The Auerbach Will (10 page)

The Irish are the enemy. The Micks—big, thick-headed, tough, and mean—prey on the Jewish children, calling them Christ-killers, and when little Abe is old enough to go to school, Essie must take him on a circuitous route to avoid the blocks which the Micks patrol. Even so, a group of Micks may be encountered unexpectedly, looking for victims. When this happens, Essie puts her arm tightly around her brother's shoulder because even the wicked Micks have their scruples. It's the Jewish boys they're after. They will not bother Jewish girls. Minna Litsky talks of moving to the Bronx, but only in a worried, uncertain way. She dislikes, you see, the thought of travel.

From Uptown come Do-Gooders—rich women in stone marten scarves, little animals with glass eyes and their jaws clasped fiercely to each others' tails—women like Mrs. Oliver Hazzard Perry Belmont, and Mr. J. P. Morgan's sister. Their pictures are in the
Tageblatt
, which disapproves of them. They are suspected of being Christian missionaries. The Do-Gooders come down to the East Side and pass out cookies and doughnuts and apples to the children on the street. But even the hungriest children who accept these gifts are afraid to eat them because they are probably not kosher. It is humiliating to be on the receiving end of the Do-Gooders' well-meaning charity, and yet their presence is begrudgingly accepted since it must be admitted that the Do-Gooders do some good. They put on lectures, they help the teachers in the schools, they care for the sick.

SOMETHING MUST HAPPEN! the
Tageblatt
's headline declaims. The Jews have been shipped to Texas, but Texas doesn't want them—as Sam Litsky could have told the authorities all along, he says, slapping at the aberrant daily. (If her father hates the
Tageblatt
so much, Essie wonders, why does he insist on having the first copy of the paper that comes off the pile?) There must be International Talks. In Washington, D.C., Congressmen are rattling their legislative swords and calling for quotas. President Theodore Roosevelt has declared, “We should aim to exclude absolutely not only all persons who are known to be believers in anarchistic principles, but also all persons who are of a low moral tendency or of unsavory reputation.”

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” the Statue of Liberty implores, beseeches, from New York Harbor, holding high her lamp above the golden door.

In 1904, there are rent strikes all over the city, some of them quite violent. Strikers are clubbed and knocked about. One, knocked over the head by a policeman's billy, dies in the hospital. Now there is talk of a children's strike—surely the strike-breakers would restrain themselves and not harm innocent children. Essie is thirteen, and there is much talk at home of whether or not Essie should be allowed to march with the strikers, most of whom are young girls in their early teens. At issue is the situation at the Cohen paper-box factory on the Bowery, where the girls were being paid three dollars for every thousand cigarette boxes they turned out, and where a wage cut of ten percent has just been announced. The
Tageblatt
is raising a special fund to help the strikers. Seven hundred dollars is raised by the United Hebrew Trades, there are benefit concerts, and the Do-Gooders from Uptown, led by such social workers as Jane Addams, have offered their full support.

Minna Litsky is opposed to the idea of having Essie march with the demonstrators, but Sam, who has decided that he is a Socialist, is for it. And so Essie marches, with her father keeping close by, in case of trouble. There is none, but in the end it is hard to see what the strike has accomplished. The Cohen paper-box factory remains inflexible. But Essie Litsky's picture is in the paper.

And so, though the Lower East Side keeps growing, changing, there is much that remains the same. Within the community flourish beggars, thieves, plunderers, heroes, clowns, noisemakers, rapscallions, miracle workers, saviors, Samaritans and sinners, goldbricks, warriors, saints and bloodsuckers, ruffians, reformers, rebels and backsliders, cutthroats and comedians and revolutionaries, all held together by some common glue—America.

Now the
Tageblatt
is inveighing against Victrolas. The newfangled machines, played at full volume from open windows of the tenements, simply add to the din and chaos of East Side living. Victrolas! Think of it!

Nothing is permanent, except the fact that life goes on.

It is a world in which one grows up quickly.

In 1907, when Essie was sixteen, she realized that her school days were coming to an end. Ten years of schooling was enough for a Jewish girl—in fact, it was more than most had, her mother pointed out, reminding her again of her good fortune. Most girls were at work by age fourteen, and the time had come for Essie to begin to make some financial contribution to the household. If nothing else, she could help Minna in the store. The time was also approaching when Essie should begin thinking about finding a husband. Minna herself had been fifteen when she was married, and seventeen when Essie was born. These matters, however, would be left in the hands of Essie's father, who would find her a match in the customary way.

At P.H.S. Eleven, knowing that this was her last year, Essie was not studying very hard, nor was her mind really on the complicated business of what lay ahead for her. Most of the courses she was taking—Home Economics, Civics, Botany—were designed to teach a Jewish girl to be a practical housekeeper, to cook and to sew and to press flowers under glass, and she found them too easy to get high marks in. But that was the year she had discovered books—not the books that were the texts for her courses, but the books on the shelves of the branch of the Public Library on East Broadway near Chatham Square. All that was needed was her name and address on a little card, and all these books were hers to take home for free. There were newspapers and magazines at the library, too—magazines on art and travel and science and history—and all at once she found herself lifted up, transported, out of the constricted and quarrelsome little world of the
Tageblatt
, into the Casbah of Marakesh and onto the landscape of the moon.

She read ravenously, everything she could get her hands on, from Shakespeare's plays to the latest novel by Joseph Conrad, called
The Secret Agent
, and the more daring modern novels by Bertha M. Clay, the poems of Ethel Lynn Beers and Rose Terry Cooke. Vicariously, she rose in the ranks of the French bourgeoisie with Emma Bovary, was titillated by the erotic Kate Chopin, and suffered the humiliation of Hester Prynne. “Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart,” she read, and sighed.

Her father complained about it. “Look at her,” he would cry, “her nose in a book again!”

“But you're always reading, Papa.”

“Not the trash you read—novels, picture magazines.”

“You wanted me to memorize Shakespeare. Remember?”

“But that was for your school,” he argued. “No husband will want a wife who spends all her time with a book.”

“Your papa's right,” her mother said. “Men don't like bookish women. If a man ever finds out you're bookish, he'll want nothing to do with you.”

Still, she continued her journey to the center of the earth with Jules Verne.

At school, meanwhile, there was one weekly lecture which she had begun to look forward to. It took place on Fridays, and the tall young man who conducted it was one of the Do-Gooders from Uptown who worked as a volunteer in the school system. The course he taught was called Living With Our City, and the topics he chose were almost uniformly boring—How Our Fire Department Does Its Job, A Day in the Life of a Sanitation Inspector, Our Mayor and His Councilmen, Why the Policeman is Our Friend, and so on—nor was his manner of delivery particularly inspiring, as he droned on about the sewer system and abjured against young people's practice of opening fire hydrants on hot days. And so, instead of listening to what this tall young man had to say, Essie had taken to making sketches of him in her notebook, because Essie thought him simply the handsomest young man she had ever seen.

He must have been in his early twenties, with the darkest, curliest hair, the bluest eyes, the strongest chin, the straightest nose. He was also beautifully dressed, and one of her classmates had told her why—his family was in the men's clothing business. Essie sketched him with a mustache, didn't like that, and erased it off. Then she sketched him with a small, pointed beard, but didn't care for that, either.

One afternoon, as she was leaving school, she encountered him on the steps. He smiled at her, and said, “Do you live near here?”

“On Norfolk Street,” she said.

“I'll walk you home,” he said. “Here, let me carry your books,” and he took her packet of books that were tied together with a slender string. She had actually been headed for the library. But that could wait.

Up close to him, not separated from him by rows of students and their desks, and by the lecture platform, she saw that he really was extraordinarily handsome.

In that memory, he still is.

It is February there, and the low late-afternoon sun is leaden and cold. There is a damp wind coming up from the river, and instinctively Essie draws her scarf up over her nose and mouth, and they push forward, heads lowered, clutching their coats, against the wind. It is too cold for conversation, and there seems no point in trying. Warm gusts of steam blow up from the storm sewers, the hot innards of the city that he has described in his lectures, and fling up soot and candy wrappers, all the detritus of the city, spiraling into the air. A blowing sheet of newspaper cuffs about his trouser legs and he does a little dance to rid himself of it. Essie cups her hand across her eyes to keep cinders from flying into them.

In that memory, the city is all motion, people rocking about on the pavements like passengers on a huge ship on a stormy sea, swaying to keep their balance, grasping for handholds as the vessel that is Manhattan Island pitches and tosses in the waves. But in more ways than one this short journey to Norfolk Street seems to Essie Litsky like an ocean crossing, and in the wind she and only she feels that she is walking on sheer air. Where will this journey lead? For this young man himself, in his fine clothes, with his highly polished dark brown shoes, is from the Other Side. And on the Other Side, she knows from what she has read in her books and magazines, stand open spaces, green lawns and picket fences, trees and streams and fountains, gardens where children play in swings and sandboxes, where sunshine falls on all four sides, not just slanted narrowly through streets and airshafts. This is where she suddenly feels herself headed now, with this fine-looking young man as her escort and her guide. The trip may be full of perils, but it need not be long, and she knows immediately that this is the trip she has always dreamed of making, and it is as though, if she stood on tiptoe, she could see and greet the horizon of that shining opposite shore. Because it is as simple as this: he is taking her out of the Old World, and into America at last.

I must make him fall in love with me
, she tells herself. I must make no false moves. Then, holding tight to him, I will leap to it.

They turn into Hester Street, and the wind falls, trapped behind the buildings, but there another storm assails them—a moving sea of humanity and sound. The street is lined on both sides with pushcarts topped by makeshift canopies and umbrellas as far as the eye can see, and in between are people—bearded men in heavy coats, women in long skirts and aprons and shawls, children, and everyone, it seems, is carrying some sort of bundle or basket, buying, selling, bickering, haggling: newsboys, egg-sellers, fish-peddlers, the matzoh men, the cash-for-clothes men, thrusting goods at one another. Blocking their way is a group of women arguing loudly with a yard-goods dealer over a bit of cotton cloth. People lean against each other, shout and move away. Fists shake. Threats are issued. Terrible terrors and curses are invoked. Then there is a sudden burst of laughter and from somewhere the sound of an organ-grinder's music. The crowd sways as two policemen move slowly through, fingering their long sticks.

“What's going on?” the young man shouts in Essie's ear.

“It's all right. It's always like this,” she shouts back. “It's the safest place in town. You just have to push through.”

And so they push forward, shouldering, elbowing, shoving and forcing themselves against the crush of human traffic that assails them, between the pushcarts and their disputatious customers, through the warm smell of charcoal fires and the cooking smells of bread, chicken broth and garlic sausage and, above all, the pungent smell of human bodies, through the seething, jostling throng.

The next block is even worse. “Hold my hand,” he says. “So we don't get separated.” They push on, clinging to each other, step by step through the tide.

At the corner, Essie shouts up to him, “Do you like egg creams?”

“What?”

“I said, do you like egg creams?”

He stops and laughs, and Essie sees that he has a nice laugh, much more compelling than when he is standing at a lectern in an auditorium, holding forth on water mains. “Don't think I've ever had one,” he says.

“They make good ones here,” she says, pointing to a little shop.

Inside the ice cream parlor, it is considerably quieter. They sit side by side at the counter and order egg creams, and Essie shows him how to spoon the runny liquid out of his glass. “This is good,” he says, though from his tone she is not entirely sure he means it. Then he says, “Do you like living in this neighborhood?”

“I've lived here all my life.”

He seems to consider this. Then he asks, “Are you enjoying my lectures?”

“Oh, yes. Very much.”

“I've noticed that you take a lot of notes.”

Essie feels her face redden. He is still holding her books, and she prays that he won't ask to see her notes and discover what they really are. “Yes,” she says.