Nudelman popped up, stamped on the broken rubber band, and sat down again. “I was jailed six months after the Rubells were murdered.
“Henky Rubin was forty-nine when he died. He looked hale and hearty. We must leave to history the atrociously rich complexity of human nature—”
“You talk,” Manya said, “like I don’t know what—a dog with a college education.”
“Remember,” Nudelman said, “that the Rubell Committee, just like the Party, was shot through with F.B.I. agents. Rubin’s death apparently came from a heart attack. But the police suspected foul play. Rubin’s body was pajama clad, while his head was in a bathtub filled with water. A law officer told Rubin’s law partner: ‘We have to be sure that someone on your side didn’t bump him off because he knew too much.’”
“This I don’t know,” Manya said. “They call you a pervert, an interloper, a provocateur, and a Trotskyite. If that’s all that’s wrong with you, in my opinion it’s not so bad. Have a beer.”
Later that night, the couple, he with his duffle bag filled with his pamphlets, petitions, ruminations, and autobiography: Vomit-Provoking Thoughts, and she with a shopping bag in each hand, trundled through Union Square. He shyly asked her if she had a place where he could stay. “No,” she said, “but I was wondering if you got a place for me?”
They looked at each other, and took the subway to the all-night automat on 47th Street and Broadway.
At dawn, as the sky lightened over Broadway, over the RKO Palace and Jack Dempsey’s and Lindy’s and the Latin Quarter and Hubert’s Flea Circus, the two Leninists thought it through and through, circling around and around their hunches and suspicions, how the Party fucked up and smelled rotten, but at dawn, their pale faces faint with fatigue, their berets falling over their faces, they knew for certain: it was the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. that had framed the Rubells. It was a close call, but still, as they gathered up their stuff, shooed out by the manager, they believed.
Judy Garland’s picture was on the Palace marquee. “What disgusting displays,” Nudelman said. “Lipstick, bosoms. This could never happen in the Soviet Union.”
Manya bopped him on the side of the head. “You don’t like Judy Garland? Mister, you gotta lighten up a little.”
Nudelman jumped up in the air. “Sir, your accusations are fit for the machinations of the F.B.I. You’ve appeared pleasant enough, but the vicious nature of some humans accommodates both affection and outright betrayal. Goodnight.”
Manya shrugged, and headed for the union hall. Perhaps he was a little unstable.
(In 1979, the reporter asked her: “What do you think you are?” Manya: “I don’t know. I’m not interested in myself. I’m a human being with all the human shortcomings. So help yourself with a cookie.”)
Sometimes she would go the whole day on the picket line without time to eat anything, drink a cup of coffee, go to the bathroom. The picket line began at 8 A.M. “The bosses are trying to choke it in the bud!” she shouted. When it was over, the strike committee met. Manya was chairman. Three hours remained for sleep. She slept on the bench in the union hall. At 6 A.M., she took a napkin out of her pocket, patted herself, and went back to the picket line. It went on for three months. Her mother said there were only three big Communists: Lenin, Trotsky, and Manya.
In 1928, the cafeteria workers had gone on strike. A court injunction was issued against the strikers. They decided they would have to break the injunction. Manya was chosen to go first. She could hold the line longer than anyone else.
She began picketing the cafeteria alone. A policeman said, “Madam, don’t you know there is an injunction here?”
“What is an injunction?” Manya asked.
“I think it means you cannot strike. I’m not sure, frankly.”
“Listen, Officer,” Manya said, “you seem like a very nice person. I’ll tell you: workers from this cafeteria are not allowed to strike. But I don’t work here. So I don’t think the injunction applies to me. Why don’t you let me read it?”
The injunction was twenty-five pages long. It was mumbo jumbo to her, but she kept reading, walking slowly up and down with her picket sign up. The cafeteria manager stood by the door shaking with rage. No customers entered. The first policeman sought a second policeman, but he was also inexperienced in these matters.
After several more minutes, the first policeman said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to arrest you. The manager is distressed.”
“All right, I’m arrested,” said Manya. “Tow me away.”
The policeman called the station and asked for reinforcements. Manya checked the clock. Another half hour passed. She was still walking.
Two officers from the station house arrived. Manya held on to the cafeteria pole “like two mules.” They couldn’t pull her away. They clubbed her arms. She thought she heard a bone being fractured.
It was noon. A large crowd formed. Traffic was halting on Fifth Avenue, a two-way street. The police frantically directed the cars to move on. Buses were rerouted. The crowd applauded Manya and booed the policemen.
The policemen used their nightsticks to beat her hands. She let go of the pole. They tried to pick her up. She kicked them and spat at them. She looked at the clock: ten minutes to one. Three more cops joined in and tried to pull her into the police car.
In the car the policemen hit her in the mouth. One of her teeth popped out, and a torrent of blood followed. It poured out on her coat, on the floor, on the men’s uniforms. They socked her in the eye. It closed and swelled. They beat her on the nose. It bled. They beat her all over with their fists and heels, this bitch who had humiliated them.
She was unconscious when they brought her into the station. Four ribs were broken.
Bail was set at ten thousand dollars. Manya pleaded with the union rep to let her go to jail because the union couldn’t afford that price. The rep was afraid of the condition of her eyes.
Manya said, “Look, no doctor can even find my eyes now because they’re closed and swollen. I’m sure they won’t beat me in jail. I’m okay there. I know everybody.”
In jail she did know most of the girls: about forty prostitutes, one millinery worker, one dressmaker. A registered nurse looked at her eyes and said she must have ice. The women screamed until ice packs were brought.
That night the weather was hot. The windows were closed and the steam was turned on full blast. It was impossible to breathe in the cells.
The women pleaded for the guards to open the windows, but they refused. They screamed and yelled, “Open the windows, shut off the steam.” During the midnight count, Manya led the women in singing, at the top of their voices, “Hold the Fort,” the “Marseillaise,” and the “Internationale.”
Suddenly the women heard the steam being closed off, the windows being opened. One of the prostitutes said, “Can you beat that? ‘Russia’ gets the steam shut off and the windows opened in an American jail. We couldn’t do it, but ‘Russia’ did it!”
Manya said, “You’ll be very pleasantly surprised, sisters, at what the example of the Soviet Union will do for you in the future.”
When Manya was six, her friends, most of whom were Christian, were discussing who would go to heaven. They didn’t know. They asked a Greek Orthodox mother. She replied: Only the Greek Orthodox people would go to heaven.
The children, especially Manya, weren’t satisfied. They went to a Catholic mother. She said only the Catholics would go to heaven. When they had tried all the other mothers, Manya said, “Well, let’s try mine. What have we got to lose?” Manya’s mother told them: “All the Jews will go to heaven, and everybody else will go to hell.”
Manya led the children to her father. She said of him, “He’s a very religious man, but he knows in the world everything.” Her father sat in his study. “Papa,” she asked, “how big is the Jewish population compared to the gentiles in the world?” He replied, “The Jews are a tiny fraction; maybe one percent.” “My God,” Manya said, “then hea
ven must be such a small place.”
Her father said, “What makes you say that?”
Manya told him what all the mothers, including her own, had said.
“No, my child,” he said, “not only the Jews will go to heaven. Any human being that cares for another human being will go there, regardless of his religion. Any human being that cares for an animal, that picks up a wounded dog, tries to help him, will go to heaven.
“So you see, Manya,” he said, “heaven is not such a small place.”
Her parents wanted her to fast on Yom Kippur from the age of thirteen. Her mother said, “If you eat on Yom Kippur, you die.” When she was fourteen, Manya wanted to test God. So she secretly had a snack. She was terrified all day. By evening, she could not stop laughing.
Manya began printing and distributing Bolshevik literature at fifteen. She made leaflets on a press made out of gelatin, spreading the ink over and over again. She hid the gelatin stamp and the ink under a board under her bed.
Manya and the other young Bolsheviks organized a watch through the night to guard against a pogrom. They had two rifles that worked, but they paraded back and forth with six, as well as fifteen pinless grenades.
When the war ended, Manya left for America.
How could she leave the Party? At one time expulsion would have been worse than death.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Central Committee said that in the future everything had to be voted on by a majority. In her club she shouted, “What means from now on? So what was before?”
After Khrushchev’s speech in 1956, she claimed that she never slept again. Khrushchev said that if the other leaders, like himself, had protested, Stalin would have murdered them. “Where were their balls?” Manya shouted.
At first she had thought it was only the American Party that was at fault. One night at her club meeting, Sylvia Pollack said, “Isn’t it wonderful how Brezhnev embraces Gus Hall? Gus told me that Brezhnev gave him a big hug and thanked him for doing such a marvelous job.”
“Wait a fucking minute,” Manya said. She walked up to Sylvia and spat at her. Sylvia spat back.
Manya ran out of the room, leaving her shopping bags behind.
She couldn’t eat. She stopped looking for work.
She stopped going to Soviet movies, concerts, the Bolshoi.
She found a room of her own on the Upper West Side, a cot, a chair, and a table. She lined up seven bottles of beer on the floor at night, lay down on the cot, her eyes wide open. If she were in the Soviet Union, she would have one of three fates: shock therapy, an insane asylum, or a concentration camp.
“So now I know,” she said, her voice thick by 3 A.M. “I even know why I never had a union job. What the hell’s the point of even looking anymore? Even when the Party is in the union leadership. Somehow everybody gets a job except me. Even progressives want obedients. I took over jobs if somebody left sometimes … two months, three months … and then I had to give them up. Not only by the other side was I denied a job. I was denied by my own … nobody wants to stick their neck out … everybody wants quiet, Goddamnit …”
(She told the reporter in 1982: “There were sufferers in many other unions too. We are as we are, that’s all. I couldn’t sell myself for a job. It’s not easy to be straight. It’s not easy to try to better a shop. Everybody wants to have a smooth circle. In every shop there was something doing against the workers. Wherever I was, I couldn’t tolerate it. That’s all. There will be a time when people will be able to be free. And people will be able to straighten up. But so far, we haven’t got it. We never had it.”)
She looked around for a group that really believed in revolution. She found that even the most militant had a soft spot for Israel. “Why is everybody so hot for Israel?” she asked in her thick Yiddish accent. “Goddamnit, what is it? What makes Israel so holy? The Israelis even have the American president in their pocket. In six or seven states there are almost a million Jews. And they can swing a president. So that’s why all the American presidents handle the Israelis with silk gloves. Goddamnit, because of the Jews. And those six states don’t only rule from Riverside Drive to West End Avenue. They rule America.” At this point Manya lost some of her listeners, but she went on: “The formation of Israel didn’t juice me up, I’ll tell you the truth. The Israelis are worse than Hitler. If the czarist government or Brezhnev or Hitler chased me out and told me I could never come back, I would work my life, I would work to my death to kill all of those who did it.”
Manya had a difficult time adjusting to some of the harsh new language of the sixties. “Kill the pigs” was a chant she found hard to digest. For years progressive Jews in the Party had expressed their admiration for pigs: their lovely taste, their working-class heft, their simplicity and unbourgeois brawn. “You look like a pig” had been a compliment, and Manya still found herself saying it by mistake.
It was the black militants who seemed to her to have kept their revolutionary purity.
Manya began selling copies of the Black Panther on Harlem street corners.
It was beautiful, the way this little Jewish activist understood, Lonnie Rose thought. She had come into the Panther office, given the black power salute, and handed out cartons of chopped liver. Flagrant lies had been espoused against them, yet Manya was always with them. When Lonnie lectured about the history of Palestine and the two alien pigs, British imperialism and kosher nationalism, there was Manya shouting, “That’s right, shoot first!” When he explained that when the Jews were barbecued, they should have learned to behave themselves, Manya said, “Right on!”
When the Panthers were on trial, Manya would make a hissing sound in the courtroom. The judge couldn’t pinpoint it. He spotted an old lady muttering in the first row and told her to come forward. Manya hobbled forth on two canes, and was told to keep her opinions to herself.
When the defendants were held in the Tombs, she would bring a little paper bag for each one, with chicken, fruit, and a piece of cake, all neatly wrapped, napkins, a small can of juice, and a can opener. “If I can’t be behind bars with them,” she said, “I can at least make things a little nicer for them.”
If there was an acquittal, she shouted, “Hurray for the people’s jury!” and tossed two canes in the air.
Manya helped Lonnie dissolve a lot of negative feelings he’d been harboring. And the checks she sent them with the notes: “This is to be used only for a fugitive from justice who shoots first.”
Lonnie loved having Manya around when he talked about capitalism and imperialism and their running dogs, pork chop nationalism, kosher nationalism, taco nationalism, all that doomed shit imposing against the grain of history. They had two interpreters in the room, one doing sign language for the deaf, and Manya, translating Lonnie into Yiddish.
Lonnie wondered how she would react to the cartoon in the Black Panther that showed two pigs toe to toe, shaking hands and kissing, snout to snout. The pig labeled “Zionism” had an Israeli flag and wore a black eye patch. It held aloft in one arm a religious scepter crowned with a Star of David. The other pig was labeled “U.S.A.” The front page also had a cartoon of a massive, bare-breasted pig labeled U.S.A. suckling two piglets, one called Israel, the other Germany. Grouped around the pig’s feet, waiting their turn to be suckled, were ten other piglets: the countries of the Western world from France to Belgium.
“A little hyperbole there,” Lonnie said defensively to Manya, testing her reaction. “I’ll tell you the truth,” Manya said, “I never thought pigs could be so ugly.” Lonnie sparkled at this, roared, gave her an embrace that knocked out two of her last teeth.
By 1974, Manya thought she had asthma, ulcers, dozens of allergies (she fainted from plums), heart disease. She told friends that Dr. Reuben’s book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, had come too late. If she had read it sooner, she would have married again. She heard psychiatrists talk on the radio about medication for depression, called them up
and saw them for a few weeks. She tried acupuncture. She underwent a nutrition analysis. They took a strand of her hair and told her she was deficient in zinc.
Manya became a volunteer in the old-age home on Riverside Drive. She soon was shouting that the hospital needed to be “cleaned up from the waist,” that it was neglecting the patients. The hospital barred her from the premises, but she kept coming back. In desperation they assigned her a social worker, Linda Pastoff. Manya tried to recruit the social worker into the Panthers, put up notices of demonstrations on the bulletin board, collected money for various causes when the social worker was out of the building.
Manya reminisced to Linda Pastoff about the years when she had raised two children. When she had been on a picket line, she said, and it had been a terrible day, before entering the house she would always compose herself and comb her hair and enter the apartment singing so that the children would not be upset. She said she never had much money, but she could always afford a couple of lemons and some sugar, and would make a big pitcher of lemonade for them and tell them to bring their friends to the house.
She had more and more blackouts from her allergies. Between blackouts she made Easter baskets for the children of the Panthers, stormed her way into the hospital to visit the elderly progressives, and was a full-time activist with the local welfare council, the Panthers, and a peace committee.
In 1975 Manya applied to live at the old-age home. “Over my dead body,” Irving Bernstein, the director, told Linda Pastoff. “Now she’s stealing food from the cafeteria to bring up to the patients.”
Manya began to visit Linda Pastoff every few days.
In 1976 she blacked out for two days. When she awoke, she attempted suicide.
In a few weeks she was an activist again.
Linda Pastoff s Manya Poffnick File: 1974-1984
September 1974. Mrs. Poffnick complained that over the last few weeks she has become incontinent and has begun to sleep. She claimed that she had not slept at all for eighteen years prior to this. She is sleeping more and more, up to sixteen hours a night. Mrs. Poffnick had to stop taking Elavil as “it was tearing me apart,” a feeling she could not describe in any other way and that she has never had before.
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