Inside, Outside, page 27
I called him again, and he stood over the open volume as I sailed out on my explanation. Well, those bright piercing blue eyes! The way they blazed at me! The way that bearded imposing countenance nodded and nodded! “Yes, yes—no, no—” (when I wandered off the point a bit) “yes, go on, yes! Good! Yes! Oy, God in Heaven! Yes! That’s it. Oy, HEALTH to you!” He sprang at me, embraced me, and gave me a hairy kiss; pressed the five dollars on me, and rushed off to tell my parents. It must have been a Sunday, since they were both at home, and on Saturday, Zaideh would as soon have touched a white-hot poker as a five-dollar bill. “A godol, he can still grow up a godol!” I heard him say. “But he knows nothing, nothing. A fine head. Now he has to start learning.”
That was it. From then on, I studied with Zaideh two hours a day. The novelty and the thrill didn’t last, I must tell you. I paid dearly for that first five-dollar reward. “Koom (come),” he would say, when I got back from Townsend Harris. Weary, bored, I would trudge to the table and open the volume. After a month of this, “koom” began to sound to me like “doom.” Those columns of abstract Aramaic were hard cheese, friends, for an American boy used to Douglas Fairbanks movies, Frank Merriwell paperbacks, and public library novels.
Instance: “Reuben’s cow kicks a stone, which breaks Simon’s crockery in the marketplace. What does he pay?” Now, cow, stone, and crockery do neatly pose the issue of extended liability in a public place; but at thirteen I didn’t find torts a spellbinding subject. I still don’t. Besides, that would be expanding the text into comprehensible English. The Talmud would say something like, “Stone in market, what?” I suppressed yawns, studying with Zaideh, till tears rolled down my cheeks. He seemed not to notice.
Still, I was allowed to drop Hebrew school; and I did enjoy the blaze-up in his eyes whenever I caught on to a Talmudic idea. That did wonders for my self-esteem. At Townsend Harris, remember, I was just the Arista reject in the purple suit. Here was this genial amusing colossus of a grandfather—for his way of teaching, as much as possible, was to make jokes and draw comic comparisons—telling me and my parents that I could still be an iluy (genius), a gaon (academy head, super-genius), a godol (you know that one), if only I applied myself, and went to the right school. He did not mean Columbia College: my goal, my rainbow’s end, the classiest college in New York, and so far as I knew, in the world. Zaideh thought that the only place for such a Jewish head was a yeshiva, an all-day Talmud school. Quite a difference of opinion; and if presumably the decision was mine, the star quality was his.
***
It was Aunt Faiga who ripped the balance, strangely enough. From the day she came, Faiga marched to her own music. She already knew some stilted English from a Soviet high school course, but she at once enrolled in night school. She was very bright and learned fast. She came and went as she pleased with her own latchkey, on the Sabbath as well as other days. Zaideh never said a word about that.
And this was odd, because with his arrival our household had much tightened up on religion. I’ve mentioned the timer which shut off the lights on Friday night, driving my sister Lee nuts, and panicking her suitors. There were other minor reforms: separate dishtowels for milk and meat utensils, sterner scrutiny of ingredients in packaged foods, and the like. Electricity on the Sabbath was finished, for Zaideh announced when he came that electricity was fire. Mom and Pop obeyed him. Star quality. Later on, when I learned a little physics, I argued this point with Zaideh. Electricity was a flow of electrons along a wire, I explained. It wasn’t a flame at all, it was more like water running through a pipe.
He cheerily inquired, “Does the water give off light and heat?”
“Water? How can it? It doesn’t burn.”
“Exactly. Electricity gives off light and heat, because it does burn. And it burns because it’s fire.”
Aunt Faiga heard this exchange and winked at me. She was our resident unbeliever, but it didn’t seem to trouble Zaideh at all. She could do anything with him: tweak his nose, tickle him, pinch him, and he would pretend to be harassed and offended, but he obviously loved it. She was the child of his old age. None of the rest of us, not even Mom, would venture on such liberties with the patriarch.
Faiga at once began bringing into the house The Daily Worker, the New Masses, and pamphlets by Lenin and Trotsky; this was before Stalin had had Trotsky brained and erased from Soviet history. She tried to interest Lee in this stuff, but Lee’s mind was full of boys and clothes, with no room left for revolutionary economics. Pop, an ex-socialist, tried reasoning with Faiga. America was all different from Czarist Russia, Pop said. Faiga would soon realize that. It was the greatest land on earth. The real revolution had already happened in America a long time ago, and everybody was free and equal, with all kinds of opportunities. The Soviet Union, by comparison, was just one huge backward prison.
But Faiga had at her fingertips the Negro lynchings, the Haymarket riots, the coal miners in Kentucky, and the horrors of Chicago meat-packing. Faiga ate up stacks of novels in red paper covers by writers like Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos. I read a couple of those for the violence and gore, but they were too talky for me. America was built on the exploiting of slave labor, Faiga maintained. It was a collapsing society, the revolution was only a few years off, and she would be a fighter in the class struggle.
“Am I exploiting slave labor in the Fairy Laundry?” Pop tiredly asked one night. “They work eight hours a day, I work sixteen. They get the highest pay in the laundry business.”
“Do you make a profit?” asked Faiga.
“We try.”
“How can you make a profit, if you don’t exploit slave labor? Profit is nothing but the margin of surplus value extorted from the workers. The whole world knows that.”
“If we didn’t make a profit, we’d go broke, Faiga, and all our workers would have no jobs.”
“That’s why it’s an evil system,” said Faiga, “and has to be destroyed.”
“You don’t mind eating an exploiter’s bread,” observed Mama. We were at supper, and Faiga was tucking into her second helping of lamb stew.
“It won’t help the toiling masses if I starve,” said Faiga.
These fiery abstractions notwithstanding, when Faiga finished her English course she asked Pop for a job. Mom was all for that. Faiga was underfoot, house expenses were way up, and Faiga was offering to pay rent and board, because she didn’t want to exploit my parents. So Pop took her on as a shirt-ironer. Mr. Gross taught her the art, and soon reported that Faiga was a first-class girl, ironed a beautiful shirt; only the other girls complained she talked too much.
37
Boss Goodkind
She did more than that.
Aunt Faiga’s wrecking of the Fairy Laundry’s finances rendered moot the question of my college choice. Columbia was costly, about six hundred dollars a year (times have somewhat changed), and when Faiga got through with the laundry, Pop couldn’t afford the six hundred. This is a story you may not believe, but it happened exactly as I will tell you.
The new building was now operating full blast, occupying a square block, with a smokestack you could see for miles, with three stories full of crashing, thumping, steaming, sloshing machinery, with a horde of employees in white smocks and caps turning out mountains of bundles, delivered by a fleet of new trucks all over New York. The Fairy Laundry couldn’t have been more impressive, and it was going broke. Wall Street had crashed. Aunt Faiga’s Daily Worker bubbled happily about the long-awaited death agonies of capitalism. The huge expansion had put Pop in a cash bind. The bank wouldn’t renew the construction loans. Kornfelder and Worthington, pleading hard times, had put up such tough terms for more cash that Pop was desperately looking elsewhere.
Luckily, he had met at a laundryman’s convention a wealthy Californian, who was moving to New York and wanted to buy into a laundry. They got on well at the convention, and the man liked the operating statements Pop showed him. Pop invited the man to come and have a look at the Fairy plant. He told Mom that this man would be arriving in a week; a millionaire, a gentleman, ready to put in, on reasonable terms, whatever new money the laundry needed. All of us could hardly contain our joy. It meant release from Kornfelder and Worthington. It meant Pop could take a raise, we could move to Manhattan at last, and Lee could go to Cornell, instead of Hunter College. All our money pinches would be a thing of the past!
Well, Papa came home one afternoon looking greenish. I was reviewing the Talmud in the parlor, and I heard the whole thing.
“Why home so early, Alex?” Mom asked, her face anxious.
“The laundry’s on strike.”
“On strike?” Mama was flabbergasted. So was I. “On strike? You’re joking. Why, there’s no union. Everybody’s happy.”
“Faiga did it. She brought in organizers from downtown.”
“Faiga? Faiga!” grated my mother. “Oy! Koidanov!” She waved her fists wildly in the air, and beat her temples. “Koidanov!”
“That man is coming day after tomorrow,” Papa said, slumping down in an armchair.
“Settle the strike, then,” exclaimed Mama. “Settle it! I’ll talk to Faiga. Leave her to me.”
“You don’t know the demands. Those fellows from downtown are Communists. They want the workers to take over the plant, nothing less.”
“Why did your people listen to strangers?”
“Brodofsky.” Pop sighed in a heartbreaking way. “Brodofsky, again! Just before the vote, Brodofsky got up and made a speech. He said he would fire anybody who voted to strike. So the vote was unanimous to strike, and Brodofsky fired everybody, and they all walked out. I was at the bank, and when I got back, the place was empty. Outside, pickets were marching with signs. Signs about me! And they kept shouting a poem.”
“Signs? A poem! About you? It all sounds so crazy.”
“Faiga made up the poem herself. She was leading the march. She’s proud of it. I remember every word.”
And Pop chanted, in a mournful singsong,
“Boss Goodkind isn’t good,
Boss Goodkind isn’t kind.
Boss Goodkind sucks the workers’ blood
And steals the workers blind.”
Aunt Faiga came home at her usual time, in excellent spirits, and asked Mama what there was for supper. Mama ignored her. That set the tone of the evening. There had never been such a supper in our household. We sat around the dining-room table, the six of us, hardly saying a word: the four Goodkinds in shock, Zaideh puzzled, Faiga happily downing chicken and noodles, remarking that she was awfully hungry, or requiring someone to pass the bread, the salt, or the ketchup. Faiga had developed a heavy ketchup habit, shaking out half a bottle at each meal.
At last Mama spoke out. “So, you had to start a strike, Faiga, did you? After Alex gave you a job, only because I asked him to? What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m just another worker,” said Faiga. “The workers are waking up. It’s a historical process.”
“Did you start the whole thing, or didn’t you?”
“That’s ridiculous. How can I start a world movement? Please pass the ketchup.”
“No,” said Mama, firmly clutching the ketchup bottle.
Faiga looked surprised, and a little disconcerted. “What?”
Mama recited,
“Boss Goodkind isn’t good,
Boss Goodkind isn’t kind.
Boss Goodkind sucks the workers’ blood
And steals the workers blind.
Did you write that?”
“That’s the voice of the workers,” said Faiga. “I just gave it expression.”
“And you can still sit there,” Mom said with sledgehammer sarcasm, “and eat Boss Goodkind’s food?”
Faiga shook her head and said very patiently, “Why not? Personally, I have nothing against him.”
This reply so dazed Mama that she mechanically passed Faiga the ketchup. Faiga slopped great gobs into her chicken and noodles, and went on eating.
After a while Papa said, in the tones of Job on the ash heap, “Faiga, you’ve been in the laundry six months. Am I that kind of boss? Do I suck the workers’ blood? Do I steal them blind?”
The faint flickering smile on Aunt Faiga’s flat Slavic face might have been embarrassment. Then again, it could have been pride of authorship. “Alex, that’s agitprop for the masses. Agitprop must be simple and strong.”
Well, let me wrap up this painful scene. Mama told Faiga about the man from California, and the urgency of calling off the strike. Faiga insisted that Papa’s situation was just part of the class struggle. History had caught up with the Fairy Laundry. You couldn’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. (First time I ever heard that one was from Aunt Faiga.) And so on. They were getting nowhere, their voices were rising, and all this was in English. Zaideh was looking from daughter to daughter in bemusement. He struck in and asked in Yiddish what was going on.
Mama told him, with a free translation of Aunt Faiga’s agitprop poem. As she explained, Zaideh began to glance at Aunt Faiga, with thunderclouds gathering on that majestic bearded countenance such as I had never seen there before. When Mama finished, he and Faiga were staring at each other, and Faiga was pouting like a naughty little girl.
“Did you do this?” Zaideh asked her.
She whined something about the bosses and the toiling masses. Zaideh’s face grew sterner and darker. Faiga fell apart. She said the men from downtown were very tough. The strike wasn’t her fault. She had just talked to them about the Fairy Laundry, and they had come on their own and organized the strike. There was nothing she could do about it.
“Papushka,” she crooned, timidly stroking his hand, using her favorite endearment, “don’t be angry with me, Papushka. I can’t bear it.”
Zaideh stood up, and wrathfully left the table.
***
The strike soon disintegrated. Pop’s foreman told him that actually Brodofsky, more than Faiga and the downtown agitators, had precipitated it. But the man from California arrived at the height of the chaos. The machines were standing idle, the place was filthy, half the workers were back and milling uselessly around, and the others were absent, thinking that Brodofsky’s dismissal was for real. So the man returned to California on the first available train. Pop had to submit to the crushing terms of Kornfelder and Worthington, to keep operating. Lee did not apply for Cornell. My chances for Columbia went glimmering. Papa installed Zaideh and Faiga in a small apartment near the Minsker Synagogue, and we moved to the Pelham section of the Bronx.
Not long after the Boss Goodkind episode, Faiga was arrested during a riot on Union Square. Faiga hit a cop on the head, with a placard protesting police brutality. Shades of Mama and the brick! That placard must have been mounted on a two-by-four, because it laid the policeman out, and he left the scene in an ambulance. Faiga’s defense was that in the close quarters of the riot, the policeman had started to feel her up. Clouting him with the placard was not a political act at all, Faiga claimed, it was a reflex of offended female modesty.
Well, this was pretty thin stuff. Faiga was clad at the time in her Lenin cap, a leather jacket, and a wool skirt; a forbidding sight, not calculated to provoke a New York cop to lewd liberties. Faiga spent some six hours in jail with assorted shoplifters and whores before Pop got hold of Assemblyman Bloom and had her released. Some money also changed hands, to persuade the cop not to press charges; my father’s money, of course. Faiga was sobered by her few hours in the lower depths, and grateful to Boss Goodkind for springing her; and her Soviet brainwashing began to fade. In time Faiga changed a lot, as you will see.
Meantime the damage was done. It hit my sister Lee hardest. She had been promised Cornell, but now she was graduating, and there was no money. Lee rode the subway to Hunter College for four years. Her indignation still burns at this, an eternal light. After college, my parents staked her to a year of travel abroad, by way of recompense, and that was how she came to meet Moshe Lev in Palestine; but Lee never forgets that Yisroelke ended up at Columbia, and she at Hunter. For some unfathomable reason she holds this against me, not Aunt Faiga. She has utterly forgotten—Lee, of the elephant memory—the Boss Goodkind affair.
I have not, because it landed me in a yeshiva.
38
The Yeshiva
Yes indeed, it really came to pass, Zaideh’s dream: our hero sitting in the study hall of a yeshiva, the bet midrash, amid sixty or seventy skullcapped youths all swaying, chanting, and disputing over tall Talmud volumes in a great noise; and Yisroelke right in there with them, expertly stabbing a thumb in the air to emphasize a point, as they say in Yiddish, “with the fat finger.”
How come? Well, my class graduated from Townsend Harris in February, so that we were at a loose end until the fall. Some of us planned to stay on to repeat courses, so as to raise our averages on the statewide Regents tests. New York gave out college tuition scholarships of a hundred dollars a year to the highest scorers. I appeared doomed like Lee to a free subway college; still, a hundred dollars a year might close a gap and make Columbia possible again.
Well, Zaideh got wind of this. He asked around, and heard about a new Jewish seminary, Yeshiva University; today a major institution, but forty years ago a little one-building affair gasping for survival. It had a lower school, called the Talmudical Academy, which gave the Regents tests. Why not repeat my subjects there, inquired Zaideh, and pick up some Talmud, too? His hope, of course, was that I would continue on and become a rabbi, a brand snatched from the burning of Wicked America. Pop was all for it, saying that a few months of intensive Talmud couldn’t hurt. I casually agreed.
Little did I grasp what I was letting myself in for! Ten hours of English and Hebrew subjects, two hours of study with my grandfather, and four hours on the trolley; that was the daily schedule. I could hold my own in Talmud only if Zaideh drilled me. I rode a trolley from Pelham to his flat, then another trolley clear across town to the yeshiva. Now and then Pop came to Zaideh’s flat to join in our study. How wistful his weary face would be, as he listened to our sharp exchanges, never cutting in, only listening! I had my moments of rebellious disgust with this burden, I must tell you. Once I told Pop in no uncertain terms how tired I was of this interminable Talmudic brain-twisting over laws two thousand years old.
