by Carol Zoref
“You don’t have to bang like that,” said my father.
I shrugged one of those I hear what you’re saying but I’m going to do it anyway looks.
“Suit yourself,” he said. My father banged his bat a couple of times to emphasize his point and kept on banging the whole time we were crossing. The rats went on gorging themselves on maggot-covered scrap, but they stayed away from us. After a while, once he got his rhythm, my father ate one of the sandwiches that my mother had packed for us. I could no more eat on a garbage scow surrounded by the rats and horse guts than I could have eaten a rat itself. My father ate my sandwich too and I kept on banging.
A man with a cart rode us from the dock in Sheepshead Bay to a subway that milk-stopped its way to Manhattan. My father pointed out the sights when we climbed up from the subway. “Cooper Union,” he said, indicating the large, sandstone building in front of us. “Abraham Lincoln spoke there when he was running for president. And Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist who met with Lincoln at the White House. And Mark Twain, the writer. I bet you’ve read Tom Sawyer.” I had not.
“They were Jewish?”
“You think I only know about Jews?”
I did not answer.
“Cooper Union is where smart, gentile boys study engineering and architecture. Jewish boys go to City College, also free. Over there, across the street, is the Carl Fischer Building. You see the name painted on the side? That’s where all the orchestras in America get their sheet music. On the other side of the square is Wanamaker’s, the department store, very fancy. They sell the shirts from Uncle David’s factory.
“You think only Robert Moses builds New York? Turn this way,” he said, guiding me by the shoulders.
“The Empire State Building!” I gasped.
“A little closer to us and to the right, a little shorter, that’s the Chrysler Building. You can’t see from here, but it’s got gargoyles made of chrome, just like the bumpers on the cars.
“Over there, on Lafayette Street, that’s where we’re going. John Jacob Astor—one of the richest men ever in America—that was his library, the first in New York. He paid for the whole thing. From selling animal furs and buying real estate. That’s how Andrew Carnegie, another big rich man, got the idea to build small libraries all over the city. Any town in America could get one built for free if they promised to keep it going. Another war profiteer. And another group of muckety-mucks got together and built the big one at 42nd St.”
How did he know so much? While Mr. Paradissis was reading The Daily Worker—or having it read to him in English—my father was reading The Daily Forward in Yiddish. Mr. Paradissis knew a lot about labor struggles; my father knew a little about a lot of other things.
A hundred or so yards away was the HIAS building, three stories tall, built of terracotta-colored sandstone. It was a stately building with muscular arches and lead-paned windows. Surrounding the entry—the stairs to the raised lobby were inside—was a crowd of people reading newspapers, cradling babies, and talking in a jumble of languages. The sidewalk was littered with cigarette butts and paper stubs. A woman dressed in black was leaning against the building, crying; the little girl clinging to the folds of her skirt was crying too at the same time as she was looking around, her crying not an obstacle to watching the comings and goings. The voices blended into a single, monotonous hum. Here and there a phrase in English cracked through. I did not understand most of what they were saying, but it was easy enough to know the fear in their voices, the desperation in their eyes.
“Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society,” said my father.
“The government?”
“Forget the government. It’s a private organization that assists people. We need the right papers for the family to get to out of Zyrmuny. Here they help you make the right papers. When the people get to Canada or South America, they maybe help you get a job, find relatives, teach you English. They used to help people get settled in America before the Immigration Act, before America said No more.”
My father got in line.
“Over there,” he said, motioning toward a bench where a couple of old women were sitting, their old-woman thighs spread wide past their hips. “Take this,” he said, handing me the satchel with our overnight things.
“Momma said stay with you,” I complained.
“You are with me.”
“All the way over there?” I said, pointing to the two old ladies. They looked like sacks of onion, their skin loose and spilling over.
“Don’t be silly,” said my father. When would people stop saying my worries or fears were silly? Oh boy, was I ever glad to become an adult and leave that nonsense behind.
The line inched slowly or hardly at all, people shifting forward out of restlessness until each newcomer was bunched in closely with the others. The room was filled with body smells, warm and salty and sour, and even as I grew sleepy I kept an eye out for my father’s head in the crowd. Who-knows-how-much-later I woke to find my head propped against one of the old onion ladies. She was sleeping too, whistling through her lips. Her breath smelled like old plants rotting in still water. It is the smell, I now know, of decaying teeth. I raised my hand to cover my nose. The lady shifted when I moved and I caught a whiff of urine, too. How old was that woman? Younger than I am turning today, I am saying not for nothing.
A man wearing a white shirt and dark tie came out from behind the counter. On one foot was a stacked shoe meant to even out his short leg with the longer one. He limped down the line, his hip thrusting to the left with each step. “Numbers?” he asked. “You got numbers?”
He handed my father a piece of paper with a number.
“What do I do with this?”
“You wait until we call your number.”
“I never got one of these before,” said my father. I do not know how many times before he had been to HIAS. Enough times, no doubt, to wonder why he kept going. Or maybe, knowing my father, he could not afford that kind of thought. Giving up on the family in Europe would have been like giving up on my mother, which he did not.
“You got one now,” said the man.
“They call me today?” my father pressed.
“How should I know?” said the man, limping off. “You been here before? You ever see so many people?”
We had no luck at HIAS that day, unless one thinks that getting a number that might or might not ever get called is good luck.
On the street, a man in a jacket and tie approached my father.
“Sir,” he began. My father acknowledged him, the combination of the suit and the formal salutation stopping him in his tracks. This man was a number broker, a business created by the new system.
“You give me your number and I give you a receipt. When you come back you come to me for a number. Not your old number, of course. You get the lowest number I have.”
Was this free? Of course not. Was it legal? Who knows. Was it fair? With all due respect: if we are asking what is fair in life, there are some questions that interest me more than those numbers. Was Helen dying fair? Was Flat Sammy’s head fair? Even stupid, disgusting Joey Pessara: was his life fair?
It was too late now to make a boat to Barren Shoal. We made our way instead to Boro Park among shoppers filling the subway car with bags of garlic and chickens and cheese. The subway car filled itself with the whuffle whuffle sound of open windows and the big-mouth argument of steel wheels against steel tracks.
A block from my aunt and uncle’s place we ran into Uncle David, who was walking slowly.
“Look at you,” he beamed, tousling my hair. “Wait just a second: I shouldn’t mess a young lady’s hair,” he continued, making a big show of smoothing it back into place. I had not seen my uncle since the day after Helen’s funeral. Not even for an unveiling, which neither Noah nor I were permitted to attend. My uncle’s own hair was grey now; his skin had turned grey, too.
“How did it go?” he asked, resting a hand on my father’s shoulder. He looke
d tired.
“Nothing but a long line,” said my father.
“Come with me to this union meeting,” he said. “Norman Thomas is speaking.”
“I should probably...,” my father started to say, indicating something about me.
“You should probably nothing. What you should do is come.”
“Me too,” I begged. I knew about Norman Thomas from Noah. Noah would be crazy jealous. To meet Norman Thomas: that would be something. Later on I even voted for him for president a couple of times. Better than that hypocrite Jimmy Carter, not when there was genocide in Cambodia and he ignored it. I would still appreciate an apology from him.
“You stay with your aunt and your cousins,” instructed my father. “What do you know about Norman Thomas anyway?”
“That he ran for president. That he lost but got a lot of votes. That he’s a socialist. That he’s famous for...”
“Whoah, whoah, slow down,” said my father.
My father and uncle delivered me to my aunt and then they took off for the union hall. My cousin Ruthie was out with her new boyfriend Sidney, who was taking her to a JCC dance; Flat Sammy was in the kitchen, where my aunt was teaching him to braid challah dough.
“Here you go, Sammy: you remember your cousin Marta,” she prompted.
“Yes,” he answered, shaking his head to say no. Older did not look better on Sammy the way it did on Noah and the boys. His body had gone from bad to worse, his damaged brain misfiring signals that contorted his movements more than I remembered.
“Marta will help us bake?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said again, this time nodding approval.
My aunt handed me a mound of dough and told me to break it in three equal pieces, roll out the little logs like the ones in front of Sammy, and pinch them together. She guided Sammy’s fingers and I followed a half step behind.
“You remember this from last time?” she asked Sammy, laying the clean back of her hand against the flat of his head.
“Yes,” he said, nodding like crazy.
Sammy, once he got going, handled the dough smoothly without breaking the rhythm. We became a little assembly line around the table, making a couple of large challahs as well as a bunch of small ones. My aunt, meanwhile, turned her attention—at least some of it—to plucking a roasting chicken, singeing stubborn feathers with a wooden match.
“Be gentle with that dough, children,” she cautioned. “If you overwork it, the bread will be like a sponge.” Even Sammy giggled at the irony of this suggestion of gentleness as she yanked feathers out of the bird. At least I think that is why he was giggling. When we finished our loaves she checked our handiwork. I imagined Sammy working some day in a bakery, sliding dough into big brick ovens, sliding hot loaves of bread back out. He would have a job, have co-workers, have a life. He could wear white trousers and a white shirt and a white paper hat. And what would I have? Just Barren Shoal, just more of the same. I was not feeling sorry for myself; I was not full of self-pity. I was trying to understand what growing up there would finally mean for me.
“Now, the finishing touch. Marta, you break this egg in the bowl. Sammy, you beat it around with this fork. Take turns painting the egg on the outside of your challah dough with this brush.” She handed me a pastry feather.
“This is the chicken’s feather,” said Sammy in a worried voice. He had forgotten that he had used this feather the week before and the week before that.
“No,” my aunt assured him. “See how big your feather is and how this chicken’s feathers are small?”
“What about the egg?”
My aunt held dinner for as long as she could until she announced, “I’m going to give those men a what-for when they march in here.”
“What for?” asked Sammy.
“A what-for is...never mind,” said my aunt. She prepared plates for the three of us: white meat for Sammy, dark meat for me, a little of both for her, and roasted potatoes with crisped edges, and boiled string beans. The rest she left on a plate that she covered with a kitchen towel to keep away flies.
“What about Ruthie?” I asked.
“She’s having dinner with the family of her young man.”
“Sidney,” said Sammy.
“That’s right, Sammy. His name is Sidney.”
“I like Sidney.”
“I’m sure he likes you, too.”
Sammy was already asleep and I was half-trying to read Hamlet for school when my father and uncle returned. We were destined to read Hamlet every year now because a carton with twenty badly beaten copies had been salvaged for the school by a friend of Miss Dr. Finn who taught at Canarsie High School, one of the good schools over in Brooklyn.
“So?” asked my aunt, her voice all filled with warm expectation. “Tell.”
What happened to her telling them off? What happened to her telling them to stop acting like so-and-sos while she had her hands full with us and not knowing where the meeting was or if something happened or what time they would return?
It was after 9:00. My father and uncle were tired and hungry. My aunt pulled Sammy onto the edge of her chair, holding him in place while he struggled to get into her lap, as if he could fit there.
“What important news did Norman Thomas have for the two of you?”
“Nothing,” said my father.
“Not so nothing,” said my uncle. “He was better than on radio. The man speaks with his eyes.”
“Double nothing,” said my father, who sat down to eat.
“What would be so terrible, our getting a little more food on the table, the way Norman Thomas says?” said my uncle.
“What kind of table?” asked my father. “You work at a cutting table. I have a butcher block and meat hooks in the ceiling. That’s my table: the place where a dead horse hangs in air. You think they won’t hang a man who makes union trouble? Who do you think’s in charge?”
“Right now I am and I’d like to finish up here already,” said my aunt, pushing plates around the table as if that alone would change the conversation.
“One minute you’re supporting the union, Sol. The next you’re so...what’s the word?...skeptical.”
“It’s not Thomas that bothers me. I respect the man, even if he’ll never be president. Even if he’s a loser. It’s not even the union leadership that worries me. It’s those other ones, their lieutenants. They’re like Boyle at the factory. Nothing in their heads but to tell men what to do. What’s the difference if they’re working for the bosses or for the unions? I don’t like it.”
“Why do you think they call it ‘organizing’?” said my uncle. “Without leadership, without a plan, without someone in the field....”
“Beating up on guys who don’t join? How’s that different from the Pinkertons at Ford’s or in Allentown?”
“Enough already,” said my aunt.
“You asked,” said my father.
“Spare me,” said my aunt.
“It’s important,” said my uncle. “Important, important, important.”
“You got time on your hands, David?” asked my father, his voice quiet now. “Time for the union hall, but not for HIAS, not getting the family out from that hell?”
Everyone was quiet now. My aunt scraped at something on the table with her fingernail, something that was not even there.
“We’ll do both, Sol,” said my uncle. He spooned more potatoes on his plate and passed the bowl to my father. “We’ll divide what we have to and do both.”
Nobody spoke for a while after that until Ruthie came in from her date and my aunt took her into the other room to hear about dinner with Sidney. “Don’t worry,” said Uncle David, once she was gone. He straightened Sammy out in my aunt’s now-empty seat and pulled it closer to the table so that it would be harder for Sammy to slip away.
I crossed my arms on the table and lay my head on them. Hamlet was in my hands as I fell asleep.
CHAPTER 11
We were unhappy in our own ways on t
he early morning trip home. My father never took his hand out of the pocket with the broker’s receipt. I was still rattled by the fight between my father and my uncle, which had ended peaceably enough, but was not resolved. How can anyone with a family be surprised by anything that happens in this crazy world?
We both worked the wooden poles to keep the rats away from our feet; other than that, we were pretty quiet. The barge was filled with a hodgepodge of cow heads stripped of their saleable parts, the hinds of sheep and pigs identifiable by their tails, and who knows how many horses on which the scavengers were hard at work. How many new ways can I come up with for describing the smell?
The pier was deserted when we returned. The captain went off to sleep at the factory where Mr. Goldberg, the night stoker, had a meal waiting in return for the pint bottle of whiskey the captain brought him every week. He offered my father a drink from it, but my father turned him down.
The scavengers were not supposed to step foot on the island, so who knows where they really went. I did not think about it. The factory, which looked nothing short of diabolical when the furnaces were going full force, appeared weary under the weight of a day off. Not that the furnaces were ever fully shut down, it taking too long to get the temperature up. They were kept to a slow burn by Mr. Goldberg on his night shift and all day Sunday, meaning he was the only Jew on the island who lived orthodox and the only stoker who was not a black man.
The air on the walk home had a Sunday smell, a hollow and haunting odor made by the simmering furnaces. It was the residue of everything burned the week before and a reminder of what would be burned in the week to come.
“Where’s your mother?” my father asked Noah, who was in the garden talking with Yorgos and Joey when we got to the house.
“How did the meet....”
“Noah—is she okay?” my father interrupted.
“The usual. Fine. She’s inside. What happened at HIAS?”
My father took a few more steps toward the house then circled back to where the boys were sitting. Instead of finding my mother he explained about the lines, about the number broker, about hearing Norman Thomas.
