Tinsmith Manny Schatz manufactures mechanical bird: inserts tongue of adder that causes automaton to speak prophecies suppressed since Babylonian exile.
The floozy Katya Bimbaum wears in her marcelled hair the mystic thirteen-petaled rose; rose plucked by Hershel Tarnopol for his papa’s lapel, its radiance resulting in papa’s combustion.
Zygmunt Tisch invokes as maggid (medium) the medieval cephalophore Rabbi Ashlag to interpret dream in which Theda Bara palpates his frontal lobe; in the absence of their rebbe Shpinker Hasids devise balloon raised aloft by lilin (aerial demons) spawned from Hasids’ own seminal emissions.
Sam Alabaster uses, for fishing bait, a toxic worm that causes birds to fall from the sky by merely crawling over their shadow; Mrs. Bluestein invites ushpizin (spirit guests) from the Circle of the Unique Cherub to her canasta table.
Pantsed by dog-faced imps at belated bar mitzvah (revealing his petsel like a licorice whip), the aged changeling Benjy Padauer nevertheless succeeds in delivering his Torah portion.
Returned from underworld, Katie Pin celebrates renewed menstrual cycle; her child is born six weeks later.
Et cetera …
1921—Blind fiddler Asbestos, longtime fixture of North Main Street, is lynched after aiding and abetting convict escapees; Pinch resumes Central Standard Time.
1921–22—Muni abruptly ceases writing; retired from circus, Jenny Bashrig returns to Memphis; Muni and Jenny wed, become guardians of orphaned Tyrone Pin and proprietors of Pin’s General Merchandise.
1922–28—After years of financial struggle and compromised health, Muni succumbs to pulmonary tuberculosis (1927); Jenny dies the following year from kidney disease aggravated by alcohol narcosis; young Tyrone, self-designated custodian of Muni’s abandoned manuscript, becomes virtual charity case.
1944-45—Tyrone is conscripted into US Armed Forces, sees action after D-Day in northern Europe, witnesses liberation of Dachau.
1945–52—Tyrone returns to North Main Street enervated from battle fatigue, begins to paint; immigrant camp survivor Avrom Slutsky, having followed Tyrone to America, recovers Muni Pinsker’s buried manuscript, edits and redacts text — which he titles The Pinch—and funds its printing along with the plates of Tyrone’s illustrations.
1953—Over Slutsky’s protests, Tyrone is declared mentally incompetent and confined to Western State Psychiatric Hospital at Bolivar.
1968—Book dealer Leonard Sklarew, legatee of Muni’s printed book, sells rights to the venerable Frigate Press for publication as The Pinch: A History; a novel.
Significant Historical Events
1881–84, 1903–7—Major waves of pogroms in Russia, mass emigration of Jews.
1887—Artesian well water becomes available in Memphis.
1894–99—Dreyfus affair.
1897—General Jewish Labor Bund formed.
1899—Blood libel trial in Bohemia (the Hilsner case); black millionaire R. R. Church funds Church Park and Auditorium, first Memphis park and entertainment center for African Americans.
1903—The Protocols of the Elders of Zion published in the newspaper Zamnye; Kishinev pogrom.
1900—Casey Jones leaves Memphis’s Central Station bound for catastrophic train wreck at Vaughn, Mississippi.
1905—Failed Russian revolution; pogroms ensue.
1906—W. C. Handy writes “Mr. Crump Don’t Like It” (later “Memphis Blues”); opening of Overton Park Zoo.
1908—Wild Bill Latura murders five Negroes in Ashford’s Saloon on Beale Street, acquitted by all-white jury despite concern that such behavior might lead to killing white people; Mose Plough loans son Abe $125 to start Plough Chemical Company, also on Beale.
1909—Edward Hull Crump elected mayor of Memphis.
1913—Riots at Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring; Mendel Beilis on trial in Russia for ritual murder.
1914—World War I begins.
1915—Lynching of Leo Frank.
1916—E. H. Crump illegally “votes” illiterate blacks, pays city budget deficits with bond issues, protects political allies who abuse offices, ignores prohibition laws; Clarence Saunders opens first Piggly Wiggly self-service grocery at Third and Madison.
1917—Bolshevik Revolution: approximately 200,000 Jews murdered as counterrevolutionaries and bourgeois profiteers; Harahan Bridge completed over Mississippi River.
1918—Spanish flu epidemic.
1919—Treaty of Versailles.
1920—Henry Ford prints 500,000 copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
1923—Ku Klux Klan candidate Clifford Davis elected Memphis city judge; old Orpheum Theatre burns.
1924—Reunion of Confederate veterans in Memphis.
1925—“Fee system” of blacks sold into peonage exposed; New Peabody Hotel opens at Main and Monroe; Tom Lee, “a good Negro,” rescues thirty-two people when excursion boat capsizes; Mein Kampf published; Scopes “Monkey” Trial begins.
1926—Last Valley Line packet boats retired from Mississippi River.
1927—Sacco and Vanzetti executed; The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, released; Mississippi River floods.
1928—Jimmy Lunceford’s Orchestra plays roof of Shrine Building; Bessie Smith at the Palace on Beale.
1929—Stock market crashes; Memphis adventurer Richard Halliburton lost at sea in Chinese junk.
1931—Cotton Carnival launched.
1933–41—German Jews stripped first of rights as citizens, then of rights as human beings.
1937—Amelia Earhart vanishes; Great Flood brings thousands of homeless refugees to Memphis.
1938—Two runs shy of Babe Ruth’s record, Hank Greenberg walked rather than be given shot at home run. Kristallnacht.
1939—Germany invades Poland.
1941—Pearl Harbor.
1943—Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
1945—Victory in Europe; atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
1948—State of Israel established; Gandhi assassinated; WDIA radio station adopts all-black format.
1950—Senator Joseph McCarthy mounts anti-Communist crusade; Sam Phillips opens Sun Records Studio.
1951—Phillips records Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88,” first rock ’n’ roll hit.
1952—Night of Murdered Poets in Moscow; Kemmons Wilson opens first Holiday Inn on Summer Avenue.
1953—Rosenbergs executed.
1954—E. H. Crump dies.
1955—Emmet Till murdered.
1956—“Million Dollar Quartet”—Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley — jam at Sun Records; Elvis appears on Ed Sullivan Show.
1958—Stax Records’s “Memphis Sound”organized.
1961—Eichmann trial.
1962—Cuban Missile Crisis.
1963—Martin Luther King gives “I Have a Dream” speech; John F. Kennedy assassinated.