East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's (22 page)

And she said, “All noise, sound, that’s what it is. Just both of you be quiet. Let’s have a nice gathering today. For once.”

Uncle Moe said to her, “You. You abandoned the class struggle, how can you live with that?”

“Oh, come on,” she replied. “You, Moe, you parrot the Worker. Blah-blah-blah-blah. It says stand on your head, you stand on your head. It says black is white, then for you black is white. When are you going to think for yourself?”

Uncle Sol jumped in with, “Yeah. That’s what I say. Think for yourself.”

“You,” Aunt Ruth said to him. “That’s what I say to you too, when will you think for yourself?”

“Listen, Ruthie,” Uncle Sol said angrily to her. “I don’t like the way you talk to me. You understand?”

“So you don’t like it,” Aunt Ruth replied. “What do you know, Sol, except the
schmateh
trade? How to cut dresses? Do you read anything but the comics in the newspaper, I don’t mean the Worker. Do you read a book, any kind beside your checkbook? Do you talk about anything but your business?”

“Ah!” Uncle Moe said. “You’re right about that last thing. A pearl of wisdom, that’s it.”

“Enough!” Zaydeh finally shouted out. “No more! It’s enough!” He shook his head and said, “Eat up, keep quiet! Then you’ll play your poykair,” referring to the penny poker game they usually played after the meal.

As the old scenes momentarily flashed through his mind and had gone, Danny looked up at Frieda. Remembering her last question, he said, “What do I believe? I believe in the individual. I believe in me and in you. I believe—” Frieda began to shake her head in disbelief. “Why?” he asked. “Why can’t I believe in that?”

“Because it’s false, it’s a lie,” she answered. “It’s something the capitalists want you to believe. Individuals can do nothing. The proletariat,” Ah! That word! Danny said to himself as he shut his eyes as if that could eliminate sound of it, and she was saying, “move things, the individual does nothing. Look around you,” she said. “Do you like this?” she asked pointing to tenements. “Do you? Me, I detest it, I hate it! I’m getting out. Don’t you want to get out of this ghetto, this hell hole? This place where they’ve caged us?”

Danny stared up at the tenement buildings, their tops mantled in black by the falling night. A few early stars shone and shimmered up there in the sky, a sliver of a moon, a slice of yellow slowly sailing in a dark blue sea. He hated those buildings, how he hated them! They stood there like rotting teeth biting into the sky, he wished the Navy would bring their destroyers into the East River, empty the buildings of all their inhabitants, empty the Lower East Side, not one person remaining, and shell and demolish those buildings, all of them.

“I hate this goddammed place,” he said to her.

“Then do something about it,” she said. “Join with us, make the capitalists afraid of us, make the revolution happen.”

“The revolution?” he said in amazement. “What revolution?”

“The proletarian revolution. Like it happened in Russia and the Soviet Union came about. It’ll happen here, I can tell you that,” she said.

He stared at her, uncomprehending. Was this the Frieda, the girl that had so occupied his mind?

“There’ll be no revolution, no,” he said shaking his head.

“No?” she asked. “Look around. No jobs, no food, no clothes, evictions, the capitalists getting richer and fatter, the proletariat getting nothing, less than nothing. Do you know something?” she asked somewhat belligerently.

He said nothing, what could he say to her now? And she said, “Do you know Mrs. Klein?” she pointed to a nearby tenement building, “up there, in 4D?”

“Yeah,” he said wearily. “The widow. She’s got a daughter.”

“Right,” she said. “You know what she does, Mrs. Klein?” Without waiting for his reply she said, “She practices. With a gun.”

“A gun?” he whispered slowly as if he couldn’t believe the words. “A gun? Mrs. Klein with a gun?”

“Yes,” she said. “Not a real gun but the kind with a spring in it, a toy gun, you push the wooden shaft into it, the end of the shaft that hits the target, that’s got a suction cap on it so when it hits it sticks to the target that she’s got tacked on the wall. She’s preparing for when the revolution comes.”

It was too much for him, it was senseless, impossible, something even a child would have difficulty in believing. Confused, angered, he said, “There’ll be no revolution, you’ll see. And Mrs. Klein, she’s out of her mind. You believe in that crazy practice? You really believe in it? What are you thinking about? Does it make any sense? Mrs. Klein wouldn’t know what to do if you got your revolution, you wouldn’t know what to do. What would you do? Would you kill?”

“Me?” she said. “Sure. You bet I would.”

Danny couldn’t believe it. This wasn’t Frieda at all, this was somebody else, a crazy imposter gone mad posing as Frieda. He shut his eyes, he wished he could shut his ears, those words were insane. She would kill? And for what? For what?

He said, “Your mother, your father, your aunt or uncle? Whoever? You would kill them?”

“If I had to, if they stood in the way. Yes, to move the revolution forward. To get a better life for the proletariat.”

He laughed harshly. “You’d kill,” he said angrily. “You’d kill people to give people a good life? Holy God!” he exploded. “What’re you saying? Do you hear what you’re saying? Toy pistols? Killing to live?”

She tensed in great anger now. Somebody, a tenant, went by them, said a passing hello to Frieda. Frieda looked up to the windows of the Klein apartment. Someone was at the window, it was the Klein daughter who called out to Frieda, “Well? Is it yes?”

“Yes!” Frieda shouted up to her.

“Come on up,” the daughter called out.

“Okay. In a minute,” Frieda said to her. And to Danny, in a tone of derision, “So tell me what big thing you’re doing to make the world better.”

“I’m going to be a doctor,” he said.

He didn’t know how he would do it, how his family would manage it. Where would the money come from? But somehow it would happen, he hoped. They would do piecework, all the family, they would work at home. His mother and father would work

when she had finished with her housework, his father when he came home from work at his shop, if there was work. They would work at making leather belts, braiding loops of leather one into another, pulling at the leather, the brown or black colors staining their fingers, the stress of the constant pulling causing their fingers to ache. During the summer he would be a waiter in a resort.

“You’ve got the money to do it?” Frieda asked derisively.

“We’ll get it. I’ll go to City College,” he said. “Then to medical school. I’ll better my world, I’ll better my family’s world, I’ll better other people’s worlds, that’s how I’ll do it. You can’t better a world by killing, you better it by healing.”

He had seen Paul Muni in a movie about the life of Louis Pasteur. It had moved Danny tremendously, Pasteur working against all odds to benefit mankind. You did it by ridding the world of disease, of hunger, of pestilence. And little by little you raised up the world.

“You can’t better the world by making the capitalists fatter,” Frieda said.

He shrugged at the stranger in front of him. The Frieda he had conjured up in his mind was gone, had never been. This was someone he didn’t know at all. Because he was angry with himself and with her he said caustically, “And what will you be doing to better the world? You, personally?”

She smiled derisively at him as she said, “I’m asking to be assigned to selling the Worker at the entrance to the subway station. I’ll help educate the masses, we’ll be the vanguard. You’ll see.” And in a normal tone of voice, “Come join with us.”

He shook his head, more to himself. It was all useless. How had it come to this? “You’ll do what they tell you to do?” he said dully. She nodded. “You call that freedom? They decide, you don’t have a say about it, and you do the donkey work? That’s freedom?”

“When you have enough to eat, a nice place to live in, a steady job, when everybody can educate their children, that’s freedom.”

“You’re dreaming,” he said. “A pipe dream. It won’t happen under a dictatorship.”

“A-agh!” she said angrily. “Who can talk to you? I tell you something, Danny,” she said, her eyes blazing. “I don’t ever intend to go out with you. Never. It’s you, people like you who stand in our way. What made you ever think I’d go out with you?”

He wanted to harm her then, his rage was boiling, there were ready words in his mind to wound her but with great effort he held himself in check. Instead he said, “I was wrong, yes, I was wrong. And you were wrong. It would’ve been a terrible mistake.” But now his anger exploded and without realizing it he hurled the nickel still held in his hand to the ground and said, “Take your damned money! Who needs it?”

She moved away from her parents’ house soon afterward, he heard that she went to live with a cousin in a cheap apartment outside of the East Side, in Chelsea somewhere. He didn’t see her anymore. once in a great while he momentarily thought of her, but now he was too busy with his school work at City College.

Months later, after he had finished with his classes for the day at the college, when he was exiting from the subway, he saw her, she was hawking the Daily Worker, chanting to everybody nearby, “Learn the truth. Read it in the Worker. Don’t be fooled by the capitalist press! Work for your interests, not the capitalists!”

She stopped a young man and began speaking earnestly to him. He was drawn to her by her looks and her figure, he appeared to be listening, he was staring intently at her face. He nodded automatically now and then, seemed to be in agreement with her.

Danny stopped, stared at her, she now lived in a world that was alien to him, somewhere else light years away. And before, in his dream world, how he had wanted to be with her, to protect her from the world she had run to, from the jackals and the sharks, the predators, the liars, the users of people.

But it had all come to nothing. He would no longer dream longingly of her, that was finished, he knew it. She noticed Danny and approached, a smile on her face. “Danny,” she said as if they had not had angry words that time long ago, months and months before. She glanced down at the books he carried in his hands. “City College, huh?” He nodded. “You’re saving the world?”

There was the barb. She couldn’t hold back, could she? With a smile on his face, he replied, “I’m saving the world the best way I know how. And you? You’re saving the world with the Worker?”

“The truth will set you free,” she said glancing over his shoulder to see whether a likely prospect had come into view.

“That’s Biblical,” Danny said. “That doesn’t come from your gods Marx or Lenin or your comrades.”

“Why don’t you find out?” she asked. “Buy a Worker.”

“I’ve got enough truths,” he replied. “Truth up to here.” He placed the side of his hand up to his throat. “I don’t need any more.”

Frieda saw a woman emerge from the subway exit. Abruptly, Frieda left Danny, ran over to the woman, was talking to her, moving along with her, cajoling her, waving The Daily Worker in front of the woman.

Shaking his head sadly, Danny turned and walked away. It didn’t matter anymore.

 MRS. 3B

She stood alone, silent, on the stoop of the wide tenement building, gazing out over the heads of the women who were her neighbors, looking for someone. It was a sunny afternoon, the other women had already cleaned their flats, had planned their evening meals, now all of them were seated on folding chairs in front of the tenement, all clustered near their baby carriages, some still rocking their babies to sleep, others talking to each other in muted voices, their other young children scampering on the sidewalk near their mothers. All except the lonely woman, Mrs. 3B. Everybody called her by that designation since that was the number of her flat.

They were on a street at right angles to the main thoroughfare, Delancey Street, where the Williamsburgh Bridge rose in a steady climb of massive horizontal riveted steel, spun metal cables, all rising higher and higher, spanning the East River a distance away, joining the Lower East Side with the area in Brooklyn known as Williamsburgh.

“A
koorveh,
a prostitute, that one,” one of the women whispered to her seated neighbor, thrusting her head in the direction of the lone woman.

“Yeh, yeh,” the other woman said as she rocked her carriage in slow tempo, saying, sh! sh! mechanically to her stirring infant. And to the other woman she said, “And, my God, a Jew yet!”

“They shouldn’t allow such people here, a
nafkeh,
a whore,” another neighbor, Mrs. Levine said. “She has no shame, nothing. And her husband . . .” she shut her eyes as her voice rose with each of her last words.

“A pimp,” another woman, Mrs. Rafsky, said. “A
koorveh
with a pimp yet, a husband and a wife yet, and they let them live in this building? The landlord, he should throw them out in the street, it’s a shame for the children, what do they think when they see those two doing those things? It’s a shame for all the neighbors, we shouldn’t allow it, a shame for our husbands, they look at the
koorveh,
what do they think?”

“A shame, a shame,” Mrs. Levine said. “We should all talk to the landlord, he should do something.”

“Nah, it won’t help,” another woman, Mrs. Berkowitz said. “My husband, he talked to the landlord already, and the landlord acts like he’s deaf. All he wants is his rent money, he don’t care what his tenants do.”

The tenants, especially those who lived on the same floor as the
koorveh,
as well as the floors above and below it, all of them heard her cries from her flat when her husband beat her because she hadn’t earned enough money.

“The pimp, he should get hit by a truck,” Mrs. Rafsky said. “To live with such an animal, ai-yai-yai.” Her head rocked from side to side.

“She married him, didn’t she?” Mrs. Berkowitz said. “Why did she do it?”

“Yeh, yeh,” Mrs. Levine said. “But she could get a
gett,
a divorce, no? The rabbi would give her a
gett,
one, two, three. She’s a Jewish woman, she shouldn’t be doing what she’s doing.”

“A divorce, it’s a
shandeh,
a shame,” one of the other women who had been listening said. “Who gets divorced?”

“Shandeh, schmandeh,”
Mrs. Rafsky said. “It’s a shame but it’s better than living with that animal husband.”

There was a silence. Finally Mrs. Levine said, “And we have to live together with that
koorveh?
That’s the shame.”

The lone woman stared out over the other women. She saw her husband turn the corner from Delancey Street, another man walked beside him. As they approached the tenement, Mrs. 3B sighed to herself, turned, entered the tenement building and began to trudge upstairs to her apartment.

“A-ha! She’s going,” Mrs. Levine said. She looked up into the

street, saw the
koorveh’s
husband, and the other man, and with a violent shake of her head said, “A-ha! Here he comes, the no-good husband, the pimp. And with a customer yet.”

The other women turned their heads to stare at the approaching men. The husband disregarded the women, the other man, in embarrassment, attempted to look above their stares. The two men passed the group of women, entered the building. One of the woman spit loudly after them.

“He should drop dead, he should break a leg,” Mrs. Rafsky said vehemently. Her infant began to cry, she bent over the carriage, closer to the child and said in a soft and caring tone,
“Shah, mein kind, shah,
don’t cry, my child.”

The women stared into the dark empty hallway of the tenement. In a short while the husband emerged from the building, alone, walked past them, his pace undiminished. The women stared at his receding figure, he finally disappeared as he turned the corner into Delancey Street.

The women stirred, shook their heads sadly, turned their attention once more to their children. A small boy of four ran up to his mother, and hopping back and forth on his legs said, “I got to pee. Quick.” Some of the women lived three, four, five flights up in the tenements, and since there was no time to leave their babies and accompany their boys upstairs to the toilet, it had become usual for a woman to take her small son to the edge of the sidewalk where she quickly unbuttoned the fly of his pants.

He began to shoot a stream into the street. Immediately other young boys joined him and all lined up on the edge of the sidewalk, they stood in concert, their streams arc-ing high and out. It had become a contest to see whose stream went out the farthest, and now little girls, their heads at an angle stopped to stare at the boys’ fleshy protuberances. Finished, one of the boys whose stream had gone out the farthest into the street shouted out gleefully as he returned to his mother to have his fly buttoned, “I won! I won!”

“Yeh, yeh,” his mother said, her fingers worked at the buttons, closed the fly. The other women whose sons had joined in the

competition did the same. The little girls resumed their play, the boys returned to their shouting and running, all was normal once more.

One of the women in the group asked, “So what are you making for sopper?”

“Tomato herring,” Mrs. Berkowitz said.

Earlier in the day at the neighborhood grocery store, she had bought a ten cent flat oval can of Del Monte sardines in tomato sauce, a staple food among all of the women. She would serve the fish with vinegar poured over them along with slices of raw onion and fresh rye bread. The family liked it, along with the fish there would be a dish of boiled potatoes and sour cream, followed by tea. It served her family of four. Anyway it was filling, it was cheap, this was the Depression and pennies counted.

“And you?” someone asked Mrs. Levine.

Mrs. Levine managed a smile and said, “A little meat,
gedempt,
potted meat, you know my Harry likes meat for his sopper.” Her husband was a blacksmith, his shop was on Division Street, there were still a sizeable number of horse-drawn wagons in use although their number was dwindling. Dwindling too was the number of blacksmiths on the Lower East Side, gasoline-powered vehicles were taking over. Now there remained two blacksmiths in the area. Harry was a
shtarker,
a strong one, banging his heavy hammer on the white-heated metal, beating his strong metallic tattoo on his anvil.

“Ah-h-h!” Mrs. Berkowitz said with a slight touch of envy in her voice as she shook her carriage. “Everybody should be able to afforda it.”

“Ach!
What are you talking about?” Mrs. Levine said. “You think we’re millionaires? Harry makes just a living. The horses, they’re less and less. See. Look in the streets. How many horses do you see now? Cars and trucks you see, yes? We make a living, that’s all.”

Before any of the women could say anything the man who had gone up to the
koorveh
emerged from the building. He moved quickly, averting the women’s stares as he went past them, their eyes following him, their heads shaking in disapproval. He turned the corner and was gone.

“Ai, de nafkeh,”
Mrs. Rafsky said. “She’ll come down now and look for another one.”

“Such a life, such a life,” Mrs. Levine said sadly.

“Only for my enemies,” Mrs. Rafsky said with a heavy sigh.

The other children were playing on the sidewalk, their voices high and shrill filled the air. A horse dragging a wagon filled with red ripe tomatoes went clopping down the street. The wagon came to a slow stop near the women. Its driver, a middle-aged man wearing a cap shouted out, “To-may-toes! Two cents a pound! The best to-may-toes! Two cents!”

Mrs. Rafsky left her carriage, went up to the man and ordered two pounds. As the man weighed the tomatoes on his hanging scale, she fished carefully into her small clasp purse and removed four pennies. Other women approached the wagon and made their small purchases. The horse stood still, only its tail whisking and flicking against the flies on its rump.

Now it was time. As if on a signal, the women began to prepare to leave, calling to their children, gathering them, while the children asked for another few minutes of play, Just one more minute, ma, and finally, one by one, all except Mrs. 3B, they trooped into the tenement building leaving their carriages garaged under the staircase. Going up the stairs, the chattering children tagging after them, the hallway filled with smells of food, they said goodbyes to each other and entered their flats.

Upstairs, Mrs. Levine tended to the meat on her stove and set the kitchen table. Her husband would be home soon and although business had slowed up somewhat he still worked hard, shoeing those horses was not an easy job and when he came home, after his hello to her, he would wash up and remove that stable smell from himself. He would sit down and read the Jewish newspaper, the “Forward,” while she finished up with her cooking chores.

Now at the table, as they ate, Mrs. Levine said to him, “Harry, it’s that woman, that
nafkeh
. . .”

He looked up from his plate and said, “Again? That
koorveh?
What is it now?”

“Koorveh, schmoorveh,”
Mrs. Levine said. “What about her husband, the pimp? He goes out looking for men, for customers for her. What should she do? She’s afraid of him. He beats her.”

Mr. Levine said, “She should leave him.”

“Who leaves a husband?” Mrs. Levine asked. “What kind of a thing is that to do?”

“It’s better than doing what she’s doing, isn’t it?” Mr. Levine said. He tapped his forefinger on the porcelain top of the kitchen table, a small drumming sound. “Would you do it, hah?”

“No, Harry. How can you say that to me?” She glared angrily at her husband who put up his hands defensively in front of his face. “Would you be a pimp for your wife, God forbid?”

“No,” he replied.

“Well, there,” Mrs. Levine said. “I wouldn’t do what that women does, never. And you wouldn’t do what her pimp husband does.” They settled into silence, eating slowly and finally she said, “Maybe they don’t have the money. Maybe she has to do it, maybe—”

“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” her husband said as he took a sip of hot tea from the glass he held gently between his fingers. “The Rafskys, do they have money, hah? They took in a roomer so they could make the rent, yes? Who’s got money? But those women aren’t
koorvehs.
One way or another, they live, they eat, they don’t do what she does.”

“That woman,” Mrs. Levine said as she arose from the table and began to clear the dishes. “She’s living a terrible life, just terrible. I wouldn’t wish it on a dog.”

Mr. Levine shrugged. Those two, they did what they did, nothing he could do could change it, she would still be a
koorveh,
her husband would still be a pimp.

Mr. Levine would worry about things if he could do something about it, but there was nothing he could do for those two. Anyway, he had enough worries of his own, he had just heard that one of his big customers, a bread company, would be mechanizing its store deliveries, converting from horse and wagon to trucks. He wouldn’t tell his wife about it, no need to worry her, this wouldn’t be fatal to his blacksmith shop, but it would hurt. Anyway, both of them would live, they wouldn’t starve, they would remain in this flat, things would somehow go on.
Ach!
What a world! What a world!

Pretending, he smiled up at his wife as she busied herself washing the dishes at the sink, her hands mechanically going through the cleaning motions. As she wiped each plate she was thinking, A terrible thing, that pimp, he forces her, his wife yet. What kind of animal is he? It was forbidden, a terrible sin. And yet the wife, why didn’t she do something? Why didn’t she say, no, I won’t, I won’t be a
koorveh.
Why didn’t she go to the district attorney and tell them her husband was beating her? And yet... and yet... The man didn’t have a job, everybody knew jobs were impossible to get, who could get a job in this terrible Depression? They had to do something to live, didn’t they? But not that. Never. God forbid, any woman should have to do it.