Called to Controversy (5 page)

“I never questioned that God chose the Jewish people, as we'd been taught from the Bible,” he said.

At the same time, I never imagined that the rabbis—with their laws upon laws and their need to know almost everything about almost nothing—could really understand what an awesome people we Jews were. Somehow with all of their learning, I never felt they adequately explained what it meant to be Jewish.

Intuitively I knew that if being Jewish was something from God, it should not be so hard to understand. So many rules and procedures, and the not-so-subtle hints that much more study was required all seemed to obscure the issue: What does it mean to be a Jew?

Like his father, Moishe eventually grew cynical toward religion, but also like his father, he did not allow such feelings to compromise his Jewish identity. Ben Rosen was absolutely loyal to the Jewish community. He knew the prayers and made sure his sons knew them, too, because that was part of what it meant to be a Jew. Once he had the means, he contributed generously to Jewish causes, even to the synagogue that he only occasionally attended. Likewise, Moishe's assessment of the religion as inadequate in no way lessened his sense of Jewish identity or his loyalty to the community.

Part of that loyalty meant not trading his religion for another. Moishe had heard how Christians tried to convert Jews to their own religion—the very religion (he supposed) that caused people to hate Jews as Christ killers. He rehearsed over and over for the day when some Christian would try to lure him to “the other side.” He would smile and say, “That's all right for you, if you want to believe that way,” and then he would add in his best don't-mess-with-me voice, “But as for me, I'm a Jew.”

Moishe recalled, “As Jews, we knew that we weren't regarded as being champions by non-Jews. But our attitude was, if they weren't going to like us, then we were going to like ourselves.” He quickly learned to accept that part of his identity as a Jew was to be hated for no particular reason. Yet he always felt accepted and secure in his own community, the Jewish community. The fact that he was pretty much finished with the religion by the time he was thirteen was no reflection on his place in that community. In fact, it made him more like than unlike most Jews he knew, including his father, whose influence was considerable.

*
For whatever reason, he never expected to have a very long life.

*
Bar mitzvah
, literally “son of the commandment,” refers to the boy who undergoes the rite of passage, but it also refers to the ceremony itself. Traditionally, the bar mitzvah recites the Hebrew prayers and reads from the Torah during the weekly worship service.

**
Shul is a Yiddish word for synagogue.

FOUR

I'm always amazed at how much I accepted my father's values on one hand and, on the other, how much I reacted against them.

—MOISHE ROSEN

T
he light of the long summer day was finally fading, but the lanky fourteen-year-old had not caught a single fish. He wasn't disappointed, though; he'd enjoyed the day immensely. He had long since honed habitual daydreaming into a fine art, and fishing was a generous patron of that art.

He'd heard enough radio shows and read enough to fill the big screen of his imagination with all kinds of stories. Sometimes Moishe starred in his own daydreams, but often he reconstructed famous characters. He knew a lot about superheroes and their powers from comic books, which he bought or borrowed whenever possible. If Captain America wasn't strong enough to handle a job Moishe dreamed up for him, well, he simply added in a quarter of Superman's abilities for good measure.

It made little difference to him that no fish were biting. That saved him a chore, after all. His mother's maxim was, “I cook fish; I don't clean them,” and the subsequent warning was, “If you catch anything, it better be cleaned by the time you get it home.” Thinking of fish caught or uncaught reminded Moishe that he was hungry, and he was glad when his father drove up. But before the boy could pack up his gear, his dad had jumped out of the truck and picked up the rod.

Nodding to his son, he asked, “Catch anything?”

“Nah,” Moishe answered.

Ben said, “Let me show you how.”

Moishe was pretty sure his father realized that he already knew how to fish. So he sighed, and silently wondered,
Why don't you just say you want to try for a while
? And he prepared for the inevitable. Sure enough, his dad soon reeled in a fish. Ben continued to fish, speaking slowly, amiably, about things his son already knew. The line jerked, and he pulled another fish off the hook.

Instructions that imparted no new information were bound to irritate the hungry adolescent. It didn't occur to him that while his dad liked to fish, he might also want to spend time with his older son. Ben's way of relating to his boys was to teach them. When he wasn't teaching, he was teasing.

The son watched as his father caught another fish and another. He'd spent a whole afternoon without catching anything and had not felt the least bit inadequate. But now he heaved an audible sigh. “Uh, Dad? I'm pretty hungry. Can we go home?”

His dad shrugged. “Sure. But first I better clean these fish. You know how your mother feels about that.”

Ben Rosen triumphed over the Great Depression years to become a successful businessman and a good provider. He began with buying and selling goods from a truck and eventually he and a partner, Izzy Weiss, opened R & W, a secondhand store. In the mid- to late-1940s, Ben started his first junkyard, Rosen Brothers, with his brother, Dave, his brother in-law Joe, and his nephew Louie (Annie Singer's husband and son). Ben poured every drop of sweat and smarts into his trade, eventually shaping it into a large and lucrative business. In 1956, Ben started Atlas Iron and Metal with his younger son, Don, and a couple of Don's in-laws.

Busy as he was, Ben set aside an hour or so each evening to teach his sons his philosophy of life. Moishe recalled this as “a combination of the Jewish sense of culture and achievement and his own brand of homey diligence.” He said, “Dad periodically made sure we could recite our Hebrew prayers, and he stressed business principles that, had we written them down, would have made a valuable course in any business school. He taught us how to deal with people, how to determine the value of an item, and how to buy and sell.”

Regarding the prayers, Ben never hid the fact that he did not think much of religion in general. Moishe knew that if his father believed in God at all, it was not the God of the Jewish religion. At one point he asked, “Dad, why do we say these prayers if you don't believe God is listening?”

“Sonny Boy,” his father replied, “we say the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag because we are Americans. I don't think the flag can hear us, do you? We say the prayers because we are Jews. If we don't do these things, how else will people know we are Jews?”

And so Moishe learned from his father that the Jewish religion, though not necessarily to be believed in, was to be respected and practiced because it was part of what made people to be Jews.

These lessons were not relationship-building times, per se. “I never really thought of myself as having a relationship with him,” Moishe explained. “At school I was supposed to learn from the teachers and at home I was supposed to learn from my father.”

Ben was extremely devoted to his family, but he hadn't many clues from his own father when it came to drawing out his sons as individuals or providing one-on-one experiences they could enjoy together. Moishe's fondest memories of his dad were times when the entire family was together, around the supper table or out for a drive. He also remembered taking pride in watching his dad excel or receive acknowledgment in various public arenas. Their private father-son moments were not as satisfying—perhaps because those times afforded more possibilities and therefore greater potential for disappointment.

“He never took me to do anything that I wanted to do,” Moishe recalled, not by way of complaint or accusation. “He took me along to do what he wanted to do.” Then, correcting himself, he added, “I take that back. He took me to see
Snow White
when I was five years old. It was a big deal because at the time we were still very poor. . . . He hadn't chosen the movie for his own pleasure. He expected me to enjoy it, since the film was created for children.”

Unfortunately, a pale, shaken little boy emerged from the theater, wide-eyed with horror. As he told the story seven decades later: “When that witch, with her big ugly face that filled the screen leered at poor Snow White, offering her that poisoned apple—it terrified me!”

Moishe may not have had a truckload of happy memories of moments spent with his father, but he certainly learned a great deal from him. He was decisive in pointing out the major influences: “I learned two important things from both my parents. First, I learned that you have to live by principles. It wasn't enough to do what was right; you had to understand why it was right. Second, I learned curiosity.”

Ben worked hard and had a good reputation as a man to be trusted, and he transmitted these values to his sons. But at times, there seemed to be contradictions.

“There was a time when I was nine years old,” Moishe recalled,

and I was with my dad at his little secondhand store. . . . Somebody came in to buy a tool and when they named a price, my father said, “I paid that much for it myself.” I knew that he had paid less than the amount stated, and thought he must have forgotten. So I corrected my father in front of the customer. He didn't say anything at the time, but later when we were alone, he referred back to the situation and said, “In business, you do things like that. There's truth for the family, then there's truth in business. And in business, sometimes you say things that aren't true.”

He could see that I was puzzled, so he patiently put it in terms I could understand. “It's like a game—each side says something to try to win. If you, the seller, get your price, you've won. And if they buy it for their price, they've won.”

To Ben, this was a common outlook that businesspeople understood and accepted.

Moishe accepted the explanation for a while, but within a few years, he concluded that employing such a tactic while making a sale was “not nearly as necessary as my father had indicated.” Even before Moishe came to regard truth as something to be told because of its intrinsic value, he had already rejected the notion that sacrificing a small piece of it was a reasonable requirement for striking a good deal.

Despite the liberties he sometimes took in the interest of business, Ben paid what he owed, and he loved and provided for his family in every way that he knew how. He also insisted that both sons learn how to work, and so, at nine years of age, in addition to chores at home, Moishe had occasional chores in the family business. As he grew older, those chores expanded to a part-time job on the weekend. His pay was three dollars for a day's work, most of which he was expected to contribute to help with household expenses. At twelve, he was taking apart automobile motors at the junkyard, and by the time he was fourteen, he was swinging a sledgehammer to break cast iron. Most employees used twelve-pound sledgehammers, but Ben had Moishe using an eighteen-or twenty-pound sledgehammer to show that he was working harder than they did.

Moishe said, “It didn't occur to me that I had any choice until one day when I complained to my father about having to use a bigger sledgehammer than the grown men. His answer was, ‘Well, if you want to get a job elsewhere, do it.'”

Ben had every reason to assume that both sons would eventually take over the business as partners. But it bothered Moishe that when he felt things should be done differently, he had no authority to make any changes. Instead, he decided that if he ever had a business to run, he would do things a certain way. So without realizing it, the “if ever” began to take him on a different path.

Moishe never could feel the way his father wanted him to feel about the family business. Added to the issues mentioned above was the simple fact that Moishe disliked being dirty.

“There was this mysterious difference between my father and me,” he recalled. “My father would take a bath and he seemed to get perfectly clean, with nothing but hot water, lava soap and a scrub brush. But no matter how much I washed and no matter how hard I scrubbed, it seemed like I could never get the grease from the junkyard off my hands, and I could never get the dirt out from under my fingernails.”