Have I Got a Story for You

by Ezra Glinter

  Starting in 1904, Rosenfeld became a regular contributor to the Forward, where he contributed numerous articles and short stories, in addition to poems. “Collecting Rent” appeared in the paper on March 2, 1911, and was republished the next year in a volume of Rosenfeld’s collected writings. Although the subject of the piece is a landlord—a person Rosenfeld would normally consider a class enemy—the portrayal of Barnett Krepk is surprisingly sympathetic, even as it satirizes his capitalistic pretentions.

  Collecting Rent

  (MARCH 2, 1911)

  Translated by Ross Perlin

  HABIT, THEY SAY, is second nature—and the saying seems to be true as well. Thus was Barnett Krepk in the habit of collecting rent: he simply couldn’t live without it.

  For Krepk it was one of the two: either collect rent or die, God forbid. And indeed he would sooner die than miss a first of the month and not go out collecting rent.

  “Collecting rent—you don’t know what a delight it is,” he often explained to the members of his family. “It’s good for my health. May the hour never come, but if I ever have to stop being a landlord, I think I would do myself in!”

  Krepk had once been one of the great up-and-coming real estate men—” quite the real estate man,” as the ladies say; “a real estate man and a half,” as the English say. At one point, he reckoned that if his tenants, their children and their children’s children all belonged to him, he would have an army like the King of Romania’s and wouldn’t be afraid of going to war, even with Prussia itself.

  Many times he fancied himself something of an emperor and his properties barracks, fortresses crammed with soldiers. He imagined that his tenants were his subjects, bound to pay tribute or soon settle accounts with their sovereign.

  He could give an order, and they would be out on the street! And this little demonstration of power was nothing, just a trifle . . . An emperor, only an emperor could do such things . . .

  “I’m off to review the troops,” Krepk would say, chuckling, as soon as the morning of the first arrived. The little book with the rent receipts would be in his pocket, a stovepipe hat on his head, a gilded stick in his hand.

  His face would light up with a smile, and he would set out for “the barracks” with a proud step, like a police lieutenant or a Cossack general.

  But times change: kings are deposed from their thrones; nations come to nothing; colonels and even generals, heaven help us, fall off their horses and sprain their ankles, or get a bomb in the eye.

  And Berl Krepk was sadly no longer “up on his horse.” He now went about like someone defeated. He himself knew not from what—it was as if someone had given him the evil eye.

  Yes, times change. At one time he was doing pretty well, he was an “allrightnik,” though not much more than that. He had made it up one side of Mt. Allright, only for the ugly crash in the real estate business during the last financial crisis 7 to send him hurtling down the other side. He lost his shirt, lost face.

  Those who had enough sense and courage to sell their buildings and lots before the panic broke out had gotten a good price and were now swimming in cash. But Krepk hadn’t wanted to part with his houses. If he sold them, he would cease to be a landlord, would no longer be able to savor the collecting of rent. He would have money in the bank, but who doesn’t have a bankbook in America? No! To become just a person like other people didn’t suit him at all. There is something altogether different about property . . . A landlord is not a person; a landlord is . . . a landlord!

  Alas, it had now been quite some time since Berl Krepk had gotten any joy from his properties. The ladder of success had suddenly started shaking under him the way a fever patient shakes, and Krepk had fallen headlong from its rungs and tumbled down as it broke over his head. He was ruined. His earlier good fortune had collapsed like overcooked dumplings in a pan of hot water. He had almost nothing left, and as for what he still had—he had to do a song and a dance to keep it.

  Even now he was still collecting rent, but oy, some collecting! What could he do? He had to do it, he was used to doing it, and habit is second nature, isn’t that right, and so, in short, he collected.

  From his whole earlier “kingdom” there remained just one single “palace” in one neighborhood of the city, which the real estate men called the “North Pole,” since nobody lived there. You can’t live there. The houses are ancient, decrepit, wheezing, without body or soul or the necessary conveniences, and on top of all that far from both trolley cars and subway stations. The population there was frozen through, as if they were up on the Arctic Ocean. The few characters who wandered around were the type who can get by without any apartment whatsoever, the sort who barely care where they sleep or which policeman’s club they get decked by.

  However many panes were in the windows of Krepk’s building, the same number were all plastered with TO LET signs, but it helped like cupping helps a corpse. It was a rare event that anyone took an apartment there. As soon as anyone did walk in, you had to give him the first month free, and then he had nothing to pay with for the second, and the third he just didn’t want to pay, and the fourth month he promised to pay by the fifth, and then the sixth month Krepk himself had to wait, because he needed a new mortgage. To get the mortgage, God help him, Krepk had to show that the building was not vacant and was in fact filled from top to bottom. By the seventh month the landlord himself had to pay for affronting the tenant’s honor and moving him out. He would have to help the old tenant find rooms and give the new one a little cash, sparing no effort to hire a mover and pay the man’s moving costs—all the while giving the old tenant loose change “for spending,” or at least enough for the first few cases of beer. Nor could Krepk forget after all this to throw some coins in the charity box for ridding himself so easily of such a “bargain.” It was only with God’s help, for it might not be so easy to separate oneself from such a tenant, and first you might have to spit out your own lung before living to see two broken chairs and a tubercular mattress being carted off in a little wagon.

  “For God’s sake, Berl, get rid of this ruin, it’s impoverishing us!” So Mrs. Krepk begged her husband, as you would beg a thief.

  “Upon my life, brother-in-law!” said his wife’s sister, a greenhorn. “Your fortune is worth nothing but trouble. You would have done better with such a building in Europe. To the devil with it! What do you need it for?”

  “Papa, give it up!” the eldest daughter wept in English—and in Yiddish, “Daddy, let it go to hell!”

  “Leave it, let it go, let it go to the devil,” they all screamed at once.

  “What do you want with me?” shouted the miserable Berl Krepk.

  You can’t blame Krepk too much. Habit is second nature. He was used to going around and collecting from his buildings, even when he was back in Europe. There he used to go into strangers’ buildings. In America too, he would go around strange buildings for a long time, always collecting.

  Later he collected in his own buildings, and yet still he went around collecting in foreign ones. And now that he had just the one building, he simply couldn’t bring himself to abandon it. He couldn’t sell it, and letting it to go to the devil would be a waste and a sin.

  In truth, the Krepk family would have been a thousand times more fortunate without the property. The little Krepks would have been especially happy, and it’s no wonder they were boiling with anger that their father took the whole dollop of shmaltz 8 that they earned and wasted it on the “North Pole.”

  The eldest daughter was an artist of the needle trades. She embroidered the tops of expensive women’s blouses and earned thirty dollars a week. A second daughter worked for a fancy cap-maker and made twenty-five dollars a week. The youngest daughter was a stenographer and bookkeeper, making fifteen dollars a week. Two sons brought in thirty dollars a week, and on top of all this the Krepks had a cellar store, a basement full of woolen merchandise where the old Mrs. Krepk presided and earned. But whenever there was that rare
extra penny, it went right into the empty property.

  Interest on the mortgages, taxes to cover fire protection and water, repairs—the place was a sinkhole.

  Here there was a ruptured ceiling and there, a chimney blowing up, refusing to let out smoke. By now it was just plain trouble and Krepk couldn’t save himself. A drunken Irish tenant fell down the stairs and knocked out his own teeth—naturally the landlord was at fault for having such terrible stairs. Here an air vent was stopped up, there a water pipe burst. From sheer rage, an Italian had broken all of the doors along with their frames, using them to heat his oven; a Slovak, from some similar madness, had torn off the wallpaper and the plaster, along with everything else, and had blocked a critical vent. After that, the man informed the Board of Health that “there was something pungent” in the building. The man was afraid, horror of horrors, that he would get sick.

  And so the city became involved, the police got mixed up in it, and Krepk received a warning that he had to overhaul the whole building, and if he did not, it would be condemned and no one would be able to live there anymore. He would simply have to go without tenants altogether and lose the little he still had.

  The family rejoiced: perhaps now they would have an opportunity to abandon the wreck—but Krepk quickly convinced them that real estate would start booming again in no time, and they would be “all right” just like before. And in the meantime their father was still a landlord, and he would go on collecting rent.

  7 A reference to the Panic of 1907, also known as the Bankers’ Panic or the Knickerbocker Crisis.

  8 Literally, “fat.”

  B. Kovner

  1874–1974

  B. KOVNER WAS the pen name of Jacob—or Yankev—Adler, a humorist for the Forward for almost seven decades.

  Born in Dynow, Poland, Adler received a traditional Jewish education until the age of sixteen, when he immigrated to the United States. In New York he found his first employment in a factory, before beginning a literary career in his early twenties. His first published pieces were two poems that were printed in the Forward shortly after its founding, which appeared under the pen name “Nesher,” the Hebrew word for “eagle”—a play on the Yiddish meaning of his last name.

  For the next seventy years Adler wrote poetry and short stories for some fifty-four different outlets, including the Forward. In 1911 he became a regular contributor to the newspaper, and was given the pseudonym B. Kovner by its editor, Abraham Cahan.

  Under that name Adler became beloved to millions of readers as a writer whose sketches trained a loving yet satirical eye on life in immigrant neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. His recurring cast of characters included several who became veritable figures of Jewish folklore, including Peyshe the Farmer, Moyshe Kapoyer, and especially Yente Telebende, whose name became synonymous with the well-meaning, but annoying, female busybody.

  In a series of sketches that spanned decades, Kovner portrayed Yente, her husband Mendel, and their son Pinnie, as they negotiated American rituals such as voting, going on strike, going to the opera, finding housing, and every other experience an immigrant family might undergo. While Kovner’s portrayal of Yente may sometimes seem misogynist by contemporary standards, it is a product of its time, and experienced immense popularity among both male and female readers of the Forward. The selection of pieces included here were all published in 1913 and 1914, and were collected in a book that year titled Yente un andere shtiferayen (Yente and Other Capers).

  Brownsville Looks to the Heavens

  (MAY 11, 1913)

  Translated by Eitan Kensky

  BROWNSVILLE, 7 A.M. People rush around half-asleep, some headed to the El station, some to the streetcars.

  But over on Pitkin Avenue, men, women, policemen, and a couple of runny-nosed, filthy-cheeked small children idled in a circle, heads raised to the sky.

  “What happened?” I asked a guy with a red beard.

  “I don’t know,” he said to me and shrugged his left shoulder.

  “Did something happen?” I grabbed a second man. This one had a black beard, but his ears were stuffed with cotton.

  “Huh?” he replied. “Did you say something?”

  “Did something happen?” I raised my tone.

  “Don’t ask me! I saw people staring up at the sky, so I looked too.”

  “What do you make of this crowd?” I turned and asked a young blond girl.

  “Ask me something easier,” she answered. “I was just passing by. I heard people talking, a commotion, a clamor, so I stopped here too.”

  Seeing as no one knew what was happening, I elbowed my way to a policeman. But the policeman also didn’t know. “I saw a circle of people,” he said. “I thought it was a fight, a fire, or some strikers who needed to get beat—turns out that nobody knew.”

  And with each moment the crowd grew and the racket boomed louder.

  This was a regular picnic for the women: their mouths were busy, working overtime, asking God to keep the circle together forever. They were like fish in water.

  Seeing that I was never going to make any sense of it, I spit and left for work.

  On my way home for lunch, the circle was still standing, but the cops were gone. I found Yente among the women. Her face was unwashed, her housecoat was unpinned, and she carried an empty pitcher in her hand.

  “Boy am I thunderstruck! Here he is back for lunch and I haven’t even made breakfast,” Yente spat out.

  “Do you have any food for me?” I asked her.

  “Fever!” Yente answered quickly, blood rushing to her cheeks. “I’m supposed to give him something to eat? And I suppose you won’t accept pain and suffering? A real human being would see that I’m busy, that the house hasn’t been cleaned, that I haven’t sent the kids to school, that I had to pick up Pinnie at the station, because he disappeared from right under my hands. Just a kid being a kid, huh? He’ll be a success just like his father—nothing but storm clouds ahead! Then he comes back, and asks me about food!”

  “Who told you to spend half the day standing around with those women?” I grilled her.

  “Just wait to see the ‘kind’ face I put on when I have to ask you questions! You’ll think I’d never seen a person before, the way I’ll deal with you. So you want to know how I got here? You really want to know? OK here, I’m saying! I was on my way out early in the morning with the pitcher to get milk, and I was about to go to the grocery when I saw it: the street black with people! I thought, Mrs. Kanarik had been caught with her boarder again, or Benny Zhuk slapped his wife again . . . I wouldn’t wish it for the world, Mendel, but Benny is right. Day and night, she’s out in the street gabbing with the women. Her house is littered in garbage and, not that I mean to gossip, but her greasy, filthy, empty-headed children swim around in the mud! And all she does is curse and slander and repeat every piece of gossip and upbraid her neighbors. And it’s supposed to be a wonder that he slaps her?”

  “Yente,” I said. “You’re going to make me faint!”

  But Yente went on spreading rumors: “Yeh. I saw that the street was littered with people, I thought Mister Kanarik was fighting with the boarder, or Benny Zhuk was slapping his wife. So of course I wanted to know what was really happening, and I went, like this, with the pitcher in hand, and saw a bunch of Jews hanging around with their chins in the air looking at the sky, and I started to look too . . . And that’s what I did: stand there, holding the pitcher in my hand and Pinnie by the ear. Suddenly, I feel someone tug at my housecoat. I turn around, and it’s Fanny Keselpoyk and Sadie Bandura and blond Becky, and everyone has their kids with them. So they ask me: Yente, why is everyone just standing around? So I say, I don’t know. People were standing, so I stood too . . .”

  “Yente,” I said again. “My heart is going to drop right out of me! Yente! It’s one o’clock already. The whistle’s blowing.”

  But Yente kept on talking: “So there, in the middle of
all the commotion, I reach out and—can you believe how it hurt me as a mother?—Pinnie wasn’t there! So I ran around and shouted, ‘Has anyone seen my Pinnie?’ Turns out that nobody’s seen him. So I shout even louder, Pinnie, Pinela! Pinnie today, Pinnie tomorrow, Pinnie didn’t answer! By then I knew: Pinnie was lost. And I ran over to a policeman and asked him: Have you seen Pinnie anywhere? The policeman asked me: Who is this Pinnie? So I said, My Pinnie, a little boy people call Pinnie!

  “So he asked for a description. I said, ‘He’s a filthy kid, muddy, barefoot, disheveled hair.’ He said, ‘There’s a kid just like that at the station house.’ So without taking a breath I ran there and I looked—Pinnie! There he was sitting on a chair, washed, hair combed, with a lollipop in his hand, smacking his lips. A regular sport! I try to take him home, and he doesn’t want to go . . .”

  “Yente, the whistle! Without food, I’m growing weak! Yente!”

  But Yente went on talking: “So I grabbed Pinnie by force and ran back to tell the woman that I got Pinnie, and in the meantime you came back. You know what, Mendel, I have some advice for you.”

  “What kind of advice?”

  “Since it’s already whistling and there isn’t any time, wait a few hours and I’ll make a regular supper for you.”

  Without taking a breath, I went back to the shop.

  When I came back home for supper, I found Yente lying in bed with her head wrapped and a damp cloth on her throat. The kids were out in the street. The chairs were all knocked over, feet sticking out. The tablecloth was every which way. The sink was full of potato peels; the blanket was on the ground next to the bed and the broom and kashering board were on the blanket, and the picture of Baron Hirsch 9 was turned around with his face to the wall.