A Walker in the City Read online

  Chester Street at last, and the way home.

  On my right hand the "Stadium" movie house—the sanctuary every Saturday afternoon of my childhood, the great dark place of all my dream life. On my left the little wooden synagogue where I learned my duties as a Jew and at thirteen, having reached the moral estate of a man, stood up at the high desk before the Ark (Blessed be He, Our Lord and Our Shield!) and was confirmed in the faith of my fathers.

  Right hand and left hand: two doorways to the East. But the first led to music I heard in the dark, to inwardness; the other to ambiguity. That poor worn synagogue could never in my affections compete with that movie house, whose very lounge looked and smelled to me like an Oriental temple. It had Persian rugs, and was marvelously half-lit at all hours of the day; there were great semi-arcs of colored glass above the entrance to the toilets, and out of the gents' came a vaguely foreign, deliciously stinging deodorant that prepared me, on the very threshold of the movie auditorium itself, for the magic within. There was never anything with such expectancy to it as that twilit lounge. I would even delay in it a little, to increase my pleasure in what lay ahead; and often shut my eyes just as I entered the auditorium, knowing that as soon as I opened them again a better world would take me in.

  In the wonderful darkness of the movies there was nothing to remind me of Brownsville—nothing but the sudden alarm of a boy who, reminding himself at six o'clock that it was really time to get home, would in his haste let himself out by the great metal fire door in front. Then the gritty light on Bristol Street would break up the images on the screen with a meanness that made me shudder.

  I always feared that light for the same reason: it seemed to mock imagination. I could never finally leave the movies, while the light of Saturday afternoon still filled the streets, without feeling the sadness that Spinoza describes as coming after lust, and would stare amazed, numb and depleted at the mica dots gleaming in the pavement and at the people still busily moving up and down Chester Street. There was something in the everyday look of the streets that reproached me; they seemed to know I had come back to them unwillingly. But deep inside the darkness of the movies everything that was good in life, everything that spoke straight to the imagination, began in some instant dark fusion between the organ music from the pit and the cycles of terror that started up again each Saturday afternoon in the "episodes." Walking home afterward, everything I felt came to me as the first ominously repeated notes of Schubert's Unfinished when the hero jumped from roof to roof just ahead of the crooks; the horn calls in Weber's overture to Oberon when Tarzan fell into the lion trap, his mouth opening in a silent scream I heard all along my spine; Sinding's Rustle of Spring when the sky darkened just before a storm—music that was as uncontainable as water or light or air, that shifted its course with each new breath it took, and showed me the rapids, the storms, the plunging mountain falls of consciousness itself. Where were those notes racing in me? Oh where were they racing? What had that music been preparing for me so deep in the bowels of the earth? Whenever that shadowy organist in the pit, whose face I could never see as he bent over the faintly lighted rows of keys, began one of those three pieces he played for "episodes," my throat would beat wildly in premonition, but I knew a secret happiness, as if my mind had at last been encouraged to seek its proper concerns.

  Not so in the synagogue. It was dark enough, but without any illusion or indulgence for a boy; and it had a permanently stale smell of snuff, of vinegar, of beaten and scarred wood in the pews, of the rebbitsiris cooking from the kitchen next door, of the dusty velvet curtains over the Ark, of the gilt brocade in the prayer shawls, of ancient prayer books and commentaries which in their chipped black bindings and close black print on the yellowing paper looked as if they had come down to us from Moses and the Prophets, with the reverent kiss of each generation in the margins. The synagogue was old, very old; it must once have been a farmhouse; it was one of the oldest things in Brownsville and in the world; it was old in every inch of the rotting wooden porch, in the crevices deep in the doors over the Ark, in the little company of aged and bearded men smelling of snuff who were to be seen there every day at twilight, wrapped in their black-striped prayer shawls, their eyes turned to Jerusalem, mumbling and singing in their threadbare voices—"Blessed, praised, glorified, extolled and exalted shall be the Holy Name of the Supreme King of Kings! Blessed is He, for He is the First and the Last, and besides Him there is no God!"

  As it was for Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Benjamin ... Old as the synagogue was, old as it looked and smelled in its every worn and wooden corner, it seemed to me even older through its ties to that ancestral world I had never seen. Its very name, Dugschitz, was taken from the little Polish village my mother came from; everyone in the congregation was either a relative or an old neighbor—a lants-man. I belonged to that synagogue as a matter of course; I was my mother's son. My father, as an honest Social Democrat and enlightened free thinker, was tolerant in these matters, and with good-humored indifference let my mother claim me among her "brethren." When he came around to the synagogue at all, it was to exchange greetings at the New Year, and to listen, as he said, to the cantor trying for the high notes; he liked singing.

  There was another synagogue halfway down the block, much larger and no doubt more impressive in every way; I never set foot in it; it belonged to people from another province in Russia. The little wooden synagogue was "our" place. All good Dugschitzer were expected to show up in it at least once a year, had their sons confirmed in it as a matter of course, and would no doubt be buried from it when their time came. Members of the congregation referred to each other in a homely familiar way, using not the unreal second names so many Jews in Russia had been given for the Czar's census, but the first names in their familiar order—Dovid Yossel's or Khannah Sorke's; some were known simply by some distinguishing physical trait, the Rakhmiel lame in one foot. There were little twists and turns to the liturgy that were strictly "ours," a particularly nostalgic way of singing out the opening words of prayers that only Dugschitzer could possibly know. If the blind Rakhmiel—the Rakhmiel in the back bench who was so nearsighted that he might fairly be described as blind—skipped two lines in the prayer book, the sexton would clutch his hands in despair and call out mockingly, "Beneshalelem; Bless the Lord! Will you just listen to the way he reads?"There were scornful little references to the way outsiders did things—people from Warsaw, for example, who gave every sound a pedantic roll; or Galicians, who, as everyone knew, were coarse-grained, had no taste, took cream with herring, and pronounced certain words in so uncouth a manner that it made you ache with laughter just to hear them. What did it matter that our congregation was poor, our synagogue small and drab? It was sufficient to the handful of us in Brownsville, and from birth to death would re-gather us in our ties to God, to the tradition of Israel, and to each other. On a Saturday when a boy had been confirmed, and the last loving proud Amen! had been heard from the women where they sat at the back separated from us by a gauze curtain, and a table in an open space between the pews had been laden with nut-cake, fruit, herring, and wine, and the brethren had gathered to toast the boy and his parents and each other in their rejoicing for Israel, we were all—no matter what we knew of each other or had suffered from each other—one plighted family.

  Though there was little in the ritual that was ever explained to me, and even less in the atmosphere of the synagogue that in my heart I really liked, I assumed that my feelings in the matter were of no importance; I belonged there before the Ark, with the men, sitting next to an uncle. I felt a loveless intimacy with the place. It was not exclusively a house of "worship," not frigid and formal as we knew all churches were. It had been prayed in and walked through and lived in with such easy familiarity that it never seemed strange to come on young boys droning their lessons under the long twisted yellow flytrap hung from the ceiling, the shammes, the sexton, waddling about in his carpet slippers carrying a fly swatter, mumbling old Hebrew tunes
to himself—Ái! Bái! Biddle Bái Dóm!—as he dashed after a fly, while his wife, whom we mockingly called the rebbitsin, the rabbi's wife, red-faced over her pots in the kitchen next door, shrieked curses against the boys playing punchball in the street —bandits and murderers, she would call the police!—who were always just about to break her windows. The wood in the benches and in the high desk before the Ark had taken on with age and long use such a deep rosy mirror shine that on those afternoons when I strayed in on my way back from school, I would think that if only I bent over it long enough I might see my own face reflected in the wood. I never did. Secretly, I thought the synagogue a mean place, and went only because I was expected to. Whenever I crossed the splintered and creaking porch into that stale air of snuff, of old men and old books, and saw the dusty gilt brocade on the prayer shawls, I felt I was being pulled into some mysterious and ancient clan that claimed me as its own simply because I had been born a block away. Whether I agreed with its beliefs or not, I belonged; whether I assented to its rights over me or not, I belonged; whatever I thought of them, no matter how far I might drift from that place, I belonged. This was understood in the very nature of things; I was a Jew. It did not matter how little I knew or understood of the faith, or that I was always reading alien books; I belonged, I had been expected, I was now to take my place in the great tradition.

  For several months before my confirmation at thirteen, I appeared every Wednesday afternoon before a choleric old melamed, a Hebrew teacher, who would sit across the table eating peas, and with an incredulous scowl on his face listen to me go over and over the necessary prayers and invocations, slapping me sharply on the hands whenever I stammered on a syllable. I had to learn many passages by heart, but never understood most of them, nor was I particularly expected to understand them; it was as if some contract in secret cipher had been drawn up between the Lord of Hosts and Gita Fayge's son Alfred which that Amerikaner idiót, as the melamed called me, could sign with an x. In the "old country" the melamed might possibly have encouraged me to understand the text, might even have discussed it with me. Here it was understood that I would go through the lessons simply for form's sake, because my mother wished to see me confirmed; the melamed expected nothing more of me. In his presence I stammered more wildly than ever, and on each line. "Idiót!"he would scream. "They have produced an idiót in you, idiót! "Sitting back in his chair, he would hear me out with a look of contemptuous resignation as I groaned and panted my way to the end of each passage, heave sighs of disgust at the ceiling, and mechanically take up some peas to throw them into his mouth one by one, always ready to lean across the table with his bitter smile and slap my hands.

  Still, I had to go through with it; I was a Jew. Yet it puzzled me that no one around me seemed to take God very seriously. We neither believed nor disbelieved. He was our oldest habit. For me, He was horribly the invisible head above the Board of Superintendents, the Almighty Judge Who watched you in every thought and deed, and to Whom I prayed for help in passing midterms and finals, His prophetess Deborah leading me safely through so long as I remembered to say under my breath as I walked in the street, "Desolate were the open towns in Israel, they were desolate, until that I arose, Deborah."He filled my world with unceasing dread; He had such power over me, watched me so unrelentingly, that it puzzled me to think He had to watch all the others with the same care; one night I dreamed of Him as a great engineer in some glass-walled control tower high in the sky glaring fixedly at a brake on which my name alone was written. In some ways He was simply a mad tyrant, someone I needed constantly to propitiate. Deborah alone would know how to intercede for me. Then He became a good-luck piece I carried around to get me the things I needed. I resented this God of Israel and of the Board of Superintendents; He would never let me rest.

  I could not even speak of Him to others—not to the aged and bearded men in the synagogue always smelling of snuff, who spoke of the Talmud with a complacent little smile on their faces; not to the young Zionist pioneers in their clubhouses off Pitkin Avenue, who were busily learning to be farmers in the Land of Israel and chilled me with that same complacency whenever they formed their lips around the word Jew; certainly not to those strangers standing on the steps of the little Protestant church on Rockaway or to the Italians in the new red-brick Catholic church just off East New York Avenue, at the borders of Brownsville. He was my private burden, my peculiar misfortune.

  Yet I never really wanted to give Him up. In some way it would have been hopeless to justify to myself—I had feared Him so long—He fascinated me, He seemed to hold the solitary place I most often went back to. There was a particular sensation connected with this—not of peace, not of certainty, not of goodness—but of depth; as if it were there I felt right to myself at last.

  THE KITCHEN

  THE LAST TIME I saw our kitchen this clearly was one afternoon in London at the end of the war, when I waited out the rain in the entrance to a music store. A radio was playing into the street, and standing there I heard a broadcast of the first Sabbath service from Belsen Concentration Camp. When the liberated Jewish prisoners recited the Hear O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One, I felt myself carried back to the Friday evenings at home, when with the Sabbath at sundown a healing quietness would come over Brownsville.

  It was the darkness and emptiness of the streets I liked most about Friday evening, as if in preparation for that day of rest and worship which the Jews greet "as a bride"—that day when the very touch of money is prohibited, all work, all travel, all household duties, even to the turning on and off of a light—Jewry had found its way past its tormented heart to some ancient still center of itself. I waited for the streets to go dark on Friday evening as other children waited for the Christmas lights. Even Friday morning after the tests were over glowed in anticipation. When I returned home after three, the warm odor of a coffee cake baking in the oven and the sight of my mother on her hands and knees scrubbing the linoleum on the dining room floor filled me with such tenderness that I could feel my senses reaching out to embrace every single object in our household. One Friday, after a morning in school spent on the voyages of Henry Hudson, I returned with the phrase Among the discoverers of the New World singing in my mind as the theme of my own new-found freedom on the Sabbath.

  My great moment came at six, when my father returned from work, his overalls smelling faintly of turpentine and shellac, white drops of silver paint still gleaming on his chin. Hanging his overcoat in the long dark hall that led into our kitchen, he would leave in one pocket a loosely folded copy of the New York World; and then everything that beckoned to me from that other hemisphere of my brain beyond the East River would start up from the smell of fresh newsprint and the sight of the globe on the front page. It was a paper that carried special associations for me with Brooklyn Bridge. They published the World under the green dome on Park Row overlooking the bridge; the fresh salt air of New York harbor lingered for me in the smell of paint and damp newsprint in the hall. I felt that my father brought the outside straight into our house with each day's copy of the World. The bridge somehow stood for freedom; the World for that rangy kindness and fraternalism and ease we found in Heywood Broun. My father would read aloud from "It Seems To Me" with a delighted smile on his face. "A very clear and courageous man!" he would say. "Look how he stands up for our Sacco and Vanzetti! A real social conscience, that man! Practically a Socialist!" Then, taking off his overalls, he would wash up at the kitchen sink, peeling and gnawing the paint off his nails with Gold Dust Washing Powder as I poured it into his hands, smacking his lips and grunting with pleasure as he washed himself clean of the job at last, and making me feel that I was really helping him, that I, too, was contributing to the greatness of the evening and the coming day.

  By sundown the streets were empty, the curtains had been drawn, the world put to rights. Even the kitchen walls had been scrubbed and now gleamed in the Sabbath candles. On the long white tablecloth were the "company" dishes,
filled for some with gefillte fish on lettuce leaves, ringed by red horseradish, sour and half-sour pickles, tomato salad with a light vinegar dressing; for others, with chopped liver in a bed of lettuce leaves and white radishes; the long white khalleh, the Sabbath loaf; chicken soup with noodles and dumplings; chicken, meat loaf, prunes, and sweet potatoes that had been baked all day into an open pie; compote of prunes and quince, apricots and orange rind; applesauce; a great brown nut-cake filled with almonds, the traditional lekakh; all surrounded by glasses of port wine, seltzer bottles with their nozzles staring down at us waiting to be pressed; a samovar of Russian tea, svetouchnee from the little red box, always served in tall glasses, with lemon slices floating on top. My father and mother sipped it in Russian fashion, through lumps of sugar held between the teeth.