Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  “The goyim were after me again. I swung around and hit him in the face as hard as I could with my hockey stick. I must have split his head open. The last thing I saw as I flew by was this circle of kids around somebody lying in the middle of the street. To this day, of course, I wonder if there’s some kind of a zombie wandering around named Rocco. I can’t say I felt good about it. My heart was beating a million miles a minute because I still faced the Bronx River. I’m still heading downhill, picking up speed, and cars are coming in all directions. I’m looking at the cement fence and the river and the falls on one side and the elevated subway on the other. Somehow I managed to make a right turn, zoomed in between two cars, and tumbled down in front of a store.

  “I was afraid I’d killed this guy, but nothing ever came of it. I didn’t go skating after that. It’s not my sport. Either you get killed or you kill someone. In the war between the Jews and the anti-Semites, the anti-Semites win in Zarasai and the Jew wins in the Bronx. I thought about Simeonka’s Shaygetz. I got a blow to the head, and now I gave a blow to the head. So I figure we’re even. Closure, they call it.”

  By January 1935, after a year of living uneasily, the situation at the Pincus household had so deteriorated that Mr. and Mrs. Pincus gave up on their mission of saving Al and threw out both father and son. Al and Morris moved to another furnished room, on Daly Avenue in the East Bronx, where they boarded with the Morrisons. If Al wanted to be completely left alone, he got his wish. There the “room” of “room and board” meant a bedroom so small that it barely held a single bed, never mind a bureau or chair. As for “board,” there was none. “The Morrisons’ son was a happy-go-lucky kid who ran to the refrigerator whenever he wanted something to eat.” The Jaffees weren’t even allowed in the kitchen. Al rarely saw the Morrisons or his father. At about 8 PM, after yet another day of trying to eke out a living by hanging around the post office, Al’s father would return to their tiny room with dinner—two sandwiches—which they would eat sitting on the edge of the bed. Then Morris, exhausted, would fall asleep. After finishing his homework, Al would get into bed and settle in against his father’s back.

  It must have been about 1935 when Al entered Herman Ridder Junior High School, a newly constructed, turreted, Art Deco castle on Boston Road. Herman Ridder, named after an editor and publisher who had been prominent in New York political and civic affairs, was a “rapid advancement” school, open to children who occupied the tenements near Crotona Park. At some point during his year at Herman Ridder, Al and his father moved to within walking distance of the school, from Daly Avenue to Kelly Street. On his walks to and from school, Al made sure his route included a stop in front of an art store that displayed in its window a pencil sketch of a nude woman. “I was probably fourteen by now, and oh, how I stopped and stared at that! I could hardly wait to get through school so I could come back and see it again. I think I was in some kind of puberty stage.” Even though he was more than capable of drawing this, or any other nude woman, Al refrained. “My father was so straightlaced. If he saw me looking at a nude, he’d cuff me. He didn’t even like dirty words. I waited until I went to art school to draw naked ladies.”

  One of Al’s favorite classes at Herman Ridder was shop. There he spent the entire term designing and constructing a book rack, which would hold books in a freestanding V-shaped cradle that could be placed at the back of a desk. “I carved elaborate end pieces with intricate, flowery designs that I then painted. I was very proud of it.” Al anticipated an A+ in woodworking. Then along came a fellow student and thug named Sandowsky. “He looked to be about eighteen—he’d probably been held back for years. This brute was accompanied by two other bullies, the kind who threaten you for your lunch money. He just came over, took my shelf, and declared it his own. He literally stole my work, and he got away with it.” Al, who had long since had his taste for confrontation beaten out of him, retreated. Taking his lumps without protesting was becoming a lifelong habit. “I certainly wasn’t going to go to the teacher. That would have been a death sentence.”

  As had been the case at PS 6, Al continued to amaze students and teachers at Herman Ridder with his superior artistic talents. He had one close competitor, a friendly rival named Herbert. Even though the students had their lunch in the school cafeteria, they sometimes skipped out and went to the local diner, where invariably Herbert and Al would argue about who was the better artist. “Herbert would bring pictures he’d drawn the night before and say things like, ‘I’m going to show you that I’m a better artist than you are.’ I really wasn’t as intense about it as he was. I could draw what I could draw, and I wasn’t thinking in terms of being a better artist than somebody else. But Herbert felt a strong need to show me up.

  “Then came the moment critique—the annual talent show. Anyone who could sing, dance, draw, or recite was invited to participate. I was asked to do something, but I turned down the invitation. I didn’t think drawing was a performance. The auditorium was filled with students. I was surprised to see two people lug a large easel out onto the stage and place a big drawing pad on it. One of the easel bearers announced that Herbert would appear onstage and give a drawing demonstration.

  “Herbert marches out, takes his place in front of the easel, and addresses all assembled. ‘I will now take suggestions from the audience. If somebody will make a request, I will be happy to draw it.’ Somebody shouted out, ‘Draw a tiger,’ to which Herbert responded calmly, ‘I’m not going to draw that. I’ll draw a football player instead.’ With a flourish, Herbert applied pencil to pad and quickly produced a perfect rendering of a football player. He’d probably sketched on the pad beforehand. Everybody applauded wildly. Nobody seemed to mind being duped. I was had again.”

  But Al was not “had” for long. A month or so before he was to graduate from Herman Ridder, one of the school monitors came into class, read out his name, and said that he was to report to the art room. There Al found himself in the company of about fifty kids, Herbert among them. The students were instructed to come up one at a time, take a sheet of drawing paper and a pencil, go back to their seats, and draw something. “Nothing came to me except to draw the village square in Zarasai. As I was finishing my picture, something in front of me caught my eye; it was a drawing being executed by the tiny, skinny little freckled boy seated in front of me. I’d been in the school for at least a year, but I didn’t know this kid. I thought the picture was of an old rabbi, but he told me it was a peasant. How he knew from an old peasant I don’t know; I should have been drawing old peasants. I thought to myself, ‘If everybody in this room is drawing as well as this twerp, then what am I doing here?’ It was the most beautiful portrait I had ever seen.

  “A monitor came by, collected all the drawings, and took them up front to the teacher, who took a few minutes to examine each picture and then announced, ‘Everybody is excused except Abraham Jaffee and Wolf Eisenberg.’ Then the monitor came over and said he was going to take us to the principal’s office.” Those two words, spoken in conjunction, caused Al considerable worry. His recent misdemeanors flashed before his eyes, filling him with dread. “I had obviously done something terrible, but what about this other kid?”

  While Al was sweating it out on the bench outside the principal’s office, Wolf Eisenberg turned to Al and said in a thick Bronx accent, “I tink dere gunna send us to art school.”

  Wolf was right. “The principal gave us the whole spiel. ‘You are two very lucky boys,’” he said. “Mayor La Guardia is creating a brand-new music and art high school. Kids from all over the city are taking the test. You two have qualified to take the final test.” Herbert had not.

  Al and Willie* had each been agonizing about which one of three unappealing career paths to pursue after they graduated from Herman Ridder: vocational, academic, or industrial. Neither of them had imagined a fourth alternative—a high school devoted to music and art.

  In September of 1935 Will Elder and Al, along with about 300 other contestants,
took a test to compete for about 140 places in the Fiorello H. La Guardia High School of Music and Art, a massive building located at Convent Avenue and 135th Street. The multiple-choice test involved many pages. “I clearly remember one question: ‘Here are two lamps; which do you think is the better designed?’ One of the lamps had a very clean Art Deco design. The other was too fussy, too full of curlicues. I chose the simpler design, hoping that I wasn’t going to be judged by some old-fashioned lady with a passion for the ongepotchket.* We must have picked the right answers. Willie and I won. We started school in January 1936.” Three years later, when Al and Willie were seniors, Harvey Kurtzman would win a place in the freshman class, setting the scene for a cartooning collaboration that thirteen years later would be MAD magazine.

  After a life overburdened with impermanence and dismal turning points, Al’s prospects changed dramatically for the better. For the next four years, Music and Art, “the Castle on the Hill,” would offer Al not only stability but also the kind of versatile artistic training that would beckon to and develop his already impressive talents, talents that would eventually drive Al and his friend Willie Elder to MAD. Perhaps just as significant, at least at the time, January 1936 was also the date that the Jaffee family would finally move to a rental apartment of their own, a place they could call home.

  Acting off a tip from one of his fellow postal workers, Al’s father had found a one-bedroom apartment on Marcy Place in the West Bronx, a classier neighborhood than the East Bronx. There, where everyone had his own bed and access to a kitchen, they languished in the lap of tenement luxury. Morris slept in the bedroom—by himself. Harry and Al set up two beds in the living room. When Bernard visited on the weekends, he would sleep with one of his brothers. Even Morris emerged from his depression long enough to engage in some home decorating. He was amused by a cartoon he’d come across of Sir Otto Jaffe, a Jew who had been the mayor of Belfast at the turn of the century. He deemed it suitable for framing. Even though Sir Otto only had one e at the end of his name, he might have been a relative. You never knew. Anyway, he was good for a laugh. “I can still see my father proudly hanging it over our little kitchen table.”

  The rent was thirty-five dollars, probably more than Morris could afford. It is likely that Uncle Harry pitched in. After three years of living apart, the Jaffees were a family again, but Al found the reunion anticlimactic. The family had gone their separate ways for too long. There was no picking up where they left off.

  “We were as much a family as we were ever going to be during the time I was at Music and Art, but we were teenagers. Each of us moved in his own space, off on our own. Dad read the newspaper and listened to the radio.”

  It fell to Al, the eldest, to pick up Bernard at the New York School for the Deaf on Fridays and to return him on Sundays, a job he resented. The trip to the school involved multiple lengthy subway rides that meant he sometimes had to miss class activities and after-school basketball and baseball games. But most of all and much to his chagrin, he resented Bernard’s poignant neediness. “Bernard waited eagerly for me at the school gate, glued to the iron fence. He had been thrust into this strange place, separated from me and Harry, the only people he could talk to. He was a puny kid. He was way behind in school. I’m sure he was bullied.” Al’s anguished and complicated feelings of compassion, resentment, and shame only increased on the subway rides home. Bernard, in his enthusiasm to transmit to Al all that had transpired during the past week, made funny grunting noises and gestured wildly in his crude, homemade sign language, which sometimes involved jumping up and down or hitting himself on the head. Soon the entire subway car was galvanized, staring at Bernard. “I kept shushing him. Here I am in a strange land, trying to fit in. And I was a teenager, ashamed of everything that teenagers are ashamed of—their parents, their grandparents. I was embarrassed to have the whole world see our peculiar problems.”

  Years of living apart had weakened Al and Harry’s intense bond, but in 1936, the year when the family came together, however tentatively, under one roof, Harry abruptly turned against Al. Even when Harry entered Music and Art six months later—he breezed through the exams—Harry would have nothing to do with the older brother from whom he had once been inseparable. “Harry regarded me as a philistine. I wanted to be part of the excitement of society—parties, dates, girlfriends. Harry looked down on me. Harry was into intellectual pursuits. He was listening to classical music while I had the radio on to Make Believe Ballroom. He was reading Kahlil Gibran and Blake. He became a real artsy-fartsy Greenwich Village culture vulture. ‘What do you know?’ he’d say to me. ‘You’re into this low-class popular stuff.’ He put me down.”

  Only when it came to building projects, like making an entire model train, a movie projector, or a miniature iron lung out of flattened Del Monte peach cans, did Al and Harry collaborate as a duo. “Harry and I made use of all kinds of throwaway stuff. For us, coming from Zarasai, making things was easy.

  “We didn’t know how these things worked. We guessed. We found a piece of film on the street and decided to make a projector. It turned out it was a night scene from a silent film. We only got the projector to show movement, but it worked.”

  The model train took months to make. Sitting at the kitchen table on Marcy Place, with a pattern from Popular Mechanics at his elbow, Harry cut out the pieces of tin with scissors. They didn’t have a soldering iron, but improvisation was their forte. Instead, Harry used pliers to hold a heavy nail over the flame on the gas range. Al and Harry mined telephone lines for the copper wire necessary to make the impossibly tiny chains that steered the cars. Al was very proud of their creation. “The degree of authenticity we achieved was astounding. We entered the train into the science contest, where it was stolen. We suspected the teacher.”

  Harry did his work and got good grades, but outside of the classroom he started to behave erratically—a continuation and intensification of the nasty teasing he had directed at Uncle Harry’s daughter, Bernice, and at the little girl at Cohen’s Villa. He challenged people to fights without apparent cause or regard to his potential for success. Invariably, he was beaten and came home crying.

  Domestic life at Marcy Place got off to a shaky start. “We are now in our apartment and it’s the first dinnertime. My father gave us money to go to the market on 170th Street. Somehow we decided we would have salami and eggs because Harry, who had eaten a lot of salami and eggs when he had lived with Uncle Harry and his wife, Pauline, knew how to make them.” They also agreed upon baked beans, a family favorite.

  When they got home, Harry found a frying pan and a pot among their rudimentary kitchen supplies. The directions on the can of beans read: “Place contents in pot.” They paused to consider the meaning of contents. They lingered for a moment in front of the sink, standing on the spot where the linoleum had worn to the wood, and discussed whether or not they should add water to the pot. They decided against it. Then they put the can in the pot, turned up the flame, and went to work on the salami omelet. The beans exploded, sending up a gooey gusher that hit the ceiling, hung there briefly, and then yielded to the laws of gravity, plopping down in disgusting clots.

  The great bean explosion and other domestic disasters that followed made Morris Jaffee, hardly a cutting-edge feminist, wish he’d had at least one daughter. “I was always amused by my father’s rants. He’d say, ‘Why couldn’t one of you have been a girl so we’d have somebody to keep this place in order and cook for us?’ At first I’d commiserate with my father. To have one girl to be the mommy like in Peter Pan and see to it that everybody had their lunches and stuff was a very appealing idea to me at the time. It wasn’t until I got a little older that I finally said, ‘You know, Pop, if you had a daughter and we had a sister, I don’t think she’d want to take over this hellish job of scullery maid any more than I do.’”

  It was Aunt Frieda, Mildred Jaffee’s sister, who came to the all-male household’s culinary rescue with her personalized catering serv
ice. Every Friday she’d cook up a storm, both for her own family, her husband, Charlie, and their two daughters, Nancy and Sonie, and for the Jaffee gang as well—a huge pot of stew, a whole chicken, chicken livers, chicken soup, and gefilte fish—enough to last well into the week.

  The problem was how to transport this twenty-five-pound load of takeout from Aunt Frieda’s place on the Grand Concourse to the Jaffees’ on Marcy Place, a hernia-inducing shlep of about six blocks and three flights of stairs. The answer was a cardboard satchel from Woolworth’s. The next problem was who would perform the onerous task. Al and Harry would play rock, paper, scissors to determine who would be the unlucky shlepper. Then they realized that they could tie the suitcase to the handlebars of Bernard’s scooter. It didn’t take but one round trip for Al to realize that “cardboard suitcases, chicken soup, and gravy don’t go together too well. As we passed by the alleys between tenements, dripping gravy and chicken soup, we’d be pursued by cats and dogs with their tongues hanging out. We were never attacked. They just followed us, stopping and licking their way to Marcy Place.” This became a four-year ritual for man and beast, except for the summers when Aunt Frieda and her family went to the Rockaways, at which time the Jaffees reverted to beans—out of the can—and salami omelets.

  As far as Al was concerned, the problem with the School of Music and Art was that it was a school. “The academics were the only fly in the ointment. When you’re a kid, what you’re looking for is the ice cream, not the spinach.” Al was force-fed plenty of spinach. In retrospect, though, he acknowledges that it was good for him. “Music and Art saved my life.”

  In addition to the usual high school curriculum, Music and Art required its students to be fluent in two languages besides English. English had been an interrupted language for Al, so he struggled with rules of grammar in that class. French came pretty easily—he had his parents’ flair for foreign languages—and because of Yiddish, he was a whiz in German. But he flunked algebra. When he took a make-up class with a teacher who spoke Al’s intellectual language—logic—he got the second-highest grade in the class. “Logic appeals to me. I thrived on algebra; it’s pure logic. It’s one step at a time. It’s just common sense.” Nevertheless, not looking forward to trigonometry, calculus, and Pythagorean theorems, Al told the teacher that he was going to drop math.