A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom) by Her Bastard Son

by Clancy Sigal

  Roughhousing, wrestling, and punching one another to leave purple bruises functioned to restore something in the common order, a sense of assertion and self to right a balance thrown askew by the life around us.

  But each of us had a secret vice, an intellectual perversion, unknown to and hidden from the others because it might betray our group-think. Ike snuck off to Grant Park symphonic concerts; Oscar solved chemistry problems in his basement; Legs built frontier-style Conestoga covered wagons out of old cigar boxes; Julie Wax tinkered with math problems from his older brother’s textbook; and so on. Yet no Rocket dared import his secret pleasure into the club: better to be known as an ignoramus than a snob. The one time I dared enter the Chicago Art Institute, instead of merely riding on one of the bronze lions outside, I was thrown out by a guard for climbing up on the naked and armless Venus to touch her white marble breasts. By pure coincidence, a couple of the Rockets were passing by on Michigan Avenue and they chased and jeered at me all the way to the State Street L station.

  Low culture was our high culture. Despite the mild scorn of Jennie, who loved Russian novels and Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater, which specialized in “new and improved” Shakespeare, I clung to crude pop for its seductive way of shaping my shapeless dreams. The soaring-sweet trumpet meister, Harry James, was my idea of art, Wee Bonnie Baker (“Oh, Johnny, Oh”) my comfort zone. Classical music I first learned from Republic Studio’s cowboy movies, where Comanche chases were often set to Liszt’s Les Preludes or to Rossini because the old scores were free in the public domain.

  It’s possible I got stuck back there when the other Rockets were quietly evolving, behind my back, so to speak. How else explain that, as adults, Ike became a passionate opera buff or Julie Wax had enough math to become a B-17 navigator or Albie the Schtupper a serious Sunday painter in the Klee style? True, the teenage Rockets whipped my ass for reading “too many” books, but what were we holding out on each other?

  Tom Sawyer in a Yarmulke

  My Chicago in the 1930s and 40s was 95 percent Jewish and 115 percent Democrat. (Vote early, vote often.) Religion defined the neighborhood but not me. On Saturday mornings cantors’ voices ululated through the Lawndale district, which supposedly held the highest concentration of Orthodox Jewry in the world outside of Poland. Some of the cantors were as famous to us as Enrico Caruso and Schaliapin were to opera lovers. There was a schul on almost every street corner, and sixty-five synagogues in a one-square-mile area, imposing citadels of faith that rivaled any Christian church brought over stone by stone to Chicago from the Old Country: Anshe Roumania, Anshe Makarov, Anshe Knesses Israel (Russische), K.J. Talmud Torah, Adas B’Nai Israel, Temple Judea. Sprinkled on any given block, as numerous as pubs in Dublin, were tiny informal front-porch schuls bearing the names of the shtetls from which their founders originated (Pinsk, Odessa, Wilno, etc.).

  The twenty-fourth ward’s main thoroughfares—Roosevelt Road, Sixteenth Street, Kedzie Avenue—were thronged with elderly Jews in ankle-length black frock coats and young yeshivah bochim in yarmulkes. Almost all shop windows had freshly white-painted signs in Yiddish, and on almost every counter inside you could find a blue and white slotted can for contributions to a Jewish homeland in Palestine or, if the proprietor was Communist, in Soviet Azerbaijan. The Midwest headquarters of the nation’s most popular Jewish newspaper, the Daily Forward, was in a green-turreted building on Thirteenth and Kedzie a block from our laundry.

  Yet I strolled around as if my ears were stuffed with cotton and my eyes half-blind to these obvious signs of the Old Country. There was an emotionality to the Jewish life around me—all that yelling, arguing, out-front loves and hates—that distanced me even as my life depended on it for sustenance and continuity. Stop all this noise, I wanted to scream at these vulgar, crude, cursing, pushing, elbowing crowds—before jumping in to add my own noise to the joyful and hurtful dissonance. A congregation’s kol nidre sifting through the stained glass windows of the synagogues I never attended had a strange and unsettling effect on me. It was all mumbo jumbo I kept telling myself, while pausing on the corner to listen with all my heart.

  On the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah, 25,000 Jews of all ages trudged down feeder streets to the Douglas Park lagoon to cast their accumulated sins into the mossy water, and on the other High Holidays boys my own age—including the Rockets Athletic Club except for Oscar Guttierez, Deaf Augie, and me—would suit up to play the chestnut game in front of the crowded synagogues. Approaching their thirteenth birthday, one by one my pals inconspicuously slipped away to study for their bar mitzvahs; and to my astonishment, on my own secular graduation day from Howland Elementary, the parents and mispochah in the school auditorium rose to their feet and stood to attention when we eighth-graders onstage sang the Jewish hymn “Hatikvah” in a medley of the world’s national anthems. Even my mother, erect and proud, had tears in her eyes. What was that all about?

  Jewishness was so taken for granted on the west side that up to then I’d believed that all of us, grown-ups and kids alike, were on the same assimilationist wavelength, that poverty and religion, which in my mind went hand in hand, would somehow disappear in the American Miracle. “Hatikvah” opened me up to Lawndale’s beating Jewish heart. They were different from me, I realized. Up to then I’d successfully deluded myself, in a mental trick, that though my soul was Lawndale, a secret part of me lived along a Mississippi river bank with those honorary Rockets, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. I felt perfectly at ease absorbing the actual Lawndale into a rural fantasia of it. Everything that was the real Chicago around me—polyglot languages (Russian, Polish, Hungarian, German, Yiddish, Greek, Slovak, you name it), chicken-fat smells, the roaring iron rhythms of big-city life—somehow morphed into nineteenth-century Hannibal, Missouri, a boys’ utopia, a lot like Chattanooga on its best warm summer day. Living this split existence was no strain. I was here, I was there, the two halves of my imagination in touch with both realities, my fantasy Hannibal and the actual Chicago. When MGM’s Tom Sawyer movie came out, I was just sane enough to know that its rural Missouri was neither mine nor the real one but the studio’s.

  My private make-believe Hannibal had no Jews, real Lawndale nothing but. The psychic space between them licensed me, in my own view, to be a different self-invented Jew, unridiculed and unscorned, atheistic, unpersecuted, a Pimpernel spy in goyishe territory. For example, whenever I explored a new neighborhood, crossing forbidden ethnic lines, and was accosted by a gang of strange kids and they’d ask, “Hey, what religion are you?” (the Chicago version of “Who are you, alien?”), I’d glance around to spot the nearest church spire and, depending on its architecture, reply stoutly, “Lutheran” or “Catholic.” I was quite good at this. Ma and I had pretended so often dowun sowuth to be other than what we were that it was second nature for me to lie plausibly. “Oh yeah?” a skeptical kid might demand, “do me a Hail Mary.” And I’d drop to my knees and recite the Rosary like Father Lenihan, who operated St. Agatha’s across Kedzie from the store, taught me.

  About the only religion I never imagined myself to be was Jewish.

  That’s because I was Jewish. And that’s because, encouraged by my mother’s calculated lack of spiritual guidance, I felt I had a right to choose what kind of Jew I wanted to be. That is, to be a super-American Super-Jew who rode free on the backs of streetcars hanging by his fingertips from the rear window, thieved and burgled abandoned stores and apartments, built semilethal rubber guns, would gladly have died for a chance to be the Chicago Cubs’ batboy—my second highest ambition—and fled guiltlessly from the Twenty-second Street Irish who were screaming “Christ killer!” Being Jewish had nothing to do with religion; it was a fighting creed or it was nothing. Both my parents, Jennie and Leo, were strong proud Jews who rarely entered a schul, not even Knesses Israel Nusach Sfard or the “laundrymen’s shul.” Keep kosher? Ma loved ham, bacon, pork, shellfish—anything trafe. And Dad lived in an almost entirely gentile world of about-to-be-o
rganized Italian barbers, German butchers, and Ukrainian meat packers where he—a small wiry man with a hair-trigger punch—relished “standing up” to real or imagined anti-Semites, the bigger the better.

  I knew Jews looked different, just as towheaded Poles and fair-skinned Irish did. Many of my school chums—Moishe, Julie, Albie, Abe, Mendy—were small and dark and, yes, had “Jewish” noses: the immigrant look. (See my Patrick Henry and Howland school photos.) But along with Julie Wax and Legs Glasser I was one of the “American looking” Jews, who in any crowd could pass as Clarence Carmichael or Calvin Peterson or Clement Wood or any other Waspy name Ma invented for me. Being able to pass was useful “out there,” in a world of Jew baiters and Hitler sympathizers; inside the Lawndale shtetl I felt deeply secure in my multiple Jew-who-is-a-non-Jew-but-a-certain-kind-of-Jew identity. Anyway, just as there was no gay option, what choice was there? Hitler and his American Nazi Bundists had defined me and my kind for all time as destined for ausrotten—extermination—so the judgment was in. We were the People Chosen to die. After 1933, when Hitler was voted into power, and NBC began radio hookups to Berlin, when the neighbors gathered to listen to translations of the Nazi rant, I had to move spiritually out of Hannibal back to where I felt safe and battle-ready. Everyone knew a war was coming; it became the Rockets’ permanent anxiety and conversation piece. “Better now than later,” we said, and our rough games became preparations for combat.

  This left only the question of God.

  There was no God. And I was angry with Him.

  On warm summer evenings, while my mother and father were screaming at each other (“Leo, pay attention to the store” “Leave me alone, I wasn’t born for this”), I’d slip out the Family Hand Laundry’s back door through the alley onto Douglas Boulevard, a mile-long grassy strip, to lie on the dewy ground and stare up at the stars and shake my fist. “IF YOU ARE THERE,” I cursed, “MAKE ME NOT BE.” Especially on sultry thundery nights I’d call down lightning flashes to electrocute me like Bruno Richard Hauptman, the Lindberg baby kidnapper, staring God in the eye and calling His bluff. God the putz making my mother cry and ruining my Dad’s bowels, and I was furious with Him for creating, or condoning, a profit system that had no profit for us. God was a Jew who probably owned a bankrupt garment sweatshop and squeezed, squeezed the workers until their tears ran dry.

  This was not an abstract argument, nothing on the west side ever was. God was personal and immediate in His absence. My mother refused to intervene in my quarrel with the putz-god. Even though her dearest wish was that I grow up “more Jewish,” she was totally unyielding that I find my own answer. “I’m an atheist,” I protested. “So,” she’d replied “at least be a Jewish atheist.”

  Case #1. Finally, when Jennie could stand it no longer she’d sigh, “Go ask Father Lenihan. He’s closer to God than I am, for sure.” He was the priest at St. Agatha’s across the street, who let me use the church gym in the hope I carefully nourished, that I would convert. Also, I liked going to Easter Mass at St. Aggie’s—it was safer inside than outside the church on the day Jews killed their Lord—and kneeling to make the sign of the cross with my fingers dipped into stone-urned holy water.

  “Why is it, Clarence, I don’t see you very often at services?”

  “I’m sorry, Father. My mother’s been sick.” Lies in the sacristy.

  “Oh, too bad. Would you like myself or one of the Sisters to call upon her?”

  “We’re not Catholics yet, Father.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  I had an exquisite sense of the mark.

  Still, give it to him, Father Lenihan extended himself for a few more private sessions. Nodding sagely, grunting attentively, he’d listen to my God questions. Sincerity flowed from the man like communion wine. I was so sure he was sure he had me hooked that my tongue loosened. Jesus, I suggested one day, was the first socialist. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—I’d learned about them at Baptist primary school—were the first labor organizers, like John L. Lewis and Harry Bridges who were the Antichrists in the eyes of the Chicago Tribune, the most widely read newspaper in the Midwest. “Who?” Father Lenihan leaned forward to catch my drift until our heads were nearly touching. Suddenly he reached over, circled his big red hand around my ear, yanked me to my feet, and frogmarched me, my feet hardly touching the splendidly polished and waxed floor, to the side door, and with no particular violence but plenty of muscle kicked me out with a swift one in the keester.

  What is it about men of the cloth and my ears?

  Case #2. Ma dispatches me, age eight, to my first and only Hebrew school in Albany Park, Chicago, in an upstairs room leased from a dry goods store. The teacher is choleric Reb Barzalai, a large imposing man in a black frock coat. I survive a single day. Enraged by my unruly conduct, the Reb lunges at me, twists my ear, and throws me down a flight of stairs, where I tumble out onto busy Lawrence Avenue.

  Case #3. Ma broods about my lack of yiddishkeit, a feel for the Jewish people. She sends me, age ten, to a pacifist-socialist arbeitering schule at the Workmen’s Circle temple over by Ogden and Kedzie. The atmosphere is more radical and less pious. On the wall hangs a large tinted photograph of a World War I soldier with most of his face from chin to bridge of nose shot away. I am expelled for throwing spitballs. The teacher, a hitherto gentle man, walks down the classroom aisle, pulls me up by my ear, and takes me out into the street. When he releases me, he dusts off his hands and says, “Feh.”

  Last case. A sunny Saturday morning on Christiana Street, where my basement clubhouse also is located. On the sidewalk I am exercising my main talent, doing nothing. A little old man with cracked teeth summons me to him on the front porch of a two-story family house. “Du kennst mir a bisselah helpf geben?” I give him the classic west side response, “How much?” He holds out what turns out to be, on inspection, a nickel. He lures me inside a small dark apartment and gestures me to pull the string on a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling. I yank it and find myself in the interior of a tiny schul, or “people’s synagogue.” Politely, he ushers me back outside to the stone porch. “Boychik,” he croaks, “bis du nischt a Yid?” “Sure I’m a Jew,” I assure him. Whack! He slaps me across the face, grabs one ear and—yes—pushes me down the steps. “Shabbish goy!” he screams, meaning a non-Jew hired to do work prohibited to Jews, especially on the Sabbath. At the time, I have no idea what the crazy old bastard is yelling about. But I keep the nickel.

  By now I am thinking that perhaps I am not destined for a religious vocation.

  Recently, I took Joe to his first Hebrew lesson at a local temple because my gentile wife insists on it. “He should know who he is,” she says. “He already knows that,” I argue, “and he has no identity crisis.” “He’s half Jewish,” she persists, “and I don’t want him having a problem about it later in life.”

  On Friday nights we have shabbat dinner, complete with chollah, candles, and a brief “Baruch atoi adenoi” blessing at table. Joe sports his yarmulke at a cocky angle like my father wore his Homburg hat. At Sunday dinner Janice says a brief blessing (“We give most humble thanks”), and that’s it for theology. But as time goes by, more and more Yiddish street slang rolls unbidden off my tongue. I cannot pretend to a Yiddishkeit I have not earned, and not all precincts are in about God, as my mother would say, but perhaps through Joe I may regain a wholeness of what’s left of that which Jennie devoutly wished for me to be, a Jewish mensch.

  In the Midrash, an ancient Hebrew commentary, there is a strange and gripping tale. Rabbi Meir, an Orthodox sage, is taking lessons from the Jewish heretic Akhar on a Sabbath. The heretic rides a donkey while Rabbi Meir walks beside him in deep argument. Suddenly the heretic says, “Look—we have reached the boundary [where no Jew is permitted on the Sabbath]. We must part now. You must not accompany me further. Go back!” Rabbi Meir returns to his Jewish community while the heretic Akhar—the Stranger—rides on, beyond the boundaries of Jewry.

  This story has puzzled gen
erations of Jews, including the Polish anti-Nazi poet and biographer, Isaac Deutscher, from whom I borrow it. But “beyond the boundaries” is where I live as a Jew. I was born a “Hitler Jew,” just as today I am an Osama Jew: the real, personal threat gives me almost no wiggle room. Over the years I have, indeed, become “more Jewish,” partly through having a half-Jewish son, partly in response to living so long in England with its closet anti-Semitism. That’s my rational brain. But twice in my life, my soul—which the other marginal Jew, Freud, called an unconscious—commanded me. In the sixties, when I had a transformative moment (anxious witnesses called it a breakdown) in a schizophrenic halfway house in London, I suddenly leapt upon a communal supper table and pranced between the soup bowls with an imaginary tallit around my shoulder, singsonging Hebraic prayers that bubbled up from my repressed and long-denied Lawndale memory. And then in 1973, at the onset of the Yom Kippur War, when Syria and Egypt, backed by seven other Arab states, almost overwhelmed Israel, my feet surprised me by hurrying down to Trafalgar Square to mingle with thousands of perfect strangers, joining other Jewish men in solidarity.

  Jennie probably would have rejected the notion of a “marginal” or non-Jewish Jew. “How can this be?” I hear her saying. So I argue with my mother, and the dialogue continues past death to the resurrection of the spirit we call a loving memory.

  Small Expectations

  There is something to be said for low expectations for children. On the Greater Vest Side, pressures to succeed or excel were almost nonexistent, and this lack of goals was perversely liberating. Since unemployment was a natural condition, homework was as modest as our teachers’ prospects for us and our horizons for ourselves. Our self-esteem came from one another.