“You’ll see, man.” Benji turned to his sister. “Laugh now, but you’ll see the way it is when you go to college.”
“Oh, okay, Ben,” Vanessa said. “The flower child hath spoken.”
Benji shook his head. “So sorry, little pseudo-punk girl, to offend your sensibilities.”
Vanessa pinched her nose. “Do you smell that?” She turned to both sides of the table. “It stinks like a hippie, worse than it stank of jock when you lived here.”
“Let me guess,” Benji said. “You’ve lost your appetite?”
“Enough!” Sharon said. “Please—”
Sigmund interrupted, “Why don’t you tell this professor to do some research. Is he over twenty, Ben? Because we were not infatuated with Stalin, not ever. This was a nuanced time. We believed in the Soviet Union, yes. As a model, absolutely. But please ask this professor of yours if he’s ever heard of Trotsky.”
Tatti coughed. “Excuse me,” she said, her hand fluttering to her neck.
“Why don’t we start questioning the university now?” Dennis said.
“Come on, Dennis.” Sharon looked up from her plate. “Sigmund is a teacher, after all. This is the kind of discussion we should embrace. We should always be questioning, right? Isn’t that what we believe in?” She threw up a meek fist.
“Okay, Mom.” Vanessa shook her head. “God.”
“What do the rest of you think of the potatoes? They’re from a farm in Maryland, and so are the onions!” Sharon said.
“They’re just fine, Mom,” Benji said earnestly. “But this is important!” He turned to his grandfather. “I will ask him about that, about Trotsky. Thank you, Grandpa.”
“So it’s settled then.” Dennis resumed eating. “And the potatoes are delicious, Share.”
“See the problem with all this is context, Ben,” Sigmund said, ignoring Dennis. “It was a confusing time. No one had ever seen anything like Stalinism before. It’s your teacher’s job to put things in historical context. You’ve got to remember, remember the revolution: there is no way to ever start new. And while he has a point, separating my generation from the next, he is not right to disown it. I mean, he’s got twenty-twenty vision on his side now, but we were inside it. We would have done anything to keep the Soviet Union in business. Absolutely anything; it was going to save this country. The Soviet Union meant that there would be no poverty, no inequality. That’s what it meant to us then. In light of all these tenets of the sixties, this insistence on rather violent questioning, it’s also important to question where your professor is coming from as well.”
“The revolution?” Dennis said. “That was a thousand years ago. The sixties was revelatory too.”
“I need to write all this down.” Benji put down his napkin.
“Not now,” Sharon said, putting her hand over Ben’s. The gesture was also meant for Dennis. “We’re having dinner.”
“Yes,” Tatti said. “We are eating this beautiful dinner Sharon has worked so hard to prepare.” Pre-pare, she said, her r’s a long trill of the tongue between her teeth. “You may write it down later.”
Sigmund nodded at Sharon. “Oh, the way you talked then, Dennis. But it was like you’d never listened to a word I said. It was like you’d never heard any of it before once you had Vietnam.” He turned to Benji. “Just listen. Please. What’s his point of view? Look at your grandmother—why is she here, after all?”
Tatiana brought her water glass to her lips.
“Why is she here?” Benji asked as if he’d never considered it.
Vanessa looked at their grandmother.
“I departed, first to London, just before what you here call the Great Purge.” Tatiana placed her glass back on the table. “My father was a bureaucrat and he got me a job at a Jewish theater troupe when they came to Leningrad. Stalin allowed this then—he’d appointed the director to an anti-fascism campaign. There were quotas here then; not many people got in. And there was, of course, this irrational fear of communism.”
“They thought there was going to be a communist revolution here, in New York City and Philadelphia!” Sigmund interjected. “Imagine.”
Tatiana smiled. “There was still a hangover from that scare when I came. But I snuck in with a lead actor. We were not farmers! We were well educated; we were the bureaucrats and artists. George Balanchine, also from St. Petersburg, though it was Leningrad then, we came the same year. We were not peasants.”
“She always does this,” Sigmund said. “Who cares you weren’t peasants?”
“Your country,” Tatiana said.
“She was very lucky!” Dennis said. “Right, Mom? I mean, you were really, really fortunate. And later, well, it was awful.”
“What if you had stayed? What would have happened?” Vanessa asked.
“One never knows,” Tatiana said. “It was not good for us there. Not for Jews. Zionism at the time was actually a crime against the state.”
“Well,” Sigmund said, “Zionism is just a form of nationalism, now isn’t it?”
Sharon put down her fork. “You can’t be serious, can you? So persecution of the Jews in the Soviet Union is justified?”
“I said nothing of the kind.”
“He didn’t say that, Sharon,” Dennis said. “But we know, Dad, your socialist beliefs preclude your belief in Israel.”
“Wait,” Benji said. “I’m getting totally confused.”
“And, let me say,” Sigmund said, “that my views on this are changing. I can see the argument for Israel now, let’s say. I can see it clearly.”
Dennis nodded. “How interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say any such thing before.”
Sigmund smiled. “Well, I’m getting older.”
“Wow, how scary,” Vanessa said. “Leaving your country.”
Tatti nodded in agreement.
“Why didn’t your brother come?” Benji asked.
For a second, his question hadn’t seemed to register. She tilted her head. “Oh, Misha. He didn’t have to come. Music was such a part of our lives. George Balanchine was already successful. He was lucky! He was wanted. But what would Misha do here? Many people were coming here only to drive taxis!”
“But wouldn’t Stalin want your brother out too?” Benji asked.
“Well, yes, of course. But he was okay. He played music with the company and took care of my father.”
“Just listen, Benjamin,” Sigmund said, ignoring Tatiana’s rather faraway expression. “You come to our house one weekend, from school, we’ll talk. About all of this.”
“Well,” Dennis said, “it’s an apartment.”
“I’ve been to their place, Dad.” But it had been years. Benji remembered the taxi pulling up on a crowded street and his father dragging him up the stairs, covered in worn rubber treads. Vanessa and Sharon had come up behind them, and he remembered looking back at them and the smell of cabbage and the sharp scent of unfamiliar spices.
“Rent control in New York City is a beautiful thing. There’s a lot for us to discuss,” Sigmund said to Benji. “It’s just so wonderful to know that you are interested.”
Tatti turned to Dennis and said something in Russian.
Dennis nodded.
After a pause, Sharon put down her fork for the second time. “What? What did you just say? We’re all sitting here talking together, it would be nice if we all knew what was being said, don’t you think?” She looked at Dennis, then at Tatti, and back at Dennis. “Hmmm?”
“I’m sorry.” Tatiana wiped her mouth with the linen napkin. “I was saying that the potatoes are good, yes, but so is the turkey. The turkey is very wonderful, Sharon.”
“She was, Share,” Dennis said.
Sharon smiled sheepishly. “Oh!” she said, breathing. “Thank you. You know I brined it. For five days.”
“Brined?” Tatti said, looking closely at a forkful of the bird. Then she looked up at Sharon. “Well, it tastes like he really appreciated it.”
Ben
ji took his grandfather up on his offer and visited his grandparents on the way home to Washington over the winter break. Despite Benji’s protests that he could easily take the subway downtown on his own, Sigmund arranged to meet him at Penn Station. But it was all turned around: instead of running to meet his grandparents at Union Station, now his grandfather, his cap pulled down over one eye, leaned against a pole waiting for him. Is this reversal, Benji thought, what it means to get old?
Benji was grateful his grandfather had come—it was a more complex journey to the Lower East Side than he’d anticipated. They got on the A train, and after an excessive amount of stairs and train changes, and Sigmund’s insistence on running to get in the car that would dump them closest to the proper exit, they finally ended up at the Delancey Street station, just at the turnstiles.
Trying to move through the crowded streets with his grandfather, Benji realized how little time he had spent in an actual city, even though he considered himself to be a city kind of person. He didn’t feel he had grown up in the suburbs, like most of the people he now knew at Brandeis. He’d spent a good deal of his youth in Georgetown and Washington bars—Vanessa used to beg him to take her with him to the Charing Cross, peopled with its frat boys, and girls just back from Rehoboth Beach, as black as beans. Though now, in Waltham, he rarely went into Boston unless it was to go to a movie, or when he and Rachel decided to go to a club or see music with one of her friends in Cambridge.
That wasn’t city, though, Benji thought; it was not navigating streets and avoiding traffic, fighting through the throngs of people, taking public transportation. His grandfather guided them south, showing him Hester Street, which once, Sigmund explained, holding out his arm, had a street market where people spilled out of their flats and bought anything from herring to work pants to chickens killed in the kosher way, bleeding from the neck. He grabbed his own neck and stuck out his tongue by way of example, then took Benji over to Seward Park, and to the Forward building, and the Henry Street Settlement, which, he told Benji, was once the center for Jewish life but now, thankfully, was the center for every kind of life, as it should be.
Accosted by images and smells and chaotic sounds, Benji understood he could never live this way: so crowded in; terribly fearful. He’d never held such fear in him, fear of anyone walking toward them, fear of getting lost in the maze of streets and beneath the overhanging bridges, which he also feared would fall and crush them. He was embarrassed by the way he clung to his grandfather, so at ease as he strolled along past all the kids hanging out on the chilled street with huge combs sticking out from their Afros, the kids with bandannas tied over their faces, their breath hanging in front of them in the cold as they bunched together conspiratorially.
“Is this neighborhood even safe, Grandpa?”
Sigmund waved it off. “It’s fine. When you live somewhere, it’s not dangerous. But it certainly has changed. Absolutely. You should have seen it in the thirties and forties, all Jews, communists, and socialists screaming in the streets over who was what and then banding together anyway to turn on the anarchists, who then went for the Zionists. Now it’s the Puerto Ricans and the Dominicans. Before them, the Chinese, the Mandarins. This is where all the immigrants come, even now.” Sigmund pointed to the Manhattan Bridge, just slung over the city like that, a crisscrossing of roadways suspended over carts and tin-can fires, little figures in fingerless gloves hovered around the heat, hundreds of screaming people beneath it.
And then—finally!—they were at his grandparents’ place on Orchard Street, though Benji couldn’t say how the hell they’d gotten there. He would certainly not have been able to find it again. Once they walked up the three flights, the smell was exactly the same as when he’d come as a boy. And inside the place, he remembered the tall ceilings and molding along the doors and windows, and the open dining area and kitchen.
“You’re too young to know, but rent control,” Sigmund said. A radiator sang with heat. “We pay next to nothing, and see?—we have a lot of space. Plenty of space for two.”
Benji wondered what it must have been like for four as he kissed his grandmother hello and sat down in the chair Sigmund waved to, at the Formica kitchen table piled high with books: Buber’s Paths in Utopia; Stephen Cohen’s Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution; an anthology, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?; issue upon issue of Dissent, many with his grandfather’s name listed in the table of contents, Benji noted as he flipped through them all respectfully.
Then, just as he had finally sat down as if to rest from his labors, Sigmund stood up suddenly. “Wait. Have you read this?” He came back with a tiny book, almost a pamphlet, with a plain red cardboard cover, worn thin. “Please, if you haven’t read this, you must read it now. I’ll wait.” He crossed his arms.
Benji felt the soft, faded cover and nodded. “It was the first book we read in class.” He handed The Communist Manifesto back to his grandfather.
He heard Tatiana let out her breath.
“Well, thank God for that,” Sigmund said. “At least some things don’t change.”
As Benji listened to his grandparents for the afternoon, he finally decided what he would do for his American Protest! class. They had choices: Organize and run a campus workshop! Prepare a pamphlet! Document the oral history of a movement! Develop a network of former and current activists! Start your own protest! Base your project on the past, Professor Schwartz had said, but look toward the future. That’s revolution.
Benji decided he would do an oral history not of a movement but of a family. Just before the Great Purge, Tatti had said, we ran four city blocks, holding hands. Once I went to Moscow and I skated in Gorky Park. She’d described the meat pies and the scratchy records an old woman played as the skaters in their fur caps and dull skates went round and round. Later the Jews were being persecuted but Misha was okay. My father had protection. Communism was not all bad, she’d said, winking. The ballet, it was beautiful. I came over the same year as George Balanchine. For the Ballets Russes! Like nothing you have ever seen. Benji had thought of the only ballet he had been to: The Nutcracker at the Kennedy Center, his mother in the red velvet seat next to him hitting his leg every time the sugarplum fairies scampered onto the stage in their stiff white tutus.
Sigmund had dismissed her. “That’s ridiculous, Tatiana. Art has nothing to do with communism.”
Tatiana had smiled.
“But see, Ben,” Sigmund said, “communism there, it was very different than here. That is the major thing people don’t understand. About the failure. It was never going to work here. These are two different cultures. There is more than a world between us, and it is wrong to say that only economics would link us. Even this country, this single nation is so varied. In the end, what was of vital interest to the farmers in the dust bowl was not going to be important to the factory workers here.” Sigmund waved his arm at the kitchen window above the sink, where Tatiana had stood, her cheek illuminated by gray light. Sigmund smiled. “But I’ll tell you, down here, on the Lower East Side, was the most interesting part of the Soviet Union!”
“Now that’s ridiculous,” Tatti said. “This is not the Soviet Union.”
“The most interesting part, I said. Here, at least we could have a discussion about the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin. There was no discussion in the Soviet Union. You are forgetting everything!”
“I’m forgetting nothing.” She turned to Benji from the sink, where she was slicing cucumbers. “You know I met your grandfather at a Communist Party meeting. Or maybe it was a benefit of some kind. For the striking seamen, I think.” She turned back to her slicing. “I wasn’t interested in the politics; everything was art for me then. But I missed home! I wanted to see some Russians. Of course there wasn’t a Russian in the place.” She turned to face her husband.
“Why you didn’t think you’d get deported still unnerves me,” Sigmund said.
Tatti ignored him. “Who was singing, Sigmund?” she asked
instead. “I want to say it was Ethel Rosenberg, but I know it couldn’t have been she.” She turned to Benji. “She did sing at meetings sometimes. She had a very high soprano voice. It was lovely in its own way. You know about Ethel Rosenberg?”
“Yeah.” Benji imagined her again, as a ghost. “I do.”
“It was just awful what they did to that poor woman.” Tatti looked over to her husband. “Maybe it was Helen. Sigmund, could it have been Helen singing?”
Benji’s grandfather shook his head. “Your grandmother Helen.” Sigmund threw his head to the right, as if Helen Weissman were just outside the door. “She sang all over the neighborhood. I remember some picket-line stuff, that time in front of Orbach’s, a lot of Spanish-loyalist activity, but not at CP events, darling, what are you talking about?”
“You knew Grandma Helen?”
“No,” Tatti said. “We didn’t know her, and it was only when Dennis was getting married to your mother that we realized we had heard her sing. She was the opposite of Ethel Rosenberg; low and very sad. A very nice voice. I had thought it was at a meeting, no?”
“Most definitely not. She was decidedly unpolitical,” Sigmund said. “How else could she have married that man? No values! Just works for whoever pays. Capitalist pig.”
“That’s enough,” Tatti said, looking nervously at Benji.
Benji thought of Herbert handing him one of his collectible Olympic coins. It was fulgent, smooth, brand-new. To start your collection, he’d said, pressing it into Benji’s palm. That was capitalism.
“You know this is true, Tatiana.” Sigmund crossed his arms. “You know this.”
Tatti nodded, her mouth pulling down at both corners as if tugged by two strings. “Well, anyway then, the day we met, on this particular day, Sigmund and I both stood in the back. In the beginning this is where your grandfather stood, before he left and went to the young socialists and learned how to get on a soapbox and scream his head off.”
“Unlike your grandmother, who went to people’s doors,” Sigmund said. “Or whatever she did at people’s doors.”
Tatti reddened. “I was campaigning for Roosevelt. I believed in his New Deal. I don’t see how you couldn’t have.”
Something Red Page 21
