The Pinch (52 page)

Lenny was contacted by the agent in the fullness of time. At the suggestion of her valued client she was passing the book along to an editor at a well-respected publishing house who she thought might be receptive. She cautioned the book dealer, though, that he shouldn’t get his hopes up; the chances of a self-published volume being picked up by an established press were extremely remote.

Things happened thereafter with a startling alacrity. The agent, confessing her own surprise, got back to Lenny in a matter of days with the news that the publisher had made a better than reasonable offer for
The Pinch.
There were legal issues that needed ironing out in order to resolve Lenny’s dual role as both executor and beneficiary of Muni Pinsker’s literary estate (he should see a lawyer). Once the details were settled, he would receive half the advance upon signing the contract and half on publication of the book. While Lenny’s head was still spinning from what sounded to him like an astronomical figure, the agent increased his vertigo with talk of print runs and marketing strategies. There had been some debate over just how to categorize the work, but it was finally decided the subtitle,
A History
, would be retained, further qualified by the sub-subtitle:
A Novel.
Ambiguity, it seemed, was a selling point. Though the publisher intended to target “the obvious niche audience”—Lenny wondered who exactly that was—it had a broader readership in mind, and toward that end engaged an eminent writer—Jewish though not to an onerous degree—to tout the book’s universality in a preface. The writer, unable to locate any biographical information about the author of
The Pinch
, was told all roads led back to a book dealer in Memphis; so he appealed to Lenny for a chronology of the major events in Muni’s life. Having spent the publisher’s advance on settling accounts with landlords and bill collectors and making initial improvements to the store, Lenny agreed, with his fledgling chutzpah, to provide the timeline for a supplemental fee.

The book was published the following autumn in a handsome, octavo-sized volume, its contents printed in an elegant Garamond type font on acid-free, Bible-grade stock. The title was embossed, the glossy dust jacket a reproduction of one of Tyrone’s extravagant polychrome mirages, others appearing at intervals throughout the text. Removing it from its padded envelope, Lenny pawed the book and fanned its pages, hoping to revive something of the heart-stopping emotion he’d felt on encountering the original. (That particular volume had been filed away among the shop’s labyrinthine shelves under History.) But
The Pinch
no longer seemed to belong to him. He had the awful sinking sensation upon cracking the spine of the newly minted edition that, in selling the book, he’d betrayed Muni Pinsker and the entire vanished community of North Main Street. The feeling was not much relieved when he turned to his own contribution, attached as a historico-biographical appendix:

1889—Muni Pinsker is born to Zalman and Itke Pinsker in town of Blod in the Russian Pale of Settlement.

1892—Enters as pupil in cheder of Reb Yozifel Glans, called by his students Death’s Head.

1898—Transfers to more advanced school in Tzachnovka, thirty versts from Blod; Muni begins “eating days” and writing poetry.

1906—Enters yeshiva of famed Chazon Ish in Minsk, where he is exposed to radical politics.

1907—Passover pogrom in Blod: Muni’s father is murdered, sister assaulted, mother left deranged.

1908—Joins Jewish General Labor Bund.

1909-10—Is arrested for distributing socialist paper the
Hammer
, accused of conspiracy, and sentenced to four years’ hard labor and permanent exile to Siberia; marched to the mica mines at Nerchinsk, a journey from Moscow of more than five months.

1910–11—Escapes from the labor camp: walks from Nerchinsk to Irkutsk across frozen Lake Baikal; travels (funded by smuggled currency from American uncle) by train through Russia to Bremen; then by SS
Saxonia
to New York and train to Memphis, Tennessee.

1912–13—Works on North Main Street (the Pinch) in the general merchandise owned by uncle Pinchas Pin; becomes romantically attached to funambulist Jenny Bashrig; earthquake occurs.

1913–21 (an approximate span of years perceived by population as single cyclical day)—Stricken with graphomania, Muni retreats into room, begins writing chronicle of the Pinch in which events seem to happen concurrently if not all at once; after terminating pregnancy, Jenny joins circus.

Children of flooded North Main Street begin fainting at will: entering hiver-betim (deathlike trances), they emerge with occult knowledge; permutate letters of Tetragrammaton with alphabet blocks to summon cosmic monsters for the purpose of remembering fear.

Millie Poupko’s son Myron slices open big toe, inserts chit inscribed with name of God, sprouts wings; Izzy Grinspan’s daughters pluck scales from dragon Rahav, use as mirrors in which to view future husbands.

Tinsmith Manny Schatz manufactures mechanical bird: inserts tongue of adder that causes automaton to speak prophecies suppressed since Babylonian exile.

The floozy Katya Bimbaum wears in her marcelled hair the mystic thirteen-petaled rose; rose plucked by Hershel Tarnopol for his papa’s lapel, its radiance resulting in papa’s combustion.

Zygmunt Tisch invokes as maggid (medium) the medieval cephalophore Rabbi Ashlag to interpret dream in which Theda Bara palpates his frontal lobe; in the absence of their rebbe Shpinker Hasids devise balloon raised aloft by lilin (aerial demons) spawned from Hasids’ own seminal emissions.

Sam Alabaster uses, for fishing bait, a toxic worm that causes birds to fall from the sky by merely crawling over their shadow; Mrs. Bluestein invites ushpizin (spirit guests) from the Circle of the Unique Cherub to her canasta table.

Pantsed by dog-faced imps at belated bar mitzvah (revealing his petsel like a licorice whip), the aged changeling Benjy Padauer nevertheless succeeds in delivering his Torah portion.

Returned from underworld, Katie Pin celebrates renewed menstrual cycle; her child is born six weeks later.

Et cetera …

1921—Blind fiddler Asbestos, longtime fixture of North Main Street, is lynched after aiding and abetting convict escapees; Pinch resumes Central Standard Time.

1921–22—Muni abruptly ceases writing; retired from circus, Jenny Bashrig returns to Memphis; Muni and Jenny wed, become guardians of orphaned Tyrone Pin and proprietors of Pin’s General Merchandise.

1922–28—After years of financial struggle and compromised health, Muni succumbs to pulmonary tuberculosis (1927); Jenny dies the following year from kidney disease aggravated by alcohol narcosis; young Tyrone, self-designated custodian of Muni’s abandoned manuscript, becomes virtual charity case.

1944-45—Tyrone is conscripted into US Armed Forces, sees action after D-Day in northern Europe, witnesses liberation of Dachau.

1945–52—Tyrone returns to North Main Street enervated from battle fatigue, begins to paint; immigrant camp survivor Avrom Slutsky, having followed Tyrone to America, recovers Muni Pinsker’s buried manuscript, edits and redacts text—which he titles
The Pinch
—and funds its printing along with the plates of Tyrone’s illustrations.

1953—Over Slutsky’s protests, Tyrone is declared mentally incompetent and confined to Western State Psychiatric Hospital at Bolivar.

1968—Book dealer Leonard Sklarew, legatee of Muni’s printed book, sells rights to the venerable Frigate Press for publication as
The Pinch: A History
; a novel.

1881–84, 1903–7—Major waves of pogroms in Russia, mass emigration of Jews.

1887—Artesian well water becomes available in Memphis.

1894–99—Dreyfus affair.

1897—General Jewish Labor Bund formed.

1899—Blood libel trial in Bohemia (the Hilsner case); black millionaire R. R. Church funds Church Park and Auditorium, first Memphis park and entertainment center for African Americans.

1903
—The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
published in the newspaper
Zamnye;
Kishinev pogrom.

1900—Casey Jones leaves Memphis’s Central Station bound for catastrophic train wreck at Vaughn, Mississippi.

1905—Failed Russian revolution; pogroms ensue.

1906—W. C. Handy writes “Mr. Crump Don’t Like It” (later “Memphis Blues”); opening of Overton Park Zoo.

1908—Wild Bill Latura murders five Negroes in Ashford’s Saloon on Beale Street, acquitted by all-white jury despite concern that such behavior might lead to killing white people; Mose Plough loans son Abe $125 to start Plough Chemical Company, also on Beale.

1909—Edward Hull Crump elected mayor of Memphis.

1913—Riots at Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s
Rites of Spring;
Mendel Beilis on trial in Russia for ritual murder.

1914—World War I begins.

1915—Lynching of Leo Frank.

1916—E. H. Crump illegally “votes” illiterate blacks, pays city budget deficits with bond issues, protects political allies who abuse offices, ignores prohibition laws; Clarence Saunders opens first Piggly Wiggly self-service grocery at Third and Madison.

1917—Bolshevik Revolution: approximately 200,000 Jews murdered as counterrevolutionaries and bourgeois profiteers; Harahan Bridge completed over Mississippi River.

1918—Spanish flu epidemic.

1919—Treaty of Versailles.

1920—Henry Ford prints 500,000 copies of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

1923—Ku Klux Klan candidate Clifford Davis elected Memphis city judge; old Orpheum Theatre burns.

1924—Reunion of Confederate veterans in Memphis.

1925—“Fee system” of blacks sold into peonage exposed; New Peabody Hotel opens at Main and Monroe; Tom Lee, “a good Negro,” rescues thirty-two people when excursion boat capsizes
; Mein Kampf
published; Scopes “Monkey” Trial begins.

1926—Last Valley Line packet boats retired from Mississippi River.

1927—Sacco and Vanzetti executed
; The Jazz Singer,
starring Al Jolson, released; Mississippi River floods.

1928—Jimmy Lunceford’s Orchestra plays roof of Shrine Building; Bessie Smith at the Palace on Beale.

1929—Stock market crashes; Memphis adventurer Richard Halliburton lost at sea in Chinese junk.

1931—Cotton Carnival launched.

1933–41—German Jews stripped first of rights as citizens, then of rights as human beings.

1937—Amelia Earhart vanishes; Great Flood brings thousands of homeless refugees to Memphis.

1938—Two runs shy of Babe Ruth’s record, Hank Greenberg walked rather than be given shot at home run. Kristallnacht.

1939—Germany invades Poland.

1941—Pearl Harbor.

1943—Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

1945—Victory in Europe; atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

1948—State of Israel established; Gandhi assassinated; WDIA radio station adopts all-black format.

1950—Senator Joseph McCarthy mounts anti-Communist crusade; Sam Phillips opens Sun Records Studio.

1951—Phillips records Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88,” first rock ’n’ roll hit.

1952—Night of Murdered Poets in Moscow; Kemmons Wilson opens first Holiday Inn on Summer Avenue.

1953—Rosenbergs executed.

1954—E. H. Crump dies.

1955—Emmet Till murdered.

1956—“Million Dollar Quartet”—Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley—jam at Sun Records; Elvis appears on
Ed Sullivan Show.

1958—Stax Records’s “Memphis Sound”organized.