Revolution.”
Sam continues, “This sketch omits the fact that Tsudik was sent to Siberia for fomenting strikes and demonstrations against the Tsar, that extracts from his Sketches of Village Life were printed in the New York Jewish Daily Forward, and that my uncle declined the Forward’s invitation to come to New York as a staff writer. More importantly, a full report from a reliable source revealed that my uncle (was) condemned to hard labor in Stalin’s concentration camps where he died.” I have since learned that Sam’s belief about his uncle’s demise was incorrect. It seems that Tsudik managed to survive both Stalin’s camps and the subsequent Nazi invasion. He died in 1959.
Imprisoned by two tyrants, Uncle Tsudik was a man for many a season. The only family anecdote about Tsudik that comes down to me through the years was from Sam’s brother, Louie. Seems Tsudik knew Stalin’s NKVD were coming for him, late at night, as was their way. So he left the door open and waited for them to thump up the stairs in their winter boots. “Pigs, can’t you see she has just polished the floor! Respect my wife,” he snapped at them as they burst in. And so they stood at the door, abashed, as Tsudik rose from his chair. The tale may well be apocryphal, but it moves me to this day.
There is another story that may well be apocryphal that also moves me. It arrives from that far away place in the mind where what you think was told to you merges with what you would like to imagine was told to you. Yet the image is indelible. I “see”—or do I feel?—my future father, the four- or five-year-old Shmuel, in the knickers children wore in those days. There is the carcass of a dead horse abandoned in a vacant garbage strewn lot, a feast for the flies and rats. And, in a metaphor of his life to be, my father-to-be is astride it, crying, imploring it back to life, while several adults, Grandpa Max among them, are yanking him off the fetid thing.
The diaspora of Eastern European Jews to New York’s Lower East Side has acquired a polyurethane coating of nostalgia as it recedes ever further in time. The upper-middle-class descendants of this Diaspora are taken on tours of a meticulously preserved nineteenth-century tenement and to colorful relics of the old days: Gus’s Pickles, Yana Shimmel’s Kinnishery, Katz Deli, and so on. Fiddler on the Roof makes for a good cry at a safe distance and allows for more than a bit of smug self-satisfaction. Not many people have read Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money, which presents a bitter, astringent picture of immigrant life—in other words, the way things were.
This is what Sam had to say as an old man, looking back:
Upon our arrival in New York we lived in a typical Lower East Side slum on Rutgers Slip, a block or two from the East River Docks, in overcrowded quarters. The two toilet seats for the six families on each floor were located in the common hallway. There was no bathroom. A large washtub in the kitchen also served as a bathtub. When another immigrant in need of shelter came, a metal cover over the washtub also served as a bed. There was no central heating, no hot water, and no electricity. Gas for illumination and for hot water in summer was supplied only by depositing a quarter in the meter. Neither the electric trolley nor the auto were in general use and both commercial and passenger traffic was horse drawn.
Nevertheless there was richness to life; the seeds of his anarchist philosophy were planted in the hard dirt of poverty.
Despite the horrible economic conditions, there was, at least in our neighborhood, far less crime than now. We could walk the streets at all hours of the night unmolested, sleep outside on hot summer nights and leave our quarters unlocked and feel perfectly safe. To a great extent this can be accounted for by the character of the new immigrants. The new immigrants, fortunately, had not yet become fully integrated into the American “melting pot.” The very local neighborhood communities, which enabled the immigrants to survive under oppressive conditions in their native homes, sustained them in the deplorable new environment.
The new arrivals lived in the same neighborhoods as did their friends and countrymen, who shared their cramped lodgings and meager food supplies, found employment for them where they learned a new trade. They helped the new arrivals in every possible way, at great sacrifice, to adjust to the unfamiliar conditions in their new homes. Thus, upon arrival, as already noted, my father was taught the painting trade by his fellow countrymen, who lodged and sustained him until he could establish himself.
My father became a member of the Vitebsker Benevolent Society, which provided sickness and death benefits, small loans, and other essential services at cost. Fraternal and other local associations actually constituted a vast integrated family. Neighbors in need received the widest possible assistance and encouragement, and the associations promoted the fullest educational and cultural development.
Social scientists, state “welfarists” and state socialists, busily engaged in mapping out newer and greater areas for state control, should take note of the fact that long before social security, unemployment insurance, and other social service laws were enacted by the State, the immigrants helped themselves by helping each other. They created a vast network of cooperative fraternities and associations of all kinds to meet expanding needs—summer camps for children and adults, educational projects, cultural and health centers, care for the aged, etc. I am still impressed by the insight of the great anarchist thinker Proudhon who in the following words outlined a cardinal principle of anarchism: “Through the complexity of interests and the progress of ideas, society is forced to abjure the state…. Beneath the apparatus of government, under the shadow of political institutions, society was closely producing its organization, making for itself a new order which expressed its vitality and autonomy. (General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century [London: Freedom Press, 1923], 80.)
When Grandpa Max pieced together the money to move his family to the less crowded “wilds of the south Bronx,” their meager possessions were loaded onto a horse-drawn cart. Grandma Anna wept and embraced the other wives as if she were crossing the Atlantic again. It might as well have been. The trip took nine hours through congested streets and the virtually impassable Willis Avenue Draw Bridge. Can you imagine the pile up of loaded down carts, teamsters, horses, horseshit, flies, and stink?
Sam loved the common horses that did the world’s hard work. He would approach them on the street and pat their sweating hides. Though it is hard to imagine a more unsuitable soldier than my father, he was, along with cousin Izzy, enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry and sent to hot, faraway, hostile New Mexico: two underage Yiddish kids circa 1916. They served as grooms, mucking out stables and swabbing and feeding the animals. Sam liked that part of it, and—contrary to what you might expect—he liked his sergeant, too, who counseled him in a kindly way on how best to adjust to the disciplines of Army life. That did not prevent Izzy and Sam from deserting at the first opportunity.
It is clear to me Sam was a restless, sensitive boy condemned to hard labor and poverty, searching to know the world, searching for a way out. School certainly did not provide that way out. It was instead his introduction to hierarchal authority, and a profoundly unhappy one. He often described grade school as a hell hole of neo-Victorian child abuse.
You’d walk through the halls and hear the bedlam coming from the rooms. “Ouch! Leave me alone you bastard.” Whoop! You could hear the rod come down. Children would run out the rooms screaming and their teachers—who were like prison guards—would drag them back in by the ear. You sat on benches and recited things by rote. The teacher would walk behind you with the rod. You had to look straight ahead. You never knew when the rod would come down on you or if you had to open your hands for it in front of the room. The object was to break the child’s spirit, make an obedient citizen.
Eight-year-old Sam faced the added obstacle of having to help his father support a family of five children. That is when he took to delivering milk and bread from a horse-drawn wagon, seven days a week: school days, six to eight each morning and four to six in the afternoon; Saturdays and Sundays all day. It paid three dollars a week. Under those circumstances, he found it difficult to pay attention in class and, worse yet, he was plagued
