Inside, Outside, page 5
Mama read David Copperfield during her pregnancy, and decided that I would be a great writer. This I daresay was before I came to reincarnate the Minsker Godol. She was assuming, of course, that I would be a boy, and not another misfire like my sister. One grievance Lee really harps on is that her birth was nothing but a stage wait in our family before the grand entrance of myself. That is perfectly true. I was aware of it as soon as I was aware of anything. Lee’s anecdotes of our childhood all turn on how I upstaged her, crowded her out, got the best of everything; that is, when she is not fuming about Zaideh’s timer, or Grandma’s blue spells, or the clambake. I will get to the clambake, but right now there is this matter of my name.
Not a complicated point, you might think; but you would be wrong.
To begin with, every Jew who has ever stepped into a synagogue or temple knows that we have two names: the outside name with which we go through life, and the inside name, the Jewish name, used in blessings and Torah call-ups, marriage and divorce ceremonies, and on tombstones. No shammas or sexton, even in the most Reformed of Reform temples, has ever summoned me to the Torah as “Mr. I. David Goodkind.” Unthinkable. I am “Reb Yisroel Dovid ben Eliyahu.” We usually are named in Hebrew after relatives who have passed on; then the parents try to find some outside name that will at least have the same first letter.
It is a far-drifted Jew who has forgotten his or her inside name. There are plenty of those nowadays in the Goldena Medina, and rabbis have taken to figuring backward from the outside names, by guesswork. So for the marrying or the burying, Mark becomes Moshe, and Gail becomes Gitta, and Peter becomes Pinchas, and everyone hopes for the best. Lately biblical names have regained some Christian chic, so, among us also, one encounters more Judahs and Sarahs and Josephs; in which case the inside and outside names merge, and there is one less acculturation problem for the harassed modern rabbi.
But my birth certificate reads “Israel David Goodkind,” and no fooling around; no Ira, no Darrell, none of that acculturation stuff. Between David Copperfield and David’s Tower, there was no way Mama wasn’t going to call me David; and so Israel slipped in there too. A time bomb, as it turned out. Until I went to public school, where the bomb went off, I was just Yisroelke at home; that is, “Little Israel.” The Frankenthal kids in the next door flat called me Davey, because whenever Mom talked to Mrs. Frankenthal I was “my David.” Mama tried to remember to call me that in the house, too, but whenever any serious business was afoot, like dinner time or some discovered mischief, it was always “Yisroelke!”
I can hardly remember my father calling me David. I was Yisroelke to him first to last. I rushed to his hospital bedside after his heart attack, from the Army Air Corps school where I was getting officer training, right before Pearl Harbor. Mama was already there, trying not to cry. He gave me a smile that I still carry in my heart and whispered, “Ut is Yisroelke, der Amerikaner offizier.” (“Here’s Little Israel, the American officer.”) His English was good though heavily accented; but he tended to talk Yiddish when tired or beset. I took his limp damp hand, and he got out a few more hoarse whispered words. “Nu, mein offizier, zye a mentsch.” (“Well, my officer, be a man.”) He was dropping off to sleep under sedation. Those were the last words I ever heard from him. I was not there when he died.
Still trying, Pop. Time’s getting short, and it’s uphill all the way, but I’m trying. You fooled me, making it look so easy.
8
The Partners
I have to break off here, with my father on his deathbed, and the story not yet started; a strange way to tell it, but I’m writing it as it comes.
When I was describing Cousin Harold’s adventures with Uncle Hyman’s cadaver, some pages back, an under-secretary of State called me. I jumped clear out of my chair to grab the telephone. It had been days since I had done anything here but pass the hours scrawling. In spirit I was far away, at that funeral parlor. I was about to describe how the officiating rabbi, a smooth-shaven young divine who apparently worked there on a job-lot basis, puzzled all of us by eulogizing Uncle Hyman’s extraordinary achievements as a dental surgeon. He was talking about the corpse in the next chapel, where the mourners were just starting to gather. One of the long-faced undertakers in tan satin skullcaps had to sidle up and mutter at him. This rabbi, a fast man with a eulogy, switched smooth as butter to a fine flowery improvisation on the social value of the dry-goods business. I didn’t write that funeral scene because the phone call broke my train of thought.
Anyway, this under-secretary and I are now about to meet with the Israeli ambassador; agenda, the latest debate in the UN on Israel. I don’t know what we’ll accomplish. There’s always a debate in the UN on Israel, and the vote always goes against Israel a hundred and seventy-nine or so to one or two. Stark Samuel Beckett elementalism. Reduce the drama to one solitary figure in a desperate, seemingly hopeless predicament, surviving by the sheer indestructibility of the human spirit. Yes, and didn’t old Jimmy Joyce know what he was doing, when he made Ulysses one lonely little Jew amid the teeming hostile Irish of Dublin?
I was about to get to my father’s start in America, and his two partners from Minsk in the laundry business. So as soon as I return to my story, on come the clowns.
***
Reuben Brodofsky was short, stout, and sallow, with heavy hair parted in the middle, a thick grizzled mustache, and a narrow-eyed way of peering around as though looking for pickpockets; or for the cops, after picking some pockets himself. At age four I was deeply suspicious of Reuben Brodofsky. I was a wise child, as you will learn. Brodofsky had an American-born wife, quite a catch for a greenhorn. This Yankee spouse was a stout jolly woman, who sat around cutting serial novels out of ladies’ magazines. Her apartment was piled high with stapled-up novels by Peter B. Kyne, Kathleen Norris, and Octavus Roy Cohen, under layers of dust; because as Mrs. Brodofsky liked to say, she didn’t believe in housework.
This heresy thrilled and charmed my sister Lee when she first heard it. Lee rushed home and announced to my mother, “Mrs. Brodofsky doesn’t believe in housework.” My mother, a lunatic housecleaner, gave a loud sniff through a wrinkled nose, and I seem to remember her saying, “That’s why, when you walk out of her house, you leave footprints on the sidewalk.” I liked the easygoing fat lady, and her perpetual magazine clipping seemed no stranger to me than my mother’s everlasting scrubbing of floors on her hands and knees. The Brodofsky children, three boys and a girl, fascinated me. They would come home from school and cook up whole meals for themselves from whatever was in the icebox, and give me some, while their mother sat clipping and stapling a Cosmopolitan serial. If there was nothing to cook they would eat bread with mustard. I thought that was ever so much more exciting than bread and butter, though now I wonder why they used mustard. Maybe Mrs. Brodofsky didn’t believe in butter, either.
Brodofsky, like my parents, came from Minsk to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where he got a job in a small laundry, collecting and delivering bundles in a hand cart. Sidney Gross, the other partner, worked there, too.
Sidney Gross was very tall, very thin, very pale, and very hopeless. His pessimism about the laundry business, about his health, about the whole future was bottomless. Penury and fatal illness were ever-present in his mind. Sidney Gross outlived my father, outlived Brodofsky (who lived forever), and died rich, for he saved all his money and kept buying Bronx apartment houses. He smoked more than Lee does, but it never spoiled his fine baritone voice. He sang in the synagogue choir which my father led. Gross was courting a cousin of Mama’s, my Aunt Ida, when Mama first came to the Goldena Medina. It was through Gross that my parents met. My father and Gross at the time were laborers in the same laundry; and one evening, at a café on Attorney Street, Gross introduced Pop to Aunt Ida’s pretty cousin. His therefore was the hand of fate. Sidney Gross, and nobody else, turned the key that opened the golden door of existence to the nativity of I. David Goodkind; or, the Return of the Minsker Godol.
Gross ironed shirts. All his life long he was one of the world’s great shirt-ironers. The Fairy Laundry grew in time into a three-story cement structure with a huge brick smokestack, covering a square block in the Bronx, and Gross was one of the three bosses. Yet he was only happy there showing one of the scores of perspiring girls at the presses how to iron a shirt. I saw him do it. This man had a deep mastery of shirt-ironing; it was his ruling passion, his Tao. He could do nothing else, except sing and smoke; and he knew it, and was never at ease as a boss. Hence perhaps his pessimism. I think he always feared being unmasked as just a shirt-ironer, and broken to the ranks. I also suspect he might secretly have liked that.
By the time my father came to America—eighteen years old, penniless, knowing no English—Brodofsky and Gross were Yankee Doodles. They could talk to policemen and streetcar conductors, and Brodofsky was even seeing a stout Jewish girl who had been born in America, or at least in Newark. My father had known Brodofsky in Minsk, so he too landed in that laundry; and so he met Gross, and so he met Mama. That is the story.
Pop started as a “marker-and-assorter”; that is, he undid the bags of soiled smelly wash, inked identifying numbers on each item, and threw them into piles or bins: shirts here, sheets there, ladies’ drawers elsewhere. He did this for sixteen hours a day, in a damp cellar lit by one electric bulb, at the bottom of a chute. He did it for two years. That was his start in the Goldena Medina. Times were bad. It was do that or beg, or eat at some Jewish charity kitchen, so he marked and assorted at two dollars a week until times got better. There were no toilets in the cellar, and the proprietor did not allow the marker-and-assorter to waste time coming upstairs, not for a whole year. That year wreaked havoc on my father’s insides. Brodofsky and Gross worked up on the street floor at five dollars a week. My father did not envy them their vast salaries, only their access to a john.
Reuben Brodofsky founded the Fairy Laundry, by supplying the hundred fifty dollars for the down payment on a washing machine, a mangle, and a press. That is undeniable. A hundred he had saved; the fat Newark girl’s dowry furnished the other fifty. That cleaned out Brodofsky. Sidney Gross from his savings paid the rent of the little store on Attorney Street for the first year. My father was taken in as a partner, though he had no money. In lieu of capital investment, he worked for nothing. How long, I do not know. How he ate, I do not know. Possibly Brodofsky and Gross fed him. In the snapshots of Pop at that time that survive, he looks bushy-haired, fiery-eyed, and proud, but pitifully skinny and sleepless. The prints are in old-time violet ink, and under his eyes are deep purple pools. This spell of labor without pay for Brodofsky and Gross I believe puts Pop up there with Oliver Twist, as one of the great undernourished figures of literature. But at twenty, what can a man not endure?
The name “Fairy Laundry” came with the move of the enterprise to the Bronx. There used to be a Fairy Soap, a white perfumed oval cake, sold in a blue box with a little girl’s picture on the cover, and the slogan, “Do you have a little Fairy in your home?” I believe that is where the partners got the name. Alas, by the time I was eleven, “fairy” had acquired a new meaning. I tried to keep it quiet that my father was part owner of the Fairy Laundry; but whatever neighborhood we moved to, and we were much on the move, the word always got out and caused me grief. Later, in boys’ camp theatricals, I was cast in female roles, because of my soprano voice and genteel ways, and between that and the Fairy Laundry… well, I draw a curtain over those ancient horrors.
By the time the business moved to the Bronx, Papa was boss man. I don’t write this out of fondness or pride. That he burned out his bright brief candle in the laundry business is a tragedy about which I’d prefer to be silent. He would have been good at anything. Given his rudimentary schooling, his uprooting, the chance that threw him in with Brodofsky and Gross, and the financial pressure on immigrants, he lived and died a laundryman. Investors often begged him to drop the partners, leave the Fairy Laundry, and start a new large-scale plant. I heard Mama urging him to accept one of these offers.
“What would Brodofsky and Gross do?” he said. “They would starve.”
“Are they your children?” said Mama. “Your brothers?”
“Sarah Gitta, you’re just talking. Gross is married to Ida. He’s family. If I can’t drop him, how can I drop Brodofsky?”
“But they’re dragging you down. They’re killing you.”
“They took me into the business,” said Papa. “When Yisroelke grows up, maybe we’ll see.”
That was it. In his own mind, he never did work off the hundred dollars he didn’t have when the thing started. In Brodofsky’s mind, Pop stole the Fairy Laundry from him, and his grandiose vision was that some day, somehow he would regain his domain from the usurper. As for Sidney Gross, he knew he could iron a shirt better than Pop. I suppose that took care of his self-esteem.
Both partners came to my father’s funeral, and went out with the cortege to the graveside service. The rabbi had scarcely finished his closing prayer when Brodofsky leaped at a shovel and threw the first dirt into the grave on Papa’s wooden coffin, thud thud thud, one heaping shovelful after the other. I had to wrest the shovel from his hand to throw some in myself. The family is supposed to do that; there is nothing in the ritual about partners throwing earth on the coffin. That was just Brodofsky’s eagerness to pay his respects to the dead.
At a business meeting right after the funeral, which I attended in my Air Corps uniform, I learned that my mother was in danger of being voted out of her widow’s pension, due to incredibly tangled bank loans and stock redistributions forced on my father by the depression. This meeting took place in Mama’s apartment, where we were sitting around on mourning stools.
“I never voot against you, Sarah Gitta, dunt voory,” said Brodofsky. His wife’s Newark speech had not rubbed off on him in all the years. “I never, never, never voot against you, dunt voory.” He kept repeating that.
Brodofsky did voot against Mama. He got Gross to voot against her, too. Mama fought back and licked them; she didn’t do it with a brick, but she might as well have. “Don’t let them spit in your kasha,” was her word at times. Brodofsky wasn’t man enough to spit in Mama’s kasha, as it turned out. No way.
But all that is nearly forty years down the road.
9
The Green Cousin
Maybe it was a dumb thing to do, but I took this manuscript to New York last Thursday (I went with the Israeli ambassador to the General Assembly meeting, though that’s neither here nor there), and I read it to Mama. She smiled, now and then laughed, and sometimes looked pensive. She can’t see to read any more, and she can hardly hear, and she creeps around on a cane, but there’s nothing wrong with her head.
“Have I got the facts right, Mom?”
“Yes.” Very disappointed tone.
“What’s the matter?”
Pause. Sad headshake. “It’s so brief.”
I might have known.
Look, just bear in mind, Mama, you were born well before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. It’s now four years since Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, and here you still are. You’re spanning the craziest, most crowded, most tragic, most incredible, most glorious, most dangerous stretch of years in the history of the world; a time so mad and risky and speeded-up that nobody can say that the curtain won’t drop on both of us, on the whole wild show, in the next forty-eight hours. Literally! When I think about what I’ve already seen at the White House—when I contemplate the brute truth that the rope of the final curtain is really in those hands—I shake. I don’t sleep. I get diarrhea. I’ve shut it from mind; which is only what the whole idiot world is doing, instead of applying some common sense to saving our skins while there’s still time. Clearly, if I don’t whiz through this tale I may not finish it while anyone is still left alive to print and read books. So I will go right on being brief, Mama. I must.
Still, I know—I could tell by Mama’s look—what was troubling her. I left out her courtship. Well, I did that on purpose. It would make a book in itself, that romance of Alex Goodkind and Sarah Gitta Levitan, or The Green Cousin, as the little circle of young Minsk Jews dubbed Mama, when she showed up among them on New York’s Lower East Side. Her sad, “It’s so brief” haunts me, so I’ll put in at this point, as baldly as possible, the story of The Green Cousin’s courtship.
This is for Mama, and for the world of her young love that is no more; a small wreath that I toss from the Brooklyn Bridge, as it were, to float down the East River, which still laves the place where it all happened; where little is left of those rich years, and those lively crowds of Jews, but boarded-up synagogues, failing kosher delicatessens, and the decaying buildings of the Workmen’s Circle and the Jewish Daily Forward; where gray ghostly employees still sit around in dusty offices, drinking tea and talking disconsolate Yiddish.
***
When Mama first came to the Goldena Medina she roomed with Reb Mendel Apkowitz, a former Minsk neighbor of Zaideh’s, who ran a furniture store in Brooklyn. I remember Reb Mendel well, a genial gray-mustached old Jew with a swarm of smart sons. As I grew up there seemed to be among my parents’ friends a platoon of burly doctors and dentists, all looking alike and all named Apkowitz. I had my first tooth drilled, in fact, by Murray Apkowitz. Mama reports that all the sons fell in love with her and proposed except Herman, the stupid Apkowitz who flunked out of dental school and got a job delivering chewing gum to vending machines, and collecting the pennies. The family was ashamed of Herman. You didn’t talk of chewing gum around the Apkowitzes. But Herman ended up in the jukebox business, stinking rich, with the laugh on all those doctors and dentists.
