by Sam Ross
2.
Before his father had gone away, they had never lived in a flat more than a year. He didn’t know why they always had to keep moving, but once his mother said: “We move because it’s the only way to get a clean, freshly painted, aired-out, brand-new flat. Sometimes we get a month’s free rent, too.” Each year, it seemed, she forgot the heartache and turmoil of moving, the many new fights Hershy had to get into on the new and strange streets, and the tearful partings when the fights were over.
Long ago, they had lived around Maxwell Street, the pushcart neighborhood to which all Jewish immigrants first came, but he was too young to remember it, except for one incident, which brought him his first present. He had tripped on a broken stair and fallen to the bottom of the stairway so hard that his father had to carry him back into the house. He couldn’t remember the pain he had felt, but he did recall that his father, not knowing what to do, left the house and came back with a bright-red cardboard fireman’s hat, and he got well and strong in an instant. After that, the only time he ever got a present was when he was sick; sometimes he got a nickel on Hanukkah, the Jewish Christmas, but that never seemed like a real present.
Once, when his father wasn’t working, they moved three times in one year. One place was above a stable off an alley, with a toilet in the yard that had a hole in it; he got sick then because it was too cold to go down there in the winter and because he was afraid of the hole and the dark. Besides, they were the only Jews on the street. All about them were Italians; his mother didn’t know how to talk to anybody; he didn’t, either. He had a fight every day, and once his father came home with a bloody face. The next day they moved again, to a street where everyone was Jewish.
When his father got to work again and the job began to look steady, they decided to move to a cleaner, bigger flat in a better neighborhood. They moved to the Northwest Side, near Western and Division streets: a neighborhood, his mother said, which wasn’t all played out, and where there was a park nearby to enjoy. Plenty of goyim lived there, but also plenty of Jews; one, then, couldn’t be a total stranger. Besides, they were getting up in the world, his mother claimed: the streets seemed bigger, and there were trees one could look at, and she could hang out her wash without fear of getting it full of smoke from railroads and factories, and she could breathe air that wasn’t always filled with the stink of slaughtered animals from the stockyards. People, she insisted, had to better themselves.
Year after year, they moved farther west, closer to Humboldt Park; now they were only a couple of blocks away from it. On the other side of the park lived his rich uncle, who owned a laundry, an automobile, and a brick house. His mother always looked toward the other side of the park, and said someday, with God’s help, they’d live there; meanwhile, they were close to making the jump across. But before his father left, he said to his mother: “Please, do me a favor. Keep your eyes off the park. Keep calm. Make the landlord clean the flat. And don’t move. I want to come back to something I’m used to.” Perhaps they’d have moved again, because the autumn his father was away she did look for new rooms, but flats were hard to find, and they remained where his father had left them.
He wondered if his father would remember the street and the house they lived in. After all, his father hadn’t lived there very long. Besides, his father had been to so many places, a million miles away, it might be hard to remember. His father had known the street only in the early hours of the morning when he went to work and at night when he came home, so how could he be expected to recognize the street and the house? Maybe his father was lost; that’s why it was taking him so long to come home. Maybe he should wait for him on the corner, or by the streetcar, so that he could show him the way home.
I’ll show you, Pa, he said silently, imagining himself leading his father home. I know the whole neighborhood by heart. Sure, Pa, I explored it. When I grow up big, I’m going to be an explorer. I been practicing and I’m learning good. I’ll take you in the park, too. I’ll show you where I fish, by the bridge, under a tree. I’ll show you Bunker Hill. We play cowboys and Indians there. I’ll show you where you get the boats to go rowing on the lagoon. Yah, Pa, I’ll show you.
He remembered suddenly the statue at the entrance to the park. It was of a miner with granite muscles, bent on one knee, and embracing a little girl. Every time he saw it, or remembered it, something big began to thump in him. Maybe that’s the way his father’d come home. He’d see him on the street and he’d run to him and his father’d get down on one knee and wrap him up in his strong arms. Jesus, Pa.
But maybe, if he went to the carline, he’d miss him. He’d better stay in front of the house.
He wondered what his father looked like now. He remembered that he was a very big man when he left, like a tower; he had to bend his head way back to look up at him. Since his father had gone away, his mother had grown shorter and shorter, and now he didn’t have to bend his head back to look up at her face. But his father, maybe he was like a giant now, with muscles busting out of his clothes, like the miner in the park.
Oh, hurry on home, Pa. Hurry. Hurry.
CHAPTER TWO
1.
Waiting on the wooden stairs of his front porch, wishing that he could slide down the black iron rails on the sides, Hershy scanned the street, ready to rush up to his father at the first glimpse of him. Suddenly a fear came over him that he might not recognize his father. The picture he held of him in his mind was vague, the edges blurring as he tried to make it sharper. A shadowy figure of his father rose in its stead and began to accuse him of not being a good son. He felt himself shrinking backward, yelling inwardly: I know you good, Pa. I know you real good.
2.
He knew, for instance, that his father’s name had not always been David Melov. In the old country it had been David Melovitz. But when he began living in Chicago the mailman would never call his name when he brought the mail.
“It’s a hard name to pronounce,” the mailman complained. “All you itzes and ovitches and skis. When I come home, not only do I have to put my feet in a hot liniment bath but I also have to spend all my money on candy drops to take out the cramps in my tongue. Do me a favor, then, and change your name.”
His father wouldn’t listen.
“Don’t do me a favor, then,” the mailman said. “Instead, let me give you a piece of advice. You’re a greenhorn, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” his father said.
“You want to get along in this country, don’t you?”
“Certainly.”
“You don’t want any trouble, do you?”
“God forbid.”
“Then cut out the itz and be an American.”
His father wouldn’t budge.
“Look,” the mailman said. “If you didn’t mind having a piece of your rosebud cut off, why should you mind knocking off a little itz?”
His father didn’t know what the mailman was talking about; he knew only that he was fighting hard to keep his name. But how hard can a man fight? He was so worried about his wife, pregnant with Hershy in Russia, that to get mail from her promptly he had to change his name to Melov. After that, he felt like a real American. The mailman gave him immediate service, yelled his name all over the building, made him known, and became a friend. It was his first introduction, his father explained, to a great American phenomenon: the tendency of people in America to equalize themselves and to lose their identity.
3.
That happened before Hershy was born.
But as he grew up, always gathering information and learning secrets, trying to solve the mystery of himself and the world about him, he found out that older people lived in and talked about mostly two things: the past and tomorrow. Talking about the past made them feel stronger in the present and gave them the hope for tomorrow. The hope, in their relating the sharp contrasts of two worlds, seemed to rest finally in him, for they always said: “It’s your America, Hershy.”
His father, he learned,
had never known a childhood as it is experienced in America. He was the eldest son of a sofer, a pious man who writes out the Scrolls of the Torah and who also copies mezuzahs and other Hebrew religious writings. He was expected, then, to follow his father’s footsteps, and, in preparation, had spent his whole childhood in a schule, stooped over the long tables, reading by the flickering lights of candles, rocking with prayer and study: play was a thing which only the rich and the idiots and the mujiks could enjoy. But David did not want to be a sofer. It had bent and gnarled his father and had made a stranger of him. For his father, gone sometimes for months in his travels through the province of Kiev to do his work, was seldom home. Even David, his own son, hardly recognized him when he did come home. And his mother, left dumb and slightly deaf from an attack of scarlet fever, suffered her loneliness in silence. In her muted way, she made her son understand that she, too, did not want him to become a sofer, but that, being a woman, she could do nothing against the dominating will of a father.
David wanted to be a carpenter, instead, like his mother’s father. As a small child, before his grandfather died, he was fascinated by the patterns in the grains of wood, the shavings curling out of a plane, the sawdust spraying from the bite of a saw, and the power of the hammer. The rhythmical sounds and movements pleased him, too. But the touch of smooth surfaces against his fingers and the magic of seeing things put together made him jump with joy. Later, he liked the smell of the forests outside his village and was overwhelmed by the thought of felling a tree and shaping it to any form he desired.
The decision of what he was to do with the rest of his life rested finally in himself. For, just before his barmitzvah, the day a Jewish boy becomes a man, his father left in the snowdrift dead of winter on a trip through the province, promising that he’d be back for his son’s barmitzvah, but he never returned. His father, who always insisted upon being thoroughly clean before he would begin work on the Scrolls of the Torah, had come to a village where the whole water supply had frozen. He had no alternative but to go to a nearby river, chop a hole in the ice, and bathe himself. Soon afterward, he fell ill with pneumonia and died dreadfully, away from home, with his pus-filled lungs choking him to death.
Alone, then, David became a man on his thirteenth birthday, a man who suddenly was able to shape his own destiny, with his childhood left behind in the old yellow pages of a prayer book. Immediately afterward he went to Kiev to become apprenticed to a master carpenter, armed with the proper papers of permission to live in the big city; for in those days a Jew was not considered a citizen, and God help you if you were caught without a yellow pass.
At the time, he was a slender, bony, hollow-faced boy weighing eighty pounds. He thought of himself as a man, for officially he was one, but the terror he felt when he first saw Kiev could only have gripped a child. Houses seemed to lie on top of one another. Houses, drawn by horses over shiny rails, with jabbering people tangled in them, clanged through the streets. Countless spires, with ugly jagged fingers, pointed accusingly at the charred heavens. Bulbous domes, like the diseased noses of drunkards, sniffed the sky. He could hardly breathe from the smoke that pocked the city and from the suffocated-looking people that wormed about him. He shrank against the buildings as he walked, trembling within an utterly strange and hostile world.
Finally he found refuge in the master carpenter’s house and vowed that he’d never wander from it. Even after the older apprentices laughed at his fears, he seldom wandered from the immediate neighborhood. The one time he did, aside from visits home, he was attacked by a gang of older boys who, when they found out that he was a Jew, beat him so violently that he could barely crawl home. Besides, there was no time or energy to wander far. He had to get up at dawn to mourn for his father, then work until the sun went down. At night he slept in an attic with nine other apprentices, which wasn’t much different than at home where everyone slept and lived in the same room. All in all, he had traded one room for a more crowded room, a dark smelly schule for a darker smellier hole.
Gradually, after the year of mourning for his father was over, it became harder and harder to go through the morning and evening ritual of prayer. Hard work and piety somehow did not go together. Time was too precious and the body was overwhelming in its demands. In this frame of mind he began to heed a new kind of philosophy that was being expounded by Jewish trade union leaders and socialists. They said: “Destroy the delusion of the Messiah.” That was like saying: “Destroy Judaism.” They said further: “What is the Messiah? It is nothing more than man’s dream of a better life. But why hope for a better life after death? Is it wrong to hope now? Why not hope today for tomorrow? Let man himself become his own Messiah. In man alone rests the fulfillment of tomorrow’s dreams.” Slowly, he began to drift away from the rigid training of his earlier life.
But before his apprenticeship was over, he became fervent again in his religious observances. During a pogrom that occurred in his home village, his mother, his older sister, and her husband were killed. His younger brother Yussel was away at the time, learning to become a tailor. And Rachel, his sister’s little child, was left unharmed; she had been in the outhouse during the massacre, paralyzed by the terrifying screams.
Soon afterward, Yussel, on his way back to Kiev from the village, met a drunken Russian officer on the road. The Russian officer, who had been left behind with a peasant girl after a night of drinking and gambling, was lost, and he commanded Yussel to take him home. But on the way the officer passed out, and Yussel robbed him of his winnings and ran off to America.
This left David completely alone, cut off from the world, except for his niece Rachel, who was taken in by a cousin in a nearby village until he could support her. He mourned a year for his dead ones, rocking with prayer and beating his breast. Slowly, the guilt he had felt in having turned away from God began to dissolve. And presently, purged of neglect and sin through prayer and the sweat of his daily labor, he was able to sleep through a whole night without waking up in a cold fright from a horrible dream.
Then he met Sonya. He was visiting his niece Rachel at his cousin’s house in the village of Narodich when he saw her. Afterward, in remembering, it seemed to him that at one moment he had been living a deep, internal life, and at the next moment he had been suddenly sprung from a dark prison to face a warm, glittering world.
Back in Kiev one night, in the attic with his friend Hyman Bronstein, who had begun his apprenticeship with him, he said: “Hyman, are you awake?”
“No, but I can hear you.”
“I met a girl, Hyman.”
“Where?”
“In Narodich.”
“So?”
“I’m going to marry her.”
“Are her parents rich?”
“No.”
“Don’t be a fool, David. Remember, we promised each other we’d go to America.”
“She’ll go with me.”
“How do you know she’ll have you?”
“She has to have me. For once, something good has to happen to me.”
“But who is she? Who are her parents?”
“Her father is a poor baker.”
“Then you won’t get a dowry.”
“That’s not important.”
“Oh, you fool. Remember, you are the son of Hershel Melovitz. It’s almost like being the son of a rabbi. You can have anybody you desire. You can get a large dowry, enough to make you a master carpenter, enough to get you to America, enough to let you live like a king for the rest of your life. Don’t be a fool, David. Don’t throw yourself away on a piece of flesh.”
“That’s the way it is, Hyman.”
“And to tell me this you woke me up?”
“She’s a picture of a woman.”
“Let her be a picture, but a gold frame around it wouldn’t hurt, either. Go to sleep, you idiot, and dream of another picture.”
But he couldn’t go to sleep at once. He was too full of the beauty of Sonya’s face, of her strong ar
ms and back as she carried water from the river, of the shape of her bare feet and solid ankles as she stepped over the earth, of the sound of a comb choking through her thick black hair, of her young bubbling laughter, of the smell of fresh bread, deep and warm and earthy, about her. The image of her grew fuller and fuller, and one day he wrote to his cousin asking her to make a match. He also wrote to his younger brother Yussel in America, taking it for granted that he was rich, asking him to send the fare to Chicago for him and his future wife.
At the time (Hershy heard this from his mother in conversations with her sisters or Rachel, which always left him bleak and frightened), Sonya had plenty of suitors, one in particular who later came to Chicago to make a fortune. And he (David), though he was nineteen and thought of himself as a full-grown man, had no conception of his appearance to others. Actually, he looked like a slightly overgrown, deprived child, with protruding ears and hollow cheeks and cavelike eyes; he had no teeth, either, since he had had them pulled out in order to evade being drafted into the army.
But Sonya had no choice. She was a poor girl, one of four sisters, two of whom had already married plain, common men, one a harness-maker and the other a tailor, and she had a younger sister who couldn’t get married until Sonya did. For a girl to have a choice she needed wealth, her family had to make rich offers, as though the man were a God. Whatever she dreamed she would have to forget; her other suitors were nothing, nobodies, no matter how good they looked. She was fortunate that a man like David was eager for her. He was a good man. He came from a fine family. He was highly educated. Why, he was even able to interpret the Talmud. He was a man, coming from the family of a sofer, who could ask for blood if he insisted. And apparently he loved her, for no man in his right mind, who could marry into a fortune, would marry a girl whose parents had no dowry to offer. Besides, she would do what her parents told her. She would marry David. She would be happy with him and would give him children. Love was for the idle and rich. Love was a dream. A woman was life. And a poor woman had to face life, that’s all.