Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  Their only Jaffee relatives in Kaunas were two brothers, Naftolka and Fishke Simetz, who were probably related to the Gordons. Like the relatives in Zarasai, they moved in to fill the emotional and nutritional void and inadvertently provided Al with yet another father substitute. “The older brother, Naftolka, was a big, powerful, virile guy. His brother was very effeminate. Ironically, Fishke was the only one who survived and got to this country. I should go find him, but I hate to retrace those terrible years.

  “Once a week, Harry and I would visit the Simetzes for a meal of sprat sandwiches and a glass of milk. Harry loved the sardine-like sandwiches so much that even back in America, when he was fifty years old, he kept trying to replicate that meal, but he could never find the Russian soldier’s bread (soldatskee khleb) he enjoyed in Lithuania. The sandwiches must have given Harry such a great lift. He considered them a delicacy. I ate because I was hungry.”

  Mildred continued to be far more involved in her religious life than she was in the lives of her children. “Some of the time we were locked in. We were on the third floor and there weren’t any fire escapes, so we just did whatever we could. She left us some food—butter mashed with cheese—and a pail for our bathroom needs. Once we were locked in for two days, but a bag full of defective wooden yo-yos—maybe my mother got them somewhere—kept us amused. We built buses and cars. We used whatever we had—cardboard, wood, pieces of string. From these basic materials, we were able to rig the front wheels with string so that we could steer the vehicles from behind by pushing them with our thumbs. My mother wasn’t home, so we moved all the furniture around and set the whole apartment up as a racecourse. Making things was every bit as important as drawing.

  “I don’t remember thinking I had a special talent, but Harry amazed me. Harry was the brilliant inventor and engineer. In Kaunas, Harry built a remarkable toy fire engine that actually squirted water. He spent weeks making little ladders out of match-sticks. He could have built the Taj Mahal out of matchsticks. I would have stopped after the fifth matchstick. My talent is creative, more in the humorous, fantasy realm. That’s my biggest problem. If I’m going to satirize something, it has to have some semblance of accuracy, so I have to do research. It slows me down and I hate it.”

  January 21, 1933, marked a turning point in Al’s life, although he didn’t know it at the time. It was a bright sunny day in Slobodka. “I went outdoors. There was no one on the street. It wasn’t a Jewish holiday, which could have accounted for why the streets were deserted. I tiptoed around. It occurred to me to go to the nearby grocery store, where Harry and I bought candy whenever we had a couple of centimes. I walked inside. The store was filled with people. Many of them were crying. I asked the proprietor what was happening. She told me that Hitler had taken over Germany. I didn’t know what Hitler was. I wasn’t very concerned about it.”

  On one of the brothers’ weekly visits to the Simetzes, a smiling Naftolka met them at the door. With a grand gesture he waved us in, saying “Come in, come in, I’ve got a big surprise for you today.”

  The surprise was Morris Jaffee. “After four years, there was my father. He was smoking a Lucky Strike. He reached his arms out. I moved reluctantly toward him. I knew who he was, but I wasn’t all that comfortable about being embraced. I remember having very funny feelings. All these American things were coming at me: my father, Lucky Strikes, the way he was dressed. ‘Go tell your mother that I’m here and I’m going to take everyone back to America,’ he said.

  “I didn’t think that this was going to be a particularly good turning point in my life either. What did begin to seem okay was that if I went to America, I could get out of this ridiculous yeshiva; I wouldn’t have to dress like a bellhop and dovan.”

  Morris could not have afforded passage for himself, his wife, and his children on his meager earnings as a part-time letter carrier. Al learned later that Morris Jaffee had appealed to his relatively wealthy brother, Harry, for money to make this second rescue mission to Lithuania. Harry, in turn, appealed to Morris’s other siblings and relatives to pitch in, and they did.

  Al’s parents had not seen each other in four years. Nevertheless, Mildred Jaffee refused to meet face-to-face with her husband. Instead Al was tapped to act as envoy between the two, carrying back and forth across the bridge Morris’s pleadings to come to America and Mildred’s refusals to leave Kaunas. “Ultimately an agreement was reached. My mother said she couldn’t come with us, but it would be all right with her if our father took me, Harry, and Bernard, but not her favorite, David. She said she needed a little more time—six months—to put her affairs in order and then she’d join us.

  “I asked my mother if she would come to the train station the next day to say good-bye to us, and she answered, ‘Yes, my darlings.’ We loved it when she called us ‘darlings’ and ‘sweethearts.’ I was tremendously anxious about what my mother was going to do. Would she come to the station, or wouldn’t she? I thought I had become inured to the fact that what she said and what she did were seldom the same, but I got a stomachache anyway.

  “So the next morning we’re at the Kaunas railroad station. We wait on the platform. No Mother. Ultimately the conductor tells us that the train is about to leave and we must get on board; reluctantly we do. So now you’ve got one of those tearjerker scenes. Three little kids—Bernard is nine, Harry is ten, and I’m twelve—and our faces are pressed against the train window and our eyes are glued to the gate, which is right in front of us. Slowly a guy comes over and starts to close the iron gates that shut off access to the platform. No sign of our mother. When the gate is closed and the chain is locked, she shows up. She’s got both hands on the bars, shaking them violently, trying to break them open. She really didn’t recognize the formality of schedules. I think maybe departure and arrival times seem flexible when you grew up in the last century in small villages. You talk to somebody and ask him to open or close the gate. That would explain it. So there she is, trying to break the gate down. The train starts to pull out, and that was the end of that. The scene is etched in my mind forever. That was the last time I ever saw my mother.”

  The train took Al, his father, Harry, and Bernard to Memel, where they boarded a ferry that would take them across the notoriously rough Baltic Sea to Göteborg, Sweden. Morris had purposely chosen to depart from Sweden rather than sail from Germany. Before the ferry embarked, the ever-curious Al toured the ship and behind a glass wall saw an oval table heaped with delicacies—meats, fish, pastries, and cakes—a spread the likes of which this dirt-poor boy had never seen or imagined. Perhaps he had been wrong. Perhaps this bounty—so soon to be his—was a promising sign that going back to America was a good idea.

  The passengers were not allowed to pass through the glass enclosure until the ferry was under way. Al waited impatiently to gain entry to this extravaganza of a feast, but the moment the doors were opened the ferry started bucking and pitching, and Al spent the rest of the journey hanging over the railing. “I was so seasick, I never got to eat. I dreamed about that smorgasbord for many days afterward.” On May 16, 1933, a depleted Al, his father, Harry, and Bernard boarded the Gripsholm, a Swedish boat sailing from Göteborg, bound for the Port of New York.

  It was only the day before, when the brothers met their father at the Kaunas railroad station, that Morris Jaffee learned that Bernard was deaf and mute, something that Mildred had never mentioned in her letters.

  “My father was traumatized by the news. As soon as we got settled on the Gripsholm, he took Bernard down to the engine room, thinking that maybe the terrible noises made by the spinning propellers, the pumps, and the generators would penetrate and somehow miraculously bring his hearing back. As it turned out, Bernard didn’t hear a thing and was having a wonderful time examining the machinery. It was my father who was going deaf.”

  Although Al was only twelve, he was sought out by the purser as the only other passenger on the ship who might be able to communicate with a Lithuanian woman who was c
rying hysterically and incomprehensibly in the captain’s quarters. “She was central casting’s version of a Lithuanian peasant woman. She had braided, flaxen hair and wore typical peasant clothes. I managed to elicit from her the fact that she had suddenly realized that she would arrive in the big city of New York and not know how to get to Chicago, where she was to meet her husband, who had left Lithuania some years before and had finally saved enough money to send for her.” She told Al that he took care of a big building. “I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but all too soon I would be living in a tenement myself and would understand that Lithuanians, Poles, and Czechs often took janitorial jobs because they got a free apartment and didn’t have to speak English.”

  Al translated her fears to the captain, who assured her that she would be met at the dock by someone who would see to it that she got on a train to Chicago. The young woman was so grateful to Al for his help that she invited him to her cabin to show him the present she was bringing to her husband—a beautiful, lovingly handcrafted sickle. “My notion of humor and satire and the ridiculousness of life in general must have started at an early age. A sickle was a great present in the hinterlands of Lithuania, but what was a janitor in Chicago going to do with it? In my crazy head, I saw the scenario in terms of a cartoon sequence. She hands him the sickle, her eyes bright with anticipation. I picture him looking at it, his eyes rolling.”

  Strange as it may seem, during their ten-day journey on the Gripsholm, Al never asked his father where they were going to live once they landed in New York. He didn’t even wonder to himself. “What was the point of asking, ‘Where in America are you taking us?’” Wherever his mother had taken him, he had gone. Wherever his father was taking him, he would go there too. “I had gotten to the point in my life where I just let things happen. I kind of shut off.”

  4

  SLEEP FASTER, WE NEED THE PILLOWS

  “I am a reverse immigrant.”

  AL’S PREMONITION THAT coming back to America might not be “a particularly good turning point” was immediately realized. He learned that for the first time in his life he would be separated from his brothers, and they from one another. This second rescue had depleted his father financially and psychologically. Instead of a family life, Al would embark on a lonely Bronx odyssey that would take him to at least eight different households—none of them his own—over a period of three years. (Frequent moves were common during the Depression years, motivated by the inducement of two months’ free rent, a bonus Al’s father couldn’t afford to turn down.) Some of the places Al would remember by their addresses only: Kelly Street, Saint Paul’s Place, Daly Avenue. Other households in which he boarded were made memorable by the people he met and the challenges he encountered as he continued to be moved about by forces over which he had no control, living sometimes with relatives, sometimes with strangers.

  Uncle Harry met Morris and the three boys at the Port of New York and drove them to the tenement apartment of his and Morris’s sister, Anna, in the Bronx. Uncle Harry, who had raised the money to help Morris rescue his family from Kaunas, now took on the job of presiding over their well-being in New York. Harry was the only relative who had the wherewithal to care for the impoverished Jaf-fee clan—a good job with the IRS, a car, and a kind heart. While Harry drove through New York with his human burden, Al took the measure of the city.

  “What has our father brought us into? This place called New York is a slum. It’s one hundred times worse than Lithuania,” he thought as he looked out the car window at the dreary apartments and the cars, streetcars, and pushcarts competing for space with screaming kids, hustlers, and beggars. “There was noise and confusion everywhere. It was just so overwhelming I went into some kind of shock.” That initial jolt was followed by the all-too-familiar experience of the immigrant sleepover—too many people, not enough beds—a situation that inspired the Yiddish saying “Sleep faster, we need the pillows.”

  The Jaffee boys arrived with not much more than their Eastern European clothes on their backs. “We were like hobos with our few possessions tied up in a cloth bindle.”* They hung their coats on wooden pegs and endured the hugs and kisses of aunts with bad breath and prickly chin hairs. When it was bedtime, Al and Harry shared what Aunt Anna called the “lunge.” They slept with their heads on the seat of the lounge and their torsos and legs resting on two kitchen chairs pulled up for that purpose. Harry cried himself to sleep. Al fought to keep himself calm, even though he was terrified. “I never knew what was coming next, and even if I did, there was nothing I could do about it.” He never considered the possibility that what was coming next might be good.

  In the morning the relatives gathered to participate in a cruel triage: What are we going to do with the kinder?† It was a given that nobody wanted or could afford to take all three kids; the Depression had affected them all. For the first time in their lives, the Jaffee boys would be split up. Harry responded with a tantrum. What would he do without Al? Bernard cried and frantically signed his grief to a father who didn’t yet understand the crude sign language the Jaffee boys had invented to communicate among themselves in Zarasai. Al was stoic, passive. “I learned not to question anything.” The fact that he had lived with his brothers his whole life and now was about to be separated from them didn’t enter into his conscious thoughts. “I was completely focused on surviving these new surroundings.

  “Had I become totally unfeeling? I know that’s not true. I don’t think my feelings were distorted—they were rearranged a bit, that’s for sure—but for me to get excited and agitated about being separated from Harry or Bernard would have led to an argument, and I had learned somewhere way back that carrying on got you nowhere or it got you punished. I don’t remember complaining, ‘Why can’t you keep us all together? Why do you have to separate us?’ I had learned to submit.”

  Harry would live in relative luxury with Uncle Harry and Aunt Pauline in Brooklyn, where he began a long career of aggressive behavior, upsetting the household by persistently picking on his cousin Bernice. Bernard would go to the New York School for the Deaf in Manhattan, where his immigrant status gave him one more handicap. To add to his misery, he had no home to go to when the other children went home for the weekends. Al, it was decided, would be sent to South Fallsburg in Sullivan County to live with the Cohen brothers. He’d overheard his fate while huddled with his father in a phone booth outside Aunt Anna’s apartment. “We’ll keep the kid for the summer, Morris, but in the fall he goes back to you.”

  If there had been television sitcoms in 1933, the Cohen brothers’ domestic arrangement would have qualified for prime time. The brothers, Joseph and Morris, had married two Jaffee sisters, Sarah and Dora. Between them they had three children, Florence, Bernie, and Seymour. The brothers were partners in Cohen Brothers Printing Company, which produced brochures promoting Borscht Belt hotels. Both families lived over the printing shop in mirror-image railroad flats, joined by a connecting door. Even though their apartments were identical, they were always grousing about who had the better place. From May through August, Al would move from one apartment to the other, living alternate months with alternate Cohens, sleeping in their alternate sun-porches. “In either case, someone was stuck with me.”

  Not much of the school year remained when Al arrived in South Fallsburg, and truancy was no longer an option. “I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. I was a big, husky twelve-year-old. The teachers put me in the third grade. I couldn’t fit into the seats. The first day we’re all shlepped outside, where there’s a big pole in the ground. Each one of us was given a ribbon to hold. We were going to dance around something called the Maypole. I felt like eight feet tall, running around this pole with these little farts, singing a song about two lips, ‘Tiptoe through the Tulips.’ I’m prancing around this thing thinking, ‘How can you tiptoe through somebody’s lips?’ I thought they were crazy. I wished I was back in Europe with sane people.” With the exception of the miserable months he
had spent in Far Rockaway, Al had lived the last six years of his childhood in Lithuania. Be it ever so awful, Lithuania was home.

  Culture shock caused Al to inadvertently insult his aunt Dora, who set out to please this poor, deprived little shtetl boy by saving her pennies and serving him a piece of cantaloupe, a rare and expensive treat in those Depression days. Al, who had never seen a cantaloupe, refused to eat it. Stunned and hurt, Aunt Dora said, “And what do you expect me to do with it?” Al responded by adding insult to injury. “Give it to the beggars,” he said, drawing upon his experiences in Zarasai, where there were beggars on every corner eager to snap up his mother’s table scraps or potato peelings. “I was on Dora’s shit list from then on.”

  Repatriation did not come easily. It didn’t help that Al had returned to his native land a reverse immigrant, wearing cobbled boots and speaking English with a Yiddish accent. “The kids called me ‘greenhorn.’” As always, when confronted with a strange new scene, Al literally drew himself into the picture and began to make himself at home. He ingratiated himself with the other kids by drawing popular cartoon characters—this time in chalk on sidewalks. “I was very good at Popeye. I also found out that I could get laughs by making witty observations, or by drawing cartoons and having the characters say something funny. At first I used cartooning as a crutch, but soon it took on a life of its own.”