A Good Place to Come From

by Morley Torgov

  Once, when I proposed to take apart my brand-new twowheeler as a shop-mechanics project at school, father—to whom my bicycle was a sacred object—decided not to take any chances with the regular neighbourhood referees; instead he brought the matter before the rabbi for adjudication. As defendant at these proceedings, I chose to rest my case at the very outset, giving the prosecution plenty of leeway to submit evidence that I was too young, too old, just plain crazy, and without a shred of proper respect for the material possessions he bought for me with his hard-earned money. The rabbi weighed the evidence solemnly. He allowed as how a bicycle was very special, probably the most expensive thing you could give a boy (remember: this was twenty years before transistors). Nevertheless it stood to reason that anything constructed of parts was nothing more than the sum of those parts and need not be regarded as an inviolable whole. Two and two made four, not five, when one spoke of machinery. In other words, my shop-mechanics project had his blessing.

  Father suffered this latest adverse ruling without grace.

  "What the hell do rabbis know about bicycles anyway?" he grumbled as we drove away from the clergyman's house.

  Faced with a steady string of losses in both the secular and religious courts, my father abandoned the trial system, discharged the druggist, the barber, the liquor store manager, the rabbi. Victory after victory had made me more brazen. It was time for him to climb back into the saddle, to be once again the whole judicial system rolled into a single personage—prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, appeal court, sheriff, and meticulous keeper of criminal records. But this time the badge and the old six-shooter wouldn't do; he would need a new weapon. And a new weapon he found; a weapon that arrived fresh daily by mail all the way from New York City a thousand miles to the east, one that was available in an inexhaustible supply, that discharged its force silently but with deadly effect and disappeared next day innocently wrapped around some household garbage.

  That weapon was the Jewish newspaper.

  In the major conflict that began to take shape between my father and me—the conflict concerning my future occupation—I learned that if the pen was mightier than the sword, the Jewish newspaper was mightier than a 75 mm. howitzer.

  A word here about the importance of the Jewish newspaper, in those days.

  To the smalltown Jew, news was not so much a matter of quantity as quality; no newspaper could earn his readership simply by claiming to print all the news that was fit to print; it had to be the right kind of news. And the right kind of news was to be found in one or the other of the two most popular New York Yiddish-language dailies, The Day and Forward: tales of marital discord, reunions of long-lost relatives, clinical woes, triumphs over poverty and persecution. Stories of filial disloyalty and parental suffering—stories that tore out the reader's heart—were a great favourite. (Every Jewish father in town had played King Lear in real life at one time or another.)

  Of course, the front pages were full of Roosevelt and the New Deal, Hitler and the New Tyranny, and the wars in Ethiopia, Spain and China. These events, however, had no immediate impact upon the smalltown Jew. How could one be expected to be profoundly moved by events in Washingon or Nanking when one hardly bothered about affairs in Sudbury, less than two hundred miles distant over the primitive washboard that was Highway 17 in the thirties? Massive political movements, social upheavals—the stuff of history—were happening on some other planet. Meanwhile, here and now, life had to go on. Goods had to be sold. Bills had to be paid. Money had to be put aside—somehow—for a child's education, and for the lonely rainy days of his parent's old age. The Jewish newspaper, even though it was made up and printed in another land, indeed in another world, knew intimately every iota of the strugglesome life of the smalltown Jew. Its pages were filled with the earthy humour of the garment trade, with sympathetic advice on just about everything from bunion-trimming to brain surgery; it articulated his fears and frustrations and offered him, if not solutions, at least the comfort of knowing he was not alone in the wilderness; it nurtured his ambitions, not so much for himself as for his children. If he had to be content to exist in a two-by-four world, that was one thing. But his children would have to rise above this. Life offered greater challenges than selling dresses and scrap metal and Florida oranges.

  I have gone to some pains to describe the influence of the Jewish newspaper so that you will have some understanding of how, in the aforementioned major conflict that developed in our household, it became my father's staunchest ally and my own most dreaded adversary.

  Now to the war itself.

  It broke on my thirteenth birthday with the pronunciamento: "My son is going to be a doctor." This was greeted with universal approval; what higher calling could any man possess? "Doctor." The very word conjured up a picture of a young miracle worker strolling benignly among his patients, they reaching out adoringly to touch his white coat or to let his magic stethoscope brush against them, blessing his pale delicate hands, calling out his name in reverential tones reserved for popes and emperors, begging for his attention—"Doctor, please..." Think of the title, and the honour. Better still, think of the money!

  Only one person failed to approve the idea—me. I had stood by, one summer at the cottage, while one of the older Jewish boys in the community, a medical student, performed an autopsy on a dead frog, observed him struggling to commit to memory a formidable list of Latin body parts, overheard his parents boast of how hard their son worked to justify their financial sacrifices. None of this was for me.

  "I'm going to be either a car designer or a writer," I declared.

  "A car designer? A writer? Are you crazy, or are you out of your mind?"

  As a car designer, father warned, I'd spend the rest of my days in oil-stained overalls, fingernails permanently greasecaked, patching tires and welding fenders like the men at the service station.

  And as for writing, that was even less respectable. "Where have I ever needed a writer?" he demanded. "I've been in business all my life, I've never once needed a writer. A doctor, yes, many times. Even two or three times a lawyer—may they all rot in hell, those crooks. But a writer?"

  And he was right. He had never needed a writer.

  There were no poet laureates, no writers-in-residence in the clothing trade. From time to time if creative writing was called for, the merchant supplied it himself, composing newspaper advertisements and window posters in the standard prose of the industry: "High Quality at Low Prices" ... "Lease Expired, Everything Must Go" . . . "Once in a Lifetime Opportunity to Stock Up"... "Selling Out to the Bare Walls". . . and that most charming of all seasonal greetings "Merry Xmas."

  Business correspondence was similarly functional, and minimal: a manufacturer's invoice stamped "Account Overdue"; a merchant's response ("Go to hell") scribbled across the face of the invoice and mailed back. All quite terse and to the point.

  So who needed a writer?

  Besides, there was the matter of lifestyle.

  "I knew writers in Russia," he said. "Never made a ruble, any one of 'em. Sat around in the restaurant all day drinking tea and bumming cigarettes, so broke most of the time they lived off whores. Is that the kind of life you want?"

  Frankly it wasn't. In my mind I had envisioned a far different life. I had gone twice to see Foreign Correspondent, a Hitchcock thriller starring Joel McCrea as an American newspaperman thickly involved in an underground fascist plot in Europe. I was inspired by that movie (and still watch it every time it shows up on late-night television). McCrea embodied everything I pictured for myself: trench coat, snappy fedora, trans-Atlantic flights and phone calls, diplomatic luncheons in palatial dining rooms, editors barking "Hold the press!" as the big news scoop clattered in on the teletype. New places, new faces, briefcase plastered with stickers reading "Amsterdam," "London," and "Paris." On the go all the time. That was for me.

  But to my father this lifestyle was pure gypsy. It ran contrary to his whole way of thinking. To one who had grown up dr
ifting from country to country, from town to town, who craved nothing more than a plot of land to call his own and who finally acquired it—a rectangle of earth thirty by a hundred and twenty, not much but fixed and forever immovable—the idea of a son unrooted to desk and diploma, flying constantly to far-off capitals, with no stock-in-trade save a sheaf of notepaper and a portable typewriter, was anathema.

  ''You were born to be a doctor.''

  "I wasn't born to be anything," I countered. "I'm going to be a writer!"

  So went the initial skirmish. No thundering barrage, no mortal hand-to-hand combat. The process resembled more the opening round of diplomatic talks: a decree sternly handed down, a counter-decree promptly handed back up, followed by a frank exchange of views and a fruitless attempt to agree upon the text of a joint communique.

  Preliminaries over, I made preparations to fight the rest of the war along traditional lines. Expecting that whole sections of the local populace would eventually become caught up in this clash, I set to work moulding public opinion in my favour. I was positively genial to the barber, the druggist, the liquor store manager; I displayed a sudden fascination with Hebrew lore much to the rabbi's surprise and delight; I even went out of my way to establish rapport with the rabbi's wife by insisting upon her recipe for noodle pudding—an unusual request considering that I had never before (nor have I since) attempted to cook a noodle pudding. With the possible exception of the town drunk, I courted everybody and anybody likely to contribute his or her two cents worth for my benefit.

  Looking back, I would have to admit all this laying on of charm was—in a word—sickening. Still, I needed all the allies I could muster. So what if, in the process, I had stooped to just about every false and ingratiating act imaginable, short of kissing babies? War was war.

  I dug in, a one-man Maginot Line, waiting for the blitz.

  But the big gun on the other side of the boundary was silent. I waited. And waited. January, February and March blew themselves away and became bleak memories. It was April now, and still my adversary held his fire. Trees budded, the first brave robins arrived and sang of spring; from the docks along the waterfront the steamships stretched their long steel hulls, broke free of their icy winter prisons and moved cautiously into the narrow strip of black water at the mid-point in the St. Mary's River channel, their whistles blasting a baritone version of the robin's spring song.

  Then, on a calm balmy evening late in May, the first salvo landed suddenly in my territory. It didn't come zinging over, as I had expected; rather it drifted over (if a salvo can ever be said to drift)—casually, like a Sunday stroll, quietly like an early-morning mist.

  "Look at that," father said. He held up the Sunday rotogravure section of Forward. The expression on his face was that of an explorer who had just stumbled upon the Eighth Wonder. "Just look at that. Isn't that a beautiful sight?"

  I looked. It was a page full of graduation portraits. Young faces, fresh-looking despite the unflattering sepia tones of the roto, looked out at the world from under academic caps. All wore ceremonial black gowns and sheepskin collarbands.

  "They all look like Mr. Chips to me," I said.

  "Mr. Chips my eye. Read. Here, look at this one."

  The captions were in both Yiddish and English. I read the latter aloud.

  "Mr. and Mrs. Harry Garfinkle of Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn, are proud to announce the graduation of their son, Dr. Marcus Philip Garfinkle from Columbia Medical School. Dr. Garfinkle topped off a brilliant academic record by winning . . ." There followed an impressive inventory of scholarships and medals.

  "What's Harry Garfinkle's son got to do with me?" I asked. "I never even heard of the Garfinkles. Do we know them?"

  "Of course we don't know them, Ivan!" (Ivan, pronounced "Eevun" in the Russian manner, was the name father would bestow on me when I was especially obtuse; it placed me in the same mental category as those muscular Siberian dunces alongside whom he had served in the Czar's militia.) "Here, read another one."

  "Bound for a career in surgery is Dr. Henry Leo Rosenfeld, son of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Rosenfeld ... Dr. Rosenfeld's older brother, Milton, is an eminent surgeon in Cleveland ..."

  "Lucky father. Two surgeons he's got. Here, look at this one."

  I read again. "... Dr. Levine leaves shortly for postgraduate training in England, having earned the J. Peabody Winterbotham Award for excellence in pathology ..."

  "More!"

  I read on. One by one I went through the entire page of portraits. Each caption was pure press-agentry and must have been composed by a highly-paid public relations counsel or at least an adoring mother. Not a single one of this spring crop of sawbones was mediocre. Each and every one had graduated magna-cum-everything; each and every one of them was destined to earn a Nobel Prize in medicine before he reached thirty.

  "Well?" father said.

  I suppose a dramatic reaction was in order at this point. I suppose I ought to have seen the light, ought to have laid down my sword and shield, ought to have fallen into my father's arms—like the prodigal son returning to the paths of righteousness—and cried "I will, I will. Lead me to the medical school. I will make you proud of me. I will be the youngest Phi Beta Kappa west of Suez. I will discover cures for cancer, corns, and the common cold. I will win not one but three Nobel prizes for medicine. I will even get my picture in the Sunday Forward."

  "Well?" father repeated. "What do you think of them?"

  "I bet they've all got freckles and smell from iodine. Not only that, but most of them have small eyes."

  The reference to the smell of iodine reflected one of my pet distastes. The reference to freckles and small eyes reflected two of my father's. If there was anything he disliked in a human, one was freckles, the other was small eyes; the latter, he claimed, were a sign of sneakiness. ("Show me a man or woman with small eyes and I'll show you a person you can't trust.")

  Father re-examined the page of pictures. Of course there wasn't a single freckle in sight. And as for the eyes, every physician was the lucky owner of two large dark saucers that spoke of love and devotion and moonlit nights in desert hideaways.

  "Ivan!" That was all he had to say for the moment.

  Then he fell silent. The topic was exhausted. Or so I believed.

  But when the following Sunday's Forward arrived, out came the roto section and behold—another page of sepia-tinted medics. Once again it was caption-reading time in our household. Once again the writer assigned to this feature rhapsodized: Dr. Steiner worked his way through medical school by playing the fiddle; Dr. llyman had the highest I.Q. ever recorded in The Bronx; Dr. Feldman was born in Poland and didn't speak a word of English until he was sixteen; Dr. Nathan was about to make his parents the proudest and happiest humans alive by marrying ... a doctor! Ecstasy of ecstasies. Two doctors in one family, and a husband-and-wife team at that.

  On and on I read, caption after caption, all announcing in the same wide-eyed throb-nostrilled prose that the cream of American-Jewish youth—the most golden of golden boys—had made it.

  During the remaining weeks of that May, and well into June, we carried on thus. At last—praise be to God!—toward the ·end of June America's colleges ran out of Jewish medical graduates. Of course I had caught on to the purpose behind all this quite early in the game. "Ivan" I might be, but I was sharp enough to know when I was being conned. The word "brainwash" had not yet been coined, but the technique itself was as old as the hills.

  Having gotten wise to my father's game, why didn't I confront him and ask, "Look here, just who the hell do you think you're kidding with all this crap about doctors?" There are three reasons why I didn't: firstly, that sort of raw communication between parent and child just didn't exist in those days. Secondly—going from the general to the particular—such a question put in such a manner to my father would have caused an explosion that would have laid waste most of Sault Ste. Marie; the fallout would be settling over parts of The Western Hemisphere to this very
day.

  Thirdly, and most importantly, it dawned on me (and when it did I was tempted to run through the streets of the town shouting "Eureka!") that my enemy was using my ammunition-the written word. After all, what was a newspaper but pages of written words? And who wrote all those words? Why, writers, of course.

  There was an enormous irony here, but I would say nothing of this to him. The logic of it was too simple and he was not a man to be convinced by anything so self-evident. Better to play this game from now on "the Russian way;" be devious, even mendacious; pretend to be swept up in the thrust of his advance but all the while quietly construct a tunnel beneath him into which he will collapse at the precise moment he thinks he smells victory. Betray my thoughts at this point and he might concoct some new and more aggressive scheme to coerce me into medical school.

  A year went by. Again it was commencement time. Again my father, the self-appointed dean, greeted class after class in the pages of Forward while I, the dean's unwilling and treacherous assistant, read aloud names and deeds and promises of medical glory.

  The year after, it was the same routine. On the surface I smiled, I marvelled, I expressed admiration and even envy. But underground I was tunnelling. My freedom, my life, depended on that tunnel.

  In June of 1943, when I was sixteen, I applied for a job as a cub reporter with the Sault Daily Star and was hired. Elated at being accepted for the position, I broke the news to my father.

  At that very instant the earth gave way under him. He managed to claw his way to the surface. But into the tunnel beneath him tumbled the white coat, the magic stethoscope, the piece of paper that said "Doctor" in Latin, the hundreds of graduation pictures. All buried. Buried forever.

  As for me, I went on that summer to the happiest days of my young life, scooping Reuters, Associated Press, and the continent's major dailies, on the newsmaking activities of the local Ladies' Aid, the Lions Club, and the Monday morning drunk-and-vagrancy courts.