A Book of Great Worth Read online

  “But weren’t you sad?” Esther asked.

  “Yes, of course, I was very sad,” my father said.

  “And is it true, you never saw them again?” Benjy asked. He was speaking Yiddish and he chose his words carefully.

  “Yes,” my father said.

  “And they’re dead now?” Esther asked. The children already had some knowledge of this concept, having helped my father bury several dead birds they’d found.

  “Yes,” said my father, “and that’s why it’s so important that you should meet your grandparents now, while you have the chance. They’re old.”

  “And is it true that Mommy hasn’t seen her Mommy and Daddy for years and years?”

  “That’s right, Esthela.” My father took the little girl in his arms. “Do you ever get mad at Mommy? Or at Daddy?”

  “Sometimes.”

  My father smiled. “And you, Benjy?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And do you sometimes get so mad you think, ‘I wish they were dead,’ or think about running away and never coming home, just to show them, to make them feel bad?”

  The children pouted. Esther sucked her thumb. My father gently tugged at her hand until it came away. “Tell the truth now.”

  “Sometimes,” Benjy said.

  “...times,” Esther echoed.

  “You have to be careful what you wish for,” my father said. “Sometimes wishes come true and you don’t like it so much and you can’t take them back.”

  “Is that what Mommy did?” Esther asked.

  “What do you think?” my father asked.

  •••

  My father was milking. He sat on the stool, his head pressed against the warm side of the cow, his fingers wrapped around the teats, squeezing, that peculiar rhythm as if they were an instrument and he was making music.

  Over the last week, the festering situation in Europe had erupted into full-fledged hostilities, with war being declared between Germany and Russia on the first day of August, followed, in rapid succession, by German invasions of France and Poland, and Britain joining the fray a day later. At breakfast just that morning, they had heard on the radio that Russian troops had crossed the border into Prussia and an Eastern Front was fully inflamed, including Austria-Hungary and Serbia. Although the fighting was far away from Peekskill, it was possible for my father to imagine troops marching through the village where, just ten years ago, he had lived as a boy.

  Naturally, he was upset, and confused. News reports from Washington suggested that the United States was unlikely to become involved, at least not for a while, and it was unclear whether someone like my father, a native of an area under arms, or soon to be, would be expected to fight in any event. He was anxious to return to New York and be with his family, but had promised the Pearlmans he would stay until Hillary’s parents’ arrival, scheduled in just a week’s time.

  Already the situation at the Pearlmans’ estate was becoming ugly.

  The previous evening, at dinner, Robert Pearlman, home for the weekend, and Ernst Schmidt had engaged in a bitter argument, Schmidt, predictably, on the side of Germany, Pearlman favouring the Allies. The fact that the Pearlman family had lived for generations in Germany before immigrating to the United States did not mitigate his views one bit. The argument had ended with Schmidt calling his employer “a colonial apologist,” the women and children in tears and Pearlman ordering the farm manager out of his house, Betty rushing after him. There were no nightcaps that night, nor did either of the Schmidts come to the house for breakfast. Earlier, Schmidt had been in the barn as usual when my father arrived for the morning milking, lightning bolts blazing from his reddened eyes, or so it seemed to my father, but the two men had managed to avoid each other. Oscar, the part-time hired man, was there to help out, as was usual on a Saturday.

  My father, who had no head for politics, had stayed out of the argument, saying barely a word through dinner, then going directly to his room after helping Hillary put the agitated children to bed. He had wanted to say something comforting to her, perhaps to put his hand gently on her shoulder, but he had resisted, instead willing his attention to be focused on Benjy and Esther. For a moment, as they adjusted the covers on Esther’s bed, Hillary on one side, my father on the other, she gave him a look that confused him. He lay awake in bed for hours wondering if it had conveyed desire or simply gratitude.

  Breakfast had been quiet, the children still sulky, Betty conspicuously absent from the kitchen. Ordinarily, on a Saturday, Schmidt, who seemed indifferent to religion, would drive the Pearlmans into Peekskill for morning services at the synagogue, but there was no mention of such a trip today.

  The day passed uneventfully, my father occupied with the children, who had many questions. They wanted to know why their father and Mr. Schmidt, as they called him, had argued, what war was, where Germany and Russia and France and the other countries they were suddenly hearing about were. My father found an atlas in the library and spent a long time with the children pointing out key locations and, in as simple a way as he could, explaining geopolitics. This actually calmed him, since it helped to clarify his own thinking on the situation in Europe.

  On a map of Germany, he showed the children Berlin and Leipzig, where he knew the Pearlmans had originated, and other geographical points. He showed them, on a large map of eastern Europe, Lithuania, from whence their mother’s family came, and the area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire straddling parts of Poland and the Ukraine where he and his own family had lived.

  “Why do people move around so much?” Benjy wanted to know.

  “They want a better life,” my father answered. “For themselves, and especially their children.”

  “Why are bad people so dumb dumb?” Esther asked petulantly, and my father laughed.

  “Only God knows that, Esthela.”

  The Schmidts had remained out of sight most of the day. But as it was Saturday, that wasn’t unusual. The Pearlman household wasn’t particularly religious, but other than the basic farm chores there was no work done on the place, and meals were simple, and usually cold, sliced meats from a delicatessen in Peekskill or cheese and bread and fruit. That’s what the meals had been this Saturday, and there was little talk at the table. Even Robert Pearlman, usually garrulous, was quiet and, save for one moment at dinner when he gave my father a long appraising look, kept his eyes on his plate. My father’s own eyes, as furtively as he could manage, strayed often to Hillary’s lovely face, but her eyes too were mostly lowered.

  When my father came to the barn for the evening milking, there was no sign of Schmidt. Even Oscar was nowhere to be seen.

  He brought in the cows, with the help of the yapping dog, and locked them into their stanchions. Milking all of them by himself would take a while, and they would soon be bellowing with impatience, but he knew he could do it. He didn’t want to bother Pearlman, and doubted if the jeweller could milk a cow at any rate.

  He was on the third cow, one of the Guernseys, and the rich smell of warm milk rising from the pail was beginning to intoxicate him, when he became aware of the presence of someone nearby. He turned his head, raising his eyes, to see Schmidt leaning against the barn wall, watching him with a jaundiced eye.

  “So you choose to remain a lackey, Harry,” the farm manager said scornfully. The smell of whisky wafted off him like a cloud of flies around a cow’s head.

  “I choose to do what is expected of me,” my father replied simply. He went on with the milking.

  Schmidt was wearing his jodhpurs and boots as usual, and, my father noticed with some alarm, held the shotgun loosely against his hip.

  “I can’t abide this fool Pearlman, this traitor, another minute,” he said, ignoring my father’s comment. “Betty and I leave for New York in the morning, then on to Germany. You’d be well advised to do the same.”

  My father was acutely conscious of the shotgun, and of Schmidt’s volatility, but he had made up his mind not to be bullied.

&
nbsp; “This is our country now,” he said, resting his head against the Guernsey’s flank. “And it’s definitely Betty’s country.”

  “You’re a fool,” Schmidt replied mildly. He made no move. “And my wife is none of your business.”

  “I’m the fool?”

  The two men eyed each other, with suspicion and contempt, until my father finished with the Guernsey, slapping her affectionately on the rump as he rose. He moved the stool and pail down the row to the next cow, a Jersey that rolled her tongue and shook her head with impatience. “Okay, Bossy, good girl,” my father murmured soothingly. The tension between the two men was palpable, the silence broken now only by the hissing of milk into the pail.

  “Harry...” Schmidt began, his tone menacing, and he took a step forward, the shotgun rising involuntarily with his movement, but before he could say another word or my father could react, there was a rattle from the barn door. Oscar stood there, his usual good-natured but baffled grin on his vacant face. “Late,” he said with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “Sleep.”

  “Grab a pail,” my father said. Relief coursed through him, and he buried his face in the cow’s warm hide for a moment. When he looked up, Schmidt was gone.

  The milking done, my father bade Oscar good night and paused on his way to the house for a moment in the empty barnyard, wiping his hands. Although it was only early evening, the sun was already low and red in the sky to the west – it was August and days were getting noticeably shorter. The days remained hot but evenings were cooler and it was easier to sleep. With Schmidt and Betty gone, he imagined the Pearlmans might want him to stay on longer to help with the chores until something else could be arranged, maybe even through the grandparents’ visit. He would do that, he resolved, do whatever was asked of him. But soon his time on the farm would end and he’d be returning to the city and, as was becoming increasingly evident, an uncertain future. He had no way of knowing that his time with the Pearlmans would serve him well and that once again he’d be working on a farm.

  He looked over to the silent Pearlman house, where no lights glowed. The Schmidt house was similarly unlit, but he could hear, from within its walls, shouting, a man’s gruff bark, followed by a woman’s high keen. Then silence. It was hard to believe that Betty would really follow Schmidt to Germany, but the depth of mystery that surrounded women continued to confound and astound him. He shook his head in puzzlement. There was another shout, and a clatter from the Schmidt house, as if dishes or pots had been thrown against a wall.

  My father stood motionless in the dusk.

  • • •

  The Wisdom of Solomon

  There he was in Cleveland. My father liked to use this expression for his life in those days: “I was still chasing the donkey, trying to pin the tail to it.” The donkey had led him away from New York and out west, where his intention was to see some of the world and, hopefully, write about it. But he’d gotten no further than Chicago, where he holed up in a cheap hotel room for several weeks and wrote, in longhand, the bulk of a novel, a fanciful tale of a sensitive boy growing up in the Lower East Side that owed much to Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. When his money ran out, he burned the manuscript – a surprisingly satisfying ritual – and he circled back to Cleveland, where he’d heard, from a poet fleeing the place, of a job on a Yiddish newspaper. His father and brother were both well-known journalists, and it had been important for him to make his own name, on his own, and he’d gone so far, once he got to Cleveland, as actually to change his name, to Morgenstern, which means morning star. Now, at last, he had his first real job on a newspaper, though it wasn’t quite what he had expected, and was beginning what he hoped would be a glorious career. If not glorious, then at least exciting, interesting. He saw himself as Don Quixote, the hero of the famous novel he had recently read, tilting at windmills – righting wrongs – not with a lance but a pen. First, though, he had to learn to type.

  And he held in his hands the hearts of thousands of readers. That was his chief concern.

  “My husband beats me and the children. What should I do?”

  A reader had posed this question in a letter and my father considered his answer with gravity. If he advised her to be a dutiful wife and bear what her husband meted out, he might be sentencing her to a life of drudgery, frustration and pain, and possibly even worse for the children. On the other hand, what if he suggested she leave the man – what sort of life would she and her children face, without a roof over their heads and a source of food, clothing and protection? Even the middle ground was fraught with danger, he could see: should he urge her to talk to her husband, to try to mollify him, she might instead provoke him into even more extreme acts of violence. Lives might well hang in the balance.

  How to respond?

  •••

  It was 1920, and my father was twenty-seven; as he liked to say, he was always a few years older than the century.

  The Cleveland Jewish World – Der Velt – had a grand title, but the paper itself was somewhat less than grand. Its circulation was barely fifty thousand, just a fraction of that of the big Yiddish dailies of New York City, but it saw itself playing a role just as important in the lives of the Jews of Cleveland and other cities in Ohio, bringing them not just news but education, entertainment and literature. It was that part that most interested my father, who had been writing a novel and poems, but he was assigned more mundane tasks at first, not the least of which were obituaries. He got a crash course in the history of Cleveland as he succinctly documented the lives of its Jewish residents as they died. “People are dying to get into our pages,” my father’s boss, Everett Heshberg, told him. “It’s the last time most of them ever will. Some of them, the first time too. Treat them with respect.”

  My father’s chief job, though, was as news writer, another grand title that was somewhat less than it sounded. The World subscribed to the Associated Press news wire, which, of course, came in English. First thing in the morning, Heshberg, who as managing editor was the heart and soul of the paper, went through the overnight dispatches, selecting stories he thought would be of interest to his readers. This included local items of government, politics, human interest and even crime – the same stories which that day would appear (or already had the previous day) in the front pages of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, which had, in fact, originated most of the local and state AP items. He also selected many stories from Europe, which was still recovering and reorganizing from the ravages of the Great War. Cleveland’s Jews came from many parts of Europe – Germany, Romania, Russia, Hungary, Latvia, Galicia and elsewhere – and were hungry for news of home, even if they no longer really considered those distant countries their homes.

  My father and another young man, who was somewhat senior to him, shared the translation duties, which he enjoyed. The trick was not so much to translate literally as to read the story, absorb it and write it fresh in Yiddish as if the story were his own. My father was ideally suited for such a task, as he was fluent in both English and Yiddish, and could write quickly, though his two-finger attack at the typewriter was the cause of much amusement in The World newsroom. When he had time to spare, he practiced ten-finger typing but it seemed hopeless.

  There was little spare time, though. The World was an afternoon paper, meaning it appeared on the street shortly after noon. My father reported for work at six in the morning and wrote news till the nine-thirty deadline. Then he turned his attention to the death notices sent in by the Jewish funeral homes. As Heshberg had explained it to him, “Each death represents a life, and each life is a story.” Again, my father’s job was to translate, taking the bare essentials of those lives – the facts provided by the families for the mortuaries – and turn them into interesting stories, occasionally taking liberties.

  “Do not fabricate,” Heshberg counselled, “but bend.”

  This suited my father fine, for he was attempting, as he saw it, to tailor the soul of a poet into the mind of a journalist.
Each obituary, in his hands, became a poem.

  News and obituaries occupied almost all of my father’s time – after that day’s paper was put to bed, as the expression went, the process would immediately begin again for the next day’s edition – but they took up only a small part of the paper, which was mostly filled with articles by real writers on all manner of subjects: essays on philosophical and theological subjects, usually written by learned rabbis; treatises on history, civics and politics; and educational articles that helped the Jewish immigrant community of Ohio in establishing their lives in this new world: how to apply for citizenship, how to get a driver’s licence, the rights of a tenant and so on. Then there were poems, short stories, condensed novels, literary criticism. This is what my father aspired to but he knew he had to earn the right to it. So he was both thrilled and chagrined when Heshberg asked him to write the advice column.

  The newspapers of New York were filled with such columns, which were wildly popular. Abe Cahan, the great editor at The Forward, the Socialist paper, had invented the form, which he called the Bintel Brief, Yiddish for a bundle of letters, but all the other Yiddish papers had followed, even the religious papers, which at first considered themselves too serious for such a seemingly trivial feature. But readers demanded it. Regardless of what paper they read, they had questions, often much the same ones. Even the English papers, like the Sun and the Telegram in New York, seeing all the fuss, were quick to follow.

  Native-born readers and well-established immigrants, though, were less likely to pose the utilitarian questions of the recent arrivals, so the columns established by the English papers quickly narrowed their focus to the lovelorn. Heshberg made it clear to my father that his column would involve much more than just letters from unhappy lovers. This was just as well, since my father, who was still a bachelor, was one of the least likely men on earth to give advice on affairs of the heart, as soon would be evident.