Slow to Grow
Page 5
Chapter 5
Kulligan was not, is not, and will never be an inherently Jewish name. In fact it isn=t Jewish at all. Lloyd=s Zayde, the Yiddish term for grandfather, Lionel Kullizczwoksi was an immigrant from Russia who traversed to Ellis Island in 1927 at 21 years of age. For many years, Lloyd was under the mistaken impression that Zayde Lionel had made it to the United States by donkey.
He heard his father once reference a donkey ride and coming to America and somehow it had meshed into his head as fact. He never took the time to think about the logistical implications involved in riding a donkey across the Atlantic, though.
Lloyd was mesmerized by the thoughts of this heroic character crossing thousands of miles of land by donkey to grasp the promised fruits of freedom in these great United States of America.
The truth was not quite on par with the life affirming heroics of someone like the Great Lawrence of Arabia. In fact the truth was kind of off-putting.
Lionel was a con artist who traversed the wicked and bitter lands of Soviet Russia by horse to sell veal to peasants, where the meat was considered a delicacy. He would ride village to village with his cadre of horses who supposedly were stocked with the aforementioned beef. As he would leave the town no one would notice that he was one mule lighter than when he had entered.
One day as he was exiting the hinterlands of Kasaksya, a small town in a province of Siberia, a little child with his father, asked why he didn=t have the same amount of horsies that he had whence he came, and Lionel laughed and said he must be mistaken. The father then commented about the toughness of the meat, and suddenly the light bulb went off in his head. Before the man could stop him, Zayde hopped on his last remaining donkey, Yuri, and headed for the border.
Soon he found himself at the Sea of Okhosk, where he hid in a barrel full of dead mackerel on a Soviet fishing vessel headed to Japan. Once arriving in Tokyo, the irony of mule meat being considered a delicacy was not lost on him.
Three weeks later he boarded a boat headed for New York. The boat took an arduous route across the Pacific, up through the Arctic, and finally to Hudson Bay.
At Ellis Island, it was customary for all immigrants to be routinely assigned new names, pretty much at the whim of the agents working there. When Lionel proudly stated his name, Lionelovich Theodor Kullizczwoksi (pronounced Kullizczwoksi), the agent rolled his eyes and asked him what country he was from. ASoviet Union@, Lionel fiercely barked in his broken English. AYour name is now Kulliano@ replied the agent.
This sent Lionel into spastic fits of rage under the notion that Kulliano was a deeply Italian name. He raged about the stink of the Italians and that he would rather be named after a Slavic Pig than a dago wap. He had never met an Italian in his life, but knew enough about Mussolini to hate them all. While illiterate, he was very knowledgeable about the doings in the world. Everything he knew he learned from a one eyed Serbian prostitute named Natasha, whom he frequented, and paid handsomely to read the Moscow papers to him in a Polish accent. Many times she would call him an impotent bastard, and to his ears it sounded like a compliment. In lieu of money he would stock her iceblocks with fresh meat, for which she was quite appreciative. Sometimes he would break down and pay her.
It wasn=t until many months after he had left did Natasha realize he had been paying her with counterfeit bolshevik fennels. She never did connect him to the rash of mule robberies in the village.
The station agent, somehow swayed by the man=s rants and ravings renamed him Kulligan. Lionel once again became incensed and started railing and ranting about Irish drunks, and calling them potato vagabonds, and that their women were uglier than Stalin. He had never met an Irishmen either but through Natasha he knew they were all drunken potato eaters. At this point the agent had enough and had Lionelovich Theodor Kullizczwoksi Kulliano Kulligan escorted to the stockades where, ironically, he shared a small room with a drunken Italian and a fascist Irishman.
In Russia, Lionel had heard tales about how many of the Russians previously had immigrated to the Midwestern United States. The weather was similar and he thought it would be good to go to a place with others like oneself. But that was not the main draw for him. He fashioned himself as a small time gangster and was ready for the big time. That meant Chicago. Gangsters. Al Capone, boom boom boom.
He soon found his way there in a concerted but ill conceived effort to become a henchman for Capone. He didn=t know what a henchman was or what they did, but Natasha the one-eyed hooker regaled him with stories from the Gelehdzhik Herald and Times about the proclivities of the Capone gang. He was sure once the local hoodlums and scalawags heard about his counterfeit donkey meat scam the doors would lead straight to Capone headquarters.
He took to asking every Italian looking man in the Chicago area for the gangster=s whereabouts and found himself on the short end of many punches. Nothing ever came to fruition as unfortunately the Capone gang had no openings for a Jewish, non-English speaking Russian, illicit horsemeat vendor.
Finding it difficult to find a racket that he could take advantage of, and because of a depressing lack of donkeys in the Chicagoland area, he found himself a job as an apprentice to a Polish tailor on the North Side of the City. It was here that he met the tailor=s daughter Eileen, who would read him the Chicago Tribune in an authentic Polish accent. It was love at first voice. She didn=t understand why he left bolshevik fennels for her, but found it both charming and quirky.
They were married in July, 1935 and Lloyd=s father, Nathan was born in September of that year. Hint hint.
Lionel Kulligan was not a very religious or pious man, yet his Jewish identity was so strong that he felt compelled to attend Orthodox Synagogue. This was the most strict of the Jewish sects, women and men were separated by a wall, and every word was spoken in Yiddish or Hebrew.
Zayde Lionel was quite the enigma to young Lloyd. Lloyd could never reconcile the fact that his grandfather could break so many of the tenets of the Jewish faith, like eating pork, or not eating Kosher, and not being cheap, while still practicing at the highest arc of the religion. It would not be the first time Lloyd questioned the thought processes of the religious. It seemed that non-secular folks seemed to tailor their religion to suit themselves, when it seems it should have been the other way around.
Zayde only went to Temple once a year, on the high holidays, and Lloyd could never reconcile the fact that God somehow forgave all sins just by saying sorry. That was what Yom Kippur was for. AAtone for your sins. Fast for the day. All is forgiven,@ said Zayde. Murder someone? Fine, Rape? Fine. All is forgiven. Oh, But never consort with a black woman, he said. The schvartzes! Straight to hell. Though there was no real concept of hell in the Jewish teachings, so Lloyd was never really sure what the consequences were of angering God. Or G-d as he was taught in Hebrew school.
Hey Lloyd, you lived a wonderful life, welcome to heaven.
But God, I killed 7 people and ate their livers for sustenance.
That is no problem my son, you asked for forgiveness and that is what you shall have.
But remember that one time when I raped my neighbor=s wife? That is way worse than coveting her.
No problem again my son, you went to Temple once a year. You are absolved.
But God, I was a lawyer.
Don=t push your luck, my child.