by Sam Ross
On this day, Hershy made the mistake of bringing his union buttons and rubber-band ball to school. And during the afternoon recess period he produced them. Everybody wanted to lag for them and play with him. Polack, seeing the buttons and ball and resenting the way everybody ganged up around Hershy, wanted them. He rushed in and caught the ball while it was being thrown around and put it in his pocket. Nobody dared challenge him, outside of saying: “Come on, Polack, throw us the ball. What do you say, Polack? Be a good guy and throw us the ball. All right for you, Polack. All right if you don’t.…” Then they gathered around Hershy. After all, it was his ball. What was he going to do about it? It was up to him.
Hershy confronted him.
“What do you say, Polack, you going to give me the ball?”
Polack spit out of the side of his mouth.
“You going to give me the ball?” Hershy said louder, his voice dry and tight.
Polack spit on his shoe.
Hershy’s voice wouldn’t work for him any more. In its stead, a raging tear crept out of his eye; it blurred the crowd that was thickening around him and Polack. Then a burning tear crept out of his other eye. The next thing he knew, Polack lunged at him and as he tripped to the ground, the union buttons spilled out of his pocket. The crowd scattered and he scurried about to pick up as many buttons as he could, but before he knew what had happened most of them had disappeared. He was lifted to his feet to face Polack again, but just then the bell rang and he let himself be pulled into line to go back to class.
There, he tried to figure out some way of getting his ball back and of getting even with Polack, but nothing he could think of seemed good. He knew that he couldn’t collect a gang to go into Polack’s neighborhood to get him; a bigger gang might kill them. He couldn’t snitch on him to teacher; nobody’d have any use for him afterward. Could he knock Polack out and take the ball away from him? He was reduced to whispering tensely from time to time: “Give me it back, you.” Immediately, he received a prompt answer from teacher: “Silence!” At which Polack got red in the face as he strained to contain his laughter.
Then Polack began to inflict more torture. Each time he was not looking directly at Polack something struck him. He did not know what it was but automatically he slapped his neck, his cheek, his ear, and the back of his head each time he was hit, until teacher yelled: “Hershel, will you please sit still.”
This got Polack doubled up with suppressed laughter. When he turned away, bang, again he was hit. Again. Again. Again. It began to take on the effect of a shot-put dropping on him. He stared at Polack a long while to avoid being hit again. Then he turned away slowly, but jerked his head back quickly, and caught Polack in the act. A beebie, flicked out from between Polack’s teeth, bounded off Hershey’s nose.
“Right on the schnozz.”
“I’ll kill you, Polack.”
“You and who else?”
“Me and me.”
Polack flicked out another beebie and hit Hershy’s eye.
“Right in the eye. Crack shot.”
His eye seemed to explode right through his head and a ball of fire crackled through his body. He lunged over and tumbled Polack off his seat and tore at his mouth to extract the beebies. Accidentally, as they scuffled on the floor, Hershy grabbed Polack’s fingers and bent them backward. Polack screamed and the beebies fell out of his mouth. Hershy put on more pressure, and as he brought his full weight down on Polack’s hand, he smashed one of his knees into Polack’s groin. Polack suddenly stopped screaming and squirming, and his body grew limp under him.
By this time, teacher was upon them, and with the help of a few boys tore Hershy away from him, but not before he had taken his ball from Polack’s pocket. Nobody knew what had happened to Polack, least of all Hershy, who was taken by complete surprise over his quick and definite victory. But everybody had seen Polack knocked cold, everybody had seen his chalk-white face, everybody had seen how he slowly sat up in a daze and how teacher had to help him to his seat and how he looked sick and frightened. Yes, everybody had seen the triumph of the Muscle.
Teacher, of course, kept him after school. But when he got out, his pals, Cyclops and Niggy and Lala, were waiting for him. They slapped his back and punched his shoulders and jumped around him. What they felt came out in Cyclops’ expression: “Boy, Hershy. Boy.”
And there were no reprisals. Polack wasn’t sure but that another accident might happen. Besides, Hershy always had a gang around him.
And Hershy himself? He believed that he had realized himself for the first time in his life. He believed, as he looked at himself in the mirror that night, with his hair wild, his eyes glaring, his teeth gritted, that another being had crept into him, with a secret energy that had made of him a terror.
“When I get mad,” he said to himself, “watch out. Just watch out, see!”
Then a new and rich experience occurred to him suddenly. For a moment, while looking in the mirror, he idolized himself.
CHAPTER FIVE
1.
Winter was official only when the first snow fell.
The sight of the soft flakes coming down brought a choking tenderness to Hershy’s mother. It made her remember the old country: how the snow piled up on the ground and the trees and the bushes, and remained crystal-white all winter; how the house smelled of baked things and cooked foods; how the whole family cuddled together on top of the broad oven at night; how the bright sun reflecting off the snow almost blinded one; how the sound of sleighs and bells brought cheer to one’s heart; how people gathered in the house and sat into the night spinning stories. It made her think of her parents and her brothers; and, wondering if they were still alive, she wept sadly. Winter was a time for remembering. Winter time was family time.
The father’s remembrance of winter was the death of his father; a pogrom; the going to schule before daylight and shivering over his prayers until the warmth of the stove and the candles and the closeness of other human beings took their effect. Through the falling snow loomed the remembrance of another large city, Kiev: gray, gloomy, and fearsome, where only two kinds of people existed; those who wore boots and furs, and those who wore nothing. Wintertime there was a time for darkness and loneliness, when one welcomed hard work and fatigue.
Winter cramped Rachel’s style: it was strictly an inconvenience. The only good thing about it was New Year’s Eve, if you had a date. She had a date, so the winter was going to be a success. Otherwise, the only steam she could work up over it was the steam that came out of her breath. Winter was strictly for the kids.
It certainly was. (All seasons, with the wonders and new phases of life they brought, were strictly for the children.)
It’s snowing, it’s snowing,
A little man is growing.…
Jack Frost made magic on the windows; he made magic smoke come out of peoples’ mouths; he made daggers hang from the trees and fences and windowsills; he made the milk that was left on the back porch pop right out of the bottles and gave it an ice-cream taste. It was a time for sleds and ice skates, toboggans and slides, snowball fights and King of the Hill, snowmen and igloos.
Winter was a time for cursing, too. It had no respect for a stiff muscle, a creaking bone. One could expire for a piece of daylight, the father complained. He woke up and went to work and came home in the dark. And, while waiting for a streetcar, one could almost die from the burning frost that swept in from the lake and prairies. His only comforts were a warm supper, a glass of hot tea, huddling around the stove and staring into its glowing belly, then feeling the huge warmth of the mother in bed: all of which he did not have the winter before away from home. The mother complained, too. The floors were impossible to step on in one’s bare feet. The house was impossible to keep clean, what with the ashes and the coal and the snow and the slush. And the house stank and looked like a laundry with the wash hung all over to dry. Oh, for a steam-heated flat, for a home of her own with a big basement, for a maid to do all the clea
ning, like her rich sister had. Only the animals lived right; they buried themselves and slept right through the winter.
Winter … a time for Christmas and New Year’s.
It was strictly for the goyim.
2.
For Hershy, only one thing was wrong with winter: Christmas.
Everything suddenly changed, but not for him. In school, teacher smiled tenderly. It roused his suspicions; he wondered what she wanted. Then he knew. She wanted to make a Christian out of him. Fearful of being doomed forever, he gritted his teeth to keep from singing the Christmas carols in class; he bit into the nail of his forefinger so hard that it turned black and blue and he was excused from making Christmas cards when he complained that it hurt.
On the street at night, many of the houses glowed with candles on Christmas trees and the windows were decorated with holly leaves and poinsettias. On the business street, the stores were crowded, and in the red, white, and green windows were all kinds of presents. The church bells seemed to be ringing all the time. On the carline intersection, across the street from the park, there were always a couple of Salvation Army women with tambourines; with them was a Santa Claus with runny eyes and a dirty cotton beard, who heaved his pillowed belly up and down with his hands but who never laughed. Every time he went over to warm his hands over the fire that was going in a tin pail, Hershy said: “Some Santa Claus.”
Once, he and his pals put rocks in the center of snowballs and whipped them at Santa Claus and the Salvation Army women; they ran away frightened when one of the women fell to the ground. Another time, they threw snow instead of money into the tambourines. And another time, they threw a shoebox full of snow into their pail of fire and put it out.
Among themselves, they fortified each other.
“Christmas is a lot of baloney.”
“Yah.”
“There ain’t no Santa Claus.”
“Yah.”
“The dopes. The dumb goyim.”
“Yah.”
“It’s all bushwa.”
When they caught hold of a lone gentile kid, they said: “You believe in Santa Claus?”
“Yah.”
“There ain’t no Santa Claus, you dumbsock.”
“There is too.”
“How much you want to bet?”
“All the money in the world.”
“A million dollars?”
“Yah.”
“Put up or shut up.”
“Yah?”
“Yah.”
“Okay. Here’s a present from Santa Claus.”
The kid got his face smeared with snow.
Every day the snow remained on the ground, Hershy’s mother cursed it and said: “The goyim live right. It’s their world. God is with them. They’ll have a white Christmas.” Specifically, the goyim, to her, were the Polish landlord, his beefy red-cheeked wife, and their six-year-old daughter. “The snow makes the Polack upstairs a happy man.”
One day, Hershy saw the Pole come home with icicles on his mustache and with the blood of the animals he killed at the stockyards still stained on his thick hands; he was carrying a Christmas tree. When he reached the front door he stopped and touched the mezuzah, then kissed his finger and crossed himself.
“Hey, you,” Hershy yelled. “What’d you do that for?”
“I’m not taking a chance. The snow has to lay on the ground. I don’t want your God to be mad and spoil the Christmas.”
“You’ll get a sin doing that.”
“Shahkreft, you bloody dog. Jesus Christ was a Jew, wasn’t he?”
“Yah, but you took him away from us, you cheater.”
“Shahkreft, little one, peace and good will to all men.”
“Ah, bushwa.”
A great puff of smoke came out of Mr. Pryztalski’s mouth, the icicles dripped off his mustache, he gripped the base of the tree as though he were going to whack him one with it, and Hershy ran away.
“You little sonofabitch,” Mr. Pryztalski bellowed. “I said peace and good will to all men.”
For that, Hershy wanted the snow to melt, even though it was more fun to have it on the ground.
But how strong can a child be? How long can he hold out? Even his own father couldn’t make it easier to bear the holiday. For once, after staring longingly at the frosty windows on the business street, at the sleds, ice skates, electric trains, erector sets, hunter’s knives, guns, cowboy suits, football and baseball equipment, he said to his father: “Pa, why ain’t we got a Christ?”
“Because we don’t need one.”
“Why don’t we need one?”
“Because their God wasn’t strong enough and they needed another one to help them. With us, there is only one God.”
“Can our God fight their God?”
“Yes, ours is stronger.”
“So why do we get beat up more than them? Why do we have to be more afraid than them?”
His father shrugged his shoulders, not knowing what to answer. In the old country you took your faith, your station in life, your very life itself, for granted. You asked few questions. The world seemed to have a definite order. There, you had your own religion, your own language, your own school, your own traditions: your whole life stemmed from the schule, your whole life turned inward: somehow, because you were more unified it was easier to bear the outward pressure. There was no problem there of reaching outward, of hoping to become a vital part of the community, for if you tried to poke just a little finger outward it would be crushed. So you waited, suffering, for your own Messiah. And the Jew became a symbol of eternal hope, because life couldn’t be worse for them; it could only become better.
Here, well, you came here with your eternal hope; and, to a degree, it was fulfilled, for life was better. But here, you took the chance of losing your former unity; in being able to reach outward you came into greater conflict with the world about you. You had to be more careful: for there, only your life could be destroyed; but here, your spirit also could be crushed.
Here, a Jew’s strength was slowly undermined in the changes he had to make. You had to work on Saturday to hold a job. You had to learn a new language and adapt yourself to the values of the new language. You didn’t ask too many questions about the food you ate outside the house. In the South, where there were no schules, what was one to do, create his own temple of worship? His own father would have walked miles to demonstrate his piety. But he—he had grown lazy. He had even become lazy in the old country. In a sense, he had rejected his own father. Perhaps his own child might reject him. Perhaps he (Hershy) might have to reject him so that he might become a better man.
Already the foreign seeds were blooming. The child could understand Yiddish but was losing the flavor of its speech. Instead of the biblical heroes of old the child had his own: prizefighters, ballplayers, gangsters, moneymen. In one generation thousands of years of tradition had been lightly thrown away.
Even he, himself, in his daily comparisons of there and here, felt the chasm growing wider and wider. Sometimes he, himself, had asked: what is a Jew? Why shouldn’t his son ask it? And how can one answer? If one is not wholly involved in a religion; if one doesn’t have the language of the Jew; if one, in adopting the manners about him, doesn’t even look or feel like a Jew, what can you say: that he is a part of a people, he is the carrier of a breed of oppressed people, that he must be a twentieth-century symbol proving the endurance and the greatness of a people once great, that he is a conscience, if nothing else? What can one say to a child to make him feel secure, to make him feel stronger? Could he say: We are the strongest people in the world; we prove it every day of our lives by enduring the subtlest kinds of persecution; we also prove that the world about us, with its Christ, is evil. When they stop bothering us, when they stop making us fear them, then we will know that the real Messiah has come, then all men will belong and will feel safe, all men will love each other, all our energies will be released to do good, and we will feel, for the first time since
Adam, that we are fully alive? How does one put a million thoughts into the simple words that a child might understand? How does one sum up one’s whole lifetime into something a child can grasp?
“When you get older, Hershel,” he said, “you’ll understand.”
“Yah, but I still wish we had a Christmas.”
“Well, we have a Hanukkah.”
“Ah, Hanukkah. All you get is lotkes, them lousy dried-up pancakes, and a few pennies. But Christmas, all the things you can get.”
“Don’t think about it too much, Hershel.”
“I can’t help it, Pa. All the things in the stores.”
“You’ll get what you need without Christmas. If the goyim need to fool themselves, let them.”
“Yah, but I wish I had a sled and a pair of skates.”
His father knew that he couldn’t deny him these things. He had already made many concessions to life; one more wouldn’t hurt.
“All right, Hershel. You’ll get them.”
But his father didn’t buy them in a store; he had Hershy help him build them in the basement. But Hershy was disappointed in the sled; it wasn’t a real coaster. And he wouldn’t wear the skates; all the guys would call him a sissy because there were double runners on them. His father tried to distract him by getting him to help build a phonograph that Rachel wanted. But when Christmas Eve arrived Hershy felt that his heart would burst. The Pryztalskis upstairs didn’t help matters, either. Mr. Pryztalski shook the house with his thundering walk. Mrs. Pryztalski’s giggles and high-pitched voice prickled through Hershy. He felt like killing the little girl.
“So what’s Santa Claus going to bring me?” she shrieked.
“You’ll see,” Mr. Pryztalski bellowed.
“But when’s he going to come?”
“After you go to sleep. Now go to sleep.”
“First I’m going to hang up one more stocking.”
“Ho, ho, ho.” Mr. Pryztalski was practicing his Santa Claus voice. “Hang it up. Quick.”
