The Hue and Cry at Our House

by Benjamin Taylor

  Our ancestors’ lives in northeastern Poland and western Belarus were on old stones dating to the fifteenth century. We may have been as ancient there as Yiddish itself, a language my brother and I were the first generation in twenty not to speak. For five hundred years northeastern Poland and southwestern Belarus had been our home, replaced in the nick of time by northeast Texas and western Louisiana, else there would have been no Bocksteins, Goldbergs, Rutskys or Treszczanskis, for the Jews left behind in Sielce, Pruzhany, Korycin and Goniądz were either taken to the edge of town and slaughtered by Einsatzgruppen or sent to the gas chambers of Treblinka and Auschwitz. Remembered for a blessing here are Yossel Treszczanski; his wife, Chaya Kowalska Treszczanski; and their children, Rochel, Avrum, Maische and Yentl, my father’s second cousins. These were Treszczanskis who did not become Taylors. Indeed, no fewer than sixty-four Treszczanskis of Goniądz vanished into the Polish abyss that coincided with our American idyll.

  I know these names now because of databases and genealogical websites that my parents and grandparents could not have dreamed of. Dad only guessed at the proper spelling of Treszczanski. “Trashansky” was the version he would now and then search for in various North American phone directories. Cold-calling these strangers tended not to produce much, or even go well. “Must have thought I wanted money,” he said about a Trashansky in Brooklyn who’d hung up on him.

  “I don’t think they’re even in the United States,” he concluded. “I think they’re in South America.”

  Thus was launched the family legend that we had relatives in Rio or Buenos Aires or Caracas. Best not to disturb them down there. We gave the Trashanskys no more thought. But nowadays comes this recurrent dream: I am in the street with friends. We are laughing. My cell phone rings. It is Dad, who says humbly, apologetically, “I know I’m dead. I just want to hear your voice again.” Armed with knowledge taken from the Yad Vashem database, I say accusingly, heartlessly, “Ever hear of a place called Goniądz? It’s your hometown.” I am pitiless. What the hell is wrong with me?

  “The Trashanskys—”

  “Can’t hear you, son, you’re breaking up.”

  “The Trashanskys. Treszczanskis. I’ve found them.” But then I am flooded with shame for thinking I have something to tell him, or any of the dead.

  “You were right, Daddy. South America.”

  But I’ve lost the connection.

  • • •

  My mother’s parents had sponsored a refugee Jewish girl in the spring of 1938, Erika Meyer, who came from Langenfeld, a Rhineland town midway between Cologne and Düsseldorf. She stepped off the train in Fort Worth with five shaky words of English: “I glad to be here.” A Star-Telegram reporter and photographer were on hand to record the occasion. Bubbe and Grandpa promptly immersed her in the public school system and all aspects of Fort Worth’s Jewish community.

  It was on CBS Radio that they’d heard Eddie Cantor’s appeal to American Jewish families willing to take in refugee children. Bubbe said to Grandpa, “Here’s this big house,” and contacted the German Children’s Jewish Aid. Several months later they were greeting their new charge at the Texas & Pacific depot. Erika was brave, good-looking, witty, popular—and hell-bent on Americanizing herself. There were slumber parties, picture shows, new hairdos taken from the magazines, even new personas. After seeing The Mark of Zorro she came home with a faraway look and said her new name was Linda Darnell.

  Bubbe and Grandpa didn’t adopt her, of course. The idea was that Erika’s parents, Bernard and Emmy Meyer, and younger sister, Helga, would come to America as soon as they could. Erika wrote home faithfully to Langenfeld, sending photos and trinkets and newspaper clippings. Then, suddenly, her letters went unanswered. She never heard from her family again. After the war she learned that they had been deported to their deaths at Stutthof concentration camp, east of Danzig.

  In the 1980s, in one of those improbable codas sometimes attaching to these stories, Erika very reluctantly went back to Langenfeld and presented herself at the doorstep of Hauptstrasse 133, where she’d lived as a girl. The inhabitants asked her in. They were very glad to see her, as a few years earlier they’d uprooted an old tree in the front lawn and found at the root a strongbox containing letters and photos and news items and mementos from a place called Fort Worth: pictures of the Bocksteins at home; my parents’ wedding announcement; pressed corsages. All of this the Meyers had buried, expecting to return.

  • • •

  My deeper suspicion about the Taylors and the Bocksteins is that they had an American determination to be uninjured, unhumiliated, as if the Shoah had happened only to Jews unlike us—Big Max and Little Abeleh, for example, custodians at the synagogue with tattooed numbers on their forearms. The American playwright and critic Lionel Abel wrote that after his mother saw the first newsreel images of the liberated camps she said: “I don’t think the Jews can ever get over the disgrace of this.” Looking back now, I’m bound to admit that by neither word nor deed did any Bockstein or Taylor try to find out who of our own blood were among the Six Million. Erika’s murdered family represented the calamity for us and our curiosity ended with them.

  And yet I recently came upon a letter my maternal grandfather wrote in the spring of 1944 to a man in Chicago he believed to be his cousin, in which Grandpa says he hasn’t heard from any family in Wolkowysk, his mother Masha Grodzensky Bockstein’s birthplace in southwestern Belarus, since 1904. (She’d died in Fort Worth in 1934.) Though the unimaginable extent of Germany’s war against the Jews would not be known for another year, this letter can have been prompted only by the growing anxiety he felt. One read by then of systematic exterminations, if not of death camps. Grandpa wrote: “My mother, may she rest in peace, had two sisters, Schala and Davera, and one brother, Yankel,” all left behind when she married and moved to Sielce (which my grandfather calls Siltz). Schala, I now know, came to America with her husband, Shimon Samoschzianski, where they Anglicized their name to Senor. But about Davera and Yankel I can learn nothing at all. Grodzensky is not a common family name and Yad Vashem lists six Grodzenskys of Wolkowysk—three without first names—who were exterminated at Treblinka.

  • • •

  A customized forty-five-rpm record, made in the fifties and long ago gone to smash, carried on one side my brother delivering his bar-mitzvah speech and on the other Little Bubbe singing, in a shaky contralto, “For All We Know,” a J. Fred Coots–Sam Lewis hit of the mid-thirties, but with Lewis’s lyrics rewritten to express Jewish uncertainty in the Promised Land, shading even into fears that what happened elsewhere could happen here. Where the original song says, “We won’t say good-bye until the last minute, I’ll hold out my hand and my heart will be in it,” our Bubbe sang, “America’s clasping her hands, there’s a limit. We’ll open our shul and we’ll find police in it—for all we know!”

  Congregation Ahavath Shalom. How I dreaded that sepulchral place. After seven hours of school, when I’d have liked to be outdoors exploring nature or indoors exploring topics of my own choosing, I was condemned to Hebrew school. The teachers were a hapless couple, a Mr. and Mrs. Zipper, survivors of Nazism whose appearance, lackluster hygiene, hilarious name, foreign speech and sulfuric rages were our only fun as we watched the sun go down on another lost afternoon. I certainly wasn’t there because Mom and Dad were devout. What they were trying to do was appease our forebears from Wolkowysk, Sielce, Pruzhany, Korycin and Goniądz. For them, the sanctified dead, I was offered up, two afternoons a week and twice more on Saturday and Sunday mornings, to Simon and Miriam Zipper.

  The good boy vanished when I got to Ahavath Shalom and in his place stood an imp of the perverse. One afternoon, just to see what would happen, I wickedly informed Mrs. Zipper that I was uncircumcised. She shook with rage and reported me to the rabbi. What I’d said was nonsense, of course, though there was an irregularity attaching to my circumcision. At Harris Hospital, when I wa
s three days old, I got mixed in with the gentile baby boys and was modified alongside them. So when I was eight days old, at what ought to have been my bris, there was no foreskin to remove. On the strength of this hospital error I felt I could be Jewish or not as the mood took me.

  We ate no catfish. Of the noble structure of Jewish dietary law this single prohibition was all that remained. Mom never mentioned God at all and Dad only by way of imprecation. They forsook the Conservative rite and went over to the Reform. As for Orthodox Jews, Dad couldn’t stand them: “The bigger the tallis, the bigger the thief,” he used to say. Of my final attendance at High Holy Days with the two of them I chiefly remember what Mom, looking around in amazement, said for all to hear: “I’m not coming back till the whole congregation goes on a diet.” Had life been long enough my parents would have continued on to the Unitarians.

  Still, I think my Hebrew schooling made them feel better about how ham- and lobster-infested their lives had become. And made me devoutly antireligious. I’d compose my face into an obedient mask while saying inwardly, “There is no God, there is no God,” till the bell rang and I could go home. The sanctity of atheism has stayed with me to this day. I hope to die in the odor of it.

  • • •

  When my father graduated from high school his uncle Sam Roosth, Big Bubbe’s elder brother, a rough customer who had struck oil in East Texas and who dispensed the family largess and in whose shadow everyone lived, said: “Son, your future’s planned. I’m sending you to college and afterward to law school.”

  My father, who’d always hated school and done poorly there, said: “Uncle Sam, I want to get into business right away.” Uncle Sam said nothing. But a day later Dad got from him a graduation gift that said it all. One dollar.

  Perhaps inevitably, he formed the ambition that my brother and I should be lawyers, and gave Tommy a copy of The Story of My Life by Clarence Darrow. My brother never liked being told by anyone, least of all our father, what he ought to do. He tossed the book aside for me. I was drawn to a particular case, that of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, very wealthy sons of Chicago’s Jewish upper crust who in May of 1924, for the pleasure of planning and executing a perfect crime and thereby proving themselves Nietzschean supermen, murdered fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks, a boy from their elegant neighborhood. After bludgeoning him with a chisel and asphyxiating him with a rag, they stripped the child, poured hydrochloric acid on his face and genitals, stuffed him into the drainage pipe of a culvert and sent a ransom note to the frantic parents.

  The body was promptly found, along with a pair of eyeglasses. At the funeral parlor these sat on the boy’s disfigured face until Mr. and Mrs. Franks said that Bobby wore no glasses. It was then that they became the first and most crucial piece of evidence in the case. The frames themselves were ordinary enough, as was the prescription. But they had an unusual hinge. Only three such pairs had been sold in the Chicago area, two to individuals readily cleared of any possible involvement and the third to Nathan Leopold.

  Solving the perfect crime took the state’s attorney less than two weeks. Getting the perpetrators to confess took an afternoon and an evening. Leopold had stonewalled, the way Danny Metzinger did with Dad, but Loeb was like me and spilled his guts in a hurry. Before long, both were proudly sharing details of their supermannish deed with prosecutors.

  On our bookshelves we had Meyer Levin’s Compulsion, a true-life novel based on the case. And the four of us had watched on TV the 1959 movie version with Orson Welles as the Clarence Darrow figure, E. G. Marshall as the state’s attorney, and Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell as the murderers. Like everyone of their generation, my parents were aware of this “crime of the century” with its motiveless malignity and trappings of German Jewish wealth, and were initially amused by my researches. But then, as the obsession took wing, my questions became too many and too unpleasant. I was as roused as if the year were 1924 and the place Cook County. I made my own map of the South Side and environs. X marked the spot where Loeb and Leopold had enticed Bobby into a rented car and another X indicated where they disposed of his body. Over here was where they’d hidden the chisel. I elaborated a timeline on an adding-machine roll and included stirring words from the great Darrow’s closing remarks to the court: “Before I would tie a noose around the neck of a boy, I would try to call back into my mind the emotions of youth. I would try to remember what the world looked like to me when I was a child. . . . The brain of the child is the home of dreams, of castles, of visions, of illusions and of delusions . . . and whether they take one shape or another shape depends not upon the dreamy boy but on what surrounds him.”

  Part of me, with Darrow, was ready to affirm that nurture was all. The Leopold and Loeb homes must have engendered these monsters. But maybe there was something fatal on the nature side too. An unnamable miasma hung over “Babe” Leopold and “Dickie” Loeb, as they were known, unnamable by me then but soon to be named, and those two psychopaths were the least favorable introduction to grown-up homosexuality that chance could have thrown my way. In a flash I understood that I was their kin, shared their nature and was capable of anything.

  | CHAPTER SIX |

  NATURAL SHOCKS

  I found a lump in my upper arm and it kept getting bigger. In the spring of 1964 Dr. Fred Aurin, a general surgeon, had checked me into Fort Worth Children’s Hospital and taken the tumor out. My parents told me it was benign; but what Dr. Aurin had told them was that it was a rhabdomyosarcoma. I might be losing an arm before long, or my life.

  Was this their rationale for the grand trip to New York we took that summer? Rooms at the Plaza overlooking Central Park. Dinners at the Colony and ‘21’ and La Caravelle and Parioli Romanissimo and the Cub Room of Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club. Midnight snacks in the Palm Court. We were hicks all right but living the life. And I may or may not have been very ill.

  Robby and his parents were over at the Regency, having a glamorous time of their own. When I boasted that I’d ridden in an elevator with Lucille Ball, he stared back mildly and told me who was staying at their hotel. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Said he saw them every day. Said they’d actually said hello.

  Burton was starring that year in Hamlet, a bare-bones production performed in (carefully selected) rehearsal clothes under John Gielgud’s direction. What scenery there was, Burton ably chewed. A film of the production survives and you can see for yourself. It was my first Shakespeare and his Hamlet remains for me the prototype. At intermission in the lobby of the Lunt-Fontanne we bought an LP record of highlights from the play and for the next few months I flung myself, Burton style, around the living room, crying out with him about the thousand natural shocks flesh is heir to until Tommy said: “You can’t do that accent, so stop trying.”

  We went to the theater nearly every night that June, as my old collection of Playbills attests. It was a signal time for Broadway musicals and we saw our share: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum; Oliver!; 110 in the Shade; Hello, Dolly!; What Makes Sammy Run?; Fade Out—Fade In; Funny Girl. Plays too—“the legitimate theater,” as Dad loved calling it. My parents were indiscriminate theatergoers, afraid they might miss something. This got transmitted.

  Most powerful of all was James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie. I had no vocabulary or frame of reference at eleven for what I was seeing and though raised in the South had never heard “nigger,” a word regarded with the utmost contempt in our household, flung around as it was on the stage of the ANTA Theatre that night. (I do recall having come home from Mrs. Pakston’s kindergarten with the standard counting rhyme—“Eeny meeny miny moe, catch a nigger by the toe”—and being angrily told to say catch a monkey or a spider or anything but a nigger because only trash said “nigger.” “Colored” and “Negro” were the respectable words in our Jim Crow universe.)

  My visual memory of Baldwin’s play is concentrated into a single dramatic moment: Pat Hing
le, a powerhouse of the day, telling how his first love had been a girl “the color of gingerbread when it’s just come out of the oven” and what had happened when the girl’s mother discovered them together. This had the real pity and terror in it. Baldwin had used the horrific martyrdom of Emmett Till, which launched the mid-century civil rights movement, as loose inspiration. Blues is about the racially motivated murder of a black man who has gone home to the South after living in Chicago. At the climax the culprit is acquitted, like Till’s murderers, by an all-white jury.

  Two years before my parents were born, a white vigilante mob of three thousand killed perhaps as many as two hundred blacks in East Saint Louis, Illinois. In the year of my parents’ birth, 1919, the most terrible episode of American violence against blacks occurred in and around Elaine, Arkansas, when as many as eight hundred men, women and children were slaughtered by lynch mobs ravening through the Delta. In 1921 the entire Greenwood district of Tulsa was burned down and two hundred or more black residents massacred and ten thousand left homeless.

  My parents’ native ground, East Texas and West Louisiana, was also very notable for lynchings that mobs carried out with impunity. Tyler or Shreveport could have been the setting for Baldwin’s play. In Tyler, one year before the Treszczanskis settled there and became Taylors, a black man named Dan Davis was burned at the stake with unseasoned firewood. A crowd of two thousand attended. That was 1912. In Shreveport lynchings were a way of life: Isaac Pizer in 1896, Jennis Sturs in 1903, Henry Rachel in 1909, Thomas Miles in 1912, Edward Hamilton and Watkins Lewis in 1914, Henry Brooks in 1917.