Being traditional, she insisted on a man who shared her religious values, and she rapidly learned how to winnow out the freethinkers. Having worked to support herself since she was fifteen, she turned down the suitors who expected her to continue working after marriage. But even men who matched all her criteria found themselves gently shown the door as she felt no chemistry with any of them. By the time she was thirty-two she felt she might be destined to spinsterhood and had given up hope of finding her bashert.
All this changed on a rainy Saturday night in early February 1928. Despite a persistent head cold, she agreed to join a get-together at the home of her good friends the Carlins. Climbing the five flights to their apartment and opening the front door, she came face to face with a man she had never seen before in their circles. Dressed in a dapper striped suit and tie, he appeared a bit older than her. He was very good looking, with brown wavy hair, deep brown eyes, and a sunburned complexion (quite unusual in the frigid New York winter).
“Come on in and meet Mordche,” said Fanny Carlin. “He’s a family friend who recently came back to New York.” Of all evenings, Freida Sima had decided not to dress up and so there she was wearing a plain sweater and skirt that had seen better days, although she wore her long string of yellow jade beads which she always claimed brought her luck.
Taking a step forward, she smiled at the interesting-looking stranger and held out her hand. From that moment on, everything changed.
“We shook hands and forgot to let go,” she would always say. Morche led her to a chair at the dining room table and sat down next to her.
“Here they call me Max,” he said.
“But I will call you Mordche,” she answered, unable to tear her eyes away from his.
The next few hours passed in a blur. As always, people came and went at the Carlin household, passing in and out of the kitchen and dining room. But the two sat at the table, talking in Yiddish, oblivious to everything and everyone around them.
She told him she a was from a chassidic family in the Bukovina; he said his family was from Kiev. She told him how she had brought two of her brothers over after the war; he related how he and two sisters had escaped Russia after the unsuccessful revolution in 1905 in which one sister had even been involved, and that his parents, two brothers, and a third sister were all living in America.
They compared name changes – how her “Ensenberg” became Eisenberg in America while his “Karasik” had turned into Kraus. She told him about her work as a forelady at a pocketbook factory run by close friends of their host, Morris Carlin; he told her how he and his brothers had learned trades in America and even his sisters had studied practical nursing.
“I’m a housepainter and I make a good living, but most important I’m a union man!” he announced, spending the next hour extolling the virtues of a socialist, preferably a communist, society in which the working man is valued above the businessman.
“If communism is so wonderful, why don’t you go back to Russia?” she asked, and the two began a vocal ideological battle that only ended when they began to argue about religion.
“Religion is the opiate of the masses,” he said. “How can a beautiful, intelligent woman like you be taken in by such narishkeit!”
