When she tried to control herself, her eyes only moistened more. “And maybe you will tell him some time he should try to come home and see his Momma.”
It was like a very little moan for a very deep wound. I went out wondering how many other cruelties of Sammy’s she had accepted with the same mild protest.
The synagogue was a bare, shabby place, airless with all the windows shut, where forty or fifty men, mostly aged and bearded, faced east to the Holy Land, humbled themselves before their fierce, demanding God and wailed their songs of endless sorrow. I stood there swaying with them, but only mechanically, for I was raised in the Reform Temple that these traditional religionists would spit upon, and in recent years I had even strayed from this watered-down Judaism, occasionally doing lip service on the High Holy Days now but coming to believe that if love for your fellow man is in your heart you need no superstructure to dramatize it for you. And if it isn’t, no God and no church can put it there. So I stood there swaying and wondering. What is a Jew? The anthropologists have proved it is not a race, since the only scientific category is the Semitic, which includes Arabians and Assyrians, some of the most fervent anti-Jews in the world. And if it were merely a religion, all Jews like me would have to be excluded. And if it is only a unit of national culture, it is withering away in America, for the customs and traditions that the Glicksteins brought over at the end of the nineteenth century may have been inherited by Israel, droning in his yarmulka at my side, but were thrown overboard as excess baggage by anyone in such a hurry as his younger brother.
Afterward we went across to a little bakery, because that was the most convenient place to sit, and ate potato knishes and talked.
The poverty of the neighborhood had swallowed Israel. He had worked for the Settlement House fifteen years. When he was a child he had developed tuberculosis of the skin, and doctors had been telling him to find a better climate, but something held him here, like an umbilical cord between him and his people, which he would not cut.
“It is hard to explain,” he said. “I would always be thinking about them. I would worry about them.”
He talked without an accent but with the wailing tone and cadence of the Jewish chants.
“How much can the Settlement do?” I said.
He nodded wearily. “I know. Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to bail out the Hudson with my bare hands.” The singsong of his voice emphasized the futility. “This one has no clothes to go to school. So, when you get the clothes, he can’t go to school because the father has no job. So, when you find the job …”
He shrugged helplessly. “The same every day, only worse. The Reds say to me, ‘What is the use of your Settlement? It is just a patch on the old tire. What we need is to throw the old tire on the dump heap and start with a new one.’ I don’t know, sometimes I think maybe they are not so crazy. Only more violence? I have seen too much already. And meantime who is going to get the milk for Mrs. Fleischman’s baby, or find someone to take care of little Irving whose mother died yesterday …?”
He stopped short, swamped with the hopelessness of it.
“Israel,” I said, “have you always felt this way about it?”
“I guess I got it from the old man,” he said. “If he had lived a long time ago they would have written about him in the Bible. Everybody on the East Side called him Papa Glick. I can remember when I was a kid, Papa was always bringing somebody hungry home for supper, even when we didn’t have enough to go round. I remember once he even dragged an Irish bum in off the Bowery for the Passover feast, and the ceremony made the mick bawl. Whenever anything went wrong, the neighbors always yelled for Papa. They even called him in the middle of the night like a doctor. Poor Papa Glick.”
“Where is he now?”
“He’s been dead since Sammy was thirteen.”
“How did he die, Israel?”
“He was run over. Coming home with his pushcart one night. Poor Papa. It was like he really wanted to get run over.”
“Why?” I said. “What was the matter, Israel?”
“What is the use?” he said. “What’s passed is passed. So now that my brother is a big man I would only sound jealous.”
“But you really wouldn’t want to be Sammy?”
“Me be Sammy!” he said. “May I eat a live pig first.”
“How was it with him and your father?” I said. “What kind of a kid was he? You can tell me.”
What I was trying to say was that I was on his side and he seemed to understand.
Israel was one of those Jews who cannot look angry. When they want to look angry they only look more melancholy.
“He broke Papa’s heart,” he said. “He made Papa not want to live any more.”
“What happened?” I said. “What did he do?”
“It’s a long story,” Israel said. “I know it’s a terrible thing to say about your own flesh and blood, but, before God, if he should drop dead this minute I would not even sit shiva.”
When we finally left the bakery it was dark and the pale kids looked like hobgoblins playing around the lampposts and I had heard Israel’s story. It was a sad, angry story, full of tears and curses and, as I walked slowly toward the subway through those jumbled ghetto streets, it made me shudder to pass all those little creatures who might be Sammy Glicks.
Israel’s story was just fascinating and unsatisfying enough to make me want to go on playing Sherlock Holmes, only this seemed more important than tracking down a murderer. And there were still large gaps to be filled. But Israel had given me some promising leads. He had told me about Sammy’s first teacher, Miss Carr, who was still at P.S. 15. And about Foxy Four Eyes, the degenerate son of a tailor, always the idol of the younger boys who used to hang out at his old man’s shop on the corner.
The first chance I had I was down again. I walked through the yard of Sammy’s school. The boys had gathered to watch a fight. “Kill the dirty sheeny,” they were yelling, “Kick him in the balls.” Send him back to Palestine, to Ireland, to the Pope. Blazing with hatreds so quickly inherited, it was easy to make the mistake of thinking they were in the blood.
The little boys did not fight like children. It looked professional. They fought grimly, weaving, jabbing, dancing away. They clinched, pounded each other’s kidneys, broke, and punched with perfect timing. These were not children but seasoned battlers, battle-scarred veterans of seven or eight, for the East Side is like one gigantic prize-ring through the ropes of which everyone has to climb at birth.
On the fence at the back of the yard, a child who looked as if he had not been on this earth more than half a dozen years was conscientiously inscribing the usual obscenity in chalk letters, a foot high, which stood there like a desperate challenge to a hostile world, summing up in two brief words the attitude toward life that Sammy had probably begun to learn at the same age and place.
I really hadn’t expected to find her, but Miss Carr was still there. Middle-aged, wiry, talkative and not as nervous as you would expect her to be after struggling for control of those hostile, overcrowded classes for so many years.
As she talked on, memory of Sammy sharpened, reminiscences of him she thought she had forgotten began to return, and she passed them on willingly, partly because she took special pride in her memory, partly because Sammy’s childhood exploits still had a fascination for her.
One story she said she would never forget. Sammy’s first day in school. After she told me, I knew I would never forget it either. And I knew that even if Sammy had forgotten it, it had become a part of him.
As I was leaving, Miss Carr said, “So now he’s a famous movie writer. I used to think Sammy might become a brilliant scholar. But as he got up in the higher grades he began to lose interest. That’s our problem down here, you know. I’m afraid P.S. 15 is the smallest part of their education. The street is the real school. And that’s where Sammy was a star pupil.” She took off her glasses and began to clean them carefully and I suddenly saw how old and tired
she was. “But I guess there’s nothing we can do about it. Sometimes I sit here looking out that window and feel so hopeless—the things they learn out there in the street.”
Then back into the street again. Searching for another kind of classroom where Sammy received a liberal education. It was still there too. The old tailor had died and the shop had been handed down to Foxy Four Eyes, whose shifty, crossed eyes leered out at you through lenses half an inch thick. He was chinless and puffy-cheeked and when he started to talk he exhibited a mouth full of bad teeth and a vocabulary that made Sammy sound like the Archbishop of Canterbury. The walls of the little shop were decorated with intimate pictures of female anatomy cut out of Film Funs and Police Gazettes with loving care.
“I’m a friend of Sammy Glick’s,” I said. “He told me to look you up if I were ever down this way.”
“Well, for Chris’sake,” he said, “good old Sammy! He sure was a hot-shot, that Sammy! I always said he’d sock the jackpot, but I sure never thought he’d get his in the movies.” His laugh was shrill and indecent. “Boy, I’ll never forget the time …”
I left Rivington Street behind, but not the smell of Rivington Street, not the noise, not the faces. Not Sammy Glick running through Rivington Street. For days after that wherever I was, whatever I was doing, it kept coming back to me. I saw the Dead End Kids in a movie. Oh, hell, I thought, compared to Sammy these are nothing but a bunch of Honor Scouts. Their speech may be a trifle more colorful, but they aren’t really evil, not the way I know childhood can be evil now. Oh, the beautiful American dream of childhood, barefoot boys with feet of tan, playing pirate, swimming holes, bullfrogs in quiet ponds and Sunday hats, puppy loves, schooldays, dear old golden rule days, my bashful beau, my ring-around-rosie queen in calico, Tom Sawyer and Penrod and Andy Hardy with America’s No. 1 Star, Mickey Rooney, don’t miss that heartwarming picture of family life coming to your neighborhood theater on Rivington Street, a sole screenplay credit, by Sammy Glick.
Where was the childhood of Sammy Glick? Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and see the man who was never young. It was flashing through my mind like a montage nightmare, Sammy’s face looming up behind all those quick and terrible scenes of his unchildhood:
Max Glickstein was a diamond cutter in the old country, proud of his trade and his religion. After the pogrom that took his first-born, Max brought his wife and other son to America. The child died in mid-ocean. “We must be brave, Momma,” Max tried to console her. “Maybe God is trying to tell us that we will carry none of the troubles of the old world into the new. We will have new sons, little Americans. In America we will find a new happiness and peace.”
They found Rivington Street. But no diamonds to cut. In time, Max got a job cutting glass at ten dollars a week. “Glass,” he complained. “Glass any jackass can cut. But diamonds!”
For years he cut glass every day but Saturday, when he worshipped his God, and Sunday, when the Christians worshipped theirs. And his wife bore him two sons, first Israel and five years later Shmelka. The midwife did not think Shmelka would live. He weighed only five and a half pounds. “Nebbish such a little one,” said the midwife. “Were he a little kitten we would drown him already.” But survival of the fittest is a more complex process with thinking animals. Even one who thought as simply as Mama Glickstein. She pushed her great breasts into his mouth until he choked, hollered, and began to live.
Because he was puny, Mama spent so much time with him that his growth was precocious. He walked before his first birthday. Talked before his second. When he was three and a half, he changed his own name. One of Israel’s friends always teased him with “Whadya say yer name is, Smell ya?” One day Mama called, “Shmelka, come here,” and he paid no attention. She called his name again.
“Shmelka isn’t my name any more,” he said.
“No,” Mama said, “then what is it, please?”
“Sammy,” he said.
Sammy was the name of an older kid across the hall whose mother was always yelling for him.
The strike came when Sammy was four. The glasscutters wanted twelve-fifty. Papa was a foreman now, making sixteen, but he remembered how it was to live on ten dollars a week. And now it was even worse with the war boom started and prices rising. He walked out with his men.
“Mr. Glickstein, don’t be a dope,” the owner said. “In another two, three years you will becoming maybe a partner. To cut your own throat, that is not human. And what kind of foolishness is this when I can get plenty immigrants” (the owner having been here twenty years could look down on the aliens) “to take their places?”
Papa Glick’s voice was deep and sure as if he were reading from the Torah. “To be a partner in a sweatshop, such honors I can do without.”
But the owner was right about one thing. There were too many others. The strike dragged on six months—a year … They never saw those jobs again.
Neighbors helped the Glicksteins the way Papa had always helped them. And he picked up a few pennies as the cantor in shul on Saturday. But he would gladly have served for nothing and often had. There in the synagogue, a dignitary with his impressive shawl, his yarmulka and his great beard, there life was rich and beautiful. The rest were just the necessary motions to keep alive.
And this they barely did. Sammy played in the streets without shoes. For his fifth birthday he was given a pair that Israel had outgrown. But they were still several sizes too large for him, and the way they flapped like a clown’s made the other kids laugh. Sometimes when Sammy would run after his tormentors the shoes would fly off, and Sammy would pick them up in a rage and hurl them at his nearest enemy.
Papa Glick finally gave up any hope of resuming his trade again. He was too old. America was a land for young men. Finally he got himself a pushcart like all the others. He sold shirts, neckties and socks, nothing over twenty-five cents. But there were too many pushcarts and not enough customers. So Sammy started peddling papers. He was three feet, four inches high. He wanted to play. He couldn’t see why Israel shouldn’t do it instead. But soon Israel was going to be bar mitzvah. After school let out at three o’clock he studied in the cheder until suppertime. Papa was so proud of him. The melamed had told him Israel had the makings of a real Talmudic scholar. And it was well known that the melamed was a man who never had a good word to say for anyone but God. “God has blessed my son with the heart and brains of a rabbi,” Papa boasted.
Sammy lugged his papers up and down Fourteenth Street yelling about a war in Europe. He used to come home with a hoarse throat and thirty or forty cents in pennies. He would count the money and say, “God dammit, I’m yellin’ my brains out for nuttin.”
Papa Glick would look up from his prayer book. “Please, in this house we do not bring such language.”
“Look who’s talkin’,” Sammy said. “Know what Foxy Four Eyes toi’ me—he says I wouldn’ hafta peddle papers if you wasn’t such a dope and quit your job. He says his ol’ man tol’ him.”
“Silence,” said Papa Glick.
“He says that strike screwed us up good,” said Sammy.
Papa Glick’s hand clapped against Sammy’s cheek. It left a red imprint on his white skin but he made no sound. By the time he was six he had learned how to be sullen.
“Papa, please,” Mrs. Glickstein pleaded. “He’s so small, how should he know what he’s saying—he hears it on the street.”
“That’s so he should forget what he hears,” said Papa.
Several weeks later Sammy came in with a dollar seventy-eight. Papa, Momma and Israel danced around him.
“Sammy, you sold out all the papers?” said Papa in amazement.
“Yeah,” Sammy said. “There’s a guy on the opposite corner doin’ pretty good ’cause he’s yellin’ ‘U.S. may enter war.’ So I asks a customer if there’s anything in the paper about that. So when he says no, I figure I can pull a fast one too. So I starts hollerin ’ ‘U.S. enters war,’ and jeez you shoulda seen the rush!”
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p; “But that was a lie,” Papa Glick said. “To sell papers like that is no better than stealing.”
“All the guys make up headlines,” Sammy said. “Why don’t you wise up?”
Sammy worked a year before he entered school.
That first day at P.S. 15, Sheik kept staring at him. He wanted to listen to what Miss Carr was saying, but he couldn’t concentrate very well because the Sheik’s small black eyes kept boring into him. Everybody knew the Sheik. His old lady was Italian and his old man was Irish and the neighbors would always hear them fighting at night over who was the better Catholic. The Sheik was older than anybody else in the class because he had been left back a couple of times. The kids didn’t call him the Sheik because he was handsome, but because it was whispered around that he already knew what to do with little girls. There was even a story that he had knocked one up already, but this was probably circulated by Sheik himself who was a notorious boaster and had a habit of appropriating all his big brother’s achievements.
The Sheik sat there all through the hour actively hating Sammy. Sammy had taken his seat, the seat he had had for the past two years. He had told Sammy, but Sammy had refused to budge.
“O.K., yuh dirty kike,” Sheik whispered harshly through his teeth. “See yuh afta class.”
It was lunch hour. Some of the kids were getting up a game of ball. Sammy wanted to play. After school there was cheder. And then papers to sell. Sammy was going to be a ballplayer when he grew up. He had a good eye and he was fast. But now he had to fight Sheik. Sheik was two years older, half a head taller. Sammy appraised him. He would probably get the bejesus kicked out of him. But he wasn’t scared. Just sorry he couldn’t get into that ball game. He followed Sheik into a vacant lot across the street, all boarded up and full of old tin cans and whatever anybody had ever felt like throwing there.
What Makes Sammy Run? Page 23