Kiss and Make-Up (5 page)

For me, as a kid, this was a new world, and I was trying to soak it all up. Later, though, I learned two stories about my mother’s experiences in this immigration process that helped me to understand it better. At the time, only a certain number of people were allowed to come to the United States from Israel. My mother was very striking as a young woman, and apparently she convinced one of the authorities, either with her looks or with her people skills, to move our papers out from the bottom of the pile and to the top. That way we were able to get out of Israel and come to the United States. That’s the first story.

The second one involves the fact that my mother had to take an oath before leaving Israel. She saw the American official at the embassy, and he couldn’t speak Hebrew, and she couldn’t speak English. They fumbled around and eventually hit on a common language, German. He asked her a series of questions about her political beliefs. They were trying to gauge her suitability for coming to
America. The first question was, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Those were the kinds of things that people were asked in those days. Literally: “Are you a member of the Communist Party? Do you have secret plans to overthrow the American government?” Who’s going to say yes? She said no. So the interview went fine, and then it came time for her to take this oath, and the official said, “Please raise your right hand.” I guess my mother was a bit flustered at that time, and Jews don’t do the same swearing on the Bible that Christians do, so she stuck her hand straight out the way the Nazis do. He started laughing, and he told my mother, “No, don’t worry, you’ll never have to do that ever again.” That was very profound, I think. That marked the change we were about to undergo. The Nazis had hung over her like a shadow ever since the war. It was so painful that she didn’t like to talk about it. But now we were going somewhere that would help to make all that a distant memory.

When we got to New York City, my mother and I went to stay with her brother Larry and his wife, Magda, in Flushing, Queens. I was, at that time, no longer Chaim Witz. I had taken the name Gene for my first name, because it was more American than Chaim, and I had taken Klein because it was my mother’s maiden name. In Old Testament Jewish law, it’s a matriarchal society, so once your father leaves or dies, your mother’s maiden name becomes your name. So I was not Chaim Witz, Israeli. I was Gene Klein, new American. And I do mean new American. I was eight and a half years old when we arrived, and there were so many things that I just couldn’t understand, things that were so foreign to me. One of the first things I remember seeing was a Christmas billboard for Kent cigarettes, with a picture of Santa Claus smoking. He had this big cherubic face, and in the background the reindeer were up in the sky waiting for Santa to join them. Since I had never really heard of Christ or Christmas or Santa Claus, I immediately thought, “Oh, that’s a rabbi smoking a cigarette.” I figured that he must have been a Russian rabbi, because of all the snow in the background.

The other impression I had was that the place exceeded my imagination in every possible way. There’s this stereotype of foreigners who come to America—they keep their heads up, so they can see all of these unimaginable vistas, streets that never end, rows of houses that never end. Coming from Israel, there was nothing to prepare me, and that’s exactly how I was. I walked around with my head up and my eyes wide open. As usual, the best way I can describe how I felt is with a scene from a movie, although it’s a movie that would come out a number of years later:
Moscow on the Hudson
, with Robin Williams. He plays a guy who comes to America from Russia, and he’s fresh off the boat, and he goes into a supermarket and walks up to one of the floor managers and says, “Excuse me, which way is coffee?” in his broken English. And the floor manager, polite as can be, says, “Aisle 13.” Aisle 13? What does that mean? So the guy says again, “Aisle 13, sir. All of Aisle 13.” So when Robin Williams goes down to that aisle, there are literally hundreds of brands of coffee. He can’t believe his eyes. He just starts repeating the word, “Coffee, coffee, coffee!” and eventually he collapses, and all the coffee falls on him.

Passport photos of my mother and myself, in 1958. She was thirty-two and I was eight and a half.

That was my experience of America. The stores were like football fields full of food. I had never seen anything so big. In Israel, there was no such thing as brands. You wanted milk, you got milk. You wanted eggs, you got eggs. Here there were hundreds of kinds of breads, hundreds of kinds of meat. And when you walked outside, people were wearing hundreds of kinds of shoes and hats, driving hundreds of kinds of cars.

I would like to say that I quickly grew sophisticated in America. But the truth is far different. When I first walked into my uncle George’s house, which, like his brother Larry’s, was also in Flushing, Queens, it must have been around dinnertime one night, and the television was tuned to the news. In those days, the television sets were huge—six feet long or so—and most of the piece was furniture, because it was the centerpiece of the room; it was considered bad taste just to have a TV screen. So here I come, fresh off the plane, and there’s a close-up of a man’s face on the screen reading the news. I actually went around behind the furniture to see where the guy was. That was my first impression of television, which later bloomed into a full-fledged love affair. But at the time, it was just another thing that I didn’t really understand.

The refrigerator was another source of amazement for me. I opened it up and found these huge bottles of soda, and I didn’t even have a word for them yet. (I called them
gazoz
, the Hebrew word for soda.) Then there was Bosco chocolate syrup, which I used to squirt directly into my mouth, and ketchup, which I loved so much that I used to make ketchup sandwiches. My cousins would just sit at the table and watch me eat, because of the combinations of food that I would invent. Wonder Bread was like cake to me. We would sit down to dinner, and I’d just start eating slice after slice of Wonder Bread. And my aunt and my mom would say, “No, no, you have to eat right.” And I would think, “Eat right? What’s wrong with this?”

That first year, my life changed, and changed again. My uncle Larry had two daughters, and they were older than I was, and though they were kind to me, they viewed me as a curiosity. One of my cousins, Eva, let me ride her bicycle, which I thought was a gift from heaven. I rode it around the block what must have been a hundred
times. A native-born American kid would have just crossed the street, but I had never crossed the street before, and there were cars going by, and I didn’t know what to do. In Israel we didn’t have stop signs, red lights, or green lights, at least not where I lived. So I kept going around the block. I didn’t feel limited, though. It was fantastic just to ride around and around the block.

Then one day I saw two kids on the other side playing marbles. Up until then I hadn’t had much interaction with other kids, because I would start talking to them, and pretty soon I would get this strange look and this series of questions, “What? Are you stupid? Can’t you speak English?” And I couldn’t. I could barely understand anything. But these kids playing marbles intrigued me, because I had four or five marbles that my cousins let me have, and I also had skills—back in Israel I had been very adept at playing marbles. And the Israeli style of playing marbles was different: in America you used your thumb as the aiming mechanism, but in Israel you played standing up. I knew that I could hit a marble standing up, from maybe four or five feet away. These guys saw me coming across the street and knew that I was a rube, and they tried to take my marbles away. They explained the rules, and I quickly understood that there was a circle, and anything you hit out of the circle with your marble was yours. If your marble stayed in there, you lost your turn. By the end of the day, I won all their marbles, well over a hundred. I’ve still got all those marbles saved in the same Dutch Masters cigar box that my aunt Magda gave me. Those kids didn’t think I was stupid in the end.

I loved being with my uncles. My uncle Larry was a baker. He made cakes, so he was my hero. One of his best, and one of my favorites, was this amazing poppyseed cake. And my uncle George was a prosthodontist. He made teeth for people who wore false teeth. He also made fake testicles for people who had lost their own. I’m not making that up. Both Larry and George worked hard and made good livings, and they were very generous to my mother and me. Still, about a year after we came to America, my mother decided that she needed to strike out on her own, rather than stay with her brother. My uncle Larry was happy to have us, but we were living
in the basement, and she wanted to go to work and make her own way. So within a year, she put me into a Hasidic yeshiva—the Jewish equivalent of a theological seminary—in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, while she worked at a button and buttonhole factory. The factory was nonunion, a sweatshop, and she made a penny for every button that she sewed onto a coat. She was making about $150 a week, which was a lot of money at that time, and an awful lot of buttons. She had to lift the coat, sew on one button, and then the next, and then lift each completed coat and hang it on a hanger. It was seven until seven, six days a week, of back-breaking work.

While my mother was at the button factory, I was staying with a family in Williamsburg, the Schainers. They were part of the Hasidic Jewish support system, people in the community who accepted boarders to give kids a chance to go to yeshiva. They didn’t have any kids of their own; they were an older couple, or seemed older, although they were probably in their forties. They were very kind to me, and I remember seeing the first private telephone in someone’s house. It was another wondrous sight.

My schedule was grueling. It wasn’t the button factory, of course, but at seven o’clock in the morning, wearing a yarmulke and dressed in black, I started in on a very thorough Jewish religious schooling. The first half of the day was spent on the Old Testament, Torah studies, and Bible stories. Then we had a half-hour break, and by twelve-thirty we were back in school for fundamental academics: reading, writing, arithmetic, and so on. At six, when we were already tired from the school day, we would move from one building—at 206 Wilson Street in Williamsburg—to another building, at South Third Street and Bedford Avenue, and gather for a group meal. Then after the meal, we would have more class, evening Bible study, until nine-thirty. Then when I would go home to the Schainers, I would have homework. This was six days a week, not five. On Saturdays we were expected to go to temple, both in the morning and in the evening. With this kind of schedule, one thing was for certain: you were never going to get into trouble. I lived in a poor area, but it was a happy neighborhood. We didn’t know any better.

Slowly I learned how to get around in this new world, and I
learned to speak English, which wasn’t always easy. One of my early language lessons was with the phrase
Come here.
I thought it meant “Come here,” but what I didn’t realize was that there were two different phrases. One was
Come here
, and that meant “Come here.” The other was
C’mere
, and that meant “I’m going to kick your ass.” Originally, with my extremely limited English, I wore a name tag with my address, saying, “Please point me in the direction of this address.” Even when I was able to get by, after about a year, I still sounded like Latka, Andy Kaufman’s character from
Taxi.
I would say, “What time it is?” instead of “What time is it?” and I had a very thick accent. I remember other kids constantly making fun of me. “What’s the matter?” they would say. “Are you stupid? Can’t you even speak English?” That always struck me as bizarre. I always knew the difference between being stupid and simply not being able to speak a language. It’s okay, though. Later on in life, they would all work for me.