Meanwhile, Mom, in anticipation of the joy that being near her family would bring, and Pop, in anticipation of the rewards that becoming an independent milkman might bring (made possible by moving close to the milk-shed, the freight yards on West 125th Street), abandoned their breezy East Side eyrie four flights up on the corner of Avenue D and 9th Street, and with their eight-year-old son, Ira, moved, united in hope, to Harlem. In her eagerness to be near her kin, and still stay within her husband’s limited means, Mom had resigned herself to living in three rooms “in the back,” the cheapest she could find in “Jewish Harlem,” three sweltering little rooms, on 114th Street, just east of Park Avenue. Into this cramped, airless little flat, the Stigman family moved as soon as school was over and summer vacation began.
The immigrants arrived: Mom’s father and mother; Zaida, bearded, orthodox Jew, already a patriarch in his mid-fifties, discontented and irascible; Baba, his patient and shrunken wife (she had loved her spouse greatly once, Mom said, but his all-consuming selfishness had drained her of affection). She had borne him a progeny of eleven children. The last two, twins, would have been Ira’s age, Mom told him, had they survived, but they died in infancy. Of the nine remaining, five were daughters and four were sons. All had now emigrated to America, except Genya, second child, Mom’s younger sister. Most attractive, according to Mom, of all of Zaida’s brood, Genya had married a man earning a fine income as an expert appraiser of lumber. They both decided to stay on in Austria-Hungary with their infant son.
Oh, the things that happen, Ecclesias, the things that happen, to me, to us, to my beloved wife and me, this 14th of January 1985, to our heirs, to our country, to Israel, the things that happen. My good friend, the writer Clarence G, was wont to storm at generational novels (he had Thomas Mann’s work in mind). “I hate generational novels, don’t you? They drive me crazy!” he would exclaim. I think I agree with him, but this is different, Ecclesias; how different I have yet to discover myself. .
Nine surviving offspring, five daughters and four sons, and all but Genya in America (Genya and daughter later vanished in a Nazi death camp. Husband and son, because of their shared expertise, were allowed to live — and to watch the two women herded into a lorry, and to hear the young girl cry: “Papa, I’m too young to die!”). All but Genya were in America. Mom came over first, brought here by Pop, who, in common with other immigrant husbands already in the new land, scrimped and saved, and in his case, stinted to the point of alimentary collapse, until he had accumulated enough to buy steerage passage for his wife and infant son. “We saw leviathans, great sea-creatures following the ship,” Mom tried vainly to awaken Ira’s memory. “You don’t remember? And you cried for milk, for which we had to pay extra: milk, the only word you could say in Polish.”
After Mom came to America, Mamie followed, Baba’s third child and Mom’s second younger sister, mettlesome and assertive Tanta Mamie. Once here, she boarded with Zaida’s brother, Granduncle Nathan, a thriving diamond merchant of somewhat flawed scruples. The poor girl was virtually indentured in his household as a domestic — until she found work in the garment industry, and thus earned enough to rent a room of her own in Manhattan. Almost at the same time she met her future husband, Jonas, an immigrant of equal acculturation as herself, a gnome of a man who worked in the adjacent building as a cloak’s operator, “by clucks.” At first, he courted her at lunchtime, then after-hours, when he would escort her to her room, and at length, to show serious intent, took her to the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue on Saturday night to hear the famous Yiddish thespian, Tomashevsky. They married, set up housekeeping, not on the East Side, where Mom and Pop already lived, but in a small apartment in Jewish Harlem, in the same b’tveen where Baba and Zaida and their unmarried children were later to reside.
Next in order of birth, and next to emigrate to the United States, was Moe, Baba’s fourth child and first-born son. Unlike his sister Mamie before him, Moe boarded with Ira’s family, by now living on 9th Street, high above the horse-car trolley tracks on Avenue D. Moe eschewed the needle trades; he preferred to work in heavy industry: he applied to steel fabricating shops, to a storage battery plant, but was turned away because he was a Jew. He found work in a café, and there toiled inordinate hours as a busboy, regarded in those years as the necessary apprenticeship to becoming a waiter. Of above-average height, for the epoch, though not tall, Moe was solid and robust in build (he had worked in logging camps in the Carpathian forests). Blue-eyed, fair, anything but the “typical” East European Jew in appearance, Moe was the guileless, outspoken country bumpkin. Endowed with Mom’s kindliness, her open-handedness, her lenience and her ready laughter, Moe was unaffectedly fond of his first-born nephew, first-born grandchild of Ben Zion Farb, the patriarch. Moe, or Morris, the name he preferred, would return from the sawdust-strewn café where he worked, trudging home on a summer night, to the big corner house on Avenue D; and with his nephew hanging on to his hand, make for the candy store at the foot of the house. There he would buy five or six or more penny Hershey chocolate bars, and bestowing one of these on his clamorous nephew, strip the wrappers off the others, and crowd the dainties one after another into his mouth, until for a minute he radiated chocolate spokes, like misplaced rays of the Statue of Liberty.
Moe was the second of Mom’s immediate kin to make the crossing (Utter rustic! In Hamburg, where the young simpleton had to stay in a lodging house overnight before boarding ship the next morning, he blew out the gaslight ere he went to bed, and had it not been for the timely arrival of a bed-fellow, Moe’s journey to America would have ended then and there).
Next came Saul, devious, surreptitious, hysteric Saul, who also became a busboy like his brother, but unlike his brother, as soon as he reached the status of waiter, he spurned working in Jewish restaurants. The best hotels, the most exclusive dining rooms — where the “white slaves” worked, as Pop called the German waiters, when he himself became a waiter, too — were the only places Saul would deign to wait at table.
The sun reflected off the windshield of a passing car. The light burst into lurid spectrum, shattering the darkness of Ira’s half-closed eyes focused on the computer screen. Ira mused on the meaning of the Syrian-controlled PLO hit squads reported by radio to be slipping into other countries for the purpose of assassinating Arafat’s henchmen. And the mind with its involuntary shorthand signaled: Arafat was cozying up to Hussein, and he to Iraq, while Syria was to Iran. Did that mean Arafat was becoming mollified, resigned to reaching a compromise with Israel? Doubtful. Highly.
Saul strove after all things American: “Especially loose shiksas,” Mom murmured to her young son in embarrassment. “It’s not seemly.” Among the scanty images of his uncle, incubated over the years since childhood, two were preserved intact: Saul’s vindictive swatting, with a rolled-up copy of the Journal American, of a couple of copulating horseflies on the sunny granite rocks of Mt. Morris Park. By some chance Ira had accompanied Saul, and the younger, lately arrived uncle, Max, to the park. . Another time, of an evening, as Ira stood by, listening: In reply to Pop’s proposal that he and Saul both pool a couple of hundred dollars each, and as partners invest in a certain luncheonette, Saul bragged, lifting a reckless, yet Semitic, face to the light of the street lamp: “I’ve spent more than that on a whore for a night.”