Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue

by Mark Kurlansky

This was Nusan's explanation: "In Europe, all you can do is survive. But if you have the kind of luck to survive in Europe, chances are in America you will end up rich. Whether you want to be or not."

  Even Nathan's shop was showing a profit—in part because of the higher prices he charged the new restaurants for their menus and flyers. A producer was investing in Sonia's play, and it would soon move to a larger theater. But also the Seltzers were about to get a great deal of money for selling their vacant lot, which would become the tallest apartment building in the neighborhood. Ruth had been offered the penthouse, but having never lived higher than the sixth floor, she didn't like the idea; it made her feel queasy, a feeling that was enhanced by the possibility of gazing from her living room out on the bridges of lower Manhattan.

  Ruben and Palo had given up on the Japanese and found employment at a new "caviar bar." Panista and several others had also been promised jobs there. At the soon-to-be-closed casita, afternoons were passed arguing details.

  "I love belugita."

  "Fuck beluga, sevruga is where it's at."

  "Beluga is like gold."

  "No, pendejo, that's ossetra. I can get into ossetra. But beluga has those skins that just melt away on your tongue."

  Chow Mein Vega was not yet making money, and like most of those who weren't, he would soon be out of the neighborhood.

  Felix, observing that the Italians were making money and the Puerto Ricans were not, became Felice and pronounced it in the Sicilian way that rhymed with how Nusan said "knish." He renamed his store Felice's East Village Gourmet. He even made a point of dropping in on the Sals who had never noticed him as a Puerto Rican and showing off his Sicilian dialect. But the Sals were not interested in new Sicilians coming to the neighborhood and creating more competition. Sal Eleven didn't like his accent. After Felice left the store, Sal would make an expression as though he had just smelled something extremely unpleasant and dismiss the upstart with a wave of his hand. Then Sal would explain to whatever customer was there, "That guy thinks that because we are from Palermo we're supposed to befratèlli. But I can tell that he's not from my mandamento. I'm from Kalsa, there's no way he's from Kalsa. Maybe Albergheria, but not Kalsa."

  "How do you know?" the customer would ask.

  "The accent," said Sal, brushing away the interloper with another dismissive sweep of his arm. "Che accènto. It's a different part of Palermo. We Sicilians are never fooled by accents."

  Sal First went even further. "That guy says he's from Palermo, but I hear his accent—Catania." He whispered the word harshly, as though it were a curse capable of summoning up the forces of darkness. But when Sal A heard the new grocer was from Catania, he stopped by to visit him. Felice denied being from Catania and said he was from Palermo. Sal A could see the Arab in him and hear it in his voice, reasoning he was from Erice, Trapani, or even Favignana, "but more likely, he is a Tunisian here illegally. That's none of my business."

  Felice's East Village Gourmet became one of the popular new stores. He no longer specialized in produce from the casitas—the tomato season was over. He had started buying produce from Italians in the Bronx and had even made some contacts with upstate farmers. When the plumbing supply store next to him went out of business, he rented that and expanded his store, putting a kitchen in the back. He hired Dominican women from the neighborhood and taught them how to make caponata, but he would never speak to them in Spanish, even the ones whose family knew his back in the green Cibao. They would speak Spanish and he would shout in Italian, not Italian but Sicilian dialect, as he rolled a hard-boiled egg in his right hand. He said ova instead of uova for egg, even though the Italian would have been easier for a Spanish-speaking person to understand. He believed that hard-boiled eggs, ova duri, should go in almost everything, and he found a good egg connection in Washington Heights. Tomatoes were never excluded. One of his specialties was hard-boiled eggs in tomato sauce, ova duri ca sarsa. He grated hard-boiled eggs on top of his caponata and added artichokes, octopus, shrimp, and squid, which the Sals, in a rare point of agreement, considered an atrocity. Even more infuriating, he put a label next to the platter: "CapunataPalirmitana," Parlermo-Style Caponata.

  "They do this in Palermo," said Sal A, "but it is an exaggeration. It is not in good taste."

  But Sal Eleven leaned forward with a knowing nod that meant he had won the argument and said, "Catania."

  At the new Felice's East Village Gourmet, everything, besides Felice and his staff, was Sicilian except for two dozen bialies that came in from Grand Street every week.

  Felix had become so proud, so confident, about his new business that he invited Rosita to come look at his store, the kitchen, taste some of the specialties.

  "This could be, you know, what they call a mom-and-pop business."

  Rosita gently pushed away from him and walked aimlessly through the store, examining vegetables. She smiled almost shyly and said, "It's just not what I want."

  "It's clean, Rosita. I know what everybody thought, but there is no drug money in this business. I built it on casita tomatoes."

  "This neighborhood. It's changing. Everything's changing. New opportunities. You know what I think? I told this to my mother, I thought it would make her mad. But she said, Good for you, Rosita!"

  "Good for you, Rosita, what?"

  "I've decided—no Puerto Ricans. Everyone is going somewhere but us. I don't want a Puerto Rican."

  "I'm going somewhere." But she didn't believe him—because he was Puerto Rican, which he wasn't. His next move had been planned, even studied for. "Rosita, I'm not Puerto Rican."

  "What do you mean?"

  "My name is not Felix."

  "I know. It's El Cuquemango."

  "No," he said with irritation. "It is Felix."

  "I thought you said it's not Felix."

  "It's not. There are different levels of not being, tu sabe', and I am not El Cuquemango. But on a much deeper level I am not Felix, either."

  Rosita stared at him the way she would have looked at a magician whose trick she had not yet figured out.

  "I pretend to be Puerto Rican because Puerto Ricans are citizens. I'm not a citizen. I'm—I'm Italian, Siciliano, from Palermo." He started speaking in the Italian he had studied, Sicilian dialect, Palermo accent, with the final vowels swallowed. Rosita spoke to him in Nuyorican and he spoke to her in Siciliano, and they understood each other.

  On the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah, the first afternoon of the Jewish New Year, the tradition is for Jews to walk to the water's edge and rid themselves of the sins of the past year by casting them in the form of pieces of bread into the water. For the Lower East Side, the nearest available repository of sins was the East River. The Seltzer family and many others would walk through the alphabet avenues. They walked past the baths, which were now jade green and called the Kyoto Baths, and past the casita, where it was written on the sidewalk, "Our home has been stolen by the Seltzers."

  This had been written in the night and Chow Mein tried to wash it off the next morning, but the white paint had already set. The Seltzers and the other repentant Jews stepped over the words, walking past the projects and the Latin people who were used to seeing them over there every September.

  Palo was standing in front of a brick wall where someone had written, "Jew landlords took our Casita." He was trying to block the words until Chow Mein got back with spray paint to cover it over. But Palo was not wide enough to block it completely. When Nathan walked by, Palo said, "Sorry, it wasn't us."

  "I know that."

  "We know who it is. We'll take care of it."

  "Let it go."

  "We clean up our own dirt."

  Sarah, who was holding Nathan's hand, looked up at Palo and said, "Can you say 'Bay dem schtetl schteyt a schtibl' really fast?"

  Palo shook his head.

  "Try! Really fast."

  "We have to go, Sarah," said Nathan.

  "By da stable sat a stebl," Palo said gamely. Sarah giggled.
r />   The Jewish sinners could smell the smoke from the building Du-binski was burning down on Avenue C. The squatters would be out, the insurance would pay. Nathan could hear Harry say, "Burning them out on Rosh Hashanah, the anti-Semitic bastard."

  Up the steps to the walkway over the speeding traffic of the FDR Drive they walked, down the other side through the park that was, for the first time in years, starting to be used again, so that the few remaining drug addicts, mainly old-fashioned heroin shooters, would stare in confusion as though caught with their pants down at the parade of Jewish sinners. Then they all walked to the railing by the river along the blacktop walkway, some with broad-brimmed black hats, some with colorful Israeli skullcaps so small only a hair clip would keep them on, others bareheaded, and all sharing the riverside walkway with panting joggers. The Seltzers chose their spot, under the massive steelworks of the Williamsburg Bridge, like standing between the stocky legs of a giant. Across the water were the sugar docks that landed Dominican cargo in Brooklyn.

  As always happens in these matters, those with the fewest sins cast them off the most grandly. For three-year-olds sins are nearly weightless, pondered painfully but readily shed, so Sarah delighted in holding the loaf of bread Sonia had carried for her and breaking off pieces, huge chunks in rapid succession, and hurling them through the fence and into the green brown opaque and churning waters of the East River. Sarah talked of feeding the fish and strained her little body to see fish rush for the bread, but the only fish she saw had its white belly showing and was floating in the current along with what appeared to be a chair leg.

  Poor Harry, afraid of rivers, never got rid of any sins. Nathan thought of how his father had carried to his death the sin of having lusted after a goy, a girl named Klara. When Harry was a child in Poland, where did he cast his sins, or was that how he learned to fear rivers?

  Nathan noticed that his mother, deep in thought, occasionally dropped a piece of bread with a delicate flick of her thumb and forefinger. Ruth could not bring herself to look up at the bridge or even turn her head to the right or left, where waited the unbearable sight of more bridges. She concentrated on the water and the bread.

  Nathan walked over to her, a piece of stale bread in his hand. "Mordy never comes," he said.

  "Oboy it's a gift," Ruth answered.

  "What is?"

  "Mordy doesn't have to come here for the New Year because he has the ability to cast off his sins wherever he finds them. He just tosses them off. The rest of us can't do that. You can't. You are like your father. Like Nusan."

  Nathan thought about his father. Remembering not going to the cuchifrito with him, he tore off a piece of bread and threw it. He thought about Nusan. Did Nusan go to another part of the river, or did he just keep his sins to torture himself? In any event, Nathan could not imagine Nusan willfully throwing out bread.

  "Why was Nusan so angry with Dad?"

  Ruth shook her head as though trying to shake off the question. "He wasn't. He's angry with me. Everyone's angry with me. Now all the Puerto Ricans are angry, too."

  "You just did what you had to do. Everyone understands that."

  Ruth shrugged.

  "You know what I sometimes think?" said Nathan, putting his arm around his mother's shoulder and staring at the troubled East River. "There are a lot of things men do and they are understood, but as soon as a woman does it... You are entitled to a living for your family, too."

  "That's nice, Nathan," said Ruth, patting his cheek the way she did when he was a small and earnest boy "But I'm not as innocent as you imagine. Boyoboy You know what I did?"

  "What?"

  Ruth sighed. "We should all be more like Mordy." She threw more bread in the water. Then she turned to face her son. "I did something really terrible. Not everything can be cast off and forgiven."

  Nathan stopped asking, and they stood there in silence. Ruth turned back toward the river. "Just before the war, Nusan wanted to come here. The whole family. They were desperate. I wouldn't help them."

  Nathan looked at his mother.

  "I didn't understand. We didn't understand. There were almost a dozen of them—brothers, sisters, parents, aunts and uncles, even one grandmother. We had to agree to take them all in, house them, feed them. They had no skills. They didn't even speak English. They were shtetl. They would have turned Avenue A back into a shtetl. They were everything Harry had escaped. Literally. He came here to get away from his family and their life. You hear of Jews fleeing the Cossacks, the pogroms. Harry fled the mespuchak He was running away from his family And happily for him, they didn't want to leave. But then they had to, and we didn't know what to do. You know this country was very anti-Semitic at the time. These people were like a provocation. We would have had a lot of trouble if this neighborhood had started filling up with them. And Harry would have been right back in the place that he had just escaped. But we had to do it. So, oboy, we talked and debated. And thought and agreed that it was what we had to do, and by then the Nazis had taken Poland and you couldn't get them out. Then Hitler killed them all. We didn't know that Hitler was going to kill them all. Who would have thought that? We heard that. We even read pamphlets that claimed it. But who would believe it?"

  Nathan could see the tears gathering in his mother's eyes. He wanted to comfort her, but she pushed him away.

  "I haven't told you the worst. And this was not your father, it was completely my stupid idea. We sent them money. Can you imagine? The Nazis got it all. It was like paying the Nazis to take them."

  Nathan thought of how he struggled to live with his choices. Karo-line. Not going to the cuchifrito. He put his arms around his mother and held her safe under the menacing bridges. But she pushed away again. "So now you know."

  She started to walk away and then turned and came back to the rail. "Nathan," she said, "I've been talking to your father. He comes to me every night."

  Nathan nodded with understanding.

  "You too?"

  Nathan nodded, not looking at her.

  "It's so real. To tell you the truth, we haven't been getting along of late. Every night he's crabbing. The whitefish at Saul's isn't good anymore. It is better on Grand Street. I tell him that Saul Grossman is convenient. I don't want to walk to Grand Street. He says I can get them when I go for bialies. I say, What do you care, you're dead. That's no excuse, he says. And then he starts in on the seltzer delivery, which he says is a plot. By delivering seltzer, they are getting a list of where all the Jews live, like they did in Europe. Oh, and suspending alternate side of the street parking on Jewish holidays is philo-Semitism, he now says. Just anti-Semitism in disguise. This is the meshuggas I listen to every night. Boyoboy, he is a bigger nudnik dead. Do you think this is some way of telling us that his spirit is still alive, in us?"

  "I don't know," said Nathan. "It just happened to me one time... twice."

  "But if he's coming back as a spirit, why isn't he more—I don't know—more spiritual—and not such a nudge? And can I ask him things, like where is the title to number 425? But it's my dream he comes in, and I don't remember these things while I'm dreaming— which makes sense—I mean, I'm asleep. But what about him? He's dead and still he's remembering things like the whitefish at Saul Grossman's."

  Not expecting an answer from Nathan, she quietly started walking back into the neighborhood. Sarah saw her leaving and took her hand. The two walked back holding hands, Ruth weighted to the ground, Sarah skipping, like a balloon tediered to Ruth by an outstretched arm. "Feygele, feygele, pi-pi-pi," they chanted together.

  "Vu is der tate?" Ruth sang gently

  "Nishtahie," Sarah shouted.

  "Vos t'er brengen?"

  "A fesek bit"

  Little bird, little bird, peep-peep-peep. Where is your daddy? He's not here. What will he bring? A mug of beer.

  "You haven't thrown much bread," said Sonia, her curly blond hair vibrating in the swirling river winds at the edge of Manhattan. "No good sins this year?"


  Nathan always suspected that Sonia knew about Karoline. But he would not confess. Karoline had insisted that he would, and he had sworn that he never would. He was not going to let her be right about that. Living with his lie was the only honor he had left. Like Karoline and, for that matter, the Democratic National Committee, he hoped that in time he too would forget this past summer.

  "I'll tell you a good sin, if I'm not limited to last year," said Sonia.

  She's bargaining, Nathan thought. Going back in the archives to get something really good so that I will match it. But no matter what it is, Nathan was resolved that he was not giving up Karoline.

  "I slept with Mordy."

  To his own surprise, Nathan's first reaction was to laugh. How did Mordy do it?

  "Not now. Years ago. When we were first dating."

  "A lot?" The pain was setting in.

  "One time. I was panicking. I had come to New York to be a bo-hemian, a free spirit, an artist. And I was getting deep into this Jewish family with the photocopy guy."

  "The photocopy guy? And what was Mordy?"

  "I know. It was stupid. And every time I see the photocopy guy, if it's just been a few hours you were away, I feel that I love my life because you have come back."

  Nathan reached over and took some bread from her hands and tossed it over the fence into the river. "Gone."

  "Yeah," Sonia said, smiling. "Gone."

  And they turned their back to the river, now filled with floating scraps of bread, the sins of New York rushing out to sea, swirling quickly down the thick and soupy East River, spinning in circles as though someone had pulled the plug in New York Harbor. Nathan and Sonia walked together, his arm around her shoulder.

  "We should take a vacation sometime," Nathan said pensively.

  "That would be nice."

  "It's okay if I bring along my mother?"

  Sonia started laughing.

  "What?" Nathan said. "It would cheer her up. I asked her where she would like to go and you'll never guess what she said."

  "Puerto Rico?"

  "Iceland."

  "You're kidding."

  "Where would you want to go?" Nathan asked.