Читать книгу The Man Who Carried Cash - Julie Chadwick - Страница 7

THE WHITE COAT

Two girls huddle in a modest wood-framed house in the village of Dmytrivka, not far from Ukraine’s capital city of Kiev. The shouts of men on horseback grow louder, and soon they hear the sound of hooves in the mud outside. Then the screams, as the house next door erupts in flames.1 “It’s time to run,” their mother says in Yiddish, and throws each of them a coat — one white, one brown.

The screen door claps shut behind them, and they tear off toward the cornfields that lie flat and green on the horizon. The youngest, Ann, sees the men on horseback out of the corner of her eye as she runs. There are seven or eight of them. The sound of a gunshot cracks through the air. Her sister falls. Ann keeps running.

For four days Ann hides amongst the cornstalks with the other children, drinking cow’s milk from a makeshift cup and subsisting on what grain and scraps are around until she can return home. Schuncha, her older sister, survives, but not for long; the bullet wound in her stomach becomes infected. About a month after she was shot, she dies.

“It could have been me,” Ann said later. It was the coats; they were accidentally switched. “I got the brown one; she got the white one. There was only a year and a half difference between us, so either one would have fit. And that’s when she was shot, because the white coat stood out.” It was a sentiment also echoed by her aunt, who murmured, “Isn’t it too bad that the beautiful child had to be taken?” when she thought Ann was out of earshot.2

Ann’s father was an intellectual, she was told. He worked as an advocaat, something like a lawyer. This made her proud. When the shadow of the First World War loomed, her father, Joel Holiff, was one of a flood of villagers who abandoned their dwindling shtetl to avoid being conscripted into the army. He left his homeland and travelled across the ocean to build a new life for his family in Canada, and his attempt to find work there was executed with single-minded determination. Not long after his departure, Jews in the Ukraine were pummelled by large-scale anti-Semitic pogroms and brutal raids that ground on in the lead-up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and continued for years after. Tens of thousands of Jews were murdered by Bolshevik armies and Ukrainian nationalists.3

It would be almost eight years before Joel’s wife, Esther, and daughter Ann were permitted to join him in Canada. During that time, life for Ann and her mother was simply a matter of survival, as the sound of horses drove them, breathless, into hiding among the dusty feed bags. The fear of discovery hung dark over their days like the sacking over the broken windows. The men would ride into the village and take over, stay a day or two, get drunk, rape and terrify the villagers, and then move on. Ann watched silently one afternoon as a man went into her house carrying a scythe and entered the bedroom where her grandmother lay dying. In a senseless act of cruelty, the man swept the weapon across the old woman’s nightstand and sent all of her medicine bottles shattering to the floor. It was incomprehensible to Ann, who replayed the scene in her mind for years after. My grandmother didn’t do any harm to him, she thought. She didn’t even open her mouth.

The underground shelters weren’t much better. At first they would make their escape carrying a few household items, uncertain how many days they would be gone or what would remain when they returned. However, their valuables were eventually all pillaged. The winters were so harsh, the cold gnawed into Ann’s toes and made her bones ache. Ann’s mother strained to quiet the noise of the little ones. She feared for herself also, as the attractive lines of her face and her long hair meant she was a target for the marauding men. Fear hung in the air, high and sharp, mingled with sweat and mouldering damp. During one pogrom, more than two hundred people crammed into the shelter. When one of the infants began to squall, Ann watched as a man took a pillow and wordlessly suffocated the baby so it wouldn’t give them away.

Ann helped out when she could, and stood guard at the cellar door to watch for military police while her mother made bootleg liquor in the basement and then hid it in the wall to later sell to the goyim. This, along with some sewing work, allowed Esther to provide for the children and her bedridden mother, as all the money Joel sent home from Ontario was confiscated by the Russian authorities.

At least three times their escape plan seemed set, their passage guaranteed, only to have it unravel at the last minute when the Russians refused to let them leave. Finally, in 1921, with exit visas in hand, Ann and Esther boarded a train in Kiev destined for Hamburg. Thin and sickly, Ann tried to keep her strength up so she could pass the immigration examinations. At one station stop, Esther got off the train and went to find a pharmacy to get her daughter some medicine. On her way back along the platform, the train started to move. Ann, watching from the small train window, began to scream as she saw her mother break into a run. As she tried desperately to catch up to the train, her mother’s long hair, held up with bone hairpins, started to fall. Just then, two men reached out and pulled her onto the train. Ann was in tears. She had nearly gone to Hamburg without her mother.

While switching trains in Germany, an elegant woman approached Ann and Esther on the platform. “You have too much luggage to carry by yourself. Let me help you,” she said with a smile. A moment later they turned back to find she had disappeared, along with the two small bags containing all of Esther’s valuables, purchased or bartered for through years of sewing and bootlegging. All that was left was their large wicker travelling trunk.

“My mother sat down and cried her heart out,” Ann later remembered. “She wanted to show her husband she wasn’t exactly a pauper, that she earned monies herself.”

At Hamburg, they boarded the ship that would take them to Montreal. Three weeks of travel across the roiling Atlantic Ocean followed, as the pair was packed in steerage with hundreds of retching passengers and nothing to eat but herring, sour cream, and onions. The entire boat was crawling with lice, and upon their arrival in Montreal the immigration officials doused them in kerosene and roughly sheared their hair.

Then came the medical examinations.

“I remember vividly about a dozen people were put on the small boat to go back to the big ship and be taken back to Europe, because they had different diseases. We were fortunate. They let us through,” said Ann.

Free to leave, they were swallowed up in the push of bodies leaving the immigration hut; struggling with their wicker luggage, they merged into the river of other passengers streaming onto the train station platform.

A man, eyes searching behind circular-framed glasses, stood tall and immutable amidst the jumble of bodies, derby hat clutched in his hand. “This is your father,” Esther said to Ann in Yiddish as they approached him.

Husband and daughter stood staring at each other. Joel wore a double-breasted topcoat, all buttons, and underneath, a vest and high-necked shirt. A tie was just visible, held down with a tiny sparkling pin. His face was smooth and inscrutable, though this moment marked the culmination of days that had run into weeks and months and years. Time had blended together in an endless ream of rolled-up rugs and sacks of dried goods hefted door to door. It was nights measured by the clink of his fork as he ended the day at Wong’s Garden, the old Chinese restaurant on Richmond Street. It was the creak of springs as he fell into bed at the boarding house where, he would later confess to his son Saul in a rare moment of intimacy, the woman who ran it once tried to lure him into a “compromising situation.” And here, now, on the train station platform was his child — a virtual stranger.

Joel’s arrival in London, Ontario, in 1913 had been swiftly followed by news of the war, which clouded out all else except the grinding years of waiting and working. Cent by cent the original fifty-dollar loan he had taken out was repaid, and dollar by dollar he trudged unwaveringly toward the goal of freeing his family. At first, he peddled goods on a bicycle; then, he moved to a horse and buggy until he scraped together enough money to purchase a panel truck.

By the time he led his wife and remaining child out of the train station, it was to the open door of a convertible Essex automobile, in which they drove to a trim little house on Rectory Street, which was furnished and complete with a wiggling bulldog puppy for Ann. Her old doll, fashioned from a linen kitchen towel, was replaced that day with a new one.

Ann remained an only child for two years until her brother Morris was born in 1923. Two years after that, her mother came home from the Salvation Army hospital across the street with a new baby they called Israel — and who later went by his middle name, Saul. The family soon moved from Rectory Street into a large apartment above the ladies’ ready-to-wear shop they owned, where both parents toiled for thirteen hours a day. Ann was left to raise the boys, who were both still in diapers. Serving as nursemaid and housekeeper, cooking, making formula from scratch, and washing diapers, thirteen-year-old Ann often resented the lack of choice in her position as second mother. She juggled this role alongside the adjustment to life in a new country, where her family members were dismissed as “greenhorns,” and in which she was so ashamed of her inability to speak English that she often didn’t speak at all.

Saul was a boisterous six-year-old when his sister, Ann, was first courted by Sam Paikin, a man from Hamilton who would later become her husband. Adored and admired in equal measure, Sam captivated Saul. When Sam came to visit, it was the high point of Saul’s day, and the two soon developed a game in which Saul wheedled nickels and dimes from him. It always took a different form, but when Sam arrived, Saul would race out to meet him as he emerged from his car.

“Look, Sam! I found a billfold, and there was a nickel in it,” Saul would call to him.

“Only a nickel, Saul? What’ll that buy you?”

The way the game unfolded, Saul would typically end up triumphantly clutching two quarters. Throughout his life he viewed Sam as a mentor, though Saul struggled with insecurities that were exacerbated both by his father’s constant belittling and Sam’s impatience and criticism. Even when pushed away, Saul continued to watch Sam from the corners, taking note of his style and flair, his dominant personality and ability to turn a room to his favour with magic tricks and jokes. The way Sam jostled and traded barbs with his own siblings was curious to Saul. It stood in stark contrast to the pressurized, reserved atmosphere in his own home. Proper inhibition was the tenor of their household, and physical affection was in short supply. At times, Saul would become tongue-tied around his brother-in-law — Sam would tell a joke, and Saul wouldn’t get the point. If Saul tried to be a smartass, Sam could cut him up and down with just a few words. Like a shamed dog, Saul would put his tail between his legs and run off. Over time, though, Saul went from feeling intimidated by Sam to wanting to emulate him.

By the beginning of the 1930s, Saul’s parents were struggling to make ends meet at the dress shop. It was as though Joel and Esther were sliding into a pit, and no matter how hard they squirmed to get out, it only seemed to make them sink faster.4

Aware of this, six-year-old Saul conspired with his brother Morris, and the two boys took to the streets. They slipped into the backyard of one of the nearby houses, raided their pear tree, and then went out and sold the fruit along Dundas Street. One of their customers turned out to be the very owner of the pear tree whence they had obtained their wares, a man who had a ladies’ wear store nearby.

The two boys became adept at shoplifting from the variety store and the Loblaws supermarket down the road from their house, and would regulary load up their windbreakers with jelly beans and licorice and chocolate maple buds. This continued until Morris brazenly bounced a huge beach ball away from the front of the store and was caught.

The boys also got newspaper routes, and Saul took pride in his notoriety as the youngest carrier in London. They did what they had to do, Saul later recalled with a sense of pride. More or less, the two boys were growing up on their own; but as self-sufficient as they were, times were going to get even tougher. By May of 1933, the bottom had dropped out of the business and the family faced bankruptcy. After much agonizing, Joel shut down the clothing store, and with Sam’s help moved the family into a home at 315 Wharncliffe Road North, which they rented for $33 a month. Though small, their new home still allowed each of the kids to have their own bedroom. They also had a nanny — though she was faced with her own financial problems and would drink Saul’s daily milk allowance until he came down with a case of rickets.

In addition to the strain of the family’s finances, there was also a discernible atmosphere of anti-Semitism that was pervasive in the city at that time. The schoolyard bullies the boys had to push past every morning on their way to Lorne Avenue School were incessant in their torment. Particularly brutal were the Wiley family boys, the biggest being Tor Wiley, who took great delight in burying Saul in the schoolyard sandbox. The Holiff boys would spend the last two periods frozen by fear of what inventive taunts might lie in wait for them once the bell rang. The Italians had recently invaded Ethiopia, so some taunts involved strange slogans that associated Jews with Ethiopians somehow — a twist that was so bizarre Saul thought it verged on poetic. One Halloween, Esther went to answer the door and had a bag of flour thrown in her face. Before it slammed shut, Saul heard a voice call out, “Dirty Jew!”

As the boys waded through the challenges of the Great Depression, there was little time for distractions or hobbies, though they would often play street hockey until midnight, or strap on roller skates and head down Dundas Street to Queen’s Park to watch buskers entertain the jockeys as they trained their racehorses.5

Saul’s father also found time for his own small pleasures. Well-read and highly skilled at chess, Joel continually lobbied the local paper to devote more of their coverage to the game via letters to the editor and articles. “It is better than Latin for teaching young minds to think,” Joel once told a reporter, “and it will keep young men and women off the streets at night.” As president of the London chess club and one of the top players in the district, Joel played both locally and internationally, by correspondence. Forms with chess moves would come in the mail from far-off places like Belgium, and Saul would watch his father as he set up the board and logged his own moves on the sheet. When Saul was eleven, Joel invited twelve-year-old chess prodigy Daniel “Abe” Yanofsky to stay at their home, and young Saul was awestruck by the boy’s abilities. Yanofsky not only simultaneously played thirty games of chess, including one against Joel at the London Public Library, but he also demonstrated to Saul how he could read a page of the Bible and remember it word for word, a feat he explained by saying his head worked like a recording machine.

By this point, Saul and Morris had taken up serious gambling of their own with a dreidel, and were engaging in every other kind of competition they could think of: gin rummy, poker, and matchstick races in the gutter runoff down the streets. The instincts were to kill, to win, to exploit, and Morris always prevailed and pressed Saul to play just one more game — and typically came out the winner.6

Dark, awkward, and uncertain of his place in the world, Saul was regularly subject to comparisons with tall, fair, and affable Morris, which didn’t help their sense of rivalry as they entered their teens. Saul often had the impression his mother favoured him, though his father was toughest on him by far. This tendency of Joel’s was most evident in the aftermath of conflicts that inevitably arose as a result of the boys’ regular competitions. One time, while on a trip to a family member’s farm outside London, Saul tricked Morris into a barn on the property and then locked him inside. When Joel found out he beat Saul so severely he was hospitalized. Another afternoon when a fight erupted between the brothers in their bedroom, Saul suffered two broken front teeth. The punishment meted out by Joel was so severe that Saul rarely talked about it afterward; it was another of his father’s episodes that he later preferred to keep hidden. That incident was the beginning of decades of dental work and a lifelong self-consciousness that rendered Saul almost incap­able of smiling. “Which seems to suit my personality anyway,” Saul later liked to joke.7

Though she moved to Sam’s hometown of Hamilton once they were married, Saul’s sister Ann continued to be a firm and loving force in his life, and provided guidance that his parents were simply too busy to offer. As Saul stumbled from childhood into adolescence, he became aware that he was not terribly happy, one reason being the realization that he was woefully unprepared to become an adult. Ann had to take him aside on more than one occasion to inform him he should be wearing underarm deodorant, and if not, he should be showering more frequently. “Clean up your act,” she advised him, and then proceeded to outline the basics he so desperately needed. It took years for Saul to understand how to operate in the world of adults, and Ann couldn’t bear to watch him flounder.

Although Saul was aware that he once had another older sister, he was never told the full circumstances of her fate, nor that of his grandmother, and as an adult he confessed in his diary that he thought they had died of diphtheria. Ann never talked about the sister they had lost, but did her best to be all things to everyone, and continued to be close to her younger brothers as they grew older.

At fourteen, Saul’s life was small, as were his joys. Hockey on the radio. Glazed honey-dipped donuts and fresh coffee for fifteen cents at the White Spot on Richmond Street, next to the shoeshine parlour. Aside from Sam Paikin, his hero was Gerry Siegel of the Siegel Fruit Company. It was a small life, but it wasn’t always simple.

As they did when they were children, Saul and Morris sensed once again that their help was needed at home. This time they planned to drop out of high school to sell fruits and vegetables door to door, but on a more professional basis like the other vendors in London. It was a difficult scenario; Saul already knew he wanted to finish school and continue on to university. On hot summer days he sat on the veranda at the Wharncliffe Road house and watched with jealousy as the long procession of expensive cars driven by well-groomed locals and out-of-towners made their way to Western University, dreaming of the day he would be a student there. It represented everything he desired in life.

Something else entered Saul’s life at this time that offered him his first glimpse of a larger world. Ann would often say their house was “so quiet you could hear a mouse,” but by the time he was thirteen, Saul had developed a keen interest in music — specifically jazz, classical, and the big band swing music that expanded in popularity just as he was emerging from boyhood. Not unlike his fascination with Sam’s family, the contrast it offered to his own life bordered on magical. Through his teenage years he ventured out to see big band leaders like Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, and his all-time favourite, Artie Shaw, who had just been dubbed “the new King of Swing.”

After the shows, Saul liked to wander the silent streets home to Wharncliffe Road and reflect on what he’d seen. One clear evening in 1939, it was well after midnight when Saul emerged from an Artie Shaw performance at the London Arena and proceeded to walk up Dundas Street. The roads were empty. On the left he passed the looming facade of Joe McManus’s Hotel London. And as he passed Muirhead’s Restaurant, Saul happened to glance in the window. He did a double take. On a stool, alone at the soda bar, sat Artie Shaw, looking completely dejected. It was unbelievable. Saul stood and studied the slumped figure for a moment.

Temperamental, brilliant, and a perfectionist, the clarinetist was often immersed in turmoil about his work and how commerce was occupying an increasingly dominant space in the world of music. Recently, he had dismissed his jitterbug-dancing fans as “morons,” though he later clarified he found it hard to understand “why kids paid for a ticket to hear the band, and then stood in front of it and yelled at the top of their voices for the whole night.” Saul, who attended shows alone, was not one of those fans. Every move Shaw made onstage or in life, Saul followed — especially how he pulled together innovative bands that combined stars like Billie Holiday and Buddy Rich, only to swiftly dissolve them again to form something new.

Saul’s ears felt warm as he pulled open the door. The bell faintly jingled. With typical chutzpah, Saul slid onto the stool next to Shaw, uninvited. The two began to chat. Born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, Artie Shaw was a twenty-nine-year-old Jewish boy from New York — short-tempered, imperial, and sophisticated. He would soon marry actress Lana Turner. By contrast, Saul was a gauche and inept teenager; by his own estimation, “strictly small potatoes.” The two immediately hit it off.8

Not yet sixteen, and therefore too young to get a driver’s licence, every morning at 5:30 a.m. Saul would slide into the passenger seat of the Holiff Brothers delivery van beside Morris to hit the market. Their father, by some miraculous means, had been able to continue putting money into two policies he’d taken out when they were born, and when both policies had a mature value of about a thousand dollars, he agreed to turn that money over to purchase Louis Averbach’s fruit and vegetable business. Hauling cases and bags of produce, the brothers delivered to boarding houses and grocery stores until late in the evening. “Invariably, we would wind up with things like raspberries or strawberries or other fruit that could not be kept overnight. We did not have refrigeration. So no matter how hard we worked, the leftovers usually wiped out our profit and the day was just for nothing,” Saul later recalled.

When Morris joined the air force in 1942, Joel took over his sons’ business and continued to sell fruits and vegetables while Saul drifted through a variety of unappealing jobs. While toiling more than fifty hours a week in a menswear store near the old Palace Theatre in London, he discovered he had a knack for selling, but little else. He stayed in boarding houses and eventually wound up living in his sister’s attic, where Ann continued to look out for him, securing him a variety of jobs through Sam (whom Saul still considered his mentor) at the Paikin Brothers steel businesses in Hamilton. Although it was hard labour at the scrapyard — working the scales, clearing stoppages on the conveyor belt, and loading dump trucks with scrap glass for transport to Dominion Glass — the job allowed him to observe the Paikin family and their dynamics at an even closer vantage point, and he never tired of their rancorous and passionate interactions. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced in his own family, and he was drawn to it. One time Saul was recruited to chauffeur Sam’s father, Ora, on a buying trip to the scrapyards around Kitchener and Waterloo. As he drove, Saul realized he was being judged by the older man about his lack of knowledge of the Jewish religion. By the time he managed to cluelessly order bacon from a roadside diner in Hamilton, Ora had given up, and for the remainder of the journey his communication dwindled down to little more than withering looks aimed at his driving companion.

Directionless, Saul decided to follow in Morris’s footsteps and enlist with the Royal Canadian Air Force, where Morris was working his way up to becoming a general. The next few months were tough, as he waited to be called up. In the meantime, a job was secured at Silverstein’s, where he was paid a pittance to haul halibut out of freezer cars, with part of his paycheque going toward the purchase of his own cotton gloves, which wore out at the rate of about two or three pairs a week. It was frigid, miserable work. Finally, word from the air force came, and he travelled to New Brunswick, arriving on May 7, 1943, after a train ride in which he lost all his savings — several hundred dollars — shooting craps with people he later realized were professional con men.

Soon after he arrived on the East Coast, he started a diary. Paper was in short supply at that time, so he wrote on the backs of envelopes that had held letters from home. Many of the entries focused on working out his insecurities and his perceived lack of inclusion among the other RCAF members.9

“I shall never make a success if I always incite the anger of my fellow airmen. It seems no matter what I do, I either lose the friends I make, or make enemies of mere acquaintances. Why, I don’t know, but as my sister once told me, ‘Fifty thousand people can’t be wrong, I guess.’ I better start taking inventory. The conclusion is: talking too much, showing off, and inferiority complex,” he wrote. “Pete gave me a going-over. Told me I talk too much, ignorant, push myself, bad manners, possessive, use words I don’t know and always try to grab the limelight.”10

But Saul soon discovered a way in which the air force, where he was now a tail gunner on the Lancaster bombers, could supply the means for him to pursue his musical education. His brother had explained how, whenever he got a pass, he would finagle it to travel from New Brunswick to New York or Chicago for free. “All I did was to get ‘Permission to visit U.S.A.’ typed on my pass and get on the train to New York,” advised Morris. As a result, Saul saw more first-class music and theatre than some people observe in a lifetime. Harbouring a clandestine habit, an interest that could feed and enrich his life, lessened the sting of loneliness. These adventures were then relayed to Morris, who by this point felt obligated to offer his little brother some more advice about how to better work his passes and handle himself in the Big Apple.

“If they ask you how much money you’ve got, you say about four dollars in Canadian money. You show them your pass and say that you’re going to visit your uncle. They know that you’re full of shit anyways, so they don’t say anything,” Morris wrote. “If you haven’t already gone to New York, by all means see Hazel Scott at the Café Society Uptown. But stand at the bar — don’t sit at a table or it will cost you an extra $3. Also, go to 52nd Street where all the nightclubs are next door to each other. But watch out for these smart looking dames who will approach you. They’re nothing but pros and will take you for every cent you’ve got.”11

The travel also fostered an intoxication with America itself. “In New York City on Easter Sunday,” Saul wrote in his diary on April 9, 1944, “trotting down 5th Avenue with eyes wide open. American people are for me. They’re spending, earning and enjoying life. Saw Ted Lewis at the Versailles Club, Billie Holiday at the Onyx. Saw Phil Spitalny broadcast, etc., etc. Everything I’m seeing for the first time.”

By the time Saul received an honorable discharge from the air force in 1945 (despite having gone AWOL the previous month to catch a Bob Hope show), he was hungry for more showbiz. Expected to return to London, he lied to the discharging officer and said his parents had moved to Vancouver so that they would send him to British Columbia. Now armed with a flight sergeant’s rank, which gave him some perks on the train, he took a lower berth for free and headed out west. Tucked in his pocket was a book of stamped passes given to him by Morris, who had risen to the position of navigation bombardier instructor, which came with the authority to issue passes.

After a short stop in Banff, where he chased a girl for a bit, Saul ended up in Vancouver, and wandered into a jewellery store. There was nothing to lure him there beyond the name of London Jewelers, which seemed serendipitous given his point of origin, but it was a start. Before long, he struck up a friendship with the woman who ran the store and confessed an intention to hitchhike to Hollywood. “Wouldn’t you just know it? I have a connection in Hollywood,” she told him with a grin. “A Jewish jeweller, he belongs to a famous club there called the Masters Club, made up of Irish character actors who are famous, recognizable — not necessarily megastars, but you get the idea.” For the adventurous twenty-one-year-old Saul Holiff, that was all the connection he needed.

It was pouring rain as Saul stood on the edge of the highway out of Vancouver in a blue battledress jacket adorned with his air gunner’s badge. It hung wet above a pair of beige pants, from which he attached a long keychain to hang down in a way he thought was fashionable. In his pocket was thirty-eight dollars. As he shifted from one foot to the next in his air-force-issue shoes, with one thumb out, the other hand pushed rain from his eyes. Here I am heading off for California with no money, no brains, no destination … but I have a key thing, I have a Hollywood connection, thought Saul.

It turned out to be one of the most exciting connections in his entire life.