Just As I Thought (2 page)

An extended family is wonderful for a child who is important to everybody’s life; who is, in fact, its meaning—but often a terrible experience for the grownups who carry into the new country secret and bitter knowledge of one another and all the old insults.

My mother was a woman of unusual kindness. She loved my father, who was considered a difficult man. This made me very romantic. I began as soon as I could (around thirteen or so) my successful searches for difficult men of my own. She had been a photography retoucher when my older brother and sister were children. In my middle-class childhood she managed a household—my father’s neighborhood medical practice on the first floor and the complicated family life upstairs. She was not liked by my grandmother or my aunt. She lived with them all her life. She died before they did. I could see they felt my mother’s love for my father one-upped their love for him—at least it interfered with their serving him his evening tea or morning coffee. My daughter has pointed out that there were not enough love jobs to go around in this new world. In any event, I probably learned tolerance, maybe even literary affection for the person in the wrong historical moment, living such long, never to be mediated wars with other sufferers.

My mother died too early in my adult life to see clearly that I wasn’t going to rack and ruin. She missed all the grandchildren but my brother’s Frances. But tucked into my granddaughter’s name, Laura Manya Paley, there she is: my mother, modest as usual, but present.

I / Beginning

I ought to say a few things about the pieces in this section. “Injustice” is about your typical socialist Jewish child. “Other Mothers” was written first for
Esquire’
s “Mom and Apple Pie” issue, then was reprinted in
Feminist Studies.
I think I did have those other mothers in mind, the way they seemed left behind; I could almost see them watching their sons disappear into America and that generation’s misogyny. It may have been a good time for apple pie, but it was a hard time for mom. It seemed everything was her fault, her daughter’s autism in the life of one friend, for another friend her son’s schizophrenia. With this friend, I visited many head doctors whose authoritative voices I heard addressing her, explaining, more frequently accusing. “Jobs” is the best résumé I ever dreamed up, and the most accurate. It was done a long time ago, but not much has changed. I’m still a writer, sometimes a teacher, and have graduated to grandmotherness. I’m glad to have included the interview, “The Illegal Days,” from
The Choices We Made,
though it is kind of discursive, partly because it’s presented as a written piece. I love Angela Bonavoglia’s persistence in putting that book together.

“Six Days” and “Traveling” explain themselves pretty well (I think). As for the speech “Like All the Other Nations”—it was given at a
Tikkun
magazine conference, actually at the conference dinner, one of those fund-raising dinners that must happen from time to time or important organizations would starve. I began with what might be called a story, “Midrash on Happiness” (I do tend to begin or end my talks with stories or poems). In this case, I wanted to tell how my serious atheistic Jewish parents gave me enough stories—biblical, historical—so that I grew up as a Jewish woman and liked it.

There is on page 36 an introduction to
Peacemeal,
a Greenwich Village Peace Center cookbook, which describes the gang fights in the East Bronx as a tough struggle between the Third and Fourth Internationals. A friend reading it suggested that no one would know what I was talking about. So I will explain that the Third International, as we were raised to understand it, believed that Socialism could be successfully built in one country, and that country became the Soviet Union under Lenin, then Stalin. The Fourth International became itself, believing that the Soviet Union was not a Marxist or a historical possibility. It then became Trotskyism after Trotsky, who had fled Russia and was murdered in Mexico by Third Internationalists. For some reason Trotskyism was attractive to many American intellectuals. Though I seem too easy or wry in my comments, these serious factional furies had great influence on our American labor movement and our literary magazines, as well as on street corners in the Bronx.

“The Unfinished Bronx” was originally a preface to a book of Mel Rosenthal’s wonderful photographs. The book has not appeared yet—but here’s the preface. It does tell something about my poor borough’s hard life, its betrayal by the Lords of the City. My own street, however, has improved—little one-story family houses seem almost literally planted on one side of the street. But our old, short, fat, two-story red brick still sits there. Grass now grows on the dirty old corner lots. I drove by and stopped the other day, and I saw that change. The mother in the upstairs window, the little black boy on my childhood’s excellent stoop probably waiting for his friends. “Can I help you, señora?”—two Puerto Rican men walking by saw my intense looking. “I used to live here,” I said. “Oh, lady, lady, come back,” they cried.

Injustice

When I was about nine years old, I was a member of an organization called the Falcons. We were Socialist youths under twelve. We wore blue shirts and red kerchiefs. We met once a week (or was it once a month?). To the tune of “Maryland, My Maryland,” we sang:

The workers’ flag is deepest red

it shrouded oft our martyred dead.

With the Socialist ending, not the Communist one, we sang the “Internationale.” We were warned that we would be tempted to sing the Communist ending, because at our occasional common demonstrations there were more of them singing. They would try, with their sneaky politics, to drown us out.

At our meetings we learned about real suffering, which was due to the Great Depression through which we were living that very year. Of course many of my friends already had this information. Their fathers weren’t working. Their mothers had become so grouchy you couldn’t ask them for the least little thing. Every day in our neighborhood there were whole apartments, beds, bureaus, kitchen tables out on the street. We understood that this was because of capitalism, which didn’t care that working people had no work and no money for rent.

We also studied prejudice—now known as racism. Prejudice was particularly sad, since it meant not liking people for no reason at all, except the color of their skin. That color could happen to anyone if they’d been born to some other parents on another street. We ourselves had known prejudice—well, not us exactly. In Europe, that godforsaken place, our parents and grandparents had known it well. From a photograph over my grandmother’s bed, my handsome uncle, killed at seventeen because of prejudice, looked calmly at me when I sought him for reminder’s sake. Despite its adherence to capitalism, prejudice, and lynching, my father said we were lucky to be here in this America. We sometimes sang “America the Beautiful” at our meetings. Parents were divided on that.

At each meeting we paid 5¢ or 10¢—not so much to advance Socialism as to be able to eat cookies at four o’clock. One day at cookie-eating time, our comrade counselor teacher, a young woman about eighteen years old, announced that we were going to do a play. There would be a party, too. It would include singing and maybe dancing. We began to rehearse immediately. She had been thinking about all this for a couple of weeks. The idea had matured into practical action.

Our play was simple, a kind of agitprop in which a father comes home; he says, “Well, Sarah, the shop closed down today. No more work! And without warning!” The mother is in despair. How to feed the children! The children’s breakfast bowls are empty. Some boys carry the furniture (lots of chairs from the meeting room) out to the hall. Eviction! In the second act, neighbors meet to drag the furniture back, proving working-class solidarity. They then hold a rally and march to City Hall at the back of the room, singing the “Internationale” all the way. The event would have to take place in the evening after supper in case some father or mother still had a job.

I was one of the little empty-bowl children. Every day after school I worked in the bathroom mirror at the creation of a variety of heartrending expressions. But my sweetest contribution would be the song

One dark night when we were all in bed

Old mother Leary took a candle to the shed

and when the cow tipped it over

she winked her eye and said

There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.

This song had been chosen to show we had fun, too; our childhood was being respected.

Before supper that important night, I decided to sing for my mother. When I finished, she said gently, lovingly, “Gracie darling, you can’t sing. You know you can’t hold the tune. The teacher in school, she even said you were a listener. Try again—a little softer…”

“I can so sing,” I said. “I was picked. I wouldn’t of been picked if I couldn’t sing.” I sang the song once more.

“No no,” my mother said. “That girl Sophie, Mrs. Greenberg’s Sophie? She has no idea. She has no ear. Maybe deaf even. No no, you can’t sing. You’ll make a fool of yourself. People will laugh. For Sophie maybe, the more laughing the better.”

“I don’t care. I have to go. I have to go in a half hour. I have two parts.”

“What? And I’m supposed to sit in the audience and see how your feelings are hurt when they laugh at you. When Papa hears—well, he wouldn’t go anyway. That Sophie, she’s just a kid herself.”

“But, Mama, I have to go.”

“No no,” she said. “No. You’re not going. Just to be a fool. They’ll have to figure out what to do.”

Guiltless but full of shame, I never returned to the Falcons. In fact, in sheer spite I gave up my work for Socialism for at least three years.

Fifty years later I told my sister this story. She said, “I can’t believe that of Mama—that she would prevent you from singing—especially if you had an obligation. She wasn’t like that.”

Well, I had developed a kind of class analysis, an explanation which I think is pretty accurate. Our parents, remarkable people, were also a couple of ghetto Jews struggling with hard work and intensive education up the famous American ladder. At a certain rung in that ladder during my childhood they appeared to have climbed right into the professional middle class. At that comfortable rung (probably upholstered), embarrassed panic would be the response to possible exposure.

“Exposure to what? What are you talking about?” my sister asked. “You forget, really. Mama had absolutely perfect pitch. For a person like that, your wandering all over the scale must have been torture. I mean real physical pain. To her, you were just screeching. In fact,” my sister said, “although you’ve improved, you still sound that way to me.”

My sister has continued to be fourteen years older than I. Neither of us has recovered from that hierarchical fact. So I said, “Okay, Jeanne.”

But she had not—when she was nine—been a political person and she had never been a listener. She took singing lessons, then sang. She and my brother practiced the piano like sensible children. In fact, in their eighties they have as much musical happiness in their fingertips as in their heads.

As for my mother—though I had no ear and clearly could not sing, she thought I might try the piano. After all, we had one. There were notes on paper inside a nice yellow book that said
Inventions by Bach
on its cover. Since I was a big reader, I might be able to accomplish
something.
I had no gift. That didn’t mean I must be a deprived person. Besides, why had the Enlightenment poured its seductive light all across the European continent right into the poor endangered households of Ukrainian Jews? Probably, my mother thought, so that a child, any child (even a tone-deaf one), could be given a chance despite genetic deficiency to become, in my mother’s embarrassed hopeful world, a whole person.

—1995

The Unfinished Bronx

I remember the day that the East Bronx began to become the South Bronx, though no one realized it at the time. I was in kindergarten. My entire class, probably many other classes as well, walked all the way from our school, P.S. 50 on Vyse Avenue and East 173rd Street, east, east to the Bronx River. There the Mayor of the City of New York, Jimmy Walker, dedicated the East 174th Street Bridge. Dedicated to what?

Probably to real-estate development (bridges, roads, benign or sneaky, are good for that). Soon some little houses and big houses called tenements or apartment houses were established, much like those on our side of the river. But in only a few years out of the frantic good-time winds of the 1920s, the merciless Depression sprang forward, stalking money, houses, people.

Then everything was unfinished, even in our neighborhoods. There were empty lots on many street corners, rocky, hilly, good for games, but already jammed with garbage and rats (our mothers said). Someone must have owned those lots and was hoping for better days. They never came—to that neighborhood at least. Evictions were a daily fact. Many neighbors and most of my friends were on home relief. It was only the terrible war news from Europe and the beginning of a war economy, then war, that returned people to work, saving them, as well as the system called capitalism.

The Depression was the first great blow to the unfinished Bronx. There were demographic changes, too, as the Irish and Jews, recovering from the harsh 1930s, began to move out of the old tenements to the North and West Bronx, New Jersey, the Westchester suburbs. Puerto Rican families and African Americans had already begun to move up out of Manhattan hopefully to the Bronx. But normal American racism never did let everyone into the melting pot at the same time.