My father left Russia when he was eighteen. How he got the means, I don’t know. He had left Russia and traveled in steerage on a ship in order to come to the land of plenty, as did so many thousands of others.

When the ship had docked, the new immigrants were standing in line on deck when a kind man who had boarded the ship gave my father a banana. My father had never seen a banana before. He knew it was food, and that food was to be eaten, and he had learned as one of nine hungry children that you’d better eat quickly before someone took your food from you. My father started to take a bite out of the banana when the man who had given it to him came over and started to take back the banana! My father ran from the man, but the man caught up to him, took the banana away from my father, and showed him how to first peel it!

How well this story reveals, as God in Heavenletters™ says so many times, how markedly our perception determines our reaction.

Like my mother, my father was the first of his brothers and sisters to arrive in the United States.

At immigration, my father was asked his name. In the small ghettos of Russia, when asked your name, you gave your first name. My father gave his first name which was Zalman. Immigration took that as his last name and wrote it down as Solomon. Later, as my father’s brothers and sisters came to the U.S., they also took Solomon as their last name.

The real last name was Silver something. It wasn’t Silverberg, but now I can’t remember what it was.

For his first name, immigration gave my father Samuel. No middle name or initial. His signature, Samuel Solomon, is the only thing I ever saw my father write. It may have been the only thing my father knew how to write. I remember my father’s signature now, how slowly and carefully he wrote his name and admired it, how the letters were a little pointed and how they gradually slipped down below the line.

I do not know the meaning of the name Zalman. Of course man means man. I just like to think that the Zal means soul.

My mother would call my father Zalman or Zalmankeh (dear or little Zalman.) And Solomon, his new last name, meant wisdom. I loved my last name and that it had three o’s in it.

Like my mother, my father also spent his first night in America at a cousin’s house. My father slept on the cousin’s front porch and cried all night.

How someone gets a job in a country when he doesn’t know the language at all, I don’t know. But somehow my father and others like him did. His job was at a slaughterhouse. He stood at a chopping block all day and cut off the extra fat from meat. He was one of many men who stood there and trimmed the fat off from various cuts of meat. Each man had two barrels, one barrel to place the meat in and the other to throw the fat in.

My father was what was called a greenhorn. Greenhorns were not always welcome, and sometimes they were tricked and made fun of. When some of the other men had cut fat off with too much meat left on it, they would throw their fat in my father’s barrel. Apparently, this was like a joke to them.

The supervisor would check the fat barrels from time to time. He was not pleased with what he saw in my father’s fat barrel. The boss saw too much meat on the fat in my father’s barrel and shook his head in disapproval. My father somehow expressed that if the boss would move him away from the other men, my father would show him how well he could trim fat. The boss did move my father away, and the boss did see how well my father knew how to trim the fat. My father took pride in his good work.

There are two more stories from my father’s first days in America that I will tell you about next time. One shows my father’s innocence and inventiveness, and the other is so very sad. Even as a little child, it was so sad to me that I always thought that somehow I could go back in time with my father and be there with him and tell him what to do and help him so that this story would have a different ending.