So they sent him away. But they didn’t forget him. One of the people who had interviewed him, a woman who was active in synagogue affairs, thought about him constantly and one day she heard of an opening for a young man of strict orthodox upbringing in the recently formed Union of Orthodox Rabbis. It was just perfect for him. If he couldn’t be a rabbi himself he would be among them – the next best thing.
He had left her the address where he was living, a cheap hotel in the Bowery where you rented a bed not a room, the bed costing fifty cents a night. Fortunately, he had been able to find a job: stock boy at Gimbels Department Store. It was a dull, poorly paid job, much like the one he’d had at Sears Roebuck, and when the offer came through this woman he jumped at it. He was elated. No job could have suited him better.
The office of the Union was located then in Brownsville and he moved to Brooklyn immediately, finding a room in the apartment of a Jewish family. He liked his job more and more each day, and they liked him. A good deal of it was clerical work, but it also involved soliciting funds to help build up the new organisation and he was especially good at that. He joined one of the small shuls that proliferated around Pitkin Avenue, and he was quite content and beginning to think of getting in touch with us in Chicago and perhaps even going there to visit us.
He knew nothing of Joe’s presence in New York, even though they lived only a few blocks away from each other and must have passed one another in the crowds on Pitkin Avenue often without noticing. Then there came that morning. Part of his job was driving visiting rabbis to various places in the city. He had been taught to drive the organisation’s beat-up old car and this morning, after services at shul were over, he was to meet a rabbi from Cleveland at Grand Central Station and drive him to Brownsville. And it was while he was on his way to the little shul for early morning services that he saw us.
There was something fantastic about it. I remember thinking I must still be asleep and this was all a dream. I heard my mother distinctly cry out his name. The shock must have been great for her. She ran towards him, and he met her halfway to the steps and they embraced. When he broke away from her he went up to me and then to Sidney, and he took hold of both our hands. He seemed bewildered himself. He kept looking from one to the other of us, as if he could not believe our presence. Then he said, ‘I don’t understand. What are you all doing here?’
Well, there was a lot to tell him. I blurted out as much of it as I could. My mother added some and Sidney chimed in with a little more, and eventually, still standing there on the sidewalk in front of the house, we were able to fill him in with everything that had happened. And I had been able to take him aside and whisper to him the news of Lily’s death. He had listened attentively to all the other things without much expression on his pale, ascetic face, and it was hard to judge if he thought we had done the right thing in leaving my father. But this about Lily clearly shocked him, and then there was something else flashing across him, and I knew what it was, the realisation that we were late for sitting shiveh, the mourning for the dead that was so important to him.
He swung into action immediately and there couldn’t have been a better person to help us. He knew all the social workers, the Jewish benevolent associations, the people whose business it was to help those in need.
It did not take him long to find us a place to live, an apartment on the top floor of a two-family house on a quiet street, to assemble enough furniture to make the place habitable and to stock a refrigerator with food.
Nor could there have been a better person to break the news of Lily’s death to our mother. It was a blow to her, a terrible blow that halted everything else with her grief. But Saul managed to soothe her and to guide her mind towards the ancient ritual of mourning for her dead daughter.
I don’t know if my mother realised this would be the second time she was going through it, that once before we had sat in our stockinged feet in a darkened room with prayer books in our hands, mumbling prayers for the dead. I had thought of that last night when we were sitting huddled together on the step, and it had occurred to me then that I was no longer the young boy I had been then and my feelings about religion had changed: I no longer believed in all this or its meaning and would not want to go through it a second time.
But I did, for the sake of my mother. It was enough for her to have to bear the loss of a daughter whom she had adored without having this thrust at her too. I would conform, but just this once, I told myself, and never again. Yet there were limits even now.
Saul had sent for Joe to join us and had arranged for several members of his congregation to sit with us. And now, he told me privately, taking me aside and keeping his voice low, he would send for Rose. Not Jim. He did not want Jim here. Jim was Christian. Rose would have to come by herself. Then he shocked me, saying he would also send for our father.
‘No,’ I said, and I spoke loudly enough for everybody to hear, and he looked around quickly and shushed me. I lowered my voice, but I spoke fiercely: ‘Not that bastard. We’re done with him. That’s why we’re here instead of in Chicago.’
‘I must,’ Saul said quietly.
‘Why must you?’ I demanded. ‘What law says you must?’
‘The highest law,’ he replied.
‘Just what does that mean?’ I asked.
‘It means the ten commandments. I believe in them, and one of them says “Honour thy father and thy mother”. I must honour him, no matter what he’s done. He belongs here to sit shiveh for his daughter.’
‘Well, I can tell you this,’ I said, ‘Ten commandments or no commandments, if you bring him here then I’m not going to be here.’
He was shocked. ‘You have to,’ he said.
‘No, I don’t have to.’ I was furious and I said what I hadn’t intended to say, no more to him than to my mother. ‘I don’t believe in this anyway and I’m only doing it for Ma’s sake, because I don’t want to hurt her feelings. But if he comes I won’t stay and I don’t care whose feelings I hurt.’
Saul was silent for a while, then he said, ‘All right, I’ll just send for Rose.’
‘You can save yourself the trouble,’ I told him. ‘Rose won’t come.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she’s a Communist and Communists don’t believe in religion.’
‘Is that what you are?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not a Communist, but I don’t believe in religion.’
He said nothing more. He swung round, his face tight, and he did not speak to me again for some time. Rose came after all, and although Jim had travelled with her to New York he did not come to the house to sit shiveh. Rose sat with us and held the prayer book in her hand but did not read any of the words.
My father did not come. I don’t know if Saul had sent for him, but even if he had my father could not have come. He was sitting in a jail and was being held for trial on charges of being drunk and disorderly, and assaulting a police officer.
But there was someone else who came whom we had never met before. In all the excitement of our strange meeting with Saul and the rush to get us settled in new quarters, and the sad news that had to be broken to my mother, and then the ritual of the mourning that followed, Saul had forgotten to tell us of the important development that had taken place in his life. Or had he really forgotten? I have never been sure about that. I think perhaps there was a certain reluctance on his part to tell us, a touch of embarrassment that he would be fighting against for the rest of his life. You see, Saul was married.
Saul had never been at ease with girls. He had never gone out with one. He did not know how to talk to them and he always hung his head when he was in the presence of one. He was still like that when he got through with his wanderings and settled in New York to live and work, and it was during the time he worked as a stock boy at Gimbels that he met Estelle and fell madly in love with her, but from a distance and without even having spoken to her.
She was a salesgirl in the bargain basement an
d very different from the kind of girl you’d have expected Saul to be attracted to, much less fall head over heels in love with. She was Jewish, that part was all right, a saving grace in my mother’s eyes when she got to meet her after the mourning period was over, but the only favourable thing my mother saw in her. The rest she viewed with scepticism, as we all did.
To begin with, she was about ten years older than Saul. And then, she chewed gum, constantly, and she wore high heels and very short skirts, and her long face was smothered in cosmetics, rouge, powder, thick red lipstick, mascara, and she wore tight dresses that showed plenty of large, pointed breasts. Her voice was high-pitched and came out in shrieks. What was all the more remarkable, considering the suitor, she knew nothing about religion or keeping a kosher home. She came from a broken family. Her mother had run off with another man, leaving Estelle and her two brothers to be raised by their father.
After her first visit to us, when they had left, my mother summed her up with just one word: ‘Trash.’ She was bitter and sad. This coming on top of what she had just gone through was a final blow. ‘Saul was either blind or mad,’ she said.
All her children’s marriages thus far had been disappointments to her. Even Joe’s marriage, after seeing the crowded hovel in which he lived and the difficulties he faced with a coming child, had hurt her badly. But Saul’s was the worst.
I think Saul knew how we felt about his wife. But it didn’t alter his own feelings. The hardest obstacle had been approaching her the first time and asking her for a date. It had been agony for him, and Estelle had gaped at him in astonishment, seeing this very, very Jewish fellow with the yarmulke on his head and tsitsis fringes sticking out of his trousers, stammering out what she had wished other men would say to her but least expecting it from him.
She’d laughed. She herself told us that once when they were visiting, showing no consideration for Saul, sitting next to her on the sofa, looking embarrassed. She told us how he barely got the words out and how she had to laugh, it seemed so funny to her. She said no, at first. But then she thought it over. She was getting on for thirty. No men were tearing down the door to get to her. She was spending boring nights with her father, and occasionally she went to visit her mother and her mother’s fat little paramour.
So she changed her mind about Saul and let him take her to a movie and afterwards into the hallway of her apartment house, where she let him kiss her and squeeze her pointed breasts, and was amused at his breathlessness. As soon as he got his job with the Union of Orthodox Rabbis at a much better salary than at Gimbels they were married in a simple little ceremony at her house, by a rabbi from Saul’s congregation. And my mother had known nothing.
Nothing until now and perhaps she wished she hadn’t known then, because it was quite clearly not a happy marriage, with Saul constantly battling to turn Estelle into an orthodox Jewish wife and Estelle resisting, and the two of them fighting and arguing over it. Once, Saul came to us with his face scratched and bleeding, his shirt torn. Her mother had arrived to side with her in the argument they were having over her refusal to buy meat from a kosher butcher, and the two of them had attacked him with their nails and driven him out of the house.
He went back. Despite my mother’s attempts to keep him from returning to her he went back to fight and argue again, and in the end, after their son had been born, he won the battle and she became an obedient Jewish housewife, attending the synagogue with him, maintaining a kosher home and doing all the right things, except that when she spoke of him she couldn’t stop laughing.
Chapter Eighteen
SIXTH AVENUE IN 1929 could well have served as an economic barometer of the times. From as far uptown as Fiftieth Street all the way down to Twenty-third Street, the ancient red-brick buildings that were stained black with soot housed nothing but employment agencies. They stood side by side in block after block, and in front of each one there were boards with crudely lettered signs on sheets of white paper advertising jobs, and in front of each one there were knots of men and women with anxious faces pressing forward to read these signs.
The elevated structure in those days ran overhead, darkening the street, and L trains rumbled by constantly, showering dust on the heads of the job seekers. It went unnoticed by them, for their attention was riveted on the signs, and sometimes they fought for better vision, shouldering other people out of the way, or if it was some luckless short person standing on tiptoe to see past the heads of the luckier, taller people in front of him or her.
In good times the knots of job seekers gathered in front of these agencies were relatively small, but in bad times they were large and the jobs posted grew infinitely less desirable. The vacancies were mostly for porters, dishwashers, bus boys, janitors, labourers, menial jobs with low pay, yet the crowds grew and in the summer of 1929, about a year after we had come to New York, they were so thick that they blocked passage along the street and passers-by had to step off the kerb to get past.
It was hot, and the faces of the people studying the jobs posted on the boards were perspiring, and sweat trickling into their eyes blurred their vision. The L trains overhead ground and screeched incessantly, and the dust showered down on heads. I was in those knots of people and because I could read quickly, I was able to move from one to the other faster than most of them.
On each corner, at the end of a block, there were men with little pushcarts, some improvised from baby carriages, selling apples. They had once worn white collars and shirts and well-pressed suits to jobs in offices. An apple made a good enough lunch and I bought one for five cents, a big, shiny red one, and I ate it as I went slowly along the street, pausing to read, while the sun beat down on my head and perspiration rolled down my back along the prickly dust showered down from above.
The Great Depression was in full swing. Everything my mother had heard one day back in Chicago from that man speaking from a ladder had come true. Millions were unemployed. Banks had closed, taking with them the life savings of many people, and if my father had not stolen the money my mother hid under the mattress it would have been lost anyway. My own savings had been transferred in time to a bank in Brooklyn that remained solvent, and we had been living off them for the past year. They were almost gone now. I’d have to get a job of some sort and Sixth Avenue was the only place to find it.
So I had joined the legion of job seekers and went there daily, starting at Twenty-third Street and working my way gradually uptown, my neck growing stiff from arching forward over the heads of others to see the signs, my eyes watering with the perspiration that gathered as the sun’s heat increased. And as I went along I wished so often that I had my job back in the post office and wished, too, that I had not been so cocky and superior about my future and so contemptuous of working there.
I am sure I was not the only one with similar regrets about the past. I met people. Sometimes a social touch was added to the search. You stopped and smiled and talked. There was a man with five college degrees, a heavy, middle-aged man with a paunch, wearing a tweed suit that must have added considerably to the heat he was feeling and evidenced by the sweat on his tired face. He had been a college professor. He had taught ancient Greek philosophy. We strolled along together for a while, talking. I was shocked when I heard what he’d been and perhaps, too, I began to wonder if I had lost much by not having gone to college.
There was also the chemical engineer. He was a few years older than me and married, with five children, another college graduate, and he was in a worse fix than I was. There were others like these two now looking for jobs on Sixth Avenue, willing to take anything, even a porter’s job if they could get it.
Well, they couldn’t. I couldn’t either. I had tried it. I had gone up the stairs to the office and asked for a job washing dishes in a restaurant. The man seated behind a desk with a cigarette in his mouth looked at me sceptically and said, ‘Let me see your hands.’
I stretched them out towards him and he looked and shook his head. ‘You’re
no dishwasher,’ he said.
It was the same with all of them. Hands were the giveaway. If they were soft and white you were not qualified for any kind of menial job and there was no use lying.
So what kind of a job was there for the ex-professors, the ex-chemical engineers and another that I ran into, an architect, of all things? And for me, an ex-post office clerk? I was getting desperate. My little money was almost gone. Joe and Saul could not help us. They were barely making enough for themselves. Rose and Jim had gone back to Chicago. They couldn’t do anything for us. Sidney was not even in high school yet. He had earned a little money after school selling ice cream in the parks, trundling a wagon and finding that most of his ice cream melted in the heat before he could sell it.
What were we to do? What was anybody to do? But there was little comfort in knowing that others were in the same boat. It was every man for himself and I thought that when my eye was caught by the sign that said ‘Clerk Wanted’. Clerk! My heart skipped several beats. Unfortunately, I was at the back of the crowd gathered before this agency. But that didn’t stop me. I pushed. So did several others. We all scrambled for the stairs. They were dirty, well-worn stairs, dented in the middle from legions of feet tramping up and down. They were littered with cigarette butts and dead matches. I raced up them, elbowing aside those who got in my way. I burst into an office that was so crowded it didn’t seem as if there was enough room for another person. A thick cloud of cigarette smoke hung over the mob.
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