(Unknown wantlist/date)
Another holiday, another mild fit of depression — not like it used to be but then holidays aren’t like they used to be either. For a nine-to-fiver, a holiday is a day to get paid without working, and who can fail to rejoice at that, but for a 6 AM to 1AM free-lancer, a holiday is just a day to catch up on a little quoting without the phone ringing or people asking “How much are your books?”
Somewhere along the line I learned, and accepted the proposition that one’s attitude toward holidays (among other things) was influenced by childhood experiences. I can’t think of any holiday for which I had a really happy association, although Declaration Day (May 30th) had some merit because it was the day after which you could nag your mother to take you swimming. In my very first year in school I had a teacher I was sweet on, and she asked us to hang our heads in silence for two minutes on Arm-Us-This-Day, because it was the day the Whirl War was over and the boys came home. No other holiday had any pleasant associations whatsoever; most of them were distinctly unpleasant and at least two of them viciously traumatic.
As we all know, a neurosis is an irrational current reaction to a past experience. My neurosis about holidays is mild, and harmful to no one but myself and anyone unfortunate enough to be near me during these periods, but what about the neurosis of Christianity itself? For century after century Christians have been blasting and battering Jews; exiling and exterminating Jews; pounding and persecuting Jews; raping and robbing Jews; segregating and slaughtering Jews, etc etc for an incident that happened, or might have happened, or is thought to have happened, two thousand years ago, when a small group of doctrinaire intransigent Jews turned their backs on a member of their tribe, a homeless rabble-rouser who called himself God, or the Son of God.
When I was a boy in America, hostility toward Jews was fashionable and overt, from the most exalted circles on down. Hotels, resorts and toney restaurants were genteel as well as Gentile; they used words like “restricted” or “exclusive”. Private schools, from kindergardens to Ivy League Universities were a little more dicreet but no less firm, but country clubs were blatant and overt. They just said NO JEWS, as though they envisaged a thousand bearded Litvaks standing outside, yamalkas in hand, their long hooked noses protruding through the chain link fence, yearning to Jazz some skinny shiksah at the annual Halloween do.
I never suffered these indignities myself — I was as innocent of Moses as I was of Jesus or Zoroaster. My grandparents — my father’s parents that is — were, as I envisage them now, rigidly Orthodox Jews, although I couldn’t have known that then. My father has six siblings, all of whom seem to have accepted the Faith with docility if not enthusiasm, but it didn’t take with my father. There must have been some formal rupture, because the last time I remember seeing my grandparents as a young child I overheard a discussion about the merits of the dead President, who, as I reconstruct it now, must have been that great statesman Warren Gamaliel Harding.
From that time forward, I never heard a word in my parents’ house that pertained to race, religion or nationality, although I lived in neighborhoods now known in sociological circles as “mixed” — the mix being Irish, Italian and East European Jews. The particular neighborhood I am thinking about now was settled by the Irish in the 1870’s and 1880’s. As the more aggressive among them became politicians, policemen and publicans, they prospered and moved out, leaving their poor behind. Next came the Jews from Eastern Europe about 1890 and 1900, who occupied the spaces left by the departing Irish, followed by the Italians just before and just after World War I, until 1924 when all immigration was cut off.
At ages 4, 5 and 6 my friends and acquaintances were confined mostly to the kids next door. Since we moved around a lot, I was exposed to a wide spectrum of cultures, religions and nationalities without having anything at home to compare them with, invidiously or otherwise. By age 7 I started hitting the streets a little, and by 8 and 9 I was practically living in the street, returning to the other place only to sleep and sometimes to eat.
The year of my trauma was 1929. I know that because about a month earlier Herbert Hoover had just been inaugurated as President. As the only kid on the block who predicted the election of Hoover over Al Smith, I was already something of a pariah, as though I were responsible for it. Being rather new to the neighborhood did not enhance my standing with my peers, especially since, despite my precautions, I was once caught reading a book on the subway by a girl who lived in the same apartment house.
It was the first day of spring vacation from school, and I came out hoping to get a game of stickball or handball. I was a frail, bookish kid who didn’t look like an athlete, although I was a pretty good one, especially in handball. The stickball kids in the Bronx didn’t play handball, which was regarded as a Brooklyn game. Everybody in Brooklyn (where I lived the previous two years) played handball or some variation of it; there were many real courts and many improvised ones as well. In the Bronx, or at least in this neighborhood which for me at that time WAS the Bronx, there was only one court and that was in the schoolyard which naturally was locked after school so the neighborhood kids couldn’t fool around in it.
In order to play handball you had to climb over an eight foot chain link fence and over the bob bwyer (barbed wire) that topped it. I did this often, along with a few other kids with names like Patrick, Michael, Daniel and James. They went to my school but didn’t live on my block, where most of the kids had good solid Anglo-American names like Baldwin, Cecil, Morris, Stanley, Winston, Alfred, and (yes) Arthur, and (yes) Irving. We even had a Pierpont — Pierpont Shapiro.
On the day that I am thinking about, I first checked the handball court but nobody was playing so I ran down to the stickball street. In handball circles I had demonstrated my prowess and was accepted because of it, but in stickball circles I couldn’t seem to break in. To my surprise, many of the regular players were dressed up in long pants and shiny shoes, and some of them even had Jackets to match. They were leaning on buildings, smoking, or standing in doorways, talking to goils. A game was just being choosed up, with Kippy Sinberg heading one team and I forget who on the other. Kippy was my ideal, a sweet gentle lad of 13 or 14 and a great natural athlete. The previous year he had been a batboy for the Chicago Cubs and would have been there still but for an altercation with Rogers Hornsby.
Because the dressed-up guys weren’t playing, there weren’t enough players to make up two teams and Kippy Sinberg picked me, the very last choice, to be sure, but at least and at last I got a game. He put me in sennafeel (center field) because few balls were ever hit that far. About the second or third inning, with a runner on second base, a whistling line drive approached me over the second baseman’s head. “Onna hop, onna hop (field it on one bounce),” my teammates yelled, but I started with the crack of the bat, as the saying goes, and scooped it up with one hand two inches off the ground. Without breaking stride, I stepped on the manhole cover that was second base and closed out the inning. Casually tossing the ball to the stunned opposing pitcher, I took my seat on the curb and waited for my turn at bat. I was batting ninth of course, but I already had a ringing double that drove in a run. In the fifth, I got another hit, a two-out single. Kippy Sinberg was practically jumping for joy, and as for me, it was easily the happiest day of my life. So far.
In the last half of the sixth I was in deep center field for their power hitter when a car drove up and parked on first base. A man and a woman got out of it who looked vaguely familiar. The game had stopped, of course, and as I came trotting in I saw that it was my father and my mother. No wonder I didn’t recognize them right away! My father was wearing a suit and a tie and my mother had on a long flowery dress. I approached them and stared, in disbelief. “Jesus Christ!” I shouted, “Who died?”, little realizing, of course, that that was precisely who it was.
“Tuck your knickers in your socks and let’s go. We have to go to Grandpa’s.”
“Jeez, Dad, cancha wait a lil wile? Itsa six tinning urready. Game’ll beeyovah pree soon.”
“We have to go right now,” said my father.
“Jeez, go widdout me den. Whaddya need me for? Ya wan I should jess walk away and leave empty sennafeel? What if Oil Cohms diddat?” (Earl Combs was the centerfielder for the New York Yankees.)
“Can’t go without you,” said my father. “It’s because of you that we’re going.”
“Kuzzameee?” I screamed. “Kuzza ME!”
“Yes. You are the oldest grandchild and Grandpa is giving a satyr for you.”
I knew what a satyr was, kind of a half man and half goat, and if I hadn’t been so agitated, I would have wondered where my grandfather got one and why he was giving it to me. I never had much use for household pets, but a satyr sounded interesting, and in other circumstances I might have accepted readily, but right now I was in the middle of my first big league game, so to speak, and I wanted to get on with it.
“Doan wahno satyr. Leave him give it to somebody else. Now kenya Jess get the car otta foice space?”
“Never mind about first base. You’re coming with us. NOW!”
“I yain gone. Saul air rizz tuit. I yain.”
I started to trot back to center field and he trotted after me. I started to run faster and faster up and down the street and he ran up and down the street after me. The guys on both teams were laughing and the girls playing patsy on the sidewalk, were laughing and people were looking out of the window and laughing, and I’m screaming at the top of my lungs “I yain gone. I yain. I yain. I yain.” My father couldn’t have caught me in a million years, but Kippy Ginberg caught me and held me until my father came up.
“Lissen, Lefty, wyncha go witcher roll man now? I got a money stickball game sattiday an ny wancha on my team.”
I was only half mollified by this and still squirming. “An neck sweek wurroff fomm school and oll playah gaymah hamball witcha.” That stopped me, because there was nothing in the world I would rather do than play a game of handball with Kippy Sinberg. If I beat him, or even game him a close game, I would never have to worry again about Herbert Hoover, or reading a book on the subway, or even calling Leo Da Roacher (Leo Durocher) Leo Doo row shay.
When we got to my grandfather’s apartment, everybody in the family was seated a the long table already, waiting for us. At one end was my grandfather; along the sides were his sons and daughters and their spouses and their well behaved children. There were seats for my mother and father, and at the other end of the table, opposite my grandfather, was a seat for me, a massive mahogany throne, with arms, which I practically had to climb into, and from which my feet barely touched the floor. The table was heaped with food, most of it very strange to my eyes, but I was very hungry and wondered when we could eat. I also wondered where was the satyr.
All the men at the table were wearing funny little,black hats. I looked at my father, who was just putting his on. One of them was in front of me, folded up like a pie wedge. My father was jerking his thumb up and down, and I guessed that meant put it on, so I did. The electric lights were turned off and the room was illuminated only with the candles on the table. My grandfather began an incantation in a strange cabalistic language, the purpose of which, in my wild childish imagination, was to invoke or materialize the satyr. It went on for a long time but no satyr appeared.
I was tired and hungry and sweaty, and my Indian underwear was creeping up on me, and the buckles of my knickers, which I had tucked into my socks, were cutting into my calves and I was about as uncomfortable as I had ever been in my life. Still, I was determined to be brave and see it through, and I would have, too, except that — I had to take a leak. I had been out since morning — it was now well into the evening — and I hadn’t had a chance all day. It was becoming urgent. Actually I had started to feel the pressure during the ball game, but of course I couldn’t leave then. What with the episode in the street with my father, and the spookiness of this ceremony, and the anticipated appearance of the satyr, I was beginning to sweat blood, as the saying goes. All I could think about was whether it was more impolite to get up in the middle of the incantation and look for the bathroom or to pee in my pants, because it was soon coming to that.
I opted for the former and pushed back my chair, which made a loud disrespectful noise as it scraped along the floor. I ran out into the corridor and opened the first door I came to, which luckily was the bathroom. I closed the door behind me, which this time at least, I didn’t have to be reminded to do. It was pitch dark in there and I groped along the wall for where I thought the light switch should be, but it wasn’t. I opened the door a little. There was no illumination in the house but the candles on the dining room table, but even so I could see that the light switch in the bathroom was a pull chain overhead and that I couldn’t possibly reach it.
There was no help for it — I had to open the door, just to get enough light to find the bowl, and even so just barely made out its outline. At last I could let go, and I did, much reassured by the sound of the stream on the water below that it was going into the bowl and not on the floor. It seemed to go on for a long time, and when I was finished I groped around for the little lever on the tank to flush it, because that’s what my father taught me. He never taught me anything about religions or races or nationalities and the differences among them and how ours was better than all the others put together; he never taught me how to eat properly, or dress properly, or speak properly, but he did teach me that when I went to the bathroom in somebody else’s house to be sure to flush the toilet.
As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I noticed the absence of the familiar white tank behind the bowl but I did see a pipe and I followed that pipe up with my eyes to large box overhead with a chain attached to it. I reached up on tippy-toes and pulled that chain and the water swushed down like Niagara Falls. I decided to hold onto the chain until the water stopped, but it didn’t stop — it just kept gurgitating into the bowl. I jiggled the chain until it finally slipped out of my fingers and reduced the deluge to a trickle as the tank filled up again.
When I returned to my seat, the dining room was a silent as the tomb. Everybody was looking everywhere but at me. My youngest aunt, just married, began to giggle hysterically, setting off a wave of smiles and painfully suppressed laughter, while her husband glared at her with absolute fury. Despite the provocation, that was the only fury at the table. My grandfather, a kind and gentle old man, was staring at my father but more in sorrow than in anger. My father’s elbows were on the arms of his chair — his palms were titled outward and his eyes were directed heavenward. My grandfather left the room and everybody got up from the table and stood around in little groups, talking, as far as I could tell, about anything but me. My father soon had my jacket in his hand. He grabbed me by the collar, but not harshly. “Your mother’s in the car already. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
On the way home he explained to me about the bondage of the Israelites in Egypt and how the seder was the ceremony in commemoration of it. I wondered then (as I do now) what all that had to do with me, and why it should take precedence over a kid’s heroic efforts to prove himself on the ball field.
But my Passover humiliation was not over. Kippy’s money stickball game was rained out on Saturday. Sunday afternoon I went to the schoolyard to see if I could get a handball game. A game was already in progress and I didn’t even have to climb over the fence — the gate had been breached and I slipped through. Kippy was playing some big guy. Another big guy was holding his sweater which had a big white E on it. I knew what that E was for — Avandah. (Evander Childs High School). These guys were on the high school team, the best team in the city.
One of the kids from my block was watching the game, and I asked him what’s the score. “Shhh. Eighteen — six.” Eighteen — six! Poor Kippy! I could tell from the intensity of the spectators that this was big money game. The Avandah guy was serving but Kippy, poor Kippy, got him out easily and ran off the next three points to win the game. The sore loser slammed the ball on the wall, grabbed his sweater, and stalked off, followed by his contingent. Kippy picked up the ball and stuck it in his pocket. Then he saw me and nodded for me to come on the court.
I warmed up slowly, throwing the ball against the wall with my left hand and fielding it deftly with my right. This was my big chance to prove that I was not a book-reading wimp who made a lucky catch, but a real athlete. Kippy let me serve first, a fatal blunder, because I could sometimes break the game wide open with ten or twelve untouchable serves. I gave him my best serve, a low reverse book that hit the left hand corner just past the short line and broke away sharply to the left. He retrieved it easily and rifled it back past me. Playing mostly with his left hand, and with hardly any effort at all, he beat me 21 to zero.
I did a lot of reading that spring — mostly Argosy All-Story Weekly, but a little Poe and Dickens also. Every day my mother said. “It’s such a beautiful day. Why don’t you go outside and play?” and every day I responded “Hey, Ma, leemee lone, wilya.” I went to school as late as I could, ducked out as early as I could, and tried to stay off the streets while I waited for the inevitable move. It seemed like months and months, but it was really only about six weeks. Passover was in April, my birthday was in early May, and here it wasn’t even Declaration Day yet. One evening we piled all our meager belongings into the Reo, and in three trips we were in our new apartment.
“Go over tomorrow and get the kid’s school records,” said my father to my mother.
Hot dog! Another school! This would be my sixth, and I was only 10 years old.
“You know, all the windows in this apartment face north,” said my mother to my father.
“Yeah, well, we’ll be cool all summer.”
“But we’ll freeze to death in winter.”
My father said nothing, just looked at her with contempt. He knew, and I knew, that by winter we would be long since gone.