Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  At one point during their career in Zarasai, Al’s and Harry’s passion for innovation took a turn toward alchemy and the boys became preoccupied with the idea of making ink out of horse chestnuts. “I loved the chestnuts. They grew inside of a prickly shell, the size of a peach. When they were ripe, one of the favorite pastimes for kids was to knock them down with a rock or stick and crack open the shell. You’d get this beautiful chestnut. No one would eat them, but we collected a wagonload of them. We tried cooking them for days, but all we got were charcoal chestnuts.”

  When the ink caper failed, Al and Harry switched their attention to the making and selling of penholders. “We were pretending to be little shopkeepers, like the grown-ups. Entrepreneurship was in the air. We were doing the equivalent of an American kid’s lemonade stand. What Lithuanians called le Crise, the impending Depression, was being felt in Zarasai, and everyone was trying to make some extra centimes. Penholders may seem an esoteric product, but in Zarasai, where everyone used pens, we were dealing in a basic necessity. We carved the penholders out of wood, colored them, waxed them, and tried to sell them to the other kids, but they, like most of the adults we were imitating, didn’t have any money.”

  Mostly, when it came to ingenuity, Al and Harry led the pack, but it was the native shtetl kids who showed the boys how to make balls out of the hair from molting cattle. Karolka’s cow was a major donor. “By rubbing her flanks, you could grab a fistful of hair, which was usually wet with perspiration. We would mold it into a ball until it got dense enough to bounce off the side of a barn. I suppose this is how people made balls for their children to play with going way back into history. It’s curious to me that I lived in such a backward country that we made balls out of cow hair, whereas at the same time in Germany and the U.S., they were manufacturing rubber balls and baseballs.”

  Although some aspects of primitive life appealed to Al’s and Harry’s sense of adventure, nothing—not the outhouses, not the wolves—had prepared them for the horror they felt one day when they saw a peasant woman sawing the head off Karolka’s cow. “The cow was our friend. We loved her. We had just come back home from downtown. We noticed the cow was not in her usual place, between our cottage and the barn. We found her in a little clearing very near the sauna. We snuck up and hid behind some bushes. The cow was standing but too sick to try to get away. This woman was dressed in an abbreviated babushka and a typical peasant dress. She was a shtarker* a farm lady, a slaughterer for all I know. She held the poor cow’s horn and was slicing away at its neck from beneath. A big pool of blood was forming at her feet. We must have made some noise because suddenly she’s brandishing this big knife at us—it was like a scimitar—and she’s yelling, ‘Ve kroyh yite-ze.’* We ran out of there. Talk about traumatic sexual experiences!

  “Later I was talking to Karolka about how sad I was. He showed me a piece of wire about four inches long, wire that in all probability was snipped off from some fencing around the tomatoes and must have flown into the haystack. It was in the cow’s internal organs, but it didn’t kill the cow immediately. For weeks and weeks she stopped eating and giving milk. She was dying, he said, so it was better to slaughter her before she suffered any more. The meat was okay to eat, he said, because she hadn’t died of poisoning. I had dinner at Karolka’s a lot. I hope I never ate her.”

  Their friends introduced Al and Harry to their favorite games—lapta (“lap-ta”) and soccer. Lapta, similar to baseball, was the gang’s favorite pastime. They played it as it had been played centuries earlier. “At first it appeared to be a simple game requiring only a big stick and a little stick. But once you got into it—think of American baseball—the game could get very complicated, with techniques, scores, and statistics. The little stick was carved and tapered to a point at each end. You would put it on the ground and hit it, and because it was tapered, it would fly up into the air and then you would hit it with the big stick and try to run to the base and back. Someone out there would try to catch the little stick and run after you and tag you. I was amused about fifty or so years ago when I heard that the Russians claimed they had invented baseball in the fourteenth century. Thinking back to lapta, maybe they did.”

  Al longed for a soccer ball. He was eager to show his pals that they didn’t have to kick around a crude ball made of sweaty cow hair. Al’s mother was always encouraging him to write to his father asking for things. “We are hungry,” she coached him to say. “We are cold. We need books to read.” Into one of these letters, Al slipped a request for a soccer ball. “Next to lapta, soccer was the most popular sport in Zarasai. I wanted to make a huge impression on my friends by having my father send a real soccer ball. I bragged to all of them that my rich American father was sending a football. This is a football, after all, I reasoned. You kick it with your foot. The language difference never entered my mind. I wrote a pleading letter and waited for months and months. Finally, this misshapen ball arrives. An American football to those kids is a totally bungled soccer ball. Can you imagine if you’ve never in your life before heard of anything but a round ball, and someone sends a magnificently made leather ball that’s shaped like a cigar? My ego was on the line. I would have been a laughingstock. The amount of disappointment I felt could not be measured. I don’t think I showed it to anybody. I think I buried the thing.

  “I was trying to keep a bridge between me and my father, but I couldn’t bring America to Lithuania, and we, in Lithuania, could not get to America.” Although their father would continue to send the funnies, money orders, letters, and gifts, with each passing year even this minimal contact dwindled to the point where Al lost all hope of ever seeing him again. Morris became more and more out of touch with how old his children were. “By now I was almost eleven years old and Harry was nearly nine. Time froze for my father. When we asked for books, he would send us kindergarten books—Sean of Ireland or Tom Sawyer—with one line per page. ‘Tom is painting the fence.’ He would write us these very simple short notes. ‘I miss you. Someday we’ll all be together.’ I learned later that he had gone into a big decline and was very seriously depressed. He simply stopped knowing what to do. I think that he, too, was giving up hope.”

  THE MONTHS PASSED; it was 1931. Al was ten; Harry, eight and a half. By now they felt quite at home, although “home” often meant somebody else’s house. At the cottage they usually ate standing up and at different times. At their grandfather’s, Karolka’s, or Chaya’s, or at Chaimke Musil’s, everyone ate together around a table, like a family.

  “We loved going into Chaimke’s house. It had dirt floors and lots of little warrenlike rooms to play in.” Mrs. Musil excelled in treats for hungry boys. At harvesttime, she would cut the sweet-tasting cores out of cabbages from the large garden in back of the house and offer them to Al and Harry. In the backyard, next to the succah, the Musils had a huge earthenware oven. Mrs. Musil baked once a week. Most of the bread was meant to be sold at their store in town, but she’d set aside one loaf for Chaimke and his pals. “We’d hang around and play there all day, and when the loaves came out, Chaimke’s mother would divide one down the middle, cut out slices, smear them with butter, sprinkle them with honey or sugar, and give one to each of us. She’d send us off to sit on the front porch. ‘Wait until they cool off or you’ll get a stomachache,’ she would call after us. That bread was like eating watermelon—you’d have this big warm slice covered with goodies. It was heavenly.” At the Musils’, food was love.

  “Chaimke Musil’s house was a warm place for us. They were family. We were invited for dinner very often. We enjoyed ourselves so much that we would stay until it was dark. ‘Don’t you think you should go home?’ Mrs. Musil would remind us; she was concerned that we wouldn’t be able to find our way in the dark. But we’d always say, ‘Sure, we’ll go home soon.’ We never wanted to leave. We sat at a huge table, and whatever they had they shared with us. We would bask in this warmth.”

  One night around the dinner table Mr. and Mrs. Musil
and some guests were talking with great animation about something that had taken place that afternoon in the square. It didn’t take long for Al to realize that he had witnessed that mysterious something. “I was hanging out around the town square when a cowering woman was let out of jail. A mob gathered and followed her screaming a Russian word, blyad, over and over and louder and louder. The poor woman was sobbing hysterically. Since I did not know the word’s meaning, I didn’t know if I should feel sorry for her or join the crowd and yell.”

  Al listened to the grown-ups as their voices rose in excitement and fell in secrecy. When there was a pause in the conversation Al seized the opportunity to get his question answered. “What is a blyad?” His words met with total silence. “You would have thought I’d farted. Everyone dug into their soup. I later learned that the word was Russian for ‘whore.’ To break the embarrassing silence, Mrs. Musil made a big deal out of noticing how dark it was getting outside. ‘Don’t you think you boys should go home soon?’ I felt for this poor, sobbing woman. After all, my mother was called names, too, just because we lived in Karolka’s compound without my mother’s husband.”

  Al and Harry left the Musils’ promptly and soon found themselves in the middle of nowhere. “It was pitch black. The moon wasn’t out, so we couldn’t see a foot in front of ourselves, and we had a five-kilometer walk in the snow back to Karolka’s cottage. We heard wolves howling in the distance, and all we could figure was that the wolves were coming in a pack and they were going to get us any moment.”

  Al could not help but be affected by the seminal Eastern European folktales that seized the imaginations of adults and children he lived among. He did, in fact, live in that cautionary world of snow maidens, wolves, woodsmen, and wicked witches such as Baba Yaga who ate orphan children lost in the forests. “By the last couple of kilometers I was in a terrible panic—but not Harry.

  “From now on,” Al told Harry, “I’m not going to stay out so late. I’m scared of the wolves.”

  “I’m not,” Harry answered, pulling out a gun he had carved out of wood. “If the wolves come, I’ll point my gun at them.”

  “So I said, ‘Harry, we know this is a gun, but the wolf doesn’t know this is a gun. Besides, it’s not a real gun. You can’t shoot him with it. This isn’t going to do us any good at all.’”

  Some, who didn’t know better, might view Harry as merely a bit naïve for his age, but, even at the time, Al was beginning to think that maybe his brother and dearest friend was more strange than naïve. “In a primitive society that doesn’t have eight psychiatrists to every square foot, and fourteen teachers who think they’re psychiatrists, and parents who read all the health columns in the New York Times and Good Housekeeping—in a country that has none of that, how do you know what unusual behavior is? There were no diagnoses in Zarasai, only nicknames: Yudel ‘der knacker,* Avrom der putz,† Moshe der gonif,‡ or Lifka die meshuggeneh,§ a sixteen-year-old young woman who flung her used menstrual rags on her front lawn.” Al and his friends thought she was dying.

  Al has no idea why, in 1932, his mother moved the family from Zarasai to the heavily Jewish Slobodka district in the capital city of Kaunas. Perhaps he never knew. What he does remember is how intensely he hated the place, much as he had despised the hellish interregnum year he spent in Far Rockaway between the two trips to Zarasai. “I may be mentally blocking memories of Kaunas because in retrospect, Kaunas made Zarasai look good.”

  Once again he was called upon to adapt, and once again he did, but not without paying a price. To this day Al gets terrible stomachaches whenever he has to change places, no doubt an intestinal homage to the perils of traveling with Mildred Jaffee.

  About the time that the Jaffees arrived in Kaunas, Lithuania’s golden age was coming to an end. Anti-Semitism was taking hold. In 1930, on the economic front, an organization of Lithuanian workers and traders whose slogan was “Lithuania for the Lithuanians” had made it increasingly difficult for Jews to compete with Lithuanian cooperatives that enjoyed tax privileges. On the political front, President Antanas Smetona was preparing the way for Hitler by suppressing parliament and assuming authoritative powers. Al paid no attention to politics, but he knew that Smetona was “bad for the Jews.” What most intrigued him, though, was that Smetona’s name sounded like smetana, which is Russian for “sour cream.” “We all had closeted laughs about this tyrant.”

  Kaunas had become the de facto center of Lithuanian Jewry and culture after Vilnius was incorporated into Poland in 1922. There were three Yiddish daily papers in Kaunas, assorted journals, a Hebrew theater, sports clubs, Hebrew banks, and youth organizations. One-third of the population was Jewish. Slobodka, though not yet a ghetto—it would become one in 1941 when the Nazis herded Kaunas’s Jews into the already crowded district—was a well-known center of orthodoxy and learning. Large, the size of the Warsaw Ghetto, Slobodka was a place where Jews could keep completely to themselves, practice their traditions, and rely exclusively upon Jewish doctors, lawyers, and other professionals without ever having to come into contact with the outside world. Maybe that’s why Mildred moved to Slobodka—to burrow even more deeply and completely into Jewishness. To do so she gave up the comfortable familiarity of her hometown, her shul, and her relatives. For their part, Al and Harry had to give up their unfettered freedom, their playmates, their friends and relatives, the beauty and bounty of the woods and countryside of a place they had come to call home, and, most critically, Karolka, their friend and protector.

  Even though Kaunas was a twentieth-century European city, Al wasn’t impressed. The tall buildings, cars, trains, and buses of his earliest childhood days in Savannah left him cold. “I know I played in the street with other kids—we built snow houses and had snow fights—but I don’t remember a friend, I don’t remember a name. And to make matters worse, the cartoons stopped coming. We knew nothing of my father anymore. We didn’t think we’d ever go back to America.”

  Mildred Jaffee took this opportunity, however belated, to enroll both Al and Harry in yeshiva (an even more religious school than the cheder), where they became the hapless victims of its cheerless rigors and rote demands. “The yeshiva we attended was in Kaunas, even though Slobodka had shuls on every corner. We lived on the top floor of a three-story wooden house on a small mercantile street. If you looked out the window in one direction there was a shul and a store. Look out in the other direction? Another shul, another store. My mother was surrounded by Yid-dishkeit.* She loved it.”

  Al went to the yeshiva every day, but once there he adhered to a policy of passive resistance. Although he was obliged to dress “like a bellhop” in his itchy yeshiva uniform, he drew the line at further conformity. “I refused to learn the prayers.” While other children shuckled† and dovaned,‡ Al refused. “I never said a word of Hebrew. I faked it. Essentially, I think it was my American background saying, ‘What am I doing standing here with all these people shaking back and forth?’”

  Only ambivalence can define why many years later, while working at MAD, Al would cheerfully agree to contribute original cartoons for practically no money to the Moshiach (Messiah) Times, a completely religious magazine, generated in New York and published by the Lubavitcher sect for Orthodox Jewish children who shuckled and dovaned. To this day he continues to draw cartoons for them, doing his Talmudic best to draw only kosher animals, those with cloven hooves, and to avoid depicting mice, which are also not kosher. The assignment of a barnyard scene posed a particular challenge. Pigs, of course, were out. So were horses, cats, dogs, and any other creature that was without cloven hooves and did not chew its cud. When Al got done with it, Old MacDonald’s kosher farm included a cow, some deer, a moose, and an antelope.

  “I have a warm relationship with my editor, Dovid Sholom Pape. Even though I abandoned all of the religious zealotry years ago in Lithuania, I like the kind and gentle souls of the people of Orthodoxy. Or maybe I’m doing penance for my mother. I keep asking Dovid, ‘Where was our
God while they were roasting our people?’ I know it’s an elementary question, but I still haven’t gotten an elementary answer.”

  THE TRIP ACROSS THE RIVER, which they made daily to attend yeshiva, was almost as fearsome in its urban way as the walk through the woods from the Musils’ to Karolka’s had been in the outskirts of Zarasai. The houses reminded Al of a scene from a silent movie, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, where the stark, angular buildings that lined the road seemed to lean menacingly toward one another. Still, it was worth the scary journey, especially when their destination was Uncle Moise’s Bango movie theater.

  It was through the movies that twelve-year-old Al began to develop an adult emotional repertoire. He fell deeply in love with Clara Bow. He envied the handsome Gustav Frölich, who always got the girl. In a world of beautiful people, Al, so sure he was ugly, wondered if he’d ever succeed with women. Uncle Tom’s Cabin elicited his first feelings of compassion. “I felt so bad for this poor slave woman, holding her baby, jumping from ice floe to ice floe.” Another silent film, Taras Bulba, about the medieval conflict between the Lithuanians and the Poles, suffused him with passionate pro-Lithuanian patriotism. He was growing into a man. Even so, Al never outgrew his adolescent enthusiasm for slapstick. “To this day, my favorite comedians are one of the world’s first film comedy duos, the tall and short slapstick Danish team of Pat and Patachon, the models for Laurel and Hardy, and Abbott and Costello.”