Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  “How would an eight-year-old make a drawing of a mountain? It would be a triangle, and Moses would be standing on the point, teetering. I colored the picture with watercolors, but then this older kid showed me that if you rubbed the watercolors with a candle, the picture got this nice, satiny sheen to it. My three younger brothers were watching me do this magic. When I was finished, David, the youngest—he must have been around three—rubbed his hand along the picture and said, ‘It’s so slippery. Won’t Moses slide down the mountain?’ ” By putting Moses teetering on top of this pointy, shiny mountain, Al had made it plausible that Moses might slide down. Al identifies David’s inadvertent joke as “the first thing that ever struck me funny. At that moment I understood the difference between the slapstick I had seen in the funny papers, and this other, deeper dimension.” He recognized this same dimension just four years later while watching his favorite cartoon, Betty Boop, at his Uncle Moise’s movie theater in Kaunas. Betty Boop was in danger, and in order to save her, Felix the Cat needed a ladder. No problem. He pulled off his tail, spread it apart, turned it into a ladder, and rescued her.

  Sometime during this first year back in zarasai, three-year-old Bernard contracted spinal meningitis. He received medical care, which is probably why he survived, but the ordeal left him deaf and mute. This lively little boy, the prodigious talker and mimic who, just a year earlier, had amused and amazed everyone at Grandfather Gordon’s table by asking Irinka for chai in Russian, could now neither speak nor hear. “At first we were totally unaware of what had happened. We would stand next to him and we would say, ‘Bernard, move over,’ and there would be absolutely no response. Finally we started clapping our hands. Still no response. Over time we developed our own crude sign language so we could communicate with him, but it was tedious going. Bernard was a happy child, in spite of his physical problems. He’d been butchered by a mohel in Savannah. He was blind in one eye, due to a botched effort to straighten his crossed eyes. He’d taken a lot of punishment in his young life.”

  Al’s schooling remained episodic. During his first stay he had been obliged by edict to study the Lithuanian language. This time, although there was a cheder in town, his mother hired a tutor. In spite of the fact that Morris Jaffee’s part-time job as a standby postal carrier paid him a pittance, he continued to send money to Mildred on a regular basis. It’s possible that Grandfather Gordon also continued to pitch in. “We didn’t have to be poor, but we were, because my mother was giving most of the money away.”

  Japan’s defeat of the czar’s army was a big subject around town. “Danke was obsessed by Japan’s defeat of the czar’s army even though it had happened in 1905, long before he was born. He enjoyed the fact that the Japanese kicked the shit out of the Russians. There wasn’t a Jew anywhere in the world who wasn’t thrilled to see this anti-Semite get his just deserts because he sent many a Jew to a horrible death. The fact that the Japanese defeated the czar’s army and paved the way for the Russian Revolution was good for the Jews, for a little while anyway, because now everybody had a chance to be somebody. Harry loved to illustrate the battle scenes—right down to the Japanese gun emplacements—and Al’s tutor loved to teach it. To this day, Al enjoys reciting the mellifluous names of the four main islands of the Japanese archipelago: “Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu.”

  Month by month, year by year, Al became more and more caught up in shtetl life. He accepted as normal what he had once rejected as the primitive hardships and indignities of life in zarasai. “I got into the adventure. In many respects I had a happy Huck Finn-ish childhood in zarasai because all the things of childhood were available to me. My world, in whatever way it is connected with art, is just an extension of childhood playtime, only now I need to get paid.”

  Although their father was missing from their lives, he kept the promise he’d made years before and continued to send the funnies to Zarasai. Al and Harry read the first installment of Dick Tracy curled up on the pripichuk. “Cartoons consumed our days and constituted an intense sense of play. We spent whole days cutting out cartoon panels, assembling them in sequence, and sewing them into bindings.” The brothers may have invented the Big Little Book in zarasai before 1932, when the debut cartoon book, devoted to the new pulp-inspired comics hero Dick Tracy, was produced in the United States. Harry and Al read their home-sewn books to each other over and over again. Then they translated them into Yiddish and read them to their friends, who by now were hooked on American cartoons.

  The entire town was their playground. zarasai’s location on top of a hill from which pathways radiated downward to the lakes provided year-round opportunities for fun. In the winter, sledding would become Al’s main preoccupation. “If you shoved off at the top of the hill, you’d pick up so much speed that you’d spin out nearly half a kilometer on the frozen lake and sail almost clear across to the mainland. Then you’d have to trudge forever to get back up the hill.”

  There was not much to do around Karolka’s compound. Al’s pet chicken, named Hun (chicken), didn’t offer much in the way of entertainment, so the boys trekked five kilometers daily in order to meet up with their friends, all of whom lived in town. If the weather was warm, the brothers and their friends might race barefoot to the lake, gaining speed until they lost control just in time to splash headlong into the water. “I loved being in the water, even more than I cared about eating.”

  Two years before, the boys had only dared to wade, but now they were ready to learn to swim. To that end, they invented water wings. Al and Harry picked and chose among the spongy reeds that grew by the water’s edge, gathered them in a bundle, and tied them tight in the middle with a piece of rope. Later they made boats out of reeds. The boys also had fun with a sturdy, bamboo-like vegetation that grew near the lake. If you broke the sticks apart into segments, you could blow bubbles in the water. The boys had heard their grandfather talk about the time during World War I when he, Lifa, Moise, and some other Jews from town had hidden from a murderous Bolshevik rampage by submerging themselves entirely in the lake, breathing through these reedy straws. Al and Harry tried this technique out for fun.

  To put a finishing indoor touch to an outdoor day, the brothers might take in a free movie at their Uncle Moise’s oddly named Bango Theater. No one knows how the theater got its name, but Al thinks it might reflect the frequent subtitle “Bang Bang” (as in “Bang! Bang! You’re dead”) that appeared at the bottom of the screen during gangster and cowboy movies. However, those Lithuanians in the audience who could read pronounced the English word bang as “bong,” so that although the theater was named the Bango it was pronounced “Bongo,” as in “Bong! Bong! You’re dead.”

  If landing in Zarasai from Savannah was a moon shot for Al, a night at the movies was at least as disorienting and unnerving for the rustic peasants who made up the majority of the audience, since the short silent films were especially chosen for their capacity to engender shock and awe. A moviemaker would set up a camera on a railroad track and film an oncoming locomotive that, when shown, would seem to be rushing headlong into the audience, most of whom had never seen a train. Another terrifying short subject featured a mastiff lunging repeatedly at the camera, drool dripping from its bared fangs. Children cried. Sometimes the peasants fled the theater. One man threw his cane at the dog. All of this mayhem was going on to the inappropriate accompaniment of schmaltzy Russian songs played on a scratchy gramophone. Meanwhile Al sat back and enjoyed the show. “It’s hard to believe that anyone would not know this was just a picture, but they didn’t.” The Bango was a place where the nineteenth and twentieth centuries clashed with a vengeance.

  One night, a clip of a film featuring a Moscow Cossack choir would, like the plausible impossibility of Moses sliding off Mount Sinai, open Al’s mind up to a whole new world of the ridiculous that years later he would bring to artistic realization in the pages of MAD.

  “First, the choir members marched in and lined up in three or four rows. Then the guy with
the baton began to conduct and the choir started singing, except that while their mouths were moving, no sounds were coming out. Finally the guy who was manning the gramophone got the thing going, but by then they were totally out of sync. When they had finished singing, the choir marched off. Only this time their mouths were closed, but they were still singing. That absurdity of timing struck me as the funniest comedy I’d ever seen.”

  Sleds and skates dominated play during the long winters. Wooden skates were made locally. Al never managed to get a pair, but he did get a sled. In the winter, when the peasants couldn’t grow crops, they’d try to earn some money making many items, among them sleds. They’d take a piece of oak, steam it, and bend it around to form a little platform on which to mount the runners. Then a smith would fashion bent steel runners and attach them to the sled. There were no nails. Everything was wound and secured with local reeds and rope.

  “Once a peddler came down the road with five or six of these sleds on his shoulder. I had never had my own sled, even though I’d been begging for one. This time my mother went out and bought one. Every once in a while she came through.” Al had been hoping for one of the beautifully handcrafted ones made by the local peasants and decorated in the centuries-old European tradition, a sled like the one that Berke Lintup’s mother had bought him. “Instead, she fell for one that looked like a Flexible Flyer. Maybe it was imported. Maybe part of her was still attached to buying American.”

  Typically, Al, already the mad inventor, couldn’t leave well enough alone. He knew how fast these sleds could go, especially if you headed them downhill in the direction of the lake. He nailed four poles to a plywood base, added a piece of plywood on top for liftoff, and launched himself down the hill. “I figured I’d go flying, and I did. Partway down the hill, the sled hit an obstruction and the nails holding the plywood base came loose. I almost chopped off the end of my middle finger, which was caught between the base and the sled. I wrapped a rag around the injury and ignored it.” So did his mother, assuming she ever even noticed. Nor, it seems, did anyone notice the pre-gangrenous odor that increased daily. “About a week later I was visiting my crippled cousin, Chaya. She unwrapped the rag, and the nail fell off. She tended to my finger and bandaged it properly. My mother didn’t notice that either.”

  When they weren’t sledding or swimming, the brothers and their friends found plenty to engage their interest just hanging around the town square. They’d stop at the Musil family grocery store, where Mr. Musil would invariably offer them a piece of candy. Better yet, he would climb down the wooden ladder that led to his cold cellar and emerge with a crystallized apple or pear. Even though the grocery store, like all the stores in town, was unlit and therefore always gloomy, for the boys it was a cheerful place. Mr. Musil would watch with satisfaction while Al and Harry sucked greedily at the delicious fruit. “Good?” he’d ask rhetorically. “Good like wine?”

  Like kids everywhere, Al and Harry and their friends were drawn to the thrill of danger. During the day, if they were feeling brave enough, they played hide-and-go-seek in what Al and his friends called the moyershe krumin, the “scary stores,” a large building that housed small shops that had been gutted during World War I. Nighttime offered even more terrifying possibilities. The gang didn’t dare approach the cemetery from which, it was believed, the dead rose, walked among the trees, and went to the synagogue to pray. But they did summon the courage to hide out in the high balcony of the main shul looking for and hoping not to see shaydem* that were rumored to float around haunting the place.

  Playing amateur archaeologist was another source of fun and giddy terror. The skeletons that had been unearthed in front of Moshe Jaffee’s record store two years earlier only whetted their appetites for further exploration. The boys walked about, their eyes trained on the ground, looking for clues—sometimes a bit of paper or a coin—that suggested a promising excavation site. Digging with sticks and their bare hands, they unearthed boxes full of worthless treasure—badly deteriorated paper money and czarist rubles that had probably been buried as the German soldiers advanced in 1917. They made their most spectacular find when they were digging right next to Berke Lintup’s house. “We came upon old circular medallions that said gott mit uns,* and I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, the Germans spoke Yiddish.’ I told my friends and they all agreed. We didn’t realize that Yiddish is based on German, not the other way around. Then we started to find machine-gun bullets—lots of them. The number eighty-six sticks in my head.

  “What to do with the bullets? I got a great idea to knock off all the bullet heads by banging the tops off with rocks and then emptying the powder into an earthenware flower pot. We all could have been blown to kingdom come. Then I initiated a discussion about all kinds of devastating things we might do with the gunpowder.

  “Everybody hated the rebbe at the cheder because he used to hit. He had a cane, and if you didn’t do your lesson properly, he hit you across the hand, like to break your fingers. We made up a song about the rebbe, whose name was Yosche, the slang word for ‘defecate.’ Whenever he would stagger into the outhouse, we kids would start singing, ‘Yesh-che, drish-che, shmear die vent,’ suggesting that the rabbi was going to defecate and afterward he was going to wipe his behind with his hands, and then smear his hands on the outhouse walls, the evidence of which was always there. Most people wiped themselves with their own hands. There was no toilet paper or newspapers. There were no Montgomery Ward catalogs either. I didn’t go to the cheder, but I suggested to my friends who did that when the rebbe went to the outhouse for his daily crap, we could put a fuse in the flower pot, light it, and throw it under the outhouse. Little did I realize that if that thing blew up, this guy would fly about a thousand feet in the air. We threw our bottle bomb and ran. Luckily for us and the rebbe, our bomb didn’t go off. I still get these crazy ideas. People should be very careful about following them. I should be very careful about following them.”

  Toys were scarce in Zarasai, and what few showed up in the marketplace were made of straw. But that didn’t mean that Al and his friends felt deprived. “There was something appealing and exciting about making your own toys. At the same time that parents were buying hoops and jacks for their children at the five-and-ten-cent stores in the United States, the shtetl kids were begging hoops from the local barrel makers and ironmongers and making jacks out of clay. With a spool, a stick, some string, and a propeller cut from tin, aero-dynamically shaped for maximum liftoff, Al and Harry amazed their friends by pulling stoutly on the string and launching the propeller fifty feet in the air. “We even made our own fishing line out of hairs we’d yank from the tails of white horses. One of my friends showed me how to braid three hairs together by knotting them at one end and rolling the hairs between my thumb and index finger. I was extremely skeptical at first—I thought the whole thing would come apart—but it didn’t. We made the bobbers from discarded wine-bottle corks. The only manufactured part we needed was the hook.”

  This childhood pleasure of making things from virtually nothing would turn Al into a lifelong scavenger and inventor who prefers homemade to store-bought. He would forever covet garbage. The sight of four metal tubes protruding out of a trash bin would beckon to be turned into the legs of a coffee table. While other artists dipped their brushes into pots of paint, Al would use the tops of spent seltzer bottles. When his tennis partners threw their tennis cans into the trash, Al would retrieve them and make vases, sconces, and bird feeders. In his adult life, Harry would carry this tendency to extremes, cutting the cuffs off of worn-out pants to make himself hats and filling his apartment with furniture he constructed entirely of cardboard.

  Unlike their American counterparts who drove their hoops with sticks, Harry and Al navigated theirs by means of a wire they’d bend into a U shape. “The challenge was to keep the hoop going. We wandered everywhere, steering our hoops up and down hills and around corners that required expert maneuvering.” So did a local variant of the hoop, a
kind of crude push toy, a wheel on a wire. “You looked for a round log, and you had someone cut off a two-inch-thick piece. Then you drilled a hole and put a wire through it and you pushed it around.”

  One day when Al was rolling his hoop through town, he encountered trouble in the form of Simeonka’s Shaygetz (Simon’s gentile son), a Lithuanian bully, navigating his wheel on a wire. “The mere mention of Simeonka’s Shaygetz’s name struck terror into all the little Jewish kids. It was like High Noon whenever this kid, this bulvan* came down the street. Everybody would be jumping into windows, over fences, running all over the place. This time I decided to stay put. I just felt that a tough guy from America doesn’t go running like that, so I stayed put, provoking Simeonka’s Shaygetz to spit out the Russian equivalent of ‘Go to the devil, you filthy Jew.’”† Still undeterred, Al stepped fearlessly into his path. “I believe I called out to him in Russian, ‘Ya, Ameri-kansky! I’m American! I am not afraid.’ Something like that. My Russian wasn’t very good at the time. The next thing I know I’m being awakened across the street at Berke Lintup’s house, where they’re putting cold compresses on my head.”

  This incident permanently extinguished in Al what had been a childhood passion for confrontation. “I suffered an abrupt personality change after being hit by a log. Ever since then, even when I’m completely in the right, I back down from confrontations. I ask myself, ‘What would John Wayne do?’ And then I do the opposite. I’m afraid of becoming a babbling idiot. Anger overwhelms me. Maybe it’s the anger of wanting to get back and kill that son of a bitch who hit me over the head with a log, and I know I never can. This fear of confrontation pisses off my wife, Joyce. It bothered my first wife, Ruth, too. My women have never been too happy about my cowardice. They want the warrior.”