Authors: Steve Stern
On a sultry September morning, after they’d finished their breakfast, Muni and his uncle went downstairs as usual to open the store. Fastening his apron strings behind his back, Pinchas took up his familiar refrain.
“The Shpinker rebbe, old ben Yahya—a crackpot,” he groused. “The man claims to go each evening in heaven where with the Baal Shem Tov he studies Torah.” Persisting in his censure, he no longer troubled to translate the words his nephew was gradually becoming acquainted with. Muni was learning as well to take his uncle’s grievances with a grain of salt. Hadn’t he observed how the storekeeper found such frequent excuses to draw the rebbe into religious disputes? True, they tended to be one-sided arguments, since Rabbi Eliakum largely held his peace. The old man seemed bemused by the freethinker’s capacity to remain unbelieving in the face of such practical demonstrations of the indwellingness of the divine. Today, however, after unlocking the front door, Muni was seized by a rogue impulse to call the proprietor’s bluff.
“So Uncle, why do you stay?”
Pinchas Pin, né Pinsker, the suffix having dropped off like a vestigial tail since his arrival on North Main, was taken aback. “Stay where?”
“Here in the Pinch.”
Pinchas looked at his nephew as if he were mad, and in one of those perplexing statements that Muni was growing so accustomed to, declared, “There ain’t no place else.”
Shortly after, a colored man entered the store. Despite the caveats of the local Klan lest they set an unseemly precedent, the so-called Jew stores along North Main Street had no policy against trading with Negroes. Business was business. Most of the city’s colored clientele, however, did their shopping south of the Pinch on rowdy Beale Street. So it wasn’t unusual that, when a schwartze came into a North Main establishment, some irate customer might raise an objection. Such was the case this morning, when a pear-shaped matron left off sampling a bolt of percale in order to alert the proprietor to the fact that “there’s a nigra in your store.”
Pinchas looked up from replacing the drawer of his till, which he closed with a pleasing
click-ching.
He squinted over his eyeglasses at the black man, who was also wearing spectacles, round ones with smoky lenses, while tapping the floorboards before him with a rattan cane. In a stage whisper the storekeeper replied to the woman, “This one is blind, so maybe he don’t know he’s colored.”
Shooing the little boy in her charge out the door in front of her, the woman indignantly exited the general store.
Muni had to laugh, a rare occurrence. During the weeks in his uncle’s employ, he’d seen Pinchas indulge any number of drifters and bindle stiffs, some of whom he invited to stay for a plate of Katie’s glutinous spuds. Muni recalled the Old Country custom of suspecting that every stranger might be the prophet Elijah in disguise, and so entreating him to share a Shabbos meal, but Pinchas was the sworn enemy of all such grandmothers’ tales.
“What for you can I do?” the storekeeper inquired of the Negro, who had stationed himself between the fabric counter and a flatware rack. He was an old fellow in a floppy hat, his hollow cheeks fretted with cracks like muddy sinkholes. He wore a collarless white shirt gone dun-drab with age and an ancient spiketail coat that gave him the aspect of a draggled crow. Muni, for whom black people were still a novelty, calculated that the man was old enough to have been born into bondage.
“Do y’all got a mite of catgut?” he asked in his sandpaper voice.
Pinchas had all kinds of gut, as well as yarn, twine, mason’s and fishing line, kite string and shoestring, plaited rope. He asked the man how much he needed and was told “’bout a footstep,” which the storekeeper proceeded to unwind from a spool and snip with a pair of shears. He held out the curling catgut to the Negro until he remembered the man couldn’t see. Approaching him, he took the cane from his fingers, tucked it under the man’s damp armpit, and folded the gut into his leathery hand. The man thanked him kindly and, clenching the gut between his couple of buff-yellow teeth, reached into the gunnysack he carried in his other hand. He withdrew what looked at first glance like a hunk of driftwood but proved on closer inspection to be a violin, a rough and rustic relation of the original instrument. Feeling for the edge of the counter, he laid the instrument tenderly atop the hill of fabric, like an infant he was preparing to diaper. Then the blind man deftly replaced the missing string, turning the pegs at the scroll end to tighten it, plucking it until he was satisfied with the sound.
“Let’s see can I play y’all gentlemens a tune,” he said, stooping to remove a bow from his sack. Bracing the violin under his bristly chin, he began to saw the strings, while loose hairs from the bow tossed like the mane of the horse they were shorn from.
Muni’s experience of fiddlers was limited to the vagabond musicians he’d heard at shtetl weddings as a boy, and so he expected something lively. Perhaps a jig with a foot-stomping rhythm that expressed the vitality of a people who, common wisdom had it, were a fundamentally happy lot. But this tune, if you could call it a tune, was achingly sorrowful. There were brief melodic moments, but no sooner did you begin to relax with a lyrical phrase than the music turned plaintive again. Muni wondered if the musician had simply failed to master his instrument, a judgment his uncle—clapping his hands over his ears—seemed also to have made. In rejecting the serenade, Pinchas appeared to disregard as well the presence in his store of the blacksmith’s shifty son Hershel, a well-known ganef, a petty thief. Muni had been told to be on the lookout for the kid—a needle-nosed gowk in knee pants and jockey’s cap—but he was too diverted by the music to pay him any heed. Though the fiddling transported him to a place he didn’t especially want to go, he was helpless to resist being carried away.
Then the Negro ceased playing as abruptly as he’d begun and asked the storekeeper what he owed him. Pinchas made a dismissive sign—the recital was compensation enough—but as the blind man was insensible to signs, the storekeeper came forward to escort him (“Name’s Asbestos”) from the premises. Behind them, his shirt bulging with pilfered loot, slipped young Hershel Tarnopol.
Thereafter the blind man with the unlikely name became a fixture in the neighborhood. Novak the pawnbroker, who ran a shop on Beale Street, remembered having seen him playing on various corners down there. So why relocate from the district where he belonged to one where he was plainly, so to speak, out of tune? Did he mean to provide, with his unearthly oratorios, a kind of somber complement to the otherwise vibrant commercial racket of North Main? Because the blind man’s music served as a frequent counterpoint to the three-toned horn on Sam Alabaster’s touring car; it challenged the clangor of the trolley bells and the palaver of Leon Shapiro enticing passersby into his emporium to be measured for a suit of clothes. It was an antidote to the ecstatic ululation of the disciples of Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya, gathered of an evening in Market Square Park to say the blessing over the new moon. And though he couldn’t have said why, Muni Pinsker never passed him without dropping a little spare change if he had any into the fiddler’s felt hat, which was generally brimming with coins.
“It says here,” cited Pinchas from behind his upraised journal, spectacles sliding down the slope of his nose, “they got in the new State Duma in Saint Petersburg deputies that they represent four Jewish parties.” Pinchas tried conscientiously to stay abreast of events in his mother country, subscribing to a paper he had sent all the way from New York. In this way he had followed, if some weeks after the fact, the failed Russian revolution of 1905 and the ensuing pogroms, the trial for blood libel of the brick maker Mendel Beilis. When he wasn’t griping about the intrusion of the uncanny into the quotidian life of the neighborhood, he was hopeful about prospects for the downfall of the czar. He looked forward to the impending establishment of an international socialist utopia. It was clear, however, that he was disappointed when his nephew, despite his own afflicted history, did not readily share his uncle’s political enthusiasms. Muni showed little more interest in such goings-on, in fact, than did his aunt Katie, who merely smiled indulgently at her husband’s theorizing as she carried on peeling potatoes.
Still, Muni was sorry that he couldn’t find it in himself to better accommodate his uncle Pinchas; there was a time when he would have responded zealously to the shopkeeper’s concerns. Hadn’t he tried, during his imprisonment in Minsk and later Moscow, to stay informed about the seditious happenings in the streets? But privation and hunger and the coffled march across an icebound continent had distanced him from the once overriding importance of the Marxist dream. Now he felt not the least temptation to take down the fat volume of
Das Kapital
from his uncle’s overstuffed bookshelf; nor was he drawn to the other staples of his insurgent years: neither Darwin nor Auguste Comte or the Yiddish editions of Tolstoy and Edward Bellamy, which elbowed aside Pinchas’s copies of
The Ethics
and the Shulkhan Arukh. Of course, if Muni were honest, he would have had to admit that a thirst for social reform had never been his original impetus. It was perhaps simply his guilt over the lack of a passion for change that had compelled him to act so audaciously, to declare after refusing legal counsel at his trial, “I am a member of the Jewish Revolutionary Federation, and I will do everything in my power to overthrow the czarist autocracy and its bloody henchmen!” Which had thus sealed his fate.
Muni could hardly remember the person who’d shouted those words so defiantly in that Moscow courtroom. Bereft now of ideology, even curiosity, he felt nothing when looking back but a deep lassitude. There was little that engaged his interest—though now and again some character out of the cavalcade that passed through the general merchandise might briefly capture his attention. He might look up an instant from sweeping the floor to observe Mrs. Gruber the bootlegger, accompanied by her flame-bearded familiar Lazar der Royte, as she waddled in to purchase a sack of corn. Or the chapfallen Mr. and Mrs. Padauer, widely regarded in the Pinch as objects of pity, holding the hand of a toddler who resembled a wizened old man. Or Jenny Bashrig, upsetting a pyramid of butter churns as she gazed at Muni with unblinking black satin eyes. (Once or twice she had inquired of him concerning the use of a nickeled emasculator or fly powder in a bellows box, items whose utility Muni had no knowledge of nor Jenny any intention of purchasing.) There was Hershel Tarnopol, scamp, liar, and thief, whose petty pilfering was largely tolerated in deference to his talent for sleight of hand; and Rabbi ben Yahya and his disciples, some of whom entered the store trailing bits of rope they’d neglected to remove from their ankles. These were the strands they tied to furniture and doorknobs during prayers lest they levitate beyond a height of easy return.
It was nearly sundown on the first evening of Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Days of Awe, and the population of North Main was heading en masse toward Catfish Bayou. A stagnant inlet of the Mississippi only a few blocks north of the Pinch, the bayou was the site where Irish refugees from the Great Potato Famine had beached their johnboats decades ago. They had dismantled the square-ended boats to build makeshift shanties, some of which still stood, or rather leaned, though they’d long been abandoned by their previous tenants and taken over by destitute Negroes. The Irish had since emerged from the muck around the bayou to become the original inhabitants of North Main Street, which was then a lawless corridor atop the river bluff called Smoky Row. Their pinch-gutted countenances were the source of the neighborhood’s eventual name. Muni had been cajoled by his uncle to come along and enjoy a spectacle that Pinchas regarded as yet another example of his neighbors’ quaint delusions. Katie held Pinchas’s hand as they walked, sashaying more like a sweetheart than a veteran wife, though her winsomeness seemed a trifle subdued to her nephew tonight.
“In this hekdish, this sink, was my Katie raised,” explained Pinchas, indicating the marshy banks surrounding the brackish body of water; for the dredging of the river had reduced the once broad bayou to an overgrown cowpond. But Katie was quick to contradict him, recalling the hand-to-mouth childhood that Muni had heard her ruefully allude to more than once. “It was a paradise.”
Their neighbors had come together to perform the tashlikh ritual, which involved emptying one’s pockets of the breadcrumbs you’d stuffed them with and casting them upon the waters. The crumbs were meant to symbolize the sins you’d committed during the past year. It was supposed to be a solemn ceremony, but the cadre of citizens parading past the old auction block at Jackson Avenue had about them a carnival attitude. They gossiped and joked (Mr. Sebranig to his wife: “How about a bissel henky-penk after?” His wife: “Over my dead body.” Mr. Sebranig: “How else?”), accompanied by the Widow Teitelbaum’s windup gramophone, which she hauled behind her in a little wagon. The gramophone played a medley of Victor Herbert standards plus the Jazarimba Orchestra’s exotic rendition of “Ain’t We Got Fun.” When the music began to drag, the broad-bottomed widow would pause to crank her machine, looking as she leaned toward the speaker in her blowsy apricot frock like a bee at the mouth of a trumpet flower. Rabbi ben Yahya and his knot of disciples in their holiday gabardines brought up the rear, beating their shallow breasts and singing wordless niggunim.
“Ay yay bim bom yiddle diddle do …”
Once they’d arrived at the bayou—the mud along its bank alive with polliwogs, ooze sucking at the soles of their shoes—some began reading psalms by the failing light. The five Alabaster children were enjoined by their papa to sprinkle generous portions of crumbs on the water, as if a multitude of sins were a proof of their prosperity. Old Ephraim Schneour scattered, instead of pumpernickel crusts, the ashes of the wife he’d abused for half a century, spreading them like a man sowing seed. Looking forlornly at one another over the head of the ill-favored child that stood between them, Mr. and Mrs. Padauer heaved a mutual sigh, having perhaps decided to throw bread in place of the boy. Jenny Bashrig tossed a few crumbs, only to have a breeze blow them back into her face, which she turned toward Muni, her soft eyes beginning to tear from the motes that had settled therein.