Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  Often when the children woke up in the morning, their mother had already left to pray at one of the shuls on “synagogue row,” three large communal wooden buildings, each with sumptuous vaulting supported by wooden posts. Typically even the most Orthodox of Jewish women did not go to shul during the day. Women were supposed to stay at home and take care of their children. She may have been all alone in the balcony reserved for women, but there was nothing typical about Mildred Jaffee’s religious observances. If she wasn’t at shul, she was tending to the sick and needy Jews of zarasai at the linat tzedek charity hospital and at the Jewish old-age home. Mildred was committed to practicing tzedakah, a special kind of charity required by the Torah. In Hebrew the word means “righ teous ness, justice, or fairness.” In Judaism, giving to the poor is viewed not as a generous act of charity but as a religious and moral imperative. It was common for women to prepare food and drop the dishes off anonymously at the homes of poor families. This act of charity was called metrogt teplech* It was a duty that Mildred apparently extended first to the rebbe and the sick and needy and then to her children. If a beggar knocked at the door, as beggars often did, Mildred would give him either money or the food from her children’s plates. Al doesn’t know where she got the money. Maybe it came from his grandfather, or perhaps from his father. Al was called frequently to the post office—mail was not delivered in zarasai—to pick up letters from his father. Apparently, at least as far as Mildred Jaffee was concerned, tzedakah did not begin at home.

  When the door wasn’t locked, Al and Harry would be on their way, but usually not to school. Jews, Poles, Russians, and Lithuanians each attended their own parochial schools, although ever since liberation, each child was required to study the Lithuanian language one hour a day. “At first she put us in cheder†, where we went briefly and episodically to study Jewish history and the Hebrew language. I do remember learning the Hebrew alphabet and the rudiments of the Lithuanian language.” But at some point all schooling stopped. “First of all, she wasn’t around, so playing hooky was easy. Second of all, there were no truant officers in zarasai. But more likely, I think, when she got the bill, she didn’t pay it.

  “Harry and I spent as much time as possible out of the house.

  We were pint-sized juvenile delinquents, the Katzenjammer Kids let loose in Lithuania. We were an odd couple. Harry was solemn and serious. I was noisy and outgoing. The two younger ones were my mother’s responsibility. Most of the time she probably took them with her to shul. We had nothing to do with them, except on those occasions when all four of us were locked in the house from morning to night with no provisions. If we hadn’t been locked in, Harry and I would have escaped.”

  If the door was locked, Al and Harry used a pail as an indoor toilet and waited for their mother to return. “To us it seemed an eternity, but it was probably sundown. I think everybody living in that village did things like that,” says Al, in defense of his mother. “You may be doing your kids a favor by locking the door and leaving a pail rather than having them wander out in the freezing cold.” Al sees his mother as negligent by today’s standards but only careless by the standards of 1920s Lithuania. “In primitive societies, older children are given the job of becoming the mothers and fathers. Mother may have been taking care of some poor, sick, old person who was going to starve to death if she didn’t come. Maybe that was it.”

  Opinion in the Jewish community varied on the subject of the woman who was known to her Yiddish-speaking community in zarasai as Michle Gordon. “Some said of my mother, ‘What an admirable pious woman she is!’ Others thought, ‘What’s the matter with Michle Gordon? She’s really overdoing it. She should be home with her children instead of spending so much time in shul.’ It’s difficult to tell the difference between duty to home and piety to God. It would have been much easier if she’d been playing mah-jongg all day.

  “We were hungry all the time. My mother didn’t have a hold of the day-to-day realities, such as providing food. I think if we didn’t beg for food or yell for it, she might just have ignored feeding us altogether. David was her favorite. She would buy things for David. There was always something for him to eat, and we had to figure out ways of taking it away from him.” Al learned to be grateful for a meal of fried herring with potatoes and carrots. “Dairy products were easily available, and we relied on them. When there was breakfast, our mother would mash butter and cottage cheese, or butter and creamed cheese together, and give it to us in a saucer. Otherwise, we’d eat leftover bread. Every now and then we’d get borscht, or cucumbers and radishes in sour cream. It was always a treat when the Russian peasant woman came down the street calling ‘Kupitsy bublichki, Kharachee bublichki’* She would be wearing garlands of small bagels around her neck. Each string had maybe twenty bagels on it. My mother would send me out with some money, and I’d buy a whole string of them.”

  Food was better on the weekends, when Mildred Jaffee would undertake more ambitious cooking projects such as gefilte fish, carrot tsimmis, chicken, and cholent, a stew made of chunks of meat, chicken, sliced carrots, onions, and potatoes. On Friday nights, in preparation for the Sabbath, Al would pick up horseradish for gefilte fish from the horseradish lady, and then he and Harry would carry the food, usually a kugel or cholent in a big iron pot, and deposit it with a gentile man who would shovel all the Jewish housewives’ pots into a brick oven—like a pizza oven—and stoke it so that the coals were banked. It was his job to see to it that the fire was kept at a constant, low temperature for twenty-four hours. After sundown on Saturday, they would carry the pots home. “Kugels were very big; my favorite was a potato kugel. Sometimes it would come back undercooked and other times overcooked, but when it was just right, it would have this wonderful brown crust on top that was absolutely delicious.” At the beginning of the week the boys could rely on Sabbath leftovers. They were hungriest as the weekend approached.

  Sabbath was the religious apex of Jewish life in Zarasai, but the market, held on Tuesdays and Fridays, was the nonsectarian economic lifeline of the shtetl—its very reason for being. Preparation for the Sabbath did not compare in intensity with the frantic activity that preceded each market day as cobblers, tailors, and other artisans worked feverishly and shopkeepers bustled about, sweeping, printing signs, and arranging their goods on outdoor stands to attract customers.

  On market days, Al and Harry were awakened at dawn by the distant, metronomic clip-clop of horses’ hooves and the groan of wooden wagon wheels grinding on the gravel road as dozens of gentile farmers from the countryside converged in the large marketplace. Their wagons were loaded with fruits, chickens, eggs, cheese, fish, butter, geese, grains, corn, and produce of all kinds. A veritable barnyard of goats, hogs, cows, and horses trailed behind, adding to the shouts of the merchants with their squawking, clucking, mooing, neighing, and grunting.

  It was about 8 am when the noisy parade of wagons and animals reached the square, which was decorated with banners of red, yellow, and green—the Lithuanian national colors—that hung suspended from strings attached to candy-striped poles. By then the mayhem resolved itself into an orderly, if still noisy, procession as each wagon headed for its predetermined location in the square. There the peasants unhitched and fed their horses and displayed their produce on wooden pallets atop their wagons. There were separate aisles devoted to grains and hardware and others to fruit, chickens, or knit goods. To attract buyers’ attention, fishmongers blew up fish bladders into balloons and hardware merchants banged their pots and pans. Intense scrutiny of the merchandise followed by loud bargaining was de rigueur. After a profitable day of symbiotic buying and selling, many of the peasants would visit the Jewish inns to fortify themselves with vodka and beer for the journey home. The more they drank, the more abusive they became. The delicate equilibrium of the relationship between Jew and gentile might be threatened by the telling of an anti-Semitic joke. “Don’t take offense, my friend, we are only kidding.” But after a few more drinks—in vo
dka veritas—outright insults would often result in physical violence.

  Harry and Al, excited by the prospect of so much activity, and the possibility of organ grinders, balalaikas, fortune-tellers, magicians, puppet shows, and dancing Gypsies, would throw off their covers, pull on their clothes, and head for the center of town. Al’s favorite destination was the horse market. “There would be a horse race—mainly to sell the horses. Faster, of course, meant better, but local lore had it that in order to impress potential customers, the seller would insert a hot potato up the horse’s rectum, which would make the animal very lively.”

  Eventually, Al discovered on his own that he had a distant relative from his father’s side in Zarasai, a young man named Moshe Jaffee. He had a bicycle-and-gramophone store. “I hung around there from early morning until late at night. He sort of looked like my father. I liked him. He was very nice to me. He let me sit in his store and play records over and over again.” Al’s favorites were Russian songs, often accompanied by balalaikas. “They were full of such schmaltz and pathos—so emotional. I used to sing along. Some of the lyrics could tear your heart out, and that appealed to me. The songs were about what I was feeling—alienation, loss of love, family, and loss of hometown. He had Yid-dish records, too. They all had the same flavor. ‘Vein mein shtetele, vein.’* I just loved sitting around listening to these songs. This was the music I came to know as popular music, music that’s played on a magic machine. It’s always about losing. ‘My little town, how I long to see your streets again.’ These songs were very much like country and western, except that instead of losing your pickup, you lost your horse, or even bigger things than that. You lost your town and the places and people you loved. I guess the reason they wrote songs like that is because people were constantly being driven from pillar to post by new regimes, revolutions, and by armies chasing them out. They had to start life all over again in a strange, harsh land.”

  Unfortunately, these bittersweet, sentimental binges that spoke so profoundly to Al’s own condition didn’t last long. Somebody, Al suspects his grandfather, wrote to his father in Savannah, telling him that his six-year-old son was working at a phonograph shop. It was a shanda.† “I wasn’t working, but they made me stop going there.” Al was bereft. He loved hanging out in the record store, and he enjoyed the company of his only Jaffee relative, a kindly man who even looked a little bit like Al’s father.

  “While I was still there, though, a fascinating thing happened. The store was on a main street. It was a dirt street that, whenever it rained, became a quagmire. A street crew started to dig up the road. They had to dig down pretty deep in order to grade it and install cobblestones. One of the workers found a skeleton and propped it up in a seated position on the side of the road. Pretty soon both sides of the road were lined with skeletons. Imagine if I’d had a camera at that time! What a sight that was! It was Halloween for real. I told my friends about it and they all came to see. It could have been a cemetery, but I don’t think so. I think it was a war burial place. People must have dug a deep pit and put all the people who were killed in World War I in it.”

  WHAT MILDRED JAFFEE had said was to be a brief trip to zarasai to visit relatives had lasted a full year; but to Al, too young to think in terms of weeks, months, and years, it seemed an eternity. Al had found friends, learned new languages, and figured out how to live successfully in what had at first been a frightening and alien society. “I was making the best of the situation.” By now his only links to his father and Savannah were letters, separated by months, that vaguely referred to a time “when we would all be together,” and the much-anticipated funnies.

  Every now and then someone would ask Al if he wanted to go back to America, but as the months went by, the question had less and less relevance. He didn’t give up on the idea of going home, but he no longer thought of going home when he woke up each morning. “After a while I concentrated on life as it was and resigned myself to giving up the dream of life as it might have been in Savannah.”

  It was then, when Al had nearly abandoned all hope of ever seeing his father again, that Morris Jaffee showed up in zarasai to reclaim his family. Al remembers little about his father’s arrival, except that he drew a crowd of curious children when he appeared at his grandfather’s house in a Model T with a driver whom Al assumed he had hired in Kaunas. “One of the big-shot Jewish kids who’d rarely seen a car of any make before made fun of it. ‘Ach, ah shtick Ford!’* His taunt may have been payback for all the times Al had bragged to the kids about his rich American father.

  Mildred Jaffee could not have been pleased to be “rescued,” but she acquiesced. What neither she nor the children knew at the time was that Morris Jaffee had sacrificed his job to make the lengthy and expensive journey to zarasai. Moreover, it had taken every penny he had to provide passage back for his wife and children. Before he left, Mr. Blumenthal, who had put up with Mildred’s hysterical demands and Al and Harry’s destructive Saturday visits to his toy department, delivered an ultimatum to the beleaguered Jaf-fee: “If you go, don’t come back to Savannah.” Mr. Blumenthal had understood from their earliest association in Savannah that Mildred Jaffee and the kids could be Morris Jaffee’s undoing.

  Predictably, Mildred raised hell at the port of embarkation in Germany. “We were required to go through the bathhouse to be deloused in order to pass quarantine. The rest of us took the requisite showers, but my mother simply would not undress, not even in front of a matron. I don’t know how the problem was resolved; perhaps they gave in to her stubbornness, her religious principles, or both.” Al, as always, gritted his teeth at his mother’s embarrassing behavior and focused with renewed enthusiasm on the happy prospect of returning home to Savannah.

  “I thought we would be going home to Savannah, but that didn’t happen.” After a year of keeping alive the hope of returning home, Al was bitterly disappointed. Instead, Al and his family found themselves back on the Lower East Side, broke and exhausted, sleeping on mattresses on the floor of a relative’s apartment. “When my father brought us back from Lithuania, it wasn’t the same. After a year of separation and alienation, we were strangers to one another.”

  Luckily, Mr. Blumenthal’s son took pity on Al’s father and set him up in a little cigar, cigarette, and candy store in the lobby of a bank building in Charlotte, North Carolina, a job with far less prestige and salary than his department store job. This relocation and demotion was the first nail in what was to be Morris Jaffee’s career coffin.

  Mildred Jaffee refused to follow her husband to Charlotte and insisted instead upon living with the children near the water, in Far Rockaway, Queens. No one knows why. Perhaps it was because there was a significant Orthodox Jewish population and plenty of shuls in Far Rockaway. Nor does Al understand why an increasingly depressed and depleted Morris Jaffee continued to bow to his erratic wife’s demands. “My mother always laid down the law. She had lots of conditions. ‘Either I get this, or something terrible is going to happen.’ We ended up on the top floor of a three-story, rickety, stucco building near the beach. The higher up, the lower the rent.

  “I think my father learned early on, when the honeymoon was over, that he’d married somebody who didn’t care what people think—and my father cared a lot. I think he recognized that he had someone who was so totally unpredictable that in the middle of the street she could start a screeching argument, so I think he just simply shrank and would not challenge anything. To challenge was to stick your head in the lion’s mouth. He became very passive in order to avoid humiliating spectacles. Divorce was not an option in those days. Having four little boys and trying to save them was what the rest of his life was about. In all my adult years, from the time I was a teenager on, I never heard a critical word from him about my mother. Never. So I think my father just simply took his lumps.” And his children took theirs.

  Al hated Far Rockaway. It didn’t matter that he was back in the United States, among people who spoke English, and livin
g in an apartment with plumbing. “Sure there are automobiles and trains, but what have I got to do with it? I was longing for the company of my friends in Lithuania. I wanted to be able to walk around all over town. I missed visiting people and stopping over at my grandfather’s house. I felt that if there was anything in me that was worthwhile, it was beaten out of me. Rockaway was nearly a complete blank. Everything was temporary. I never knew how long anything would last. I kind of drifted through it all.”

  In the summertime, a desultory Al and Harry roamed the beaches, picking up and smoking cigarette butts. There they joined a gang of ne’er-do-well kids who had established a pint-sized casino under the boardwalk. “They were gambling friends, not real friends like our friends in zarasai. It was strictly a commercial deal.” For stakes as high as a dime, they’d roll marbles into slots cut out of Philadelphia cream cheese cartons. “There were as many as eight of these games going at one time. It was almost like Las Vegas. If your marble went inside, you won five marbles from the proprietor. If you missed, he took your marble.”

  Again, they were on their own, as they had been in zarasai the year before. Again, much of the time, they were hungry. And again, Al and Harry escaped into the funnies. Al knows that he attended school, but he can’t remember a thing about it. He doesn’t remember having any friends. What he does remember are months of sickness. “It was as if a plague had descended upon our lives. The apartment was a pest house. One kid after another got chicken pox. They were screaming and crying. They were covered with sores.” After chicken pox came whooping cough. Al became infested with worms. He disgusted himself. “Meanwhile, my mother was calling my father, demanding money, and my father was commuting on weekends into what had to be a shit storm of troubles.”