B000FC0RL0 EBOK (5 page)

“Where did you get the money?”

“Uncle Charlie gave it to me.”

“What? Come with me,” she said. “Take the gum and the cards.” We went back to the candy store.

She confronted the owner. “How could you sell a kid twenty-five pieces of gum?” She turned to me. “Give him the cards.”

I quietly took out the cards and handed them back to the store owner.

“What do you want from me?” the man asked.

“I want the quarter back.”

The man looked at my mother, her eyes afire. He sheepishly gave back the quarter.

“Don’t ever do it again,” she said to him.

Uncle Charlie continued to slip me money from time to time, and I would buy what I wanted. And hide it.

Although the country was in the depths of the Depression my aunts, uncles, and older cousins still managed to have family meetings once a month. Each month the gatherings of the Devorah Faiga Jake Club—named for those aunts and uncles—were held in a different Citron household.

There was food, card playing, and discussion. In the middle of an evening of schmoozing and camaraderie, the bedroom door opened and a man dressed in a woman’s fur coat, a lady’s hat on his head and a rose in his mouth, burst into the living room singing the flower song from Bizet’s
Carmen
.

He started to dance the flamenco, whirling around the room, grabbing my cousin Beady, who seemed to be a willing partner. Of course the shock of seeing my father in drag brought on a state of hilarity. No one could stop laughing.
Where did this come from?
I wondered.

Everyone laughed but my mother. This was a side of him we had never seen. He loved to dress up and shock the hell out of everybody, and he did.

I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t realize that my father’s dancing was his way of denying there was a Depression. He wasn’t going to let being jobless stop him from enjoying life. My mother could not understand this, and neither could I. I was ashamed at watching him make a fool of himself.

My father died at 102. Whenever I would ask what kept him going, he’d answer, “I never worry.”

The get-togethers of the Devorah Faiga Jake Club never grew tiresome. They were full of warmth, good food, spontaneous singing, card-playing, and coffee and cake prepared by the many cooks and bakers who swarmed all over the kitchen. In the basement of my Uncle Max’s house on Farragut Road in Canarsie, children would play games. My mother and my older cousins would always go off in some corner. Their conversations became intimate little gatherings that, as with Tessie and my mother, kids were not meant to overhear.

When the entertainment part of the evening began, there was an air of anticipation. My cousin Joe Lieberman, looking like an elegant compere, would introduce the show. His introductions were serious, as if he were presenting the greatest talents in the world. Chairs would quickly align themselves on either side of the room, creating an informal nightclub.

“Tonight we’re going to hear from some members of the family,” Joe said one night, as if at heart we were all artists whose talents had been hiding underground till this moment. “Who’s going to be first?” he asked.

Doreen, who was five years old, blonde, blue-eyed, and terrified, suddenly bolted out of a corner into center stage, singing fervently, “Ay, ay, ay, they call her Minnie from Trinidad.” Her rhythm was twice as fast as the written score. Her body was shaking and gyrating like a wound-up Judy Garland. “Ay, ay, ay, she wasn’t good but she wasn’t bad.” After sailing through the chorus in record time, Doreen immediately sat down on a chair and joined the audience. She had broken the ice.

Uncle Abe had promised he would do a number, Joe announced as he scanned the room. An operatic piece, no doubt. Uncle Abe, however, was nowhere in sight.

“Where’s Uncle Abe?” someone asked.

“He’s in the bathroom warming up,” somebody else said.

“Well,” Joe said. “We heard from one member of the Stiller family. Now let’s hear from Jerry.”

Less shy than Doreen, three years older, and full of poise, I moved to the center of the room.

“What are you going to sing?” Joe asked.

“‘Wagon Wheels,’” I said proudly. I began singing: “Wagon wheels, wagon wheels, keep on rollin’ along. Wagon wheels, roll along, sing your song, carry me over the hill. Go long, mule, the steamer’s at the landing, waitin’ for to carry me home. Go long, mule, the bosses is a-waitin’, waitin’ for to carry me home.”

The fact that I was singing a Negro spiritual to my family never fazed me or them. It was the only song I knew, and I sang it with feeling. When it was over and the cheering subsided, my cousin Leo—the one who had taken me on his bike—sang “Once I Built a Railroad.” Joe himself followed by singing in Yiddish “Beltz, Mein Shteitle Beltz,” Beltz being a small town in Poland.

A quiet settled over the room. “Where’s Uncle Abe?” someone asked again.

“He has a cold,” someone said.

“Well, he’ll sing next time,” Joe said. “Let’s all eat.”

We feasted on platters of salmon salad, tuna fish, egg salad, seeded rye bread, fresh-whipped butter, tomatoes, lettuce, and onion, all prepared by Abe, Hymie, and Max, restaurateurs who loved food and what it could do for the soul.

Abe owned the Madison, the biggest and classiest delicatessen on the Upper East Side. He and my Aunt Anne were the family aristocrats and lived on Park Avenue, but they were as generous as they were well off. Being good to the family seemed as important to them as being good in business. You always knew you could drop in at the restaurant without an invite.

Uncle Abe was small and feisty, quick to smile, and could speak positively on any subject. Even when the country was in the throes of the Depression,
there was never a hint of negativity in his thinking. Though he was successful in business, the story in the family was that his true ambition was to be an opera star.

When I first told Uncle Abe that I wanted to be an actor, he never blinked. He looked at me with the unshakable belief that I would someday make it. “At least you’ll never starve,” he said. “If you’re hungry, you can always come into the restaurant.” It was a vote of confidence.

Some years later, during World War Two, Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia visited Uncle Abe’s restaurant. It was during the days of rationing and the Office of Price Administration. The senator ordered a turkey sandwich. The check came to a dollar. The senator, feeling he’d been taken, reported it to the OPA. The story made page 3 of the
Daily News,
under the headline “Senator Byrd Gets the Bird.” The flap devastated my uncle. He was characterized by some customers as a war profiteer, and was bombarded by hate mail. The barrage never ended. He finally sold the restaurant.

We were now living in East New York, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that was like a Jewish Brigadoon. It was warm and
gemütlich
. I was nine years old. What sticks in my memory was that our apartment doors were always open. Kids in the building were always running in and out of each other’s apartments.

On Blake Avenue you could find appetizing stores, fish and poultry markets. On Sutter and Pitkin Avenues were movie palaces like Loew’s Premier and Loew’s Pitkin. On Hopkinson Avenue across the subway tracks in Brownsville were the Stone and the Stadium, where on weekdays anyone could get into a double feature two for a nickel.

The pushcarts on Blake Avenue were not unlike shtetl scenes Isaac Singer described in Frampol. They were a reminder that I was Jewish. Peddlers were up each morning screaming their wares half in Yiddish, half in English. They’d argue over a customer.

“I had her first,” one would say.

“Gey in Dreyet.”
(“Go to hell.”)

They’d shout, and grab people by their sleeves as they went by.

“Hey lady, I got something for you.” A peddler was pulling my mother by the arm. It made me very uncomfortable.

“Leave me alone,” she said, removing his hand. It was usually the beginning of bargaining.

“You’re a nice-looking woman.” The guy was suddenly turning romantic. My mother knew it was a come-on to making a sale, but she loved it. “What are you so mad about, lady?” I could see there was an immediate attraction. Being poor made her sharp, and she was naturally very attractive. She turned men on.

“
A sheine veible
. You’re a good looking wifey.” Even if she didn’t buy, the peddlers enjoyed the banter.

We loved East New York. But incredibly, my mother and Tanta Chaila, Leo’s mom, won $2,500 in the Irish Sweepstakes. They split the money, and my father used our half of the winnings to buy the job that forced us to move again.

So in 1939, the year Hitler invaded Poland, we moved to Goerck Street on the Lower East Side. As a five-year-old, I had not been very nice to my younger brother, Arnie—in fact, I had once pushed him down a flight of stairs and on another occasion had done nothing while he almost drowned in Prospect Park lake. But now, I felt I was my brother’s keeper. So at age twelve I became Arnie’s protector from kids who might take advantage of him.

Ralphie Stolzman was a tall, angular boy about a year older than me, and was a terrific stickball hitter. He was quiet and wore glasses. He looked like a misplaced Eton student. His grace reminded me of Joe DiMaggio as he stepped up to the plate to take his incredible whacks.

The first fistfight of my life was with Ralphie in the schoolyard next to the Rubel Ice plant on Mangin Street. I was a full six inches shorter than Ralphie, and full of conviction that I could kill the guy. This was to be my baptism into manhood on the Lower East Side.

The argument that started the fight had to do with a ring belonging to my brother that Ralphie had absconded with. Ralphie denied stealing the ring. I called him a liar. In front of friends I goaded Ralphie into the fight by calling him “four eyes,” then accusing him of being yellow. He seemed to take the provocations calmly, as if giving me a chance to take them back even while saying them.

“You’re yellow, Ralph, you know that, don’t ya?”

Ralphie kept listening with a sense of disbelief.

“You took my brother’s ring,” I said.

“No, I didn’t,” he finally replied.

“Yes, you did. You stole it.”

“So where do you want to fight?” he asked. “In the schoolyard?”

I said okay. And I could feel fear creep up my shoulders into my neck and into my head. I knew he hated me.

“When?” he asked.

“How about Friday, after school.”

“I’ll be there,” Ralphie said.

It was about five days before showdown, and the news really got around. Excitement rippled through the whole neighborhood. I heard rumors that Ralphie had obtained a second, an older fat boy I knew from school, a loudmouth know-it-all.

The fat boy was spreading it around that Ralphie was out to kill me. Fat boy confronted me two days before the fight to alert me that I was in a lot of trouble. I asked him what he meant.

“Ralphie’s in training.”

“What does that mean?” I said.

“He’s doing roadwork.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He wants to teach you a lesson. How did you get into this, Jerry?”

“He stole my brother’s ring.”

“Your brother gave it to him. Do you really want this?”

Ralphie’s trying to get out of it,
I thought to myself.
He’s trying to back out; he really is yellow.

“Tell him I’m waiting for him,” I said.

My words seemed to fill me with courage and anticipation of what was to be the great triumph of my twelve and a half years on the planet. I was going to make it on the Lower East Side.

The next day I got a report that Ralphie was dipping his hands in cement to toughen them, and that the fat boy had gone to Stillman’s Gym to bone up on some tricks of the trade.

Friday arrived at the schoolyard, and so did I. A thin spray of water was spritzing from the ice-making machinery atop the Rubel plant, and the last rays of the sun through the mist gave everything an eerie reddish tint. The concrete ground was the color of rust.

I could see a few curious faces hovering around. There were a couple of others peering from behind a wire fence. They seemed skeptical that anything violent was going to take place. Ralphie was nowhere in sight. My dream of this being another Dempsey-Willard fight went up in smoke.

Suddenly Ralphie arrived with the fat boy. Ralphie seemed very concentrated.
He hardly noticed me. Methodically he removed his glasses and handed them to the fat boy. He looked kind of innocent without them, and also a little blind. Fat boy whispered something into Ralphie’s ear. Ralphie nodded. I suddenly felt all alone. Now people started coming in from behind the fence. Someone in the yard shouted, “You need a referee.”

Fat boy said, “I’ll be the referee.”

I said okay.

“Shall we have rounds?” someone asked.

“Sure,” I said.

No mention was made of how many rounds, and how long. I stared up at Ralphie, who now seemed even taller than the six inches he already had on me. I figured if I crouched he’d never lay a hand on me. I tried looking at him. He showed no emotion. He seemed a little hurt. Maybe he was right, I thought; maybe my brother did give him the ring. It didn’t matter. I wanted this fight. I had provoked it because I wanted somebody to beat up, someone I thought I could lick and prove myself a man on the tough Lower East Side. Ralphie looked so easy. At that moment I knew that fear had made me act like a bully so I would not appear a coward.

Somebody said, “Bong.” The fight started.

Ralphie just stood there. He looked strong, tough, unafraid. I was scared. I charged into him, trying to convince myself I could fight. Ralphie stood his ground. I tried to get under his long arms and land a blow to his head, which I thought would make him quit. I missed.

He stood and measured me as I prepared for another onslaught. His right hand hit me in the face, and I could feel his knuckles against my skin. It hurt. I looked at his hands. They were chalk white. They
had
been dipped in cement. He hit me a shot above the left eye. I was bleeding. I tried hitting him in the stomach. I couldn’t touch him. He was moving around me. I lunged again. Now he was hitting me at will, like an
angry
Joe DiMaggio. The only thing he didn’t have was a bat.