The Auerbach Will

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  She read ravenously, everything she could get her hands on, from Shakespeare’s plays to the latest novel by Joseph Conrad, called The Secret Agent, and the more daring modern novels by Bertha M. Clay, the poems of Ethel Lynn Beers and Rose Terry Cooke. Vicariously, she rose in the ranks of the French bourgeoisie with Emma Bovary, was titillated by the erotic Kate Chopin, and suffered the humiliation of Hester Prynne. “Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart,” she read, and sighed.

  Her father complained about it. “Look at her,” he would cry, “her nose in a book again!”

  “But you’re always reading, Papa.”

  “Not the trash you read—novels, picture magazines.”

  “You wanted me to memorize Shakespeare. Remember?”

  “But that was for your school,” he argued. “No husband will want a wife who spends all her time with a book.”

  “Your papa’s right,” her mother said. “Men don’t like bookish women. If a man ever finds out you’re bookish, he’ll want nothing to do with you.”

  Still, she continued her journey to the center of the earth with Jules Verne.

  At school, meanwhile, there was one weekly lecture which she had begun to look forward to. It took place on Fridays, and the tall young man who conducted it was one of the Do-Gooders from Uptown who worked as a volunteer in the school system. The course he taught was called Living With Our City, and the topics he chose were almost uniformly boring—How Our Fire Department Does Its Job, A Day in the Life of a Sanitation Inspector, Our Mayor and His Councilmen, Why the Policeman is Our Friend, and so on—nor was his manner of delivery particularly inspiring, as he droned on about the sewer system and abjured against young people’s practice of opening fire hydrants on hot days. And so, instead of listening to what this tall young man had to say, Essie had taken to making sketches of him in her notebook, because Essie thought him simply the handsomest young man she had ever seen.

  He must have been in his early twenties, with the darkest, curliest hair, the bluest eyes, the strongest chin, the straightest nose. He was also beautifully dressed, and one of her classmates had told her why—his family was in the men’s clothing business. Essie sketched him with a mustache, didn’t like that, and erased it off. Then she sketched him with a small, pointed beard, but didn’t care for that, either.

  One afternoon, as she was leaving school, she encountered him on the steps. He smiled at her, and said, “Do you live near here?”

  “On Norfolk Street,” she said.

  “I’ll walk you home,” he said. “Here, let me carry your books,” and he took her packet of books that were tied together with a slender string. She had actually been headed for the library. But that could wait.

  Up close to him, not separated from him by rows of students and their desks, and by the lecture platform, she saw that he really was extraordinarily handsome.

  In that memory, he still is.

  It is February there, and the low late-afternoon sun is leaden and cold. There is a damp wind coming up from the river, and instinctively Essie draws her scarf up over her nose and mouth, and they push forward, heads lowered, clutching their coats, against the wind. It is too cold for conversation, and there seems no point in trying. Warm gusts of steam blow up from the storm sewers, the hot innards of the city that he has described in his lectures, and fling up soot and candy wrappers, all the detritus of the city, spiraling into the air. A blowing sheet of newspaper cuffs about his trouser legs and he does a little dance to rid himself of it. Essie cups her hand across her eyes to keep cinders from flying into them.

  In that memory, the city is all motion, people rocking about on the pavements like passengers on a huge ship on a stormy sea, swaying to keep their balance, grasping for handholds as the vessel that is Manhattan Island pitches and tosses in the waves. But in more ways than one this short journey to Norfolk Street seems to Essie Litsky like an ocean crossing, and in the wind she and only she feels that she is walking on sheer air. Where will this journey lead? For this young man himself, in his fine clothes, with his highly polished dark brown shoes, is from the Other Side. And on the Other Side, she knows from what she has read in her books and magazines, stand open spaces, green lawns and picket fences, trees and streams and fountains, gardens where children play in swings and sandboxes, where sunshine falls on all four sides, not just slanted narrowly through streets and airshafts. This is where she suddenly feels herself headed now, with this fine-looking young man as her escort and her guide. The trip may be full of perils, but it need not be long, and she knows immediately that this is the trip she has always dreamed of making, and it is as though, if she stood on tiptoe, she could see and greet the horizon of that shining opposite shore. Because it is as simple as this: he is taking her out of the Old World, and into America at last.

  I must make him fall in love with me, she tells herself. I must make no false moves. Then, holding tight to him, I will leap to it.

  They turn into Hester Street, and the wind falls, trapped behind the buildings, but there another storm assails them—a moving sea of humanity and sound. The street is lined on both sides with pushcarts topped by makeshift canopies and umbrellas as far as the eye can see, and in between are people—bearded men in heavy coats, women in long skirts and aprons and shawls, children, and everyone, it seems, is carrying some sort of bundle or basket, buying, selling, bickering, haggling: newsboys, egg-sellers, fish-peddlers, the matzoh men, the cash-for-clothes men, thrusting goods at one another. Blocking their way is a group of women arguing loudly with a yard-goods dealer over a bit of cotton cloth. People lean against each other, shout and move away. Fists shake. Threats are issued. Terrible terrors and curses are invoked. Then there is a sudden burst of laughter and from somewhere the sound of an organ-grinder’s music. The crowd sways as two policemen move slowly through, fingering their long sticks.

  “What’s going on?” the young man shouts in Essie’s ear.

  “It’s all right. It’s always like this,” she shouts back. “It’s the safest place in town. You just have to push through.”

  And so they push forward, shouldering, elbowing, shoving and forcing themselves against the crush of human traffic that assails them, between the pushcarts and their disputatious customers, through the warm smell of charcoal fires and the cooking smells of bread, chicken broth and garlic sausage and, above all, the pungent smell of human bodies, through the seething, jostling throng.

  The next block is even worse. “Hold my hand,” he says. “So we don’t get separated.” They push on, clinging to each other, step by step through the tide.

  At the corner, Essie shouts up to him, “Do you like egg creams?”

  “What?”

  “I said, do you like egg creams?”

  He stops and laughs, and Essie sees that he has a nice laugh, much more compelling than when he is standing at a lectern in an auditorium, holding forth on water mains. “Don’t think I’ve ever had one,” he says.

  “They make good ones here,” she says, pointing to a little shop.

  Inside the ice cream parlor, it is considerably quieter. They sit side by side at the counter and order egg creams, and Essie shows him how to spoon the runny liquid out of his glass. “This is good,” he says, though from his tone she is not entirely sure he means it. Then he says, “Do you like living in this neighborhood?”

  “I’ve lived here all my life.”

  He seems to consider this. Then he asks, “Are you enjoying my lectures?”

  “Oh, yes. Very much.”

  “I’ve noticed that you take a lot of notes.”

  Essie feels her face redden. He is still holding her books, and she prays that he won’t ask to see her notes and discover what they really are. “Yes,” she says.

  “I just wish they’d let me lecture about some of the things that really interest me,” he says.

  “What sort of things?”

  “European history. And
art.”

  “I was born in Europe, but I don’t remember it.”

  “I guessed as much.”

  “Why won’t they let you talk about that?”

  He makes a face. “We must teach the new people useful things.”

  “I think art is useful.”

  He shakes his head.

  “I’m studying botany this year,” she says. “What use is that?”

  “Very useful,” he says. “We must interest Jews in farming—agriculture.”

  “Are you Jewish?”

  He nods.

  “Where do you go to shul?”

  “Shul?” He laughs again. “I guess we don’t go in much for that sort of thing, my family,” he says.

  Puzzled, Essie spoons up the last of her egg cream. “I’d better get home now, or Mama will worry,” she says.

  Outside, they push on, through more crowds, across Allen Street, then Orchard Street. The winter sky has grown darker, colder, and there is a scattering of snowflakes in the air. “Only two more blocks,” Essie says.

  At Norfolk Street, they turn the corner and head north, toward Grand Street, and leave the crowds behind them. “This is where I live,” Essie says, and realizes that a note of pride has crept into her voice—pride that her street, at least, is not as crowded and noisy as some others. But when they stop in front of number 54, and Essie says, “This is my house,” and when she sees him plant his feet on the sidewalk and gaze upward at the facade of the building—and when she lets her eyes follow his—it is as though she is seeing her building now as he is seeing it, and she feels suddenly helpless and apologetic for the narrow, ugly, soot-blackened building where she lives, its face crawling with zigzagged fire escapes, a building identical in its grimy sameness with every other on the street, with nothing special about it in the whole wide world.

  “We live on the fifth floor,” she says.

  “Shall I walk you up?”

  “Oh, no,” she says with alarm, thinking of all the possibilities which her mother has warned about arrayed before her. “No, this is fine.”

  He hands her her books. Thus, with both her hands briefly encumbered, he kisses her lightly on the forehead.

  It is a first—the first time Essie has ever been kissed by a man other than her father and her baby brother.

  He smiles, steps back, gives her a little salute, says, “See you next Friday,” and starts off.

  “I don’t even know your name!” she calls after him.

  “Jake Auerbach.”

  Five

  The atmosphere in the Litskys’ flat that night had been heavy with recrimination and reproach. Little Abe had been sent into the other room, with the door firmly closed behind him, since the matter under discussion, Essie’s impure act, was considered too awful and momentous for a boy of his tender years, even though Abe, at thirteen, had become street-wise in ways that would have surprised his parents. He had already, though Essie would not know about it until much later, managed to filch a dollar from Minna’s cash drawer and had been inducted into manhood by one of the Delancey Street girls.

  “But Mama, you didn’t see what happened!” Essie kept repeating.

  “No! But I’m the only one on the street who didn’t,” her mother said. “Mrs. Potamkin from downstairs saw it, and Mrs. Brachfeld from across the street—all those nosy yentes who have nothing to do all the day long but sit in their windows and watch what goes on in the neighborhood. Mrs. Potamkin was the first one into the store to tell me. ‘Guess what, Mrs. Litsky. Your daughter Esther was just now out in front on the street, carrying on with some strange man.’”

  “Mama, I wasn’t carrying on! He just gave me a little kiss, just a peck, like this”—she demonstrated—“I wasn’t even expecting it. That’s all there was. I didn’t kiss him back. He just gave me the little peck, and said good night.”

  Sam Litsky’s head was in his hands, and he rolled it back and forth as though he were experiencing a convulsion. “Who is he?” he demanded. “Who is this man, this piece of filth, who would defile my daughter and bring shame and disgrace upon my family? Who is he, that’s all I want to know.”

  “His name is Jake Auerbach, Papa.”

  “Auerbach? I know no Auerbachs. How did he pick you up?”

  “He didn’t pick me up, Papa. He teaches at my school. We just happened to be going out the door together, and he offered to walk me home.”

  “What sort of course does this filth teach? What sort of ideas is he putting into the heads of our young people?”

  “It’s a course called Living With Our City.”

  “What? Living with sin?”

  “No, Papa—Living With Our City. It’s about how water starts out in a reservoir upstate and comes down in big pipes to people’s houses, and things like that. He’s really very nice. He bought me an egg cream at Mr. Levy’s.”

  “What? You let him buy you things? Don’t you know that that’s how the seducer always begins? Haven’t your mother and I told you often enough never to take food or candy from a stranger? How many times we’ve told you? A thousand, maybe? Two thousand? Three?”

  “But Papa, I told you, he’s not a stranger—”

  Now Minna was becoming cross with her husband. “Now, Sam, enough already,” she said sharply. “Let Esther tell her story. Esther—” she hesitated. “Did he try—did he try to touch you in any way, in any special place, in a woman’s special places?”

  “No!”

  “Well, thank God for that!”

  Now her father was shouting at her mother. “Do I believe what I am hearing?” he said. “Do I believe my own two ears? Do I hear you thanking God for a man, a man who is a teacher, a man who is hired to instruct the lives of little ones in moral ways, for a man in that position in the school, for that man to grab one of his girl students and kiss her—you thank God for that? I think you have just gone crazy! In Russia, if a man teacher did that to a girl student he would be marched into the square and shot!”

  “He didn’t grab me,” Essie said.

  “He didn’t grab her,” Minna echoed. “And it isn’t Russia. Thank God for that, too.”

  “Still, you cannot say that this is the proper way for a teacher to behave in any country—and thank God for that. No, it is wrong. And I am going to write a letter, in English, to the proper school authorities tomorrow, first thing in the morning, explaining what has happened and what this man has done to my Esther from his school. No, I take it back. I’m not going to write a letter. I’m going to the school myself tomorrow and personally tell the authorities what this man has done. He’ll have no more paycheck after tomorrow.”

  “Oh, Papa, please don’t. A few people on the street saw him give me a little kiss. If that was so bad, do you want the whole school—the whole neighborhood to know? They will, if you do that.”

  “She’s right, Sam,” Minna said. “There are enough busy-bodies right on this block without bringing in the whole East Side.”

  “A man like that should not be working for the New York City public school system.”

  “He doesn’t really work for the school system, Papa. He’s a volunteer. He comes down from Uptown to give his lectures, once a week, on Fridays.”

  “So much for his paycheck, Sam,” Minna said.

  Essie’s father looked suspicious. “Is he Jewish?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah,” he said, “I know exactly the type. He’s one of the Uptown shtadlonim. I know all about those types, Esther. They’ve turned their backs on their faith, they don’t keep the Sabbath, their synagogue is even in what used to be a church. They’ve taken out Hebrew from the service, their women sit right beside them in the shul. The men don’t cover their heads in God’s house, and instead the women wear fancy hats. They sing Christian hymns, they’re more Christian than the Christians. They’re not real Jews. They don’t keep the dietary laws, and they want to force good Jews like us to be like them. Did you know that one of those shtadlonim—right on Gr
and Street—took a Russian Jew into a restaurant, trying to convert him, and made him eat an oyster? Don’t look so shocked! It happened. I read it in the Tageblatt. The poor Jew died, of course.”

  “Papa, you’re always saying that most of the stories in the Tageblatt are lies.”

  “This one was true. On Grand Street.”

  Shtadlonim—it was a Yiddish term her father used somewhat indiscriminately. Technically, it meant any wealthy, influential Jew who was able to intercede on the Jews’ behalf with the government. As such, it was a term of gratitude and respect. But her father also used the term sneeringly, and applied it to anyone who groveled before the feet of the Establishment, or who tried to curry favors from higher-ups. Among people like these, he included what were also known as the Amerikanishe Deitche Yahudim, the haughty, purse-proud, arrogant American German Jews, who lived in great brick and brownstone mansions Uptown. Though the Deitche were the self-appointed leaders of New York’s Jewish community, and though they headed all the important Jewish hospitals and charities, they were suspected of secretly harboring no small amount of riches, or anti-Semitism. They claimed that they wanted the Russians to “assimilate,” which meant be submissive and inconspicuous, and being inconspicuous meant shaving off sidecurls, discarding yarmulkes and phylacteries, abandoning traditions that were thousands of years old. The Tageblatt frequently complained about the missionary nature of the Uptown Germans’ incursions on the Lower East Side.

  The Germans feared the Russians, but they didn’t call it fear. They called it philanthropy.

  “Then I think,” her father said, “that if we can’t get that man out of school, where he is bothering our little children, that it is time to take Esther out of that school.”

  “Sam, we agreed that she could finish this year,” her mother said.

  “And I’m really not a little child, Papa,” Essie said. “Mama was married when she was my age. You know that.”

  “It’s true, Sam,” her mother said. “Our Esther is growing into a woman. So—what’s an innocent little kiss? That’s all there was to it.”