Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  Time seemed to have no meaning in Coney Island, or only as much meaning as delirium might have. Year after year, the place died and was reborn. It was resplendent; it was doomed. It was Now; it was Then. And something of the otherworldly, if not the Divine, appeared to govern its cycles. Again and again, sections of the city were destroyed by fire, most recently, in the years before Heller was born, in 1907, when the Cave of the Winds suddenly ignited, and in 1911.

  Fires, mostly pleasant ones, were among Heller’s earliest memories: the “barnfires” fueled by broken fruit crates, over which his family ate charred marshmallows and smoky, sandy “mickeys”—roasted potatoes—on the shore, along with hundreds of other summertime revelers; and fireworks, every Tuesday night during summer, shot from a boat anchored at the Steeplechase pier. “It brent a fire in street,” his mother, Lena, warned him gutturally whenever he ran barefoot from the apartment onto scalding pavement. Lena could barely speak English. Her uneasiness with the language often embarrassed the family. Early on, her insistence on speaking Yiddish and sometimes a little Russian struck young Joey as a refusal—of anything, everything—and the bitter humor of the Yiddish was unmistakable even to a child: If not the sentiments, he understood the weary, mocking tone. It was a language of longing and displacement, qualities made even more palpable by his mother’s stubborn use of it, even though it clearly isolated her from her greater surroundings. “I was not aware of coldness or warmth [from my mother],” Heller told an interviewer years later. Just intransigence and nay-saying—as well as noisy silence, for though she talked often, she generally did not attempt to communicate, at least not directly.

  Isaac Daniel Heller, Joey’s father, emigrated from Russia to New York in 1913. His four-year-old boy, Hillel Elias, known as Lee in America, arrived with his mother shortly before or after Isaac. Briefly, the family lived in Manhattan, then in Spring Valley, New York. After that, they moved to Coney Island. As an adult, Joseph admitted his father’s past had always been murky to him. “I … never grappled much with the idea of trying to find out more about him,” he wrote in Now and Then. He understood only that his father had come to America “from somewhere in western Russia.” He wrote, “I prefer not to [know more].” [K]nowing more would make no difference.… I know him by his absence.” That the figurative lack of a father would soon enough become literal only added to the older man’s mystery.

  Ambiguity clouds the family name. The German word heller means “lighter” or “brighter.” Ashkenazi Jews were said to apply the word to someone with a light complexion. Some historians trace the name to the sixteenth century and the city of Halle, Germany, where it was linked to a coin, the Heller, in use there; others say a rabbi and scholar named Yom-Tov Lipmann is the source of the family’s lineage. At one point, he lived in Halle, and a bastardized form of the city’s name came to be associated with him. From the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, thousands of families called Heller migrated east from Austria and Germany. Records indicate that many Hellers arriving in the United States at around the time Isaac did came from the old Lithuanian frontier, once part of Poland, now belonging to the Ukraine. A sheet from the fourteenth census of the United States, dated January 8, 1920, lists Isaac Heller’s place of origin as Russia and his native language as Yiddish. No further details. However, a ship manifest dated September 29, 1913, indicates that Elias Heller, age four, traveled on the Lapland, a nearly nineteen-ton steamship sailing from Antwerp. Elias came from Tschschonovitz, Russia (his last residence). He was born in Gulanowie, Russia. These towns are difficult to pinpoint: Linguistic, cultural, and political barriers led to many mistakes and alternate spellings on ship manifests and immigration records; names and national borders were exceptionally fluid in that part of the world. The likely possibilities suggest Elias was born west of Moscow, within a couple hundred miles of the city, and that just before coming to the United States, the Hellers were living in the Lithuanian/Polish/Russian frontier. If so, they came from an area with a centuries-long Jewish history, and with many Hasidic sects. At the beginning of the twentieth century, oppression from the Russian czar, as well as violence perpetrated by Cossack soldiers and Polish gangs, forced many Jewish families to leave. In the United States, Isaac declared himself a Jewish agnostic, in flight from Czar Nicholas II, and a strong supporter of socialism.

  The 1920 census lists him as a “chandler” (though his primary occupation was driving a delivery truck for Messinger’s Bakery), and it gave his age as thirty-five.

  In 1913, the year he arrived in Coney Island, socialism was a topic du jour in New York’s Jewish communities (and a subject of fear in America’s mainstream press; in September of that year, the New York Times charged Teddy Roosevelt with “redistributing [America’s] wealth,” under the headline ROOSEVELT’S SUPER-SOCIALISM). Abraham Cahan’s popular newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward, undoubtedly a staple in the Heller household, as it was in every Jewish neighborhood, spread the socialist gospel, as well as labor unionism, in straightforward Yiddish accessible to working-class readers (“Not to take [the] paper was to confess you were [a] barbarian,” Irving Howe once wrote).

  That same year in Coney Island, a prime example of American capitalism came to pass. Nathan Handwerker, a dishwasher at Charles Feltman’s hot dog stand, decided to undercut his boss by selling the morsel Feltman claimed to have invented—the charcoal-cooked frankfurter—for five cents instead of the usual ten. Initially, the plan backfired. The public, long accustomed to rumors that hot dogs were made of horse meat or some other unsavory material, distrusted the inexpensive dog. To counter these fears, and lure more eaters, Handwerker hired transients from the beach to crowd the tables in front of his stand. The men’s disheveled appearance did not encourage anyone to approach. According to some stories, Handwerker then dressed the transients in rented lab coats; other accounts say he offered free hot dogs to interns from Coney Island Hospital. In any case, he advertised his stand as a place “where the doctors eat”—what could be safer than that? From then on, Nathan’s hot dogs became a famous Coney Island product (and a favorite food of Joseph Heller, in childhood and beyond).

  Coney was a confusing place for an immigrant to land, its basic nature as hard to grasp as one’s image in a house of tilted mirrors. The clearest picture we have of the perplexities facing the generation that shaped Joseph Heller is found in the Jewish Daily Forward’s “Bintel Brief” (literally, a “Bundle of Letters”), an advice column for immigrants befuddled by modern America. “People often need the opportunity to pour out their heavy-laden hearts. Among our immigrant masses this need was very marked,” Abraham Cahan wrote in his memoirs. Problems between parents and children (kids quickly becoming accustomed to New World freedoms and abandoning old values), ambivalence about integration, ethnic tensions (“I am a girl from Galicia and in the shop where I work I sit near a Russian Jew.… [Once] he stated that all Galicians were no good.… Why should one worker resent another?”), and fears and temptations about intermarriage filled the daily column. Many letters addressed domestic tensions caused by new opportunities discovered in the United States.

  More striking than the confusions battering these uprooted souls was the series of mixed signals offered by the column’s wise men (sometimes Cahan himself, but more often S. Kornbluth, one of the paper’s editors). For example, some replies encouraged intermarriage as a way of becoming more Americanized; on different occasions, the editors suggested intermarriage was a curse, certain to cause isolation.

  The immigrant self was perpetually unsettled. As “The Bintel Brief” made clear, many people preferred to air their emotional struggles anonymously, not only because the pain was so great but also because the very nature of their problems, not to say the solutions, were hard to identify, and always shifting. The strongest impression one gets from these columns is that the wave of immigrants that included Joseph Heller’s father led double lives. They were never fully comfortable in their adopted world, but they were unabl
e to return to their pasts (you will be “strangers to [your] own neighbors” in your old homelands, the editors warned). Of necessity, men and women of this generation were largely reserved, for their old languages lacked the vocabularies to define the conundrums they encountered.

  * * *

  IT WAS A WORLD of silence, but not a silent world. On summer mornings, the cries of Italian fruit peddlers drifted up from the streets through the open windows of the Hellers’ four-room apartment: “If you got money, come down and buy. If you got no money, stay home and cry.” Gull calls and the distant screams of roller-coaster riders droned just beneath soaring Puccini arias from the Kent radio in the living room, which Heller’s mother kept on all day while she hunched above her Singer sewing machine, its whirring and tapping an accompaniment to the music. Though the 1920 census indicates she was unemployed, she worked as a seamstress, making and mending clothes for many of her neighbors, as well as converting old bedsheets into curtains. At night, she withdrew into her bedroom to read Tolstoy in Yiddish, especially Anna Karenina over and over. She had always loved to read. In Russia, members of her family worked as bookbinders (many years later, her brother Sam would land a job repairing books for the Brandeis University library).

  The Hellers occupied an upper floor in a small yellow-brick building on West Thirty-first Street, between Mermaid and Surf avenues. Lee was fourteen now. A daughter, Sylvia, had been born in 1914. Everyone in the family called the youngest boy Joey. They shared the building with a family named Winkler, and little Joey shared a baby carriage with the Winkler infant, Marvin. “He used to wet my carriage, and he was ten months older,” Marvin told Barbara Gelb for a New York Times Magazine profile of Heller in 1979. When Heller was older, his mother swore to him that whenever he’d nursed, she’d have to snatch him away from her breast, for he would never stop. Among the first smells he recalled were the duskiness of walnuts, the sweet softness of old apples, saved from going to waste by his mother, who would fold them into noodle puddings, and the floury flatness of day-old cakes, rescued from the bakery by his father. His father sat at the kitchen table at night, eating slice after slice of dry, hard cake.

  Joey’s first memory of his father’s voice was a sharp command: One day, Joey wandered close to an open window, curious about the fire escape, and his father called him back. Sometimes at night, strange noises from the street or from the beach a few blocks away woke Joey in fright, and he’d crawl into bed with his parents, warm and content in the space between their bodies. On some afternoons, his father took him riding in the delivery van, letting him press the automatic starter and pretend he was driving. Slowly, they passed through a bewildering mélange of voices—the census reveals an immediate neighborhood teeming with Russians, Germans, Armenians, and Italians. Though Joey’s parents rarely took him to synagogue (occasionally, they made exceptions for High Holiday services), he was surrounded by Jews and Jewish culture. Lists of the area’s religious institutions at the time (the Young Men’s Hebrew Association of Coney Island, Adath Israel, the Jewish Communal Center, and the Coney Island Talmud Torah) indicate large and active memberships.

  Sometime before his fourth birthday, Joey had to have his tonsils removed. As he remembered the experience, his father drove him to Coney Island Hospital and left him alone, with a parched throat and little understanding of what was happening. Figures in white moved along the corridors, silent and remote. Where was his father? Why had he gone? How could he have gone?

  Lee distrusted Isaac even more than Joey did. He recalled riding with the older man in a horse-drawn delivery wagon in Manhattan upon first arriving in the United States. On steep, icy streets, Isaac whipped the horse so brutally, passersby berated him for cruelty. Though Lee claimed his father was never mean to him, he would grudgingly admit, in later years, with tears in his eyes, that the two of them did not have an easy relationship. “There were lots of Jewish criminals around and he didn’t want me to turn out bad,” he once explained to his little brother. Isaac’s pressure on Lee to work hard and obey him was so intense that, one summer soon after Joey’s birth, Lee ran away from home. One morning, he traveled to New Jersey to apply for a job, realized he wouldn’t get hired, and, rather than go back to face his father’s disappointment, decided on the spur of the moment to board a train west. He was gone for nearly three months, traveling with hoboes, working odd jobs with farmers and ranchers in Arizona and California, sending postcards to Lena to assure her he was all right. Joey remembered the day Lee returned. Isaac was playing with Joey in the street, showing him how to wind the rubber-band propeller on a model plane, when Lee sauntered up to them from a nearby trolley stop. As soon as Lena saw him, she said something like “When you come from California, you’ve got to take a bath,” and took him inside the apartment. Joey glanced up at his father, who was gripping the model high in his hand: a trembling airplane silhouetted against the sun.

  * * *

  FOR SOME TIME, Isaac had complained of stomach pains, and Lena noticed his stools were black as coal. Later, she believed the prodigious amount of cake he ate every night led to his bleeding ulcers.

  One day, not long after Joey turned four, his family held a party. He hadn’t seen his father for days, and Isaac was not around that afternoon. Joey’s mother dressed him in a nice suit and pointed to a line of cars parked outside the apartment. The cars’ interiors were hot. He didn’t want to take a ride. Older boys from the neighborhood, also wearing suits, approached him to try to nudge him into a backseat, but he ran from them, thinking it was a game. Finally, he was forced to make the trip. Everyone got out of the cars in a large garden that had a stone bench and a rail fence. The day was brilliantly sunny. Adults, many of them strangers, fussed over Joey. An aunt he barely knew gave him a dollar. If he heard the word funeral, he didn’t know what it meant.

  Years later, he would learn from his sister that their father had gone into Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan for an operation on a stomach ulcer. Apparently, the surgeons stitched him poorly and he died of internal bleeding. He was forty-two years old. Sylvia, not quite thirteen, accompanied Lena on the subway into Manhattan when they received news of Isaac’s death; Lena could not read the subway maps. Sylvia got them to Times Square, but she became confused at that point, misidentified a train, and led them astray, deep into the Bronx. The day, and their grief, seemed endless.

  Possibly, Lena sent Joey to relatives the week before the burial so he would not be upset by the mourning and the ritual of sitting shivah. Later, he could never recover any memory of this period. In the week following the funeral, Sylvia wore heavy black dresses every day, though the late afternoons were broiling. Finally, one evening, Lena told her, in a gentler tone than usual, to put on something lighter and go down in the street to cool off.

  The 1930 census lists Lena as “head” of the household, still without outside employment. Lee (Elias) is recorded as a “bookkeeper.” Lena and the children moved across the street to a slightly cheaper, though similarly sized, apartment (with the first month’s rent included free), next to a sandy trench dug for a trolley line, that all the neighbors called Railroad Avenue. The building was owned by an Italian family named Provenzano. Once the Hellers’ belongings were out of the old place, Lee handed Joey a broom, picked up another broom, and told his little brother they were going to sweep out the empty rooms they had left behind. When Joey asked why, Lee replied he didn’t want the new tenants to think the Hellers were slobs. Shortly after settling into the new place, Lee saved some money and bought Lena a brand-new radio.

  What followed was a period of relative calm, at least on the surface; for Joey, it was a cozy, peaceful time. Lee was out of the house, working most days, returning in the early evenings. Lena shopped for, and cooked, dinner every night: smoked whitefish, kasha, and potato knishes deep-fried in vegetable oil. Lena bought these from a neighbor woman who sold homemade foods on the street—the knishes were a nickel apiece. The woman carried them from block to b
lock in a kettle covered with black oilcloth. Sometimes, while cooking, Lena had to pause to break up a spat between Sylvia and Lee; the apartment was small and hot, especially in summer, and tempers grew short. Lena refused to let brother and sister go to bed angry with each other. After dinner, she would often say, half in Yiddish, half in English, that she could use a little ice cream. She’d give Joey a dime and send him off to a nearby soda fountain, with instructions to return with a pint of Golden Glow. The family gathered around the carton and ate all the ice cream on the spot, because they had no refrigerator. These moments were immensely satisfying to Joey. As an adult, he would look back and realize that, on some level, he had already learned not to want more than he could reasonably hope to have. What he had was blessing enough: the Jewish concept of dayenu. A pint of ice cream was plenty.

  When fall came, Sylvia would sit near an open window in the evenings and do her homework by the light of a streetlamp outside, to save electricity. In the spring and summer, the family rented space to a succession of boarders. The children had to squeeze together in a single room; sometimes, one of them slept in the kitchen. One summer, one of these boarders played classical music every night on the family radio. Joey discerned familiar melodies in some of the performances. With a shock, he understood that playful echoes of Tchaikovsky popped up in big-band tunes such as “My Blue Heaven” and “April Showers”—songs he had heard in the afternoons on “Your Hit Parade.” Without his full awareness, his keen ear had revealed to him some of the secrets of art: the richness of tradition and the impulse to play against it—variation, improvisation, and parody.

  He was a precocious reader. Often, after dinner, every member of the family opened a book. Early on, Joey read the Rover Boy series and the tales of Tom Swift. An older cousin on his father’s side, a man named Nat Siegel, who worked as an accountant in the city, brought him books.