A Book of Great Worth (25 page)

It couldn’t have come at a worse time. Through most of the Thirties, my parents and their young family – my two sisters – had lived in a cramped apartment in Coney Island, saving their pennies. Just the year before, they had finally realized their dream: they’d bought a small piece of land in New Jersey, on a country road not far from Princeton, and, using plans drawn by their friend Moishe Cahan, who had left architecture school after the Crash to work as a draftsman, supervised the construction of a house, a dream house with three bedrooms, a kitchen bathed in light and a stone fireplace. In late January 1939, two months before my father went on strike, they’d moved all their belongings into the new house and he became a commuter, riding in the smoking car of a rattling New Jersey Central local train mornings from Princeton Junction to lower Manhattan, and back again in the evening. Now he was taking the train every morning to walk on a picket line. There was a mortgage as big as Yankee Stadium and, in addition to my mother and two small children, two goats, two ducks, a dog and a cat to feed. Strike pay was ten dollars a week.

To make matters worse, my mother had just learned she was pregnant again.

Every penny they’d saved had been sunk into the house, so there was no cushion. Most of their relatives, on both my father’s side and my mother’s, and friends had fared more poorly than them during the Depression years, so there was no one to borrow from.

“We could sell Esther,” my father said, straight-faced.

“NO!” my sister shrieked. She had turned eight just a week earlier.

“Ah, who would buy her anyway.” And my father grabbed her and smothered her with tickles. “We’ll sell Judy instead.”

“NO!” Now my other sister was adding to the bedlam.

“You’re right, too small. No good for anything... ex
cept...tickling...”

“It’s no laughing matter, Harry,” my mother scolded.

“That’s why I’m laughing.”

They both laughed at that, ruefully, but it was one of the last times for a long time that they’d find anything funny.

Years earlier, before my father had begun to write and followed his father and oldest brother into the
newspaper trade, he had worked as a silversmith. An
other older brother, Nathan, had already entered that trade and was doing well at it – eventually, he would have a job fashioning silver handles for canes and expensive umbrellas at a company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, would rise to be a foreman, then a manager, and wind up buying the company and becoming rich. But at the time my father, just nineteen or twenty, was looking for a job, Nathan was employed at the firm of Tiffany and Co., makers of fine lamps. He recommended my father, and he was hired as an apprentice. In all, my father worked there for two or three years, first doing the smallest and simplest of jobs, later graduating to more complex handiwork. He enjoyed the work, but at night he would scribble stories and poems on sheets of scrap newsprint from the newspaper where his father was the editor, and dream of being a writer.

Now, twenty-five years later, my father put his hat in his hands and went to the Tiffany shop on Delancey Street to beg for a job.

No one then working at Tiffany’s had been there in my father’s day, and there were no open jobs there at any rate, but someone suggested he try Goldmans’, down the street. There, he found, to his surprise, that a man named Arthur Reubens, who’d worked by his side at Tiffany’s years before, was the foreman. Reubens, like my father, was an admirer of rare old books, and over the years the two had occasionally run into each other at Fushgo’s bookshop on East Broadway.

“So you’ve given up on that crazy idea of being a writer, Morgenstern,” Reubens remarked dryly when my father walked into the shop, as if it had been only weeks since he’d left the trade, not years.

“Right now it’s given up on me,” my father said. Everyone knew about the strike at
The Day
, now in its third week, and everyone on the Lower East Side knew my father, who wrote a popular column, worked there, so there was no need to explain.

The two men shared a laugh and shook hands warmly. Reubens offered my father a job on the spot and had him working the very next day. My father wasn’t clear whether there really had been an opening or if Reubens, out of kindness, had created one.

Goldmans’ was an old establishment with a reputation. It had been founded before the turn of the century by two brothers who’d worked as skilled craftsmen in Berlin and they quickly developed a demand for their fine tableware, candlesticks, menorahs and decorative pieces, in both silver and gold. The original Goldman brothers were dead now, and even their sons, Gerson and Sidney, were nearing retirement age. They made appearances every day, but mostly confined themselves to the front office, to buying supplies and marketing to the Fifth Avenue shops that carried their wares. They left the actual running of the workshop to the much-trusted Reubens.

There were a dozen men in the shop, of various na
tionalities, “a regular League of Nations,” my father told my mother appreciatively. “The Goldmans don’t care who you are as long as you can do the work.” Among the men was Shel Goldman, Gerson’s son, who was just learning the trade. In a few years, the business would belong to him, as Sid had never married, but for the moment he was just another hand in the shop, doing what Reubens told him to do.

On my father’s first morning at work, Shel Goldman came over to say hello and my father was im
pressed by the young man’s good nature. “Welcome to the sweatshop,” he said with a wink, offering his hand. As
The Day
’s labour reporter, my father had written countless articles about the sweatshops of the garment district and the struggle by the unions against
them. “You got tired of covering strikes and decided to see them from the inside out?” Goldman asked amiably
.

“Of strikes I’ve seen plenty,” my father said. “But what can you do?”

Perhaps inevitably, there was also a man who took an instant dislike to my father. This was Pat Callahan, a big, redheaded goldsmith of such high skill that his eccentricities, irascibility and barely concealed anti-Semitism were tolerated. When they were introduced, Callahan took one look at my father’s soft white hands and new dungarees, snorted in disgust and turned back to his bench without a word. My father was flabbergasted.

“Pay no attention to Paddy,” Reubens said with a shrug, just loud enough so that Callahan could hear. “He’s the resident grouch.” Some of the other men laughed but my father felt uneasy. Callahan was lighting his torch and, with that in his hand and in his leather apron, he looked formidable. Not a good man to get on the wrong side of.

Over the next few days, my father learned to stay out of Callahan’s way. He was, Reubens assured him, more bark than bite. But still, the foreman added, “Who needs a barking dog at your heels?” The evening before, after work but before catching his train home, my father had spent an hour on the picket line at
The Day
, and there was a heckling group of men from the Bund across the street, in black leather jackets like German storm troopers. One of them had a snarling police dog on a short leash and the memory made my father shiver.

Reubens put my father to work on candlesticks and menorahs. Other, more skilled men made the parts, and my father’s job was limited to welding pieces together and final polishing. He was given a bench next to Shel Goldman’s; he was doing similar work. It was natural, then, that my father got to know the younger man better, and he took a liking to him. My mother would pack a lunch for my father, two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on thick-sliced pumpernickel bread, a wedge of cheese and an apple, and a Thermos of coffee, which my father liked milky and sweet. Lunch breaks at the shop were staggered and, invariably, when he took his break, Goldman was going off on his as well and the two men would find themselves eating together in a small windowless room at the rear of the business office that served as a lunchroom. The two women who worked in the front, looking after correspondence and the books, had done what they could to prettify the lunchroom, tacking pages from a Currier and Ives calendar on the walls and arranging gingham placemats on the wobbly tables.

“In the old days,” my father remembered, looking around on the first day, “when Reubens and I worked at Tiffany’s, we’d walk down to Orchard Street and have the free lunch at Stinky’s.”

“Free!” Goldman said, impressed.

“Well, you bought a schooner of beer, three cents, then you helped yourself. Trays of black bread, sliced meat and cheese, pickles.”

“First the beer, though.”

“Sure, first the beer.”

“And at inflated prices, I’m sure.”

“I suppose. You could get the same glass of beer for two cents some places.”

“So there’s no free lunch. That it, Morgenstern?”

My father smiled. He thought about how the free kisses my mother had lavished on him had led to the diaper bucket, the mortgage, lunch in a paper bag. “No free lunch, Goldman. You’re right about that.”

Shel Goldman was a thin, ascetic-looking man with the hands of a concert pianist or a jeweller – not a metal smith – and dark, haunted eyes that made my father wonder if he was recovering from a tragic love affair. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could ask another man about, but it wasn’t long before my father found out.

•••

As it turned out, Shel Goldman was a poet and, as soon as he felt sufficiently comfortable with my father, he was pressing some of his work into the older man’s
hands. By this time, a few weeks into my father’s em
ployment at Goldmans’, the two men were eating their sandwiches together daily and had come to enjoy each other’s company.

In his own younger days, my father had written poems and two novels, which had been serialized in the Cleveland newspaper where he’d worked. But he felt his literary days were behind him. At
The Day
, he wrote news stories and articles every day and a weekly column that had a large following; that seemed to satisfy his writerly impulses. As for literature, he explained, he read novels now, didn’t write them. And it was a long time since he’d even read a poem, other than my mother’s, let alone written one.

“Just wait till you have children,” he told Goldman with a laugh. “Art goes out the window.” But he cheerfully accepted the younger man’s handwritten pages and read them with interest on the train ride home to Princeton Junction that evening.

My father would always willingly admit that he’d never been much of a poet. He was self-taught, having consumed Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Rilke, whom he considered gods, and he had a well-earned command of the written word, at least in Yiddish. But he had a tendency to go on and on that had seemed more suitable to novels. Goldman’s poems, though, were short and pithy, filled with vivid images and startling metaphors that had my father shaking his head with admiration. They were love poems, written in English, and they expressed a painful longing for a departed lover, a beautiful, enigmatic woman, sensuously described, who, if the poems were to be believed, had spurned all emotional advances while encouraging physical contact, allowing herself to be both available and distant. “That’s one mystery solved,” my father thought.

That night, after the girls had been put to bed, he showed a few of Goldman’s poems to my mother, who was also a lover of poetry. At college, she’d read Verlaine and Rimbaud in French and had written some poems, and continued to write occasionally, though she considered herself no more than an amateur. “He’s good,” she agreed. “Too good to be wasting himself in a metal shop. You should encourage him.”

“He’s the boss’s son,” my father reminded her.

“I don’t understand,” my mother said.

“What if I tell him to quit, go to university, live in a garret and drink wine? His father will be sore at me. What if I tell him to write poetry on weekends, keep his nose clean and learn the business? He may think I don’t take him seriously and resent it. Giving advice can come back and bite you on the behind.”

Giving advice happened to be something my father knew about. Years earlier, in Cleveland, he had written an advice to the lovelorn column, questions as well as answers at first, which still embarrassed him to admit. On more than one occasion, advice he gave had produced results that were far less than satisfactory.

“How do you know he wants your advice?” my mother asked.

“Why else show me the poems?”

“Maybe he just wants to hear what you think of
them
,” she said, drawing a fine distinction.

“Maybe,” my father said, without much conviction.

“But you said he’s such a nice young man,” my mother protested after a minute of thought.

“Nice, yes. The boss’s son, also yes.”

The next day, it was fine outside and my father suggested to Goldman that they take their brown bags to the little park a few blocks away on Delancey and eat on a bench. They ate their sandwiches, commented on the burgeoning foliage of spring and the passersby and enjoyed the sunshine on their faces. Goldman seemed anxious but didn’t press. “That must have been some love affair,” my father finally said, choosing his words carefully. “She must have been some woman.”

“Pardon?”

“The poems.”