Father Divine's Bikes

by Steve Bassett

  Great War. This new party was no different than the others. His mother, up to the moment of her death in 1936, believed there was nothing for an educated Jew to fear. She would proudly recite names of Jewish academics, physicians, scientists, financiers, entrepreneurs, and even ranking military officers.

  “Our people fought in the trenches, died in the trenches,” his mother said. “We collected our share of Iron Crosses. We are Germans. We have nothing to fear.”

  Simon’s family and other members of Germany’s artistic Jewish community had become delusional in their denial of the inevitable.

  After graduating the university, Simon became involved in the rich tradition of art in Berlin, making friends among the young artists at the time. He opened his gallery with the help of his uncles, and showcased their work with growing success.

  However, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s hate-filled propaganda boss and cultural czar, despised the new artists and used the Reich Culture Chamber as his bludgeon against them. Only racially pure artists were allowed to show their work. Simon’s gallery showcased artists who refused to pander to Hitler’s regime.

  Unlike others in his family, Simon refused to wear blinders about what was happening around them. Simon realized he no longer had the moral resources to confront the inevitable. Was it cowardice that conflicted him? This question first began to eat away at him in the most unlikely of places, his safe sanctuary in Berlin that after the deaths of his mother and father contained the only things that mattered to him. Simon’s doubts were confirmed the day his landlord, Kurt Hoffman, strode cockily into his spacious second-floor gallery. The gallery’s rent had gone up four times in three years, the bad tidings delivered each time by a contemptuously smiling Hoffman.

  “Hello again, Eli Simon,” Hoffman said, smirking. “Things must be going well for you. Your stock appears to be low. Lots of buyers, I presume.”

  “It seems so.”

  “You know, Herr Simon, that if you weren’t such a good tenant, I would have turned you in a long time ago for the smut you sell.”

  Simon didn’t address that veiled threat. “And I take it that before you leave today I’ll need be an even better tenant.”

  “How perceptive of you; how perceptive indeed. But we’ll get to that later. I always find a visit to your gallery rewarding.”

  Hoffman strode about the gallery inspecting Simon’s painstakingly collected treasures. He paused and peered closely at two small, beautifully framed abstracts by Paul Klee. “Ah, I see you have Klees. Controversial these days. Is he still around?”

  “You know as well as I do he’s a sick man and has been in Switzerland for the past five years.”

  Hoffman continued his tour. “You are well aware, Herr Simon, that the Fuhrer has declared that there is no place in the Third Reich for modernist and experimental art. Only the simple virtues of our beloved Fatherland are acceptable.”

  “Heir Hoffman, with respect, what is the reason for your visit. Come on, out with it. As if I didn’t already know.”

  Simon had been seated at his desk during Hoffman’s cruel word game. The man now stood stiff and correct in front of the desk. “Your rent is now doubled starting in July. I trust you will continue to be an excellent tenant.” Hoffman hissed the words out, nodded, and headed toward the gallery entrance.

  Simon knew it was only a matter of time before Hoffman tired of playing his little mocking word games, and decided the ever-bigger rent checks were no substitute for Nazi accolades awarded for exposing a subversive Jew.

  That evening, Simon made plans to get out of Germany. He disposed of his collection piecemeal. First to friends, and then through contacts in Switzerland and France. The art world was filled with sharks that sensed instinctively when there was blood in the water, and Simon was bleeding. It was all over in three weeks. By late July, Simon had his passport in hand, and cash and some jewelry sewn into the left lining of his overcoat. Inside the right side were two Klee’s, flat without frames.

  Under the sponsorship of his cousin Isaac Weinstein, he boarded a tramp steamer at Hamburg bound for the United States, and a week later landed in the port of New York. His cousin met him at the dock and took him in until he got on his feet.

  To have a gallery in New York had been Simon’s dream. His timing couldn’t have been worse. The depression had taken its toll. By 1938, the one hundred forty art galleries in Manhattan had dwindled to thirty. Polarization had set in. The Upper East Side galleries catered to the ultra-wealthy, while in the Village the avant-garde galleries offered the more affordable works of up and coming artists. There was no place for Simon.

  His cousin Isaac came to his rescue. He had heard that the elderly widow of a Jewish pawnbroker in Newark was anxious to sell her husband’s shop. The blacks were taking over the area, and she wanted out as quickly as possible. The money Simon had stashed in the lining of his coat was more than enough to close the deal. The old woman moved in with her daughter in Irvington on the other side of town.

  Times were hard and pawn shops did a brisk business. Simon, a bachelor, devoted all his energies to his new enterprise. He developed a reputation for fair dealing and people trusted him.

  Less than four months after his arrival in New Jersey, he read in Aufbau, the Jewish newspaper from New York, that Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Jewish émigré living in Paris, gained access to the German embassy and pumped three bullets into diplomat Ernst von Rath to protest his family’s expulsion from Hanover to Poland. Von Rath’s death propelled the Gestapo, SS storm troopers and the Hitler Youth onto the streets of every city in Germany. It was Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Simon’s cultivated stoicism evaporated when he called his cousin Isaac. Isaac’s voice cracked several times, and he was obviously having trouble getting the words out.

  “Eli, can you believe? Can you even imagine? Synagogues by the hundreds destroyed, all gone. Gone! I never thought the Nazi swine would go this far. Thousands of shops and homes were ripped apart and looted. So far, almost a hundred Jews have been killed by those strutting SS and Gestapo pigs.”

  A cold sweat drained Simon. The memory of that June afternoon encounter with Hoffman crystallized and hardened to hatred. He could imagine the servile little man first currying favor with the Gestapo, then happily leading the way as they pillaged his beloved gallery.

  “We both know this is only the beginning,” Simon said. “They aren’t finished with us yet.”

  Simon had surprised himself with his involuntary “us.” His father was a freethinker and didn’t believe in religion at all. If it wasn’t for his mother and her love of tradition, his family would not have followed even the most rudimentary Jewish orthodoxy. His mother did not keep a Kosher home, even for the holidays. They were members of a temple but only to keep up appearances with their neighbors and friends. They hardly attended. He had a bar mitzvah, but his religious training ended there. Yet, when all was said and done, they still identified as Jews.

  Simon gently placed the receiver in the cradle of his newly installed telephone. He walked across the living room of his Lido apartment and gripped the fireplace mantle until his fingers turned numb in anger and disgust. That was a year before Hitler’s war machine invaded Poland and the Holocaust began.

  Inside his shop Simon kept furniture and other large items on the floor and in a back room. In a dusty glass case, he displayed smaller objects such as tarnished wedding rings; religious icons; fake baubles; medals from long lost heroes; and a few antique handguns. Rows of combat plane cards, each taken from a pack of Wings cigarettes, lined the wall behind Simon’s desk. Kids collected these cards, and traded them for used issues of Batman or Superman comics. Simon had switched to Wings, with their atrocious flavor, when he found that a P-51 Mustang had value. After the war ended, interest in fighter planes dwindled and Wings stopped offering them as nicotine inducements. Simon switched back to Camels.

  Simon had developed a tough but fair method of dealing with his custom
ers. Black or white, he treated them all with respect. The cops who patrolled the neighborhood knew he ran a good, clean business. He prospered. Until the day two of Longy Zwillman’s thugs stepped through the front door.

  The smaller of the two was neatly dressed with a gabardine suit, freshly blocked hat, and gloves. His companion was big, dark and forbidding, and carried a leather briefcase. His blue suit was rumpled and his tie was food stained. He had a wide smile that could be described as friendly until Simon noticed his expressionless eyes. “What can I do for you gents?” Simon said with some hesitation.

  “We got something for you to push.”

  Simon looked at the little man. “I’m sorry, but I have enough merchandise.”

  “You’ll like this stuff. It’s like printing money. Hy, show the man.”

  The big man lifted the briefcase onto the counter and opened it. It contained pornography, magazines, pictures, cards, even 8 mm films.

  “It’s all top quality, a lot of it’s from Argentina, the best. They do more than tango down there.” Simon glanced at the cards and at the other crude wares. He knew two things: he could sell them at a good profit, and they were illegal.

  “I run a clean business. I can’t use these things. I don’t want any trouble.”

  “No trouble. Just take it.”

  “Why me?”

  “Let’s just say we’ve been watching you. Longy trusts you.”

  Simon knew all about Abner “Longy” Zwillman, and his gang of Jewish hitmen. Zwillman’s specter had been hovering over Newark’s Jewish community for decades when Simon arrived. Zwillman had come a long way since hawking fruits and vegetables from a horse-drawn wagon on Prince Street. The old-timers with their pushcarts had long ago staked out Prince Street as their own, and Longy suffered probably the only setback of his life. Then the policy racket came to his rescue, and he found that selling numbers to better-off Jewish housewives on Clinton Hill was just his ticket. It wasn’t long before he and Mafia Boss Richie “the Boot” Boiardo sliced up Newark between them. Boiardo staking out the north precincts, with Zwillman controlling gambling, prostitution, and labor racketeering in the rest of the city. He dated Hollywood bombshell Jean Harlow while setting up legit businesses and coughing up a quarter million for slum clearance. He even offered a reward for the return of the Lindbergh baby.

  It took a while, even a stint with Murder Incorporated, before Zwillman would inherit the title “the Al Capone of New Jersey” after Dutch Schultz was gunned down in a Chinese joint in downtown Newark.

  Simon saw him every Sunday at the Mercer Shvitz, billed by owners Gussie and Isador Goldberg as the most modern sweat bath in New Jersey. His weekly steam bath was his only pleasure. It did more than clean Simon’s pores and drain his sinuses. It returned him to his roots and a time when his life made a difference.

  Every Sunday night he shared the steam room with Zwillman, whose retinue included a coterie of thugs, politicians, and some legitimate business types. It was hard for Simon to visualize the florid, pink-skinned Zwillman pushing his weight around with the Mafia Ruling Commission.

  After shvitzing, Simon was a fly on the wall in Gussie’s dining room, watching Zwillman hold court with his cronies. He watched and listened furtively while enjoying Gussie’s thick vegetable soup, boiled chicken, and her surprise specialty, Greek salad. Nobody seemed to notice him. He was just another solitary Jew at the shivtz. But Longy’s men must have asked the owner about him.

  “Please, mister. This stuff is illegal. I could lose my business if the cops find out.”

  The man laughed, “Don’t be a schmuck. We’ve got an arrangement downtown. No cops are going to be sniffing around. You get 40 percent. We’ll send a guy around every month,” he said with finality and closed the briefcase.

  “But…” Simon stammered.

  “I guess you don’t hear so good,” the big goon said. “This ain’t no negotiation. You don’t want nothing to happen to this dump you call a store, right?”

  “Yeah, just make sure we got something to collect every month,” the little man said. “Zeit gezunt.”

  The two men turned and walked out the door. They strode down Quitman Street to High Street and disappeared around the corner. The intensity of Simon’s frustration grew.

  It was only after the two thugs had left that Simon conjured images of honor restored. Nearly six feet tall with heavily muscled shoulders and arms, and a 47-year old body hardened after seven years of hoisting, dragging and pulling junk in to and out of his shop, he could have held his own with the big thug. At least for a while, until the commotion attracted attention.

  Instead, he now looked at the briefcase with fear and loathing. It was like the old days in Berlin. Thugs telling him what to do or else. Even in America, from his own people. He shrugged. World weary and jaded, he took the briefcase and put it on the floor. What choice did he have? He had become a master at bartering for goods from desperate people. Chipped mahogany chairs, tarnished jewelry, old clocks and broken bicycles – everything had a price and his customers knew he could help them get through. Catering to their darker urges was no different. The cellophaned boxes, glossy magazines, and cheap-papered, crudely drawn smut were no different from his other wares. It was all the stuff of broken dreams.

  Pornography became part of a business that, at best, was an unholy alliance with that final degradation—the calculated profiteering on man’s misfortune. It was a sickness that he first saw at the start of the war and had now reached epidemic proportions. It engulfed all of Newark but had recently become localized in the Third Ward, where the disease had surfaced as a crusty, self-inflicted wound.

  Simon knew his customers and selectively sold his new line. Business was good. He thrust the neatly wrapped packages across the counter with solemn regularity, often to nice people and generally in large quantities.

  “I like to keep something like this on hand for my special customers,” explained a suburban bookstore owner on one of his monthly visits. “You know, the James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence fans, and all.”

  A nicely dressed man from the West Orange Elks Club figured some of Simon’s playing cards could really “stoke up the old coals” at the club’s regular stag smoker.

  Each month a Zwillman runner came for the money. And each month Simon handed over a good chunk of change. True to their word, the cops never questioned him about it, and except for the times Officer Frank Gazzi nosed around, the police were never a bother.

  Simon couldn’t quite figure Gazzi out. He guessed him to be about forty or so, and at that age, probably a police veteran who was still walking a beat in a miserable part of town. It was obvious to him that Gazzi hated it all, the old Jews with their pushcarts blocking traffic on Prince Street, the Zwillman-protected whores, the bar fights that emptied onto the sidewalk, switchblade knifings, swaggering numbers runners, wife beatings, and voodoo priests illegally casting spells on street corners at twenty-five cents a pop. And now police protected pornography.

  “Name’s Gazzi, Frank Gazzi. Just took over the beat and to let you know I’ll be around from time-to-time to see how things are going,” Gazzi informed Simon that Saturday he first came around. “You’ve got a lot of stuff to keep your eye on.”

  “Thanks for stopping by,” Simon was taken by surprise that afternoon. “Good to know we now have an officer on the street, not just cruising by in a squad car. New policy?”

  “No, just extended the beat down the hill a few blocks, that’s all.”

  From then on, Simon was careful how he talked to Gazzi. He didn’t know if this cop was aware of how much money rolled into his shop each month from pornography. Or that his superiors and Zwillman made it all possible. He would play their relationship by ear and wait to see where Gazzi was coming from.

  “Not much for small talk, but I can always find time for the police,” said Simon, wondering if a two-bit shakedown was on its way.

  “I’ll be seeing you. Don’t have to worry about that
.”

  Simon knew one thing for certain, Gazzi hated this godforsaken neighborhood, and a man who hated his job could be dangerous.

  Later that afternoon Simon gave little thought to Gazzi as he prepared for his weekend ritual. Adrift in an inner-city world of Philistines and having nothing in common with the Yiddish vendors on Prince Street, Simon hungered for even a small taste of what he had left behind in Berlin. He found it five years earlier in front of the Essex County Courthouse, the soul balm he was looking for.

  Gutzon Borglum’s Seated Lincoln beckoned Simon to sit beside him. Borglum’s bronze sculpture was magnificent, and Simon found it impossible to resist. He climbed the stairs to share the bronze bench with the Great Man. Resident pigeons swarmed into the air and alighted a short distance away. Simon rested his left hand on Lincoln’s extended right arm. He caressed the cool, hard surface. His elation was immediate.

  Honest Abe was a magnet that pulled Simon to his cherished spot on the bench every Sunday morning. Each Saturday night on the way home, Simon would purchase a loaf of bread at an A&P Market and break it into pieces to feed the pigeons.

  At exactly seven-thirty he could be found with his bag of bread crumbs in one hand climbing the steps to greet his friend Abe while the pigeons cooed with ravenous delight. Simon long ago accepted that Honest Abe was one of the only two friends he had.

  The other was an abiding love of music inherited from his mother. The recorded melodies of Mendelssohn and Liszt that emanated from his apartment each night exposed Simon for what he was—an incurable romantic.

  Not long after he moved into his Lido apartment, he discovered the Fuld Hall monthly concerts at the YMHA on High Street.

  It was during a recital of Mendelssohn’s Sonata for Brass Septet that a woman took a seat next to him and introduced herself. She wore a two piece, blue jersey suit and white blouse. The only adornments were a small gold broach pinned to her lapel, a pearl necklace, and a wristwatch. Her auburn hair was upswept into a French twist. She wore only enough make-up needed to accentuate her high cheekbones and full lips.