A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom) by Her Bastard Son

by Clancy Sigal

  I, Roland, bravest of Charlemagne’s twelve paladins, was betraying Oliver, who had saved my life against the Saracens.

  I tossed out a face-saver, “Hey, Barn. War is rotten, but maybe let’s win this one only.”

  Barney glared at me. “We shook on it.”

  There it was, blood calling against blood. Voices raised, insults exchanged, and suddenly Barney and I had challenged each other out to a snowy alley downstairs where at first I pulled my punches again. This enraged him. He hit me hard, and I knocked him to the ground. I pleaded, “Don’t get up, Barn, I don’t want to hurt you.” This drove him wild with humiliation and as he struggled to rise I had to keep pushing him down. “Please,” I begged almost in tears, “stay the fuck down! I can hurt you!” This reminder of his disability drove him completely crazy and he grabbed my legs and sent me sprawling in the snow and all I could do was cross my arms and fend off his hysterical, tearful blows. Finally, I rolled over and ran away, followed by his great cry: “Come back, you coward, and try to kill me! I dare you. You never can, you never can …!”

  Monday, December 8, at Marshall High, in Miss Ballard’s glee club class, we boys sat at our cafeteria-style desk tables as the school p.a. system piped in President Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy speech. “And therefore I ask the Congress to declare that a state of war exists between …” At long long last, the moment we’d been dreading and waiting for, the thing that movies like Wings, Road to Glory, and Hell’s Angels, Fleers bubblegum cards (“Die, Yankee dogs!” screech the Nipponese soldiers as they plunge bayonets into the breasts of U.S. Marines) had been preparing us for—exploded. I looked around at the faces of the other boys. A few giggled out of fear or maybe they didn’t get it yet. I got it. My life, our lives, were changed forever. We were sitting atop a treacherous tectonic plate that was shifting massively, convulsively, and you felt the jolt, the displacement, the world sliding away under your feet.

  The catastrophe was not catastrophic for everybody.

  I had grown up into a world where you did not expect a job. Now I had a job. A future.

  Jack Perry, the pale jokester who sat next to me in glee club, whispered: “I’m joining up. Twenty-one bucks a month.” “Schmuck,” I said, “you’re only fifteen.” “You’ll see,” he vowed. And Jack kept the faith: he fell as a Marine on Okinawa three years later.

  Only last week I’d swung along Roosevelt Road crooning,

  Franklin Roosevelt

  Told the people how he felt

  And we damn near believed what be said—

  He said ‘I hate war, and so does Eleanor

  But we won’t be safe till everybody’s dead—’

  Plow ’em under

  Plow ’em under

  Plow ’em under

  Every fourth American boy.

  But suddenly, war delirium hit me like malaria or flu, fevering my brain and heating my blood. Those damn Japs! And Hitler any day now. I had a lot of wimpy pacifism to live down. A blinding surge of naked patriotism struggled with my antiwar genes, and, by jingo, won. Pearl Harbor sent me back to the streets and to Flukey’s joint where I drooped like a vine over the rising-bubble Wurlitzer juke box, snapping my fingers to:

  Praise the Lord

  And pass the ammunition

  And we’ll all be free

  I regressed to a childish fascination with all things military. As real-life soldiers, sailors, and marines filled the sidewalks of west-side Chicago in their khaki and blue uniforms—Fort Sheridan and the Great Lakes naval base were nearby—my eyes tracked them as if they were gods on earth. I idolized men in uniform, tagging along after any ordinary soldier for blocks rather than let him out of my sight, on the principle that he was fighting for my life, defending me. All men in khaki were the big brother I didn’t have.

  For the next four war years, I played a scorecard in my mind; a private was one point, Pfc two, corporal three, and so on. Once, late in the war, I glimpsed an officer with oak-leaf clusters on his epaulettes, and got so excited I fell off the Kedzie Avenue streetcar I’d been hanging onto at the back-end cowcatcher so as not to pay my fare.

  War became my frenzy.

  Now, when Barney Herzog and I brushed past in the halls of Marshall High, we avoided each other, I in embarrassment, he in anger. But his unfaltering gaze followed me everywhere. We’d bump shoulders, sidestep, or pretend not to notice, and when we had to go to the same room in Miss Saunders’ American history class there was an agony of awkwardness. Boys break up, but I keenly felt the loss of Barney, the only one my age who came near understanding my need to locate myself in a world of destruction. One day, a whole year after Pearl Harbor, I opened my wall locker at school to find a single sheet of three-hole notepaper impaled on the coat hook. On it was

  SELLOUT

  in his familiar loopily slanted scrawl.

  Barney didn’t have to worry, he’d never have to serve, but I was 1-A meat. So why did I feel he was the hero and I the coward?

  Barney and I lost touch after I was expelled from Marshall High. But one way or another, I managed to keep coming back to Chicago, at first to roam what was left of Lawndale after the ’68 riots and then to track down the remaining Rockets. I kept Barney Herzog almost till the last; he wasn’t a member of the club. Also, he reminded me painfully of myself at my defiant best, the self I’d lost track of. Forty years later after the fistfight in the snow I found him in a small apartment in Evanston, Illinois, and we spent an afternoon together while his wife—a clone of Heshie Wolinsky’s frowning frau—glowered from a corner of the dining room.

  Classified 4-F in the war and undrafted because of his health, Barney had become a copy editor at R.R. Donnelly, the commercial printer, and, like almost all the Lawndale boys, married a local girl. He had not “done well” despite the jump he had on those of us who lost time in service. Our visit was awkward, possibly because he was unsure why I was there in the first place. It wasn’t easy to explain to him, or perhaps even to myself, that the search for Jennie took me on roundabout routes but always seemed to come back to Lawndale and its long-held family secrets. He might have sensed and resented that I was doing this for myself, to clarify my own life and not his, but Barney put himself out as much as he could under the stern, unyielding gaze of his wife. Oh, those wives!

  I remembered Barney as an angry vulnerable boy fluent of speech and bristling with beliefs, feelings, ideas. But now, confronted by our mutual past he may have recalled only in vague outline, he haltingly searched for the words, backtracking, pausing for long stretches while he narrated a personal history of tragedy involving family suicides, madness, and violent tricks of fate. He was convinced his career had been stunted by McCarthyism, because a distant relative had been a Communist. Now, as a sixty-two-year-old man, he still carried his high-domed head with a certain sidelong arrogance, but the eyes which used to glisten with a keen intelligence refused to meet mine. The blank unseeing stare, like that of a blind man, fixed to one side of me as we spoke softly together that afternoon. He kept moving his head as if to hear something in my voice: was he, like me, trying to remember? Or did he have glaucoma? Was he, like some of the Rockets I was visiting, suspicious of the visiting writer from Hollywood with the rented Lincoln Town Car on the street below?

  I’d made the same mistake once before, in crossing the country in a red De Soto convertible on my way anywhere but the United States. That’s when I’d deliberately hunted down old friends and comrades, only to find them “selling out,” as Barney had accused me in high school of being disloyal to my most closely held values. Or they were somehow lacking in what I wanted to preserve in myself, a fighting spirit. In the Red Scare days it had been all too easy to find people whose spines had bent or broken under pressure. At the time, I discounted something as ordinary as the sheer grind of normal life, the thing that Jennie had in so many ways tried vainly to tell me about. “Sometimes …” she’d reply to my high-minded demands on her never to grow old or tired but to keep o
n organizing, “… sometimes, it’s … a little too much.”

  And of course I didn’t bring up the war thing that had broken up Barney and me.

  But he did, in his way. Out of nowhere he nodded gravely, “We played Monopoly. And argue, oh my, all the time. Nothing else but whose turn it was to throw the dice. Nothing else but the dice.” He studied the wallpaper behind me. “But we never really had fights, did we? Not once.” He was speaking in code to me.

  Mrs. Herzog coughed, moved restlessly, coughed again. Time to go.

  Barney and his wife did not get up when I said good-bye. But as I turned the knob of the front door to go he called out, quite strongly, not in the quaver he’d used all afternoon, “We can still be friends.”

  So he remembered!

  I left Barney Herzog’s building in Evanston with a keen sense of a job undone. Downstairs, in the Lincoln, I laid my head back on the leathery-smelling headrest and fought an urge to run back upstairs and physically pull him back into the same time warp I’d fallen into on these Chicago trips. If only I had stuck by my convictions and not gone sick with war flu—if only I’d taken my chances on a federal prison rap of conscientious objection—if only I hadn’t let myself be swept along with the flag-waving crowd, Barney would have married a better-dispositioned woman, been richer, happier, all-seeing—and I would look like Robert Redford. I laughed, and headed the car toward Morton Grove, a suburb where so many of the guys had moved with their west-side wives.

  “NEED I SAY MORE”: A Soldier’s Story

  I saved Ike Lerman for the last because we had been the closest, two lonely kids pretending otherwise, chasing each other in the alleys, tighter than brothers, two halves of a single personality. He, too, had been an “unwanted” child by at least one parent, like me a dreamer, a blotter to absorb the world’s troubles. The moment I walked into Ike’s place—a middle-income condo—I knew it was a home blessed by a happy marriage. Maybe I judge these things by how the wife treats me. After a usual round of street insults—“You used to be so fat. Now look at you. Oysgedart—a skeleton. She’s not feeding you, what?”—it’s curbstone bullshit time again.

  “What did we do all day as boys? What a question. Walked around the streets doing nothing and it took us all day to do it. We were both worriers. I am still. How about you?”

  Today Ike, a big tall handsome guy, is a retired truck driver and opera afficionado who has raised a large family and guided them through every possible trouble. Quietly, he is most proud of two things, his time with the 103d (“Cactus”) Infantry Division in Europe in WWII, and “I paid my bills. That’s not bad for a kid who never expected to live beyond twenty.”

  Despite the long distances that separate us, I constantly think about Ike, not just because we were practically joined at the hip as kids but because he was a kind of moral ideal for me, a notion that might give him a heart attack laughing. Of warm heart, he seems to see life clearly and quite coldly and dislikes my habit of romanticizing our past. “You always leave out the dead rats in the alley, the epidemics of diphtheria and scarlet fever, the big red quarantine signs. Remember when you had 105 fever and Jennie had to stick cotton swabs up your nose to keep you breathing? And the old men blowing snot through their noses on the sidewalk. That was part of it, too.”

  Like me he loved Lawndale—and its multiplying anxieties. “We were concerned about food, the family unit, and being Jews. We had to be worriers. It’s osmosis, picked up from our parents. Where was the rent coming from. Hitler. War and fascism. We thought that’s the way things were always going to be. Nazis and death camps. We were kids, we didn’t know, but we did. Of course, we knew! Big west-side families with relatives in eastern Europe. Herschel Grynspan, remember him? The Jew who murdered that Nazi diplomat in Paris, which brought on Krystallnacht. That’s when we really knew. Talk about dread. The rabbis would sermonize. Homilies. I can remember our rabbi saying they were being slaughtered in Europe years before anyone else knew. Or would admit they knew. Or didn’t want to know.

  “Even as a kid you couldn’t face reality. You go into denial.” He laughs. “I’m still in denial.

  “Back then, the only person making a living was a postman and he got his job from the precinct captain who knew the ward committeeman who kept Jake Arvey in cigars who fixed the ballot boxes for Roosevelt. What’s wrong with today’s Democrats, they don’t know how to fix elections any more? I would have liked to be a postman, only they weren’t hiring the day I stepped off the train after the army discharged me. I needed a quiet life. To keep from blowing my own brains out.”

  Half the Rockets had had a medical condition that technically made them 4-F, unfit to serve, but they went in anyway. Despite a heart murmur, Ike was assigned to the infantry, where he ran into barefaced anti-Semitism from other GIs and his officers. “All through the war they called me Jake, which is short form for kike. I couldn’t fight everybody, so I selected. In the worst combat, I kept two bullets polished for my sergeant who kept sending “kikey Ikey,” me, up to the point day after day, to get my ass shot off. And, you know? I put cellulose nitro, the stuff they drop down mortars to give them a bigger bang, under the latrine seat of my captain, likewise a Jew hater. In the army it wasn’t easy to be the only Jewish guy in the company.”

  Ike spent 112 days in frontline combat with the 103d, “forty-eight of them bad. You don’t know what darkness is until you’re in the dark in Alsace-Lorraine. Tree bursts, ground so hard you can’t dig a foxhole.” He says he knew something was wrong in a rest area “when they gave us fruit cocktail. Uh-oh. Here we go. We dug into Alsace for six solid weeks under fire. Retreating most of the time. Nazi SS had a few of us trapped one day in the upper floor of a house, one of our buddies rushes in and says ‘We’re surrounded!’ and I say ‘How do you know?’ and at that moment a mortar shell flies down the chimney and he says ‘Need I say more?’ and we dive out the back window and land in a pile of horseshit, the more horseshit a farmer has the richer he is, this guy must have been the J. P. Morgan of manure, we’re shitting in our pants and run into the woods with the SS yelling at us, ‘Come back, you fucking Yank!’”

  Ike took cover in a shell hole with a German soldier aiming his rifle at him, but Ike got the jump, “and I blew his head off, but it was raining shells so I had to stay all night and most of the next day in the rain in a hole with this headless corpse. Not appetizing.

  “How did I keep my sanity? I didn’t. Same way we did as kids. Two phrases kept me going, ‘Nobody lives forever’ and ‘Better you than me.’

  “Look, you live on many levels at the same time. You have to be different things to different people—and different things to yourself, or you couldn’t survive. You can be up with your family and an hour later by yourself you nose-dive. The ‘secret’ Ike is all of them, us, you, who knows?

  “We took the Brenner pass. I saw the concentration camps. I liked getting into Nazi girls’ pants by telling them Fritz Kuhn [U.S. Nazi leader] was my father and as I was pulling up my pants telling them I was a Jew. I fucked German women on potato bins. In combat you had a license to do anything you want—to kill.”

  Combat, Ike says, “was the adventure of my life. You go into this dreamlike state exactly like when things got really bad in the old neighborhood. When you’re there, you don’t believe you’re there, and when you’re out of it, you still don’t believe you’re out of it.”

  After the war, like almost all Rockets, Ike married a local girl who had written to him in service and, with the help of a GI loan, began long-distance truck hauling as an owner-operator. “I’m at this truck stop in Moline with this load of frozen fish. Not diamonds, just fish. This creep climbs in and sticks a gun in my face and tries to hijack me, and I tell him, ‘Hey do me a favor and shoot. It’s all a dream anyway. Gay en drart (go to hell), prick!’ and he was so surprised he freaks and runs away, the schmuck.”

  Although he had free tuition on the GI Bill, Ike did not go to college. “I don’t know, I
was blocked. I wanted to live, not take tests. I’m self-educated by WFMT, classical radio, and going to concerts. When the other truckers were tuned into Elvis and Johnny Cash and that “Convoy” shit, I had my earphones on to Koussevitzky and Callas.

  “They call us guys the Greatest Generation. So much crap. Your mother Jennie spent more time on a combat line than anybody, only it was the undeclared war in our homes. You and me, too, we’ve been at war all our lives.”

  Practically all the others except Deaf Augie—Oscar, Albie, Jules, Mendy, Legs, Nate—had seen front line fighting, an unusually high percentage considering the normal ratio of rear echelon to combat troops. They’d all turned down college on the GI Bill. After the Battle of the Bulge, Leyte, the Aleutians, and the Siegfried Line, life was too short to sit around a classroom. You wanted to earn, get married, make babies, move on up. In my round of visits and dinners, it became clear that Pearl Harbor had boosted us all toward a life we could hardly imagine before December 7. That is, all of us who survived the war except little Nate Manoff, who dreamed of playing concert clarinet and lost two fingers on D-plus-One at Omaha Beach and ended up in a psych ward and some say a suicide.

  For us, the attack on Pearl Harbor was an extension of FDR’s New Deal, a vast works project. The bomb that tore into the ammo room of the USS Arizona lifted a huge load of anxiety from the poor. Emperor Hirohito’s bombing of Hickham Field, catching all our planes on the ground, did for the American economy what even the most Utopian New Dealers could only fantasize. The rush of patriotic adrenalin, not to mention federal money flowing into factories, offices, and farms for war orders, primed the pump as no government works project ever could.