Just One Catch (5 page)

Its identity had always been mired in ambiguity and instability. For instance, it was not really an island. Once a series of small sand spits, constantly reconfigured by the tides, it eventually coalesced and joined the rest of Brooklyn when a creek that separated it from the larger landmass filled in. The Dutch claimed it but seemed to want little to do with it (they gave it the name it goes by now, Conyne, meaning “rabbit”—the creatures were plentiful there). In the early nineteenth century, businessmen began to exploit the beach area for use as a summer resort; the seduce and entertain mentality that would govern subsequent development, at least for the next 140 years or so, locked in. Eventually, sea bathing, horse racing, and the delicacies of clams lured bigger and bigger crowds (among them, the young poet Walt Whitman, who came for the clams, and who said he loved to “race up and down the hard sand and declaim Homer or Shakespeare to the surf and seagulls”).

As early as 1876, George Tilyou, then fourteen years old, embodied Coney Island hucksterism, and was convinced that people were gullible enough to pay good money for worthless items as long as these items displayed price tags touting their value. People proved him right. He sold cigar boxes of “authentic beach sand” to tourists, as well as medicine bottles of “authentic salt water” for a quarter apiece. He earned $13.45 his first day out. Twenty-two years later, with that same boldness, he would lease a plot of land at Coney's Bowery and West Eighth Street, put up a sign that said, falsely,
ON THIS SITE WILL BE ERECTED THE WORLD'S LARGEST FERRIS WHEEL
, and open an amusement park. The wheel measured 100 feet in diameter, and his pretty sister Kathryn sat in the ticket booth. She wore their mother's diamond necklace and was surrounded by two large men, whom Tilyou had hired to pose as bodyguards, protecting the necklace. This effective bit of showmanship was the beginning of Steeplechase Park.

By the time Joseph Heller was born, the area's self-image had spun up and down like a bumptious Ferris wheel car. It is a “glorified city of flame,” wrote the esteemed critic James Gibbons Huneker, where “every angle reveals some new horror.” On the other hand, the painter Reginald Marsh lovingly described the beach crowds as “moving like [the] compositions of Michelangelo and Rubens.”

Once, after a visit to Dreamland, Sigmund Freud reportedly remarked, “The only thing about America that interests me is Coney Island.” If so, it's not hard to see why: In the space of a few feet, one could fly to the moon, witness cities burn or see the destruction of Pompeii, watch automated blowholes spread women's skirts, study premature human babies displayed in an incubator, and laugh at a pin-headed man or “the” Wild Man from Borneo. People lined up for rides that would slam them against walls or turn them upside down (“Centrifugal force never fails,” boasted a boardwalk carney). Hero-pilot Charles Lindbergh remarked that a Coney Island roller coaster was “scarier than flying.” Most of the rides “succeeded because they combined socially acceptable thrills with undertones of sexual intimacy,” a Landmarks Preservation Commission report once said. And if, full of surging life, you felt like completing the journey, you could be buried alive in a coffin-shaped room with a glass ceiling, or you could descend into the Inferno to see demons drag away the wicked (Hell, it turned out, was adorned by statuary made by French sculptor Maurice Goudard—Americans always
suspected
the French had something to do with eternal torment).

Time seemed to have no meaning in Coney Island, or only as much meaning as delirium might have. Year after year, the place died and was reborn. It was resplendent; it was doomed. It was Now; it was Then. And something of the otherworldly, if not the Divine, appeared to govern its cycles. Again and again, sections of the city were destroyed by fire, most recently, in the years before Heller was born, in 1907, when the Cave of the Winds suddenly ignited, and in 1911.

Fires, mostly pleasant ones, were among Heller's earliest memories: the “barnfires” fueled by broken fruit crates, over which his family ate charred marshmallows and smoky, sandy “mickeys”—roasted potatoes—on the shore, along with hundreds of other summertime revelers; and fireworks, every Tuesday night during summer, shot from a boat anchored at the Steeplechase pier. “It
brent
a fire in street,” his mother, Lena, warned him gutturally whenever he ran barefoot from the apartment onto scalding pavement. Lena could barely speak English. Her uneasiness with the language often embarrassed the family. Early on, her insistence on speaking Yiddish and sometimes a little Russian struck young Joey as a refusal—of anything, everything—and the bitter humor of the Yiddish was unmistakable even to a child: If not the sentiments, he understood the weary, mocking tone. It was a language of longing and displacement, qualities made even more palpable by his mother's stubborn use of it, even though it clearly isolated her from her greater surroundings. “I was not aware of coldness
or
warmth [from my mother],” Heller told an interviewer years later. Just intransigence and nay-saying—as well as noisy silence, for though she talked often, she generally did not attempt to communicate, at least not directly.

Isaac Daniel Heller, Joey's father, emigrated from Russia to New York in 1913. His four-year-old boy, Hillel Elias, known as Lee in America, arrived with his mother shortly before or after Isaac. Briefly, the family lived in Manhattan, then in Spring Valley, New York. After that, they moved to Coney Island. As an adult, Joseph admitted his father's past had always been murky to him. “I … never grappled much with the idea of trying to find out more about him,” he wrote in
Now and Then
. He understood only that his father had come to America “from somewhere in western Russia.” He wrote, “I prefer not to [know more].” [K]nowing more would make no difference.… I know him by his absence.” That the figurative lack of a father would soon enough become literal only added to the older man's mystery.

Ambiguity clouds the family name. The German word
heller
means “lighter” or “brighter.” Ashkenazi Jews were said to apply the word to someone with a light complexion. Some historians trace the name to the sixteenth century and the city of Halle, Germany, where it was linked to a coin, the
Heller,
in use there; others say a rabbi and scholar named Yom-Tov Lipmann is the source of the family's lineage. At one point, he lived in Halle, and a bastardized form of the city's name came to be associated with him. From the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, thousands of families called Heller migrated east from Austria and Germany. Records indicate that many Hellers arriving in the United States at around the time Isaac did came from the old Lithuanian frontier, once part of Poland, now belonging to the Ukraine. A sheet from the fourteenth census of the United States, dated January 8, 1920, lists Isaac Heller's place of origin as Russia and his native language as Yiddish. No further details. However, a ship manifest dated September 29, 1913, indicates that Elias Heller, age four, traveled on the
Lapland
, a nearly nineteen-ton steamship sailing from Antwerp. Elias came from Tschschonovitz, Russia (his last residence). He was born in Gulanowie, Russia. These towns are difficult to pinpoint: Linguistic, cultural, and political barriers led to many mistakes and alternate spellings on ship manifests and immigration records; names and national borders were exceptionally fluid in that part of the world. The likely possibilities suggest Elias was born west of Moscow, within a couple hundred miles of the city, and that just before coming to the United States, the Hellers were living in the Lithuanian/Polish/Russian frontier. If so, they came from an area with a centuries-long Jewish history, and with many Hasidic sects. At the beginning of the twentieth century, oppression from the Russian czar, as well as violence perpetrated by Cossack soldiers and Polish gangs, forced many Jewish families to leave. In the United States, Isaac declared himself a Jewish agnostic, in flight from Czar Nicholas II, and a strong supporter of socialism.

The 1920 census lists him as a “chandler” (though his primary occupation was driving a delivery truck for Messinger's Bakery), and it gave his age as thirty-five.

In 1913, the year he arrived in Coney Island, socialism was a topic du jour in New York's Jewish communities (and a subject of fear in America's mainstream press; in September of that year, the
New York Times
charged Teddy Roosevelt with “redistributing [America's] wealth,” under the headline
ROOSEVELT'S
SUPER
-
SOCIALISM
). Abraham Cahan's popular newspaper, the
Jewish Daily Forward,
undoubtedly a staple in the Heller household, as it was in every Jewish neighborhood, spread the socialist gospel, as well as labor unionism, in straightforward Yiddish accessible to working-class readers (“Not to take [the] paper was to confess you were [a] barbarian,” Irving Howe once wrote).

That same year in Coney Island, a prime example of American capitalism came to pass. Nathan Handwerker, a dishwasher at Charles Feltman's hot dog stand, decided to undercut his boss by selling the morsel Feltman claimed to have invented—the charcoal-cooked frankfurter—for five cents instead of the usual ten. Initially, the plan backfired. The public, long accustomed to rumors that hot dogs were made of horse meat or some other unsavory material, distrusted the inexpensive dog. To counter these fears, and lure more eaters, Handwerker hired transients from the beach to crowd the tables in front of his stand. The men's disheveled appearance did not encourage anyone to approach. According to some stories, Handwerker then dressed the transients in rented lab coats; other accounts say he offered free hot dogs to interns from Coney Island Hospital. In any case, he advertised his stand as a place “where the doctors eat”—what could be safer than that? From then on, Nathan's hot dogs became a famous Coney Island product (and a favorite food of Joseph Heller, in childhood and beyond).

Coney was a confusing place for an immigrant to land, its basic nature as hard to grasp as one's image in a house of tilted mirrors. The clearest picture we have of the perplexities facing the generation that shaped Joseph Heller is found in the
Jewish Daily Forward
's “Bintel Brief” (literally, a “Bundle of Letters”), an advice column for immigrants befuddled by modern America. “People often need the opportunity to pour out their heavy-laden hearts. Among our immigrant masses this need was very marked,” Abraham Cahan wrote in his memoirs. Problems between parents and children (kids quickly becoming accustomed to New World freedoms and abandoning old values), ambivalence about integration, ethnic tensions (“I am a girl from Galicia and in the shop where I work I sit near a Russian Jew.… [Once] he stated that all Galicians were no good.… Why should one worker resent another?”), and fears and temptations about intermarriage filled the daily column. Many letters addressed domestic tensions caused by new opportunities discovered in the United States.

More striking than the confusions battering these uprooted souls was the series of mixed signals offered by the column's wise men (sometimes Cahan himself, but more often S. Kornbluth, one of the paper's editors). For example, some replies encouraged intermarriage as a way of becoming more Americanized; on different occasions, the editors suggested intermarriage was a curse, certain to cause isolation.

The immigrant self was perpetually unsettled. As “The Bintel Brief” made clear, many people preferred to air their emotional struggles anonymously, not only because the pain was so great but also because the very nature of their problems, not to say the solutions, were hard to identify, and always shifting. The strongest impression one gets from these columns is that the wave of immigrants that included Joseph Heller's father led double lives. They were never fully comfortable in their adopted world, but they were unable to return to their pasts (you will be “strangers to [your] own neighbors” in your old homelands, the editors warned). Of necessity, men and women of this generation were largely reserved, for their old languages lacked the vocabularies to define the conundrums they encountered.

*   *   *

IT WAS A WORLD
of silence, but not a silent world. On summer mornings, the cries of Italian fruit peddlers drifted up from the streets through the open windows of the Hellers' four-room apartment: “If you got money, come down and buy. If you got no money, stay home and cry.” Gull calls and the distant screams of roller-coaster riders droned just beneath soaring Puccini arias from the Kent radio in the living room, which Heller's mother kept on all day while she hunched above her Singer sewing machine, its whirring and tapping an accompaniment to the music. Though the 1920 census indicates she was unemployed, she worked as a seamstress, making and mending clothes for many of her neighbors, as well as converting old bedsheets into curtains. At night, she withdrew into her bedroom to read Tolstoy in Yiddish, especially
Anna Karenina
over and over. She had always loved to read. In Russia, members of her family worked as bookbinders (many years later, her brother Sam would land a job repairing books for the Brandeis University library).

The Hellers occupied an upper floor in a small yellow-brick building on West Thirty-first Street, between Mermaid and Surf avenues. Lee was fourteen now. A daughter, Sylvia, had been born in 1914. Everyone in the family called the youngest boy Joey. They shared the building with a family named Winkler, and little Joey shared a baby carriage with the Winkler infant, Marvin. “He used to wet my carriage, and he was ten months older,” Marvin told Barbara Gelb for a
New York Times Magazine
profile of Heller in 1979. When Heller was older, his mother swore to him that whenever he'd nursed, she'd have to snatch him away from her breast, for he would never stop. Among the first smells he recalled were the duskiness of walnuts, the sweet softness of old apples, saved from going to waste by his mother, who would fold them into noodle puddings, and the floury flatness of day-old cakes, rescued from the bakery by his father. His father sat at the kitchen table at night, eating slice after slice of dry, hard cake.