As in Chrzanow, another small town, there was a feeling that what Farmingdale had to offer should suffice, and anyone who wanted more was getting above themselves, and nothing was worse than that. There were few places less suited to a young Francophile with a love of culture and beauty, and with ambitions for a glamorous, fulfilled life than Farmingdale, 1937.
When I visited Farmingdale on a hot spring day, I was struck by how similar it felt to Chrzanow still. Both are pleasant and clean, with pretty streets and friendly people. But it has not been easy for small towns to adjust to the twenty-first century, and on the day I was there Farmingdale felt as silent as an abandoned ranch in an old Western, even on a weekday afternoon. There were vacant shop fronts, and the family-run stores had been crushed by the big chains and out-of-town shopping centres. While there are still some aviation companies in Long Island, many such as Grumman have long since closed down. With big cities just down the road (Krakow for Chrzanow, Manhattan for Farmingdale), how do you stop the young people leaving as soon as possible, desperate for something to do other than hang out on the same streets they’ve been hanging out on since they were kids? When I left and returned to the nearby cities where I was staying, it was like slipping from a faded sepia photo into a three-dimensional film. And that’s how it must’ve felt, in reverse, for Sara, arriving in Farmingdale from Paris eighty years earlier.
Farmingdale was waiting for her when she arrived, and not especially warmly.
‘Everyone knew about Bill’s French bride long before she turned up,’ said William Rappaport.
Given how little Bill himself knew about her, their knowledge of Sara was presumably limited to the fact that she was French and she was to be his bride. This was more than enough for them.
‘What’s wrong with American girls? They not good enough for you, Bill?’ people asked him.
‘If you didn’t find anything you wanted in Farmingdale, couldn’t you have just gone to New York?’ others asked.
Some were simply so stumped as to why handsome Bill would marry a Frenchwoman they assumed he must have got her pregnant while he was in Paris. She was probably one of those kinds of Frenchwomen.
And these questions did not stop once Sara arrived in this strange, unfamiliar small town. People asked them of Bill in front of Sara, taking it for granted she wouldn’t understand, and not really caring if she did. And soon enough she did understand, because she was good at languages. She heard them muttering about how her husband had had many lady friends, and maybe he still did, maybe that’s why he went into the city so much, and she heard them talking about how unfriendly she seemed, how snooty, how superior.
And she probably was snooty or, more accurately, aloof. She realised that none of these people were interested in art, or fashion, or culture – all the things that represented to her high-mindedness, sophistication. These people, it seemed to her, were little different from the Polish peasants. Like her brothers Henri and Alex, she felt that a lack of aspiration was an admission of a lack of soul. Only those who are dead inside fail to want more than the little half-inch of life they’ve been given.
But Sara was also shy and sad, and these are often mistaken for snobbishness. Talking about her snobbishness was a convenient smokescreen for the simple fact that none of her neighbours wanted to be friends with Sara, because she was a foreigner, even though most of them had immigrant parents themselves. But then, they wanted to be American and she did not. She would never be one of them, because she didn’t want to be.
‘She was a French lady in a rough Long Island town,’ my father’s cousin Ann Horowitz, who grew up in Farmingdale, told me. ‘She wasn’t ever really going to be accepted.’
She tried to make a life there: she decorated her and Bill’s home as beautifully as she could in Farmingdale, and breakfast and dinner were always on the table on time for him. She would go for walks and get to know the town. But days would go by when she wouldn’t speak to anyone but her husband. And on days when he didn’t come home, she spoke to no one.
Bill’s family were the only people who talked to Sara, as they could talk to her in Yiddish. They all lived close by: his mother Rose, who lived with them part of the time, his older brothers Jack and Mike, and his younger sisters, Rita and Sadie. The few surviving children of Bill’s siblings, all of whom are at least in their seventies now, stressed to me how much their parents liked Sara: how pretty they all thought she was, how kind they thought she was, and how protective they were of her when they felt Bill wasn’t treating her right.
This may all be true, but it wasn’t how it seemed to Sara. When my parents got engaged in 1974, Sara arranged to meet up with my mother, her daughter-in-law-to-be, for the first time. As soon as they were sitting down she spoke, in a terrible emotional rush, of how Bill’s family had bullied her when she arrived in the States: they made fun of her accent, she said, of her love of art, and of her interest in clothes. ‘Why are you interested in that?!’ she recalled them sneering at her. For almost forty years she’d been waiting for a female relative in whom she could confide the pain she’d felt on her arrival in America, and it had festered inside her for decades.
Maybe Bill’s siblings did like her, but just didn’t know how to reach out to her, or were bewildered by how different she was from them. And maybe she was just too homesick to understand them. But if she felt alienated from her in-laws that was nothing compared with how she felt about her husband.
Bill was kind – Alex hadn’t lied about that, at least – and he really did love her. That turned out to be true, too. He loved to show off his French bride – so beautiful, so classy – but as far as he was concerned, he’d brought her over, provided her with a little house on Cornelia Street, and she could figure out the rest. He’d done her this incredible favour, rescuing her from Europe – what on earth did she have to complain about? But she did complain. She wasn’t nearly as grateful to him as he thought she would be.
In another world their marriage could have worked because, in many ways, they were well matched: they both had religious parents but weren’t religious themselves, and they both had dreams of a better life tha
n the ones they were born into. But theirs was a match that was forged in lies and impulse, and forced into being by politics and circumstance. It would have been a miracle if it had worked, and neither of their families dealt in miracles.
Sara looked at this American, with his coarse jokes and coarser Yiddish, the way assimilated Jews in Paris looked at people like Chaya and the rest of the Pletzl: didn’t he understand he was supposed to hide those parts of himself? Didn’t he want to improve his social standing, and not be seen as just another working-class Jew? And didn’t he understand that his behaviour reflected negatively on her, by association? For Sara, Paris had been her step forward, and this American had pulled her back to a life she thought she’d left behind. Bill was smart, so he sensed how she felt, and it hurt him.
And, most of all, she wanted to be with someone else.
‘Your mother left her heart in Paris with that dental student,’ Sonia later told Sara’s sons.
The fights started not long after they got married. They got worse when Bill revealed that he wasn’t going to help bring the rest of her family over from Paris, because it would cost too much. Sara was devastated: the only reason she had married Bill was because she thought it would get her family out of France, and they would be with her in America. But from Bill’s perspective, he was the wronged party here. He had certainly not been told that paying for all his in-laws to come over was part of the deal – in fact, according to Sonia, Alex had promised to support Bill for the rest of his life if he married Sara. But Bill understood sooner than Sara that the promises Alex made during this whole episode didn’t amount to much. Bill was able to shrug off such things; Sara, however, was crushed. She was stuck and now she really was alone. She had given up everything for something that was worse than nothing.
Sara was desperately unhappy. Just how unhappy is apparent from looking at the passenger lists of ships between New York and France between 1937 and 1938. In November 1937, five months after she first arrived in the United States, she went back to Paris, presumably using the return ticket Bill had promised her. She returned to New York one month later, but six months later she made another return trip. Six months after that, in November 1938, she went back again. She returned to New York a month later. On none of those trips was she accompanied by Bill.
She didn’t, however, forget him. More than twenty years after Bill died, and more than eighty years after it was originally sent, my uncle Rich found a photo among my grandfather’s belongings. It was a studio portrait of my grandmother, and she had sent it to him from Paris on one of her trips. It is dated 8 December 1937 and at the bottom in my grandmother’s handwriting is the inscription, ‘Pour mon mari cheri, Paris’. Whether distance had made Sara’s heart truly grow fonder of Bill is a question only she can answer. It seems more likely to me that she felt a wifely loyalty towards him, and knew that he was a good man, and felt some gratitude towards him for that. Few relationships are all black or all white. But what is most apparent is that, just six months after marriage, a schism was growing in Sara that would exist for the rest of her life: wherever she was, she felt she should be somewhere else. When she was in France with her family, she felt she should be in America with her husband, and vice versa. More than half a century later I would see that divide in her myself.
Who was paying for all those tickets? At approximately $130 for a round-trip in tourist class, there is no way Bill would have been able to afford all these crossings to Paris, and while Alex would certainly have paid for Sara to go back to New York once she arrived in Paris, he would not have bought her a return ticket so she could then come back again a year later. Perhaps Herman Brenner, Rose Ornstein’s husband, helped, but there is no record of that, and it’s unlikely he could have afforded it either.
The truth is, no one knows how Sara made three round-trips between New York and France in eighteen months during 1937 and 1938 because neither she nor Bill ever spoke about it, certainly not to anyone alive now. No one even knew about these trips until I happened to spot her name recurring on the old passenger lists, and it was definitely her: Sara Freiman from Farmingdale, Long Island. But where she once had been described as a draftsman, she was now ‘h’wife’ – a housewife. All dreams gone. It’s easy to imagine her running back to Paris, frantic to escape her marriage, and even easier to imagine Alex all but pushing her back up the gangplank to return to New York. And that cycle might have continued for ever had Sara not realised something by the time she docked back in New York on 1 December 1938: she was two months pregnant.
Ronald Michael Freiman, my father, was born on 23 July 1939. The doctor who performed the birth botched the job so badly that, eighty years later, my dad still has long, deep scars on his temples from where he was dragged out and nearly crushed by the forceps. The first time Sara saw her son, he was, terrifyingly, covered in blood.
‘If my head looks like this, imagine what that butcher did to the insides of my mother,’ my dad would say when asked about the marks.
Sara couldn’t run to her family for comfort any more, not even after her son’s traumatic birth. Once the war had started most civilian ships were used as troop carriers or freighters. She couldn’t even write to her family: from 1939, transatlantic mail was being intercepted by British Imperial Censorship in Bermuda, and some was confiscated. From 1941, it was suspended entirely between America and France, but Sara could not have reached her relatives anyway, because by this point they were all in hiding. For the next three years Sara had no idea if her family was alive or dead.