Red Love (20 page)

Davey “Car Wreck” Lapidus

Don’t flush, Solly.

—G. L.

I know my jails. This wasn’t so bad. But Solly was a milk shake.

We met; we talked; we walked. I reminded him, he said, of a comrade with a harmonica at Goldens Bridge.

I had credentials. Former member of the Young Communist League. Friend of Harry Brimmer, also known as Jay West, who was in another cell. The Party was ignoring Dolly and Solly completely, so Big Jay never acknowledged Solly in the yard or spoke to him. You should have heard Solly speak Big Jay’s name. The earth shook. A top Party leader, Jay had been an organizer in China and Berlin and Harlan, Kentucky. Big build, high forehead with a shock of black hair graying at the temples. Squeaky Donald Duck voice.

Solly desperately wanted the Party to know just how significant his contribution was (as if they didn’t). He told me and let me know just how much it would mean to him for Big Jay to know everything. I promised the milk shake.

I told him about my car episodes. He cursed the system.

Not that I didn’t like Solly. I liked him. I was still rather progressive, but not the whole hog.

I had been at Peekskill; I knew the score. I had the Little Lenin series in my bunk; I remembered Maury Ballinzweig from Camp Nitgedaiget. I’d known Mendy—Zitzi Mendelbaum—before he’d gone to Spain. Solly and I both knew Mendy’s historic words on the rooftop of 617 Livonia Avenue with the other boys before he left for Spain: “I’m just getting into the struggle a little sooner.” Brooklyn, 1936. Mendy was killed in his first action in Spain. When I quoted those words to Solly, his eyes filled.

Solly got manic and talked for hours; he was morose and stood by himself in the corner. “When I get out of here, I’m putting you on the right track,” he promised me.

He was confused; he’d forget what he’d said. The next week he’d say he would set up drops for me in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Caracas when I got out. “These are revolutionary strongholds,” he said. “I’ve worked out an escape route to Mexico by a small boat. It’s all arranged.”

Then, the next time, he said he’d be out soon whatever sentence he got: “In five years, I promise you, sweet guy, we’ll have a Soviet America,” he said.

One night Solly drew a diagram of the operational setup of the ring. He said there were two units operating in Manhattan. Solly headed one unit; the other was headed by two others, both of whom had fled. Joe Klein was already in Europe at the time of Solly’s arrest; the other man had fled to the Soviet Union a week after Solly was jailed. Solly said that for years he’d been in direct contact with a Soviet he met several times a month. “Oh, I’ve shared many a whiskey sour with my friends,” Solly said, worldly Solly. “They’ve already given five thousand dollars to Henky for my defense.”

When he finished, Solly tore the diagram into little pieces and threw them in the toilet. He didn’t flush it. When he left, I took the scraps of paper out of the water and dried them. I put them in an envelope, and gave them to Goldberg.

Solly told me his life story. Someday bridges and boulevards would be named after him and Dolly in a Soviet America; he wanted the facts to be straight. He’d been a hot yeshiva student. Went to a Y.C.L. meeting at fourteen. They told him rabbis were politicians with beards, and gave him William Z. Foster’s
Toward A Soviet America.
He got a hard-on. The Party, the shock brigade of the proletariat, would overthrow that insatiable bloodsucker, the capitalist class. Solly would carry a long needle with him to demonstrations, and stick police horses in the flank to make them bolt.

Solly wanted above all to implement his beliefs with action, he said. Something that would tip the balance of forces in favor of the future.

“And it happened, sweet guy,” he’d say. “It happened. It wasn’t easy going either. Not everyone is capable. It takes training. You don’t just get something of value to the Soviet Union and pass it on. No way. There can be many months of waiting. You have to control yourself. Davey, do you realize that when the Canadian ring was destroyed, I lost contact for almost two years?”

He told me of his signals: a circle with a cross in the center of a store window on 14th Street. A hole in the cement floor of a movie theater that was used as a depository for transmitting information. Gum on a subway window—red for danger and white for all clear. “The simplest things are the best,” Solly said.

“Solly,” I asked, “why didn’t you escape when you could have?”

“I had to take care of friends. I knew what was happening for two months, but others had to be warned. One more week and I would have been on my way to the Soviet Union.”

“And if it’s the death sentence?”

“Look, I played the game and I lost. I’ll take the results.”

Solly wept at night about his kids. A letter came from his sister that the kids wanted him to come home, that they did not understand what was happening, or that they understood too well. I put my arms around the milk shake.

“What is Dolly like?” I asked him one night.

“Dolly … is the most beautiful person I have ever met. She is truly beautiful in her soul. A keen analytical mind. She does not give an inch, never compromises her principles. She is in pain so much of the time from her back, her headaches, and the suffering of the workers. She has such revolutionary anger; she never deviates from it. She referred to Eisenhower the other day as a ‘guttersnipe in striped pants.’ And ‘a privileged fascist dog.’ And ‘a homophobic faggot who will fuck anything in skirts.’ I mean, she talks that way to me. I have learned so much from her integrity.”

He told me Dolly was furious when the newspapers criticized returning prisoners of war from Korea for praising Communism. “ ‘They’ve seen a real system that works for the people for the first time,’ she said, ‘and their hearts rise up within.’”

Solly got sentimental, and began humming concentration camp songs and Red Army troop marches. He said that when he met Dolly, life began. She helped him with his studies and typed his homework; although, he said with a twinkle, they did their share of smooching.

Trolleys were still running then. There was a ferry at the end of Christopher Street, and they rode down to it. They read the
Daily Worker
and lists of lynchings from the Civil Rights Congress as the sweet salt spray kissed their faces. They learned about Sartre’s cockroach philosophy and other Freudian worms of reaction, the dangers of sectarianism and opportunist tendencies, and how to talk to the workers.

When Stalin signed the pact with Hitler, they shouted Starve the War and Feed America! Food for the Unemployed—Not Fodder for Cannon! Keep America out of the Imperialist War! Not One Cent, Not One Man, Not One Plane for the Imperialist War! The Yanks Are Not Coming! Solly told me of the merry days Dolly painted his hair gray, put him in a wheelchair all bundled up in blankets and wheeled him down Bleecker Street. She carried a placard: “My husband is legless because of fighting in the imperialist war! He can’t even get it up! Remember 1917! Don’t let Wall Street trick us again!—Sex-starved housewife.”

Dolly handed out
A Letter to Mother.
Solly gave me a copy of it. The cover of the pamphlet had a drawing of a bent-over little old lady, a picture of her boy on her table, letting a piece of paper fall to the floor: “Telegram: Killed in Action.”

Dear Mother,

Happy Mother’s Day.

I wish I could send you something that you need like a new chair or a nice dress, but every penny I get goes for room rent and eats. It sure makes me sore that my dear mother can’t have some nice things when the swells spend whole fortunes on a single swanky party or a country home, enough to keep a couple of dozen families like ours going for a whole year.

Did you have Tommy’s tonsils out yet? Better take care of it before all this economy stuff goes through and they begin to shut down all the free clinics and hospitals. Things are getting plenty tough but Roosevelt ain’t talking no more about the unemployed. Looks like he has gone over to the fat boys on Wall Street bag and baggage. No difference now between him and the Republicans.

You’ve guessed it, Mother. I’m sore. And I’m worried too. I’m worried about a lot of things that are happening but most about this country getting into the war. All the fellows I know feel the same way. None of us want to be smashed up in a Wall Street war.

I heard a fellow talking just the other day: he said we have a big fight on our hands right here—for jobs and security and a federal health-and-housing program. Said he was a Communist. Said that we got into the last war for the benefit of big business and the munitions makers and we don’t want any more of it. Mother, he said, Give peace a chance. Sounds good to me.

Now I see why the newspapers and the millionaires don’t like the Communists. But the Communists are for people like us. I’m going to read some of their stuff to find out what it’s all about.

I am going to send you a little booklet that my friend Jim gave me. It’s called
I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier for Wall Street.
It only cost a cent but it’s sure got a lot of common sense in it. Mrs. O’Connor, Mrs. Goldstein, and Mrs. Fabrizio ought to read it too. Jim’s mother is getting the neighbors together for a Mother’s Committee to Keep America out of War. You ought to do that, Mother. Get off your fanny. All the neighbors would go along with you.

Tell Tommy and Mary that if I get a job I am going to send you all something nice for Christmas. But there are no jobs. I am pressing my suit the way you told me to so it still looks pretty good. I want it to last till I get work. I wish I had a shirt to go along with it.

Well, this is a long letter but I just had to tell you all this. Remember me to all the neighbors and any of the old gang on the corner. Love to you, Dad, Tommy, and Mary.

Your son,

Bill

Then Hitler attacked Russia. Stalin was heartbroken. Browder made his famous statement: “What nerve! That’s really brazen, don’t you think?” The character of the war changed. Fascism lost its progressive character. Solly and Dolly carried the new placards: Starve the Shiftless and Feed the War! Not One Cent, Not One Man, Not One Plane for Peace! Down with the Appeasers of Hitlerism! Defend America by Giving Full Aid to the Soviet Union! The Yanks Are Coming! Defeat Anti-Semitism! Forward to a Worldwide People’s Front Against Hitler Fascism for the Defense of the Soviet Union!

Solly and Dolly threw out their books and pamphlets with titles like
New Germany
—
Where the Trains Run on Time,
and
America for Americans First: Refugees Crimp Our Style.

Solly stopped reminiscing. “The thing is, Dolly is a tank.”

I thought of the reason I could never testify against Solly at his trial. I’d never want Mother to know. She’s not only my mother; she is the famous Mother Lapidus.

Mother came to this country from czarist Russia.

She lived in a town that was friendly to the Jewish enclave within it. Things had not been bad.

In this town, church bells rang for the call to prayer, and on Sundays and holidays. On this particular day—not Sunday or a holiday—the church bells rang. The peasants, the town doctor, the school principal, the intelligentsia, and the priest gathered.

The Jews went into a panic. Yet it was a friendly town. They waited.

The group came out of church. They knew all the Jews and where they lived. They knocked on doors and asked the men to come to a meeting. They called them by their first names and smiled. My grandfather had evaded Petlura’s soldiers. But these men called him by his name and he went. Five hundred Jewish men gathered. They were taken out of town to a building in a forest clearing.

The town could not decide how to kill them. In the meantime, they had to feed them. They let the women in the town know they could bring food. For a week the women, including my grandmother, came with food for the men and saw them and talked to them.

At the end of the week, on Friday, they didn’t permit the women to bring food. There was no contact during the next week. The women wrung their hands and tore their hair.

A young peasant boy from the nearby French sugar refinery wandered into town. The women controlled themselves and said to him: “We’re not going to hurt you. We just want you to tell us: what happened to the men?” He took them to the mass grave. It was a block long.

They had thrown a bomb into the building. A young Jew within the building picked it up and threw it back. It didn’t detonate. The rabbi and the older Jews were critical. They said you must not fight back.

When the bomb failed, the town tried shooting the Jews in groups. But they ran out of ammunition, or didn’t want to waste it.

So they cut their throats.

They piled the Jews into wagons. They drove them around the town and to the grave. The town doctor advised them to put lime on the grave so that a mass epidemic would not result.

One man survived. He had been at the bottom of the pile. When they emptied the wagon, he surfaced. They left him for dead. He was only slightly wounded in the leg. He crawled over the bodies and out of the grave. He ran into the woods and hid.

My grandmother went out of her head. She spent the days reading doom poetry to my mother and the other children. Poetry by the Zionist Bialik. The poem began: “God sent me to you to warn you.” It ended: “Go down to the potter’s house, buy a pot, throw it on the ground. That’s how the Jewish people will be broken. And bow your head and say no more.” She read these poems. That’s what she did. She said that animals in the woods were calling: “Don’t call me man.”

One day my mother went by a synagogue. The children within were saying the kaddish for their dead parents. She listened to the weeping.

Soon after, my mother left for America.

Mother was a charter member of the Party. She was at the rally in Madison Square Garden when Mother Bloor spoke. The Communists were forbidden to display the red flag. And so Mother Bloor wore this beautiful red blouse with big butterfly sleeves. She started to talk and spread out her arms, and the red flag blazoned freely. The crowd roared.