Inside, Outside, page 6
To proceed, Mom met Pop through the Kruzhok, which you might freely translate as the Circle or the Bunch, this crowd of young immigrant Minskers who hung out together. Sidney Gross brought her into the Bunch at the Attorney Street café, where they would sit around drinking tea and talking to all hours. Pop didn’t propose for two years. They then waited another year and a half to marry. Such was the courtship of The Green Cousin.
Pop’s two-year hesitancy before asking for her hand has always been a puzzle to me. Not to Mom. She was the great beauty of the Kruzhok, she patiently explains, and of course frostily chaste. And she was also the big yoxenta, or girl of pedigree, descended from the great David’s Tower. (More precisely, that’s yach-sen-ta; but the guttural ch never comes off in English, so forget it.) The masculine term is yoxen, but believe me, that evokes not one-tenth the glamour, the worth, the sheer class of yoxenta. Pedigree was a feminine asset in the Bunch, like a beautiful bosom, and as with a bosom, there was no acquiring it, you either had it or you were out of luck. In Mom’s photographs of the time you see her well fixed with both—the bosom by inspection, the pedigree by her bearing. Even in those blurry sepia prints the girl is all queenly yoxenta.
As a pearl of such great price, Mama points out, she naturally overawed my father. That was why he took his time about proposing. Meanwhile, several other young fellows in the Bunch wanted her, but she brushed them off. Alex Goodkind, also called Elya and Elitchka, was the promising one, the clever one, a joker, a singer, a delightful reader of Yiddish poetry and Sholem Aleichem’s short stories, altogether the live wire of the crowd. Mama will say, with an incongruous touch of girlish coyness on her wrinkled old face, that from the start she had her eye on him, but she never gave him the slightest hint. Not she! Not the granddaughter of David’s Tower!
So it was two years before he nerved himself to make his move. By then the Bunch was pairing off left and right. At one of the weddings where the wine flowed free my father finally girded up his loins, drew near, and so addressed my mother: “Well, Green Cousin! Halevai af dir!” (Roughly, “May you be next!”)
Mom shot back saucily, “My blessers should be blessed!”
He proposed that night, and won the inestimable privilege of riding back to Brooklyn on the subway with the big yoxenta. He then had to lay out another nickel to return to his lair in the Bronx, some two hours away by BMT and IRT express. No doubt, to him, that night, those rumbling rattling subway cars were clouds of glory. You know the feeling. It doesn’t matter too much at that moment in life whether you’re in a Rolls-Royce or the IRT. Mom says my father was the first man who ever kissed her. I believe that, too.
In later years, Pop would account for one or another of Mom’s odd ways by shrugging and saying to me in Yiddish, “Always remember, she’s a rabbi’s a daughter.” A rabbi’s a daughter, you will please observe. The reiteration of that little a had vast force. When I once asked him why he took so long to propose, he shrugged, smiled a far-off melancholy smile, and replied, “Well, you know, a rabbi’s a daughter.” Pop left a lot unsaid, waiting for me to mature, or something. I’m doing the same with my own sons and daughter, I realize.
Papa lived in a hole in the North Bronx that cost him almost nothing. The Bunch gathered on the Lower East Side on Saturday and Sunday nights. On holidays they would all go to Central Park to row on the lake, or to Coney Island, something like that. Their evenings sped by in talking politics and literature, singing Russian and Yiddish songs, going to the Yiddish or Broadway theatre, dancing, flirting, reciting, entertaining each other, sometimes into the dawn. They were young and merry in the Goldena Medina, out from under Czarist tyranny, cut loose from the rigid religious rules and social strata of Minsk Jewry, at home in the mushroom Yiddish civilization that had sprung up around Canal Street at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge. When my mother talks of those times, her weak voice rings with a cracked echo of that long-gone joy of life, and I swear I envy her. Poor as rats, working sixteen hours a day, six days a week for a couple of dollars, riding the subways an hour or more each way to work or to fun, they lived lives vibrant with a hope of happiness in a new world of liberty. I’ve had most of the good things in life, including many things Mom and Pop never enjoyed, but a Bunch I never had, because I was never young in a new land, newly set free.
All the same, that was a damned long subway ride for Pop from Flatbush to the Bronx, once the first raptures had subsided, and that one goodnight kiss which—I don’t know, but I bet—the big yoxenta allotted him, ceased to be quite such an explosive and celestial novelty. Soon he was pressing her to name a day. Her loving response was to inquire into his finances. Did he have enough money, for instance, to buy a bed, a mattress, a table, and two chairs? He did not. They added their bank accounts together. Still not enough.
“What,” said Mama, “will two corpses go dancing?” She has a way of putting things sometimes. When Pop suggested getting a loan she vetoed that, loud and clear. No borrowing! Next, having noted Papa’s happy-go-lucky ways with money (in that regard he never changed much), she inquired whether in fact he had any debts. Well, Pop told her about his emergency borrowing from the till of the lumberyard; made a clean breast of the whole thing to Mama, who then and there laid down the law. They would save up together and pay back Oskar Cohen every last ruble. Then they would save up and buy furniture. Then they would get married.
Hence the year and half delay after he proposed. Mama so far yielded to Pop’s amorous importunities, and to his bone-deep weariness with two-hour subway rides, that she consented to buy furniture from Reb Mendel Apkowitz on credit, after paying down half the cost—no less, she insisted. A full fifty percent down before the crunching of glass at a wedding.
A year and a half! Eighteen months of young love foregone! Why? To pay back a prosperous old skinflint in Minsk who had long since written off the debt, and probably forgiven it; for young Alex had been a mainstay of the lumberyard office, and all Russian Jews understood about the draft. And to put down half the price of a bed, a mattress, a table, and two chairs!
A rabbi’s a daughter. A big yoxenta.
***
She did something even stranger and rougher than that to Pop. My sister Lee arrived on the scene; you’ll recall, a bare eight months into their wedded bliss. No sooner had Lee been weaned, than Mama picked up baby and baggage and went back to Minsk for a year. That is a most obscure business, and whenever I press Mom to explain, she comes up with some non sequitur like, “Yes, Papa was a wonderful man. He understood.”
Maybe he did. I don’t. It happened, and it almost resulted in cancelling the Minsker Godol’s return for unknowable generations, because my mother was nearly caught in Russia by the First World War. She got out by a whisker, another terrific adventure, but that one I will skip. Enough! She made it, and I got born. But why did she go to Minsk? Possibly to cause the Koidanov woman to drop dead. There is no doubt that her stepmother did die shortly after Mom’s visit to Russia.
Mom arrived in Minsk, you see, with a smashing American wardrobe, most of which she had sewn herself, but Koidanov didn’t know that, and Mom wasn’t letting on. The baby, I am told, had a wardrobe to match, the swaddlings of a princess. Mom’s luggage, her millinery, her jewelry, were all American, all dazzling, all electrifying, to the neighbors who had seen the teenage Sarah Gitta tearfully depart six years earlier, an outcast stepdaughter setting forth into the great world penniless and alone.
By then, what is more, the Fairy Laundry was launched and doing relatively well, so Mama also brought money with her and gave it all to Zaideh. Dollars! Moreover, Oskar Cohen had already spread far and wide the tale of Alex Goodkind’s refund of his borrowing, with six percent interest. The word was out in Minsk that Sarah Gitta Levitan had struck it rich with Alex Goodkind, the son of Shaya, the Soldiers’ Shule shammas; and that Alex was becoming a big American industrialist. As I write this, it gets clearer and clearer why Mama went back to Minsk. Zaideh was always vague about the cause of Koidanov’s demise, but I do believe that she choked on her own bile, exactly as Mama planned. It was a bit hard on young Elitchka Goodkind, that bachelor year or so early in his marriage; but Mama had to settle that ploika business, and by God did she ever. La Koidanov had spat in the wrong girl’s kasha.
During this bizarre mission to Minsk, Mama also managed to reconcile Zaideh to her marriage with a shammas’s son. Zaideh had sent many fiery letters forbidding the misalliance. Mama had returned indignant reams praising her choice as a learned, religious, altogether silken Jewish lad, quite worthy of a big yoxenta’s hand. She wrote a short last note flatly announcing to Zaideh that she was marrying Pop, and asking Zaideh’s blessing. His response was grumpy, his blessing on the curt side.
But Mom knew what she was about. Once she got back to Minsk, those American clothes, those American dollars, Mama’s own Americanized yet very Yiddish self, and the enchanting baby Lee—Leonore, inside name Leah-Mira, after Mom’s mother, Zaideh’s long-dead first love—quite won him over. He even called on the shammas’s family in their log-walled abode, invited the humble Goodkinds to the rabbinic residence, and wrote Pop a cordial letter about these visits. Zaideh was eventually pretty pleased with his son-in-law.
In her letters, as you may have guessed, Mama was shading the facts about Pop’s piety. She was a girl in love. The Jewish immigrants had a saying, “When the boat is halfway to America, throw overboard your prayer shawl and phylacteries.” To some, this meant a release from a galling yoke; to others, a sad yielding to the facts of the new world. In America in those days, you worked on Saturday or you didn’t eat. For those old-country Jews, once the holy Sabbath went, the entire hoary structure tended to collapse. Some stalwarts like Reb Mendel Apkowitz fought the tide and kept the faith, all down the line. But lurid stories of new world impiety were rife in the old country. Some zealots called the Goldena Medina by another name: “Wicked America.” This discouraged very few Russian Jews who could raise the steamship fare. Plenty of the zealots, even, were willing to chance the wickedness for a shot at the gold and the freedom. They found out soon enough that the streets weren’t paved with gold. But the freedom was real. You made of it what you would.
Mom and Pop never got around to the swine and the mouse. They did have a sort of brush with the abomination, as I will report when we get to the clambake. Still, from my earliest moments, I not only knew that I was Jewish; I understood that this meant everything to them. The first music I remember hearing was the High Holy Day liturgy, which Pop would sing as he dressed and shaved, before setting off to the Fairy Laundry; and I can still sing most of his Yom Kippur service by heart. On the whole Mom and Pop did all right with this knotty business. Once Zaideh came, that was that. You couldn’t have told our household from Reb Mendel Apkowitz’s.
But the Jewish thing from the start was inside the walls. Outside, breathlessly awaiting the appearance of I. David Goodkind, was the Goldena Medina, or Wicked America.
10
Paul Frankenthal
My first encounter on the outside was Paul Frankenthal. He wasn’t very far outside. We lived in Apartment 5-D and the Frankenthals in 5-A, on the top floor of a tenement house on Aldus Street, in the Southeast Bronx.
How did Mama cope with the hazard of small children loose in a fifth-floor flat? Keeping the windows shut was no answer. Mama believed in fresh air, and anyway in the summertime we would all have choked. No, what Mama did when we moved in was to take Lee and then myself by the ankles, hold us one by one outside a window head-down, and let us scream and wriggle in terror for a good while at the sight of the drop to the concrete yard five stories below. That did it. I have no recollection of this strong medicine, I have only Mama’s word for it, but I believe her. To this day I can’t lean out of an open window without getting a queasy feeling which locates itself very insistently in my scrotum. Joyce writes of the “scrotum-tightening” sea. A high window has it all over the sea in my book for scrotum-tightening, but then I have this singular background.
At some point Mama took me to the nearest public school, where Lee already was in the second or third grade, and enrolled me in the kindergarten, lying about my age with the blandest good conscience. Mom had no patience with this goyish foolishness of waiting until the Minsker Godol was six before starting him in school. I could already sound out Hebrew sentences, and she figured public school would be my meat. In fact, I had a rapid ascent, which turned into a horror not unlike hanging out of a high window by the ankles. The principal scrotum-tightener in this matter was Paul Frankenthal, and that is his entrance cue.
***
I can’t remember not knowing Paul Frankenthal. I close my eyes and there we are sitting by a window in the Frankenthal flat, Paul, Lee, and I playing casino while a furious summer thunderstorm c-r-r-racks and crashes and rages outside on Aldus Street. Jagged blue-white lightning makes me wince, rain lashes the tenements opposite us, and on the sidewalk far below gray stars splash up in myriads. The bright colors of the cards, the flat-faced kings, queens, and knaves, the joker in his yellow and red hunting costume, fascinate me. No cards in our apartment! Mama in her latter days became a terror of the Miami Beach canasta set, but at that time she retained “a rabbi’s a daughter’s” objection to playing cards. Vulgar. The Frankenthals lived in the front. Our apartment looked out at the back yards, where tall bare poles supported five stories of clotheslines. You would wake in the morning to the squeak of clothesline pulleys. From the Frankenthals’ windows you could see cars and people going by, a more interesting view than wet sheets, shirts, and union suits multitudinously flapping.
I may be doing Paul an injustice by attributing to him the memorable first beating I got. Still, I don’t think it would have occurred to me on my own to go playing doctor with the girl in Apartment 5-C. I was four, and not that much interested in girls. Her mother caught me examining her bare behind as she lay prone on her bed, little skirt up, little pants down. A scandalized caterwauling broke out, a horde of adults came trampling into 5-C, and I was summarily removed to Apartment 5-D; where Mama then and there did her best, using my father’s razor strop, to whomp voyeurism out of her jewel.
Instead, she beat into me the perception that there is something both marvellous and forbidden about a girl’s bare behind. That is strictly true, to be sure; but she was rushing matters, pressing the point at my tender age. Now, I distinctly recall Paul Frankenthal among those invading adults. Question: what was he doing there? My guess is that he set me up and then sandbagged me, thus establishing the theme and tone of our long relationship. Possibly not. He did me enough damage later, and I will waive this count as not proved. To Mama’s credit, she never told the story to Pop; not to my knowledge. I watched his face closely for the next couple of days. I’d have known, if he found out.
***
In the silent-film serials of my childhood, the bad guy could be spotted straight off by his mustache. Take Mr. Deering, the bad guy who pursued Pearl White through fifteen episodes of Plunder, trying to get the map for the diamond mine away from her. What a monster! What a mustache! Paul Frankenthal’s father looked a lot like Mr. Deering, and he had exactly the same style of mustache: thick, slick, black, pointy. Later on, Paul too grew a Mr. Deering mustache, and in point of fact he landed in the pokey like his father, and for the same reason: kickbacks and whatnot in the construction game. Yet at the outset Paul was a sort of hero to me, and to most of the boys and girls in our neighborhood.
When Faile Street had a rock-throwing fight with Hoe Avenue, for instance, Paul was right up front, heaving and ducking stones, while I manned the far rear. Faile Street meant nothing to me, nor had I anything against Hoe Avenue. Our tenement was near Faile Street, and this accident of geography obliged us to show up on the field of honor, a vacant lot between Faile and Hoe, to show our manhood, or boyhood. The neighborhood girls flocked to watch, you see. The battle station I selected was fairly close to the girls. Any Hoe type who beaned me at that range would have had a throwing arm worth money in later life. I wasn’t a conspicuous coward, the Faile Street rear was crowded with cannon fodder of weak convictions, but I was no Paul Frankenthal, either. My sister Lee admired the hell out of Paul for his valor, and talked on and on about the rock fight afterward until I was sick of it.
To my best recollection nobody—I mean not one combatant—was injured in that fight. Nobody fell. Nobody even bled. Not in the large rear clump of the hesitant, not in the hardier midfield boys yelling, ducking, and scurrying about, not even up front among the few like Frankenthal. A huge hubbub, a lot of stones flung randomly—such was juvenile combat in those days of the Bronx’s lost innocence, before the ethnic gangs made a serious bloody business of it. A born street boy, Frankenthal perceived that a show of dash in rock fighting was a high-yield, low-risk activity. I wouldn’t have acted on this insight if it had occurred to me, and I take nothing away from Paul Frankenthal; but his subsequent swagger did not rest on a very broad base of exposure to death, and it riled me that this fact escaped my sister.
On the whole, I will call Paul the first of the villains in this epic. Like Iago, like Uriah Heep, like Richard the Third, like most of the heavies in literature, Paul Frankenthal was of a jealous and envious disposition, and therefore determined on villainy. He inherited the trait from his mother. Mrs. Frankenthal comes and goes in this story like Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, but this is her moment, and she can have her own short chapter.
11
The Glories of Starving
