The Ryer Avenue Story: A Novel

by Dorothy Uhnak

  What he wanted was for his uncle to stop speaking, to stop remembering. Because he knew what was about to be told was something he would never be able to forget, something that would now become part of his own history.

  Your father was a quiet boy, but strong and tough. He was considered a good influence on me, because I was the kid always making jokes, getting whacked, breaking the rules, the troublemaker, and it was your father who would talk to me about it.

  He was a smart boy; he thought about things he didn’t tell anyone. He saw things, he understood things. There was something about the hiding place he didn’t like. He went along, when the older boys led us, but before we got to the place in the woods, your father grabbed me by the arm, took hold of my little sister’s hand. Your mother was a small girl, eight years old, crying. In the night, all the children were crying. They wanted their mothers. They didn’t want to be in the woods hiding, even though we had practiced for “when the time comes.”

  And the time was here and the children hid in the place that had been prepared, but your father had seen something a day or two before. He had seen one of his father’s customers, a peasant he traded with, a man he thought was a friend to the Jews, if any of them can be. He had seen the man in the woods, near the hideout, looking around, checking things. Your father came back and told the grownups, but they shrugged it off. What else could they do? Where else could they send the children?

  Your father had found another place to hide. There was a huge oak tree, maybe hundreds of years old, who knows such things, at the edge of our section of the ghetto. For years, children had played in the tree. We were all good at climbing, at wriggling around, stretching out. There was hardly a kid who hadn’t, when he was old enough, hid out in the heavy branches when he was going to get a licking, when he wanted to duck a job. Your father took my arm, told me to grab my sister. He didn’t feel the blind in the woods was safe. He had a bad feeling, so we went with him. Your father and I climbed the tree, pulling and dragging your mother, this little girl, to a safe place. Your father tied a piece of rope around her body so she wouldn’t fall, and then made her take off her coat and he tied it over her head.

  He didn’t want her to see whatever it was that was going to happen. He told her to bite down hard on her hand, her arm, her lips, anything, but not to make a sound. No matter what she heard.

  It was a game we’d never played before, and we knew it was not a game.

  So we watched, your father and I, we saw. They came like wild beasts, drunk and loud and without humanity, they came and destroyed and … Ben, you have no idea what a man is capable of. They were beasts, but they were men. It was as though they had waited a whole lifetime to do this terrible thing we had all heard about from the time our parents could tell us, what they knew, their parents knew. No one could believe, not really, you can’t know, not really, God forbid you see. And we watched as they murdered and raped. They did terrible things. I cannot tell you in words, I do not want to leave you with the pictures I carry in my head, I cannot describe the sounds, the screams, the terror.

  They killed everyone. No one was left alive who did not die within hours. And then they took whatever they wanted. There was nothing of value, but they took, and they burned the Holy Torah, and they burned the shacks we lived in, where we studied, where we worked, where we lived.

  And then, when it was all over, your father saw the peasant, the man he had seen in the woods. He was speaking to one of the soldiers and the soldiers gave him a bag of sugar he had just looted and then they went into the woods and found the children.

  The children were murdered, but first they were raped. Boys as well as girls. These are terrible things, things no one should ever hear or think about, but they happened and I must tell you.

  We stayed up in the tree. When morning came, we could not believe the sun could shine, that it could be a spring day with a blue sky, that birds were singing. It wasn’t possible that the world could go on, that God could permit such a day to be just like any other. At first we thought Dora, your mother, was dead, she was so silent. We took the coat off her head and … her face was so strange, a stranger’s face, a frozen face, her eyes, wide open, looked blind. And there were bite marks all over her arms, bloody, little teeth-size cuts, and blood ran from her mouth and …

  Your father went down first. He checked around, then he motioned for us to stay where we were. He went into the woods and he came back fast. We never asked and he never said, but we knew. We knew.

  For days we hid out in the woods. We came back to our homes; we didn’t look at the dead, we pretended they were invisible. We found some small amounts of food, some water, some clothing that hadn’t been ripped or burned. We made packs for our backs and a whole week passed before we were ready.

  Your father and I knew there were relatives, family, in Germany, in Berlin. That if we could get there somehow, there would be family to take care of us, to help us. The weather was good, thank God, it wasn’t winter, but your father said we had to wait a few days. He was the leader, I don’t know how that came about. There was something different about him. He said a thing, and it became the law for the three of us. So we waited.

  Before daylight, Sunday morning, he said, we will begin our journey. But first, on Saturday night, he and I had a job to do.

  They drank themselves into a rage on Saturday nights, those bastards, and they had no more Jews to rape and kill, so they went for the local peasant girls, only they gave them trinkets or bits of food, pieces of ham to the farmers for their daughters. They had music, singing, wild dancing, all night, all night, until nearly morning. All of them drunk, falling down, lying inside their barracks, on the floor, on the cots, the girls with them.

  We, your father and I, had our plan. We had kerosene we had found in our village. Some things the soldiers overlooked, some things they just didn’t get around to taking, so we took the kerosene and very late at night, almost morning—all you could hear was snoring and moaning, and night birds and animals who made low noises—we crept, your father and I, and we spilled the kerosene completely around the main barracks. Then we lit the circle into a fire that burned everything, all of them. By the time they came to, by the time they realized what was happening, it was too late for them.

  The last thing we did was to take the empty kerosene containers and put them into the hands of two peasants, a farmer and his friend who had come to celebrate, to make music for the cossacks, lying dead drunk outside the barracks. By the time the soldiers who were supposed to be on guard woke up, it was all over. All they could do was turn on the peasants with the kerosene cans.

  Your father wouldn’t let us watch. It was time for us to leave. We left.

  “So we made our way across the world, kinder. We found people who helped us, Jews who helped us. In Germany there were organizations of Jews who helped people from the east to get to America. We had the names of some distant cousins, aunts, uncles. Always there was a name. We walked, three children, we walked across the face of the world and came here and lived with relatives and we worked and your mother went to school. And we never talked about it.”

  His uncle stopped speaking finally, stood up, stretched, rotated his head, up, down, from side to side, as though trying to loosen a cramp. He took a deep breath and faced the boy.

  “So? We were bar mitzvahed, your father and I, and so officially, we are what we are, what you are and your mother and sister and cousins, all of us, all over the world, Jews. For better or worse. So, you want to duck out of it? You’re not tough enough to go along with it here, in this place, in this country?”

  At the precise moment that Ben Herskel threw himself at his uncle, Nathan Goldstein opened his arms and caught the boy. It was hard to tell who was sobbing, who was grasping, who was shaking, both bodies moved together.

  Finally the uncle disengaged, leaned down, kissed the boy on the forehead.

  “So, you don’t talk to your father about this, yes?”


  “But I want him to know that I …”

  “That you know he killed thirty soldiers and caused the death of two stupid peasants? He knows I was going to tell you this. But it is something you must not speak of with him or anyone. Remember, you promised.”

  “But why, Uncle? What he did was great. It was—”

  His uncle stiffened. “What he did was part of the madness. Slaughter and burning and killing is not what we were put on earth to do. It is something that happened and that was done. So it is over, now you know about it. You make up your own mind now about bar mitzvah. Your father said it would be up to you.”

  After his bar mitzvah, Ben did not attend any synagogue. He was a Jew, and that was that.

  He and his pals never discussed religion. They were Catholics, and, whatever their strange customs, beliefs, rituals, or obligations, it was none of his business. Nor was he even a little curious. He was comfortable in the company of the goyim; they accepted him for the large, muscular boy he was, with good, quick coordination, always a good competitor and a good winner, not too familiar with losing.

  One of the advantages he enjoyed, as a Jewish kid, was that he could get all the Jewish holidays off from school and also shared in the traditional Christian school vacations for Christmas and Easter.

  He had seen the O’Briens’ Christmas tree: a ceiling-touching job, filled with strings of great colored lights in the shapes of elves and snowmen and Santa Clauses, stars and a few little cottages: He wasn’t sure it made sense to chop down a tree and stick it in the middle of your living room, but the pine tree smelled good and looked good. He barely glanced at the Nativity scene displayed on a white cloth beneath the tree. That was them, not him.

  Ben was automatically included in the street games and the schoolyard games and he felt excited—and maybe just a very tiny bit afraid—of the adventure they had planned for this night, three days after Christmas.

  It wasn’t just the thrilling ride down twisting, darkened Snake Hill he looked forward to. It was also the possibility of running into real danger. An encounter with the Webster Avenue guys. They were different from the Ryer Avenue kids. Ben’s pals were roughhousers. They would tussle and box and shove and push, but no one ever hurt anybody, at least not intentionally. The Webster Avenue guys were thugs. If they mixed it up with someone, the aim was to hurt, really hurt—to bruise, maim, cut, disable.

  Ben spotted the O’Briens at the top of the 180th Street hill, but they didn’t see him. They were pelting each other with handfuls of soft snow, clowning around. He threw himself belly-down on his sled and crashed into them, knocking them both down. They scuffled good-naturedly, everyone rolling around, getting snow down their backs, under their hats, jammed into laughing mouths.

  Finally, red-faced, breathless, they called a truce and watched the smaller kids, attended by panting parents slipping down the big hill and hauling sleds back up the icy incline.

  “How come you came so late?” Charley asked. “We’ve been here almost an hour.”

  Ben shook the snow out of his hat, brushed at his heavy woolen jacket. “I hadda go to the Feldmans’. My mother made a cake for them.”

  “For the Feldmans? They celebrate Christmas? Or is it your Jewish holiday … Chan-oo-kah … or something?”

  Ben feinted a punch at Charley. “No, dopey. They’re sitting shiva. For the old grandfather. He died yesterday.”

  Gene remembered the old man, a thin, pleasant, lean guy who liked to tousle his head when he was a little kid. “Ai, ai, such a beautiful little one.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Gene said, “that he died.”

  “Yeah, yesterday. They buried him this morning.”

  Charley looked horrified. “He died yesterday and they buried him this morning? Jeez. That’s … that’s pretty heartless. What was the big rush?”

  Ben shrugged. Gene said quietly, “No, Charley, it’s not. That’s the Jewish custom. They don’t believe in embalming dead people, so they bury them right away. Within twenty-four hours, right, Ben?”

  “What the hell they teaching you at the seminary, Gene? How come you know all that?”

  “I’m interested in religious customs, Ben, that’s all.”

  Charley said, “Hey, remember old man Dugan, when he died and they laid him out in the living room?”

  Old man Dugan, a grouchy, mean-mouthed, cranky presence in the lives of the Dugan family, had left a sum of money and a note detailing how it should be spent at his wake—in the family living room, with all his friends invited over to toast him on his departure. It had turned into something of a brawl. The corpse had come close to toppling when one of his more enthusiastic old pals demanded that old man Dugan join in a round of drinking to his own demise. It had gotten pretty rowdy.

  “Yeah, but at least people get a chance to get a last look at ya,” Charley said. “I mean, remember when Dell’s old man, the fireman, got killed at the warehouse fire? Jeez, they fixed him up at the undertaker’s real nice. He looked just like he was sleeping. They did a really nice job on him, remember, Gene?”

  “Charley, he looked like a painted doll. For three days his widow kept screaming at him to get up, that’s how good he looked.”

  “I don’t think I’d want people looking at me, laid out and with makeup on and stuff,” Ben said. “Dead is dead. The Jews put you in a plain pine box, say a prayer over you, and you’re on your way. Dust to dust. Hell, dead is dead, it’s all the same.”

  Charley was puzzled. “And that’s it? No wake, no nothing?”

  “No, not exactly ‘that’s it,’ Charley. The family sits shiva for seven days and family and friends come and bring food and pay their respects. Without the corpse in the next room, for Pete’s sake.”

  “For seven days? Wow.”

  Patiently, Ben explained the process. “The family sit on wooden crates. And don’t wear shoes, just slippers. And they cover all the mirrors, so the ghost of the dead person doesn’t come back for a look at himself or something. And everybody brings them food and stuff, ’cause they’re not allowed to cook. The real old-timers, the Orthodox, they tear their clothes. Just a small rip, so it can be fixed. To show how bad they feel.”

  “Hey, Benny, you know what the Irish say to the family at a wake? They say, ‘Sorry for your troubles.’ You know why they say that?” Charley didn’t wait for an answer. With a broad grin he said, “Because nobody knows whether you hated or loved the bastard who died, but whichever, the whole wake and funeral and stuff is sure a lot of trouble!”

  Charley roared with laughter while his brother jammed a handful of snow down his back. “Where do you pick up this folk wisdom, Charley-dear? I never heard any of that.”

  “Hey, they don’t teach you everything at the seminary. Pop told me that a long time ago.” He started to brush at his clothes and gloves. “So what do Jews do in the summertime? Ya know, when it’s real hot and somebody dies?”

  “Whatta ya mean, whatta they do in the summertime? The same thing. It’s tradition, Charley, not seasonal.”

  Charley hunched his shoulders and shuddered. He tried shaking for a while, then shook his head. It was fairly easy to do on the cold, windy hill, but how long could you do it in an apartment, where the heat’s on and you’re sitting on a wooden box, or in the summer when it gets hot and humid?

  “Jeez,” he said, “the people must get awful tired.”

  Ben and Gene exchanged grins. “You wanna tell him, Gene, or should I? Or do you know?”

  Gene nodded. He knew. “Charley, the mourners don’t ‘sit and shiver.’ They sit shiva. It’s a ceremony to honor the dead. Charley, you dope, how could you think people could sit and shiver?”

  Charley clowned around, shaking and jumping. “Well, I could, especially on a night like this. You think Danny’s down by Snake Hill yet? We gonna go and see?”

  They gathered their sleds, adjusted their collars and hats, pulled their gloves tighter, jostled against each other.

  “
Benny, when you die, I want you to know, I’m gonna stand around and shiver for ya, ’cause I’m a real pal.”

  Charley went into a crazy dance, rolling his eyes, shuddering. Ben reached out, grabbed Charley by the collar, and pulled him close.

  “Hey, buddy. Forget it. I am never gonna die!”

  They slammed into each other, cut each other off, knocked themselves off their sleds onto the icy hill, rolled and yelled and punched, bursting with energy and life and health.

  They passed the ill-lit, dank saloon on the corner and walked along the darkened street lined with machine shops and garages. It was a light-industry, nonresidential sweep of hill, with hard-packed ice in the road. The boys put together a small block-walled barrier, an improvised fort, as they discussed who would check out the hill for possible problems.

  They were all there, his pals, Charley and Gene O’Brien, Danny D’Angelo and even the jerk who had followed them uninvited, Willie Paycek, ready for whatever they could come upon. When Ben spotted Megan Magee, who thought she was hidden from sight behind some parked cars, he told her cousin Charley that he should chase the kid home. A girl, for God’s sake, c’mon. Something happens, we got enough to worry about without worrying about little-girl Megan.

  Charley spoke to her, returned to the boys, shrugged.

  “She won’t go. Danny, you go talk to her!”

  The boys began to jeer and laugh and make rude noises. Everyone knew Megan Magee would follow Dante D’Angelo anywhere in the world.

  Danny shook his head. “The kid’s all right. Any trouble, I’ll make sure she gets the hell outta here.”

  They stood around, shifting snowballs from gloved hand to gloved hand, sleds at the ready. Waiting for Danny as always, to take charge.