Red Love (7 page)

Solly’s Sister, 1986

Solly was blowing his top.

—G. L.

Solly moved to Alabama with my father. Solly was eleven. He loved our father so much. Mama and I stayed with a relative on Pitt Street while they tried to make ends meet. Then, two years later, our father’s business failed and they came back to the Lower East Side. Something happened to Solly. He became a radical. It was a wrench for our father. Solly went to an extreme. He kept shouting against any unjust factor; he came right out with it. He was just blowing his top about it. In the yeshiva—he went afternoons after school—he had been a hundred percent religious. Took a keen interest in Hebrew. Put his whole heart into it. When Solly did something, he did it with a full feeling. He was a prone leader, a brilliant boy.

Solly had faith in everything at ten, just like young girls who haven’t reached maturity or gone out into the world yet. But he lost all his faith after a while. I think Dolly was his first girl friend. He was her first and she was his first. These boys were so pure, these Yiddish
boyeles.

We had culture from my father. He was a self-educated man. He educated himself to read the
Forward.
My mother didn’t have an education, she couldn’t read, but she knew to
daven,
which amazed me. In
shul,
the way she
davenned!
You’d think she was reading from the book, but she knew it by heart.

My father told us stories about his childhood. His parents died from hunger in Bialystok. They had eleven children. Eight died.

The three survivors were sent to America, my father and his two brothers. He told us stories, how they discriminated against Jews, the hardships they went through. I couldn’t believe these things; I was American-born. We didn’t see this in America.

Welfare came to investigate us when my father was out of a job. They refused us. But we got along. My mother used to make a hard-boiled egg, divide it, and we’d share.

We lived first on Stanton, then Pitt, and then Delancey. A step upward—you had hot water and steam. The radicalism was so common among the poor children.

Solly’s children. After the arrest, I took them to the park, bought them candy, ice cream. When I’d leave, the little one—she was afraid, you could see the fear—she’d jump up at me. With her little ruffled pants. She was only four years old.

Dolly was a super-duper person. She won’t talk against anyone. I was with her when a man undercharged her for some merchandise. She said, Mister, you didn’t charge me enough. She couldn’t afford to pay that extra two or three cents, but she paid it. That was Dolly. And they were so in love with each other.

I would come into her cell. Her apple would be on the metal window, a round of toilet paper, pictures of the children. She was short. Without shoes, she was even shorter. Everybody said they were supposed to have money from the Russians. But my brother and Dolly were so poor. If our mother didn’t give Solly money to fix his soles, he would go without shoes. They ate dinner at our mother’s house and he took a roll from my father to take home. They didn’t have anything. I mean, they were
schleppers.

Imagine, the very last day, I went to see Dolly, then I went to see Solly. The stay had come through. They were so happy. She had a little can of chicken she had set aside to celebrate; they shared it. But we didn’t know the stay had been suddenly overturned that day. Solly evidently got wind of it over the radio. I was with Solly. Mama was with Dolly. And Solly said to me, “Take Mama home, take Mama home.” He cut it short. He didn’t want to see his mother, because he would break down. But I didn’t know what was happening. “Just take Mama home,” he kept saying. “I don’t want Mama to come here this afternoon.” That’s all he said to me. So I took our mother home. When I got home, I heard the news.

This here was my brother’s Hebrew book from the yeshiva. June 12th. Twelve o’clock. Four o’clock. Room seven. Five o’clock. He was a little boy then. Written by Sol. That’s his handwriting. Upside down. Why did he write it upside down? No, wait, Sol’s right. This is the way to hold it. I forgot, this is the way it goes, he was right! My brother’s Hebrew book … held in my brother’s hands.

I had envelopes addressed by him to their friends. I kept them. Where did I put them? Goddamnit. I’ll find them … I’ll find them. …

Saturday-Afternoon Parade, 1930

Solly was strange fruit.

—G. L.

Solly and his father moved to Mitchell’s Dam, Alabama, when Solly was eleven. Solly’s father opened a work-clothes store on the railroad track from Red Mountain. His father had done everything from loading pig iron on railway cars to selling tombstone insurance. They lived in one big room behind the store. The mountain was thirty miles long, with solid iron ore. The track from the steel plant went straight on a level past the highway crossing where they lived.

Behind the store was the large shanty area called Niggertown. The store became the Jewtown corner of Niggertown. The white community lived on the other side of the tracks.

Most of Solly’s new friends were black: Ray, Louie, Smitty, and Ronnie. Their mothers fed him at lunchtime. They called him their honey. A little Jewish boy. He could not insult them by refusing and telling them he was kosher.

At a crossing point of the tracks, Solly would hop the freights from the steel mill with the other kids. They fished and swam in a rock quarry. They shot marbles. Pitched horseshoes. Chased water moccasins, cottonhead rattlers, down the creek together in the running rapids. At the base of the mill, where the water came through the sluice, there were huge rocks. The water moccasins lay under the rocks. Solly and his friends would run barefoot on the rocks, holding clubs in their hands.

Solly’s friend Ray was always writing (his mother had taught him). Ray wrote out a sheet in pencil which he distributed weekly to the other kids:
The Journal of the Sleeping Hollow Home for Blind Mice.
The journal dealt with the problems of the blind mice trying to cope with life in a civilized world, trying to get attention for their special problems.

At night, when the mill was closed, the slag that had been poured into the huge slag pots all day had to be emptied. It was still red hot. The slag pots were on enormous hangers. When the six pots were tipped over, the hot slag would light up the sky like a volcano. Solly loved to watch it at night from his bedroom window.

In school, the first exercise was to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. About everyone being equal. The words were odd to him. His black friends were not starting school. Then the teacher asked each student to tell the class about himself or herself. Solly didn’t say very much. The teacher asked him who his friends were. He said, Smitty, Louie, Ray, and Ronnie.

At recess, the kids formed a tight little circle around him in the yard. The tallest of them took him by the shirt and said, “Hey Slopbucket, Slopfuckit, your friends ain’t Smitty, Louie, and Ray. Your friends ain’t got no names. Your friends is Niggerbaby, Tarbaby, and Smokerack. They’re dirty and stupid and they smell of rat shit. That’s why there’s no school for ‘em. We’re gonna beat you up, nigger lover.”

They knocked Solly to the ground and jumped all over him. They rolled him over and jumped on his back. They kicked him and spat on him. When the class bell rang, they ran back to the schoolroom, laughing and shouting.

Solly’s teacher, a pretty young woman named Bessie Stuart, came out looking for him and saw what had happened. She touched him and said, “Now you know, Solly: niggers are just dirty and ignorant and stupid. That’s why there’s no school for them, and that’s why you got no business playing with them.” She put her arm around him and walked him back to school. She said, “I’m sure the boys and girls are sorry for what they did to you. But now you know why they did it.”

A month later, some of the kids followed him home. One boy told him to knock the chip off his shoulder. Solly refused. Another boy said, “Well, I’ll show him what we do with cowards.” He twisted Solly’s arm and threw him into a ditch.

The next day, Solly went back to the school, smiling. He was scared, but he smiled. He didn’t tattletale, but he didn’t play up to them, either.

In the afternoon, he still played a little with his black buddies.

And on the Sabbath, he didn’t play with anyone.

The work week in the town stretched until Saturday noon. Saturday was payday. There was drinking, whoring, blackjack, and poker, and a movie house for whites. Gambling was off limits for blacks.

On Saturday afternoon, the sheriff would pick a half-dozen cronies, appoint them deputy sheriffs, give them revolvers, which they jammed in their pockets, pin badges on them, and head with them for Niggertown.

In Niggertown, the men fanned out, looking for a crap game. Every crap game had a pot on the ground with a large sum of money in it. The sheriff would spot a big pot among a bunch of blacks and shout, “All right! Fan out. Get away from there.” He confiscated the money, which he shared with his deputies, and aimed his revolver at the blacks. “Now march,” he shouted.

The Saturday-afternoon parade had begun. The sheriff and his men marched the blacks who had been involved in the game—men, women, and children—down the railroad tracks, to the crossing, down a rampway in the dirt road, into a large open enclosure beside the jailhouse. It had a barbed-wire fence around it and a locked gate.

They opened the gate and herded the blacks inside. They locked the gate.

The blacks would remain there until they could get a dollar somehow and buy their way out. They huddled in the heat, without sanitation.

The Saturday-afternoon parade took place year-round.

The Declaration of Independence was celebrated in Brightwood Park on July 4th. It didn’t take place in Niggertown.

There were many contests, including watermelon eating. The white participants wore aprons. The watermelon was sliced for them.

The nigger show came next. Blacks were hired for the day. In the Watermelon-eating contest, the black men would have to bury their faces in half a melon and scoop it out. No aprons were provided. Their hands were tied behind their backs.

Footraces were held. Whites were tied at the feet and had to hop. Blacks were tied hands and feet.

The next contest was never engaged in by whites. It took place in the creek. Two blacks would have a boxing match with bare fists in a barrel. They could hardly fit in it together. The barrel would tip over in the water. The two men would have to keep beating each other to a pulp until the whites said it was enough. Then the two bleeding men were rescued.

In Mitchell’s Dam, blacks were permitted to walk only on the dirt road, not on the paved sidewalks. They were allowed to cross the sidewalk only to enter a store. The saying went, “The color of their money is the only good thing about them.”

But if blacks were in one store and wanted to go to the store next door, they had to go out, cross the sidewalk, walk down the dirt road, and cross the sidewalk again. They were not to walk across the sidewalk.

One Saturday, Solly was standing in the movie line, waiting for the theater to open.

From the line, he watched the black people shopping for groceries. They were jammed into the narrow dirt roadway.

The pressure of the crowd suddenly pushed two black men up onto the sidewalk. By chance, they jostled the sheriff, who was standing by Solly.

“What are you, a couple of smart niggers?” the sheriff said.

They did not say a word.

He took his revolver out, aimed it at each man’s head, and pulled the trigger.

Their bodies lay in a red puddle in the ditch.

He aimed his revolver at two black men in the dirt roadway. “You two niggers,” he said, “come over here.”

The shaking men approached him. He pointed to the two bodies in the ditch. “Drag them over there and leave them there all day. This will show you niggers your place.”

The Hermit Smorg

A lonely guy becomes a spy.

—G. L.

Sid Smorg of South Philadelphia kept squares of Swiss chocolate in his mother’s refrigerator. They were his luxury, late at night, in his room. He didn’t deserve them. Jews were burning.

A bald, virginal, fatting man, at forty-two the chemist remembered what others had long packed away: the girl he shared a seat with in the ninth grade, how she felt at his side, her smell of licorice; eating a sizzling kosher hot dog at twelve on a winter day; his rabbi’s words at his bar mitzvah. Once, at eight, he was swimming; a girl appeared beside him in the pool, said “You’re handsome,” and dove away.

Sid remembered his two years at YMCA summer camp. Frail and sickly, he gained seven pounds each summer. He learned to love spinach (a passion he kept the rest of his life), played soccer, and shivered with delight on the boulders around the campfire while the counselors (strapping college athletes) told ghost stories. Sid developed a sound appetite. Years later, his Soviet friend Alexei would say fondly, “Sid will eat anything that will stand still long enough and that won’t eat him first.”

Sid read manuals on how to appeal to the opposite sex. He kept a bowl of apples on his kitchen table, because he had read that apples kept the breath sweet.

You could win Sid’s gratitude by asking him how things were going. He thanked the bus driver for saying good morning. He waited each week for Fibber McGee to open his closet, and he listened to Jack Benny for eighteen years.

When Sid was in his senior year of high school, his English teacher gave an exam in his class and then asked Sid to remain afterward. He asked Sid to take the exams home and grade them that night.

Some of the other kids saw Sid take the exams. They surrounded him in the hallway pleading with him to pass them. Many of them had not even bothered to speak to him before. Sid saw many new attractive attributes in them.

Sid took the exams home and sat up until 5 A.M., erasing wrong answers and filling in the right ones, even faking the kids’ handwriting. When he was through, they had all passed. Sid downgraded his own paper to make things look less suspicious.

Sid handed the exams in to the teacher. In the afternoon Sid met the teacher in the hallway. The teacher said, “The class did very well, did they not, Sid?” turned his back and walked away. This comment burned into Sid. For twenty-four years he thought of it and considered looking up the teacher in the phone book, apologizing, and explaining why he had acted as he did.

Each year when the new phone book arrived, Sid looked at the women’s names and wondered what they were like. Stephanie Schnall: a tremulous librarian with suppressed emotions and chestnut hair; Bridget Hart: a vixen who kept a little braided whip in her glove compartment.

Russ Columbo broke Sid’s heart, and he had a special shot of Grable’s legs in his dresser drawer under his shirts and mismatched socks.

The seasons came and went; Sid sat quietly on the bus on the way to work watching the young lovers, the cycles. People’s grief gave him strength—he cheered up.

Later, in Jersey City, when his friend Pete Boston introduced him to the Soviets, Sid was uncertain. He had considered himself a Norman Thomas Socialist. But he saw these were interesting men. The Philadelphia Communists he knew, were weird and shabby losers—libertines, gap-toothed wonders—no way he would join those furry nuts. The Party was their glory. It made them shoot up a few inches, gave them a set of balls. Pete had taken him to their meetings, hoping Sid would join.

The local Party office had walls papered with drawings of brawny, upright workingmen in overalls with upraised, gigantic muscled arms and capitalists with fat cigars and big bellies sitting on piles of coins.

The leaders, with their pipes, tweedy vests, and blank faces, had this “You go out and get your heads cracked, it’s only the cops” attitude. He saw a small black woman make a suggestion about a demonstration and the leader coldly respond: “We will decide who we will learn from.” She steadied herself by putting her hand on the chair.

One angry Greek exploded at the Marxist dialectics (Does the Party shake the workers or do the workers shake the Party?) and shouted, “The hell with this bullshit—give me five good men and I’ll take Rittenhouse Square by storm.” The meetings broke up at 4 A.M. They were dominated by what the Swiss called the
ploder sacken,
the endlessly boring talkers.

Sid couldn’t take those pig festivals on the Jewish holidays—the Jewish Communists’ celebration of the pig. Not just spareribs in Chinese restaurants, mind you—okay, that was odd on Yom Kippur, but they thought they were proving they weren’t narrow Zionists. But pictures of pigs on the mantelpiece! Pig recipes! Pig poems! Sex tips! This was excess, Sid thought.

In his parents’ house he’d lived in the same room since childhood. Sid had sat in the back row in the living room beside his bachelor uncles in the darkening dusk. Uncle Simon was known for his Republican rage. You never mentioned F.D.R. in his presence. If you did, he turned livid red and screamed, then didn’t talk to anyone for days. Whenever Simon sat quietly in his chair, everyone assumed he was thinking about how much he hated F.D.R.

When Sid was introduced to Alexei by Pete, he was touched by Alexei’s concern. Also Alexei was dark and handsome, which Sid couldn’t help admiring, and had a lock of hair that kept falling over his forehead. “Sid Sid Sid Sid!” (Imagine, hearing his name said over and over again.) “Sid-Sid-Sidney,” said Alexei, gazing at Sid fondly, licking a vodka martini, “I don’t expect our boys to be social butterflies, but this is ridiculous. What can we do with you? You’re so pale. You don’t play cards, you have no girl. You think we don’t care about these things?”

Sid sat, his head down, eating it up. Come on, Alexei, you guys don’t care that much. Blood came to Sid’s face. To have such friends—and to help the USSR at the same time, the only country where anti-Semitism was a crime against the state. Anything that strengthened the USSR would help to save the Jews.

Tears came to Sid’s eyes when Alexei told him that Stalin had struggled to learn Yiddish, that he
davenned
when he prayed. This was no normal leader.

The Jew thing, who could ignore it? Sid had gone to the library every day as a boy, walking the two miles. The Neckers festered near the city dump amid mosquitoes, raising hogs. They were kids who lived in the marshy wasteland of Stonehouse Lane and did lightning forays on Sid’s neighborhood, throwing bricks and smashing windows. When he was fifteen, they beat him. Blood dripping down his face, he watched the legs of his friends skitter away into the bushes.

Sid’s father, one of the only Jews at the factory, was baited by the other workers. They stole his chisels; they put glue on his good clothes. Yus Smorg struck a man who grinned and ran together the words “Hi Jew?” and almost lost his job because the man had a weak heart and fainted.

Yus Smorg’s foreman told him, “I’m going to make you quit.” He moved him to a quicksilver production line where Yus was the only worker hand-sanding cabinets. He came home at night with the skin rubbed off his fingertips. Sid’s mother would bathe Yus’s fingers and put ointment on them. Sid’s father went back to work the next morning without a word of complaint.

Sid graduated from the university in 1932 and went to work as a laboratory worker at the Richmond Sugar Company. He was now a main support of his family.

One week before Christmas, he was laid off. He searched frantically for a job, walking in a perspiring heat in snow and slush against tides of smiling, happy employed workers with tinsel on their faces, bearing green, gold, and red Christmas boxes with silver bells to their families as carols tinkled from storefronts. This was capitalism. As he approached a factory gate, a bundled laborer walked toward him and asked what he wanted. When Sid told him, the man snarled, “Better go back, boy. Enough people out of work here.”

One night a old co-worker of his, Fred Stone, came with the news that a former classmate of Fred’s, Pete Boston, was leaving his job at the Terrill Manufacturing Company in Jersey City and might be able to put Sid in his place. A week later a telegram arrived: Sid was told to come to Jersey City that night to see Pete Boston. He anxiously packed a brown cardboard suitcase, borrowed six dollars and a jacket that closely matched his pants, and took a Greyhound to Jersey City. Boston was waiting for Sid in front of his house. Pete Boston’s biceps could make a man blush. Plus a huge, friendly, freckled face, pug nose, the grin, the feel of the bearlike grip of his hand.

They sat up until morning talking. Boston briefed Sid on soap chemistry. Then there were “complicating circumstances.” The boss, Roger Whitman, would never hire a Jew. Sid would have to say that, despite his name, he was really not Jewish. His grandfather had converted and married a Christian girl.

Then Boston got down to brass tacks. He told Sid he was a Communist Party member, and that he had purposely selected Sid because Fred had told him that Sid was a Socialist. Pete said, “We figure that when you really know the score you’ll want to struggle for real change.” Boston talked for three more hours about how mankind had advanced to a new level in the Soviet Union.

Sid was hired the next day. Roger Whitman told him what a great man Hitler was, and how the Jews in the United States should be put on ships and the vessels sunk in mid-ocean.

Sid’s thirty-dollar-a-week salary kept his family off relief. He repaid Pete by consenting to go to the Communist Party meetings in Jersey City, which he detested. He couldn’t hurt Pete’s feelings when Pete asked him to join the Party. He said that he felt he “must be adequately prepared” in the tomes of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism and “steeped in the struggle” before he would be worthy to take such a step. Pete was moved, and tried to assure Sid that there “are years to go to drink from the fountain of wisdom of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism; the Party will guide you.”

In the fall of 1933, Sid was rehired by the Richmond Sugar Company. Pete kept coming to see him in Philadelphia, where they would meet at the Automat and Sid would splurge on his favorites, hashed potatoes and creamed spinach. Pete talked for hours about Soviet justice. Pete was also welcomed by Sid’s family at his home, where he was considered their savior for having given Sid a job.

One night Pete began their conversation by telling Sid about yet another incident of discrimination so typical of American society. He had attended the Christmas party of his Jewish girl friend’s company. The party was sedate and dignified, with good, rich food. Near the end, a partner in the firm, who did not know his secretary was Jewish, rose and proposed a toast: “A Merry Christmas to all us Christians here. I am so thankful there are no others in this firm.”

After a long pause, Pete said, “Sid, the Soviet people eat off rough bare boards. You can help them live a little better, a little more as humans should, by getting this information.” He said that he had met a man who worked for Amtorg, the Soviet trading company, in New York City. The man wanted to obtain—”unofficially”—a quantity of specialized information and data on American chemical processes. The information on paper fillers, vitamin D concentrates, and sulphinated oils could greatly benefit the lives of the Soviet people. It could affect education (paper), food (fish-oil concentrates), and clothing (sulphinated oils). Pete said a great deal more information was also needed about products made by the Richmond Sugar Company. It would go a long way toward making the harsh life of Soviet citizens, who were still in the first stage of Socialist humanism, less difficult.

“Will you do this for the Soviet people, Sid?” Pete asked, that wonderful brisk look of love in his eyes, a look no one had ever bestowed on Sid before.

Sid said, “I’ll have to think this over.” Actually, he had already made up his mind. His pulse was pounding. This was great. Pete was his benefactor. Sid had been living in sin for so long by avoiding the Communist Party membership Pete wanted so badly for him. He felt he had been breaking Pete’s heart, and hated himself for it. He had torn clumps of hair out of his head at night in anger at himself. Now he could please Pete, get him off his neck about joining that bunch of furry nuts in the Communist Party, and strengthen the Soviet Union, his people’s best friend, as well.

How sweet it was.

During the next seven months, Sid and Pete fumbled about trying to figure out how they could go about copying the data kept in the office of Dr. Bachrach, the director of research at Richmond Sugar. There were voluminous plant operation reports, blueprints of equipment. The reproduction costs were prohibitive.

Sid worried himself blue about it, wondering what he could hock that would cover it. Could he ever correct his faults? In the meantime he did manage to provide Pete with the process for the manufacture of phosphoric acid. This was a simple matter; Sid drew all the necessary sketches and copied the essential data himself over a period of forty-eight hours on a weekend during which he did not eat or drink.

In the late fall of 1935 Pete came to Philadelphia with exciting news. Amtorg itself would provide excellent facilities for copying the information. Sid just had to bring the material to New York. Best of all, Pete told Sid that Dmitri, the Russian engineer from Amtorg, was very anxious to meet him, having heard so much about the canny Sid Smorg. Pete said the engineer had very warm words of praise for the information Sid had given the Soviet Union on the phosphoric acid process.

Sid dove into the air and chased a fly.

He had entered into history. He was making a difference.

Sid and Pete did some of their secret work together. Like Sid, Pete was no libertine, and he avoided marriage because he had to conserve his energy for his activities on behalf of the Soviets. Pete kept a snake, a crow, and white mice as pets, but this was not, he told Sid, because he was a bohemian. It was calculated to give people the impression he was a bit “off” so that they would not notice his secret work.

Pete was a superb lab man with an uncanny dexterity in those huge paws of his. The two friends worked in the lab together for hours without talking and it seemed to Sid as if each could anticipate the other’s thoughts and desires before they were expressed. Sid hoped that at some time in the future, when Nazism had been crushed, he could settle down to working with Pete in aiding the sick. Perhaps nutrition research. He could think of no more glorious project.