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

  Despite a reputation for anti-Semitism, fifty-five of the local resorts and boarding houses around South Haven were Jewish-owned. To escape Chicago’s mishegas, the craziness of her life, Jennie had hired on as a cook at a resort called Fidelman’s. The plan was to turn me loose while she had a holiday working a fifteen-hour day in the vast resort kitchen. Most of the guests were from neighborhoods like Lawndale or Rogers Park, people like us, except with a little vacation money saved from the winter. The upper-class German Jews had their own golden ghetto in a separate colony, Coloma, where many owned their own cottages.

  It worked out for Ma, and we hardly saw each other all that summer. We didn’t even sleep in the same cabin. I was put in with a man, possibly a war veteran, who had a pink wooden leg which utterly fascinated me as I watched him strap it on in the morning, the thigh lace held on with a thigh cuff and shoulder strap. One day he took his crutch instead of the prosthesis to go to breakfast, and I tried fitting the flesh-colored leg with its buckles and suction cup to my own healthy leg. Out of a rubber band and a piece of black cloth I made an eye patch and went stumping around going “Har har har Jim boy” like Long John Silver, and of course he came back too soon and gave me exactly the same look as Jennie had given me as she was going down the manhole. The next day he was gone, and I had the cabin all to myself and my stack of Astounding Tales magazines.

  Tall oaks, the lake, pleasant meadows, plenty of sunshine, no traffic noises: I’m a city kid and too much healthy fresh air insults my lungs. I got quickly bored at Fidelman’s and began hanging around the kitchen swatting flies and pestering Jennie, who snapped, “I’m busy. Go make friends.” She was sweating her guts out baking cookies in a huge hot oven. “Refrigerated air”—air conditioning—hardly existed. I tagged after the other guests, but even their kids from Lawndale snubbed me because I was the cook’s boy. By taking their summer holiday at Fidelman’s they had temporarily jumped up a class, and now I wasn’t good enough for them. This puzzled me. One night when Jennie came to undress and tuck me in I asked her about it. “Forget them,” she advised. “They’re common Jews with two dollars in their pocket and think they’re J. P. Morgan.”

  The upside was that I had time on my hands to ramble, poke, investigate, pry, sprawl on the grass to study dragonflies, pick my nose, practice my BingCrosbying on the nearby sand dunes (“Imagination is funny / It makes a cloudy day sunny / Makes bees think of honey, just as I think of you….”), and reflect on the meaning of the popular ditties I sang to myself at full decibel when all other distractions failed (“hut sut rawlson on the rilleraw / And the brawla brawla soo-it—”).

  I simply did not know what to do with my cock and balls.

  Puberty had erupted with a chemical rush. Banked up and uncomprehended sexual desire—for what? for whom?—easily turned to anger, spite, malice, resentment, and tasteless pranks, all directed at Jennie, who was carrying us both through the summer with her capable, sweat-slippery hands. I was getting high on pre-sex. Or something.

  Fidelman’s was rife with it. I spied on honeymoon couples, old marrieds, young girls. Stalking became my summer. If nobody wanted me, I’d look at them.

  Guests complained. Who was this monster kid lurking in the bushes? They came to Fidelman’s to get away from young animals like me. Jennie spoke to me about it several times, but what else could I do?

  Toward summer’s end, at the height of high season, she was terminated, I was pretty sure, because of me, but she refused to return to Chicago’s heat. Instead, she found another job, in town, as cook in a lumberjacks’ boarding house. These shanty boys, which is what tree cutters were called around there, were from UM, upper Michigan, and they proudly hated Jews. While Jennie cooked, I kept away from them, mainly by dancing along the railroad tracks near the boarding house and, almost my favorite thing, reciting the names of the railroad companies on the freight cars. Lackawanna, Soo, Burlington, Lake Erie & Western, Great Northern, Grand Trunk Western, Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe, Rock Island, Wabash rolling out a thunder of far horizons. Tracks are a wonderful world of found items. But Jennie got tired of the lumberjacks’ lip, and we got fired from there too.

  Summer was over, and for some reason Jennie decided to stay in South Haven, enrolling me in a public school while she went looking for a job. But before she could get hired again Dad showed up in a badly dented Hupmobile Aerosedan, a high-octane loaner from “the comrades,” and soon the three of us were rolling down the highway back to Chicago. By the time we got back at night, Dad’s arm was around Ma’s shoulder and her head rested on him.

  Slumped in the backseat, arms folded, I sang my Lucky Strike radio hits to nobody in particular:

  “… I never bother with people I hate

  That’s why the lady is a tramp …”

  And the new Astaire-Rogers warble:

  “… the mem’ry of all that

  No no they can’t take that away from me!”

  Dad was back, and I had to take a backseat, literally.

  Da’

  He was going to kill me for sure. Splatter my brains with a single thrust of his piston-like fist or throw me under the Kedzie Avenue streetcar thundering on iron rails past our laundry. Or maybe he was determined on a two-fer, snuff Jennie and me with a single Remington Bronze Point bullet. When he was out of the place I crawled under their big four-poster looking for the Colt .45 I saw him drop at the Slavic Hall, but there was nothing except dust and an Orphan Annie secret-code ring I’d lost.

  Murder had to be on his mind since it was on mine. If I was outside playing and heard the distant siren of an ambulance or fire engine, I’d race home swift as Erroll Flynn in Robin Hood, knowing beyond certainty that both of their bodies would be lying across each other in a blood-drenched heap on the wood-slat floor beside the ceaselessly silent National cash register. I was pretty sure he’d stab Ma with the same kitchen knife she sometimes threatened to kill herself with, and after that he’d carve me up and throw away the bloody chunks. RED COUPLE SLAIN, MOTIVE PUZZLES POLICE the Hearst Examiner headline would read. I gave imaginary interviews to the newspapers as the orphaned son of a mutually murdered couple or visualized myself in shackles at my trial on a frame-up charge of double slaying, like the actor Joseph Schildkraut as Captain Dreyfuss in the Warner Brothers biopic Zola shouting: “YOU ARE CONDEMNING AN INNOCENT MAN!” I killed and re-killed Jennie and Leo in a hundred creative ways, which would be my ticket of admission to the orphan home over by Albany Street where I was in the habit of swinging on the front gate dreaming up lies to get in, except the one time I really tried it they rejected me because, matron agreeably pointed out, my parents were still alive. (I was not the only west side boy clamoring to get in; successive matrons have reported it as a common occurrence.)

  My father was a skilled craftsman in a trade that no longer exists: quality shirt ironing and finishing. I was extremely bigheaded about this and boasted, truthfully, to the other Rockets that he had been chief assistant shirt ironer and French cuff specialist at New York’s famous Ritz-Carlton hotel, which most of the boys thought an odd thing to brag about. “So what? My Uncle Moe is a pimp and he makes a ton more money than your father,” jeered my best friend Ike Lerman. Since I was incoherently proud of Dad’s shirt-ironing talent, there was no option but to slug Ike into near insensibility to prove that Leo Sigal was, whatever he did, incomparably The Best.

  Leo Sigal’s other trade—his passion—was union organizing. Born in Kremenchug, Russia, he emigrated to America in 1906, at age sixteen, already a weapon-carrying radical. Like my mother, not yet on his horizon, he was an organizing prodigy at a time when all you needed was hard fists and a hot voice and your only public address system was a rolled-up cardboard shirt straightener. He’d been a rising star, two steps below immortals like John L. Lewis and William Z. Foster, when he made a bad career move by slugging his union boss at the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America. He and my mother sometimes referred to this explosion of
temper as “that time in St. Louis.” Dad had an unfortunate habit of knocking down larger men whom he suspected, rightly or wrongly, of being Jew baiters or who were out to get him or just because he didn’t like the cut of their jib.

  Despite (or perhaps because of) his unpredictable temper, Leo Sigal was in demand as a mobile organizer and traveled by poor man’s RV—riding the rods under freight cars—crisscrossing the country to sign up members. He’d been blacklisted, hauled off to jail, and ridden out of strange towns at midnight, taking his salary only when he stopped long enough to put together a “local” of five or more card signers who pitched in weekly dues of twenty or twenty-five cents. In Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, all points of the industrial compass, he organized butchers, barbers, waiters, any man itching to improve his condition. During the Great War he might have been a conscientious objector pulling time in a federal prison; I’m still trying to locate the records, but the family legend is that he was in the same Atlanta federal penitentiary as Gene Debs, at that time American labor’s living saint.

  In 1919 Sigal played a pivotal role in a general strike of meatpacking workers. By now an established “business agent” for the International Union, the only Jew among forty-six general organizers, with that one punch he killed his union career, or that’s how he told it.

  Then, at the peak of his self-confidence and belief in his own future, in a storm of lust and solidarity, he abducted my mother Jennie, a twenty-four-year-old virgin, from her loving, clannishly protective family. She was, or promised to be, or he saw her as, an untamable redhaired bohemian with whose support he would capture the heights, go to the mountaintop, except that later, when the baby, Kalman (me), came along, he saw his wild rebel girl mutate into a nursing mother and fretful bill-haggling wife. Where now was the flame of freedom they had promised to keep alive?

  Some time in the 1920s, having survived the Palmer Raids of foreign-born radicals and meeting my mother Jennie—twin catastrophes, he later claimed—he attended night school and, improbably, opened an office as a chiropractor in Pittsburgh. (I’ve seen his chiropractic school graduation photo.) “His heart wasn’t in it, and I had to go knocking on doors to squeeze money out of his patients,” my mother testified. The very idea of my dad’s angrily flailing hands manipulating a victim’s sore back struck me as ridiculous. He had probably thought so, too, for he soon returned to the dubious comforts of night-riding the rails into the twilight zone of yard bulls, hobo camps, and catch-as-catch-can union work—always the unorganized, the illiterate, the immigrant—where he functioned at his fiercely stylish best.

  My picture of Dad I have built up partly by digging through old letters, eavesdropping on my cousins Ida (daughter of my mother’s brother Duvid) and Charlie (son of my mother’s favorite brother Arkeh) recalling family history, and by piecing together stray bits of fact, memory’s best guess, and overlapping Altmanesque dialogue. (“Let me tell you about your father, the grosse knacker—big shot.” “Your mother, God bless her, a little ongepotshket, crazy.”) In a family where secrets are typical behavior you listen hard and do your legwork, the perfect training for a journalist in short pants.

  In this offhand way I was made aware of Dad’s history—the part that was (in our terms) respectable and decent, the jails and beatings and gun battles, and alley brawls. He was proud of his achievements and wounds, but a lethal mix of his incendiary temperament and the lack of Depression-time union jobs forced him back to the ironing board where, in the steamy heat of a failing laundry, he tenaciously clung to an image of his younger boxcar-riding self, ever eager to answer the call but now hardly ever summoned.

  All through my childhood Dad alternated brief periods with us and escape for a year at a time to freelance all over the country at the behest of the shoemakers, packinghouse workers, laundrymen, etc.—anyone who could handle his style and pay per diem. But, really and truly, he had lost his handhold. His wanderlust he passed on to me; for a long time, in my own drifting from city to city, here and abroad, I unconsciously duplicated his restless spirit, always finding new horizons as a means of escaping from myself in the service of a greater good.

  Sometimes I anxiously study Joe for evidence that he inherited my dad’s genes through me. Superficially, Leo and Joe don’t look like each other at all; Dad was dark and small, Joe is a young Viking, a mixed breed descended from four separate streams bubbling out of the Carpathian mountains, the Alabama lumber forests, the plains of Proskurov, and that great source of so much American Jewry, Kiev. But there are early signs in Joe of Leo Sigal’s stubborn, belligerent jaw and tender-tough eyes wary as a trapped wolf.

  Dad Hits Bottom and It Hits Back

  The time of the Slavic Hall near-riot was Leo Sigal’s longest drop-in yet, but he probably wished he hadn’t come when he had to apply for food stamps and federal relief.

  By now he hated the store, my mother, his luck, and me in no particular order. Busted flat, he traveled way out to Chicago’s north side to find a government WPA job digging sewers where none of his friends would see him. It was by pure chance that I spotted him from a streetcar on my way to Foster Avenue beach; there he was, neck-high in a muddy trench swinging a pick against a clay wall, his undershirt off revealing a frame so thin it’s a wonder he could even lift the tool. His frailty shocked me; worse, I burned with embarrassment that maybe Ike and the other beach-bound Rockets might see him, too. Of course, most of their fathers were out of work, so where did I come off turning away from mine? Dad glimpsed me staring at him through the slat-bars of the streetcar window, and that’s a thing you don’t forgive easily, either way.

  When the sewer job ended, Dad had more time for me, which wasn’t a gift to either of us since obviously I wasn’t his kind of guy, not since the time I’d fled from a bunch of bigger boys into his arms and he’d pushed me back into them with, “Stick it to them, boy!” After that, Dad kept giving me his Jack Dempsey snake-eye as if wondering, Who is this kid?

  The ache of chronic idleness and Ma’s silent judgment racked him so that his piles and hemorrhoids would keep him for hours on the toilet behind the half partition in the corner of the store. I competed madly by having my own brutal stomach aches and constipation and by puking on the floor when the tension between my parents became unbearable. Ma had her hands full cleaning up the angry spoor of the two men in her life.

  And then Dad began stalking me.

  Old Cyclops Eye, I called him to Ike. “My father hits me,” Ike said, “so how come yours hardly ever gets around to it?” Dad did, and he didn’t. Instead of the shaving strap, he’d slip off his trouser belt and wrap it around his hand and simply whale away. It was a sort of game. He’d let me dance away from the flailing buckle and wait for him to calm down and then he’d come after me again. It may sound odd but I felt lucky that he was at least noticing me.

  Not just noticing but seeing me for what I was, Mister Fake American Boy. There was no fooling Leo Sigal. He knew that my every movement, tone, and gesture was so inauthentic I was forced to borrow my Self from movies and Photoplay magazine. My strut was pure James Cagney, wisecracks Clark Gable (“Frankly, baby, I don’t give a damn”), my very thoughts second-hand from radio serials like Jack Armstrong. I, the real me, was a nothing, a transparency in a Halloween costume. He saw through the masquerade. Smart man.

  Dad’s baleful glare followed me all over the store, my every step, and he was even waiting for me, rocking back and forth on his heels, as if in training, when I came back from school with my pencil box strapped to my back. Jennie intervened only when his snake-eye burned into the red zone. She’d rap out low and controlled, “Schloog ihm nischt.” (“Don’t hit him”), handling Dad the way she dealt with hecklers, reading his moves for their explosive potential. West side women walked a thin line. Their men, humiliated by prolonged unemployment and failure to be good providers, were often dangerously close to physical violence, and then the blue flash would ignite and you could hear the screams a mile away.


  I was dead meat.

  From the time the doors opened at 9:00 a.m. we’d been sitting on a hard bench in the government relief office on the south side and now it was nearly five, eight solid hours of humiliation for Dad. I was fascinated by his unshaven jaw grinding away in rage like a machine tool. The window clerk kept parroting, “You can’t just walk in without an appointment, call back tomorrow, my supervisor isn’t in, blah blah.” Outside it was getting dark. “Let’s go,” Dad snapped, “they’re taking us for suckers.”

  We followed him out to the cranky old Hupmobile parked in the cold slush. Without a word we climbed in to face the long drive home in the snow. Dad released the hand brake, rammed his foot on the gas pedal, revved up to speed, and roared straight at a steel pole on a cement streetcar island in the middle of Cottage Grove Avenue, drag racing against death. This was before seat belts, and we knew what was on his mind. Time stood still and my heart stopped as the steel pole loomed and a surprising bliss washed over me. Finally, we were a family. Not at all scared, I didn’t mind dying if we were together. Seconds before a crash, Ma turned and gave Dad a calm, measured look.

  “Leo, the boy!” was all she said.

  Strange. That’s what he always called me. The Boy, hardly ever used my name, any of them. She was trying to wake him up from a death dream.

  At the last split-second Dad spun the steering wheel and swerved to run the Hupmobile up the snow-banked pavement, barreled along the sidewalk, hit no pedestrians with their scarved heads bent against the flurried wind, bounced back to the road, and straightened out to follow the streetcar tracks north to home. For the rest of the ride, and ever afterward, Leo Sigal’s bid for immortality was never mentioned.

  “Leo, the boy!” Now why did she have to go and make me responsible for our lives?

  Dad’s brush with murder and suicide had the curious effect of restoring his morale, as if he’d died and been reborn without the crushing weight of the iron band that always seemed to be squeezing his head. Something had snapped; he relaxed. Maybe he felt he was already dead. His self-confidence returned, along with his old sense of sartorial style. Now, each morning he dressed himself with more than usual care in a Hart & Schaffner three-piece suit pressed and dry-cleaned by a comrade in the business, a steam-brushed Homburg set at a brash angle, a clean white-on-white shirt, and silk-pattern hand-stitched tie, ivory and gold monogrammed cuff links and, of course, those wonderful creamy spotless George Raft-style spats. Almost every day he’d slip next door to Mr. Riskin’s barber shop to lean back in the swivel chair under the White Rock calendar girl and surrender to a hot towel and straight-razor shave and to be “cupped,” an ancient practice of placing small heated glass cups like leeches on the customer’s neck and naked shoulder to draw out the devils of stress. Then he’d amble back to our store and, as if clocking in, lean on the front counter all day long. He and Ma hardly spoke to each other anymore.