of “in itself” was a new and appealing notion. Art became a subject I could understand—a first lesson in the conflict between empathy and abstraction, and a primer in the politics of opportunistic relativism.
The drawings hung side by side for a long time. Nobody looked at them after the first day (another lesson) and when the term ended and I took mine home, I found that I had come to like it because of what it did not have.
NAMES IN PROSE
I lived in my aunt’s house as a child. There were two Louis’s on her block. The one Louis—it could have been “Lewis,” I never saw it written—lived in the rental apartment that was the second floor of my aunt’s house. His insistence on pronouncing the “s” in his name much impressed me, for in that neighborhood of alliances, prejudices, and envies—what others made of one’s name—was a sign of one’s prospects. The other Louis was “Louee,” never an “s”—the name being a call-word, as in “Hey Louee!”
Compared to me, however, the two Louis’s had clear nominations. My “Lucian” began in my mother’s family’s Poland—in a small town called “Mielecz”—and Lucian, when spoken in Polish, sounds something like “Lootzyan.” But this was disastrous for the Brooklyn streets—what kind of bird is a “Lootzyan?”—and so other versions emerged. The one that distressed me most sounded like “Lucyann,” and as—for immigrant reasons—my boyhood shorts and Buster Brown haircut had lingered too long, this version of my name carried intimations of “sissy” with it. Had I been better planted, it would have passed quickly, but there seemed an unending string of increasingly large boys to keep it going, and I had to revert to silence and cunning—this being the first seed of the estrangement that, much later, would have me want to write about my different names.
Legally, I had been given other names; my first middle name is “Wladyslaw,” and the second middle name—a proliferation affected by those who enter the new world with heritage but no money—is “Edvard.” My parents didn’t tell me much about Edvard; oh, there were some whispers (children hear everything) about Austrian cavalry sweeping through the town; and there was uneasy mention of an ancestor who, for inscrutable European reasons, the family felt obligated to remember but not discuss. “Wladyslaw,” however, has an older, non-familial—past. The name, as I was often told, recalls Poland’s most successful king, Wladyslaw Jagiello, he who in ancient times defeated the Swedish armies on the ice (I struggled to find an image for that—they say he waved two swords) and it was even said that, at another time, he fought the Czar’s armies to a stand-still. “Wladyslaw” is unpronounceable in Brooklynese, and at one Christmas gathering, my cousin Florence—the first of our family to go to college—suggested that the English equivalent might well be “Walter.” I was dismayed, I am not a Walter; and my mother’s usual holiday gloom deepened at the sound of it. So, despite the link between its heritage and my present state, “Wladyslaw” did not become “Walter.”
The name, in fact, is a description: “Wlad-the-Slav.” But its polyphony did not play in Brooklyn—so it was restricted to baptism and vaccination certificates until, much later, after Poland had been trapped behind the Iron Curtain, it came out as a patriotic conceit.
A woman on the block—it could have been the mother of the Louis with the “s”—started calling me “Lokshen” which is Yiddish for “noodles,” and which, as I grew taller, became “Langer Luksh.” This version presented an image of affable goofiness, which secretly I did not relish—but it was easier to carry than the anonymous images of Lou or Loosh. The woman meant well; she evidently saw the distress that an incipient “Lucyann” was causing me, and her substitution was meant to ease that. But it did something more: Being a Polish Catholic with, now, a Jewish nick-name, it put me squarely between the Catholics, who were mostly Italian and Irish, and the Jews, who were mostly Polish and Russian. What to do? The first Lewis, was Jewish, and although older and more sure of himself than I, did sometimes talk quietly with me, lend me comic books, and show me toy soldiers from his collection. The other Lou-ee, my nemesis, who was Catholic and Italian, could only talk by shouting—and systematically roughed me up whenever I showed-up on the street.
One day, he and some other boys grabbed me, pulled my pants down, and started beating me with a stick. The other Lewis was there too, as a charter member of the block—but he was appalled at this turn and loudly insisted that they stop. He was large, and so they let me go. I showed the marks to my mother who then dragged me to the house where Lou-ee lived and pulled down my pants again to show them to Lou-ee’s mother. After much shouting, the mothers agreed it would be nice if we all walked—Lucian and Lou-ee and their mothers (no fathers were ever mentioned)—together to Mass on Sunday. This would show a solidarity, despite ethnic quarrels, within the common faith. The walk happened three times—as I remember. The mothers spoke in sing-song although they had nothing to say of interest to each other. Lou-ee remained silent and sullen—but he did leave me alone after that.
The anti-Semitism in my family was deep-rooted but passive, and it was voiced mostly through imported Polish cliches, quietly, indoors, after supper. But my social precariousness pushed the issue outdoors. I was first enrolled in the Catholic cub-scouts, but they also shouted a lot and fought, and it made for long walks to the church basement every friday night. So I resisted. My mother then did something the enormity of which I did not sense until much later. She went to the Jewish temple on the next block, which also had a cub-scout troop, and tried to enroll me.
Understand—this was an orthodox synagogue, rich in ritual and clothing, with a faith so demanding that its services were well attended. My mother never spoke to me of that experience—how she walked in, who spoke with her, what was asked, how answered. I still don’t know what that silence meant, whether she felt ashamed, heretical, emancipated. But I imagine her walking up those heavy stairs with her threadbare coat, no scarf, no jewelry—so Gentile—to talk with a man in a double-breasted suit and white shirt with no tie, wearing a yarmulka; a thick man, more powerful and, yes, more sensual than any in our meager tribe. How did her voice sound? Did it crack? Did she speak English, Polish, or the bit of German she knew that let her communicate with the old ones on the block who spoke only Yiddish?
Recently, I found my mother’s citizenship papers and learned that she stood all of five foot one. What could she have said to those men, those large suspicious men—that her Catholic son Lokshen would be safer among the Jews?
However she said it, it was done, and in a few days she took me with her to the synagogue and turned me over to Mr. Moses, the scout-master. He was hearty in a somewhat unfocused way, had a constant bead of sweat on his upper lip and spoke in stentorian tones; but the troop—more precisely, “pack,”—was actually run by women. They were mothers of the scouts and I remember them as quick, plump, elaborately dressed, well-perfumed, and very verbal. Everyone, in fact, talked a lot, and so I began to talk too, and I discovered that it is a good way to make my way with people who will talk and listen. I don’t remember what we talked about but I do remember learning how to substitute words for feelings as well as things.
“Lokshen” was the first of the many names devised by people who thought to make me more comfortable in my skin. A later example of this benevolence was “Luscious,” a name awarded me by a woman in an accounting firm where I had my first summer job. She was, of course, much older—easily twenty-five. But I sought her out—although I didn’t know how not to blush and stammer everytime we spoke. She had the secretarial tight skirt, and tan sinewy feet in high heels, and she wore a gold watch pinned to a scarf, and bracelets around her wrists, and she smelled like flowers in the early morning.
I think she somewhat liked my gaping sniffing fumbling. And, who knows, she might have fleetingly entertained the thought of trying sex with me—as I had just passed the age of first consent. Well, she should have, no matter how awkward. With her, I would have
