Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue

by Mark Kurlansky

  When Harry complained to his wife about their sons' music, she would burst into an ironic laugh and say, "Oboy, meshugene gens, meshugene gribbenes." Crazy parents have crazy children.

  Maybe life was entirely beshirt. Nathan recalled from college that Kant had said this in his infelicitously titled Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschkhte in der weltbürgerlichen Absicht "What appears to be complicated and accidental in individuals, may yet be understood as a steady, progressive, though slow, evolution of the original endowments of the entire species." Aside from the fact that Nathan's parents hated the way their son could quote Kant and had squandered his education on mastering words such as weltbürgerlichen, it was possible that a life was completely shaped by parents who in turn were shaped by grandparents so that a life in the East Village was shaped two hundred years ago by some forgotten incident on the Polish banks of the Vistula River.

  Harry, another musician who could not play an instrument, could not see this. He managed the real estate holdings Ruth had inherited from her father. Her father, like Harry, had been a visionary down on his luck. Ruth's father had realized that the children of the Jews in the shops in the Lower East Side were one day going to have money, and when they did, they would move north because in Manhattan history, people had always headed north for better spaces. So he invested everything he had on Avenues A and B, the area just north of the slum. He bought buildings and lots. The building in which the family now lived, large by neighborhood standards, was built by Ruth's father, who had hired a noted 1920s architect. But the father had underestimated his neighbors; they did move north, but much farther than he had imagined—to the Bronx. Once the market crashed in 1929, he was ruined. Most of the Jews in the neighborhood had heard that after the market crash, he had leapt from his fine new building's art deco roof onto the pavement of Avenue A. The story was not true; he had died of illness in 1932, leaving his family with a great deal of unwanted real estate.

  Ruth married Harry, an immigrant who always insisted that he had been a music impresario in Warsaw Even when he spoke very little English, he used the word "impresario" with great dexterity, though no one was sure what he meant by it. In New York he tried to produce concerts with stars from the Yiddish theaters on Second Avenue, but no one came. He moved on to jazz and even befriended Charlie Parker, who lived on the other side of Tompkins Square. He never questioned, though many did, how Harry Seltzer was able to mount a Charlie Parker concert. "He's a friend," Harry would explain irritably. Harry helped other people and assumed that other people wanted to help him. But his friend died of a drug overdose only weeks before the concert date, and Harry had to pay back the ticket holders, incurring a debt that took him years to settle. Seeking release from these obligations, he formed the real estate holdings into a corporation for the purpose of declaring bankruptcy. But Ruth would not let him declare bankruptcy, which she insisted was dishonorable.

  Harry tried to produce concerts with Chow Mein Vega, but so few people came that it didn't pay for the rental of the hall on Second Avenue and Harry slid further into debt. But Chow Mein had been a big star in the sixties when boogaloo was popular, and Harry never lost faith that boogaloo would one day be big again and when that happened he would be well positioned as an impresario.

  In the meantime, Harry managed his wife's real estate inheritance. Many of the lots and buildings were left unoccupied. Nonpaying tenants, squatters, had moved in. In most cases the squatters improved the properties, and since Harry did not have any other customers, he was happy to have them stay. He could not have forced them out in any event because he thought of them as his friends. The only really paying building was the one he lived in. Except for his apartment and Nathan's, they were all rented. Of course, Mrs. Kleinman did not always pay because of her postal problems. Birdie Nagel in 2H, whose name wasn't really Birdie but was always referred to that way because she spent most of her time feeding birds, had not paid since her husband died in the late 1960s. "What am I going to do, evict a nice lady like that?" Harry argued. And it was a good argument. Everyone in the neighborhood had seen evictions—burly men roughly carrying possessions to the street, the door sealed with tape. In this neighborhood, evicted tenants ended up squatting in a building down the block, which chances were Harry owned, or they ended up living on the street in front of the building, like Arnie, who had been evicted ten years earlier from the building around the corner from the pallet on which he now lived.

  Harry had offered an apartment to his other son, Mordy. But Mordy who took home a considerable array of women, did not want them scrutinized for ethnic origin by his parents. He settled into an abandoned building on Second Street that he had decorated with trees and vines that he made of papier-mâché and was festooned with sardonic graffiti in dripping letters, most of which he had scrawled himself He had written his favorite message, "Rehab Is for Quitters," on several other buildings, some of which were owned by his parents.

  Mordy was the family nogoodnik. Parents always make this mistake. In every family that has two children of the same gender, one is always marked the nogoodnik and the other the allrightnik. The parents so label them at such an early age that they invariably grow up to live out their designated labels.

  That was why Mordy had assumed his role as the third generation of failed entrepreneurs but Nathan, feeling the pressure of being the allrightnik, had opened a photocopy store. Nathan was no more capable of charging neighborhood people for photocopies than Harry had been able to charge them rent. But he did manage to charge enough to cover his operating expenses, which were not much because his family owned the building. Artists from the neighborhood—poets, painters, musicians—would come to Nathan because he would not only charge very little, but he could spend an hour or more working with the artist on just the right layout and size for the poster or flyer.

  Nathan felt that he should take the half million dollars from Katz, but he also knew that the store that would replace his would not help East Village artists and so it would not contribute to the neighborhood. Instead, it was part of an attempt to drive all of them out and replace them with people like the parents of Sarah's inconstant best friend, Maya.

  These were the issues being juggled—several balls too many—in his mind while seated on a contour-molded bench on a downtown F train burrowing under Greenwich Village to a clearly un-Latin beat. It was a fox-trot. Chow Mein would have called it a Jewish beat. One-two, three and four. One-two, three and four. Suddenly the rhythm changed. Somewhere under Manhattan in a dark and barely lit tunnel of rock, the train slowed and then stopped. Nathan felt the oxygen steadily depleting, as though movement had created the oxygen, the same way fish have to keep water moving through their gills to breathe. His heart was throbbing, reverberating through the thick cavities of his frail body, shaking him, thudding loudly enough for the other passengers to hear.

  He realized that he was having a heart attack. His body was chilling and heating up at the same time, feeling cold inside while his skin was burning and sweat was pumping out of him at a startling rate. He had to get out of this train before his heart exploded. But the heart attack was only part of the problem. He was suffocating. Drowning. Or he was about to drown, and he could not get to the surface. He had to get out! Yet he could not do anything but remain motionless and pretend that he was perfectly all right—just riding on the subway. Could he scream for help? The act of screaming might save him. Or pounding the conductor's cabin, telling the son of a bitch to move the train now! But he could not let people see that he was panicking, because then they might try to restrain him—hold him down. He had to control himself If he seemed in control, he would gain control. He wished he could talk to someone. Normal conversation could bring him back, occupy him until the train started moving.

  "When do you think they will move this thing?" he said to a heavy-set woman with a square jaw standing in front of him.

  He knew he had sounded a little too desperate, but if he could just talk to her until t
he train moved, he would be all right. She shrugged and inched herself to a barely perceptible but safer distance.

  "I'm sorry," said Nathan, springing to his feet, realizing that his own movement could relieve the anxiety of the train not moving. "Do you want this seat?" She didn't, but Nathan gave it up anyway and began pacing the car. Why didn't they move the train while there was still oxygen left? Not much was left. Could he talk to someone? Not the thin man in leather with gold oval dark glasses that made him look like an insect. Not the gaunt man with an African face in the powder blue suit and black silk shirt with tan-and-black patent-leather shoes that he tapped to a religious song that engrossed him. It was a hymn. Like on the deck of a sinking ship. Was he praying?

  Of course, Nathan was being completely irrational, and he only had to gain control until the train moved. If he didn't, he would have a heart attack! It could start at any minute. The heart attack. Or the train. Maybe it wasn't going to move at all. It could be stuck for hours. Or even a half hour. He couldn't make it! If only it could get into the West Fourth Street station, probably not far away at all, he would get out and never take a subway again. It was a solemn pledge. A bargain he was offering.

  The difference between swimming and drowning was just state of mind. Swimming! It had all started with swimming. Sarah wanted swimming lessons. But he couldn't think about that now. No. He needed to think of something. Think about swimming lessons. Of the $500,000 offer. Money for swimming lessons. It didn't matter. What mattered? Breathing mattered! No, something else. Sex. Sex could always clear everything else out of the way. What would sex be like with someone on this train? He looked frantically through the car. Not good. He could have sex with Sonia. This was no time for sex with his wife. You can never distract yourself by sex with your wife. He found this thought funny. He may even have been distracted by it for a second. If only the train had moved. The German pastry maker's daughter. What would it be like to remove her clothes article by article?

  The train lurched. They were gliding into West Fourth Street. He could get out and walk across Fourth Street. But the door didn't open. They were going to keep going without letting anyone off!

  The train stopped. The doors opened. Slowly the air came back. His skin cooled off The sweat was cooling on him. It was over.

  This had never happened to him before. Had he contracted a case of claustrophobia? Could it happen like that? Was it a disease that was picked up somewhere? Was it curable? Could he never again take subways or elevators? That would be possible if he stayed in his neighborhood, the way his father did because he feared rivers, Nathan didn't know why Something had happened as a child and now his father feared the East River, even got uncomfortable as he got closer to Avenue D. Nothing was ever mentioned about the Hudson on the other side. Was Nathan, too, now trapped in his neighborhood by his fears? Was he afraid of all confinement or just subways? Maybe it was just the F train. Maybe it would never happen again.

  This could be a turning point in his life, just like the $500,000 Katz deal. But Nathan knew that neither of these conflicts was what he had woken up dreading. Something would make this a bad day. A worse day On this Friday he was meeting with an ill-fated destiny.

  On Friday night, bakeries on Second Avenue sold challah. The one on Fourth Street was still kosher but sold out by three in the afternoon, not because that many Jews had to have their challah kosher, but because the kosher bakery did not make many, on the assumption that few kosher people were left. Since all the kosher people knew this, they bought early. By three o'clock the action shifted to the bakery on Seventh Street, which was not kosher but at least was Jewish. Once that bakery had sold its last loaf of braided egg bread, anyone who wanted challah had to resort to Chaim's. Chaim's was one of the oldest bakeries in the neighborhood, but several years earlier Chaim, having decided to spend his remaining years pondering a blue sea he never wanted to step into, had moved to Boca Raton and sold his bakery to an industrious Korean family.

  The Koreans carefully learned the recipes and continued all the traditions, even though they found many of the foods unpronounceable. Halvah was a particularly daunting oral challenge. They never ran out of challah, baking it fresh every day because they did not understand that it was for Friday night. This destroyed the Edelweiss challah business. The Edelweiss too had tried selling challah on Friday night, but most Jews would rather get their challah from a Korean than a German, even if most of the Jews in the neighborhood regarded the Edelweiss as the best bakery. The store had been there since the 1940s, the late 1940s—that was the problem. No one knew where Mr. and Mrs. Edelweiss came from. They had posters of Heidelberg and Munich's Oktoberfest on their walls. But Nathan happened to know that their real name was Moellen and they came from Berlin. Actually, he wasn't sure that Moellen was their real name. There was no reason to be suspicious of them, and even Nathan's mother bought their strudel. In fact, she loved their apple strudel.

  Ruth served the same meal every Friday night: pickled herring in sour cream, brisket with boiled vegetables, and Edelweiss's apple strudel. Ruth Seltzer was not a great or imaginative cook. She had never wanted to be a good homemaker. She would have liked to go to college and thought she would have liked being in business. But her parents saw no point in that and were relieved when their only daughter found a man to marry. They accepted Harry's claim of impresarioship without question, turning over the family business affairs to him. Ruth understood that Harry's important credential to her parents was being male. She was angry but remained silent. She had an idea that she could manage the holdings much better, but if she had questioned Harry's business skills to her father, he would have said, "So why are you marrying this bum?" Besides, everyone loved Harry, and if she ever criticized him to anyone, the response would have been that she was unappreciative for "all Harry was doing." Harry, it was said, had kept their holdings solvent in the 1960s and 1970s, when crime and poverty drove down the little value neighborhood property had once had.

  "Thank God for Harry," Ruth's oldest friend, Esther, who had moved to the Bronx decades ago but still visited, would say. "He keeps this neighborhood alive on charm alone. You're lucky to have a charmer."

  "Oboyoboy," was Ruth's only answer.

  Ruth knew that for all Harry's charm, the family was not as solvent as everyone imagined. She could have managed the properties and made money. Even in "the bad times" you could charge rent and make people pay the way other landlords did. But she would be hated for it, because everyone loved Harry

  Her revenge was to refuse domesticity She said, "A woman who cooks too well is asking for trouble." It can never be certain that she would have been capable of cooking well if she had chosen to.

  "What kind of trouble?" Esther would ask. Ruth would shrug and point at Harry Esther would think that Ruth was difficult and she was lucky she had a man like Harry.

  No one thought of Harry as trouble. Added to Ruth's frustration, he did not care if their house was orderly and he far preferred going out to dining in. But Friday night was Ruth's weekly bout with domesticity.

  Nathan, the family allrightnik, avoided his mother on Fridays because she would ask him to "stop off and buy a little strudel from Mr. Edelweiss." It was not Mr. Edelweiss he dreaded. It was his daughter, Karoline. For the past twenty years, Nathan had dreamed of tearing the clothes off of Karoline's fleshy body and devouring her nakedness like an apple strudel. He didn't know why he felt this way. She was an ordinary-looking woman. He was certain that most men barely noticed her short brown hair, her porcelain blue eyes, or the fact that when you were close to her body, she had the scent of fresh butter. Was it because of all the butter in the pastry shop? Had her body somehow absorbed butter fumes?

  Nathan would watch other men not look at her and feel reassured that she was not a particularly attractive woman. But he could not look at her without imagining. Would her entire body smell of butter? He once came very close to finding out.

  He had planned to take her to din
ner, only the second non-Jewish date of his life, but thank God his mother never learned about this. Karoline lived in an apartment in the building with the pastry shop. Her parents lived on the upper floors. And of course, that entire building smelled of butter.

  But once they were alone and she got close to him, his dairy-driven libido went wild. He grabbed her, squeezed her, pulled her toward him, ran his nose along the soft line of her flesh—but, for some reason that he would ever after regret, he decided that they should have dinner first, as planned.

  At dinner, over an appetizer of mussels at an Italian seafood place on Seventh Street, they somehow blundered onto the subject of Germany. Maybe they both thought it would have been too unnatural not to. She knew he was Jewish. He knew she was German. She said that her father came from Berlin and that he arrived in New York in 1949. Nathan couldn't resist pointing out that this was the same year that his uncle Nusan was found with numbers on his arm. She said that there "was a lot of confusion in Europe in those years" and volunteered that Moellen wasn't her father's real name.

  "Really," said Nathan, failing at disinterest. "What was his real name?" He wanted to suggest Eichmann as a little joke, but he used restraint. She didn't know what his real name was. He grew more curious, asked more questions, grew less polite about it. She grew suspiciously defensive and finally accused him of suggesting that her father was a Nazi. He, misquoting Shakespeare, said that she "doth protest a bit much."

  Later he had to admit that you couldn't really protest too much about your own father being accused of being a mass murderer, but at the time he thought it was very significant that she took such exception to his questions. They both went home full of anger. But he never got the scent of her from his nostrils—more than butter, maybe butter and sugar? Even after he was married, he sometimes lay in bed at night imagining Karoline Moellen naked in his bed.