My Remarkable Journey (2 page)

I’m not sure if I knew the cop. But I may have. For years, before the war started and my father went to work in the defense
plant, he’d owned a little neighborhood bar and grill. He was friendly with all the cops. The cops loved my father the way
they loved any bar owner who had a great sense of humor. I remember having my own police costume when I was very young. A
badge and a little nightstick came with it. I’d make like I was walking the beat.

The cop put me in the squad car. He told me that my father had died. Heart attack.

I didn’t cry. I remember that. I didn’t cry. I was more befuddled than anything else. It must have been difficult for the
cop. He started the car and drove. We wound through the streets of Brownsville and ended up at a movie theater.

I’ll never forget the movie,
Bataan,
starring Robert Taylor as Sergeant Bill Dane. It was about a bunch of American soldiers trying to stave off the Japanese
invasion of the Philippines.

Sergeant Dane and his patrol are ordered to blow up a bridge to stop the advancing enemy. They’re cut down one by one until
only Sergeant Dane and two others remain. The first is killed by a sniper. The second is stabbed by a Japanese soldier who’d
been playing dead. The movie ends with Sergeant Dane firing his machine gun straight into the camera at the Japanese soldiers
coming at him in one last act of courage and defiance.

I don’t remember what it was like when I got home that day. A lot about that day I’ve blocked out. My younger brother Marty
has blocked it out, too. He was only six at the time. But there are a few more memories attached.

I didn’t go to the funeral. I’d been so close to my father—yet I refused to go. I stayed at home. There must’ve been somebody
watching me, but I remember being alone. I remember bouncing a spaldeen—the Spalding rubber ball we used to play stickball—off
the front stoop.

Two other things I can tell you for sure. I never went back to that library again, and from that day on I was nervous if I
saw a squad car in my neighborhood. If one parked by my apartment building, I’d start running home, in fear that my mother
had died.

W
HAT
’
S THAT OLD JOKE
? A little boy walks in on his mother and father making love.

The boy yells, “Oh my God!” and runs out of the room.

The father says to the mother, “I better go settle him.”

So the father goes to look for the kid. Doesn’t find him in his room. Finds him upstairs in the grandmother’s room, in bed
with the grandmother.

The father says, “Oh my God!”

The kid says, “Now you know what it’s like to see someone sleeping with your mother.”

It’s hard for any kid to see his mother as a young woman. My mother was
Mom
to me, not Jennie Zeiger. While I knew how tough it was on her after my father died, it wasn’t until years later that I was
able to see the bigger picture. Jennie had a pretty rough life.

I remember her telling me about her earliest memory. It was fear—fear of the eye exam at Ellis Island.

I’ve seen photos of the packed ships coming to America at the museum on Ellis Island. But it’s impossible for me to imagine
what she felt when she first set eyes on the Statue of Liberty. She was seven years old, the youngest of seven sisters. Her
mother was with them on the SS
Arabia
, though I’m not certain about her father. It was 1907. What could a seven-year-old have known about the eye test? Would she
have even heard of the strange-sounding disease the doctors were on the lookout for? Trachoma.

Trachoma was a highly contagious eye infection often caused by overcrowded conditions and lack of sanitation. It could lead
to blindness, and doctors at Ellis Island could spot it in tiny bumps under the eyelid. Maybe, in her situation, seven-year-old
Sheine Gitlitz knew all she needed to know. Fail the eye test, and you got sent back to Russia.

How could I describe what she went through to my eight-and nine-year-old sons today? So many thoughts must have been running
through her mind.
What if my mother and sisters pass the eye test and I don’t? What will happen then?
It must have been nerve-racking for all of them. It was impossible to know what was coming. But it’s clear now. Those who
failed the eye test and were sent back to Europe were not in a good position a generation later. Hundreds of Jews in the city
my father would emigrate from, Kolomyya, in what was then Austria-Hungary and is now Ukraine, would be rounded up and executed
by Nazis in 1941. Fourteen thousand more would be sent to the Belzec death camp.

I don’t know if there was a celebration when my mother’s family all passed their physicals, or just plain relief. Sheine Gitlitz
became Jennie when she arrived in Brooklyn. When Aron Zeiger arrived on the SS
Minnekahda
sixteen years later, in 1923, he became Eddie.

Eddie took a room in the same building where my mother’s family lived. That’s how they met. There aren’t any wedding pictures
remaining. The only story passed down from their wedding day is that Eddie and Jennie went to see the play
No, No, Nanette
. I suppose that’s more significant to New York Yankee fans than anyone else. The owner of the Boston Red Sox was so eager
to bring an earlier version of the show to the stage that he sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in order to raise the money.

Jennie and Eddie were married in 1927. Jennie gave birth to a son a year later. Then the Depression hit—in more ways than
one. Their son, Irwin, was some kind of prodigy. Many years later, I remember hearing that Irwin was at a second-grade level
well before his time. His death certificate shows that he died at age four. I can’t fathom my parents’ devastation. They didn’t
get Irwin to the hospital quickly enough after he complained of stomach pains, and he died from a burst appendix.

I was born a year later—on November 19, 1933. I never saw a picture of Irwin around the house. My parents didn’t speak of
him. But the impact of his death showed up in other ways. When I was three years old I became dizzy and had ear pains. I remember
being in the back of a cab on the way to the doctor, and my father yelling at the driver, “Hurry, hurry!”

My parents poured their life into my younger brother and me. My mother overprotected us. If she had ever written a book it
would have been called
Dress Warm
. My father worked long days at the bar and grill to achieve his dream of stepping up and moving to Bensonhurst. Ahhh, Bensonhurst!
To be five minutes from Coney Island! By the sea! Now,
that
was living. Moving from Brownsville to Bensonhurst at the time must have been the difference between bringing home $5,000
and $6,000 a year. But it remained a dream.

My father didn’t get Bensonhurst. He got Pearl Harbor instead. I don’t know how my mother reacted when my father told her
he was going to enlist after the Japanese attack. It didn’t matter. My father was rejected because he was too old. So he sold
his bar and grill and went to lend a patriotic hand at a defense plant in New Jersey. His heart attack struck, I was told,
while he was in the middle of telling a joke.

Two weeks after the police officers arrived at our apartment to tell us, the next blow struck. My mother’s mother died. Jennie
Zeiger was a forty-three-year-old housewife with two kids. Eddie hadn’t left behind any insurance.

The irony is that not long after my father died, his dream came true. One of my mother’s sisters helped us find a tiny attic
apartment in Bensonhurst. The rent was something like thirty-four dollars a month. There was one slight problem. We didn’t
have money coming in to pay for it.

We got by on what was then called Relief. Inspectors used to come to our apartment to look at the meat in our refrigerator.
You weren’t supposed to have good-quality meat on our income. When you were on Relief, you were inspected to make sure that
you stayed poor.

My mother was a great seamstress. She would take in dresses to hem from people on the block for a little extra cash. We weren’t
supposed to have extra money. If people downstairs saw the inspectors coming, they’d run to tip us off and we’d scurry around
and hide the clothes that my mother was altering. When you come up poor, those are the little things you remember.

I began to notice that I couldn’t read the blackboard at school right after my father’s death. First, the teacher moved me
to the front row. Then, my eyes were tested. New York City bought me my first pair of glasses. The way it worked was, you
got a slip from what was then the equivalent of the welfare department. You’d take the slip down to the optician’s office
on 14th Street in Manhattan and they’d give you the glasses for free.

The glasses you got on Relief had wire rims. Getting called Four Eyes was bad enough. Wire rims made it worse. There was a
stigma attached. Everybody who saw you in those wire rims knew that your family was poor. I hated those glasses. Years later,
the same style actually came into fashion. But you’ll never find a picture of me after the age of ten wearing wire rims.

Looking back, it’s no wonder I couldn’t see everything that my mother was going through. I was too busy making her and everyone
else feel sorry for me. I lost interest in school—just stopped reading. I must have associated books with my father’s passing.
I’d been a very good student, even skipped third grade. Suddenly, my mother was asking teachers to forgive my missed homework
assignments because I was upset over my father’s death.

Everybody else who sang the mourner’s prayer at Hopkinson Synagogue looked at least forty years old.
Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’may rabo…
I purposely recited it in a way that provoked pity. Years later, a psychologist friend suggested that anger was the reason—anger
at my father for leaving me. I didn’t go in for analysis. He was just a friend. But I can’t think of a better explanation.
Why didn’t I go to the funeral? Why didn’t I cry? I was so close to my father. I can still see myself on his shoulders at
the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Why did I use his death to gain advantage over people? It showed even more resentment
to make everyone around me feel pity.

If a man asked my mother out on a date, my brother and I would throw things and fight with each other as soon as he walked
through the door. We’d make it impossible for anyone to want to come back. Later on, we both regretted that a great deal.
Jennie Zeiger might have had a chance at a lot more happiness, and we might have had more happiness, too.

Young, losing a son, losing a husband, losing a mother, without a job—raising two boys. My mother taught me resilience, and
she taught me by example. After a short time, she got a job as a factory seamstress. It didn’t mean much more money, but we
were able to get off Relief.

I never saw my mother buy anything for herself. She lived for her sons. She cooked and served dinner at the same time every
day. Lamb chops, well done, dripping with fat. Breaded veal cutlets. Latkes. Kasha varnishkas. Potato kugel that you would
die for. My mother didn’t know it, but she was basically cooking heart attacks. If you want to get an idea of what Eastern
European Jewish food tastes like, go to Sammy’s Roumanian Steak House on the Lower East Side of New York. It’s wonderful food.
But they hand you Bromo-Seltzer as you walk out.

It’s not hard to understand why the portions were so big in Jewish restaurants or why the meals were everything in my home.
For centuries, the Jews of Europe lived without security. Any minute your property could be confiscated, your life could be
taken, the meal you were eating could be your last. Make your meal the best and eat all of it—that was the way life was lived.
The second reason to eat everything on your plate was because of the people who didn’t have. Not eating what was in front
of you while people were starving was the biggest shame of all.

If you didn’t eat, you insulted my mother. Even if you ate the whole dinner and left a bite of cherry pie, she’d say, “Oh,
you ate to please me.” I don’t remember my mother ever eating with my brother and me. She cooked, served, and sat to watch
us eat. Then she took the dishes away to wash.

Maybe because I want to remember her happy, the clearest image I have of her comes from after I became a big shot on the radio
and was able to move her down to Miami. I can still see her serving me lamb chops.

“How are the lamb chops?”

“Delicious, Mom.”

“Ask me how I got the lamb chops.”

“How Mom? How’d you get the lamb chops?”

“I went to the butcher shop and I looked in the case at the lamb chops—but they were not very attractive lamb chops. Just
ordinary-looking lamb chops. So I said to the butcher, ‘Are those all the lamb chops you have?’

“He said, ‘That’s it, lady, take it or leave it.’

“So I said, ‘Perhaps you know my son.’

“‘And who is your son?’

“‘Larry King.’

“‘Larry King is your son?’

“Then he took me to the back room. And
that’s
how I got those lamb chops.”

That was my mother. She always found a way to be proud and get me the best that she could.

There was another woman who came by to help out when I was young. Auntie Bella, we called her. She was not an aunt by blood.
She was Scottish. My brother and I called her Auntie because we loved her. She had white hair in a bun. She was old. Her father
had served in the Civil War and she had a letter that President Lincoln had written to him. Auntie Bella cooked for us and
cared for us while my mother was working. On one Christmas, she had a relative dressed as Santa Claus come down our chimney
right in front of my eyes. We had a Christmas tree in our kosher apartment so that Auntie Bella would feel at home. She was
family.

But together, my mother and Auntie Bella couldn’t be my father. It was my father who dealt the smacks.

One of the most vivid memories I have from childhood comes from after I’d fallen from the shiny black iron fence topped with
spikes in front of our apartment. I had broken my arm and was at home with a cast. I was sitting out front when a huge black
car pulled up.