The Ryer Avenue Story: A Novel Page 8

  There was a pattern throughout the day: first the morning rush, then a quiet time to catch up on the newspapers over a cup of coffee, talk with some older people who came to share some news, drink some tea, munch a bagel. The grocer next door came at ten o’clock exactly for his fast scrambled eggs, bacon, and coffee; his wife twenty minutes later.

  By noon the Herskels were in constant, synchronized motion. The high school kids from St. Simon Stock came for lunch, to play the jukebox, to smoke a forbidden cigarette, to flirt, laugh, make noise. Dora took the orders, called them over her shoulder to Hymie, who spun back and forth from the counter to the griddle. Hamburgers sizzled, buns toasted, eggs fried, sandwiches were made by hands that moved in a blur of activity. Hot soup, simmering in a huge pot, was ladled, crackers in small packets balanced against the saucer, soup dripping over the sides of the bowl.

  For Ben and his sister, the luncheonette was an extension of their home. At the end of a school day, their snack was set out in the last of the five booths. They went over their homework, discussed their day’s events with their parents, who kept a quick and seemingly casual eye on the progress of their children. The apartment immediately behind the storeroom consisted of a kitchen large enough for the four of them to sit down to eat together, although this rarely happened; two bedrooms; and a bathroom. The only time they felt the need for more space was when, from time to time, some cousin or other distant relative, newly arrived in America, needed a place to stay, just for a while. They’d open a cot, they’d manage.

  When he spent time with his goyim friends, Ben knew they accepted him because he was as tough as they were, because he was a fearless competitor. When they left the neighborhood, moved to a playground for some basketball, and other kids would jeer, “Hey, who’s the yid?” Ben’s friends would explain, “Hey, he’s a Jew but he’s okay.”

  Ben hated everything attached to being a Jew. Things he noticed about his parents left him breathless with rage. He watched as his father served “coffee and” to the endless stream of cops in the morning. They slurped and shoveled in doughnuts and Danish, sometimes paid, sometimes not. His father never asked for the money. Some guys from the precinct would come in at lunchtime, just before the rush of schoolkids, and hand Hymie a list: six sandwiches, a couple of egg creams, some Cokes. “And, Hymie, throw in a little extra, ya know? Some a’ that potato salad Dora makes, and hey, for the captain, how’s about next time you make some a’that chopped liver for the family, you make a little extra for him?” With a wink, a nod. A favor, Hymie.

  As though his parents didn’t have to pay money for every item in the store. Kids stole penny candy, every single day. Sometimes his mother stopped them, but always gently, as the kid filled the small brown paper bag with seven cents’ worth of candy and handed Dora a nickel. You are on the honor system, his father told the kids, who were born thieves, who must have thought his parents were stupid immigrant morons. His mother would say softly, “Johnny, you didn’t count so good today, ya gonna gimme two more pennies, or what do you wanna put back?”

  “Kick ’em out,” Ben would say. “Don’t let ’em come back. They’re goniffs, they steal from you.”

  His father would make a soft sound, a sigh, he would shrug. “Some big goniffs, they’re gonna grow up and rob banks, they learned to steal from Hymie Herskel. They’re children, they’ll learn.”

  And the cops: “Well, they take from everybody, it’s built into the job. They give a special look, late at night, that the lock is on the door, nothing bad is happening. Yes, it’s their job, but so you give a little extra, you get a little extra. Goodwill, it’s called goodwill.”

  But there was no goodwill involved in his sister’s tears. Deborah was a tall, thin, gray-eyed girl of ten, an A student in the fifth grade. Miss Hewitt was her teacher. Ben knew Miss Hewitt. Miss Hewitt had never made him cry.

  It was suppertime. The luncheonette was empty and the parents sat in the back booth, the children opposite. Deborah had waited all day and now she told them.

  “She said, when I got up to recite the poetry, she said, in front of everyone, she said …”

  The small mouth quivered, the tears flowed from the rapidly blinking eyes.

  “So,” Hymie said gently, “what did she say? What could a teacher say to the smartest girl in the class, that could make you feel so bad?”

  Deborah looked up, and in a soft voice told her parents, “She said, ‘It’s a mystery to me, Deborah, how a smart girl like you still speaks with that old singsong Yiddish accent. Hasn’t five years of American education changed that? What is it with you people, if you, my smartest girl, still …”

  She ran out of breath and gulped and shook her head. Dora motioned Ben out of his seat, came and sat beside her daughter, and put an arm around her.

  “So, okay. So, not so terrible. Just words.”

  “But, Momma, she always says things like that. She asks the class, when Jewish holidays are coming, ‘How many children are Americans? How many Jewish?’”

  “So you are American and Jewish, both things,” her father said. “So what’s the big deal?”

  Deborah sat, helpless to explain her pain.

  Ben watched his parents, their softness, their absolute surrender.

  “She’s a rotten, miserable, hating woman, Miss Hewitt. She hates Jews, Papa.”

  “A lot of people hate Jews. So what else is new?”

  “Papa, you should go to school and tell the principal. She shouldn’t be allowed to talk to the children this way.”

  Dora looked up, alarmed. “No, no, Ben, you take things too seriously. This doesn’t matter.”

  “This matters!”

  “These are just words of an ignorant woman, Benny,” his father said. “So next year Deborah will have Mrs. Roth, and this Mrs. Hewitt will be out of her life. This doesn’t matter.”

  It was at this point that Ben Herskel told his family that he did not intend to continue with Hebrew school. Did not intend to be bar mitzvahed. Did not consider himself a Jew.

  In a hysterical outburst, he unleashed all the venom, all the anger, all the anguish and resentment, all the observed shameful behavior. He listed all the things he despised about the Jewish kids he went to school with, and how he perceived his parents and their friends.

  “You never stand up,” he said, tears streaming down his pale face. “You shrug, you tell us, ‘Be nice, don’t make trouble, be nice-nice-nice.’ Look what it gets you. You let the goyim cops eat twice as much as they pay for; the Catholic kids steal the candy; the Polack janitor, that drunk, Stachiew, comes every morning, every single morning, you give him milk and cake and he takes two newspapers and he never pays and … and …”

  Overwhelmed, Ben turned and rushed to the street. He collided with a customer, a neighbor with an old dog on a leash, who gasped, spun about, and nearly fell over her pet. Ben ran and never looked back.

  From the corner of his eye, Ben could see his uncle, Nathan Goldstein, walking along the path in Echo Park leading to the playground. Ben bounced the small hard black rubber ball a few times, then smacked it against the high concrete wall.

  “Uncle, ya wanna play a game?”

  He turned, slammed the ball against the wall, expecting his uncle to take him on. It would be the other way around, of course. Nathan Goldstein was a superb athlete. Tall, thin, wiry, with smooth shoulder muscles and large strong hands, he was a neighborhood champion, beating not just men his own age, but the younger, faster, more aggressive kids on the way up.

  Not only was he an athlete, Nathan was a fixer. He earned his living as a motion-picture projectionist, working the big Broadway houses. He knew everything there was to know about machinery; anything broken, a radio that didn’t play, a toaster that didn’t toast, a phonograph that sounded tinny, bring it to Nathan.

  So now his parents sent Nathan to fix things up with Ben.

  His uncle caught the ball, wrapped his hand around it tightly, and shook his head.

 
“Maybe another time we play ball, kinder. Tonight I think maybe we talk, you and me.”

  Ben shrugged. He jammed his hands deep into the pockets of his heavy corduroy pants, stared down at his sneakers.

  “Nothing to talk about. I won’t go back to Hebrew school. I don’t believe in any of it. That’s it.”

  “So. You aren’t a Jew anymore and that’s it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  Nathan’s voice was soft and low-pitched. “Well, I got news for you, kiddo. Even here, in America, land of the free, a Jew is a Jew and you better find that out now.”

  “Why should you care? Why should my father care? You don’t keep kosher. You don’t go to the temple except on the High Holy Days. You’re hypocrites about it. I’m honest about it.”

  “Well, to tell you the truth, according to the Orthodox, even the people who go to Conservative and Reform aren’t Jews. So maybe you’re right, you’re not a Jew and neither am I.”

  “So?” he challenged his uncle.

  His uncle reached out and wrapped his arm about the boy’s shoulder, and they began to walk into the darkened park. It was nicely laid out, a grassy place with young trees, separate playgrounds for small children, benches for the mothers and grandmothers and old people, and a place for the older kids, for the rougher games.

  “It’s a mystery, Ben, about our people. About us being who we are. You’re mad, your father tells me, because the yeshiva boys don’t fight back. Because your father doesn’t make a big thing with the policemen, with the Polack janitor who steals breakfast every day and the newspapers.”

  “You fight back, Uncle. I seen you one day, you knocked a guy’s front teeth out, he called you sheeny.”

  “A big hero, I belted some jerk.”

  “Yeah, but he knew who you were. I get so crazy with the Jewish kids, they want to run, to get away, they … they’re a bunch of cowards.”

  Nathan smiled. “You ever seen the mothers they gotta go home to? Who look them over, make sure they acted the right way, don’t answer back, don’t make a fuss, it don’t matter. All that matters, you should get a good education. You should get a profession. That’s what their life is all about, Benny. You don’t know what they came from, the parents. So what they have here, so what, someone calls you a name. So what?”

  The boy kicked out at a stone. He gritted his teeth in frustration. “Uncle, please. We all hear stories about how terrible it was in the old country. But this is here, we’re Americans.”

  His uncle put his hands on Ben’s shoulders, turned him so that they were face to face. “We are Jews in America, Benny. Maybe someday it’ll be different, but that’s who we are. No different from the Italians, the Irish, the Polacks, any of the others. Not yet, Americans first. Maybe your children, but not you.”

  “Uncle Nathan, when I grow up, I’ll change my name the way the movie stars do, to an American name, and then I’ll be a ballplayer or a fireman or a policeman or anything I want to be, because I will be just plain American.”

  His uncle studied him in silence for such a long time that the boy felt uneasy. He had counted on his uncle, his modern, most Americanized uncle, a man who worked with his hands, who understood baseball and went to football games, who could take care of himself—this uncle would agree with him, tell him it was all nonsense.

  There was something different about Uncle Nathan now, a look of pain and anger and anguish on his face. There seemed to be a battle going on. Something terrible was being decided.

  Finally his uncle took him by the arm, led him to a bench, sat him down, stood over him for a minute, then sat beside him.

  “Ben, I am going to tell you something I had hoped you would never have to know. That your father hoped you would never have to hear. He said the decision would be up to me, after I talked to you, to tell you these things or not. Well, I think you have to know. It is part of your life as well as mine and your father’s and your mother’s and your sister’s and of all your people. But before I tell you, you must promise me, on your word of honor, that you will never discuss this with another living soul. Not with a best friend, not with your cousins. Not with your parents.”

  For a split second, Ben was going to make a wisecrack. Say something smart, sharp. But the words caught in his mouth as he saw the look on his uncle’s face. He had expected a song and dance, a soft-soap lecture, a bit of arm-twisting. He felt a shiver of fear run down his spine. He realized instinctively that he was about to hear something he didn’t want to hear. But had to.

  “I promise, Uncle. What? What, tell me.”

  When I was a child, I heard the story of my father being conscripted into the Czar’s army when he and his friends were between the ages of eight and twelve years old. Every few years, things became very bad with raids, attacks, beatings; and the worst was when they came down on the ghetto and rounded up the Jewish boys. Sometimes word came and the parents hid the children, or sent them away, alone, to relatives. Sometimes there was no warning, and the children by the hundreds across our section of the country were rounded up. My father survived. Many of his friends died. They were babies, little children.

  My father became a rabbi and he taught at our little seder school. In those days, if a child did not learn, he wasn’t stupid, he was bad, so they taught you Hebrew letters with a smack, with a pull of your hair, with screaming and poking and knocking, so you learned with tears, but you learned. Your father’s father, your grandfather, was the village butcher, married to my father’s sister, so we were all family. Cousins and in-laws, everyone related to everyone, we lived in shacks in a place we could not own. We could not go to regular school, we could only go to the town at special times, with special passes. The peasants came inside the ghetto to trade, to bring vegetables to sell, to get sewing done, letters written and read to them. We all lived so poor. All the time, cold, hungry, afraid, always afraid of the latest rumor, the latest story, the newest scare.

  Yes, we were frightened people, kinder. There were things to be frightened of. The peasants, soldiers, cossacks. They didn’t come and take the children for the army anymore, but other things. Steal a girl, a woman, Terrible, terrible.

  So our fathers warned us: Stay close to home, take care of each other. And then a time came when the rumors began. Near the goyisher holiday, always near Easter, when they crucify and resurrect their god. Always a bad time for the Jews, always stories; but this time there was something else. Trouble in the army barracks just outside of town. Some money the men were owed didn’t come; stories went around. The peasants, who always wanted something for nothing, always said the Jews cheated them on a trade, the usual stuff, they started the story—the babies the Jews stole from Christians, babies murdered and cooked, who knows what their heads could think up. It was a bad time for everyone. A bad winter, crops failed. People were hungry. Blame the Jews. They had stolen the army’s money.

  My father, who was a wise man and a good man, who had some medical training, helped the peasants when they needed advice about herbs and how to take care of a sick child, or even a sick horse, my father had friends among the peasants. There were times, when things got bad, the children in the ghetto could be sent away to the countryside, would be kept safe until the trouble ended.

  The men heard stories. Drunken cossacks who were angry, wild, looking for blood. For Jews. My father sent a message to his peasant friends and they sent word back. It was not safe to send the children to the usual hiding places, to farms, to barns. They would be murdered along with everyone else.

  So. The men tried to arm themselves with whatever weapons they could, but remember, these were shoemakers and rabbis, scholars and craftsmen. The children were to be hidden in a place in the woods, a kind of blind. We, all of us, were taken to this place and told to stay there, quiet, not a sound, until some grownup would come for us.

  Because these things happened and then they were over and life went on for those who survived.

  There were twenty-t
wo children, all of us under thirteen. Thirteen, you were a man, so the bar mitzvah boys stayed to try to defend the women, the older people. Your father and I were eleven years old when the slaughter took place.

  There was a silence now. His uncle turned his face away, rubbed at his eyes with a rough hand. The boy reached out, touched his uncle’s arm, but the uncle roughly shook the boy away.

  “These are terrible things that must be told. It is necessary for you to hear this, kinder, you who say you don’t want to be a Jew anymore, like this is a terrible thing to be, so why bother? As though to be something else is better, easier.”

  Ben clenched his teeth against the chattering, which took him by surprise. This uncle, whom he loved and respected and tried to imitate, was a stranger to him. An angry, tense, dangerous stranger. He sat quietly, waiting, afraid to speak. What he wanted to do, with all his heart, was play handball with his uncle now, in the dark, the two of them laughing and falling over each other, making great impossible slashes at the hard black ball, measuring each other, matched, two of a kind.