Читать книгу Left of the Left - Anatole Dolgoff - Страница 19

A good place to start is the photograph of Father Abraham and his young family circa 1909. They are stiffly posed and formally dressed in the manner of the day. Father Abraham is seated, his back straight, balancing Mother’s sister, the infant Sarah, swaddled in white linen on his lap. Grandmother Ida, a pretty woman, stands to his right proudly, if slightly recessed, her hand resting on his shoulder. Mother, little Esther, stands in front of Ida and at Father Abraham’s side. He clasps her hand gently. He is indeed a handsome man, and I can still discern Mother in that tiny face staring out at me from over a century ago.

Mother mentioned many times Father Abraham’s straight back and military bearing, which he came upon honestly. That is, he served several stints in the Tsar’s Army. Her fondest, most loving memory of him was creeping down to the bathroom of their Cleveland home in Garfield Heights, then a gracious suburb, to watch the ritual of his morning shave. He’d appear shirtless, suspenders over his long underwear, facing the small, round mirror. No shaving cream, stuff like that: instead soap, cold water, and straight-edge razor, which he stroked expertly on a long leather strap at his side, grown shiny with use. She loved the delicious sound of the blade against his cheeks, chin, and neck, and the way he got the blade around his mustache—all this while standing ramrod straight, as if at attention. He was of course aware of her as he shaved but said nothing; he’d smile, and she’d smile back, their little secret. Mother adored Father Abraham.

He came from a long line of bricklayers and construction tradesman. She was fond of telling us the stories Abraham told her of the pace of 1880s life in the small White Russian village of his birth. Here’s one: Seems the village priest sent for him one evening. Could he do some brick restoration work on the local church? A portion of the wall was crumbling. “I’d be glad to,” Abraham says, “but I am off to the Army tomorrow for at least two years.” The Tsar required one male from each family. Generally it was the oldest son, but since Abraham’s brother was getting married, Abraham was going instead. The old priest shrugs, “So? When you get back!”

As usual, Mother saw beyond the superficial to the moral center of the story. “You see, the priest knew that was Father’s work. He would not think of giving that work to another man. And the priest knew he was a Jew. That didn’t matter. They respected each other.”

That tolerance did not extend to the barracks of the Tsar’s Army. He had a hard go, but, typical of him, he said nothing about it. There was one incident that he savored, however, and Mother recounted it to us with relish growing up: Father Abraham was assigned to the detail that stood guard and paraded at important ceremonies. The men were picked for their looks and bearing, for the impression they made. One Easter service found Abraham deployed front row in full dress uniform and full mustache on the steps of the St. Petersburg Cathedral. Out comes the priest in full regalia. Deliberately and in stately fashion he sprinkles holy water from a golden pail at the troops, first to one side, and then the other. Now, it is good luck and a blessing to be sprayed with as much as a drop, but a full blast catches Abraham’s cheek. The water is cold and unexpected and he flinches. “Had to be a Jew!” the men behind him growl.

Once in the clutches of the Tsar’s Army it was hard as hell to get out; they’d keep you for as long as they wanted. For that and the other familiar reasons, Abraham and his young wife made their way to the U.S., and eventually to Cleveland, where they were fruitful and multiplied. They had six children who made it to adulthood. Mother was the oldest by a few years; she was brought to America six months of age. There followed Sarah, Martin, Joseph, Sid, and Daniel, who was much younger, a change of life baby.

By all accounts Abraham was a wonderful father from a bygone age, as honest and direct as his back was straight. Though he knew Hebrew well he’d read passages from the Torah to the children in his accented English, tell them the stories of Daniel and the Lion, of King Saul, of David and Goliath (though never David and Bathsheba), of Noah; Mother grew up with the Old Testament in her bones. As an adult, she loved to read from it. She loved the poetry, the purity of the language, and the wisdom. She called it a remarkable document of an ancient people and that was enough for her. There was no need of a god to worship.

And Abraham was skilled in many things. He could do carpentry, metal work, masonry, bricklaying, and farming. He built the home they lived in with his bare hands. He kept a garden with fruit trees on to which he grafted the branches of other trees. And a proud man, proud of his work. He’d take the family, the whole brood, into the city proper to admire the brick bakery ovens he built with his bare hands, his labor. I wonder if any of them are still there? In use?

He made his own tools, kept them in a large storage shed that he built in the back yard. He took the wood from fruit crates and made pirate chests for the children, with curved tops that he painted and shellacked to look old. He used his forge to make iron hinges and ornamental metal of different design for each chest. He gave them secret locks, so that the chests could not be opened even if the padlocks were removed. He put a set of wheels on Daniel’s chest to use as a scooter if he desired. He took some small tree branches and showed Daniel how to make a toy house by weaving the material together and anchoring it in the ground. The house had a roof and walls and it was still standing in the weather for some years after Father Abraham died.

They were not an observant family, vaguely socialistic, ardent Zionists. My great grandfather on my grandmother’s side, the Hollanders, died in Austria, trying to get permission from the Turks to immigrate to Palestine. His son made it there in 1909 and there is a branch of the Hollander family I have little knowledge of. Apparently they did well; every now and then a basket of fruit would arrive to Garfield Heights. But by 1925 we find Grandmother Ida sending a letter in Yiddish to Uncle Hollander, asking sarcastically if ink and paper were expensive in Palestine, since he had not been writing. Separated by oceans and worlds, the families were drifting apart.

By Esther’s account her mother was a stern and demanding woman—superficially the family disciplinarian, at least in everyday affairs. She was feisty, the rebel among the neighborhood wives. She got a group of them to lie to their husbands that they were having a “girl’s night out at the theater.” Instead, they stole off to downtown Cleveland to hear Emma Goldman or Margaret Sanger lecture on birth control. It was a defiant act for their time and class, though a bit like locking the barn door after the horse escaped if you figure Mother’s six kids were the norm.

Caring for those kids, who were dropping out one after the other was a daunting, exhausting task. She needed help. So she enlisted Esther, her oldest by four or five years, as a sort of surrogate. “I was never allowed to be a child,” Mother would complain bitterly to Abe and me when we were adults. “I couldn’t simply play, get into mischief, and have friends. ‘You are the oldest,’ she’d say, ‘I need you not to be silly. I need you to take care of your brothers!’” Which she did, before and after school every waking day of her childhood. Along the way she developed a fierce attachment to her brothers that was almost unnatural—not in the sexual sense but in its loyalty and love.

All this brings me to what I believe is the central traumatic incident in Mother’s young life. You see, that shiny leather strap Father Abraham sharpened his razor on had another use. By all accounts—Mother’s, my Uncles’, and Aunt Sarah’s—he was remembered as the kind, affectionate man I have described. Nevertheless, there was that strap and the boys knew it. The incident concerns Uncle Sid. I do not know what he did exactly to provoke punishment, but it was something dare-devil and dangerous—the kind of prank a fourteen-year-old full of testosterone and boyish defiance might try. I think it had to do with stunts at the railyard in company with a crowd Father Abraham considered unwholesome.

Time and again Abraham warned Sid to stop. Finally, he had enough. He called the entire family together in the living room: Mother, Esther, Sarah, Martin, Joseph, and, of course, Sid.

“Take off your clothes!” He had him strip naked, his genitals in full view of the family, including the women.

“If you are going to hurt yourself I might as well do it first! Bend over! You are going to say you are sorry! You are going to say you will never go there again! You are going to say please don’t hit me anymore!”

“I’ll never say that.”

Father Abraham brought down the strap. And again. Mother said the sound of it striking Sid’s flesh made her sick. “Stop! Stop!” she cried, Sarah cried, her mother cried. The boys were silent. But Father Abraham was demonic, possessed. He had passed beyond punishment into another realm. Sid started to bleed. He held out for as long as he could, but the pain became too great.

“I am sorry. Never do it again. No more, please!” he cried. Father Abraham had broken his son.

The nub of it Mother would recount years later was not the strapping, which was bad enough, but the humiliation. That, to her, was her father’s purpose, to have her dear brother stripped naked in front of his sisters, to leave him no dignity at all. For that she could not forgive her father. But she adored her father! That would never change. She took to temporizing, rationalizing her dilemma.

“Father warned Sid again and again,” she would plead to a nonexistent jury. In other words, it was Sid’s fault. But for what? Misbehaving? Crossing Father’s authority? How is that relevant, for her father was on trial for sadism in her eyes. And what, finally, was Father Abraham’s motivation in beating Sid? Sid’s safety? Or maintaining his authority? If the latter, upon what did that authority rest? Love or force?

To Mother, Sid’s punishment took on the force of biblical parable. She never resolved her feelings. Yet, there were such things as right and wrong. And if there is wrong in this world someone must be to blame and must be held to account. Not through physical brutality, which she abhorred, but there are other ways to punish. For example, it was unacceptable to Mother that my son Gregory was born brain damaged, afflicted with autism, and organic schizophrenia. Jessica, my ex, was to blame. She did not breastfeed him at birth, she rejected him, did not love him enough; it was her fault, in Mother’s eyes. Never mind the diagnosis of a dozen neurologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, social workers—or the cruelty such an opinion visited upon Jessica. Someone had to be blamed.

The story of Abraham and his sons does not end there. Let me tell you about Uncle Joseph, whom Abe and I never met because he died before we were born. He was a strong, adventurous kid, played halfback on the high school football team when it was a very different game. That was a time when you played both offense and defense and a player could be substituted for only once a half. You played with virtually no padding and there was no medical coverage. When Joseph broke his collarbone, no one stepped in to take his place and the games were canceled for the remainder of the season. Joseph was not a particularly big kid, but he was strong and he took no shit. He once threw the neighborhood bully through a plate-glass store window. Father Abraham said that he did not mind paying for it.

My grandfather—the ex-soldier in the Tsar’s Army, the kindly man of moral probity and military bearing and fierce temper—was constantly matching wills with Joseph. They’d argue up and down the house until Joseph stormed out in a huff. Hours later the two would be seen speaking quietly to each other, out front in the dark. The next day Joseph would help his father lay bricks. It was plain that Joseph was special to my grandfather, the favorite of his six.

There was scant demand for a skilled bricklayer in the Depression; the family fell on hard times. Joseph left college where he was studying to be an architect. He found work picking potatoes in Maine, and then rode the rails through Ontario and across Canada to the Northwest, working as a farm hand, harvesting crops. He finished the season there and traveled south into the States. He wrote regularly. At first his letters were cheerful, optimistic, bragging that he would make his tuition. Then they turned darker. Boy, this is hard work! Some of these fellows are real tough, scary; he needed to get away from them. He had had enough; he was glad to be coming home. My grandparents, everyone, was worried sick. But he was coming home! Sent them the date, the time, just a few more days. Aunt Sarah helped Grandmother cook a huge meal. The family waited, Father Abraham with suppressed joy.

Joseph never showed. He vanished from the face of the earth. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police traced him to a Canadian farm where he had worked and had sent a letter to the farmer. He told the farmer he wasn’t coming back; he was going to try the mines instead. He said he was getting a gun because of all the hijacking going on. No police reports after that. Nothing. Private detectives. Years and years of investigation. Nothing. It broke my Grandfather. He spun into depression. What purpose was there to life for a man who defined his life by his work, but could not find any? What purpose was there to life for a patriarch who could not feed his family? What purpose to life was there for a father who had a beautiful son, Joseph, but could not protect him? Father Abraham committed suicide. Mother never spoke of this. The truth leaked out gradually over the years.

Seventy years later, at the dawn of a new century, Uncle Daniel was poking through his storage room and came upon a dusty, decayed carton. Inside were several of Joseph’s textbooks.

Grandmother Ida died soon after Father Abraham. The siblings dispersed. All were either college graduates or well on their way, except Daniel. What to do with Daniel, still a boy? My parents offered to adopt him, move to Cleveland and live there with him. Aunt Sarah recoiled in revulsion at the very thought. No, she would become Daniel’s legal guardian, his surrogate mother. No need to marry. She could play the martyr and at the same time blame Mother for abandoning her responsibilities. It was an effective club to drive Mother from her family. The sisters were oil and water; their relationship poisonous. Sarah—petite, red-haired, impeccable, tightly controlled, the very model of the old-maid school teacher, virginal to her ninety-sixth year—dripped disapproval of Mother. Mother—larger, wide-boned, gray-haired, open and generous, her emotions gushing to the surface—spent a lifetime trying to win Sarah’s respect for reasons known only to the sisters.

Sarah had her good points. She was an A student in math, but decided to go into teaching when her Prof told her, “I’ll recommend you to Graduate School, but I’ll have to be honest and tell them you are a Jew!” By all accounts she was a terrific teacher, but strict as a straitjacket. On the other hand she spoke out against racism in the schools, even wrote a pledge that Cleveland teachers took to treat each child equally. And she was a one-woman crusade against child-abuse. She stayed with us a week in NY once on the rare occasion that the sisters called a truce. Abe recalls walking with his aunt, this tiny, precisely spoken woman with the flaming mop of red hair. They came upon a father at a street corner spanking his small son briskly in the behind for an unknown infraction.

“If that child were six-feet two-inches tall you’d find another way to communicate with him!” Sarah says to him firmly. The man is shocked at this little woman speaking to him that way. Then he recoils in shame.

Aunt Sarah followed the rules. She was sensible.

Dan in his teenage years pitched for the local American Legion baseball team. Tall, wiry, nay skinny, he had a surprising fastball and a curveball that kept hitters off balance. He once threw three scoreless innings against the legendary Birmingham Black Barons—the great barnstorming team filled with players kept out of the Major Leagues because of their color; indeed some were posthumously elected to the Hall of Fame.

“I was lucky; they were rapping me all over the park,” Dan said to me with characteristic modesty. But he was eighty years old and he had not forgotten.

“What was it like facing them?” I asked. Dan made a gesture; no words could describe it.

Major League scouts took notice and he was offered a Minor League contract: Class D or something lowly like that. This is the late 1930s. Baseball is the only American sport. To play pro ball is every American boy’s dream, his fantasy. But Dan needed Sarah’s signature.

Sarah’s response? “Town to town with a bunch of bums in the back of a bus, drinking beer! Smoking cigarettes! No Daniel, you are not playing baseball! You are going to summer school. You are taking calculus. You are going to be an engineer!” And an engineer he became after seeing combat in North Africa and France.

Mother followed a trajectory that differed from Sarah’s. No money for medical school, she worked in a home for orphaned Jewish teenage girls and was reprimanded for unprofessional conduct: being too soft, too comforting, identifying too closely. She visited the girls at night after lights were out, listened to their sad tales, brought them treats. She scandalized the head rabbi when she warned him that a male member of the staff had trouble controlling his “member” or “staff.” That is, he was “taking advantage” of the girls. “I won’t hear this filth!” the rabbi said, and fired her.

Somehow, someway, Mother kept Father Abraham’s rectitude, but rejected the authoritarian root. She came to despise arbitrary power, no matter how well intended, whether it be exercised by a father, a rabbi, or a government. It was all the same to her. And she came to identify with the victims of this world, be it a brother beaten with a strap, a poor man who picked potatoes to survive, or an unloved orphan girl. She gravitated toward the anarchists.