Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  The only bright spot during the wintertime was Christmas. Al was drawn to the holiday lights on Rockaway’s main thoroughfare, where he caught a glimpse of Santa Claus standing on the other side of the street, ringing a bell. Heedless as ever, Al darted across the street and got hit by a car. His injury was minor—a bruise on the leg—but it was enough to pitch his frequently neglectful mother into hysterics. She sent a message to her husband in Charlotte that Al was dying; he must come to Rockaway immediately. Al’s father put his assistant in charge of the store, went to Rockaway, saw that Al was not seriously hurt, and returned to Charlotte. In his absence, the assistant had emptied the store of merchandise, and once again, due to his wife’s instability, Morris Jaffee found himself fired. He’d been ruined in Savannah. Now he was ruined in Charlotte.

  It was 1929. Jobs were hard to find, but Morris Jaffee was hardworking, smart, and resourceful. He had four children and a wife in an apartment in Rockaway to support. Ultimately he landed a job, but only as a part-time mail carrier in the Grand Central Post Office in New York City. If he wanted to make anything resembling a living, Morris Jaffee, once the proud manager of Blumenthal’s department store, had to hang around the post office for eighteen to twenty hours a day to snag four hours of work, for which he was paid fifty-nine cents an hour. He would remain a substitute postal carrier for years. “He was a slave. He had to take the postal exam every year to prove himself,” Al would later recall bitterly. “He did that for years, waiting to become a regular.”

  But while Morris was scrambling for a way to support his family, Mildred had her own agenda. Somehow, in one year’s time, from what must have been her husband’s meager earnings from the smoke shop in Charlotte, Mildred had managed to salt away enough house money for one-way tickets back to zarasai for herself and her children. This time Al, now eight years old, remembers no arguments between his parents, no anguished parting scenes as he pleaded with his father not to let his mother take them away again. It might be that Mildred “kidnapped” her children while Morris’s back was turned. Nor does Al remember any details of the journey. What he does remember feeling was the weight of resignation. “There we were again. Back in zarasai. Actually, it seemed quite natural. We just picked up where we left off.”

  3

  NINETEENTH-CENTURY BOY

  “I needed a father.”

  ALTHOUGH HE WAS ONLY eight years old, Al was already a master adapter. He never looked down, at least not for long. Sad as he felt about repeatedly losing his home, his friends, his language, and his father, the moment he climbed off the bus in the zarasai marketplace in 1929 he once again transformed himself into a nineteenth-century boy. He resumed speaking Yiddish. He traded his American clothes for the zarasai uniform, lice and all, braced himself for outhouses and frigid winters, and resigned himself to whatever was going to happen next.

  Al’s grandfather reacted predictably to his daughter’s return. He held his head in his hands in disbelief and dismay, muttering repeatedly to no one in particular, “Oy, Gottenyu, oy, Gottenyu.”* But Danke, Aunt Lifa, Moise, Irinka, and all of Al’s playmates welcomed him back to the shtetl that was increasingly becoming “home,” the place you come back to.

  This time, Mildred rented a small, one-story cottage about five kilometers outside of town, disturbingly close to gentile farming territory and the forest. The cottage was located on a large estate owned by three Polish siblings: Anna, Sigmund, and the eldest, Karolka Mikutovistsch. Al and his brothers had scarcely benefited from their father’s love and presence for two years. Although their father continued to send them the funnies, Al, who desperately needed his father, came to lose all hope of ever seeing him again.”

  Back row, left to right: Aunt Lifa, Grandfather Gordon, cousin Daniel, Al, and Aunt Frieda Slom. Front row, left to right: cousin Nancy, cousin Sonia, brother David, brother Harry, brother Bernard, and Mildred Jaffee.

  Serendipitously one appeared, in the improbable form of Al’s Polish-Catholic landlord, Karolka, whom Al describes as “a hand-some, strapping young guy of twenty-one.” Karolka would fill the affectional vacuum left by Al’s father, becoming both surrogate father and big brother. Unlike most gentiles, he seemed not to be infected by the low-decibel anti-Semitism that played through Lith-uanian shtetl society like an ominous descant.

  Maternal attention was also in short supply. For that, Al would look to his “soul mate,” Aunt Lifa, and his playmates’ mothers. “They felt sorry for us. They would always ask, ‘Have you had any-thing to eat today?’ You’ve got to give grown-ups credit in that kind of a world. They looked out for us. They took care of us.” It took a shtetl to raise Al and Harry.

  Al has concealed the pain of his childhood in Lithuania like a rock in a snowball, packaging it instead as a comic myth of survival. When his mother left him and his brothers locked in the cottage for hours on end, with no access to an outhouse, they took their revenge out on her indoor rubber tree, even though she had provided them with a potty. “I can still see the four of us standing around watering it. We thought that was rather jolly. She couldn’t figure out why by springtime her favorite rubber tree plant had died.”

  A round, metal chimney, located in the center of the house, went straight up through the roof. The chimney had an opening into which one stuffed wood to make a fire. A quarter of the fireplace was exposed to each of the four rooms.

  Al can’t remember where the others slept, but he had his own bed in his own small room, which he would abandon on the coldest nights to sleep instead on the pripichuk, a masonry counter built against the wall and connected to the flat-topped chimney. “In the wintertime we loved to sit and play on this platform because it was so toasty warm. Of course if your mother wasn’t too ‘ept’ at fire making, you woke up in the middle of the night, freezing your ass off.”

  Getting ready for a Siberian-like winter required more than warm clothing, felt boots, and plenty of firewood. The cottage had to be sealed tight against the frigid weather, but not so completely that it would become uncomfortably airless. Each window had a fortke, a primitive, minimalist version of a storm window. One pane, on a hinge, was for allowing air into the cottage in the warm weather. But to air out the house in the wintertime, it was necessary to position a matching second “storm” window on the inside. With the outside windowpane opened outward and the inside windowpane opened inward, fresh cold air—but not too much—could enter through that one little square. It was Karolka, in his role as landlord, who arrived at the cottage each fall to install the fortke. Harry and Al helped by tearing paper into strips and mixing them with a paste made of flour and water to create a strong seal of papiermâché around the windows.

  The Jaffee boys made ingenious use of the fortke. During this, their second protracted stay in zarasai, Mildred Jaffee continued her habit of leaving the house in the early morning to attend shul and fulfill her missions of tzedakah, often not returning until evening. Similarly, Al and Harry picked up where they left off, also leaving the house as early as possible, to embark on a day’s worth of adventures, often returning after dark, having cadged a meal at a friends or relative’s home. These mutually absentee lifestyles suited all concerned, except in the wintertime, when Mildred Jaffee, seized by her random version of maternal concern, would lock her children in the house before going out for the day, leaving them a pail for a chamber pot. “Every now and then somebody had to make doo-doo and, never mind the smell, the pail would threaten to overflow. I got this great idea. The opening of the fortke was very small, so small that only three-year-old David, the baby, could fit through.” Al and Harry would hoist David through the fortke and lower him onto the snowy ground. Then they’d pass him the slop pail through the open pane and David would toddle off to the outhouse to dump it.

  Karolka was as interested in the two Jewish brothers as they were in him. He took them spearfishing in the winters and fly-fishing in the summers. He showed them how to dig a hole in the ice, then tap on the surface to draw the fi
sh to the hole, and spear them, using a sharpened stick. He walked in the woods with them, leading the boys through stands of tall, slim birch and the enormous, bushy pines. He helped them choose just the right saplings or branches from which to fashion fishing poles. Al was never afraid of wolves when he was in the woods with Karolka. They spent so much time together that Al, in his eagerness to communicate, learned how to speak serviceable Russian.

  One night, after they’d gone fishing, Karolka, as he often did, invited Al to dinner. “Everything was pork and I knew it was pork and I didn’t care that it was pork.” He was so happy to be with the Mikutovistsches that he’d gladly eat trayf. Besides, he liked it. Remembering the hot dogs at the Isle of Hope, he thought briefly about how upset his mother would be and then tucked right in. While he was scarfing down trayf, Anna noticed that Al was constantly leaning down and scratching and asked to have a look. “I’m wearing shorts—not short shorts American-style—but shorts that stopped below the knee. I got up from the dinner table. Both legs were covered with leeches. ‘Don’t do anything,’ Anna told me. ‘Don’t pull. Don’t scratch.’ She carefully slid a knife under the leeches and removed them. She took care of me.

  “Karolka would take me and Harry to his sauna about once every four to six weeks. The sauna was not a wonderful experience in the wintertime when it was twenty degrees below zero outdoors and two hundred fifty degrees above inside. We were parboiled in this place.” But it was a whole lot better than the town bathhouse. The sauna was a two-room masonry box of a place, with an entry for disrobing, and the sauna room itself. Benches were located at three levels. A stovelike apparatus about three feet high and made of stone and cement stood in the middle of the room. Inside, large rocks that had been cooking for at least a day glowed gold and red. “Karolka would pour water over the stones, making steam like Mount Etna. The challenge was to climb up to the highest level, because it was as hot as hell up there near the ceiling. Almost immediately we’d retreat to the second or first level—there it was cozy and warm—where we’d smack ourselves with willow branches to clean out our pores. Even though there was no soap, you got very clean.” For a grand finale, Karolka would chase them out of the sauna and into the cold, where he’d engage the naked, shivering brothers in a playful snowball fight.

  The intimate role that Karolka played in Al’s and Harry’s lives had its price. “My mother’s reputation was being sullied on two counts. Everyone thought she was crazy to return to Lithuania and bring her children along—for the second time no less—when they could have grown up in the land of milk and honey. From that point of view, they were right. But what most upset me was that Karolka and my mother became the focus of filthy rumors that my mother was having some sort of sexual liaison with her landlord. With a gentile? It was just so preposterous I dismissed it. But I resented it. Even if my mother had reached the limits of celibacy, certainly her piety would not have allowed her to go to bed with a Polish Catholic.”

  In addition to the main house and the cottage, the property included the requisite outhouse, a barn, where the cow lived, and the sauna. The Jaffees’ cottage was located at a forty-five-degree angle to the main house, right next to an enormous orchard. The bushes and fruit trees were laid out according to color: yellow on one side and red on the other, and stretched for the equivalent of half a block. There were red and yellow apples, red and yellow cherries, red and yellow lingonberries, as well as plums, pears, currants, and gooseberries. To this day, Al raves about the superior sweetness of yellow over red fruits. “People are so dumb. They think that red is sweeter.” The siblings also had a vegetable garden that produced carrots, potatoes, lettuce, cabbage, beets, scallions, radishes, tomatoes, and cucumbers—Al’s favorite. “I would just wipe them on my clothes, hack them in half, give one half to Harry, and eat them—skin, dirt, and all.”

  The Mikutovistsch family made their living renting out the orchard to professional fruit pickers, so Al and Harry were under strict orders from Karolka not to take any fruit from the orchard. They did anyway, although out of respect for Karolka, they kept their incursions to a minimum and never invited their friends to feast on the forbidden fruit. The rest of the town, however, was their orchard.

  “We always figured out how to get food from someplace. One of our big projects in the summertime was fruit stealing. Everyone watched carefully over their gardens because they lived off them. Except for cucumbers and radishes, we were primarily interested in fruit, especially apples and berries. Stealing appealed to Al’s sense of adventure—“It was fun being a thief”—and to Al’s and Harry’s genius for engineering. “These crazy ideas I have now, that I submit to MAD magazine as ‘Al Jaffee’s Mad Inventions,’ I put into practice when I was a kid.” Their ingenuity fascinated other children. “We invented fruit-stealing devices. We would tie a wire hook to the end of a long fishing pole, lasso the fruit, give the pole a yank so that the fruit dropped into an attached basket, and then run like hell because the farmer’s dog was usually after us.”

  Al knew that stealing was a sin, and he worried about God’s wrath, but not too much. “I wasn’t quite ready to say, ‘There is no God, it’s all a bunch of baloney,’ but I was ready to say that if God is supposed to be nice and almighty, why would he punish a hungry little kid for stealing fruit or playing ball on Saturday? It didn’t make any sense to me. God couldn’t be that bad. What I wasn’t accepting was my mother’s belief that all problems would be solved if you put your faith in God because he would provide. I began to see a lot of evidence that God wasn’t reliable. Hell would freeze over before God provided me with apples and pears, so I had to steal them. When you have no money, stealing is the coin of the realm.

  “We lived in a virtual ghetto.” The rulers of the ghetto were the rabbinical organizations. Simply being a Jew in anti-Semitic zarasai was to be a second-class citizen. Then, as if to add to that ignominy, the Jews levied further prohibitions on themselves. At least that’s how it seemed to Al. “No one worked on Saturdays. No one drove horses. No one cooked or lit kerosene lamps. Everyone put his cholent into the communal oven. You shouldn’t walk too far, you shouldn’t breathe too much.” Most Jewish children attended cheder daily, but even truants like Al and Harry always wore tzitzit. “A kid goes to school all week. Then on Saturdays he’s free to do nothing, not even play with a ball. On Sunday everything is closed. Not even eight-year-old boys could get away from religion. Zarasai was not a child-friendly place.” In spite of or perhaps because of these dreary, oppressive conditions, it was in Zarasai that Al solidified his particular brand of humor—adolescent. Adults were his targets. Satire would be his weapon.

  “I became aware that I could not trust adults. My father let me be shlepped to Europe; my mother did the shlepping. What good were adults to me? The only thing adults were good for was telling you things were sinful and trying to destroy any notions of your own. ‘You can’t do this; you can’t do that!’ I felt stifled. I developed my own brand of anti-adultism. At an early age, I set out to prove that adults were full of shit. I’m still doing that now, at the age of eighty-nine. I think like an adolescent.” When most people open a newspaper, they see news; Al sees bullshit—adults behaving like silly, pompous hypocrites, always asking stupid questions. Making fun of them is Al’s best revenge.

  Setting aside the Sabbath, hardly a week passed when it wasn’t time to celebrate one or another religious holiday. Al’s feelings about these holidays were mixed. On Simchas Torah, Al and Harry got to parade around the shul carrying their homemade candle lanterns, so that was fun. Rosh Hashanah was long, boring, and solemn. Yom Kippur, a day of fasting, was worse. To a perpetually hungry boy, making a holiday out of starving seemed perverse.

  Succoth, the festival of the harvest, was a particular favorite, since it was all about food and conviviality. The Jaffees never built a succah* of their own, but they were often invited to Chaimke Musil’s house, where Al took particular pleasure in helping to build their succah and furnishi
ng it with a makeshift table and chairs so the family could take their meals there during the eight days of the holiday. It was a lean-to made of worthless, bark-covered pinewood planks that were saved from year to year. Unsecured pine branches served as a roof, but in retrospect, Al sees that succah as the first of his many attempts to build a home away from home.

  Al’s favorite holidays were Purim, Passover, and Chanukah, which were summed up by the old Jewish expression, “They tried to kill us, they didn’t, let’s eat.” But what Al cared about were the gifts of food—nuts and hard candies. On one night of Chanukah, Al’s mother gave each of her four children a single but memorable grape.

  “Conversations about God and the role he played in our lives were a constant.” Children as young as Al and Harry engaged in Talmudic-like discussions—How did Moses part the Red Sea? Why did God turn Lot’s wife into salt? And how come God made Job suffer so? Although Al wasn’t convinced there was a God, he nevertheless worried that there might be, especially in view of his fondness for stealing. “There was one wonderful moment—the conversation was about sin—when an older boy explained to us that we shouldn’t worry about sin because we were too young. ‘Until you’re older,’ he assured us, ‘all your sins go onto your father.’ ” Al was thrilled with the news. “I was so angry at my father for letting my mother take us to this Siberia for a second time that I said, ‘Okay, Dad. My sins are coming your way to wherever you are, and I hope you enjoy them.’ ”

  In spite of Al’s aversion to religion, Bible stories inspired his artistic creativity almost as much as the comics. He drew Daniel in the lion’s den, Hagar at the well, and the parting of the Red Sea. But it was his elaborate drawing of Moses standing on the top of Mount Sinai, holding the Ten Commandments, that Al would never forget. “I couldn’t have been more than eight years old. I was fascinated by the story of Moses and the Jews escaping the pharaoh.