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

  “Tell your mother the kourvah to come out!”

  When I go back to the table Charlie—on his way to join the Abraham Lincoln Battalion to fight for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War—gives an almost invisible shake of his head to me. I know that gesture, a Persily trademark; Jennie does it all the time to signal me to keep my mouth zipped.

  A cold draught from the splintered windows whistles into the back of the store which Jennie so lovingly transformed into a family dining room.

  Charlie’s older brother, Joe-Davie, a CIO regional director, says gently to no one in particular, “Shall we, uh, begin?” Jennie doesn’t like their politics but loves her cousins dearly. Until now, I’ve hardly been aware I had relatives but now I’m to find out that Joe was bayoneted in the shoulder by a National Guardsman in an Indiana strike, and has a bandage to show for it, and that Charlie is a warrior on his way to the antifascist front. Other than breaking bread with Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger, what more could I ask?

  Cousin Esther gives a strangled cough and says, “It’s fine brisket, Jennie.”

  Practiced at pretending, I slip back into my chair with an Ipana smile for all. Charlie puts on his charm, “So, Carl, how you doing at school?”

  Who is Carl? Oh, me.

  I steal a look at Ma. We’re all waiting for the woman outside to make her next move, but she’s gone away into the night.

  Joe-Davie says to Charlie, “Let’s have a look at that window.”

  Jennie speaks for the first time. Eyes down, hands flat on the table, she sits as if in prayer for a long moment. Then raises her eyes and coolly meets everybody’s gaze. “Eat,” she commands.

  And we do.

  Later, the angry lady, or her neighborhood clone, will try to kill us.

  Who Put the Red Diaper on the Baby?

  A word of explanation to readers unfamiliar with radical families. Several of Ma’s dearest nephews and her most beloved brother were Communists; my mother was a socialist. In their day, that was all you had to say about the epic quarrels that estranged such families.

  To care about something outside yourself is even riskier than fighting oil fires or being a cop in Chicago’s Harrison District, because the thing that makes you human can also wreck your life.

  For Jennie and Leo, the Stalinists were gangsters who betrayed the American union movement with their slippery shenanigans and secretive agendas; both my parents carried scars, not only from police thumpings but from run-ins with Red musclemen on the other side of the Great Family Quarrel. Jennie’s rebel heart belonged not to the Bolsheviks and Lenin, but to hellraisers like Upton Sinclair, Clarence Darrow, Emma Goldman, and Red Emma’s lover, Alexander Berkman (who shot Carnegie Steel boss Henry Frick three times and stabbed him twice, so much for pacifism).

  There is hardly a Jewish immigrant clan of their generation that was not bitterly split between the “ists”—socialists versus Communists or both against the Trotskyists who didn’t like the de Leonists who loathed the Cannonites who despised the Schactmanites who—and on and on. In the best circles—that is, the American labor aristocracy into which I was born—it was uncool not to be an “ist” of some kind, and an “ist” is genetically coded to engage in fierce factional disputes over the most profound of human questions or the tiniest of procedural points. You argued for your “position” as for your own life.

  Warren Beatty’s film Reds makes a good stab at portraying the white-hot passions involved in families like mine. Reds is also useful for identifying the exact modern moment when brother and sister, mother and son, turned against one another in one of the great classic debates about whether the working class should go to war against itself. My whole life before I was born was shaped by bearded disputatious men in smoky halls passing resolutions in foreign languages about countries I only knew about from my stamp album.

  In 1912, the influential Socialist International, including the Americans, met in Switzerland and pledged to oppose the coming butchery in the First World War. They called on workers to lay down their weapons or turn them against the generals. The word socialism had heft then; in America, fifty-six socialists were mayors of U.S. cities, Oklahoma had a “red” legislature, Kansas was a hotbed of radical publishing, and the party published 262 English-language weeklies and five daily papers. Overseas in France and Germany, socialists had near majorities in their parliaments. Yet in a single moment, when war broke out in 1914, it all collapsed at the first sound of the regimental bugles in Serbia, Austria, Germany, France, Russia, and Britain, when the socialists saluted, clicked their heels, and voted for “war credits,” that is, to back their respective governments in sending workers to slaughter each other in the trenches. Hitler, who served bravely on the western front, and I are direct descendants of the moral disintegration of socialist pacifism in that war.

  That night at dinner in the back of the store, when a woman in the snow cursed my mother as a dirty whore, we all, consciously or not, carried the burden of that quarrelsome history, acting out in our own lives the insults and shoving matches of a noisy night in 1912 in Basle and Zimmerwald. The “personal is political” is a tired cliché, but in our family the political really was personal.

  The other cliché is that politically minded people don’t have personal lives or, if they do, they self-destruct because their ideals take priority over their families. Whole books have been written about how the “struggle” wrecks relationships. Look at the mess Karl Marx made of his daughters; how Engels snobbishly refused to marry his factory-girl mistress, Mary Burns; Lenin’s hotsy-totsy adultery with the haut-bourgeois Inessa Armand; Stalin murdering his wife; the storm that was Louise Bryant and John Reed’s marriage; and the long list of complaining children I know who blame their personal problems on their parents’ social dedication.

  Yet I cannot imagine being the child of anyone other than Jennie and Leo, whose lives were a constant toss-up between high ideals and messy reality. Of course, they could have done this or that better—there’s this whole question of an absent dad—but in the end I’ve come round to loving them, not only for who they were but also for who I am and who my son Joe is. Joe wouldn’t be alive if Leo hadn’t ambled past this sparkling redhead on a cigarette-makers’ picket line in 1919 with a corny line of flapdoodle, “Anymore like you at home, honey?”

  The emotional lives of radicals often strike me as muddled, complex, tangled, tormented by unresolvable contradictions, failed relationships, unfulfilled dreams, neurotic betrayals, and just all-round shittiness. But is this so very different from “mainstream” families? Check out from the library John Cheever and John Updike, or look around at your next-door neighbors in Scarsdale, Winnetka, or Pasadena. Anyway, in my world, my culture, my parents were mainstream, as I define it.

  They’re with me still, Jennie and Leo, when I’m putting Joe to bed at night or choose this word over that on the typing keys or wonder in the middle of a domestic crisis how my folks might handle it differently?

  Especially Jennie.

  1939—Nazi-Soviet pact frees Hitler to invade Poland and start WWII. Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.

  Jennie and the Women (II)

  In Chicago, arsonists-for-hire were a neighborhood institution on a par with accident fraudsters who professionally hurled themselves in front of oncoming streetcars for a cleanly broken leg and the insurance settlement. To set a good commercial fire you had to be careful to hire an experienced man, or else somebody could get really hurt. It was how desperate people lived then.

  At about the time when Jennie was negotiating with a two-man firebug team to burn down our Family Hand Laundry, a landlord’s eviction notice arrived followed by a bailiff’s papers. Jennie thought To hell with torching the place, it’s too much trouble, and in a single night moved us out of the only home I’d known for three years. None of the “comrades” helped because most of them were flat broke, or they may have held it against Dad for ducking out of his commitment to organize them against t
he Teamster goons.

  I hated leaving the store, its pink and green sign sighing in the wind, the gold and black National cash register that rarely registered anything but “No Sale,” the Chinese down the street who had cut our throats, the ornate crown molding on the ceiling I stared at by the hour to zone out my parents’ fiery quarrels, the back alley window barred from robbers moronic enough to break into our bankruptcy, the damp comforting smell of drying laundry. Our three years there had been a purgatory for Jennie and Leo, but it had given me a life, plus a license to my own name even if I hated it.

  Jennie moved us in with a family on the “Polack” side of the Pulaski streetcar tracks, but they weren’t any more welcoming than the Jews who had taken us in as paying boarders. The Poles came into our room whenever they felt like it to turn off the lights day or night; and of course their sons began beating on me, but now that I was bigger and stronger I won as many bouts as I lost.

  As if we didn’t have enough troubles, one day, as Jennie was coming back from job hunting, she was drawn down the hall by a great sobbing from inside the room next to ours. I peeked out to see Ma listening through the other door. Seeing me, she jerked a thumb, meaning “Follow me into trouble,” and grudgingly I followed as she marched in without bothering to knock. There was a girl in the room, maybe sixteen, rocking back and forth on a threadbare couch, alternately weeping and moaning to herself. Jennie plunked herself down beside her, smoothed her straggly blond hair, and got the story: Charlotte was unmarried and pregnant by a Great Lakes Training Station sailor who had walked out on her. My heart sank, knowing from experience how this would galvanize Jennie, and so it happened. In the next weeks Ma took charge of this perfect stranger’s predicament, forbade her a back-alley abortion, the only kind available then to a single girl, saw her through the birth of the child, located a Catholic adoption agency, wrote a letter to the sailor’s commanding officer (we never heard back), and gave Charlotte enough bus fare to get her home to Naperville, Illinois. All this time, I grumbled that Ma was meddling, who did she think she was, God? “What planet are you living on, son? She would do the same for me,” Ma shut me up. Life in Naperville turned out to be unbearable for Charlotte, who came back to Chicago where Jennie spread her freckled arms over this lost child and found her a waitress job at a Thompson’s cafeteria and in no time Charlotte, a church-going Catholic, became a member ex officio of the Riga-Baltic Ladies Progressive Society. I attended her first, and my last, sit-down dinner with the ladies at Carl’s Restaurant. Charlotte took one look at all the food dishes laden with brains, calves liver, tongue, gefilte fish, and all manner of forshpie entrails and almost plotzed. Jennie smiled, “Welcome to the Jews, sweetheart. The Alka-Seltzer is on the house.”

  My mother the saint, except with other women’s husbands, or on a picket line.

  Jennie the Chicagorilla

  After nearly putting a match to our store, and back to our old pattern of tiptoeing down the back stairs for a midnight flit from rooms we couldn’t pay the rent on, by luck my mother was thrown a life preserver of a part-time piecework job at Regal Frocks, a Loop sweatshop. She was a skilled overlock machine operator gifted with the holographic three-dimensional mind of an industrial engineer who at a glance could take in an entire factory floor and spot the production logjams and how to fix them. Since Regal was nonunion, she put in a call to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, which assigned a full-time organizer, and, as night follows day, the boss fired Jennie and a strike was on.

  I was thirteen and just entering Marshall High and transferring my libido from the Rockets to girls when one afternoon my supper wasn’t on the table, and something told me to grab a streetcar downtown to look for Ma. The picket line in front of Regal Frocks was just dispersing under the watchful eye of one of Chicago’s finest smacking his billy club into the palm of his hand in time-honored style. “Where’s my mom?” I asked. A woman striker put down her placard and pointed up to the sky—at the L (elevated) train that circled the Loop and ran out to the neighborhoods. “Better hurry and catch her,” the woman said ominously, “or somebody’s getting killed.”

  I raced up the L stairs and caught the train just before the doors shut and bounced down the aisle toward Jennie, who waggled that very familiar warning with her eyebrows to go past and ignore her.

  Way out beyond Comiskey Park on the south side, another passenger, a large rawboned white woman carrying a straw carryall, got off at Forty-seventh with Jennie trailing her. I followed down the station steps to the street. When the big woman passed an empty lot Jennie caught up with her and began chatting, then talking, then arguing with her. The woman’s hand darted into the carryall and came out with a pair of mean-looking cloth-cutting shears that Jennie pushed away, whereupon she knocked the woman down with a haymaker punch to the jaw that Jack Dempsey or Dad would have admired. Then, scanning to see if there were any witnesses, she dragged the yelping woman by her hair into scrub bushes and, while I watched in astonishment, slugged her a couple of times and kicked her in the ribs for good measure, just like Swede had done to the Irish kid. I couldn’t believe this was my pacifist mother who wouldn’t even let me join the Boy Scouts because they wore military-style uniforms. I ran over. “Ma, are you nuts? What are you doing?” She straightened up, not even breathing hard, briskly took my arm, and walked me away. “You saw nothing, you heard nothing. Oh look, there’s our streetcar.”

  Later, I got the full story from Dinah Farrar, the Regal Frocks dress designer who had seen the whole thing from her office window. “The woman, a scab, day after day she threatens the pickets with those scissors. Jennie tried everything—you know how she is. ‘Please put away the knife.’ ‘Come, let’s have a cup of coffee and talk about this.’ ‘We’re not your enemies.’ ‘I’m a mother, are you a mother?’ I don’t have to tell you, Jennie’s a talker, appealing to the woman’s better nature. But, nothing. The woman wouldn’t listen. So nature took its course.”

  I asked Dinah what happened to the scab.

  She said, “Oh, she never came back to Regal. What, she’s got a death wish?”

  Much later, I mentioned the Regal incident to Ma. She replied that her memory wasn’t too good anymore.

  Her exact words were: “Who remembers everything? Thank God.”

  Like Joe is with my writing profession, I tried to know as little as possible about Ma’s work. But after the Scissors Woman incident I began slipping down to Regal Frocks after school to escort her home in case of trouble. Waiting outside the factory for the closing whistle, I’d climb up an alley window to peek in and it wasn’t at all like photos I’d seen of sweatshops with grimly silent, oppressed women bent over their machines. At her overlock, it was another Jennie, perky and alive, chattering animatedly, one of the girls. True, Regal Frocks was a sea of whirring machines, regimentation, repetitive work, all that, but it was something else, too, a place for Jennie to show what she was worth, what she knew, her skills—and above all to enjoy the company of women.

  This changed as she got older and slower. Years later she wrote me that with the influx of Spanish-speaking workers and language a barrier to floor gossip—in the old days she would have picked up “Spanglish” in a day—her mind sometimes overtook her fingers as the past threatened to overwhelm her. “Occasionally at work, when the power machine is running, the more I think about all the yesterdays the faster I drive the machine, until I wake up and I know that it is all in the past and I was part of it—”

  The work that killed her saved my mother’s life.

  You’re the Pop

  You’re the baby’s father

  You’re the Pop

  But you needn’t bother

  I won’t make a claim to your ancient name at all

  The day you made me you promised you’d take me to City

  Hall …

  My mistake

  Was in getting plastered.

  What a break

  For the little bastard.

  —improvi
sed unpublished Cole Porter lyric recalled by Elaine Stritch

  MGM’s Truth Serum

  I was born out of Jennie’s movie-loving rib. The closest either of us had to a religious life was a shared, almost insane passion for sprocket-hole fantasies. Despite different tastes—mine Flash Gordon, hers Garbo and Mae West—we’d have odd truces of going together, arm in arm, alternately to the other person’s pick-of-the-week at a local theater. In a rough neighborhood like Lawndale, attending a matinee with one’s mother was not a cowardly thing to do.

  One bright Sunday afternoon I took Jennie to the Central Park Theatre on Roosevelt Road to see her matinee choice, an MGM weepie, Blossoms in the Dust, starring Greer Garson as a Texas unwed mother who builds an orphanage for thrown-away children. Garson, dignified, noble and self-sacrificing, was my mom’s special favorite because she almost never lost her temper on screen; even Myrna Loy threw vases at her husband, William Powell, and as for Jean Harlow, well, what can you expect from a common blonde? I said nothing to Jennie about Garson’s openmouthed kiss with Laurence Olivier in Pride and Prejudice which profoundly reorganized my feelings about sex.

  After watching Blossoms in the Dust, we strolled back to our little room, with kitchen privileges, in the apartment of a no-neck local family, the Orkins: Betty the pinch-faced mother, and a Depression-faded father who was part of the wallpaper, and two sons about my age, skinny bucktoothed Harold and nasty little roughneck Sidney. I could outbox and outfox Harold but his peewee sibling had a fist like a piece of flying concrete and, although smaller, Sidney walloped me almost daily.

  The room we rented overlooked a garbage-strewn alley that was handy for leaning out the window to chat with passing kids. Which may explain how easy it was, in our absence that Sunday, for somebody to toss a grenade—a cherry bomb packed with extra gunpowder loaded with three-inch nails taped to it—through the half-open window and land squarely on the bed Jennie and I slept in. It blew apart the coverlet, scorched the top sheet, which had a big hole burned in it, and sent nails flying into the wall. One nail had buried itself flatwise just above my headboard.