Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  Al would come to look up to Moise, whom he described as a “very handsome, masculine type, when masculine types were important to me.” Moise was an entrepreneur. In addition to his lucrative lumber business, he owned the primitive movie theater in Zarasai as well as one in Kaunas. That meant that Al and Harry could go to the movies whenever they pleased—for free. But at the moment, it was Danke, their son and only child, who interested Al most. Eventually, Danke looked up from his plate and said hello. Danke, whose parents also spoke English, would be Al’s first friend in this alien world.

  In time, everyone’s attention shifted to Mildred. Why had she left America? What was she doing here? Where was her husband? Russian was the language of the intelligentsia of Lithuania. Mildred Jaffee spoke English, Russian, and Yiddish fluently, but she communicated with her father, who spoke no English, in Russian. Al sat listening to his mother argue with her father. He hoped his grandfather was saying, “You must go back to America right away.” He might well have been saying that, but Mildred had no plans to leave. In a matter of weeks, Al, who proved to have his mother’s talent for language, would be speaking Yiddish, the lingua franca of Jewish shtetl life, fluently. It would take a little longer for him to learn Lithuanian and Russian. “I had a good ear. Communication turned out to be very easy for me. I can still speak Yiddish like a native. A native of where I don’t know. Maybe Yid-land.

  “When we came to feel more at home in our grandfather’s house, we used to enjoy screaming in Russian, ‘Irinka, padavai chai!’* The Russian language wasn’t big on articles.” Soon, even two-year-old Bernard, another fast learner, would entertain everyone at the table by yelling politely, “Padavai chai!” and Irinka herself, amused by this baby’s precocity, would yell back the Russian equivalent of “Go to the devil.” But for the time being, except when he was with his mother and brothers or at his grandfather’s house with Lifa, Moise, or Danke, Al was a boy without a country or a language.

  That first night, when it was time to go to sleep, the candles were blown out, leaving Al alone in his bedroom. “It was so dark it was absolutely terrifying. I didn’t know where anybody else was. I didn’t know how to find my mother or brothers. I was afraid to yell or scream or cry. I was up all night. I was convinced there were rats walking around on the floor, but I couldn’t see them. What if I fall asleep and my hand falls off the side of the bed and the rats eat my fingers? I was literally scared shitless. I was having such stomach cramps. At first light, I ran over to the door and relieved myself inside the room. I closed the door on it, figuring that no one would find it, and I forgot about it.”

  The next morning, his mother took Al and his brothers to pay a call on an elderly, gray-haired couple, Zalman the feldsher* and his wife, Mildred’s distant relative. Al can’t remember her name, but he called her Mumeh, aunt. Mumeh kissed the little ones, David and Bernard, and then turned her attention to Harry and Al. “Shain vie ah shaygetz,”† she said, admiring Harry. She pinched Harry’s soft, round cheeks between her rough fingers, making him look like a fish. Then she turned to Al and, without a comment, tousled his hair. On other occasions, when Al was introduced, the most frequent comment he elicited was “Ehr zet ois vie ah shaygetz.”‘In time Al came to understand that the connotation was “He looks crass, like a gentile.” “I always wondered how one could be pretty like a goy and ugly like a goy. I wasn’t a large kid, but photographs from the time show that I had heavy features with big lips and a prognathic look. I resembled my grandfather. Harry was a sweet-faced, thin-lipped child. Harry took after our father.”

  Mumeh and zalman had a huge cherry orchard in their backyard; it was spring and the trees were filled with red and yellow fruit. Mumeh invited Al to pick all he wanted. While Harry stayed with the grown-ups, Al, employing the same tree-climbing skills he had perfected in Savannah, shimmied up the tree and got to work. “I’m picking a cherry and dropping it in the pail, and I’m picking another cherry and dropping it into my mouth.” When the pail and Al were almost full, Al heard a commotion. From his perch in the tree, he saw his grandfather hobbling at full tilt toward his mother and the others, screaming and waving his cane wildly. “All I could figure was that he’s found the poop behind the door and he’s coming to kill me and I’m not getting down from this tree.” Al was right about the poop. He stayed in the tree, out of sight, until his grandfather limped away. “Maybe my mother mollified him. Oh, he was a tough son of a bitch. He was never friendly after that, but at least he never mentioned the poop again.”

  Al figures they must have stayed with their grandfather for at least a week, long enough for Al to have to use the outhouse again. Raspberry plants, bearing fruit nearly the size of golf balls—nothing like the puny little ones Al knew from Savannah—hung down to the ground in bunches around the outhouse, at once tempting and repellent. Al refused to eat them, but Danke had no compunction. “I would ask him, How can you eat anything that grows out of a shit house?’ The invading armies of Genghis Khan probably used this outhouse.” But Danke was undeterred. At first Al refused to eat them, but eventually he succumbed, both to the outhouse and to the raspberries. The raspberries were delicious, but Al never got used to outhouses; he only tolerated them when he had to. Whenever possible, he would relieve himself in the woods. There, at least, grew a plant that bore a little white flower that, when squashed in your hand, created a soapy foam.

  When the family left Al’s grandfather’s house, Al had high hopes that the visit was over and they were going back to Savannah, but instead they moved about a block away from Grandfather Gordon’s into a house with a large main room, one small bedroom, a foyer, and a kitchen. Al has no clear memory of the furnishings of that house, but it is likely that they were sparse: a rough-hewn plank table and chairs. The beds had no springs and were probably made of unfinished birch wood. The mattresses in such primitive homes were usually stuffed with chicken feathers. The kitchen would have been equipped with a black, pig-iron stove for cooking and a long brick-and-cement oven for baking. The roof might have been made of thatch or wood.

  “In the early days, I asked my mother when we were going to go home, but she simply evaded my questions. ‘Oh, soon,’ she’d say. ‘I have to write to your father.’ “ But “soon” never came. After a few months, Al stopped expecting his father to appear at the door to rescue him. “Once I had concluded that, I had to figure out how not to let this woman destroy me. I think I also was dealing with the question ‘Where is this other grown-up protector, my father, and how is he letting this happen?’ “

  Al’s first encounter with his Yiddish-speaking, potential Lithuanian playmates was a disaster fueled by incomprehension. “We were very low on the totem pole when we arrived from America. First of all, I’m dressed like a Georgia peach. I must have looked absolutely ridiculous. In addition to the velvet outfit, I’m wearing Keds and colorful socks. Most of the Lithuanian kids wore pants that reached just below their knees and long black stockings that hung down to the tops of their big-buttoned, high-topped shoes, made by the local cobbler.

  “These kids surrounded me. I heard them muttering, ‘Buxer, buxer.’ If I turned around in one direction, they fell back; if I turned in another direction, they fell back. It was like a bad Fellini movie. I am six years old and I can’t figure out what these kids are so scared of. Some of them were twice my size. Finally, one little pipsqueak comes up to me and says, ‘You not buxer.’ I thought to myself, ‘What is he talking about?’ But before I knew it, he gave me a shot and I was on the ground. They were all laughing, ‘Buxer, buxer, ha, ha, ha,’ and they walked away, and left me crying and confused.”

  Days later Al recounted the incident to Danke, who explained that buxer meant “boxer,” and that all the Lithuanian kids idolized a world-champion boxer of Lithuanian descent known as Jack Sharkey, né Joseph Paul zukauskas. Sharkey was so popular, even in the hinterlands of Lithuania, that a poster depicting him, gloves on, arms cocked, ready to fight, had found its way to zarasai, proba
bly on the bus from Kaunas. In the poster, Sharkey is wearing Keds.

  The humiliation of being exposed as a mere mortal, and a greenhorn at that, was made even worse when the Lithuanian kids learned that Al’s given name was Abraham. “They were hysterical with laughter. They all started dancing around and singing, ‘Über Hemd, Unterhemd, Über Hemd, Ünterhemd.’ My name, in Yiddish, it turned out, was a play on the words overwear and underwear”. Being named Abraham had been just as big a burden in Savannah as it was in zarasai. “I did get a little tired of fighting every kid in kindergarten because my name was Abraham. It was only sixty years after the Civil War, and here comes Abraham Lincoln’s alter ego. I was born in Savannah, where I’m taunted as a ‘Yankee.’ I go to zarasai, and I’m ‘underwear.’ ”

  It was Danke who helped Al and Harry segue into the local society. He introduced them to the kids who became their favorite playmates—Chaimke Musil, a bright, lively, freckle-faced boy with a good sense of humor; Berke Lintup, a small, dark, wiry, serious boy; and Itzke Schmidt, a blond, dopey child, more a tagalong than a member of what would become a gang of five shtetl-style Dead End Kids whose macho attitude mimicked that of the older Jewish shtetl boys who were training to become pioneers in Palestine.

  Al’s cousin Danke was temperamentally very different from Al. He didn’t run with the gang, but he was both mentor and friend. “He was a bookish boy. His parents were very sophisticated people, and he was a bright, worldly child. Danke knew a lot about a lot of things. We were both only six, but Danke explained sex to me, including that the male ejects a white fluid into the female. I remember that vividly. ‘What is this white fluid? Where did it come from?’ All I did was pee in the snow. We were all speculating about how it works. He explained it down to the last detail.” Sometime during the first few months of Al’s stay in zarasai, when he felt displaced and miserable and was hoping daily that this wretched visit to this godforsaken place would come to an end, Danke told Al about the sinking of the Titanic. “I started to accept more easily the fact that maybe staying in Lithuania wasn’t so bad,” said Al, “considering how dangerous it could be to go back.”

  Still, Al bitterly resented the primitive life into which he had been thrust. Even at age six, shtetl-style personal hygiene shocked and revolted him. Sometime during his first month in zarasai his mother took him to the women’s bathhouse, which he found humiliating. “I walked around with my hands over my private parts.” This was his first introduction to the mikvah, the ritual bath in which women must purify themselves after their menstrual period. Al watched with mounting concern as the women, supervised by a tukerin* submerged themselves so completely that he feared they might never reappear. The sauna, with its steaming rocks and clouds of vapor, was equally humiliating and frightening. “All these ladies were flopping around, hitting themselves with twigs, sighing with relief, ‘Oy, a-mechaye! Oy, a-mechaye! † I wanted to get the hell out of there. I must have threatened to run away from home if she ever took me there again, so she found a man to take us to the men’s side of the bathhouse, at which point I wished I was back in the woman’s side.

  “Lots of men had what was called a killa, a form of rupture. If you continue working at the jobs these people had to do—lifting logs and two-hundred-pound bundles into a drover’s cart—little by little your intestines work their way down into your scrotum, eventually making it as big as a basketball. No doctor in town could perform a hernia operation, so you’ve got these guys walking around with this basketball between their legs. You can imagine how sickening that was for me. I couldn’t look. The rest of the package—the schlongs hanging down—wasn’t so inviting either.

  “Once the steam cleared and you stopped smacking yourself, you’d climb back into the same old lice-ridden clothing you’d been wearing all winter. The mere fact that you wear your clothes all the time is just an invitation to these vermin. I never knew there was an alternative to wearing the same clothes. We were covered with lice everywhere, especially our hair and underwear. Some people used to crack them on their fingernails. We had lice combs. When you combed your hair, they would fall out by the dozens, even though we kept our hair very short, almost to the scalp, in an effort to dispossess the lice. Even the tzitzit, the fringes that hung from the four corners of a cloth rectangle undergarment that religious Jews, including children, were required to wear all the time, were infested with lice. It was de rigueur to kiss these fringes during prayer. I avoided this ritual after I discovered that the dispossessed lice had set up housekeeping there, too. And there were bedbugs. You’d wake up in the morning covered with blood. No matter how you tried, you couldn’t get rid of them. Bedbugs and lice are bloodsuckers. In the wintertime they go to warm places, and they are sustained by unhygienic conditions. There were some people who washed their clothes—my mother might have done that from time to time—but it’s a huge chore. You don’t turn on a hot-water spigot. If you want to wash clothes, you’ve got to boil water. Boiling is the only way to get rid of lice in your underwear. The so-called nits are the eggs. They were in everything. I was covered with bites. It’s like when you see children in terrible places in Africa with flies crawling in and out of their eyes. They don’t even blink. People learn to conserve their energy. Eventually, I learned. You can kill yourself trying to fight these things.”

  After the “his” and “hers” visits, Al never went to either bathhouse again. When the weather was warm enough, he bathed in the lakes. “It’s a good thing the streets were filled with defecating horses, cows, goats, and sheep, as well as cats and dogs and outhouses galore to boot—all of which made our personal body odor fade into insignificance.”

  Even though Al couldn’t get back to America, America came to him in the form of the funnies. They served as a lifeline between him, his native land, and his father. Just when he thought he could not suffer the homesickness another day, he’d receive word that a package had arrived. Al and Harry would rush to the post office and lug home a trove of newspaper installments, rolled into a cardboard mailing tube. Once home, after making sure that they saved the brown wrapping paper surrounding the funnies for future art projects, they would spread the comics on the cottage floor, lie down on their stomachs, and rediscover America in Boob McNutt, Wash Tubbs, Little Orphan Annie, Winnie Winkle, and The Katzenjammer Kids. Both of the boys had learned to read a bit of English from studying the cartoons with their father. Now it was their mother who helped them decipher the words.

  They would conjure up the aura of home and of their father’s love and attention from the funny pages of the Savannah Sunday newspaper. Part of the joy was the feeling of satiety that would accompany each shipment. The brothers could binge on Mickey Mouse all day and go to sleep at night, smug in the knowledge that installments yet unread awaited them.

  Al soon ingratiated himself with the Lithuanian kids, the very ones who had teased him when he first arrived. They couldn’t get enough of his tales of American life. He told them that his father was rich. “I regaled them with stories beyond their wildest dreams about tall buildings, trains, and huge oceangoing ships. They hadn’t even seen pictures of them. They didn’t have picture books. There were no newspapers or magazines. There was nothing printed other than the religious books.” So Al drew pictures. His new friends were amazed. And then he drew pictures of his favorite cartoon characters. Paper was precious, so he often drew in the dirt with a stick. “The Lithuanian children had never seen cartooning; they were spellbound. They followed me around. They drove me crazy, begging me to draw the same characters over and over again.

  “It began to dawn on me that dreaming of returning to America was not working, and I was learning to live in Lithuania as a Lithuanian, and doing pretty well at it. I was more inventive than my contemporaries over there, so I was gaining some status.” He and Harry were one of the gang. They played exclusively with Jewish kids. “We were learning Yiddish. We were integrating with them; they weren’t integrating with us. At the beginning we were k
ind of strange creatures, but after a while we were just part of the ragamuffin crowd.”

  Al and his friends made a sport of teasing the girls. “Like most little boys, I had a disdain for little girls. When they came out of the sul, we would at them. The thistles had little Velcro-like hooks on them that would stick to the girls’ hair and clothing and send them running and screaming.” Perhaps, also like most little boys, Al made an exception for a little girl named Dena. “There was a photographer in town named Botvinik. He had a beautiful daughter. Boy, was I in love with her!”

  Winter was coming. Ultimately, and out of necessity, Al exchanged his Georgia wardrobe for the uniform of zarasai. He shed his Keds for cobbled shoes. “Fall is a critical time in zarasai. If you don’t prepare for winter, you’re in deep doo-doo. Winter blasts in and you’d better have heavy clothing. There’s a very strong possibility that my grandfather or some other relatives warned my mother to get cracking on winter, and we’d get outfitted. Every item of clothing was made by hand, which required a visit to the stocking maker and the woman who made heavy winter underwear. Then you needed valenki, boots made completely out of pressed felt that are about one-quarter inch thick. Rubber galoshes fit over the valenki to keep them dry, and then, of course, you needed a long coat and a peaked hat with earflaps.”

  Children, it is said, can adapt to almost anything, including primitive indignities and maternal neglect, and Al did. It helped that he was precociously self-reliant, having understood not to expect much by way of attention or affection from his mother. Still, Al clings to wispy memories of displays of what seemed like love. “I remember that she once licked the palm of her hand, smoothed back my hair, and treated me to an approving smile. I don’t think she ever hugged or kissed me. Actually, maybe she once held me, maybe to comfort me. I seem to remember a warm feeling from her, but I don’t remember where or why.”