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For many years my father was a communist, an atheist, and a great intellectual. When other boys my age were being slipped crisp
five dollar bills for bar mitzvah presents, I was out ringing door
bells collecting quarters for the Spanish War Relief. My
mother and older sister were also communists, atheists, and intellectuals. I
was a communist for a while, an atheist for a while, but never,
I mean never, an intellectual.
More than anything, I liked
playing baseball, and none of the boys who were members of my YCL, Young Communist
League, knew or cared
about baseball.
They all looked alike: very intense, very skinny, with stringy
black hair and double thick myopic glasses that looked like wrong-way
binoculars perched on their noses. I always had a feeling
if I ever threw them a baseball, they would put their hands up
and the ball would smack them in the face. My comrades looked
upon me with suspicion. My dedication toward the movement
was not what it should have been, I was told, and I'm sure, if
it hadn't been for my father, I would have been kicked out of the
group. We met once a week at night and made plans for America
when the revolution took over. The best part of the meetings
was when they ended, and we were joined by our sister YCL group
for soda, cake, and Chesterfield cigarettes. Everybody, including
me, smoked like a fiend in those days. Young communist girls
looked a million times better than young communist boys.
I played baseball with a bunch of local Italian kids in Mount Vernon,
New York, where I grew up. I never discussed the U.S.S.R.
with any of them. I'm sure if they had known what I was doing
one night a week they would have kicked me off the team. One
of the boys we played was Ralph Branca. In those days he
pitched and played third base. I played first base. Ralph
would whistle the ball to me across the diamond so fast that some
nights my left hand would swell up to twice its size, and I would
have to soak my hand in warm salt water for hours. I knew
my ball playing displeased my father. He never said it in
so many words, but I could see the disappointment etched in his
face. More than anything, my father wanted me to read. "Not
to read," he would say, pausing deep in thought, "is
not to have eyesight." I never answered him. What
could I possibly say to that? Almost every night my father
handed me books - not one book but six, seven, eight, ten: Faulkner,
Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams, Sandburg,
Whitman, Jack Reed. "Here," he would say, "read
these and we'll talk about them tomorrow."
I tried, I really did. I would have liked to please my father,
but with the exception of Ring Lardner and Jack London, I found
them boring.
What My Father Did For a Living
Work interfered with my father's life, so he worked only three
hours a day, selling newspapers to the morning commuters in a nearby
affluent suburb. Could those people who thrust a nickel at
my father for the morning New York Daily Mirror, waiting
impatiently for their two cents change, possibly know that within
the hour
this short unshaven man, who some people thought looked like Lenin,
would be working on translating a Chekhov story from Russian to
Yiddish? My father was fluent in Russian, Polish, French,
Italian, German, Hebrew, Yiddish and English. With Mrs. Redka
as a Spanish teacher, I failed the only other language I ever took,
Beginning Spanish, three consecutive years.
Besides his income from his newspaper stand, my father made a modest
amount of money translating an author's work from language into
language, usually into Yiddish. When I say modest, I mean modest. For translating a Kafka novel from German to Yiddish,
my father was paid sixty dollars. For translating ten Shalom
Aleichem stories from Yiddish to Italian, he was paid forty dollars. I
remember that particularly, because he kept complaining that Shalom
Aleichem in Italian made as much sense as Baudelaire in Swahili.
Besides selling newspapers, and besides his work as a translator,
my father wrote Yiddish poetry. As far as I know, he never
received a nickel for his poetry. On the contrary, in a sense
he paid for their publication. There were three Yiddish newspapers
published in New York in the late thirties and early forties: the Forward, which my father and many of his friends considered a right-wing
newspaper; the Daily or Tog, a middle-of-the-road newspaper; and
the Freiheit, a left-wing and, some people thought, communist paper.
My father had two arrangements:
one with the Freiheit and one with
the Tog. With the Freiheit, for every ten poems they published,
he would arrange for three lifetime subscriptions, with the Tog,
it was a one-on-one basis: for every poem, a lifetime subscription. He
published most of his poetry in the Freiheit. A lifetime
subscription to the Freiheit cost twelve dollars and fifty
cents. So
for thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents, my father published ten
poems, or three dollars and fifty cents a poem. I'm sure
he never thought of it in this way, but after translating ten Shalom
Aleichem stories from Yiddish to Italian, net income forty dollars,
and "selling" ten poems to Freiheit, net outlay thirty-seven
dollars and fifty cents, he showed a net profit of two dollars
and fifty cents.
My House
Culture seeped through my house. It came at your from everywhere. The
walls were infused with it; the floors exalted it; the ceilings
inhaled it. Every room looked like a library. Books
everywhere: floor to ceiling, wall to wall, sitting on shelves,
and, where there were no shelves, vertically stacked from the floor
up. There were books in the kitchen, the bathroom, the hallways,
and on every windowsill. We had a large oak table in the
dining room. I do not recall a single meal served there because
the dining room table always had at least a thousand books stacked
on it. That was my father's desk: where he worked, read,
translated, and wrote his poetry. My mother never had to
worry about cleaning the walls, because there were no walls. If
they weren't covered by books and bookcases, there were paintings
- Picasso, Chagall, Matisse, Weber, Ernst, Walkowitz - paintings
everywhere. Using a double-edged razor with black tape on
one side, my father would carefully slit his favorite paintings
out of the art books, put them in a simple frame, and exchange
them for a painting already hanging. A Utrillo went up, a
Picasso came down. One week Chagall would replace Matisse,
only to be replaced the following week by Mondrian. It was
a process without end. Besides the books, besides the art,
there was classical music on from the moment he came home until
he went to sleep. It was not unusual to see him abruptly
stand up and conduct the last portion of Beethoven's Fifth or a
Brahms violin concerto.
With the exception of my sister's boyfriends, the only people who
came into my house were friends of my father: other intellectuals,
poets and writers and would-be poets and would-be writers, communists
and almost-communists. Quite often you could hear five languages
being spoken simultaneously in my home. But more than anything,
there were arguments: loud, shouting fist-thumping arguments. Was
Ezra Pound a fascist? Was Leon Trotsky a socialist? What
direction should the movement take? Was John Dos Passos truly
a great writer?
In the wintertime our radiators hissed not steam, but Theodore
Dreiser. The hum from our refrigerator, the verses of Whitman. The
whirr from the washing machine, the voice of Scott Fitzgerald. The
sound of running water in the kitchen, the poetry of Sandberg. The
way the wind rattled our front screen door, the stories of Shalom
Aleichem. And I - I walked about my home from room to room
flipping a baseball from hand to hand.
My Older Sister
My sister was twelve years older. Her name was Sarah. I
don't know why my parents waited so long to have a second child. I
am very grateful to my sister for many reasons, but more than anything
else, for my name. When I was born, I was named Ivan Tukhachevshy
Roth after the great Russian general. When I was three, Sarah
began lobbying my parents to change my name. Her arguments
were simple and sound: nobody could spell it, and nobody could
pronounce it. Neither argument convinced my parents. "I
can spell it," my father said, "and I can pronounce it,
and so can my friends. Who else is there?"
The gold old Central Committee of the U.S.S.R. saved me from a
life of Ivanwho? when it had a slight shift in policy (history?)
in 1937 and decided that Ivan Tukhachevshy wasn't a hero after
all but a neo-Trotskyite, and he was purged. My father, with
the weight of this new evidence, relented and a search for a new
name began. My father came up with names like Sholem, after
Shalom Aleichem or Sholem Asch; Karl or Carl, after Karl Marx or
Carl Sandburg; Ezra, after Ezra Pound; and Lincoln, after Lincoln
Steffens or Abraham Lincoln. My sister came up with Chaim,
after her grandfather from Smolensk, and they compromised on Noel
Karl Sholem Roth. One thing you can be sure of, Ivan Tukhachevshy
never could have played first base for the Mount Vernon Scarlets
- even if he batted left-handed.
My sister Sarah was my go-between. Whenever I had a problem,
I went to her, and she went to my father. When I wanted a
bike, a radio, a baseball glove, it was Sarah who asked my father.
Every request was a storm.
"A bike? A radio? A baseball glove??? For what? What
is he going to do? Become a hooligan? Tell him when
he reads Chekhov I will consider a small radio. A
bike is out of the question, and he'll get a baseball thing when
Tolstoy
sneezes."
Somehow, Sarah arranged for
me to get everything I needed.
My sister always had a lot of boyfriends. My father used
to say that Sarah had as many boyfriends as he had books, which
was an exaggeration. She was tall and attractive and bright
and knew how to dress smartly and put on makeup. She was
certainly the best-looking communist in Mount Vernon, which confused
my father. I think it is safe to say that my father neither
liked nor trusted any of my sister's suitors.
"What they want from her," he said, "has
nothing to do with the People's Revolution."
Sarah would occasionally bring her current beau home to meet my
father andmother. I never understood why she did it until
I was in my late teens.
The tableau was always the same:
early 1940's, the young suitor would be sitting nervously in the corner of
the couch, Sarah demurely
on the other corner, my father in his chair, me on the
floor squeezing a baseball, and my mother, when not in the kitchen,
sitting in her chair. My mother would bring in cookies that she had
made and hot chocolate that Sarah made. My father smoking
one Camel cigarette after another, stared at the young man the
way Bob Feller looked at a two-hundred hitter who just got a scratch
single off of him. After the brief introductions, there was
always an enforced period of silence. If one of the young
men ever chanced a timorous voice, "Nice day today, Mr. Roth," my
father would blow smoke in his direction.
Finally, my father would speak. "Do you like my wife's
cookies?" he demanded.
"Oh, yes, sir. It's truly excellent." A
smile toward Sarah.
Another long pause. "I have a slight favor to ask of
you." Was that a twinkle I detected in my father's voice? "A
very small favor."
"Anything, Mr. Roth," the boyfriend said, sitting straight
up, ready for action. "Anything."
My father handed a book to my sister's soon to be ex-suitor. "I
would like you to read out loud from Eliot's 'Prufrock,'
the first two pages up until the line - 'I have measured out
my life with
coffee spoons' - and when you are finished, tell me,
what you think Mr. Eliot was trying to tell us."
Well, that always was the end of that. Interestingly enough,
everybody (except the boyfriend) got what he or she wanted. My
sister got rid of her boyfriend, which pleased her; my mother and
father and I got my mother's cookies, filled with rich pieces of
chocolate and pecan nuts, that was delicious.
Songs We Used to Sing
On Sundays we would get into my father's 1938 Dodge truck and drive
to the country, to the Kensico Dam in Valhalla, for a picnic lunch. In
the picnic hamper there was a foot-long salami, thick chunks of
liverwurst, a meat loaf, hard-boiled eggs, rolls of every type,
pickles, a bag of fruit, a thermos filled with punch, and beer
for my father. He always gave me a couple of swallows despite
my mother's admonishings. The drive from Mount Vernon to
Kensico Dam took an hour and a half, I think. It's only
fourteen miles, and today I have a friend who jogs it on Sunday
mornings and he does it in an hour and a half. I know it sounds crazy,
but I swear, at least in my memory, that's how long it took us
to drive fourteen miles. We could leave early in the morning
so we could get a good spot for our picnic, and would sing songs
the entire trip.
We shall not be moved
Just like a tree
Standing by the water
We shall not be moved.
Tell me comrade
Do you read
The Daily Worker - Yes indeed
If you do then dance with me
True comrades - we'll always be.
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me
Says I to Joe
You're ten years dead
I never died says he
I never died says he.
Far and wide as the eye can wander
Heath and bog are everywhere
Not a bird sings out to cheer us
Oaks are standing gaunt and bare
We are The Peat Bog Soldiers
We are marching with our spades
To the bogs.
One Day I Played Catch with the Great Paul Robeson
During World War Two my parents had many fund-raisers for the Russian
War Relief. It was a good time to be a communist in America. The
U.S.S.R. and America had a common enemy, and you didn't have to
hum the Soviet National Anthem under your breath. Little
did we know what was to come. My father had somehow managed
to get the great Paul Robeson for a brief appearance. There
were at least a hundred people crowding our small house beyond
capacity. My father said that he wouldn't be surprised if
they raised as much as a thousand dollars. I was in the backyard
playing catch with myself when Paul Robeson walked out.
"Throw me the ball, son."
I was big for my age, but Paul Robeson was a giant. I couldn't
help but stare at him. Nineteen forty-four was before the
era of six-foot-six black basketball players, and I had never seen
anyone so big or so dark.
"I said, 'throw me the
ball,' son."
Everyone in the house was staring at us from the porch and windows. "It's
a hardball," I said, holding up my taped-over Spaulding for
him to see.
"I've caught many a hardball bare-handed.” He
held his hands up. They looked like they could crush a stone.
I underhanded him the ball and he whistled it back to me. He
moved across the yard. “Your father tells me you’re
quite a ball player.”
I was speechless. It was the last thing I would expect my
father to talk about to Paul Robeson. The second front,
the battle of Stalingrad, the heroic Russian soldier, the Scottsboro
boys, the problem of being a Negro in America, anything but
my ball playing prowess. “My father said that?” I
said weakly. I threw him a lazy overhand. He flung
it back to me over my head and I caught it gracefully in the web
of my mitt.
“I used to play baseball,” he said. “I
could hit a ball so high it would disappear in the clouds, but
the real player in my family was my brother Bill. Bill Robeson
hit a ball so hard that if you caught it, your hand would sting
for a week.”
I wanted to tell him about Ralph Branca, that we were on the same
team and he had major league scouts looking at him, but something
stopped me. He threw me ground balls - to my left, to my
right. I handled them easily. He threw me a short hop
that I muffed but kept in front of me.
“That’s great,” he said. “that’s
good.”
He threw a couple more short hops that I handled cleanly. All
the time I kept on throwing the ball back to him with more and
more velocity. I had a feeling he could have caught Dizzy
Dean bare-handed. I sensed my father waiting impatiently
for our game to stop, but I certainly wasn’t going to be
the one to quit. After thirty minutes, a hundred startled
American communists watching me and Paul Robeson playing catch
on a Sunday afternoon in Mount Vernon, New York he walked over
and handed me the ball.
“You’re pretty good,” he
said.
“Thanks.” Should I have said more? Should
I have said at least that he was pretty good also?
“How long have you had
this ball?”
“About a year.”
“It’s pretty beat
up.”
“I play ball in the street with it a lot. I
bang it up against the curb and practice fielding grounders that way.”
“It’s awfully lumpy.”
I shrugged.
“What’s your first
name?”
“Noel.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“I have a son. He’s fifteen also.” Paul
Robeson nodded. He seemed deep in thought. I wanted
so much to say something, anything, about his son, about how much
I admired his singing, but I didn’t say a word. To
this day I’m sorry for that.
He was studying the ball, turning it around in his gigantic hand,
gripping it, squeezing it, still deep in his own thoughts. “Mr.
Roth,” he finally spoke, calling up to my father who was
on the porch. “Comrade Roth,” he raised his voice,
his bass filling our yard up as if he were in a concert hall, “I
would like to make a suggestion, a motion if need be. After
our collection today for our Russian brothers, I would like to
peel off one dollar and fifty cents from whatever monies we take
in and give it to your son for a new Spaulding baseball. Does
anyone have any objections?”
I looked up at the dozens of openmouthed faces. My sister
was smiling. My father showed no expression. Shapiro,
the leader of the local Communist Party who had a head like a pin,
was violently shaking his head no, he didn’t dare say a word
to the great Paul Robeson.
“Do you think we have
to get Premier Stalin’s permission?” Robeson’s
voice thundered out?
“I think it’s an excellent idea,” I heard my
father say, l “and I second the motion.”
“Well, let’s get started,” Paul
Robeson flipped me my ball and bounded up the stairs.
The next day, with three of my friends, I bought a shiny new Spaulding
baseball and promised myself to use it only where, if someone didn’t
catch it, it would land on grass.
My Father’s Favorite Joke
An immigrant is walking down
Orchard Street in lower Manhattan and sees a sign in the window of a dry-cleaning
store.
What do you think
My name is Fink
I press your pants
For nothing.
He goes into the store and asks about the sign. The man
behind the counter points to the sign and says:
What do you think
My name is Fink
I press your pants
For nothing.
The immigrant gives him a
pair of pants and is told they will be ready on Tuesday. On
Tuesday, when he comes back, the man behind the counter tells
him that he owes fifty dents for having
his pants pressed. “What do you mean?” the
immigrant says angrily. He points to the sign in
the window and reads out loud:
What do you think
My name is Fink
I press your pants
For nothing.
“I’m not Fink,” the man behind the counter says. “I’m
Goldstein.”
I Become a Capitalist - Almost
When I was fourteen, my father put me into business for myself. He
opened up another newsstand in Bronxville, about three blocks from
his, and put me in charge of it. I didn’t get the morning
commuters the way he did, but I was on a main street that led to
a highway and drivers would stop and buy their papers. My
father provided the money to get me started, and I gave him a percentage
of the profits and kept everything else for myself. I brought
my newspapers from a man my father introduced me to whose name
was Al Sharkey. Al got paid every three days and carried
a pistol in his glove compartment. I know, because he showed
it to me the first time I paid him. Al took a liking to me
and would spend time by my stand, sometimes helping me out, and
even came to a couple of my baseball games. He had
a lot of stories about gangsters, and was always hinting
at some close
connection of his who could get him or any friend of his, anything. I
had no idea what he was talking about. After a while, Al
started asking me about girls. He wanted to know if I knew
any girls. If I wanted to meet any girls. How far did
I ever go with a girl? At the end of every sentence,, Al
would wink at me. “Remember kid,” he had a low
husky voice, “If Big Al can’t do it,” he winked
again, “nobody can.”
I really didn’t know what to make of Al. He was
different from anyone I had ever met before, but I liked
him.
My business flourished. People took kindly to me, many of
them going out of their way to buy their morning papers at my stand. I
began to develop regular customers whose names I learned. Some
of them would buy all four morning papers from me: the Mirror,
the News, the Tribune, and the New
York Times, which was a sixteen
cent sale. I had a couple of regulars who gave me a quarter
and waved off the change. Not a bad profit.
I started to handle magazines
- the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s,
Look and Life – and my business soared. Many of my
customers began to learn my name and when picking up their papers
would ask how I was doing in baseball. After I had been open
for two months, I was taking home twenty dollars a week after all
expenses. None of my friends made that kind of money.
My father was proud of my success. He didn’t tell me
so directly, but he boasted to his friends how well his son the
entrepreneur was doing. I began to know him in a different
way. He would wake me every morning at four-thirty, and we
would have breakfast together at a local diner. He had been
eating there for years, and the owners knew him well. My
father introduced me to them: three Greeks, all of whom needed
shaves. We always ordered exactly the same thing: two scrambled
egg sandwiches with bacon on buttered hard rolls. I had milk
and my father had tea. On cold mornings, rubbing
the sleep from my eyes, blowing into my hands for warmth,
sitting
next
to my father, I could feel his pleasure.
I was doing so well in my stand, I began looking around for other
spots to open up. All of the railroad stations were taken,
but there were two street corners in Mount Vernon where I thought
a stand like mine would succeed. I spoke to my father about
it one morning, showed him the location after work, and told him
how easy it would be for me to get school friends to run them. “More
and more people are driving to work,” I said, “and
the only place there are newspaper stands are at railroad stations. Look
how well I’m doing after being open only a few months.”
My father was impressed. We shook hands on it. He told
me to speak to Al Sharkey before I did anything. That
night I could hardly sleep as fifty dollar bills danced
in front of
my eyes.
The next day I presented my plan to Al. “It could be a gold
mine,” I said excitedly. “I got two kids lined
up and if these stands work as well as mine, I’m going to
start looking in White Plains for spots. In a year
I could have ten stands, Al.”
When Al didn’t like something he had a way of looking at
you like you were nuts, and that’s the way he was
looking at me.
“What’s wrong?” I
said.
“Let me give it straight,
kid, forget it.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so. You are what we call, very na-ive,
kid.” He winked at me.
“But you said you could do anything for me. ‘Anything. Just
ask Big Al.’” I mimicked him angrily.
"I was talking
about girls, kid. Girls.” He
winked at me
.
“I don’t want girls, Al. I
want those two corners in Mount Vernon.”
Al stared at me. “You’re not only na-ive, kid. You’re
stupid. You can’t open a stand in another town. Now
let’s forget this pipe dream and go over your account –“
”Supposing I just do it, Al. Who’s
going to stop me?”
“Kid, you’re not only na-ive and stupid, but you’re
dumb besides. If you open up a stand in Mount Vernon, some
friend of mine is going to open up a stand next to your father’s.” Al
didn’t wink at me.
“Oh,” I said, “now
I get it.”
“I knew you would, kid.”
“I thought you were my
friend.”
“I am, kid.”
“If you were my friend, you wouldn’t
do that.”
Al looked hurt. “Boy, you really don’t understand. Very
na-ive. It’s the American way. Someday you’ll
get it.” He winked at me.
The Mount Vernon Scarlets
My baseball team was named the Mount Vernon Scarlets. We
were excellent. All the boys, except me, were fifteen or
sixteen. At fourteen, I was the youngest. I was also
the only one who was not Italian. Tony Daniello was our captain,
and because of him I was on th team. He pitched and played
the outfield. Today he owns a fruit stand. Sal Mosca
was our catcher. Sal was a catcher because he looked like
a catcher; short and squat, he could fire a ball to second base
from the kneeling position. Very few people could steal against
him. He reads meters for Con Edison now. Jackie Campanella
played second base. No relation. A wonderful fielder
but couldn’t hit the ball out of the infield. He batted
ninth, and was killed in Korea. Fishman played shortstop. I
don’t remember his real name. His father owned a fish
store, so everybody called him Fishman. Fishman and I didn’t
get along. He always called me Rothman, instead of Roth,
made snide cracks about me being Jewish, and - even worse - would
purposely throw me short hops to make me look bad. We got
into a fist fight once that Sal Mosca broke up but not until Fishman
broke my nose with a left hook I never saw. Today, Fishman
owns a fish store, and I occasionally see him. The Rico Brothers,
Frank and Anthony, played left and right field. Anthony had
the better arm, but Frank was our clean-up hitter. Today
they are both electricians. Anthony Pelligrino was our center
fielder. He was the fastest boy on our team. I never
recall a fly ball being hit over his head. Anthony works
in Tony Daniello’s fruit stand.
Ralph Branca pitched and played third base. We all knew that
Ralph was going to make it in the major leagues. We just
knew it. It was the kind of thing we just knew. I played
first base. I batted second. I was tall and rangy for my
age and had a natural, whippy swing that produced a lot of line-drives.
One of the scouts for the Philadelphia Athletics who came to watch
Ralph Branca pitch once told me that it was too bad I wasn’t
left- handed. I own a men’s clothing store.
I played for the Scarlets for two years until the team broke up. In
that time, we never lost a game. We played other sandlot
teams from surrounding towns, and we scrimmaged the local high
school team, kids that were three and four years older, and we
always beat them. We were – great. But,
with the exception of Ralph Branca, not one of us ever
played high school baseball.
My Father Has a Crisis and I Come to His Aid
One day my father stopped writing poetry because he ran out of
friends. Everybody he knew, every single person he
could think of, was now receiving a lifetime subscription
to the Freiheit or the Tog. It didn’t make sense to me, but no more
friends to offer free subscriptions, so no more poetry. He
became despondent and depressed. I tried talking to him about
it in the mornings when we were having breakfast at the Greeks’,
usually a good time for us, but he looked upon me with a combination
of disdain and compassion. I pressed the issue.
“Couldn’t you continue to write poetry?” I
asked him one morning.
“And do what with it?”
“Give the Freiheit whatever
you normally give them and let them do with the money what they want. Make a contribution. What
difference does it make?”
He slammed his fist on the table. “You mean I should
pay to have my poetry published?” he shouted. “Is
that what you are telling me? Is that my son’s great advice? How can you tell me about my poetry? That kind
of advice is like a blob of snot. My poetry is everything
to me. Do you think I obtain pleasure from selling
Mr. Big Shot the New York Times, with his gloved
hand waiting for pennies change? Do you think this is mypleasure? Or perhaps
you think your ability to throw a ball is my pleasure? Or
even better, perhaps you think that one day I will come
to one of your games and cheer, and afterward you imagine
the
two of
us playing catch?”
My father never hit me, but each word he said to me that morning
was like a slap in the face. I fought back the tears. I
wanted to tell him that just because I didn’t read poetry
didn’t mean I couldn’t understand his pain, and yes,
very much, I would like to play catch with him. Would that
be so terrible? To throw a ball with your son? But
I was fourteen, and sentences like that did not form in
my mouth.
My father’s depression got worse. He stopped reading. He
stopped translating and he stopped talking to me except
for an occasional monosyllable.
“Look,” I said one morning, “I
have a way that you can start writing your poetry again.”
“I’m not interested. Let it rest. I’m
not interested. When the day comes that I need advice from
my son who can’t read past the sports pages, I’m
in trouble.”
“I think I can help you,” I
persisted.
“You cannot help me. Now stop talking. That
would help me.”
“Will you do me a favor?”
“No.”
“Will you go to the library
with me after work?”
“The library?” My father showed some emotion. “I
didn’t know you knew where it was.”
“Will you?”
“Why? What are we
going to do there?”
“I’m not going to tell you.” I knew if
I told him my idea he wouldn’t go. “Will
you do it?”
“All right. My son
wants to take me to the library? In America, wonders never cease.”
That morning, after work, we went to the Mount Vernon library. “Sit
here,” I told my father. “I’ll be right
back.” I returned a moment later with my arms
loaded down with twenty or so phone books from Montana,
Idaho and Wyoming.
“What are those?”
“They’re phone books.”
My father closed his eyes. “We are in a library,” he
took a deep breath, “I am in a library with my son,
a library where the shelves are filled with Stendhal and
Proust and Dostoyevsky
and Tolstoy and my son, my son brings me a phone book.”
Paying no attention to him I opened the Idaho book at random. “Look
at this.”
“What am I looking at?”
“In Idaho there is a town called Kimberly. It can’t
be very big. There are only two pages of phone numbers. Here.” I
pointed to a name in the middle of a page and wrote it down on
a pad. “Ralph Sanders, that’s a nice name. County
Route 16, Kimberly, Idaho.” I skipped a few pages to
another town. “Tremont. This is bigger. There
are six pages. How’s this one? Frank Mace. County
Road 21, Tremont, Idaho.” I wrote it down.
“What are you doing?” My father said. “Why
did you shlep me here? Is this funny? Am I
to laugh?”
“These names, Pop, names
of people you can send lifetime subscriptions to the Freiheit.”
“Are you mad?”
“Why? What’s wrong with it? Why
not?”
There was a half a minute of silence. My father nodded.
“Let me help you pick the names,” he
said.
My father started writing poetry again. To this day there
is a vision that slips in front of my eyes of Farmer Sanders
riding to his mailbox on his tractor, opening it, and there
is the morning Freiheit, every morning, forever.
My Son
Much has happened. The world has changed. My days as
a young man are shadows. When I tell my wife and
son that once I was a member of the Communist Party they
look
at me with
skepticism.
My father died a few years ago. He was eighty-six. Although
I was angry at him for many years, my anger has dissipated
since his death, and now I remember most of all this tough
little man
who wanted more than anything in the world for his son
to read a book.
I have been trying in vain to find some of his poetry and the idea
of publishing a collection with a vanity press. (I’m
sure it would cost me more than three dollars and fifty
cents a poem.) It is inconceivable, but he never
kept copies of his work. I suppose my father thought
the Tog and especially
the Freiheit were as immortal as the New York
Times. The Tog has long since stopped publishing, and the Freiheit publishes
a tabloid once a week that bears little resemblance to
the paper
I knew. Almost everybody from that world is gone,
and I have not been able to uncover a single poem that
my father wrote. I
have asked everyone there is to ask, but in 1982 no one
has copies of Yiddish newspapers from forty-five years
ago.
When my father died, his entire estate consisted of books: thousands
and thousands of books. On a rainy Sunday afternoon my sister and
I divided them up. Half of them sit in my house now, and
my son, who is sixteen, reads them. I don’t think my
son has ever held a baseball in his hand, but he reads books with
a passion and voracity that is astonishing. “I want,” he
told me, “to read every book ever written.”
Besides the books, my father
had bound all of the literary magazines that were being published in the twenties
and thirties: Dial,
Poetry, Hound and Horn, Pagany, Exile, Quarterly and Transition,
to mention just a few. When my son first discovered them in dusty cartons,
he acted a little bit like a young man in love. A
few days later, he came to me with a copy of a 1928 issue
of Dial. “Look
what I found,” he said. In the middle of the magazine,
in a William Carlos Williams poem, was a yellowed piece of paper
folded over twice. It was an eight-line poem of my father’s,
written in Yiddish. I don’t know why it was
there.
“What is it?” my
son asked.
“It’s your legacy,” I
answered.
DON ZACHARIA is the owner of Zachy's
Wines. He is the author of The Match Trick. Two stories by Zacharia
have appeared in KR.
Work that appears on the KR web site is from The
Kenyon Review and all applicable copyright restrictions apply.
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