A version of “Threads” appears in my book My Life as an Animal, Stories, and I want to thank Mike Levine for editing that book and for thinking with passion about the voice of a writer.
I love writing about catering jobs I’ve done, and this piece has a catering thing in the mix. What to call this kind of writing? I call it hybrid, in the way it moves between memoir, criticism, and historical accounts. I love writing with the freedom to mix genres. Thought works associatively in my mind and probably yours.
I’m posting today, a bit sooner than of late, because tomorrow Richard Toon will be sworn in as a US citizen, and we are going to Albany for the ceremony. He will be able to vote! He’s very happy about that. As I said in the subscribe tab, I’ve extended the 25% discount on new paid subscriptions through today, May 18.
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THREADS
One night when I was working for a small catering company we did a wedding on the Lower East Side in a venue that had once been a synagogue. The space was near Cannon Street, where both my parents, by coincidence, had lived as kids. According to my father, the street you grew up was an arrow that shot you into the world. There were socialist streets, gangster streets, and garmento streets. After the ninth grade, my father left school to sell dresses on the road. At around this time, a cousin of his joined The Purple Gang.
The Purple Gang were Jewish thugs who terrorized Detroit in the days of prohibition, first as vandals in their neighborhood, then as hijackers and bootleggers running booze down from Canada. During their peak years, they recruited hoodlums from Chicago, St. Louis, and New York (the cousin) and were responsible for some 500 murders. They were brought down in the late 1920s when Italian mobsters cooperated with the FBI and when one of their own testified against the leaders during a trial for a horrific massacre. Among the kingpins were the Bernstein brothers (Abe, Ray and Izzy) as well as Harry Fleisher, Abe Axler, and Phil Keywell. Phil’s brother Harry served 34 spotless years of a life sentence and was released in 1965 to find a wife, a job, and a rabbit hole out of history.
Jews became gangsters in America because they had been gangsters in Europe, famously depicted in Isaac Babel’s stories about Benya Krik, the king of Jewish gangsters in the mythicized Odessa of Babel’s youth. Jews became gangsters in the US as a way to be American—ante up to other ethnic tribes and claim their pile of success. The gangster figure acquired noir appeal from the movies. Symbolically, he remains a tough little guy—a striver, a scrapper. He preys on the weak, but his crimes cannot be measured against the pogroms, concentration camps, and gulags authorized by governments. To me, a kid in the suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s, the image of a lawless, danger-courting Jew was sexy, as it was to Babel in cozy Odessa. My parents’ generation had faced street taunts and discrimination as Jews, but for me, growing up amid well-off Jews, I did not feel risk in this category.
The floors of the former synagogue where I worked that night were splintery and creaky, the staircases steep and rickety. Plaster flaked off the walls. There were no banisters and not a single straight line. You had to concentrate not to bump your head, moving fast between floors. But the place was beautiful, with a vaulting, domed ceiling and a romantic mezzanine that looked over a ballroom draped with gauzy silk curtains and twinkling votive candles. It was easy to imagine weddings held here in the days when my parents had run around as kids. It was cold out that day, the gutters mounded with crusted snow, the air blue with ghosts playing handball against brick walls. Fine, dry snow swirled over frozen streets, holding its form like the fake snow in department store displays. I could see my grandparents bustling along, their hands chafed, winding through pushcarts selling hot chick peas—heise arbis—and roasted chestnuts. The salted, greasy peas would be scooped into paper cones and secured at the bottom with a pert twist. The chestnuts would nestle in coals that cooked inside metal braziers, the shells becoming black as beetles, little tongues of flame dancing up and down like a violin bow over strings.
I saw my father as a boy, slapping a handball against a wall, impatient to pitch himself into the world. He plays with boys from the street of learners who will go to City College. Their sons will become professors and doctors, and their daughters will raise the children of such men and teach them to use the right fork for fish. They will employ cooks who can galantine a capon, layering the boned sack of meat with nuts, fruit, spinach and eggs—a color for each season of the year. They will hire staff to sweep up snow that doesn’t melt. My father will wear a double breasted coat and a furred fedora with a wide brim and look like John Garfield (born Julius Garfinkel), a guy on the make who could play a gangster in the movies, a Jewish gangster, muscular and compact. My father will start his own business manufacturing coats for girls, and he will work out every day and smell of cologne as he smooths down the back of a coat, tugging smartly at the hem to make sure it falls right. Before customers know what has hit them, they will want to buy my father’s coats, and he will collect the garments and place them tenderly in tissue paper, as if lowering a lover onto sheets. He will circle the box with twine and attach a wooden handle to carry the parcel like a little suitcase, and he will shave the price, saying, “For you . . . ,” then waving goodbye to customers saying, “Wear it in good health.”
At home, on sleepy Barnes Street, with its green lawns, bird song, and salty air, I was not asked to make a bed, prepare a meal, wash a dish, or vacuum a carpet. My parents didn’t believe children were brought into the world to work.
The bride and groom at the wedding party were young and pleased with the event. It was a Jewish wedding, and there were pyramids of food prepared by chefs in white jackets. Asian and Mexican dishes, a raw bar, a caviar station, and an expanse of deli meat long as a block. The guests floated around gracefully. There were no drunken uncles with toupees askew, groping teenage girls. No tipsy grandmothers in acid yellow wigs, skittering around on high heels. Still, it wasn’t exactly British afternoon tea. From the synagogue’s patina seeped the “beslobbered breasts” and “blobs of rampant, sweat-odored human flesh” Babel describes in an Odessa wedding.
I was 54. I worked from three in the afternoon until one at night, up and down the steep stairs, balancing heavy platters for the buffets, crouching and dipping back to the basement. For the breakdown, there was more walking, clearing, scraping, and hauling. I loved it. It was comforting schlepping near where my grandparents had schlepped as sewers and pressers in the garment trade. After the party was finished, I cleaned the kitchen, filling 40-gallon garbage bags and lugging them outside, wiping down the steel counters, sweeping the tiled floors. After waiters took whatever leftovers they wanted, I dumped the rest. A hideous waste. For myself, I packed smoked salmon and several pounds of sliced corned beef and brisket, the kind of lean, dense delicatessen my mother used to buy on weekends. Stacked up in columns, it looked like money printed with the faces of my family.
Two party planners stayed late with us, boxing ornaments and vases. They were responsible for transporting the presents and unused liquor uptown—all in all a considerable load. A van pulled up as our crew was hauling out garbage, and we helped the young women bring boxes to the driver. The cartons overflowed onto the backseat, leaving only a small space for the planners and an empty seat beside the driver.
He wore a wool cap pulled low on his forehead. He had a lean, hawkish face with a thin nose and shrewd eyes, and he spoke in an accent I couldn’t place. His van was tidy, and he was precise in organizing the cargo. I asked where he was going, and it turned out to be close to where I lived, north and west of the old synagogue. My shopping bags were heavy, and it would have taken a long time to travel by subway. The nearest station was blocks away, so I asked the driver for a ride, and he said, “Why not?” Jaunty. I don’t know if he cleared it with the young women. I didn’t thank them. They kept apart from us, the help, in the way people do, by relating to your body as if it is a surface to leave drinks on, by averting their eyes and barely whispering, “Thank-you,” for a large service.
The way I situate myself with working people and poor people used to drive my mother crazy. “You don’t like yourself,” she would say, and I did not contradict her, because, really, how could I? I would say, “You haven’t been Queen Marie of Romania all that long. We come from peasants and shleppers.” She would look surprised to have forgotten her life and softly correct me, saying, “Not peasants. They lived in cities.”
It’s instructive being the help, instructive being a word perhaps used by people who can slip in and out of the role, although anyone who labors in a uniform—even one that upgrades you on the food chain such as a doctor’s lab coat—knows the Pirandellian slippage into a set of assumptions and the pleasure of disguise when, inside, you feel yourself a volatile element, a pile of crispy leaves, a mutant replicant. Every minority person knows this feeling in a field of dominant others. What I mean by instructive is that working in a service job reminds you that you are a wind-tossed snowflake with no purchase on permanence. When you contemplate mortality—even if you have an easy death at 95 in Marianbad instead of a brutal one at 20 in Auschwitz—everyone’s story winds up haunted and ephemeral. What is the purpose of being reminded of this all the time? Nothing. There is no purpose, period, but let’s not pull on that thread right now.
I was wearing a down parka over my tuxedo jacket, and I looked clownish in the combination of finery and street, like a figure out of Vaudeville, like a character from a Beckett play. And I had these bags by my feet loaded with food and flowers. There was a bag lady aspect to me, definitely. The young women talked on their cell phones or murmured to each other behind the driver and me. I felt a connection to him, fellow schlepper, with his trim body and neat jacket—an item of clothing, I could see, he hung in a closet rather than flung over a chair. Something wry and cagey leapt off him, a silky, familiar thing that licked my face. I asked if he owned the van. He said he did, and we began a conversation.
He lived in Queens. I knew that many Russians lived in Queens and because I had recently traveled to Russia and wanted the driver to be Russian I asked if he was Russian. He said he was born in Italy and had moved to Israel, where he’d lived until he was 30. He said, “It’s the story of the Jewish people, moving from country to country. We’re gypsies. We feel uneasy remaining in one place too long.” He shot me a sideways look. I told him I, too, was a Jew. For all I knew the girls in the back were Jews. To the driver, being a Jew was romantic the way he talked, as if Jews moved from country to country out of wanderlust. He said he had moved to Israel to be among Jews and he’d moved to the United States to feel like a stranger. I said I liked being where I didn’t strictly speaking belong. We sped up the FDR Drive. The water was shining under a winter moon, and lights from the bridges moved on little waves churned up by wind. I felt cozy in the van. It like a force from the old neighborhood had reached out a hand to me and was saying, “You may be alone, but who cares, what does it matter, if you pick the right strangers?”
The young women wanted to be dropped off first. The driver explained to them that their trip would be shorter if he took me to my apartment first. They sat with tight little mouths as I prepared a package of deli meat for the driver. He said he would have it for lunch the next day. We said goodnight, and he waited outside until I passed through the front door of my building.
Upstairs, I danced around, putting things away, not tired, not bedraggled. I said to myself, “Don’t get all Blanche Dubois about the kindness of strangers. Don’t fall in love with luck. It was just a lift between two snowy streets.” But I wanted to connect the strands of the day that felt like they amounted to something: the Jewish wedding, the old synagogue, Cannon Street where my parents had roller-skated as kids, the Lower East Side dealing out strivers, revolutionaries, and gangsters like cards in a deck, the van driver stamped with the boot of the Holocaust, as the lives of all Jews have been—all people on the planet, really, although not all as murderously.
At the wedding, a soft, padded sack had been passed around for people to put gifts in. Jews give money, a custom considered crass in some cultures. Money, before it is exchanged for something, is an advertisement for desire. Money is a symbol of freedom—the nothing a thing is before meaning is attached to it. The Jewish interest in structures of interpretation is owed in part to the long, Jewish experience of being interpreted by others, although this form of thinking is hardly confined to Jews. I stashed the meat and salmon in the fridge, feeling Jewish—a sensation, at once tender and uncontrollable, that stuck to me like an oily smudge.
Almost as soon the emotion stirred, I knew it was corny. I loaded the sink with tulips, roses, and hydrangeas and snipped the stems. I collected vases, and as I arranged the flowers I thought about the van driver. I had said I was a Jew, so he would not have to translate himself. But I was establishing more. He was talking about history, and in history I stood with Jews because people hated Jews for being Jews. In this context, to say you were not Jewish would turn you into something else you were not, because there was no such thing as being a nothing and besides I wasn’t a nothing. Everywhere I went people saw me as a New York Jewish type. My syntax, the speed of my thoughts, the Yiddish I tossed around.
I didn’t have a problem with that, but as an atheist I didn’t want people thinking I believed in God or religious practice, God forbid. When someone said, “Happy New Year” to me at Rosh Hashanah or, “Happy Chanukah,” in December, I sometimes told them about the kind of Jew I was and the kind of Jew I wasn’t. I made them wish they hadn’t tried to be nice. I didn’t think they were being nice. I thought they were trying to slot me into some box, so I wouldn’t be flying around boxless and upsetting the balance of the universe. Upsetting the balance of the universe was a job description I would have liked.
I put flowers on tables, window ledges, my desk. I lit votive candles. The place looked ready for a lover (or a funeral?), although no lover was coming. I cleared the petals and stems from the sink and carried trash to the basement, feeling a second wind. In the elevator, I asked myself, maybe not in so many words, but something like, “How might personal memories and choices figure in the seismic eruptions of history.” Or not figure?
Upstairs, I sat on the couch. The living room had a high ceiling and crown moldings. Next to the couch was a pile of books, and on top of the pile was On the Natural History of Destruction, a collection of essays by WG Sebald. The essays were about coincidence and history, and I had been reading the book before the party. It had probably been coloring my thoughts.
In this book and elsewhere, Sebald is interested in the impulse to forget things, and as a nonJewish German he’s especially interested in the German impulse to forget the Holocaust. “I have kept asking myself what the invisible connections that determine our lives are and how the threads run,” he writes.
What are “invisible threads,” and how are they connected to forgetting? Does he mean the unconscious? Maybe he’s saying, with a nod to Freud, that forgetting only seems like a random occurrence while, in reality, it’s a structured activity with intention behind it. When we want to, we can easily misplace our tortures and murders.
Snow was still falling in the night. A dog whined outside the Korean market on the corner. Otherwise, it was quiet. Sebald’s book is about the contact points of small and large events. He’s looking for a way not to forget Germany’s past and also to attach his life to history. As a German he’s saying, in effect: “I could have been one of the killers.” Okay, I’m thinking as I read along, I can see how you would need to say this, but if Sebald and I passed each other on the sidewalk of history, would I as a Jew have to say: “I could have been one of the killed?” Even in the realm of speculation, even in the realm of language, I didn’t want to do this.
Sebald also speaks of, “strange connections [that] cannot be explained by causal logic.” Does he mean a universe with a plan? Is he drifting into metaphysics? If he is, I’m leaving him on the sidewalk, because the part of the mind that believes in a planful universe is just like the part of the mind that forgets things. They are both activities of wishing for things to have a particular shape when things don’t have a particular shape. They just are.
I got up to make tea. As the water was boiling, I thought about the allure of metaphysical thinking. It tempts you when, say, you want to be rescued from a snowy street and a van pulls up. The refrigerator hummed. A message without meaning. The elevator opened, and footsteps moved down the hall. A narrative without a story. I remembered something Philip Roth talks book in his book Patrimony. His father is dying, and Roth takes a wrong turn and winds up at the cemetery where his grandfather is buried. It’s where his father, too, will soon be buried, and where, in time, he’ll join them. Roth isn’t sorry to have made the wrong turn. He writes: “I couldn’t have explained what good it had done—it hadn’t been a comfort or consolation; if anything it had only confirmed my sense of his doom—but I was still glad that I had wound up there. I wondered if my satisfaction didn’t come down to the fact that the cemetery visit was narratively right: paradoxically, it had the feel of an event not entirely random and unpredictable and, in that way at least, offered a sort of strange relief from the impact of all that was frighteningly unforeseen.”
Narratively right! What a great concept! The relief of patterns. So great.
There was another book in the pile beside the couch. It was Savage Shorthand, a study of Isaac Babel by Jerome Charyn. It had been sent to me by the publisher for possible review. I opened it, and there, racing across the pages like a pack of yapping hounds, were all the threads of my day: tough Jews, unlucky Jews, the consequences of erasure, and the unprotected life. Babel was a Jew who had run with the killers! How gangsta!
On the advice of Maxim Gorky, Babel left Odessa to live illegally in St. Petersburg—before the Revolution, Jews were not allowed beyond the Pale. Babel assumed a Russian pseudonym and in 1920 traveled with the Russian cavalry as a war correspondent, riding with the Cossacks into Poland and the Ukraine. On paper, the Red Army was advancing the Revolution. In reality, it was slaughtering Poles and Jews. Babel had believed in the Revolution, which at first lifted restrictions on Jews. Riding with the Cossacks, he wrote in what Charyn calls a “savage shorthand,” a pitching, violent present tense without direction or exit. He watched a soldier take the head of a Jewish man under his arm and slit his throat so efficiently no blood splattered on his clothes. He saw rapes, people begging and coldly denied.
Witnessing months of cruelty “crazied” Babel, in Charyn’s phrase, and he invented a Russian that aimed to destroy language, with its deceptive definitions and patternings—a language that viscerally dramatized the failure of words. For Babel, existence has no metaphysical purpose. Meaning arises from a shifting arrangement of relationships. With the Cossacks, Babel becomes a predator and feels the arousal of unbridled power. Even more transforming, he comes to identify with the Jews who are caged. He “haunts the shtetl,” Charyn writes, “repelled by the poverty, the forlorn faces, the smell of excrement, yet drawn to these Ukrainian Jews, so unlike the round and jolly worshippers at the Brodsky Synagogue in Odessa.”
Babel’s identification with Jews at the bottom of the heap was the flip side of his bond with the defiant Jewish gangsters he would evoke in his Moldavanka stories—tales of mythically proportioned, cutthroat thugs who are wildly and humorously verbal. Living in the Moldavanka, a Jewish ghetto surrounded by Czarist might, Babel sidles up to the guys with warlord clout. Riding with the Cossacks and coming upon shtetl Jews, he’s presented with an identification riskier to his image of himself and to his survival. He says to these people, in effect: “If you are in danger, then I am in danger, and if I join you in your risk then we are both safer. Or at least together.”
From this point on, Babel identified with gangster Jews and shtetl Jews, and their conversation inside him built an art of collages and clashing jump cuts—he later collaborated on screenplays with Sergei Eisenstein. In Babel’s writing there is no connective tissue, no narrative arc, only a refusal to avert the gaze and the need to narratize. Is there a more evocative style imaginable to capture fragmented existence?
Milky light moved through the windows, and I could see how thick the snow was on the branches of the tall oak outside. I read with sadness about Babel’s arrest in 1939 on trumped up charges of spying. His papers and unpublished works were destroyed, and eight months later he was shot by a firing squad. The full story of his murder wasn’t uncovered until the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the release of KGB documents.
I closed the book. On the back is a photograph of Babel, taken in 1931 when he was 36. He looks at the camera with a wry little smile, and his lips are sensual and full. The tip of his nose is oddly angled, like the nose of the Tin Woodsman in The Wizard of Ox. Rimless round glasses perch on his nose and behind them glint warm, intelligent eyes looking for action. A wool worker’s cap is pulled low on his forehead—like the cap the van driver wore.
What breadcrumb trails do we follow, what songs, sung in faraway mountains, do we hear? For some people, maybe choosing an unprotected life could become a social action? You had to seize your opportunities.
In the kitchen of the former synagogue, the meat, sliced against the grain, looked like a lattice of small tiles, and it reminded me of the shingles of the house I had lived in with my family in Long Beach. I heard the sound of trash bins, rolling over gravel, the sound of low thunder that doesn’t end. There I was with my plastic charms, and frozen ponds I skated on in winter, and an army of gladiolas that would spike up in July. There I was, unaware of my mother’s life.
One day when she was cooking mushrooms in a skillet, the mushroom pieces came to look like my father’s face, and this filled her with joy.
Threads
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the two Jewish guys who wrote "Jailhouse Rock" for Elvis Presley, snuck this line into the song: "The whole rhythm section was a purple gang." They knew what they were talking about.
What a gorgeous piece of writing. “Narratively right” is my new favorite definition of synchronicity.