Fourth Street East

by Jerome Weidman

  Fourth Street East

  A Novel Of How It Was

  Jerome Weidman

  For Peggy and Our Sons Jeff and John

  Contents

  Foreword

  1 The Head of the Family

  2 Draft Status

  3 A Kid or a Coffin

  4 A Correction

  5 Mafia Mia

  6 In Memoriam

  7 Rowboats and Canoes

  8 “Departure”

  Preview: Last Respects

  Foreword

  New Words for Objects New and Old

  16 October 1998

  An old friend of mine, an Englishman, was saying how close British English and American English have come together compared with the days, say, of my boyhood when nobody in Britain, except kings, statesmen, ambassadors and bankers had ever heard an American speak. I was 21 when sound (what we called ‘talking pictures’) came in, and I remember the shock to all of us when we heard the weird sounds coming out of the mouths of the people on the screen.

  And of course, quite apart from becoming familiar with the odd pronunciations of Americans of all sorts, we began to notice differences in the usage of words; we became aware for the first time of the great changes and unknown additions to the language that had been made by Englishmen who had been settling in America for three hundred years. It occurred to most of us rather late that this was bound to happen when Englishmen arrived on a new continent, saw a new landscape which had to be described with different words (tidewater, creek), new foods, new habits of life and work, not to mention the adoption, first from the Dutch, of new words for objects new and old. Englishmen who’d eaten buns found themselves eating crullers, and sitting out on the stoops of their houses. If you want to follow the impress of Spanish, Russian, German, Italian, Hungarian, Czech, and the other European languages on the English of America, all you have to do is go to the library and take out the 2,400 finely printed pages of Mr H. L. Mencken’s massive work, The American Language. And that will take you only as far as 1950.

  The point my old friend was making was that after almost seventy years of talking pictures, and with the radio and television now becoming universal media, nothing in American speech or writing surprises us any more and the two languages have rubbed together so closely for so long that they are practically indistinguishable.

  Well, there’s much in this. But there are still little signs in any given piece of American prose playing a mischievous devil’s advocate. One time last year I wrote a piece of English prose, quite guileless stuff, a page of fiction about a single mild adventure of a young man in New York. I asked this same old Englishman to go over it and strike out words which proved that, though the locale of the story was New York City, and the presumption of the story and all the fixings was that it had been written by an American, there were lots of little signs which showed it could not have been written by anyone but an Englishman. I’ll just say two things: that my friend missed them, and that most Englishmen would have, too.

  Just last week there was printed in the New Yorker magazine a phrase about Californian wines, proving that the writer or copy editor was English. No American talks or writes about Californian wines. California wines. ‘California’ is the adjective. ‘Californian’ is a noun: a native or resident of California. The other most gross and most frequent trick which not one Englishman in a thousand ever seems to notice is this: I say or write, ‘I have a friend in England called Alan Owen.’ That is an immediate giveaway. No American could say or write it unless they’d been corrupted by long close association with the Brits. Americans write and say, ‘I have a friend in England named Alan Owen.’ Maybe he’s called Al. ‘Called’ would refer to a nickname. ‘Named’ is used where the English use ‘called.’ In other words, a President named William Jefferson Clinton is called Bill Clinton. ‘Named’ always for the baptismal name … right?

  We went on to discuss American words, phrases, usually slang, that are picked up in England (E. B. White said it usually took fifteen years) and there go wrong, quite often assuming an opposite meaning. A beauty close to home is the word ‘bomb’. When a book, a play, a movie flops with a sickly thud, it is said to have bombed. ‘It ran a year in London, but bombed in New York.’ Inexplicably, it got to England and took on the opposite meaning. I shall never, you’ll appreciate, forget a telephone call from my daughter in England when a book of mine, a history of America carrying the succinct title America, had just come out. ‘Daddy,’ she shouted across the Atlantic, ‘your book is a bomb!’ I very much prayed it wasn’t so. Indeed, the fact it wasn’t is one reason why I’m sitting here talking to you at this late date – in comfort.

  All this amiable light talk sprang from a darker happening: the passing of a great American writer, who received a large, worthy obituary in the New York Times but, to my surprise and dismay, did not rate a mention in the news magazines. I’m afraid it’s because the writers of literary obituaries are too young to have remembered the splendid prime and great popularity of the man. His name was Jerome Weidman, and, if we were living in the 1930s, 1940s or 1950s and he had died, you would no more have been ignorant of his name than today you would say, Who is John Updike, Martin Amis? (Who, asked a contemporary of a grandson of mine, who was Ernest Hemingway?) There you have it, the frailty, the treachery, of fame. Jerome Weidman was not just a popular novelist, in the sense that James Michener or Dorothy Sayers were popular novelists. Jerome Weidman was a popular novelist who greatly impressed the literary world of New York with his first novel. He was 24 years old and earning $11 a week as an office boy and starting secretary, when in the spring of 1937, he published I Can Get It for You Wholesale.

  Here was a story mining a new vein by a young man who, even at that tender age, knew the subject, the terrain and the people inside out. It was about Manhattan’s garment centre – the hub and vortex of maybe half a million New Yorkers who whirled every day around the making of pants and coats; a mainly Jewish industry, because so many immigrant tailors originally had set it up.

  Jerome Weidman’s mother was Hungarian, and his father a young Austrian who, like George Gershwin’s Russian father, was alerted to the prospect of America and the immigrant ships by hearing the sound of a bugle, the call to fight for the Austrian emperor, which didn’t mean a year or two of military service but a semi-life sentence. He hopped it to New York City and went at once, on the Lower East Side, back to his only trade: he made trousers, pants. His son Jerome maintained against all comers that his father’s unique genius was for making better pants pockets than any other tailor on earth.

  Jerome was brought up on the Lower East Side, with the sights and sounds and idiom of the garment men and their families. That first book created a character, Harry Bogen, a shrewd, quicksilver scamp who in several disguises was to appear in his later books. All the best ones were about this life he knew as well as Dickens knew the East End of London. What was new and liberated the American novel from gentility (or the Hemingway flat protest against it) was the running talk, the exact sound and sense of the lowly characters – the first-generation immigrant sons striving to be free.

  Now you’ll see why such a man, such a writer, prompted our whole talk about the American language. Jerome Weidman was the first American street-smart novelist. (There – there’s another one, turned in England often into ‘street-wise’; nobody’s wise on the streets, but Jerome Weidman and his swarming characters are nothing if not street-smart.) He never adopted this language, but it came so naturally that when he chose titles for his subsequent works he fell as naturally as Ira and George Gershwin did into simply taking over some prevailing bit of American idiom slang. After I Can Get It for You Wholesale came What’s in It for Me? and The Price Is
Right – marvellously constructed short novels that made guessing the next turn of character as tense as tracking down a murderer. His last book, written in 1987, was a memoir, and the then senior book editor of the New Yorker magazine headed his review with the single, simple word: Pro. So he was, the complete professional, as Balzac was a pro, and Dickens. Indeed, it’s not reaching too far to say that Jerome Weidman was the Dickens of the Lower East Side (throw in the Bronx, too). He never started out with an ambition to be a writer. He was going into the garment business, and then, he thought, law school. Then he read Mark Twain and saw how he made literature out of the humblest material. All you needed was insight into character and an ear for the character’s speech. ‘Life for me on East Fourth Street’, Weidman once wrote, ‘when I was a boy was not unlike what life on the banks of the Mississippi had been for young Sam Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri. Guileless, untrained and unselfconscious, I put the stories down on paper the way I learned to walk.’

  After a fine rollicking success as a novelist, he wrote a musical play about the incomparable, cocky, little Italianate reform Mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia. It was called simply Fiorello. The most prestigious theatre prize in this country (as also for fiction, history, whatever) is the Pulitzer Prize. On a spring day in 1960, in his forty-eighth year, Jerome Weidman was deliciously thunderstruck to hear he had won it with Fiorello. I should tell you that if another famous novelist had lived on a year or two longer, you may be sure that one of the first calls of congratulation would have come from him: Jerome’s old friend, the late W. Somerset Maugham. As it was, the first call came from his mother. Neither Jerome’s father nor mother was comfortable with English. They were of that generation that was forever wary of the outside world they’d moved into – the world of America and Americans. Jerome Weidman recalled with pride, and typical exactness, what his mother said to him in that telephone call: ‘Mr Mawgham was right. That a college like Columbia University, when they decided to give you a price like this should go and pick a day to do it that it’s the twelfth anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. If you listened to me and became a lawyer a wonderful thing like this could never have happened.’

  He will be rediscovered, and revived, and read, when many, more famous and fashionable American writers, big guns today, are dead and gone for ever.

  Jerome Weidman, born Lower East Side, New York City, 1913. Died Upper East Side, New York City, October 1998. RIP. Jerome, Harry Bogen, and Momma and Poppa Weidman.

  From Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America, 1946–2004, originally published 2004

  1

  The Head Of The Family

  ONE THING I HAVE learned. The only people who ever get rich on compound interest are bankers. The rest of us have to figure out a quicker way to do it. My father never did.

  There are those who say my father never figured out anything. He was certainly not a brilliant man. I have heard him called stupid. Perhaps he was. If so, he was decent and stupid. I found myself thinking about this on a Sunday morning two weeks ago. That was the day they buried him.

  Forty-eight hours earlier, after finishing his breakfast, my father dropped dead of a heart attack. Dropped is the literally accurate word. My mother, who was facing him across the table, says he stood up, then fell down. There was no noticeable pause between these two abrupt movements. The doctor tells me death was so sudden that he is certain my father could not have had a moment of pain. I hope the doctor is right. My father deserved that. He had just passed his eighty-second birthday. To my knowledge, not one of those eighty-two was ever celebrated.

  Of the first thirty, I know only what I have heard. I was born when my father was twenty-eight, and during my first two or three years I seem to have been aware of only one parent: my mother. This is not surprising. Nobody ever called her stupid.

  During my third or fourth year my mind began to record the impression that there was a third person around the house. Years later, long after I had accepted the fact that I lived with two adults, I began to hear things about my father’s early years.

  I heard them from relatives who came to call, usually on my mother. From neighbors who dropped in, always to see my mother. From shopkeepers in the neighborhood to whom I was sent, by my mother, for the breakfast rolls, or the saltpeter she needed for putting up a new batch of corned beef. None of these things I heard was said directly to me. They were scraps of sound that passed over my head. Some were accompanied by laughter. I did not realize then that to many of our relatives my father was a joke. Some of these sounds, especially the ones I heard in Deutsch’s grocery or Mr. Lesser’s drug store, had an edge that made for uncomfortable listening. I did not realize then that to many of our neighbors my father was an object of contempt.

  Some of these scraps of sound vanished after they passed over my head. I cannot remember what they contained. Many stuck with me. I was unaware of this. They kept piling up without my knowledge, like bits of cigarette tobacco in the corners of a pocket. Sunday morning, two weeks ago, standing beside a freshly dug grave, the accumulated scraps of almost half a century suddenly began to fall into a pattern. Now that he was dead, I could see my father clearly.

  Joseph Tadeus Isaac Kramer was born in either 1885 or 1886. The uncertainty about the date is due to the fact that neither my father nor I was ever able to locate his birth certificate. He did not recall that it was the practice to keep such records in the corner of Europe where he was born. It is possible that his birth was never officially recorded anywhere.

  On his U.S. citizenship papers, however, which bear the date 1914, the year of his birth is given as 1886. Even if my father, pressed by the authorities to help them fill in a blank space on a form, had given them no more than a guess based on his best recollection, the chances are that such a guess would have been fairly accurate in 1914, when my father felt he was only twenty-nine years old. My mother felt differently.

  There was no doubt about the year of her birth. The receipt for the steerage passage in the Dutch ship that had brought her to this country indicates clearly that Anna Zwirn was born in 1885. Thus, if my father’s 1914 guess about the year of his birth was correct, Joseph Tadeus Isaac Kramer was one year younger than his wife. My mother did not like that.

  Another thing she did not like was the complexity of my father’s family tree.

  His father had owned and operated a roadside inn near a town called Woloshonowa in either Austria or Poland. The uncertainty was irritating but understandable. The boundary line between the two countries at this point was changed frequently, not always as a result of the outcome of a war. My father’s father—I find it difficult to think of him as my grandfather—was a prosperous man. His inn was on one of the tributary roads that fed the main highway to Warsaw.

  My father was the fourth of seven children, all boys. None of them received any formal education. Perhaps there were no schools in the area. Perhaps my father’s father did not believe in formal education. None of the scraps of talk that passed over my head when I was a child ever touched on this subject.

  My father and his brothers worked in the fields that surrounded the inn, and while the passengers refreshed themselves, helped change the horses of the coaches that stopped on the way to and from Warsaw. I recall nothing about my father’s feeling for farm labor, but I have a distinct impression that he liked working with the horses. This may be the reason why, when he was conscripted and went off at eighteen to serve for three years in the armies of Emperor Franz Josef, my father was assigned to the cavalry. I used to think this sounded romantic, but I doubt that it was. My father’s services to the Austrian cavalry consisted of currying horses and cleaning stables. My feeling persists, however, that he enjoyed the work.

  While he was away from home, going through his military service, my father’s mother died. The only hard fact I can remember having heard about her deals with her death. One day, while carrying a tray of drinks out to the passengers in a coach that had stopped in th
e courtyard of the inn, she tripped and fell. Her head struck a stone. She was carried to her bed. Whether there were no doctors in the area, or whether my father’s father felt about the medical profession the way he felt about formal schooling, I don’t know. All I know is that my father’s mother lay in a coma for four days. Then she died. When my father came home from the army at twenty-one, he discovered that his father had remarried. My father’s stepmother was nineteen.

  There is some confusion in my mind about the climate of this second marriage. In the scraps of talk that passed over my head there were, I see now, many variations of the traditional jokes about the old husband and the young wife. Just how old my father’s father was, I don’t know. However, when my father came home from the army at the age of twenty-one, the oldest of his six brothers was twenty-nine. None was married. My father went back to work beside them in the stables and in the fields.

  Why he did not remain with his family very long after his army service is not clear. My casual efforts to get information out of my relatives were not rewarding. Again, all I have is an impression. It tells me that none of these adults felt it was proper to satisfy a boy’s idle curiosity with facts that, in their opinion, he was too young to hear. One of the facts I did hear was imbedded in somebody’s indiscreet observation—hurriedly stifled by somebody else’s sharply spoken Shveig!—that of my father’s father’s seven sons, the new young wife liked my father best.

  Perhaps she liked him too much. In any case, a few months after he came home from the army, my father left the inn near Woloshonowa and set out for America. I suspect he did not leave with his father’s blessing. He certainly left with none of his father’s cash. The journey from Woloshonowa in Austria (or Poland) to Castle Garden in New York harbor took three years. My father worked his way.