by Philip Roth
courage to address him, I would have asked if he thought the ending meant the
Kid was finished or whether it meant the possibility of yet another comeback.
The word “inert” terrified me. Was the Kid killed by the last catch of the year?
Did the Swede know? Did he care? Did it occur to him that if disaster could
strike down the Kid from Tomkinsville, it could come and strike the great Swede
down too? Or was a book about a sweet star savagely and unjustly punished—a book
about a greatly gifted innocent whose worst fault is a tendency to keep his
right shoulder down and swing up but whom the thundering heavens destroy
nonetheless—simply a book between those “Thinker” bookends up on his shelf?
Keer Avenue was where the rich Jews lived—or rich they seemed to most of the
families who rented apartments in the two-, three-, and four-family dwellings
with the brick stoops integral to our after-school sporting life: the crap
games, the blackjack, and the stoop-ball, endless until the cheap rubber ball
hurled mercilessly against the steps went pop and split at the seam. Here, on
this grid of locust-tree-lined streets into which the Lyons farm had been
partitioned during the boom years of the early twenties, the first postimmigrant
generation of Newark’s Jews had regrouped into a community that took its
inspiration more from the mainstream of American life than from the Polish
shtetl their Yiddish-speaking parents had re-created around Prince Street in the
impoverished Third Ward. The Keer Avenue Jews, with their finished basements,
their screened-in porches, their flagstone front steps, seemed to be at the
forefront, laying claim like audacious pioneers to the normalizing American
amenities. And at the vanguard of the vanguard were the Levovs, who had bestowed
upon us our very own Swede, a boy as close to a goy as we were going to get.
The Levovs themselves, Lou and Sylvia, were parents neither more nor less
recognizably American than my own Jersey-born Jewish mother and father, no more
or less refined, well spoken, or cultivated. And that to me was a big surprise.
Other than the one-family Keer Avenue house, there was no division between us
like the one between the peasants and the aristocracy I was learning about at
school. Mrs. Levov was, like my own mother, a tidy housekeeper, impeccably well
mannered, a nice-looking woman tremendously considerate of everyone’s feelings,
with a way of making her sons feel important—one of the many women of that era
who never dreamed of being free of the great domestic enterprise centered on the
children. From their mother both Levov boys had inherited the long bones and
fair hair, though since her hair was redder, frizzier, and her skin still
youthfully freckled, she looked less startlingly Aryan than they did, less vivid
a genetic oddity among the faces in our streets.
The father was no more than five seven or eight—a spidery man
10
* * *
even more agitated than the father whose anxieties were shaping my own. Mr.
Levov was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn,
undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, college-
educated Jewish sons: a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for
whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose
compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking
that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless
energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most
serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their
sons. It was our job to love them.
The way it fell out, my father was a chiropodist whose office was for years our
living room and who made enough money for our family to get by on but no more,
while Mr. Levov got rich manufacturing ladies’ gloves. His own father—Swede
Levov’s grandfather— had come to Newark from the old country in the 1890s and
found work fleshing sheepskins fresh from the lime vat, the lone Jew alongside
the roughest of Newark’s Slav, Irish, and Italian immigrants in the Nuttman
Street tannery of the patent-leather tycoon T. P. Howell, then the name in the
city’s oldest and biggest industry, the tanning and manufacture of leather
goods. The most important thing in making leather is water—skins spinning in big
drums of water, drums spewing out befouled water, pipes gushing with cool and
hot water, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. If there’s soft water,
good water, you can make beer and you can make leather, and Newark made both—big
breweries, big tanneries, and, for the immigrant, lots of wet, smelly, crushing
work.
The son Lou—Swede Levov’s father—went to work in the tannery after leaving
school at fourteen to help support the family of nine and became adept not only
at dyeing buckskin by laying on the clay dye with a flat, stiff brush but also
at sorting and grading skins. The tannery that stank of both the slaughterhouse
and the chemical plant from the soaking of flesh and the cooking of flesh and
the dehairing and pickling and degreasing of hides,
11
where round the clock in the summertime the blowers drying the thousands and
thousands of hanging skins raised the temperature in the low-ceilinged dry room
to a hundred and twenty degrees, where the vast vat rooms were dark as caves and
flooded with swill, where brutish workingmen, heavily aproned, armed with hooks
and staves, dragging and pushing overloaded wagons, wringing and hanging
waterlogged skins, were driven like animals through the laborious storm that was
a twelve-hour shift—a filthy, stinking place awash with water dyed red and black
and blue and green, with hunks of skin all over the floor, everywhere pits of
grease, hills of salt, barrels of solvent—this was Lou Levov’s high school and
college. What was amazing was not how tough he turned out. What was amazing was
how civil he could sometimes still manage to be.
From Howell & Co. he graduated in his early twenties to found, with two of his
brothers, a small handbag outfit specializing in alligator skins contracted from
R. G. Salomon, Newark’s king of cordovan leather and leader in the tanning of
alligator; for a time the business looked as if it might flourish, but after the
crash the company went under, bankrupting the three hustling, audacious Levovs.
Newark Maid Leatherware started up a few years later, with Lou Levov, now on his
own, buying seconds in leather goods—imperfect handbags, gloves, and belts—and
selling them out of a pushcart on weekends and door-to-door at night. Down Neck—
the semi-peninsular protuberance that is easternmost Newark, where each fresh
wave of immigrants first settled, the lowlands bounded to the north and east by
the Passaic River and to the south by the salt marshes—there were Italians who’d
been glovers in the old country and they began doing piecework for him in their
homes. Out of the skins he supplied they cut and sewed ladies’ gloves that he
* * *
peddled around the state. By the time the war broke out, he had a collective of
Italian families cutting and stitching kid gloves in a small loft on West Market
Street. It was a marginal business, no real money, until, in 1942, the bonanza:
a black, lined sheepskin dress glove, ordered by the Women’s Army Corps. He
12
leased the old umbrella factory, a smoke-darkened brick pile fifty years old and
four stories high on Central Avenue and 2nd Street, and very shortly purchased
it outright, leasing the top floor to a zipper company. Newark Maid began
pumping out gloves, and every two or three days the truck backed up and took
them away.
A cause for jubilation even greater than the government contract was the
Bamberger account. Newark Maid cracked Bamber-ger’s, and then became the major
manufacturer of their fine ladies’ gloves, because of an unlikely encounter
between Lou Levov and Louis Bamberger. At a ceremonial dinner for Meyer
Ellenstein, a city commissioner since 1933 and the only Jew ever to be mayor of
Newark, some higher-up from Barn’s, hearing that Swede Levov’s father was
present, came over to congratulate him on his boy’s selection by the Newark News
as an all-county center in basketball. Alert to the opportunity of a lifetime—
the opportunity to cut through all obstructions and go right to the top—Lou
Levov brazenly talked his way into an introduction, right there at the
Ellenstein dinner, to the legendary L. Bamberger himself, founder of Newark’s
most prestigious department store and the philanthropist who’d given the city
its museum, a powerful personage as meaningful to local Jews as Bernard Baruch
was meaningful to Jews around the country for his close association with FDR.
According to the gossip that permeated the neighborhood, although Bamberger
barely did more than shake Lou Levov’s hand and quiz him (about the Swede) for a
couple of minutes at most, Lou Levov had dared to say to his face, “Mr.
Bamberger, we’ve got the quality, we’ve got the price—why can’t we sell you
people gloves?” And before the month was out, Barn’s had placed an order with
Newark Maid, its first, for five hundred dozen pairs.
By the end of the war. Newark Maid had established itself—in no small part
because of Swede Levov’s athletic achievement—as one of the most respected names
in ladies’ gloves south of Gloversville, New York, the center of the glove
trade, where Lou Levov shipped his hides by rail, through Fultonville, to be
tanned by the best glove tannery in the business. Little more than a decade
later, with the
opening of a factory in Puerto Rico in 1958, the Swede would himself become the
young president of the company, commuting every morning down to Central Avenue
from his home some thirty-odd miles west of Newark, out past the suburbs—a
short-range pioneer living on a hundred-acre farm on a back road in the sparsely
habitated hills beyond Morristown, in wealthy, rural Old Rimrock, New Jersey, a
long way from the tannery floor where Grandfather Levov had begun in America,
paring away from the true skin the rubbery flesh that had ghoulishly swelled to
twice its thickness in the great lime vats.
The day after graduating Weequahic in June ‘45, the Swede had joined the Marine
Corps, eager to be in on the fighting that ended the war. It was rumored that
his parents were beside themselves and did everything to talk him out of the
marines and get him into the navy. Even if he surmounted the notorious Marine
Corps anti-Semitism, did he imagine himself surviving the invasion of Japan? But
the Swede would not be dissuaded from meeting the manly, patriotic challenge—
secretly set for himself just after Pearl Harbor—of going off to fight as one of
the toughest of the tough should the country still be at war when he graduated
high school. He was just finishing up his boot training at Parris Island, South
* * *
Carolina—where the scuttlebutt was that the marines were to hit the Japanese
beaches on March 1, 1946—when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. As a
result, the Swede got to spend the rest of his hitch as a “recreation
specialist” right there on Parris Island. He ran the calisthenic drill for his
battalion for half an hour before breakfast every morning, arranged for the
boxing smokers to entertain the recruits a couple of nights a week, and the bulk
of the time played for the base team against armed forces teams throughout the
South, basketball all winter long, baseball all summer long. He was stationed
down in South Carolina about a year when he became engaged to an Irish Catholic
girl whose father, a marine major and a one-time Purdue football coach, had
procured him the cushy job as drill instructor in order to keep him at Parris
Island to play ball. Several months before the Swede’s
discharge, his own father made a trip to Parris Island, stayed for a full week,
near the base at the hotel in Beaufort, and departed only when the engagement to
Miss Dunleavy had been broken off. The Swede returned home in ‘47 to enroll at
Upsala College, in East Orange, at twenty unencumbered by a Gentile wife and all
the more glamorously heroic for having made his mark as a Jewish marine—a drill
instructor no less, and at arguably the crudest military training camp anywhere
in the world. Marines are made at boot camp, and Seymour Irving Levov had helped
to make them.
We knew all this because the mystique of the Swede lived on in the corridors and
classrooms of the high school, where I was by then a student. I remember two or
three times one spring trekking out with friends to Viking Field in East Orange
to watch the Upsala baseball team play a Saturday home game. Their star cleanup
hitter and first baseman was the Swede. Three home runs one day against
Muhlenberg. Whenever we saw a man in the stands wearing a suit and a hat we
would whisper to one another, “A scout, a scout!” I was away at college when I
heard from a schoolyard pal still living in the neighborhood that the Swede had
been offered a contract with a Double A Giant farm club but had turned it down
to join his father’s company instead. Later I learned through my parents about
the Swede’s marriage to Miss New Jersey. Before competing at Atlantic City for
the 1949 Miss America title, she had been Miss Union County, and before that
Spring Queen at Upsala. From Elizabeth. A shiksa. Dawn Dwyer. He’d done it.
One night in the summer of 1985, while visiting New York, I went out to see the
Mets play the Astros, and while circling the stadium with my friends, looking
for the gate to our seats, I saw the Swede, thirty-six years older than when I’d
watched him play ball for Upsala. He wore a white shirt, a striped tie, and a
charcoal-gray summer suit, and he was still terrifically handsome. The golden
hair was a shade or two darker but not any thinner; no longer was it cut short
but fell rather fully over his ears and down to his collar.
15
In this suit that fit him so exquisitely he seemed even taller and leaner than I
remembered him in the uniform of one sport or another. The woman with us noticed
him first. ” Who is that? That’s— that’s … Is that John Lindsay?” she asked.
&n
bsp; “No,” I said. “My God. You know who that is? It’s Swede Levov.” I told my
friends, “That’s the Swede!”
A skinny, fair-haired boy of about seven or eight was walking alongside the
Swede, a kid under a Mets cap pounding away at a first baseman’s mitt that
dangled, as had the Swede’s, from his left hand. The two, clearly a father and
his son, were laughing about something together when I approached and introduced
myself. “I knew your brother at Weequahic.”
“You’re Zuckerman?” he replied, vigorously shaking my hand. “The author?”
* * *
“I’m Zuckerman the author.”
“Sure, you were Jerry’s great pal.”
“I don’t think Jerry had great pals. He was too brilliant for pals. He just used
to beat my pants off at Ping-Pong down in your basement. Beating me at Ping-Pong
was very important to Jerry.”
“So you’re the guy. My mother says, ‘And he was such a nice, quiet child when he
came to the house.’ You know who this is?” the Swede said to the boy. “The guy
who wrote those books. Nathan Zuckerman.”
Mystified, the boy shrugged and muttered, “Hi.”
“This is my son Chris.”
“These are friends,” I said, sweeping an arm out to introduce the three people
with me. “And this man,” I said to them, “is the greatest athlete in the history
of Weequahic High. A real artist in three sports. Played first base like
Hernandez—thinking. A line-drive doubles hitter. Do you know that?” I said to
his son. “Your dad was our Hernandez.”
“Hernandez’s a lefty,” he replied.
“Well, that’s the only difference,” I said to the little literalist, and put out
