Mitla Pass (46 page)

Later that night, when they had all gone home, Bubba heated a pan of hot water, added Epsom salts, and placed it on the floor so Momma could soak her feet.

Momma had given me a thousand kisses that day, so I’ll never forget it. She was braiding my hair when Bubba said to speak Yiddish so the child won’t understand. Even at the age of four, I could understand Yiddish pretty well, but pretended not to. That way, I could learn more family secrets like just how much Bubba hated Zayde Moses.

“... There was this huge woman jailer, who takes you into a little side room and orders you to take off all your clothing in front of her, down to the last stitch. I promise you, she hadn’t had a bath in three weeks,” my mother said. “You could see in her hair, little white lice eggs.” I found out later that any woman my mother didn’t like had lice eggs in her hair.

“Don’t worry, darling,” Bubba said, “every uphill has a downhill.”

“Oh, she enjoyed her job, if you know what I mean. She implied to me that in exchange for favors to her, I would be given special treatment. She couldn’t take her eyes off me. It gave me a chill all over.”

“I always have said that the road to hell is just as bad as arriving there.”

“We learned that the strip-search room had a two-way mirror, so the policemen could watch. They were looking upon me without a stitch on. You can’t believe my humiliation. One of the girls, the Italian, Teresa, was having her period. It didn’t make one iota of difference.”

“Here, darling, eat, I have to put some flesh back on your bones.”

“I nibbled a bit here, a bit there, until we called the hunger strike. But there were mice droppings on everything, and the cockroaches were the size of dogs. It was almost a relief to go on a hunger strike.”

“I tried to get food to you,” Bubba said. “I begged on bended knees. That police sergeant was a regular hoodlum. Maybe they thought I’d baked a gun inside the cake already.”

“As a principled human being,” my momma said, “I don’t hold it against Dominick Abruzzi that he works with animals, but Pearl, God help her, would be well rid of him.”

“Let me tell you, darling, that for five days after your arrest the yellow journalist rags hardly printed a word about it. They are as dirty as that judge who sentenced you. Only when it became a national scandal did they put it on the front page. A mother could die.”

“Thank God I was in prison with them,” Momma said. “The others weren’t as strong as I was. Frankly, I became their inspiration. Only when I thought of Molly here, of never seeing my precious child again, did I falter.”

I was hugged and kissed and patted. It was nice.

“On the third night of the hunger strike, I began seeing visions,” my momma went on. “I swear, on Molly’s name, as I sit here, I heard—get a grip—the voices of Saul and Uncle Hyman. I felt myself growing weaker and weaker.”

Momma ate and scanned the coverage in the newspapers. She mumbled that her photograph in that Hearst rag did not do her justice.

“I found something in the dark horror of my prison cell, a cause, a cause I knew I would die for if necessary.”

“Don’t throw yourself into causes so fast,” Bubba answered. “You’re just coming into the bloom of life, Leah. You put this behind you. Life is life. Always remember that.”

“Momma, I’ve met Nathan Zadok. It was he who brought the lawyer who got us freed.”

Bubba did not react with joy. “Leah, you had a bad, bad experience. Tomorrow life starts all over.”

“Yes, you’re so right. A new start and maybe, just maybe, Nathan ...”

“Nathan Zadok is a fast-talking Charlie. I’ve known these radicals all my life. It’s not that I’m saying marry a Rothschild, but a church mouse is wealthy beside a Nathan Zadok.”

“Wealth? What is wealth? This little man, can you believe, speaks fifteen different languages. He knows Tolstoy, Shakespeare. He reads Jack London in Russian. The Communists are going to do something about the class struggle, the poverty, the lynchings in the South. They want to make a better world for children like Molly.”

I once again came in for a round of hugs and kisses.

“Don’t go falling hook, line, and sinker for no fast-talking Charlie,” Bubba repeated.

“I hear you, Momma, but my heart doesn’t hear you. Do you know, Nathan saw me on the picket line and fell in love with the back of my head.”

“So, that proves he’s a stupid as far as I’m concerned. Leah, I’m hoping that your next marriage, God willing, will be your final one. These boys coming in from the old country are damaged merchandise.

Wild radical ideas foam from their mouths. They don’t understand half of what they’re talking about. I have never, never seen one of those shmucks laugh.”

“I have so very much to learn from Nathan.”

“What you’ll learn is the inside of a tenement, with a leaky roof and no heat. Let them save themselves before they save the world.”

“Shakespeare ... Tolstoy ... Jack London ... and he will teach me what Marx and Lenin will accomplish for the proletariat.”

“Leah, you’ve always been a fragile little flower. You’ve just gone through a horrible experience. Give yourself a chance to breathe.”

“The Jewish Workers Federation is making enormous plans for me and the others of the Ginzburg Brothers Twelve.”

“They’re nothing but a bunch of Communist sheep in wolves’ clothing, using the misery of a slave shop to exploit you. Once, please, for God’s sake, be sensible. Nathan Zadok is a little
pisher
with a big mouth, who will never have two nickels to rub together. And where was your Mr. Hero today?”

“He was on important Party business.”

Guess who rang the doorbell? Nathan Zadok came in with copies of the
Freiheit
the Yiddish-language Communist newspaper, with a front page filled with pictures of the release of the Ginzburg Brothers Twelve.

Bubba picked up the hot-water pan and emptied it and suddenly began to mop up the kitchen, which didn’t need mopping, while Momma fed Nathan. He ate like he had just gotten off a hunger strike himself.

In no time at all, Bubba and Nathan Zadok were arguing about America.

“So let me tell you about America,” he said bitterly. “I arrive without a penny to my name. My Uncle Samuel, who owns four department stores in New England, didn’t have for me the time of day. He said, ‘I give you America, Nathan, now go get it.’”

“That’s the way we all start here, with nothing,” Bubba slashed back. “You want that you should be a millionaire on arrival?”

Nathan recounted how his family had dumped him in New York with a few dollars in his pockets. “They hated me because I knew about the failure of Zionism and Palestine, firsthand.”

“Don’t you speak against Zionism under my roof,” Bubba threatened.

He went on about a room he had in Harlem with a mean landlord. “Every morning I got up at four-thirty. That’s when the
Forward,
a reactionary newspaper, no better than Hearst, was put out on the streets. I read the job ads and, with the help of some Jewish-speaking people, found the right subways to get to the garment district. We were greenhorns, what did we know? Half the ads for jobs were for scabs to break strikes. The other half, for a day’s work in a shape-up, you had to bribe two dollars of your wages to the foreman. So we ended up most days cheating the H & H Automat for a cup tea, a slice bread.

“And the rest of the day? There was no heat in the apartment, so we gathered at the public library on Fifth Avenue to read the Yiddish periodicals and stay warm. The end of every day I put part of the
Forward
in the soles of my shoes, to cover the holes.”

During Nathan Zadok’s first winter, he went on, he got jobs as a floor sweeper, a shoveler on city snow removal crews, a custodian of the mounted police stable, also as a shoveler of horse manure.

“By springtime I got a permanent job with Barney Bloom, the
goniff
coat maker. Most of the garments were subcontracted to family sweatshops in the Bronx. I delivered unsewn parts and picked up finished coats. I had to fight my way into the subway, with two boxes that weighed forty pounds each, and walk six, eight blocks and up five stories with my
shmattes.
For eleven hours a day, six days a week, I was paid the glorious sum of ten dollars. This is your America, Mrs. Balaban? I’ll tell you about America ... with its lynchings and Jim Crow and KKK. With chain gangs, racketeers, police brutality, union busting, sweatshops, a yellow press, slums, sharecroppers, political prisoners.”

“Oh, Nathan,” Momma cried, “it’s so awful!”

“What did you expect, gold on the streets?” Bubba argued. “We are all like salmon swimming upstream. Some make it, some don’t.”

The rest of Nathan’s story we already knew. Nathan became a Communist to fight all the evils in America. The Jewish branch of the Party published a small Yiddish-language newspaper, called
Freiheit,
and he was sent to Baltimore to form a secret Communist cell and get subscriptions for the
Freiheit
Also, to infiltrate and gain control of the Garment Workers’ Union.

M
Y MOTHER
and Nathan Zadok and four women from the Ginzburg Brothers Twelve went on a victory tour. At first they wanted to leave me at home, but someone in New York decided I could be useful.

Every day we went to a different city by train or bus. We were put up in the homes of comrades. At night there would be a meeting at the local Workmen’s Circle hall, and I became a very important part of the evening.

“Fellow workers! Comrades!” Nathan Zadok would yell. “We serve notice that we will no longer accept the exploitation from the bourgeoisie like cattle to the slaughter! The Jewish trade union movement of America is on the march!”

He would get everybody stomping their feet and screaming and collections were made and people signed up for the
Freiheit.
Sometimes it was scary, because plainclothes police and stool pigeons tried to get the names and addresses and photographs of the people in the audience.

The Freiheit Choral Society would stretch across the stage and the big bosoms of the women heaved and the bald heads of the men shone.

Schwab! Schwab! Charlie Schwab!

Life’s unhappy lest you rob, from the bakers in your mills,

And the miners

In your hills.

I never really knew who Charlie Schwab was, except that he exploited the workers.

They would introduce Momma and the other four ladies of the Ginzburg Brothers Twelve and the building would creak because the noise was so thunderous. Mother would come up to the speaker’s rostrum and all the lights would be dimmed. Momma would then recite a poem she wrote in jail:

“Shackle me not to any machine,

I am flesh, I am real,

I want to see my child play in daylight,

In the sun.

Therefore I labor, I toil, I sweat,

And we will march,

From this sewer of debasement

To a golden throne,

Where only the masses are allowed, Immortal!”

I really didn’t understand it then and don’t understand it too much now, but people would be crying and clapping and whistling and Momma would cross her arms over her bosom and bow.

Then came the pledges.

“I have a pledge from the Furriers’ Union, Local 24, for fifteen dollars!”

Cheers.

The biggest night was in Detroit. We collected over three hundred dollars.

Now was my turn. Even though I was only four and not old enough to be a Young Pioneer, I was dressed in uniform with a blue skirt, white blouse, and red kerchief and I would march out with fifteen or twenty Pioneers behind me and we would sing:

“Fly higher,

And higher, And hiiiiigher,

Our emblem is The Soviet star,

With every propeller Roaring RED FRONT,

Defending the U.S.S.R.!”

When the cheering stopped, we would sing our encore:

“One, two, three

Pioneers are we,

Fighting for

The working class, Against the bourgeoisie,

HEY!”

And we’d hold up our fists in the Communist salute. Momma and the Ginzburg Brothers ladies would come to the front of the stage and she would hold me up to the audience. The Freiheit Choral Society returned to the stage and everyone in the audience arose.

“Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, Arise, ye wretched of the earth,

For justice thunders condemnation—A better worlds in birth.

No more tradition chains shall bind us,

The earth shall have a new foundation,

We have been one

WE SHALL BE ALL

’TIS THE FINAL CONFLICT LET EACH STAND IN HIS PLACE

THE INTERNATIONAL SOVIET SHALL BE THE HUMAN RACE

THE INTERNATIONAL SOVIET SHALL BE THE HUMAN RACE”

Sometimes we sang it in Yiddish. And once, in Boston, we sang it in Italian. And then we would go on to Cincinnati, or Chicago, or Pittsburgh. It was wonderful.

The last stop on the tour was Hartford. Momma and Nathan Zadok were married in a rabbi’s home, because it was Sunday and they couldn’t find a judge or justice of the peace. The manager of the tour, Comrade Dworkin, was there for the ceremony. I remember him vividly because he had an ugly, round face and two of his fingers were always brown from nicotine stains and he pinched my cheek with that hand all the time and it smelled bad. Nobody liked Comrade Dworkin, but they couldn’t say so.