Rumen-escences in the City on a Hill

Rumeniscences

“You saw her last night, Sofer? Your la femme de ta vie, the one you loved most?”

“Yes, Yossi. We did not say in Hebrew “l’hitra’ot” nor even French, “au revoir“ to see you again. Rather a goodbye.”

“You think for good? Forever? I recall your love, no, your ardor for her.”

“She seems determined to live in this state of misery, to follow her father’s footsteps of misery until her mid-fifties. She hopes to leave her husband then, meet me again. By then, if I’m still breathing I may be able to do not much more than breathe.”

“You’re going to see Avi, your grade school buddy up north in Zichron?”

“Yes, he is my amenuensis, he remembers all of our teachers and fellow students’ names. Followed many of them over the years. He sends their updates or obit’s. Miriam, who escaped from her bourgeois Jewish home to study in McGill, dropped out after a year, travelled as a hippy in a Ken Kesey-painted van with her own gang of merry pranksters. Lots of dope. Birthed five children with different men, all of whom she continued to befriend and whom I suspect were despondent over her leaving them. She was like some pollen-beladen honeybee, flitting from flower to flower, each bloom yearning after her. Or, the men were like Blake’s field of sunflowers, ‘Weary of time, Who countest the steps of the Miriam-Sun’”

“A “sweet golden clime” she was. She settled in Taos with a commune and three or four of her children.”

“Sofer, remember how she baked for us a cake in the shape of a half watermelon? The “rind” was green. When she cut into it, red “meat” with seeds of chocolate chips.”

“Yossi, it won’t surprise you that in Taos, Miriam scratched out a living from her woven “Navaho” Indian blankets, made imitation Acoma pottery, Zuni jewelry. Avi writes to me she died. But, Avi adds, ‘With a sense of finding her centered self.’ Whatever center that was. Apparently something other than Yeats’ center that would not hold. Anyhow, Avi keeps track. Miriam was an angel, perhaps fallen. Those who disparaged, criticized her, were more like Yeats’ rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem.”

“But tell me Sofer, over this last marvelous brunch at Mishkenot and before the Arab maitre d’ hustles us out, you’ve spoken much of your earlier life to me. Reminiscing. I’ve never heard such details from you before. What’s the deal?”

“Reminiscences? More like Rumen-iscences, I feel like a ruminant with several mind-stomachs. To digest the past, I must regurgitate and chew the cud, then swallow and repeat until the memories are digested. My memory is more akin to the stomachs of sheep, cows, goats. While the ruminants’ food is ultimately digested, they produce much methane, threaten the stratosphere. But, they’re all kosher, right?”

“Right.”

“But my memories don’t always feel kosher until I’ve ruminated on them. I pray they don’t poison your atmosphere”

“I feel, Sofer, like we are of similar temperaments, of similar values. But my background, you know is remarkably different than yours: mine, from a wealthy midwest family, Orthodox and Zionist. You, I only know, were an immigrant.”

“The details, Yossi, I don’t dwell on. Most people think of me as some esoteric, cosmopolitan academic. My mid-Atlantic English accent throws them off their blood hounding trail. Today, the epithet is “privileged.” One of my colleagues said that in my academic review at the University, the only criticism they had of me was that I wore my brain on my sleeve.

Most don’t know that I spoke Yiddish until I was five; I picked up street lingo in Rochester. Then, my father figured I should learn some proper English. He’d attended night school after his factory hours. We went to the library. I read aloud to my parents on the second story porch of Mr. Katz’s four-flat. My first book was of a boy riding a donkey into the Grand Canyon. I was fortunate that we didn’t have ethnically-sensitive schools, no ESL, no “wokeness.” I learned English by immersion.”

“You came through Ellis Island?”

“Still functioning then. Three days on storm-tossed seas from Germany. My father said that we all vomitted the entire voyage, save himself. I was born in a DP camp, you know. Outside Frankfurt. My father wanted to go to Australia after the Concentration Camps, get as far from humans as possible. “Live among kangaroos and wallabies” and such, he exclaimed. But the Australians, those descendants of British criminals, didn’t want Jews. Too good for us, those offspring of Dickesonian thieves, murderers and buggers. So after a wait, we go to America. Even here, it was thanks to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, as Roosevelt didn’t want Jews either. The deal brokered was that Jews in the US had to guarantee, sponsor the tattered remnants of the Shoah. Patch us into the American Jewish community, like some human quilt.”

“Sofer, you have the history of the Jews emblazoned in your personal life.”

“Rumen-escences you want? I can tell you one.

We spent twelve or so weeks on Broadway and 112th in an SRO. My sister showed measles after Ellis Island. Excellent timing, as we would have been sent back had she been “rash” enough to show at immigration. Mt. Sinai, on the East nineties and Central Park, put me in the crib with her; the docs figured they’d get a two-fer; I’d catch her measles and be done with it. My father took the A-Train to Grand Central, the S Shuttle over to the number three up Lexington, then hike across Second avenue, Madison, Park until Fifth Avenue to see us daily. No rooming-in for parents then. One day, HIAS or the Joint said that they had a donated buggy for us: large white-wall tires, spoked overlapping wheels, the rear wheel oversizing the front, ivory-trimmed handle, leaved-shock absorbers. A Silver-Cross Bamoral. The top folded down when you pressed a lever on the diagonal chrome handle on the sides. My dad trundled this up and down the subway stairs, then took us home. There is a photo of my sister and I tucked into this magnificent ride, she in a cap hidden behind me and both of us shaded by a Surry with a fringe on top.

Then, came a job offer from Syracuse, a Jewish scrap metals dealer offered work. My father leaped at this and with his first paycheck went to HIAS to pay them back. They refused, but suggested that he send something at the end of the year in coming years. “

“Sofer, today, the Hebrew Immigrant Association, uses its monies to settle illegals from Honduras and Guatemala. Not Members of the Tribe.”

“ Yossi, Nu, Jews never seem to learn.

My father thrived working for a Jew (the first time in his working life, after “interning” for the Nazis since adolescence). But, my mother yearned to be near her contentious pimping younger sister whom she had cared for when they escaped to Soviet Russia from Nazi-invaded Poland.

“”Pimping?”

“Listen, such a tale to tell. Tante ‘Dela, we called her, unable to say Adele. A nose like a Tucan, she fancied herself sexy. In Russia, despite my mother’s attempted protection, Adele ran the black market — onions, potatoes, likely her personal favors. Once a Cossack showed up at my mother’s shack, insisting on her sexual favors, for which, he indignantly shouted, he had already paid Tante ‘Dela, who then fancied herself as my mother’s pimp. Another fellow, when my mother was moved to a labor camp in Turkmenistan, he, allegedly a Moslem, pounded at her hut, insisting that he’d paid a horse for my mother to be his second wife. Tante ‘Dela had to return the horse.

But that was then. This was now. De Momme yearned to reunite with Adele and her new husband from DP camp, Zecharia. Or so he said was his name. My father suspected he was a Polak, who took on the Yiddish name when the chance to marry and move to the U.S. arrived. When asked his occupation, Zecharia told the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee he was a tailor, a good Jewish job. But he knew less about sewing than I. At Hart Schaffner and Marx, he put zippers on worsted suit pants. Sometimes, he joked, he’d sew them on upside down. ‘From what I care if a goy gets his schlong caught in a zipper,’ he’d shrugged.

My mother’s brother and wife were languishing in Israeli ma’abarot.”

“You mean the tent camps for refugees in the early ’50’s in Israel? There were terribly cold, drenching rain winters. People fell ill, rampant typhus a concern.”

“Yes, Uncle Avram and Tante Chaya were there with a two-year old. Avram wrote wailing letters on the thin, translucent bluish aerogrammes of the time. Begged my mother to fly him to Amerikeh. She would pilfer ten, twenty dollars weekly from my father’s paycheck until she had enough to bring Avram to Rochester. My father, working two factory jobs, couldn’t figure out how come they ran short each week unable to buy milk, bread.

We lived within a few blocks from Joseph Avenue, what would now be called a ghetto. The Jewish baker, dairy man, fishmonger, butcher lined each side of Joseph Avenue. A movie theatre where my mother dropped off my six year old sister and I for a Roy Rogers special sat on the east side. I found a straight razor under my velvet seat. We were next door to the barber who had a talent of spiking my scalp with the tips of his scissors. I asked for a Butch or brush cut, you know like Beaver Cleaver’s brother, Wally. But the cutter held up my curls to the mirror and said that “Jew hair doesn’t cut like that.”

We first lived at 21 Cole Street, but my parents moved because the landlord would step on my sister’s and my hands when we played in the yard. Then we had Mr. Katz at 41 Cole, a four-flat with balconies. Mr. Katz always dressed familiarly: white striped “ Polish wife beaters” with narrow shoulder straps, overalls usually with only one strap snapped, the other dangling over his belly and banging where his genitals were buried. Mr. Katz lived on the first floor beneath us. When my sister and I ran, he would bang his ceiling with a broom handle. Mr. Katz must have been a widower, as he had a grandson, but no wife. He would sit on his front balcony eating boiled chicken, boiled potatoes. I asked my father why Mr. Katz let flies land on his chicken, not shoo them off. “It adds protein,” my father explained. When his grandson came once, he wanted to play with me. He asked his grandpa for a nickel for a popsicle at the corner store. And he cadged a second nickel for me. When we were done, the boy asked for another and Katz turned to me, “For you, nothing.”

Once, Mr. Katz asked me, then four, to climb into his window, as he’d locked himself out. He boosted me into his bedroom window. I saw the steel safe with a combination lock from Sargent and Greenleaf, where my dad worked, at the foot of the bed. The smell was old man. I went to the front door and opened the two locks as he instructed me.

The next day, he told my father that I had robbed his safe. I had opened the combination and taken money.

The last year we were there, my father offered to Mr. Katz to replace the cracked linoleum tiles. My father bought the tiles, pulled up the old ones, pasted down the new. Then, he replaced the cracked and missing now dried-up rubber treads leading from our apartment to the ground floor. When my father finished, Mr. Katz said that since we had a new floor, he was raising the rent. We moved, bought our own house six years after arriving to the States.

We all moved from the Ghetto of Rochester; my two cousins’ families moved north nearer the Lake, Charlotte Beach (pronounced in Yinglish Sharlot, not the proper, British-tinged accent of my high school teacher, “Charlotte”). There, mostly goyim lived. Working class. North of the Kodak factory. Avram and Adele were two blocks from each other, separated by an oval park mid boulevard.

My father found a house on the impoverished fringe of a bourgeois neighborhood with Ivy-league street names: Cambridge cutting a diagonal swath, from which branched Harvard and Dartmouth and Cornell and such. University professors who wanted to remain in the City lived there as did Kodak engineers who preferred living among the culturati and to commute to Kodak Park which sat north of the city center, perhaps an hour’s drive.

So, I give you a rumeniscence.

As kids, we visit only two, three times yearly, as my mother had ongoing grievances against her brother and sister, or more likely Tante Chaya and Uncle Zecharia. I am perhaps six. We visit on a Saturday morning when the TV is tuned to cartoons until noon. My two cousins, Big Fishel and Leibele, are lying on the floor watching TV cartoons, while Uncle Zecharia is on the plastic covered, green velour couch. I stand, prepared to join the boys. Big Fishel gets up to change the cartoon channel to another, Daffy Duck. But Zecharia is furious as he wants to finish Road Runner. Zecharia, just topping five feet tall, launches from the couch and in fury starts kicking Fishel who tucks himself to protect the ventrum, his belly. Grabs his knees, bows his head; seems accustomed to such a roly-poly protective stance. Armadillidiidae they’re called scientifically. Zecharia keeps kicking him until Fishel is spinning like a lopsided top around the floor. Terrified I retreat to the kitchen into my father’s protective embrace. My head reaches his monogrammed German belt. Whisper to him. Won’t return.

These were the embers of the Camps. Still burning, ready to burst into flame. But a flame that consumes one’s young.”

“Sofer, you’ve never told me of this. Is this — memories — what’s happening here?”

“Yossi, the (not “mine,” but the) memories come unbidden in Jerusalem. Maybe when I leave this City on a Hill, this image of Augustine’s, my memories will also subside. I find myself rushing through sleep to avoid dreams here, to avoid rumenescences. Such bovine regurgitations result in heart burn. As Bellow said in the title of one novel, More Die of Heartbreak.”

Copyright Szajnberg 2021