A Book of Great Worth (2 page)

Most recently, my father had written a story detailing how Bronstyn’s agency was trying to help the women re-establish normal lives, finding them places to live and jobs, helping to locate family members, providing English lessons. He knew that Bronstyn and his colleagues worked closely with the women, in order to gain their trust.

Bronstyn took a tentative sip of his whisky. “I was careless,”
he said. “Reckless.”

He explained that following the most recent raid he had become unnecessarily close to one particular woman who had opened up to him with her problems and fears. He had taken a personal interest in her case.

“This woman, she’s attractive?” My father asked. It wasn’t a disingenuous question, as he knew that many of the prostitutes, despite their youth and the life they’d been forced into, were plain.

“Very,” Bronstyn said. His normal hangdog expression was exaggerated, and the length of his already long
face, from brow to chin, seemed to grow even as my fa
ther watched him. Again, he wiped at his nose with his handkerchief. “But it isn’t what you may think, believe me Harry. Nothing happened. I was reckless, stupid, yes, but…”

“If nothing happened, then nothing happened,” my father interrupted. “So what’s the problem?”

“There are photographs, apparently.”

My father was shocked. “But nothing happened, you said.”

“Still, I compromised myself.” Bronstyn looked even more sorrowful.

“Photographs of what exactly? If nothing happened, what’s there to photograph?”

“I haven’t seen them,” Bronstyn said. “Just been told of them. An anonymous note in the mail. But we were together, yes, sometimes…very close. And…she took me on a tour of some of the dance halls where she’d worked. This was strictly business, Harry, believe me, but I was stupid not to have brought a colleague with us. When we got to one of those places, she became frightened, she clung to my arm…

“I told you, Harry, I was careless. These photographs, they’d devastate my wife. They’d do damage to the agency. It’s bad, Harry. Very bad.”

•••

It was through his eldest brother, my uncle Sam, that my father met and became friendly with Lev Bronstyn.

Sam and Lev had met at Columbia University, where both were pursuing studies in religion, philoso
phy, literature and the social sciences that would pre
pare them for the associated rabbinical college, which would follow. They’d become friends perhaps because
neither was particularly religious nor had any real interest
in the rabbinate. My uncle, who had been given financial support by a friend of the family, saw it as a ticket to education – he graduated but became a journalist, not a rabbi; Lev was dutifully honouring the wishes of his own father, who thirty years earlier had sacrificed his own desire to become a rabbi in order to help support his family. As the two became fast friends, Bronstyn was a frequent visitor at my father’s family’s apartment on Mott Street.

My father was only eleven or twelve when he met Lev Bronstyn, who was, like Sam, then in his early twenties. There was absolutely no reason for Bronstyn to take a liking to this boy, but he did, and as my father grew into a youth and a young man himself, Bronstyn remained friendly, interested in what my father was doing, willing to lend an ear to his problems, offering
advice and support. It was Bronstyn, in fact, who advised
my father to leave the city, to go west to try his hand at the family trade, journalism, far from the shadow of his father and older brother, both of whom were prominent
on the Lower East Side – a decision that led to my father
spending several years in Cleveland, where he launched his newspaper career. By that time Bronstyn who, ironically, had had a falling out with Sam, had grown from friendly mentor to my father into an actual friend. While my father was away from the city, he and his
friend exchanged many letters, and when my father came back to New York, he and Bronstyn began seeing
a lot of each other. My father was soon closer to Bronstyn
than he ever had been – or would be – with his own brother.

Bronstyn was a tall, somewhat ascetic-looking man with a perpetual hangdog expression broken occasionally by a dolorous smile. My father, describing him to me years later, likened him to “a Jewish Gary Cooper, with a long nose, bright blue eyes – not a handsome man, really, but with a heroic profile.”
The Cooperesque nose, my father added, had a tendency to drip and was often being wiped, either with a handkerchief or by the back of Bronstyn’s wrist.

My father’s friend had married a young woman from a good conservative German-Jewish family, much like his own, and by this time had two children, a boy and a girl, and lived in a small house in the Bronx, far from where he worked. It took him almost an hour of travelling by bus and subway to get to and from work every day, but, he told my father, he preferred it that way. “I like to be able to escape from this hellhole completely,” he said. “And it gives me perspective.”

My father disagreed with his friend’s characterization of the Lower East Side, where he worked and had grown up, as a hellhole, but he himself lived at some distance from it, in Coney Island, and there was no disputing that this densely populated corner of Manhattan suffered from more than its share of social ills, all seemingly linked to the pervasive poverty that afflicted the area, including the prostitution with which Bronstyn was so familiar, but also gambling, loansharking and other evils controlled by organized crime. Just walking down a street like Orchard, where my father liked to browse the used bookstores and the pushcarts and horse-drawn wagons of peddlers, with their endless supply of tools, housewares, used books, cheap clothing and
tchotchkas
of all types, was an adventure, dodging the dozens of pickpockets and streetwalkers plying their trades.

It was only natural that, as they moved through the area and among its inhabitants, both my father and Bronstyn should come into occasional contact with gangsters of various stripes.

•••

Just how bad a situation Bronstyn had gotten himself
into my father didn’t realize until he returned to his office
that afternoon and found Hermie,
The Day
’s errand boy, arguing with a younger boy. “Morgenstern,” Hermie called to him as he came through the door, “this boy has a package for you. He wouldn’t leave it. I told him he could but he wouldn’t.”

“So here I am,” my father said. He turned to the boy, who had the rough and dirty look of the street about him, in suspendered trousers, ill-fitting shoes and cloth cap. “What’s so special?”

“I dunno. The man said give this just to you, no one else,” the boy said.

“What man was that?”

“I dunno. Just some man on the street. He gave me
a nickel, said you’d give me another.”
The boy gave Her
mie a justified glance.

My father took the package from the boy and gave him the promised nickel. The package, which bore his name in block letters, was no more than a flat manila envelope, the size of a sheet of paper and taped shut. He had a pretty good idea what it would contain but he waited until he got to his desk and sat down before opening it.

There were half a dozen photos, all pretty much the same shot, a man and a woman, glossy, a bit underexposed and out of focus, like the sort of sneak photos some of the English-language tabloids ran on their gossip pages. Photographers often lurked around outside nightclubs in wait for chances at such shots, my father knew. The man in the photo was clearly Lev Bronstyn, the woman an attractive blonde with large white teeth and a bruised air about her. They were standing outside a particularly notorious dance hall on Second Avenue, the
Palais de Danse
, its sign clearly vis
ible. There was nothing inappropriate happening be
tween them but the woman’s small hand was placed lightly on Bronstyn’s sleeve and her smile suggested she might like there to be.

There was an accompanying note, written in the same crude hand: “Here’s your friend, some so-called friend of the ‘working girl’.” The challenge to run the photos in the paper wasn’t stated but didn’t need to be.

•••

My father had another friend to whom he often turned when he needed advice. This was Fushgo, a bookseller whose crowded, musty shop was only two blocks further south on East Broadway. My father had only met him recently, since his return to New York, but they had become fast if not close friends.

“It’s unthinkable that we should run these photos,” my father said.

“Of course, but what are the consequences?” Fushgo asked. He was an older fellow, permanently shaded grey from the settled dust in his shop. Tufts of bristly hair protruded from his ears, causing a persistent itch. “Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, you did use them.”

“I wouldn’t,” my father protested.

“But let’s say you did.”

“It would be a betrayal.”

“Exactly,” Fushgo said. He twisted a finger in his right ear. “And if you don’t?”

My father thought for a moment, his mouth pursed. “After a day or two, I imagine whoever’s behind this will give them to the other papers.”

“So you can’t win,” Fushgo observed gloomily.

“No, but the first choice is not really a choice, so the second choice is the only choice. At least it won’t be me involved with ruining a friend. Some consolation.”

“Also it buys you time,” Fushgo said.

“Yes.”

“To do what with?”

“That’s the question,” my father said.

Fushgo gave his ear another twist and glanced at his finger.

“Time is always good,” he said.

•••

The next day, which happened to be a Wednesday, my father had lunch at the Garden Cafeteria at the corner of East Broadway and Rutgers Street, as he usually did, then strolled down Canal Street to Allen. It was a warm day in May, so my father wore his customary suit jacket and tie, but no coat, and his jacket was open. A copy of that afternoon’s paper, fresh from the presses, was under his arm.

He paused at the corner and, making an exaggerated show of looking both ways before crossing the street, managed to sneak a quick glance behind him and catch sight of a recognizable face. Since the day before, he’d
become familiar with the appearance of two men he didn’t
know – my father was no detective, but he had a good eye for faces. These two fellows were notable by their very ordinariness, he thought – one was skinny as a minute, with a chisel face and an elongated nose – ironically, somewhat like Bronstyn’s; the other hefty, with a face like a chicken dumpling. Both wore workingmen’s clothes that made them seem the antithesis of what my father thought of as gangsters, with flashy suits and slicked-back hair. He hadn’t seen the two men together but, whenever he was on the street, one or the other seemed to be nearby. It hadn’t taken him very long to jump to the conclusion that he was being followed.

The area near
The Day
was, as always, crowded with passersby, so he had no concern for his safety; rather, he was amused and curious. The streets were peopled mostly by men, some in rough working clothes, others in the shiny black suits of the Orthodox, with black felt hats, beards and
payes
, feathery ritual sidelocks. But there were also, my father observed, quite a few women, whose dress advertised them as streetwalkers. Allen Street, which was notorious, was especially infested with these women – there were clots of them at each corner, and individuals leaning at literally every street lamp within sight. On Allen Street and the streets around it, it was said, there were as many brothels as synagogues, if not more; as many women of loose morals as there were pious but weak-willed men.

My father already had some familiarity with gangsters – Arnold Rothstein, reputed to be the head of the city’s underworld, and Louis Buchalter, known as Lepke, were both active in the garment trade, on both the bosses’ and the unions’ sides, as the wind blew, along with a ragtag string of underlings.

He was acquainted with a fellow, a jovial Italian who provided muscle for either side of an argument, depending on who paid the most, whom he considered to be both well connected and discreet. My father had run into him a number of times, had even shared a drink with him once or twice, and knew him to be dangerous but amiable. The evening before, after his conversation with Fushgo, my father had stopped by a certain saloon where he knew this fellow, who was called Two-Fingers Giovanni, liked to spend time – the nickname arose from the unpleasant state of his left hand, rumoured to have come about at the business end of a butcher’s cleaver during a youthful fight with a rival gang. Sure enough, he was there, and for the price of a whisky, my father was able to extract the name of the gangster likely behind the photos: Monk Eastman.

“If not Monk himself, then someone who works for him, most likely,” Two-Fingers said. “He’s got his fingers in every whore this side of the East Side.” He grinned. “Well, you know what I mean.”

Afterwards, my father had gone back to
The Day
, where he spent some time in the newspaper’s dusty morgue, combing through old clippings. As he expected, he was far from the first reporter to have written about prostitution and white slavery. In the years right before the war, there’d been many such exposés, not much different from the ones he’d written. With the war’s arrival in 1914, the public’s interest had shifted,
and there were few
stories on the subject until my father
had again aroused attention with his tales of Bronstyn’s exploits.