NEW LIFE, NEW LAND
Copyright © 2018 by Roberta Kagan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
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DISCLAIMER
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events are purely coincidental.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
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CHAPTER ONE
The United States of America
Chicago, Illinois
Spring of 1959
Dovid Levi wiped down the counter at the bar where he worked as a bartender/ manager. It was a tavern located on 31st and State Street called Arnie’s Little Slice ’O Heaven. He sang softly to himself as he looked in the corner at the small stage that rose up from the sawdust-covered linoleum floor. He stood on wooden pallets lined up behind the bar. He worked long hours standing on his feet, and the linoleum was hard on his knees and ankles. The wood of the pallets gave way with his weight, making it easier for him to stand for extended lengths of time. If one were to get down on the floor and look closely, one could see where quarters, nickels, dimes, and pennies had fallen between the wooden slats of the pallets.
“Must be a fortune in there,” one of the beer delivery boys said as he looked at the change between the wooden slats.
“A fortune?” Dovid laughed. “Maybe a few hundred dollars. But we’d have to close for a week and get a child with tiny hands to dig it out.”
Dovid kept his bar spit-shined clean. His boss, Arnie Glassman, the owner of the tavern, hated it when the countertop was sticky. He was a perfectionist and if Dovid didn’t have a chance to clean the bar, Arnie would nag Dovid’s friend and co-worker, Crawford B. Dell, known to everyone as Cool Breeze, to “Get that bar clean.”
Cool Breeze had been hired by Arnie as a cleaning man. However, as things turned out, he had a wonderful knack for fixing things. As soon as Arnie learned that Cool Breeze was a handyman, he expected him to fix anything needing fixing in addition to his cleaning duties. Dovid knew that Arnie didn’t pay Cool Breeze any extra for his additional work. Dovid had mentioned it to Arnie but Arnie just shrugged his shoulders and said he saw no reason to give the colored cleaning man a raise.
“I pay him enough,” Arnie said.
Dovid didn’t agree with Arnie, but he was only an employee and had to adhere to his boss’s wishes. So, whenever Cool Breeze was busy doing the plumbing or electrical work, Dovid tried to do some of the cleaning to help make things easier on Cool Breeze. That afternoon, as Dovid was straightening his bar, Cool Breeze was trying to fix a broken radio. Arnie was sitting at the bar watching Cool Breeze carefully remove the parts from inside the radio case.
“He has golden hands, that Cool Breeze,” Arnie Glassman said to Dovid. “But he can be so lazy.” Glassman knew that Cool Breeze was standing close enough to hear him.
“That Glassman,” Cool Breeze said and shook his head. He was speaking to Dovid but he was looking straight at Glassman. “He be a slave driver.” It was obvious that Cool Breeze was not afraid of losing his job. “If’in you sees me fighten with a bear, Glassman, don’t help me, help the bear,” Cool Breeze said, glaring at Glassman, who burst out laughing.
Then, within a few minutes, all three men were laughing so hard that Cool Breeze had to put the tiny radio parts down on the bar until he could catch his breath.
Dovid liked the banter between them. His boss was a kind man with a big heart. However, he didn’t respect colored people and that bothered Dovid. Dovid enjoyed working with his dark-skinned friend who had an amazing wit and a crazy good sense of humor. As they became better friends, Dovid affectionately nicknamed Cool Breeze “the street philosopher.” The two formed a friendship right away on the day Dovid started working at the tavern. Cool Breeze had shown Dovid the ropes, introduced him to the customers and other employees. That first day, after Dovid had finished his shift, he and Glassman had sat down at the bar to have a beer.
“Listen, Dovid, before I go off and hire you on a whim because you’re a Jew like me and I feel sorry for you, I know how hard it is to be a yid and get a job in this city. But I have to tell you that bartending in a colored neighborhood is a dangerous job,” Glassman warned Dovid. “This is a bar where the colored folks can come and unwind. But you and me, we stick out here, if you know what I mean. Now I have to say that most of our customers are pretty good and they won’t give you any problems. But some of them are drug addicts, some have been in jail, they all kn
ow you have cash because we work in a cash-only business. And they might need that cash for drugs, if you know what I mean. So, you gotta watch your back all the time. The colored people are different than us; they’re a different breed. It’s not that I don’t like them. It’s just that I’ve been around them and they aren’t the same as whites. I don’t know if you know anything about heroin? But a lot of these people in here are users, especially the musicians who come in. It’s a sad situation because it was the white man who got them started on it. But you’re gonna find that smack can drive a man to do things he wouldn’t normally do in order to get a fix. What I am trying to say is that when you work here you’ll need to carry a gun because you could easily get robbed. If you take this job you better be prepared to see plenty of knife fights break out in here. Gunfights too,” Glassman said, biting his lip.
Glassman looked straight into Dovid’s eyes. Dovid just nodded his head. He needed work. He still had a little money left from what he’d saved, but he didn’t want to spend it without knowing that more would be coming in. He had a wife to support and he took his responsibility seriously.
Dovid shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not afraid to work here. I faced the Nazis. I fought in hand-to-hand combat during the war. I promise you, I can do this job,” Dovid said.
“Okey dokey! You’re hired then. Cool Breeze will help you learn everything. He’s my right-hand man. Smart as a whip that man is.”
Dovid started work the next day. As he got to know his frequent customers, he found that he liked many of them. They were a lot kinder than the Nazis or the Communists. He didn’t see rays of hatred coming from their eyes. For the most part, they were accepting of him, even with his white skin and Russian accent. It was true—as Arnie had promised—there were fights and occasional deaths at the bar; sometimes the fights were due to drugs or money, but many times they were also because of love triangles.
The hours were long. Dovid started at four in the afternoon and closed the bar at four in the morning. By the time he finished cleaning up it was five. He arrived home just as the sun was rising.
One afternoon before the evening rush began, Dovid and Cool Breeze were drinking colas outside on the stoop in the backyard behind the building.
“You know it’s not so different being a Jew than it is being colored,” Dovid said. “People hate Jews for no reason other than that we are Jewish. They hate us even without ever meeting us, the same way that some white people hate or fear colored people.”
“Yeah, lots of white folks has lots of fears. And they can be mean, that’s for sure. I know you Jews don’t have it easy, either. But the only difference between you and us is that you can hide your Jewishness. You see, Dovid, we can’t hide what we is. It’s right there on our faces. Folks know that we’s colored as soon as they see our skin. Ain’t no place to hide for us. We get paid less for doin’ the same job as a white man. In the South we can’t even drink from the same water fountain or ride in the front of a bus.”
“Prejudice and hatred are terrible things, Cool Breeze. Their roots are based in fear. And, believe me, I know that it can kill. When I was a boy, I lived in Russia. That was when Hitler was in power. The Nazis came into Kiev where I grew up and shot the Jewish people, murdering them by the thousands. They buried their bodies in a large unmarked hole in the ground. They treated human beings like they were garbage.
“I was only thirteen when I enlisted in the Russian army and fought to defeat the Nazis. When the war ended, I was there with a platoon of men when we liberated the concentration camps. It was a horrific sight. Those camps were built to murder and to destroy human life. When I was there I saw piles of bodies; thousands of murdered men, women, and children. Their only crime was being Jewish.”
“They only killed Jews?”
“Oh no, not just Jews. They killed as many Jews as they could get their hands on, but they killed plenty of other people too. They killed millions. Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Romany, Catholics, and so many more. They murdered the handicapped and the insane. For no reason at all, no reason. Such a terrible waste of life,” Dovid said.
“When I was a kid, my folks and I was traveling through Texas. I saw a man with black skin like mine. He was dangling from a tree by a rope twisted around his neck. His eyes was bulging out and I could see that he wet his pants. From where I stood, I knowd that he was dead. There was a large wooden cross with burnt edges sticking in the ground right next to him. I asked my parents what had happened there. Why was that man dead with the cross of Jesus right by him and all? You see, my mama was a real church-going Christian and she wore a cross around her neck every day. I couldn’t understand why whoever killed that man put a cross by him when a cross stood for Jesus and Jesus taught kindness and to love thy neighbor and such. My mama told me that certain people does things like twist and turn the Bible so that they can make it say what they wants it to say. That way they can kill folks who they don’t like and do it in the name of good. Hitler wanted to kill Jews. He found a way to twist things until he made it look like he was doin’ right. Or at least he did among his own folks, them other Nazis. I learned that the men who hung that poor fella was KKK. You know what that is? That be Klu Klux Klan. They be true evil. They wanted to kill coloreds, so they twisted and turned things until they found a way to make it okay to kill anybody with dark skin. No matter what they say, it still don’t make it right though.”
“No, it doesn’t. It’s never right to hurt or mistreat another human being,” Dovid said.
Working at the bar, David found that he loved jazz and blues. Many of the singers and musicians who came in to have a drink and sing a song or two were famous. At night, when one of the trumpet players picked up his horn and began to play a solo, Dovid felt as if the musician had opened a door into the depths of his own talented soul and taken the entire audience inside.
After a few weeks, Dovid began to invite Cool Breeze to come for dinner at his apartment on Sunday, when the bar was closed.
Since they’d come to the United States, Dovid and Eidel lived in a modest apartment on the fourth floor of a five-story walk-up on the South Side of Chicago. Dovid had plans for the future. He wanted children and he wanted them to have a house with a yard where they could run and play. And so Dovid had been squirreling away every extra penny to fulfill his dream. He was going to buy a house in the suburbs. It would be a long commute to work and he didn’t have a car, but it was less expensive to buy north of the city than to buy a home in Chicago. He’d heard people talk about a suburb called Skokie. It was approximately forty-five minutes north of downtown. He read newspaper articles that said a lot of Jewish immigrants from Europe and Russia were moving there. Dovid thought that it would be a good place to start a family.
CHAPTER TWO
Eidel
Eidel thought about her mother every day. Her memories of Helen still overwhelmed her. Even though she was married, she not only missed her mother but she yearned for the life she had known before she left Poland. She didn’t think she would, but she did. She missed the building where she grew up, and all of her neighbors. She missed her friends and she missed the church she attended with her mother every Sunday. Dovid was a kind, gentle, and loving husband but he was not around very much. She understood that he was busy working, trying to support them. He told her constantly that his plan was to give them a better life than they’d ever known. But Eidel felt as if she were living alone in a strange and intimidating place. Their neighbors were mostly Jewish immigrants who spoke Yiddish. People in the neighborhood, mostly the women, stood outside their apartments chatting in Yiddish during the afternoon. Eidel smiled at them when she went to the butcher or the bakery shop, but she never stopped to introduce herself. She was too self-conscious; besides, she couldn’t speak a word of Yiddish. She was having a hard enough time trying to communicate in English. It seemed to Eidel that the other women were a close-knit group and she was an outsider. She’d talked to Dovid about having a child. A
child, she thought, would fill her time and her heart, but Dovid insisted that they wait until he had enough money to buy the house and was sure that he could provide their children with a good life.
Dovid wanted to join the local synagogue. Eidel thought it was a waste of money. “We are trying so hard to save for this house that you want. Why would we join a synagogue?”
“Because we can! We can make friends and live the life my parents would have wanted for me,” he said. “Here in America we can be openly Jewish.” It made him so happy that she agreed to join as soon as they had extra money. He was hoping she would join the sisterhood and make friends but she was glad they were not members yet. She would never have felt comfortable going there without Dovid. She knew nothing about Judaism, nothing of the Jewish holidays or how to celebrate them. Even though Dovid and Eidel had spent a year in Israel before they were able to come to America, she still didn’t understand or speak Hebrew or Yiddish. Typical Jewish food was foreign to her. And she found it difficult to relate to the other female members of the temple that lived in their neighborhood. The women were always nice to her. It wasn’t that they were unwelcoming. But she felt so isolated, so lost. She missed celebrating Christmas and Easter. She wished she could go to mass with her mother. She longed to unburden herself in confession. She would have felt such relief telling a priest how guilty she felt for resenting Dovid for bringing her there to America only to abandon her by working such long hours. He was always gone, always leaving her alone. Intellectually, she knew that he couldn’t help having to work. But emotionally, she felt lost. When he closed the door to leave for work at three each afternoon, her heart sank.
Eidel accepted that her birth mother was Jewish but she had been raised Catholic and she felt Catholic. How could she ever explain this to Dovid? He was so happy that he could be proud of his Jewish heritage in America. In fact, he had begun to wear a yarmulke all the time to show the world how proud he was of being a Jew. She was not ashamed of her background; she just couldn’t find a way to fit in. Eidel had been raised as Ela and now Dovid expected her to forget everything she’d been brought up to know and love. She didn’t know how to do that.
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