Mitla Pass (47 page)

I found out later that Comrade Dworkin was a spy for the Central Committee and Nathan had gotten into a lot of trouble. Nathan was called to New York on charges made by Comrade Dworkin, for various crimes against the Party. The worst of these was getting married without permission and getting married by a rabbi in a religious ceremony.

Normally, he would have been thrown out of the Party, but they gave him a year’s probation, because Momma still had some value as a member of the Ginzburg Brothers Twelve.

I was told to call Nathan Zadok “Daddy,” even though he wasn’t my real father. My real father was named Joseph Kramer and Momma told me he had been killed in the war.

1924

I
HAD BEEN
promised a baby brother or sister for my sixth birthday. I hoped it would be a brother. On my birthday, I looked everywhere, even in the scary cellar, which was filled with rats and where Zayde made Concord grape wine. I couldn’t find my baby brother anywhere. When Momma and Bubba discovered me, I was shriveled up in a corner, crying.

“So, what’s the matter with my Molly darling?” Bubba asked.

“I was promised a baby brother,” I wept.

“Don’t cry, Molly,” Momma said. “The stork got very busy and he’s running a few days late. Believe me, you’ll get your present.” I did believe her because, in those days, kids my age didn’t know how babies were born. I thought it had something to do with the word “pregnant” and Momma’s belly, because a few weeks later my brother was born and Momma’s belly was gone.

I was allowed to hold him, and from the moment I saw him, I loved him because he was the only thing in the world that really belonged to me.

Bubba took him from me, held him up, and said, “This child is a genius.”

I
N THE FIRST
seven years Nathan was married to my momma, we moved to seven different cities. The first four were Party assignments and the other moves came when Momma got restless, approximately every ten months.

We always lived on the third or fourth floor and had to walk up, because in the few places that had elevators, they were always out of order. I also remember packing suitcases and going to catch a train. As soon as Gideon saw the suitcases come out of the closet, he would scream. He told me later he had dreams all his life of running for the train.

The neighborhoods in all the cities looked pretty much alike, East Coast dinge, with row houses that were derelict on the day they were finished. The worst building was inevitably the one that Nathan leased for the Jewish Workers Federation. It held a few offices, and a couple of the rooms were used as Yiddish classrooms. The big meeting hall could be converted into a Yiddish theater. This was where the Freiheit Choral Society rehearsed and performed. Their emphasis now was songs about the South, usually about a lynching.

Nathan came to a new city with a nice letter from the federation, stating he was a local editor for the
Freiheit
and his salary was forty dollars a week. Actually, he was paid twenty dollars, but could buy repossessed furniture on the installment plan. Later it would be repossessed from us.

Gideon and I almost always slept together on a Murphy bed in the living room, except for those nights the cell held a secret meeting, usually to discuss a plan to infiltrate and seize the leadership of a union, or break up a public meeting of the rival Socialists.

We were dressed in hand-me-downs. The relatives were generous, but the clothes were either too big or too small. In some cities a Party member would be the butcher, grocer, or baker. As their contribution to the movement, Nathan was never sent a bill.

In other cities, our credit at the grocer and butcher was soon canceled. Momma would give Gideon and me a note and we would stare at the grocer like we were real hungry.

When things were really desperate, Momma would go to the Italian, or German, or Chinese neighborhood and plant a banana peel near the doorstep of a shop and then do a monumental pratfall, screaming as she went to the pavement, “My God, I hope I don’t have a miscarriage!” At that instant a lawyer happened by and it cost the grocer at least ten dollars to drop a lawsuit. Momma and the lawyer split it, five dollars apiece.

Once Gideon had a real bad toothache. Momma didn’t have any money and there was no Communist dentist in Akron. She told me to wait for Gideon and stay with him in the reception room until she came to pick us up. Six hours went by and Momma didn’t come back. Finally the dentist caught on and sent us home with a note pinned to Gideon, threatening to turn us kids over to the juvenile authorities.

Nathan would come to a city that had, like, six hundred Jewish Workers Federation members and half of them would be secret Communists. He would recruit and sell new subscriptions to the
Freiheit.
But as fast as he could recruit them, other older members were always brought up on some kind of charges and expelled. When we would leave about a year later, there were still six hundred members.

One small benefit of being a
Freiheit
manager was that Nathan got free press passes to the symphony, opera, concerts, and sporting events. He always gave the sports passes to Italian comrades on his premise that they were hoodlum games. He never went to the concerts, except if there was a Russian artist. He was afraid the Jewish artists might not be Party-approved. Momma took Gideon and me to everything, even when he was in diapers. I remember walking up as many steps as there were to our apartment to reach the second balcony and the fright of looking down the steep pitch to the stage, but the music and acting were wonderful and my brother and I became enthralled by them. Momma was always a lead singer in the Freiheit Choral Society and was certain she would have made the Metropolitan Opera chorus if she hadn’t given her life to the movement.

By the time Gideon was in second grade, he could sing the tunes of all the arias in ten operas and he had also memorized all the Beethoven symphonies and would spend hours before Uncle Lazar’s or Uncle Dominick’s windup Victrola, pretending he was leading the symphony orchestras.

Momma also believed Gideon was a genius in music, and she sent him to Bert Weinstein for piano lessons. Bert was blind but a gifted musician. Lessons didn’t come for nothing. They cost twenty-five cents, and Gideon had to walk thirty blocks to Bert’s apartment and thirty blocks back home. Bert needed the money, but he finally had to tell Mother that her son’s genius lay in another field.

“Well, just how badly does he play?” Mother asked angrily.

“When that boy sits down and plays ‘Für Elise,’ I wish it was my ears that had gone instead of my eyes.”

But that didn’t keep Gideon from loving music all his life and he was really super singing duets with Uncle Dom.

Old man Abruzzi heard them once and remarked, “That boy’s voice is going to kill somebody—we’d better start him on a fishing boat.”

I read aloud very well, because I aspired to be a great actress, and every night I read to Gideon. Books like
Jews Without Money
by Michael Gold, or we would act out all the parts of Clifford Odets’s
Awake and Sing!
and
Waiting for Lefty.
When he learned to read, Gideon couldn’t get enough, and that’s when we began thinking, maybe he will become a writer.

As I said, I was going to be an actress, and usually the Jewish Workers Federation had a Yiddish acting group in every city. I got so good that Maurice Schwartz, the great Yiddish Shakespearean actor, came to see me perform to possibly recommend me for a scholarship to study in Brooklyn.

It turned out to be a disaster. The play was a sort of Yiddish Communist children’s version of the American Revolution. In the last act, George Washington gives his farewell speech to his troops and tells them they must always be on guard against colonialism, imperialism, deviationism, and cosmopolitanism. Then George Washington tells everyone to free their slaves. It was a stirring moment.

The only trouble with my acting was that I got stage fright sometimes. After the farewell speech, there was a finale in which I rode a wooden horse, rigged up to gallop on a treadmill. I was Paul Revere, and as the horse “galloped” I cried in Yiddish, “The fascist redcoats are coming!” Gideon was a drummer boy and also on the treadmill, running with all his might to stay even.

Well, the stage manager never did get the treadmill to work right. On the night that Maurice Schwartz was sitting in the first row, the electrical circuit got overloaded and blew all the fuses. The treadmill stopped abruptly, but Gideon and I kept on going and shot off the stage like cannonballs. We landed on Mr. Schwartz and all of us went to the floor.

My career was over before it began.

But every day and every week, Gideon kept opening secret doors through reading, and I knew he would be a real writer someday, because he was always thinking about stories.

A
MONG THE FIRST WORDS
Gideon remembered must have been Momma saying, “This is not a well child.” Momma kept six huge scrapbooks filled with articles on symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of everything from the common cold to rare tropical skin diseases.

Because Momma was often out of the house on some kind of Party business, I was left to take Gideon to the clinics. We spent long, morbid hours in the cavernous, peeling waiting rooms of the university hospitals and charity clinics. Gideon would be squeezed in between an old man in a wheelchair and a kid with braces, while I filled out the endless forms required for proof of inability to pay. He didn’t mind, though, because the long hours gave him a chance to read more and more novels.

Sometimes I went with him and Momma, like during the summer. I remember her litanies to those snotty-nosed interns who were barely shaving. “I held this child in my arms the entire night, pleading with him to keep breathing. All he has to do is look at a cottonwood tree and he’s gasping for air. He went on a hayride against my wishes and came back with a rash, from head to foot, the color of a bowl of strawberries. His Uncle Hyman, may his soul rest in peace, had the most horrible case of hives Johns Hopkins had ever seen.”

Momma located a clinic of specialists in asthma, hay fever, and sinus problems in Richmond, Virginia, and was convinced Gideon should be examined there. She
shnorred
Uncle Lazar for enough money to keep Gideon in Richmond for two weeks of tests. His back was covered with little quarter-inch scratches, an inch apart, into which they rubbed powdered ragweed, or wheat, or a variety of dusts. If the scratch became inflamed, another allergy had been unearthed.

Still more tests were applied to his arms and legs by means of injections under the skin of other allergic materials. If an injection blew up and discolored, another culprit had been found. He had dozens of scratches on his little back. It made me cry to see it.

My brother was allergic to milk, wheat, red meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, butter, most cereals, most fruits, most vegetables, ice cream, chocolate, most kinds of dust found in most of the air, flowers, all weeds, reeds, most trees, cats, dogs, newspapers, all cooking oils, and peanuts.

He could safely eat turnips, stewed rhubarb, and certain varieties of onions. Every week he got allergy shots and silver protein Argyrol packs way up his nose, to clean out his sinuses. He spent a lot of school days in bed.

You would think, with his ability to read and stuff, he would be a good student, but he wasn’t. The main reason was that neither Gideon nor I completed a full term in one school, without changing neighborhoods or cities, until we moved to Norfolk, Virginia.

Most Sundays found Gideon and me in the lecture hall of the local Jewish Workers Federation, or a hall in which Communists were allowed to speak. We listened to a rotating show of out-of-town lecturers and sometimes the big guns of the Party like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder and the beloved Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor, who was always just back from the Soviet Union with another glowing report.

Sundays for us were torture, sitting on hard-back folding chairs and trying to understand Marx and Lenin’s manifestos.

We would alleviate the hours by staring at the cracks in the ceiling, or a repetitious design on the wallpaper. Gideon learned to sleep with his eyes open, an accomplishment I was never able to master. This is not to say that being a Young Pioneer was all drudgery. Sometimes the entire family would travel to New York for a giant rally in Madison Square Garden. When twenty thousand voices sang “The Internationale,” it was a very stirring moment. The comrades did everything together: lectures, picnics, social events, picket line duty. The best was May Day, when the workers of the world marched in unity.

Being in the movement, we had to be careful of which comrades were our close friends, because after we’d known them well for a year or two, some would simply be called up on charges and expelled. We couldn’t acknowledge members who had been thrown out, even if we passed them on the street. So we were both afraid of making close friends.

The same Comrade Dworkin who had managed the Ginzburg Brothers Twelve victory tour had become a much feared member of the Central Committee. But Dworkin came under suspicion when the Arab riots broke out in 1929 and, as an editor of
Freiheit,
he supported the Jewish settlers. Orders came from Moscow to reverse this position and support the Arabs. A lot of Jews quit the Party on that issue.

Dworkin was eventually expelled when something inside of him cracked at the death of his father and he committed the cardinal sin of going to synagogue to sit
shim.
None of us were really sorry to see him leave, but Nathan was called up for being a “Dworkinite” and received a humiliating demotion to Norfolk, a post considered one notch below a sewage treatment plant.

The Party allotted him a meager twelve dollars a week, which meant he had to take a second job. One of the comrades, Harold Sugerman, was in the wallpaper business and, on Party orders, took Nathan in as an apprentice.

“I tell you,” Nathan moaned, “that, worse than killing chickens, worse than the coal business, worse than splitting rocks in Palestine, is the paper hanging trade.”