A Book of Great Worth (6 page)

“I choose to do what is expected of me,” my father replied simply. He went on with the milking.

Schmidt was wearing his jodhpurs and boots as usual, and, my father noticed with some alarm, held the shotgun loosely against his hip.

“I can’t abide this fool Pearlman, this traitor, an
other minute,” he said, ignoring my father’s comment. “Betty and I leave for New York in the morning, then on to Germany. You’d be well advised to do the same.”

My father was acutely conscious of the shotgun, and of Schmidt’s volatility, but he had made up his mind not to be bullied.

“This is our country now,” he said, resting his head against the Guernsey’s flank. “And it’s definitely Betty’s country.”

“You’re a fool,” Schmidt replied mildly. He made no move. “And my wife is none of your business.”

“I’m
the fool?”

The two men eyed each other, with suspicion and contempt, until my father finished with the Guernsey, slapping her affectionately on the rump as he rose. He moved the stool and pail down the row to the next cow, a Jersey that rolled her tongue and shook her head with impatience. “Okay, Bossy, good girl,” my father murmured soothingly. The tension between the two men was palpable, the silence broken now only by the hissing of milk into the pail.

“Harry...” Schmidt began, his tone menacing, and he took a step forward, the shotgun rising involuntarily with his movement, but before he could say another word or my father could react, there was a rattle from
the barn door. Oscar stood there, his usual good-na
tured but baffled grin on his vacant face. “Late,” he said with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “Sleep.”

“Grab a pail,” my father said. Relief coursed through him, and he buried his face in the cow’s warm hide for a moment. When he looked up, Schmidt was gone.

The milking done, my father bade Oscar good night and paused on his way to the house for a moment in the empty barnyard, wiping his hands. Although it was only early evening, the sun was already low and red in the sky to the west – it was August and days were getting noticeably shorter. The days remained hot but evenings were cooler and it was easier to sleep. With Schmidt and Betty gone, he imagined the Pearlmans might want him to stay on longer to help with the chores until something else could be arranged, maybe even through the grandparents’ visit. He would do that, he resolved, do whatever was asked of him. But soon his time on the farm would end and he’d be returning to the city and, as was becoming increasingly evident, an uncertain future. He had no way of knowing that his time with the Pearlmans would serve him well and that once again he’d be working on a farm.

He looked over to the silent Pearlman house, where no lights glowed. The Schmidt house was similarly unlit, but he could hear, from within its walls, shouting, a man’s gruff bark, followed by a woman’s high keen. Then silence. It was hard to believe that Betty would really follow Schmidt to Germany, but the depth of mystery that surrounded women continued to confound and astound him. He shook his head in puzzlement. There was another shout, and a clatter from the Schmidt house, as if dishes or pots had been thrown against a wall.

My father stood motionless in the dusk.

• • •

The Wisdom of Solomon

There he was in Cleveland. My father liked to use this expression for his life in those days: “I was still chasing the donkey, trying to pin the tail to it.” The donkey had led him away from New York and out west, where his intention was to see some of the world and, hopefully, write about it. But he’d gotten no further than Chicago, where he holed up in a cheap hotel room for several weeks and wrote, in longhand, the bulk of a novel, a fanciful tale of a sensitive boy growing up in the Lower East Side that owed much to Joyce’s
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.
When his money ran out, he burned the manuscript – a surprisingly satisfying ritual – and he circled back to Cleveland, where he’d heard, from a poet fleeing the place, of a job on a Yiddish newspaper. His father and brother were both well-known journalists, and it had been important for him to make his own name, on his own, and he’d gone so far, once he got to Cleveland, as actually to change his name, to Morgenstern, which means morning star. Now, at last, he had his first real job on a newspaper, though it wasn’t quite what he had expected, and was beginning what he hoped would be a glorious career. If not glorious, then at least exciting, interesting. He saw himself as Don Quixote, the hero of the famous novel he had recently read, tilting at windmills – righting wrongs – not with a lance but a pen. First, though, he had to learn to type.

And he held in his hands the hearts of thousands of readers. That was his chief concern.

“My husband beats me and the children. What should I do?”

A reader had posed this question in a letter and my father considered his answer with gravity. If he advised her to be a dutiful wife and bear what her husband meted out, he might be sentencing her to a life of drudgery, frustration and pain, and possibly even worse for the children. On the other hand, what if he suggested she leave the man – what sort of life would she and her children face, without a roof over their heads and a source of food, clothing and protection? Even the middle ground was fraught with danger, he could see: should he urge her to talk to her husband, to try to mollify him, she might instead provoke him into even more extreme acts of violence. Lives might well hang in the balance.

How to respond?

•••

It was 1920, and my father was twenty-seven; as he liked to say, he was always a few years older than the century.

The
Cleveland Jewish World – Der Velt
– had a grand title, but the paper itself was somewhat less than grand. Its circulation was barely fifty thousand, just a fraction of that of the big Yiddish dailies of New York City, but it saw itself playing a role just as important in the lives of the Jews of Cleveland and other cities in Ohio, bringing them not just news but education, entertainment and literature. It was that part that most interested my father, who had been writing a novel and poems, but he was assigned more mundane tasks at first, not the least of which were obituaries. He got a crash course in the history of Cleveland as he succinctly documented the lives of its Jewish residents as they
died. “People are dying to get into our pages,” my fa
ther’s boss, Everett Heshberg, told him. “It’s the last time most of them ever will. Some of them, the first time too. Treat them with respect.”

My father’s chief job, though, was as news writer, another grand title that was somewhat less than it sounded.
The World
subscribed to the Associated Press news wire, which, of course, came in English. First
thing in the morning, Heshberg, who as managing ed
itor was the heart and soul of the paper, went through the overnight dispatches, selecting stories he thought would be of interest to his readers. This included local items of government, politics, human interest and even crime – the same stories which that day would appear (or already had the previous day) in the front pages of
The Cleveland Plain Dealer,
which had, in fact, origi
nated most of the local and state AP items. He also
selected many stories from Europe, which was still re
covering and reorganizing from the ravages of the Great War. Cleveland’s Jews came from many parts of Europe – Germany, Romania, Russia, Hungary, Latvia, Galicia and elsewhere – and were hungry for news of home, even if they no longer really considered those distant countries their homes.

My father and another young man, who was somewhat senior to him, shared the translation duties, which he enjoyed. The trick was not so much to translate literally as to read the story, absorb it and write it fresh in Yiddish as if the story were his own. My father was ideally suited for such a task, as he was fluent in both English and Yiddish, and could write quickly, though his two-finger attack at the typewriter was the cause of much amusement in
The
World
newsroom. When he had time to spare, he practiced ten-finger typing but it seemed hopeless.

There was little spare time, though.
The World
was an afternoon paper, meaning it appeared on the street shortly after noon. My father reported for work at six in the morning and wrote news till the nine-thirty
deadline. Then he turned his attention to the death no
tices sent in by the Jewish funeral homes. As Heshberg had explained it to him, “Each death represents a life, and each life is a story.” Again, my father’s job
was to translate, taking the bare essentials of those lives –
the facts provided by the families for the mortuaries – and turn them into interesting stories, occasionally taking liberties.

“Do not fabricate,” Heshberg counselled, “but bend.”

This suited my father fine, for he was attempting, as he saw it, to tailor the soul of a poet into the mind of a journalist. Each obituary, in his hands, became a poem.

News and obituaries occupied almost all of my fa
ther’s time – after that day’s paper was put to bed, as the expression went, the process would immediately begin again for the next day’s edition – but they took up only a small part of the paper, which was mostly filled with articles by real writers on all manner of subjects: essays on philosophical and theological subjects, usually written by learned rabbis; treatises on history, civics and politics; and educational articles that helped the Jewish immigrant community of Ohio in establishing their lives in this new world: how to apply for citizenship, how to get a driver’s licence, the rights of a tenant and so on. Then there were poems, short stories,
condensed novels, literary criticism. This is what my fa
ther aspired to but he knew he had to earn the right
to it. So he was both thrilled and chagrined when Heshberg
asked him to write the advice column.

The newspapers of New York were filled with such columns, which were wildly popular. Abe Cahan, the
great editor at
The Forward
, the Socialist paper, had in
vented the form, which he called the
Bintel Brief,
Yiddish for a bundle of letters, but all the other Yiddish papers had followed, even the religious papers, which at first considered themselves too serious for such a
seemingly trivial feature. But readers demanded it. Re
gardless of what paper they read, they had questions, often much the same ones. Even the English papers, like the
Sun
and the
Telegram
in New York, seeing all the fuss, were quick to follow.

Native-born readers and well-established immigrants, though, were less likely to pose the utilitarian questions of the recent arrivals, so the columns established by the English papers quickly narrowed their
focus to the lovelorn. Heshberg made it clear to my fa
ther that his column would involve much more than just letters from unhappy lovers. This was just as well, since my father, who was still a bachelor, was one of the least likely men on earth to give advice on affairs of the heart, as soon would be evident.

“There should be nothing to it for a smart fellow like you, Morgenstern,” Heshberg said. My father recognized the flattery as a ploy, but he was flattered just the same. “You have the intelligence and sensitivity for the job,” the editor continued. “Just as in the obituaries, every life is a story. Every letter is an opportunity for you to influence those lives. Think of yourself as having a conversation with the readers, a conversation about their deepest concerns, worries, fears. Think of yourself as a rabbi.”

That was exactly what was frightening my father. The last thing he wanted to be was a rabbi, a calling that his eldest brother, Sam, had studied but hadn’t followed, but the notion of a conversation with the readers was appealing to him.

Heshberg had already determined that my father’s
own identity, and that of any subsequent writers as
signed
this task, would be concealed. To this end, he had con
cocted a fictitious advisor called Yenta Schmegge,
a name which, with its play on the hapless sadsack Jew
ish figure of the
shmegegge,
he hoped would convey a combination of humour and seriousness readers would find appealing. My father would assume the per
sona of Yenta as he composed replies to the letter-writ
ers. When he tired of the assignment, “after six months or a year,” Heshberg said, another writer would take his place and consistency would be maintained.

My father agreed to all this – he was relieved that
he would not have to put his own name on his replies –
and even agreed to Heshberg’s plan to prime the pump
during the first days that the column would run, al
though he objected at first.

“Make up letters?” He realized immediately that his aghast tone might be offensive to the editor. “What I mean is...”

“You’re concerned about the ethics of the situation, Morgenstern?” Heshberg looked at him with a frank expression, but he didn’t appear hostile.

“Well, yes.”

“Ethics don’t really enter into it, don’t you see? This isn’t news. It’s what in the English papers they call features. What if it were a short story or a novel you were writing?”