THE DAY BEFORE I discovered that my stamps were gone, I'd learned of my father's decision to quit his job. Only minutes after I got home from the hospital on Tuesday morning, he drove up to our house and into the alley in Uncle Monty's truck with the slatted-wood sides and parked it there behind Mrs. Wishnow's car, having just finished his first night of work at the Miller Street market. From then on, Sunday night through Friday morning, he'd come home at nine, ten A.M., wash up, eat his big meal, go to bed and be asleep by eleven, and when I returned from school I had to be careful not to slam the back door and wake him. A little before five in the afternoon he'd be up and gone, because by about six or seven the farmers began arriving at the market with their produce, and then anywhere from ten P.M. to four in the morning the retail grocers would be coming in to buy, along with the restaurant owners and the hotelkeepers and the last of the city's horse-and-wagon peddlers. He'd survive through the long night on the thermos of coffee and the couple of sandwiches my mother had prepared for him to take to work. On Sunday mornings he'd visit his mother at Uncle Monty's or Monty would bring her to the house to see us, and he'd spend the rest of Sunday sleeping, and again we'd have to be quiet so as not to disturb him. It was a hard life, especially since on occasion he had to drive out well before dawn to farmers in Passaic and Union counties and bring their produce in all by himself if Uncle Monty could get a better deal that way.
I knew it was a hard life because when he got home in the morning he'd have a drink. Ordinarily in our house a bottle of Four Roses lasted for years. My mother, a caricature of a teetotaler, couldn't stand the look of a foaming glass of beer, let alone the smell of straight whiskey, and when did my father ever take a drink, other than on their anniversary or when his boss came for dinner and he served him Four Roses on the rocks? But now he would get home from the market and, before he changed out of his dirty clothes and took his shower, he'd pour the whiskey into a shot glass, tilt back his head, and take it down in one gulp, making the face of a man who'd just bit into a light bulb. "Good!" he'd say aloud. "Good!" Only then could he ease up enough to eat a full meal without getting indigestion.
I was dumbfounded, and not only by the abrupt decline in my father's vocational status-not only by the truck in the alleyway and the thick-soled boots on the feet of a man who had previously gone off to work in a suit and a tie and polished black shoes, not only by the preposterousness of his slugging down his shot and having his dinner alone at ten in the morning-but by my brother as well, by his unforeseen transformation.
Sandy wasn't angry any longer. He wasn't contemptuous. He wasn't superior-acting in any way. It was as though he too had taken a blow to the head, but one that, instead of bringing on amnesia, had rejuvenated the quiet, conscientious boy whose satisfactions emanated not from his being a precocious big shot full of contrary opinions but from that strong, even current of an interior life that carried him steadily along from morning to night and that, in my eyes, had always made him genuinely superior to the other kids his age. Or perhaps it was that the passion for stardom-along with the capacity for conflict-had been spent; perhaps he had never possessed the necessary egoism, and was secretly relieved no longer having to be publicly stupendous. Or perhaps he'd just never believed in what he was supposed to be promulgating. Or perhaps, while I lay unconscious in the hospital with a possibly life-threatening hematoma, my father had given him the talking-to that had done the trick. Or perhaps, in the wake of the crisis I'd precipitated, he was merely concealing the stupendous self behind the old Sandy, masquerading, calculating, cleverly waiting in hiding until…until who knew what befell us next. At any rate, for now the shock of circumstances had steered my brother back into the family fold.
And my mother was no longer a working woman. There wasn't nearly what she'd hoped to accumulate in the Montreal savings account, but enough to get us across the border and started in Canada if we should have to flee at a moment's notice. She'd left her job at Hahne's no less expeditiously than my father had jettisoned the security of his twelve-year affiliation with the Metropolitan to foil the government's plans for our transfer to Kentucky and safeguard us against the anti-Semitic subterfuge that he, along with Winchell, understood Homestead 42 to be. She was back running the household full time and would once again be there when we came home for lunch and got home from school, and during the summer vacation she'd be there to monitor Sandy and me so that we didn't again spin out of control owing to lack of supervision.
A father remodeled, a brother restored, a mother recovered, eighteen black silk sutures stitched in my head and my greatest treasure irretrievably lost, and all with a wondrous fairy-tale swiftness. A family both declassed and rerooted overnight, facing neither exile nor expulsion but entrenched still on Summit Avenue, whereas in three short months, Seldon-to whom I was helplessly yoked now that he was going around the neighborhood reveling in having prevented me from bleeding to death while disguised in his clothes-Seldon was shipping out. As of September 1, Seldon would be off living with his mother, the only Jewish kid in Danville, Kentucky.
My "sleepwalking" would likely have caused an even more humiliating scandal than it did in our immediate locale had not Walter Winchell been fired by Jergens Lotion only hours after coming off the air on the Sunday night that I'd run away. There was the truly shocking news that nobody could believe and that Winchell wasn't about to let the country forget. After ten years as America's leading radio reporter, he was replaced at nine P.M. the following Sunday by yet another dance band broadcasting from yet another sophisticated supper club on the terrace of a midtown Manhattan hotel. Jergens's first charge against him was that a broadcaster with a weekly nationwide audience of more than twenty-five million had essentially "cried fire in a crowded theater"; the second was that he had slandered a president of the United States with malicious accusations "that only the most outrageous demagogue would contrive to arouse the passions of the mob."
Even the moderate New York Times, a paper founded and owned by Jews-and highly esteemed for that reason by my father-and by no means uncritical of Lindbergh's policy toward Hitler's Germany, announced its unqualified support of the action taken by Jergens Lotion in an editorial entitled "A Professional Disgrace." "A competition has been in progress for some time," wrote the Times,
among anti-Lindbergh entrepreneurs to determine who can produce the most outrageous accounts of the motives of the Lindbergh administration. With one bombastic stride, Walter Winchell has moved to the head of the pack. The borderline scruples and questionable taste of Mr. Winchell have tumbled over into an outburst of vitriol that is as unpardonable as it is unethical. With accusations so far-fetched that even a lifelong Democrat may find himself feeling unexpected sympathy for the president, Winchell has disgraced himself irredeemably. Jergens Lotion is to be commended for the speed with which it has removed him from the airwaves. Journalism as it is practiced by the Walter Winchells of this country is an insult as much to our enlightened citizenry as to the journalistic standards of accuracy, fairness, and responsibility, toward which Mr. Winchell, his cynical tabloid cohorts, and their money-hungry publishers have always displayed the utmost contempt.
In a subsequent attack delivered in behalf of the Lindbergh administration and published by the Times as the first and lengthiest of the letters elicited by its editorial, one eminent correspondent, after alluding gratefully to the editorial and reinforcing its argument by further examples of Winchell's ostentatious abuse of the First Amendment, concluded: "The attempt to inflame and frighten his fellow Jews is no less detestable than the disregard for the norms of decency that your paper so forcefully condemns. Certainly nothing is so heinous as preying upon the historical fears of a persecuted people, particularly when full participation in an open society free of oppression is precisely what the present administration is working to achieve for this same group through the efforts of the Office of American Absorption. For Walter Winchell to characterize Homestead 42, a program designed to broaden and enrich the involvement of America's proud Jewish citizens in the national life, as a fascistic strategy to isolate Jews and exclude them from the national life is the height of journalistic recklessness and an illustration of the Big Lie technique that is today the greatest threat to democratic freedom everywhere."
The letter was signed "Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, Director, Office of American Absorption, Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C."
Winchell's response came in the column he wrote for the Daily Mirror, the New York paper belonging to America's wealthiest publisher, William Randolph Hearst, who owned a chain of some thirty right-wing papers and half a dozen popular magazines as well as King Features, where Winchell was syndicated and read by many millions more. Hearst despised Winchell's political allegiances, particularly his glorification of FDR, and would have fired him years earlier had it not been that the very New Yorkers for whose nickels the Mirror competed against the Daily News found irresistible the gutter charm of the columnist's singular concoction of muckraking contentiousness and cloying patriotism. According to Winchell, why Hearst finally did fire him had less to do with the long-standing animosity between the columnist and his publisher than with pressure from the White House that even a ruthless old tycoon as powerful as Hearst could not dare to resist for fear of the consequences.
"The Lindbergh fascists"-so began the characteristically brazen, unregenerate Winchell column published just days after he'd lost his radio contract-"have openly begun their Nazi assault on freedom of expression. Today Winchell's the enemy to be silenced…Winchell 'the warmonger,' 'the liar,' 'the alarmist,' 'the Commie,' 'the kike.' Today yours truly, tomorrow every newscaster and reporter who dares to tell the truth about the fascist plot to destroy American democracy. Honorary Aryans like the rabid rabbi Lyin' Lionel B. and the snooty Park Avenue proprietors of the gutless New York Times aren't the first ultracivilized Jewish Quislings to grovel before an anti-Semitic master because they're just too, too refined to fight like Winchell…and they won't be the last. The jerks at Jergens aren't the first corporate cowards to play ball with the dictatorial lying machine that is now ruining this country…and they won't be the last, either."
And that column-which proceeded to list some fifteen more of his personal enemies who qualified as America's leading fascist collaborators-was, in fact, to be his last.
Three days later, after visiting Hyde Park to make certain that FDR was still determined not to come out of political retirement to run for a third term, Winchell announced his candidacy for president of the United States in the next general election. Until then, those considered in the running were Roosevelt's secretary of state, Cordell Hull; the former secretary of agriculture and the vice presidential candidate on the 1940 ticket, Henry Wallace; Roosevelt's postmaster general and the chairman of the Democratic Party, James Farley; Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas; and two middle-of-the-road Democrats, neither of them New Dealers, former Indiana governor Paul V. McNutt and Senator Scott W. Lucas of Illinois. There was also an unconfirmed report (circulated and perhaps originated by Winchell back when he was still making $ 800, 000 a year circulating unconfirmed reports) that should the convention wind up deadlocked, as could easily happen with so unexciting a slate of candidates, Eleanor Roosevelt, a forceful political and diplomatic presence during her husband's two terms-and still a popular figure whose blend of outspokenness and aristocratic reserve had gained her an enormous following among the party's liberal constituency as well as numerous mocking enemies in the right-wing press-would appear on the convention floor the way Lindbergh did at the 1940 Republican Convention and sweep the nomination by acclamation. But once Walter Winchell became the first Democratic candidate to enter the race, and to do so almost thirty months in advance of the ' 44 election, in advance even of the midterm congressional elections-and to do so immediately after the noisy fracas that resulted from his having been "purged" from his profession by "the strong-arm putsch tactics of the fascist gang in the White House" (as Winchell described his enemies and their methods in announcing his candidacy)-the one-time gossip columnist became the man to beat, the only Democrat with a name known to everyone and audacious enough to assault with ferocity an incumbent as beloved as Lindy.
Republican leaders didn't deign to take Winchell seriously, assuming either that the irrepressible performer was putting on a self-glorifying sideshow to sucker funds out of a handful of rich diehard Democrats or that he was a flamboyant stalking horse for FDR (or perhaps for Roosevelt's ambitious wife), at once stirring up and measuring whatever underground anti-Lindbergh sentiment might possibly exist in a nation where polls showed that Lindbergh continued to be supported by a record eighty to ninety percent of every classification and category of voter, except the Jews. Winchell, in short, was the candidate of the Jews, and himself a Jew of the coarsest type, in no way resembling the inner circle of well-bred, dignified Jewish Democrats like Roosevelt's wealthy friend Bernard Baruch or the banker and New York governor Herbert Lehman or the recently retired Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis. And as if being a Jew of no background who embodied just about every vulgar trait that made Jews less than welcome in the better strata of American social and business society weren't enough to render him an irrelevant impertinence on the political scene anywhere other than the heavily Jewish precincts of New York City, there was his reputation as an adulterous philanderer with a penchant for seducing long-legged showgirls and his profligate nightlife among the loose-living Hollywood and Broadway celebrities who drank to all hours at New York's Stork Club to make him anathema to the straitlaced multitude. His candidacy was a joke and the Republicans treated it as nothing more.
But on our street that week, in the immediate aftermath of the firing of Winchell and his instantaneous resurrection as a presidential candidate, the significance of the two events was almost all that neighbors could talk about among themselves. After nearly two years of never knowing whether to believe the worst, of trying to focus on the demands of their day-to-day lives and then helplessly absorbing every rumor about what the government had in store for them, of never being able to justify either their alarm or their composure with hard fact-after so much perplexity, they were so ripe for delusion that, when the parents gathered on their beach chairs to chat together in the alleyways at night, the guessing game that invariably started up could go on without letup for hours: Who would be vice president on the Winchell ticket? Whom would he appoint to his cabinet? Whom would he appoint to the Supreme Court? Who would turn out to be the greater leader, FDR or Walter Winchell? They plunged headlong into a thousand fantasies, and the very small children also caught the spirit and went skipping and dancing about, chanting, "Wind-shield for pres-i-dent…Wind-shield for pres-i-dent." Of course, that no Jew could ever be elected to the presidency-least of all a Jew with a mouth as unstoppable as Winchell's-even a kid as young as I was already accepted, as if the proscription were laid out in so many words in the U.S. Constitution. Yet not even that ironclad certainty could stop the adults from abandoning common sense and, for a night or two, imagining themselves and their children as native-born citizens of Paradise.
The wedding of Rabbi Bengelsdorf and Aunt Evelyn took place on a Sunday in the middle of June. My parents were not invited, nor did they expect or want to be, and yet nothing could be done to ease my mother's distress. I'd overheard her crying from behind her bedroom door before, and though it wasn't a usual occurrence or one I liked, in all the months during which my parents struggled to assess the menace posed by the Lindbergh administration and to determine the response sensible for a Jewish family to take, I'd never known her to be so inconsolable. "Why does this have to happen too?" she asked my father. "They're only getting married," he told her. "It isn't the end of the world." "But I can't stop thinking about my father," she said. "Your father died," he said, "my father died. They weren't young men, they got sick and they died." It would have been hard to imagine a tone any more sympathetic than his, but her misery was such that the gentler his voice, the worse she suffered. "And I think," she said, "about my mother, how Momma wouldn't know what to make of anything anymore." "Honey, it could all be a lot more terrible-you know that." "And it will be," my mother said. "Maybe not, maybe not. Maybe everything is starting to change. Winchell-" "Oh, please, Walter Winchell won't-" "Shhh, shhh," he said to her, "the little one."
And so I understood that Walter Winchell wasn't, in fact, the candidate of the Jews-he was the candidate of the children of the Jews, something we were being given to clutch at, the way not too many years before we'd been given the breast not merely for nutrients but for the alleviation of babyhood's fears.
The wedding ceremony was held at the rabbi's temple and the reception afterward in the ballroom of the Essex House, Newark's most luxurious hotel. The notables who attended, each accompanied by a wife or a husband, were listed inside a box separate from the wedding story itself and directly beside photographs of the bride and groom that appeared in the Newark Sunday Call. The list was surprisingly long and impressive, and I present it here to explain why I, for one, had to wonder if my parents and their Metropolitan friends weren't completely out of touch with reality to imagine that any harm could befall them because of a government program being administered by a luminary of the stature of Rabbi Bengelsdorf.
To begin with, there were Jews in abundance at the wedding ceremony, among them family and friends, congregants from Rabbi Bengelsdorf's temple, admirers and colleagues from around New Jersey, and others who had traveled from all over the country to be present. And many Christians were there as well. And, according to the article in the Sunday Call-which took up one and a half of the two society pages that day-among the several invited guests who were unable to attend but who sent their best wishes through Western Union, was the wife of the president, the First Lady, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, identified as a close friend of the rabbi's, "a fellow New Jerseyite and a fellow poet" with whom he shared "cultural and intellectual interests" and met frequently "over afternoon tea for a White House tête-a-tête to discuss philosophy, literature, religion, and ethics."
Representing the city were the two highest-ranking Jews ever in Newark's government, the two-term ex-mayor, Meyer Ellenstein, and the city clerk, Harry S. Reichenstein, and five of the slew of Irishmen currently most prominent in the city, the director of Public Safety, the director of the Department of Revenue and Finance, the director of Parks and Public Property, the city's chief engineer, and the corporation counsel. Newark's federal postmaster was there, and the head librarian of the Newark Public Library as well as the president of the library's board of trustees. Among the distinguished educators attending the wedding were the president of the University of Newark, the president of Newark College of Engineering, the superintendent of schools, and the headmaster of St. Benedict's Prep. And an array of distinguished clergymen-Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish-were also among those present. From the First Baptist Peddie Memorial Church, the city's largest Negro congregation, there was Reverend George E. Dawkins; from Trinity Cathedral, Reverend Arthur Dumper; from Grace Episcopal Church, Reverend Charles L. Gomph; from St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, on High Street, Reverend George E. Spyridakis; and from St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Very Reverend John Delaney.
Absent-and glaringly so to my parents, though nowhere alluded to in the newspaper story-was Rabbi Bengelsdorf's antagonist and the foremost of Newark's rabbis, Joachim Prinz of Congregation B'nai Abraham. Before Rabbi Bengelsdorf's rise to national prominence, Rabbi Prinz's authority among Jews throughout the city, in the wider Jewish community, and among scholars and theologians of every religion had far exceeded his elder colleague's, and it was he alone of the Conservative rabbis leading the city's three wealthiest congregations who had never flinched in his opposition to Lindbergh. The other two, Charles I. Hoffman of Oheb Shalom and Solomon Foster of B'nai Jeshurun, were in attendance, however, and Rabbi Foster presided over the wedding ceremony.
Present as well were the presidents of Newark's four major banks, the presidents of two of its largest insurance companies, the president of its biggest architecture firm, the two founding partners of its most prestigious law firm, the president of the Newark Athletic Club, the owner of three of the big downtown movie houses, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, the president of New Jersey Bell Telephone, the editors in chief of the two daily papers, and the president of P. Ballantine, Newark's most famous brewery. From the Essex County government there was the supervisor of the Board of Freeholders and three members of the board, and from the New Jersey judiciary were the vice chancellor of the Court of Chancery and an associate justice from the state's Supreme Court. From the State Assembly there was the majority speaker and three of the four assemblymen from Essex County, and from the State Senate a representative from Essex County. The ranking state official was a Jew, Attorney General David T. Wilentz, who had successfully led the prosecution of Bruno Hauptmann, but the state official whose presence most impressed me was Abe J. Greene, another Jew but more importantly New Jersey's boxing commissioner. One of Jersey's two U.S. senators was there, the Republican W. Warren Barbour, as was our congressman Robert W. Kean. From the District Court of the United States for the District of New Jersey there was a circuit judge, two district judges, and the district attorney (whose name I recognized from listening to Gangbusters), John J. Quinn.
A number of close associates of the rabbi at the national headquarters of the OAA and several officials representing the Department of the Interior had come up from Washington, and though there was nobody at the wedding from the very highest echelons of the federal government, there was an eloquent proxy representing no less a personage than the president himself: the telegram from the First Lady that was read aloud by Rabbi Foster at the reception, after which reading the wedding guests rose spontaneously to applaud the First Lady's sentiments and were then asked by the groom to remain standing and to join with him and his bride in singing the National Anthem.
The lengthy text of the telegram was carried in full by the Sunday Call. It went as follows:
My dear Rabbi Bengelsdorf and Evelyn:
My husband and I send you our heartfelt best wishes, and we join in wishing you the most blissful happiness.
We were delighted to have an opportunity to meet Evelyn at the White House State Dinner for the German Foreign Minister. She is an enchanting, energetic young woman, clearly a most worthy and upright person, and it took no more than the few moments I spent chatting with her for me to recognize the gifts of personality and intellect that won her the devotion of a man as extraordinary as Lionel Bengelsdorf.
I recall today the splendidly succinct lines of poetry my meeting with Evelyn brought to mind that evening. The poet is Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the words with which she begins the fourteenth of her Sonnets from the Portuguese embody just such womanly wisdom as I saw emanating from Evelyn's astonishingly dark and beautiful eyes. "If thou must love me," wrote Mrs. Browning, "let it be for naught/Except for love's sake only…"
Rabbi Bengelsdorf, you have been more than a friend since we met here in the White House after the ceremony establishing the Office of American Absorption; since your moving to Washington to become the OAA director, you have been an invaluable mentor. Our engrossing conversations, along with the enlightening books you have generously given me to read, have taught me much, not just about the Jewish faith but about the tribulations of the Jewish people and the sources of the great spiritual strength which has been the mainspring of their survival for three thousand years. I am all the richer for having discovered through you how profoundly rooted my own religious heritage is in yours.
Our greatest mission as Americans is to live in harmony and brotherhood as a united people. I know from the excellent work you are both doing for the OAA how dedicated the two of you are to helping us achieve this precious goal. Of the many blessings bestowed upon our nation by God, none is more valuable than our having among us citizens like yourselves, proud, vital champions of an indomitable race whose ancient concepts of justice and freedom have sustained our American democracy since 1776.
With every best wish,
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The second time the FBI entered our lives, it was my father who was under surveillance. The same agent who'd stopped to question me about Alvin, on the day that Mr. Wishnow hanged himself (and who'd questioned Sandy on the bus, my mother at the store, and my father at the office), showed up at the produce market and hung around the diner where the men would go to eat and get coffee in the middle of the night and, behaving as he'd done when Alvin began working for Uncle Monty, started asking around now about Alvin's uncle Herman and what he was saying to people about America and our president. Word got back to Uncle Monty through one of Longy Zwillman's henchmen, who passed on to Uncle Monty what Agent McCorkle had reported to him-namely, that after having housed and fed a traitor who'd fought for a foreign country, my father had now quit a good job with Metropolitan Life rather than participate in a government program designed to unify and strengthen the American people. Uncle Monty told Longy's guy that his brother was a poor schnook with no education who had two kids and a wife to support and couldn't do much harm to America by schlepping produce crates six nights a week. And Longy's guy listened sympathetically, according to Uncle Monty, who, with none of the decorum ordinarily practiced in our house, told us the whole story in our kitchen one Saturday afternoon-"and still the guy says to me, 'Your brother's gotta go.' So I told him, 'This is all bullshit. Tell Longy this is all part of the bullshit against Jews.' And the guy is himself a Jew, Niggy Apfelbaum, but what I say does not make a dent. Niggy goes back to Longy, and he tells him Roth don't do as he's told. What happens next? The Long One himself shows up, right there in my stinky little office and wearing a silk handmade suit. Tall, soft-spoken, dressed to kill-you see how he gets the movie stars. I said to him, 'I remember you from grade school, Longy. I could see even then you were going places.' So Longy says to me, 'I remember you, too. I could see even then you were going nowhere.' We started to laugh, and I told him, 'My brother needs a job, Longy. Can I not give my own brother a job?' 'And can I not have the FBI snooping around?' he asks me. 'I know all this,' I say, 'and didn't I get rid of my nephew Alvin because of the FBI? But with my own brother, it's not the same, is it? Look,' I tell him, 'twenty-four hours and I'll fix everything. If I don't, if I can't, Herman goes.' So I wait till after we close up the next morning, and I walk over to Sammy Eagle's, and sitting at the bar is the mick shmegeggy from the FBI. 'Let me buy your breakfast,' I tell him, and I order him a boilermaker, and I sit down next to him and I say, 'What do you got against Jews, McCorkle?' 'Nothing,' he says. 'Then why are you after my brother like this? What did he do to anybody?' 'Look, if I had something against Jews, would I be sitting here in Eagle's, would Sammy Eagle be my friend if I did?' He calls down the bar for Eagle to come over. 'Tell him,' McCorkle says, 'do I have anything against Jews?' 'Not that I know,' Eagle says. 'When your boy had the bar mitzvah, didn't I come and give him a tie clasp?' 'He still wears it,' Eagle tells me. 'See?' McCorkle says. 'I'm just doing my job, the way Sammy does his and you do yours.' 'And that's all my brother is doing,' I tell him. 'Fine. Good. So don't say I'm against the Jews.' 'My error,' I tell him, 'I apologize.' And meantime I slip him the envelope, the little brown envelope, and that's that."
Here my uncle turned to me and said, "I understand you're a horse thief. I understand you stole a horse from the church. Smart boy. Let me see." I leaned over and showed him where the horse's hoof had opened up my head. He laughed when he ran his finger lightly over the length of the scar and around the shaved patch where the hair was just growing in. "May you have many more," he told me-and then, as he'd been doing for as long as I could remember, he lifted me roughly onto one of his knees so that I could straddle it like, of all things, a horse. "You been to a bris, ain't you?" he asked, and began to give me the up-and-down ride by raising and lowering his thigh. "You know when they circumcise the baby at the bris, you know what they do, don't you?" "They cut off the foreskin," I said. "And what do they do with the little foreskin? After it's off-do you know what they do?" "No," I told him. "Well," said Uncle Monty, "they save them up, and when they got enough they give them to the FBI to make agents out of." I couldn't help myself, and even though I knew I wasn't supposed to-and even though last time he'd told me the joke, he'd said, "They send them to Ireland to make priests out of"-I began to laugh. "What was in the envelope?" I asked him. "Take a guess," he said. "I don't know. Money?" "Money is right. You're a bright little horse thief. The money that makes all trouble go away."
Only later did I learn from my brother, who'd overheard my parents talking in their bedroom, that the full amount of the bribe given to McCorkle was to be repaid to Uncle Monty, out of my father's already paltry paycheck, at the rate of ten dollars per week over the next six months. And my father could do nothing about it. About the laboriousness of the work, about the mortifications attendant upon serving his brother, all he ever said was "He's been this way since he's ten years old, he'll be this way till he dies."
Aside from Saturdays and Sunday mornings, my father was hardly to be seen that summer. My mother, on the other hand, was now around all the time, and since Sandy and I had to be home at noon for lunch and again in the midafternoon to check in with her and be accounted for, neither of us could stray very far, and in the evenings we were forbidden to go anywhere beyond the school playing field a block from the house. Either my mother was keeping a very strict vigil over herself or she'd managed temporarily to make peace with all her chagrin, because though my father had taken a steep pay cut and the household budget required some difficult trimming, she showed no disabling signs of the improbabilities she'd confronted over the past year. Her resilience had a lot to do with her being back at a job whose compensations mattered more to her than those derived from selling dresses, work she hadn't shrunk from doing but that seemed to her meaningless measured against her normal pursuits. Just how troubling her worries continued to be would only be clear to me when a letter arrived from Estelle Tirschwell, reporting on the family's progress in Winnipeg. Every lunchtime I brought the mail upstairs with me from our mailbox in the front entryway, and if there was an envelope bearing Canadian postage, she immediately sat down at the kitchen table and, while Sandy and I ate our sandwiches, read the letter to herself twice over, then folded it up to carry around in her apron pocket to look at another ten times before passing it on to my father to read when he got up to go to the market-the letter for my father, the canceled Canadian stamps for me, to help get me started on a new collection.
Sandy's friends were suddenly the girls his age, the teenage girls whom he knew from school but had never examined so covetously before. He went to find them at the playground where the organized summer activities took place all day and into the early evening. I was there too, accompanied regularly now by Seldon. I'd watch Sandy with fluctuating feelings of trepidation and delight, as though my own brother had become a pickpocket or a professional shill. He'd park himself on a bench near the ping-pong table, where the girls tended to congregate, and he'd start making pencil drawings in his sketchpad of the cutest around; invariably they'd want to see the drawings, and so before the day was over, chances were good he'd be walking dreamily out of the playground hand in hand with one of them. Sandy's strong proclivity for infatuation was no longer galvanized by propagandizing for Just Folks or topping tobacco for the Mawhinneys but fomented by these girls. Either the fresh excitement of desire had transformed his existence with the same incredible swiftness that Kentucky had and, at fourteen and a half, he'd been recast anew in a single hormonal blast or, as I believed-with my own proclivity to grant him omnipotence-getting girls to go off with him was simply an amusing ruse, how he was biding his time until…Always with Sandy I thought there must be a great deal more going on than I could begin to understand, when in fact, despite the handsome boy's air of self-assurance, he had no more idea than anyone else why he took the bait. Lindbergh's Jewish tobacco farmer discovers breasts, and suddenly he turns up as just another teenager.
My parents ascribed the girl-craziness to defiance, to "rebelliousness," to a compensatory display of independence following his forced retirement from the Lindbergh cause, and seemed willing to consider it relatively harmless. One of the girls' mothers felt otherwise evidently, and called to say so. When my father got home from work, there was a long conversation between my mother and father behind their bedroom door, and then another between my brother and my father behind the bedroom door, and for the rest of the week Sandy was not allowed to leave the vicinity of the house. But they couldn't, of course, keep him cooped up on Summit Avenue for the whole of the summer, and soon he was back at the playground confidently drawing pictures of the pretty ones, and whatever these girls allowed him to do with his hands when they went off by themselves-which couldn't have been much for eighth-graders as ignorant of sex as kids that young were back in those years-they didn't rush home to report, and so there were no more excited phone calls for my parents to contend with in the midst of all their other troubles.
Seldon. Seldon was my summer. Seldon's muzzle in my face like a dog's, and kids I'd known all my life laughing and calling me Sleepy, kids with their arms raised stiffly out in front of them and walking with slow, clumpy, zombie steps, supposedly in imitation of me lurching toward the orphanage in my sleep, and the team in the field all chanting "Hi ho Silver!" whenever I came to bat in a choose-up game.
There would be no big end-of-summer picnic up at the South Mountain Reservation on Labor Day that year because all of my parents' Metropolitan friends had left Newark with their boys by September to settle in around the country before the start of the school year. One by one, throughout that summer, each of the families drove up on a Saturday to visit and say goodbye. It was awful for my parents, who alone of the group from the local Metropolitan district designated for relocation by Homestead 42 had chosen to stay where we were. These were their dearest friends, and the hot Saturday afternoons with the tearful adults embracing out on the street while all the children forlornly looked on-afternoons that ended with the four of us who were remaining behind waving goodbye from the curb as my mother called after the departing car, "Don't forget to write!"-were the most harrowing moments so far, when our defenselessness became real to me and I sensed the beginning of the destruction of our world. And when I realized that my father, of all these men, was the most obstinate, helplessly bonded to his better instincts and their excessive demands. I only then understood that he had quit his job not merely because he was fearful of what awaited us down the line should we agree like the others to be relocated but because, for better or worse, when he was bullied by superior forces that he deemed corrupt it was his nature not to yield-in this instance, to resist either running away to Canada, as my mother urged our doing, or bowing to a government directive that was patently unjust. There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.
"Come," my father said, trying to perk us up on the Saturday when the last of the six homesteading families had seemingly vanished forever. "Come on, boys. We're going out for ice cream." The four of us walked down Chancellor to the drugstore, where the pharmacist was one of his oldest insurance customers and where in summertime it was generally more pleasant than it was out on the street, what with the awnings unfurled to prevent the sun's rays from piercing the plate glass window and the paddle blades of the three ceiling fans creaking softly as they revolved overhead. We slipped into a booth and ordered sundaes, and though my mother could not bring herself to eat despite my father's prompting, she was able eventually to stop the tears from running down her face. We, after all, were no less enjoined to an unknowable future than were our exiled friends, and so we sat spooning our sundaes in the awninged semidarkness of the cool pharmacy, everyone speechless and completely spent, until my mother at last looked up from the paper napkin she was neatly shredding and, with that wry, stripped-down smile that comes when one is entirely cried out, said to my father, "Well, like it or not, Lindbergh is teaching us what it is to be Jews." Then she added, "We only think we're Americans." "Nonsense. No!" my father replied. "They think we only think we're Americans. It is not up for discussion, Bess. It is not up for negotiation. These people are not understanding that I take this for granted, goddamnit! Others? He dares to call us others? He's the other. The one who looks most American-and he's the one who is least American! The man is unfit. He shouldn't be there. He shouldn't be there, and it's as simple as that!"
For me the hardest departure to stomach was Seldon's. Of course I was delighted to see him go. All summer long I'd been counting the days. Yet that early morning in the last week of August when the Wishnows drove off with two mattresses strapped to the car roof (lifted there and tied down beneath a tarp the night before by my father and Sandy) and clothing jammed to the top of the old Plymouth's back seat (stacks of clothing, including several items of my own, that my mother and I had helped them to carry from the house), I was the one, grotesquely enough, who couldn't stop crying. I was remembering an afternoon when Seldon and I were just six years old, and Mr. Wishnow was alive and seemingly well and still working every day for the Metropolitan, and Mrs. Wishnow was still a housewife like my mother, absorbed by her family's everyday needs and even, on occasion, looking after me if my mother had to be off doing her PTA work and Sandy wasn't around and I was home by myself after school. I was remembering the generic maternalism that she shared with my mother-the succoring warmth I wallowed in as a matter of course-and that I experienced so strikingly on the afternoon that I got stuck in their bathroom and couldn't get out. I was remembering how kind she'd been to me while I repeatedly tried and failed to open the door, spontaneously caring for me as though, regardless of differences in appearance and temperament and immediate circumstance, the four of us-Seldon and Selma, Philip and Bess-were all one and the same. I was remembering Mrs. Wishnow when what was uppermost in her mind was what was uppermost in my mother's mind-back when she was just another watchful member of the local matriarchy whose overriding task was to establish a domestic way of life for the next generation. I was remembering Mrs. Wishnow unperturbed, when her fists weren't clenched and her face full of pain.
It was a small bathroom, exactly like ours, quite confining, the door next to a toilet and the toilet abutting a sink and a bathtub squeezed in beside that. I pulled on the door but it didn't open. At home I would just have closed it behind me, but at the Wishnows' I locked it-something I'd never done before in my life. I locked it and I peed and I flushed and I washed my hands and, because I didn't want to touch their towel, wiped them dry on the back of the legs of my corduroys-everything was fine, and then I went to exit the bathroom, and I couldn't undo the lock above the doorknob. I could turn it a little ways but then it would catch and stop. I didn't bang on the door or rattle the doorknob, I just kept trying to turn the lock as quietly as I could. But it wouldn't go, and so I sat back down on the toilet and I thought that maybe it would somehow work itself out. I sat there for a while but then I got lonesome and stood up and tried the lock again. It still wouldn't uncatch, and I started to knock lightly on the door, and Mrs. Wishnow came and said, "Oh, the lock on the door does that sometimes. You have to turn it like this." She explained how to do it, but I still couldn't get it open, and so very calmly she said, "No, Philip, while you're turning it you have to pull it back," and though I tried to do as she told me it still didn't work. "Dear," she said, "turn and back simultaneously-turn and back at the same time." "Which way is back?" I said. "Back. Back towards the wall." "Oh, the wall. Okay," I said, but I couldn't get it right no matter what I did. "It won't work," I said, and I began to sweat, and then I heard Seldon. "Philip? It's Seldon. Why did you lock it? We weren't going to come in." "I didn't say you were," I said. "Then why did you lock it?" "I don't know," I said. "Do you think we should call the fire department, Mom? They can get him out with a ladder." "No, no, no," Mrs. Wishnow said. "Come on, Philip," Seldon said, "it's not that hard." "But it is. It's stuck." "How's he gonna get out, Ma?" "Seldon, be still. Philip?" "Yes." "Are you all right?" "Well, it's hot in here. It's getting hot." "Take a glass of cold water, dear. There's a glass in the medicine cabinet. Take a glass of water and slowly drink it and you'll be fine." "Okay." But the glass had something slimy at the bottom, and though I took it out, I only pretended to drink from it and drank instead from my cupped hands. "Ma," Seldon said, "what's he doing wrong? Philip, what are you doing wrong?" "How do I know?" I said. "Mrs. Wishnow? Mrs. Wishnow?" "Yes, dear." "It's getting too hot in here. I'm really starting to sweat." "Then open the window. Open the little window in the shower. Are you tall enough to do that?" "I think so." I took off my shoes and stepped into the shower in just my socks, and standing on my tiptoes I was able to reach the window-a smallish window of pebbled glass that looked onto the alleyway-but when I tried to open it, it was stuck too. "It won't go," I said. "Bang it a little, dear. Bang the frame at the bottom, but not too hard, and I'm sure it will open." I did as she told me but couldn't get it to budge. By now my shirt was saturated with sweat, and so I angled myself to be able to give the window a good strong shove upwards, but in turning I must have struck the shower handle with my elbow because suddenly the water was on. "Oh, no!" I said, and ice-cold water was pouring over my head and down the back of my shirt, and I jumped out of the shower and onto the tile floor. "What happened, dear?" "The shower started." "How?" Seldon said. "How could the shower start?" "I don't know!" "Are you very wet?" she asked me. "Sort of." "Get a towel," she told me. "Get a towel out of the closet. The towels are in the closet." We had the same narrow little bathroom closet directly upstairs over the Wishnows' bathroom closet, and we used it for towels too, but when I went to open theirs, I couldn't-the door was stuck. I yanked but it wouldn't open. "What is it now, Philip?" "Nothing." I couldn't tell her. "Did you take a towel?" "Yes." "Then dry yourself off. And you must stay calm. There's nothing to worry about." "I am calm." "Sit down. Sit down and dry yourself off." I was soaking wet, and now the floor was getting wet, and I sat on the toilet seat, and that's when I saw a bathroom for what it is-the upper end of a sewer-and that's when I felt the tears begin to well up. "Don't worry," Seldon called in to me, "your mother and father will be home soon." "But how will I get out?" And all at once the door was open-and there was Seldon and behind him his mother. "How'd you do that?" I said. "I opened the door," he said. "But how?" He shrugged. "I pushed. I just pushed. It was open all the time." And that was when I began to bawl and Mrs. Wishnow took me in her arms and said, "That's okay. Things like this happen. They can happen to anyone." "It was open, Ma," Seldon said to her. "Shhh," she told him. "Shhh. It doesn't matter," and then she came into the bathroom and turned off the cold water-which was still streaming into the tub-and, without any problem she opened the closet door and took out a fresh towel and began to dry my hair and my face and my neck, all the while gently telling me that it didn't matter and that these things happened to people all the time.
But that was long before everything else went wrong.
The congressional campaign began at eight A.M. the Tuesday after Labor Day, with Walter Winchell up on a soapbox at Broadway and 42nd Street-the celebrated crossroads where he'd announced his presidential candidacy from atop the very same genuine wooden soapbox-and looking in broad daylight exactly as press photos pictured him broadcasting from the NBC studio Sunday nights at nine: jacketless, in his shirtsleeves, with the cuffs rolled up and his tie yanked down and, pushed back from his forehead, the hardboiled newsman's fedora. Within only minutes some half-dozen mounted New York City policemen were already needed to divert traffic away from the eager stream of working people charging onto the street to hear and see him in the flesh. And once word spread that the orator with the bullhorn wasn't just another Bible bore prophesying doom for sinful America but the Stork Club habitue only recently the country's most influential radio broadcaster and the city's most nefarious tabloid journalist, the number of onlookers grew from the hundreds to the thousands-nearly ten thousand people all told, said the papers, up from the subways and emptying out of the buses, drawn by the maverick and his immoderation.
"The broadcasting cowards," he told them, "and the billionaire publishing hooligans controlled from the White House by the Lindbergh gang say Winchell was canned for crying 'Fire!' in a crowded theater. Mr. and Mrs. New York City, the word wasn't 'fire.' It was 'fascism' Winchell cried-and it still is. Fascism! Fascism! And I will continue crying 'fascism' to every crowd of Americans I can find until Herr Lindbergh's pro-Hitler party of treason is driven from the Congress on Election Day. The Hitlerites can take away my radio microphone, and they've done just that, as you know. They can take away my newspaper column, and they have done that, as you know. And when, God forbid, America goes fascist, Lindbergh's storm troopers can lock me away in a concentration camp to shut me up-and they will do that too, as you know. They can even lock you away in a concentration camp to shut you up. And I hope by now that you damn well know that. But what our homegrown Hitlerites cannot take away is my love for America and yours. My love for democracy and yours. My love for freedom and yours. What they cannot take away-unless the gullible and the sheepish and the terrified are patsies enough to return them to Washington one more time-is the power of the ballot box. The Hitlerite plot against America must be stopped-and stopped by you! By you, Mr. and Mrs. New York! By the voting power of the freedom-loving people of this great city on Tuesday, November 3, nineteen hundred and forty-two!"
All that day-September 8, 1942-and into the evening, Winchell climbed atop his soapbox in every neighborhood in Manhattan, from Wall Street, where he was largely ignored, to Little Italy, where he was shouted down, to Greenwich Village, where he was ridiculed, to the Garment District, where he was intermittently cheered, to the Upper West Side, where he was welcomed as their savior by the Roosevelt Jews, and eventually north to Harlem, where, in the crowd of several hundred Negroes who gathered at dusk to hear him speak at the corner of Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, a few laughed and a handful applauded but most remained respectfully dissatisfied, as though to work his way into their antipathies would require his delivering a very different spiel.
It was difficult to ascertain the impact Winchell made on the voting public that day. To Winchell's former paper, Hearst's Daily Mirror, the ostensible effort to gather local grass-roots support for routing the Republican Party from Congress nationwide looked more like a publicity stunt than anything else-a predictably egomaniacal publicity stunt by an unemployed gossip columnist who could not bear being out of the spotlight-and especially so since not a single Democratic congressional candidate running for election in Manhattan chose to appear anywhere within hearing distance of the Winchell bullhorn. If any candidates were out campaigning, they stayed far from wherever Winchell repeatedly committed the political blunder of associating the name of Adolf Hitler with that of an American president whose heroics the world still idolized, whose achievement even the Führer respected, and whom an overwhelming majority of his countrymen continued to adore as their nation's godlike catalyst of peace and prosperity. In a brief, sardonic editorial, "At It Again," the New York Times was able to reach but one conclusion about the latest of Winchell's "self-serving shenanigans": "There is nothing Walter Winchell has more talent for," wrote the Times, "than himself."
Winchell spent a full day in each of the other four boroughs of the city, and the following week headed north to Connecticut. Though still in want of a Democratic candidate willing to wed a fledgling congressional campaign to his inflammatory rhetoric, Winchell went ahead to set up his soapbox outside the gates to the factories of Bridgeport and at the entrance to the shipyards in New London, where he pushed back his fedora, pulled down his tie, and cried "Fascism! Fascism!" into the face of the crowd. From Connecticut's industrial coast he traveled north again to the working-class enclaves of Providence and then crossed from Rhode Island into the factory towns of southeastern Massachusetts, addressing tiny street-corner gatherings in Fall River, Brockton, and Quincy with no less fervor than he'd expended in his maiden speech in Times Square. From Quincy he went on to Boston, where he planned to spend three days moving through Irish Dorchester and South Boston into the Italian North End. However, on his first afternoon at South Boston's busy Perkins Square the few jeering hecklers who'd been baiting him as a Jew ever since his departing his native New York-and his leaving behind there the police protection guaranteed him by Fiorello La Guardia, the city's anti-Lindbergh Republican mayor-burgeoned into a mob waving handmade placards reminiscent of the banners and signs beautifying the Bund rallies in Madison Square Garden. And the moment Winchell opened his mouth to speak, somebody brandishing a burning cross rushed toward the soapbox to set him aflame and a gun was fired twice into the air, either as a signal from the organizers to the rioters or as a warning to the marked man from "Jew York," or as both. There in the old brick cityscape of little family-run shops and streetcars and shade trees and small houses, each topped back then, before TV, only by the appendage of a towering chimney, in the Boston where the Depression had never ended, amid the storefronts sacred to the American main street-the ice cream parlor, the barber shop, the pharmacy-and just up the way from the dark, spiky outline of St. Augustine's Church, thugs with clubs surged forward screaming "Kill him!" and, two weeks from its inception in New York's five boroughs, the Winchell campaign, as Winchell had imagined it, was under way. He had at last brought the Lindbergh grotesquery to the surface, the underside of Lindbergh's affable blandness, raw and undisguised.
Though the Boston police did nothing to restrain the rioters-the gunshots had sounded a full hour before a squad car drove up to survey the scene-the plainclothes team of armed professional bodyguards who'd been stationed at Winchell's side throughout the trip managed to douse the flames consuming one of his trouser legs and, having freed him from the first wave of the crowd after only a few blows had fallen, to lift him into a car parked just yards from the soapbox and drive him to Carney Hospital on Telegraph Hill, where he was treated for facial wounds and minor burns.
His first visitor at the hospital wasn't the mayor, Maurice Tobin, or Tobin's defeated mayoral rival, ex-governor James M. Curley (another FDR Democrat who, like the Democrat Tobin, wanted no part of Walter Winchell). Nor was it the local congressman, John W. McCormack, whose roughneck brother, a bartender known as Knocko, presided over the neighborhood with as much authority as the popular Democratic representative. To everyone's surprise, beginning with Winchell himself, his first visitor was a patrician Republican of distinguished New England lineage, the two-term Massachusetts governor, Leverett Saltonstall. On hearing of Winchell's hospitalization, Governor Saltonstall had left his State House office to communicate his concern directly to Winchell (whom privately he could only have despised), and to promise a thorough investigation into the well-plotted, obviously premeditated pandemonium that, by a mere fluke, had produced no fatalities. He also assured Winchell of protection by the state police-and, if need be, by the National Guard-for as long as Winchell campaigned in Massachusetts. And before the governor left the hospital, he saw to it that two armed troopers were stationed at the door only feet from Winchell's bed.
The Boston Herald interpreted Saltonstall's intervention as a political maneuver to gain him recognition as a courageous, honorable, fair-minded conservative who could serve his party as a dignified replacement in 1944 for the Democratic vice president, Burton K. Wheeler, who'd done the job required in the 1940 campaign but whose imprudence as an orator many Republicans now believed might compromise their president the second time around. In a hospital press conference where Winchell appeared before the photographers in his robe, with surgical dressings half covering his face and a heavily bandaged left foot, he welcomed Governor Saltonstall's offer but declined assistance in a message (cast, now that he was under assault, in language more statesmanlike than his standard feverish patter) that was distributed to the two dozen reporters from the radio and the press who had converged on his room. The statement began, "On the day when a candidate for the presidency of the United States requires a phalanx of armed police officers and National Guardsmen to protect his right to free speech, this great country will have passed over into fascist barbarism. I cannot accept that the religious intolerance emanating from the White House has already so corrupted the ordinary citizen that he has lost all respect for fellow Americans of a creed or faith different from his own. I cannot accept that the abhorrence for my religion shared by Adolf Hitler and Charles A. Lindbergh can already have corroded…"
From then on, anti-Semitic agitators hunted Winchell down at every crossing, though without success in Boston, where Saltonstall had ignored Winchell's grandstanding and directed his troops to impose order, employing force if need be, and to carry the violent off to jail, a command that they undertook to execute, however reluctantly. Meanwhile-using a cane to support himself because of his burned foot and with his jaw and forehead still bandaged-Winchell proceeded to draw an angry mob chanting "Kike go home!" in every single parish where he displayed his stigmata to the faithful, from Gate of Heaven Church in South Boston to St. Gabriel's Monastery in Brighton. Beyond Massachusetts, in communities in upper New York State, in Pennsylvania, and throughout the Midwest that were already notorious for their bigotry-and to which Winchell's explosive strategy inevitably pointed him-most of the local authorities did not share Saltonstall's unwillingness to tolerate civil unrest, and so, despite the doubling of his entourage of plainclothes bodyguards, the candidate came close to getting himself mauled each time he stepped onto the soapbox to denounce "the fascist in the White House" and to assign responsibility directly to the president's "religious hatred" for "fostering unheard-of Nazi barbarism in the American streets."
The worst and most widespread violence occurred in Detroit, the midwestern headquarters of the "Radio Priest" Father Coughlin and his Jew-hating Christian Front and of the crowd-pleasing minister known as "the dean of anti-Semites," Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, who preached that "Christian character is the true basis of real Americanism." Detroit, of course, was also home to the American automobile industry and to Lindbergh's elderly secretary of the interior, Henry Ford, whose avowedly anti-Semitic newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, published in the 1920s, addressed itself to "an investigation of the Jewish Question" that Ford ultimately reprinted in four volumes, totaling nearly one thousand pages, entitled The International Jew, in which he directed that in the cleansing of America "the International Jew and his satellites, as the conscious enemies of all that Anglo-Saxons mean by civilization, are not spared."
It was to be expected that organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and eminent liberal journalists like John Gunther and Dorothy Thompson would be outraged by the Detroit riots and immediately make public their disgust, but so too were many conventional middle-class Americans, who, even if they found Walter Winchell and his rhetoric repugnant and understood him to be "asking for trouble," were also appalled by the eyewitness reports of how the rioting that had begun at Winchell's first stop in Hamtramck (the residential section inhabited chiefly by auto workers and their families and said to contain the world's largest Polish population outside Warsaw) had suspiciously spread within minutes to 12th Street, to Linwood and then to Dexter Boulevard. There, in the city's biggest Jewish neighborhoods, shops were looted and windows broken, Jews trapped outdoors were set upon and beaten, and kerosene-soaked crosses were ignited on the lawns of the fancy houses along Chicago Boulevard and out front of the modest two-family dwellings of the housepainters, plumbers, butchers, bakers, junk dealers, and grocers who lived on Webb and Tuxedo and in the little dirt yards of the poorest Jews on Pingry and Euclid. In midafternoon, only moments before the school day ended, a firebomb was thrown into the front foyer of Winterhalter Elementary School, where half the students were Jewish, another into the foyer of Central High, whose student body was ninety-five percent Jewish, another through a window at the Sholem Aleichem Institute-a cultural organization Coughlin had ridiculously identified as Communist-and a fourth outside another of Couglin's "Communist" targets, the Jewish Workers' Alliance. Next came the attack on houses of worship. Not only were windows broken and walls defaced on some half of the city's thirty-odd Orthodox synagogues, but as evening services were scheduled to begin an explosion went off on the steps of the prestigious Chicago Boulevard temple Shaarey Zedek. The explosion there caused extensive damage to the exotic centerpiece of architect Albert Kahn's Moorish design-the three massive arched doorways that conspicuously exhibited to a working-class populace a distinctively un-American style. Five passersby, none of whom happened to be Jews, were injured by flying debris from the facade, but no casualties were otherwise reported.
By nightfall, several hundred of the city's thirty thousand Jews had fled and taken refuge across the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario, and American history had recorded its first large-scale pogrom, one clearly modeled on the "spontaneous demonstrations" against Germany's Jews known as Kristallnacht, "the Night of Broken Glass," whose atrocities had been planned and perpetrated by the Nazis four years earlier and which Father Coughlin in his weekly tabloid, Social Justice, had defended at the time as a reaction by the Germans against "Jewish-inspired Communism." Detroit's Kristallnacht was similarly justified on the editorial page of the Detroit Times as the unfortunate but inevitable and altogether understandable backlash to the activities of the troublemaking interloper the paper identified as "the Jewish demagogue whose aim from the outset had been to incite the rage of patriotic Americans with his treasonous rabble-rousing."
The week after the September assault on Detroit's Jews-which was addressed with dispatch by neither Michigan's governor nor the city's mayor-new violence was directed at homes, shops, and synagogues in Jewish neighborhoods in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis, violence that Winchell's enemies attributed to his deliberately challenging appearances in those cities after the cataclysm that he'd instigated in Detroit, and that Winchell himself-who, in Indianapolis, barely escaped being crushed by a paving stone hurled from a rooftop that had broken the neck of the bodyguard stationed beside him-explained by the "climate of hate" emanating from the White House.
Our own street in Newark was many hundreds of miles from Dexter Boulevard in Detroit, nobody around had ever been to Detroit, and before September 1942 all that the boys on the block knew about Detroit was that organized baseball's only Jewish player was the Tigers' star first baseman, Hank Greenberg. But then came the Winchell riots, and suddenly even the children could recite the names of the Detroit neighborhoods that had been shaken by violence. Parroting what they heard from their parents, they would argue back and forth as to whether Walter Winchell was courageous or foolish, self-sacrificing or self-serving, and whether or not he was playing right into Lindbergh's hands by allowing the Gentiles to tell themselves that the Jews had brought their misery on themselves. They argued over whether it would be better if-before Winchell set off a nationwide pogrom-he desisted and allowed "normal" relations to be restored between the Jews and their fellow Americans or whether in the long run it would be better for him to continue to raise the alarm among the country's more complacent Jews-and to arouse the conscience of Christians-by exposing the menace of anti-Semitism from one end of America to the other. On the way to school, on the playground after school, between classes in the school corridors, you would see the smartest kids standing toe to toe, kids Sandy's age as well as a few no older than me, heatedly debating whether Walter Winchell's crisscrossing the country with his soapbox to flush into the open the German-American Bundists and the Coughlinites and the Ku Klux Klanners and the Silver Shirts and the America Firsters and the Black Legion and the American Nazi Party, whether getting these organized anti-Semites and their thousands of unseen sympathizers to reveal themselves for what they were-and to reveal the president for what he was, a chief executive and commander in chief who hadn't yet bothered to acknowledge that anything like a state of emergency existed, let alone called in federal troops to prevent further rioting-was good for the Jews or bad for the Jews.
After Detroit, the Jews of Newark-numbering some fifty thousand in a city of well over half a million-began to ready themselves for serious violence erupting on their own streets, either because of a Winchell visit to New Jersey when he swung back east or because of the riots inevitably spilling over into cities where, as in Newark, there was a heavily Jewish neighborhood abutting large communities of working-class Irish, Italians, Germans, and Slavs that were already home to a goodly number of bigots. The assumption was that these people wouldn't require much encouragement to be molded into a mindless, destructive mob by the pro-Nazi conspiracy that had successfully plotted the riot in Detroit.
Almost overnight, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, along with five other eminent Newark Jews-including Meyer Ellenstein-established the Newark Committee of Concerned Jewish Citizens. Quickly the group became a model for similar ad hoc Jewish citizens' groups in other big cities that were determined to ensure their communities' safety by enlisting the authorities to draw up contingency plans to prepare for the worst possibility. The Newark committee arranged first for a City Hall meeting-presided over by Mayor Murphy, whose election had ended Ellenstein's eight-year tenure-with Newark's police chief, fire chief, and director of the Department of Public Safety. The next day the committee met at the State House in Trenton with Democratic governor Charles Edison, the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, and the commanding officer of the New Jersey National Guard. Attorney General Wilentz, an acquaintance of all six committee members, also attended, and, in the bulletin the Newark committee issued to the Jersey papers, he was reported to have assured Rabbi Prinz that anyone attempting an assault on the Jews of Newark would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The committee next telegrammed Rabbi Bengelsdorf, requesting a meeting with him in Washington, but was informed that theirs was a local and not a federal issue and advised to address their concern, as they were doing, to state and city officials.
Partisans of Rabbi Bengelsdorf lauded him for keeping himself aloof from the sordid Walter Winchell affair while quietly, in private White House conversations with Mrs. Lindbergh, urging assistance to those innocent Jews throughout the country who were tragically paying for the iniquitous conduct of the renegade candidate, a provocateur cynically encouraging American citizens who needed in no way to feel besieged to cling to their oldest, most crippling anxieties. The Bengelsdorf supporters constituted an influential clique drawn from the highly assimilated upper echelon of German Jewish society. A good many of them had been born to wealth and were among the first Jewish generation to attend elite secondary schools and Ivy League colleges, where, because their numbers were minute, they had mingled with the non-Jews, whom they subsequently associated with in communal, political, and business endeavors and who sometimes appeared to accept them as equals. To these privileged Jews there was nothing suspicious about the programs designed by Rabbi Bengelsdorf's agency to assist poorer, less cultivated Jews in learning to live in closer harmony with the nation's Christians. What was unfortunate, in their opinion, was that Jews like us continued to huddle together in cities like Newark out of a xenophobia fostered by historical pressures that no longer existed. The status conferred by economic and vocational advantage inclined them to believe that those who lacked their prestige were rebuffed by the larger society more because of insular clannishness than because of any pronounced taste for exclusiveness on the part of the Christian majority, and that neighborhoods like ours were less the result of discrimination than its breeding grounds. They recognized, of course, that there were pockets of backward people in America among whom virulent anti-Semitism was still their strongest, most obsessive passion, but that seemed only another reason for the director of the OAA to encourage Jews handicapped by the limitations of a segregated existence to at least permit their children to enter the American mainstream and show themselves there to be nothing like the caricature of the Jew disseminated by our enemies. Why these wealthy, urbane, self-assured Jews particularly abhorred the self-caricaturing Winchell was because he so deliberately reinforced the very hostility that they imagined themselves to have propitiated by their exemplary behavior toward their Christian colleagues and friends.
Aside from Rabbi Prinz and ex-mayor Ellenstein, the four remaining members of the Newark committee were the elderly civic leader responsible for the success of the Americanization programs for immigrant children in the Newark school system-and the wife of Beth Israel Hospital's leading surgeon-Jenny Danzis; the department store executive and son of the founder of S. Plaut & Co., as well as ten-time president of the Broad Street Association, Moses Plaut; the prominent city property owner and past president of the Newark Conference of Jewish Charities, community leader Michael Stavitsky; and the chief of Beth Israel's medical staff, Dr. Eugene Parsonette. That Newark's leading mobster, Longy Zwillman, hadn't been enlisted to join a group of local Jews as distinguished as this was no surprise to anyone, even though Longy was a wealthy man of enormous influence and hardly less distressed than Rabbi Prinz by the menace posed by the anti-Semites who, under the pretext of being provoked by Walter Winchell, had ushered in what looked to many like stage one of the resolution of Henry Ford's "Jewish Question."
Longy set out separately, apart from the many civil authorities who had promised Rabbi Prinz their fullest cooperation, to ensure that if and when the Newark cops and the New Jersey state troopers failed to respond any more vigorously than the police had to the disorder in Boston and Detroit, the city's Jews would not be left unprotected. Bullet Apfelbaum, the close associate known throughout the city as Longy's chief enforcer-and the older brother of Niggy Apfelbaum-was assigned by Longy to supplement the good work of the Newark Committee of Concerned Jewish Citizens by recruiting that scattering of incorrigible Jewish kids who had failed to graduate from high school and training them as cadre for a hastily assembled volunteer corps to be called the Provisional Jewish Police. These were the local boys without any of the ideals that were embedded in the rest of us, who'd already begun to emanate an aura of lawlessness as far back as the fifth grade, inflating condoms in the school toilet and breaking into fistfights on the 14 bus and wrestling till they bled onto the concrete sidewalk outside the movies, the ones who, during their years in school, parents directed their children to have nothing to do with and who were now in their twenties and occupied running numbers and shooting pool and washing dishes in the kitchens of one or another of the neighborhood's delicatessen restaurants. To most of us they were known, if at all, only by the hoodlum magic of their supercharged nicknames-Leo "the Lion" Nusbaum, Knuckles Kimmelman, Big Gerry Schwartz, Dummy Breitbart, Duke "Duke-it-out" Glick-and by their double-digit IQ scores.
And now they were stationed on every second street corner, our neighborhood's handful of flops, spitting expertly into the gutter from between their teeth and signaling back and forth by whistling with their fingers angled deep in their mouths. Here they were, the callous and the obtuse and the mentally deficient, the Jews' very own deviants strolling the streets like sailors on shore leave looking for a fight. Here they were, the brainless few we had been raised to pity and fear, the Stone Age oafs and the seething runts and the ominous, swaggering weightlifters, buttonholing kids like me out on Chancellor Avenue and telling us to keep our baseball bats at the ready in case we were called in the night to take to the streets and going around to the Y in the evenings and to the ball fields on Sundays and to the local stores during the week, shanghaiing the able-bodied from among the neighborhood's grown men so as to bring to a total of three on each block a squad they could count on in an emergency. They embodied everything crude and despicable that our parents had hoped to leave behind, along with their childhood pennilessness, in the Third Ward slums, and yet here were our demons got up as our guardians, each with a loaded revolver strapped to his calf, a gun on loan from the collection of Bullet Apfelbaum, who was known by everyone to have devoted his existence to loyally intimidating folks on Longy's behalf, threatening them, beating them, torturing them, and-despite the fact that, in imitation of a boss easily thirty pounds leaner and a foot taller, Bullet was never to be seen other than in a three-piece suit adorned with a neatly folded silk pocket handkerchief the color of his tie and wearing an expensive Borsalino debonairly angled only inches above what was admittedly the ungenerous glower of an extremely severe judge of human nature-ending their lives for them, should that be the boss's pleasure.
What made the death of Walter Winchell worthy of instantaneous nationwide coverage wasn't only that his unorthodox campaign had touched off the century's worst anti-Semitic rioting outside Nazi Germany, but that the murder of a mere candidate for the presidency was unprecedented in America. Though Presidents Lincoln and Garfield had been shot and killed in the second half of the nineteenth century and McKinley at the start of the twentieth, and though in 1933 FDR had survived an assassination attempt that had instead taken the life of his Democratic supporter Chicago's Mayor Cermak, it wasn't until twenty-six years after Winchell's assassination that a second presidential candidate would be gunned down-that was New York's Democratic senator Robert Kennedy, fatally shot in the head after winning his party's California primary on Tuesday, June 4, 1968.
On Monday, October 5, 1942, I was home alone after school listening on our living room radio to the final innings of the fifth game of the World Series between the Cardinals and the Yankees, when, in the top of the ninth, with the Cardinals coming to bat in a 2-2 tie-and leading the Series three games to one-the play-by-play broadcast was halted by a voice with that finely articulated, faintly Anglicized diction prized in a network news announcer back in radio's earlier days: "We interrupt this program to bring you an important bulletin. Presidential candidate Walter Winchell has been shot and killed. We repeat: Walter Winchell is dead. He has been assassinated in Louisville, Kentucky, while addressing an open-air political rally. That is all that is known at this time of the Louisville assassination of Democratic presidential candidate Walter Winchell. We return to our regularly scheduled program."
It wasn't quite five P.M. My father had just left for the market in Uncle Monty's truck, my mother had gone out to Chancellor Avenue a few minutes earlier to buy something for dinner, and my single-minded brother was off in search of a trysting place to resume importuning one of his after-school girls to grant him access to her chest. I heard shouting in the street, then a scream from a nearby house, but the game had come back on and the suspense was tremendous: Red Ruffing pitching to the Cardinals' rookie third baseman Whitey Kurowski, Cardinals catcher Walker Cooper on first base with his sixth hit in five games, and the Cardinals needing only this victory to take the Series. Rizzuto had homered for the Yankees, the portentously surnamed Enos Slaughter had homered for the Cardinals, and, as histrionic little fans like to tell one another, I "knew" before Ruffing had even fired his first pitch that Kurowski was about to hit a second Cardinal home run and give the Cards their fourth straight victory after an opening-day loss. I couldn't wait to run outside crying, "I knew it! I called it! Kurowski was due!" But when Kurowski homered and the game was over and I was out the door and headed at top speed down our alleyway, I saw two members of the Jewish police-Big Gerry and Duke Glick-running from one side of the street to the other to bang on doors and shout into hallways, "They shot Winchell! Winchell is dead!"
Meanwhile more kids were rushing out of their houses, delirious with World Series excitement. But no sooner did they hit the street howling Kurowski's name than Big Gerry began barking at them, "Go get your bats! The war is on!" And he didn't mean the war against Germany.
By evening there wasn't a Jewish family on our street that wasn't barricaded behind double-locked doors, their radios playing nonstop to catch the latest bulletin and everyone phoning to tell everyone else that Winchell had said nothing remotely inflammatory to the Louisville crowd, that he had, in fact, begun his speech in what could only have been intended as an open appeal to civic self-esteem-"Mr. and Mrs. Louisville, Kentucky, proud citizens of the unique American city that is home to the greatest horse race in the world and birthplace of the very first Jewish justice of the United States Supreme Court-" and yet before he could speak aloud the name of Louis D. Brandeis, he'd been brought down by three bullets to the back of the head. A second report, aired just moments later, identified the spot where the murder occurred as only a few yards from one of the most elegant municipal buildings constructed in the Greek Revival style in the whole of Kentucky, the Jefferson County Courthouse, with its commanding statue of Thomas Jefferson facing the street and a long, wide staircase leading up to the grandly columned portico. The shots that killed Winchell appeared to have been fired from one of the courthouse's large, austere, beautifully proportioned front windows.
My mother began making her first calls immediately upon coming in from shopping. I had stationed myself just inside the door to tell her about Walter Winchell the instant she got home, but by then she already knew the little there was to be known, first because the butcher's wife had phoned the store to repeat the news bulletin to her husband just as he was wrapping my mother's order, and then because of the bewilderment apparent among the people out on the street, who were already scurrying for the safety of their homes. Failing to reach my father, whose truck hadn't yet pulled up at the market, she of course began to worry about my brother, who was cutting it close once again and probably wouldn't come rushing up the back stairs until seconds before he was due at the kitchen table with his hands washed of the day's dirt and his face scrubbed clean of lipstick. It was the worst moment imaginable for either of them to be away and their precise whereabouts unknown, but without taking time to unbag the groceries or to register her alarm, my mother said to me, "Get me the map. Get your map of America."
There was a large folding map of the North American continent squared away in a pocket inside volume one of the encyclopedia set sold to us by a door-to-door salesman the year I started school. I rushed into the sun parlor, where, shelved between the brass George Washington bookends bought at Mount Vernon by my father, was the whole of our library: the six-volume encyclopedia, a leather-bound copy of the United States Constitution awarded by Metropolitan Life, and the unabridged Webster's dictionary that Aunt Evelyn had given Sandy for his tenth birthday. I opened the map and spread it across the kitchen table's oilcloth covering, whereupon my mother-using the magnifying glass that I'd received from my parents for a seventh-birthday gift along with my irreplaceable, unforgotten stamp album-searched for the speck in north-central Kentucky that was the city of Danville.
In only seconds the two of us were back at the telephone table in the foyer, above which hung yet another of my father's awards for selling insurance, a framed copper engraving replicating the Declaration of Independence. Local dial service within Essex County was barely ten years old and probably a good third of the people in Newark didn't as yet have any phone service at all-and most who did were, like us, on a party line-and so the long-distance call was still a wondrous phenomenon, not only because making one was far from an ordinary household experience for a family of our means but because no technological explanation, however basic, could remove it entirely from the realm of magic.
My mother spoke to the operator very precisely to be sure that nothing went wrong and we weren't charged by mistake for anything extra. "I want to make a long-distance person-to-person call, operator. To Danville, Kentucky. Person-to-person to Mrs. Selma Wishnow. And please, operator, when my three minutes are up, don't forget to tell me."
There was a long pause while the operator got the number from the directory operator. When my mother finally heard the call being placed, she signaled for me to put my ear beside hers but not to speak.
"Hello!" Answering enthusiastically is Seldon.
Operator: "This is long distance. I have a person-to-person call for Mrs. Selma Wistful."
"Uh-uh," Seldon mumbles.
"Is this Mrs. Wistful?"
"Hello? My mother's not home right now."
Operator: "I'm calling for Mrs. Selma Wistful-"
"Wishnow," my mother shouts. "Wish-now."
"Who's that?" Seldon says. "Who's calling?"
Operator: "Young lady, is your mother home?"
"I'm a boy," Seldon says. Taken aback. Another blow. They won't stop coming. Yet he does sound girlish, his voice higher-pitched even than when he'd been living downstairs. "My mother's not home from work yet," Seldon says.
Operator: "Mrs. Wishnow is not at home, madam."
My mother looks at me and says, "What could have happened? The boy is alone. Where could she be? He's all by himself. Operator, I'll talk to anyone."
Operator: "Go ahead, sir."
"Who's this?" Seldon asks.
"Seldon, it's Mrs. Roth. From Newark."
"Mrs. Roth?"
"Yes. I'm calling long distance to speak to your mother."
"From Newark?"
"You know who I am."
"But it sounds like you're just down the street."
"Well, I'm not. This is a long-distance call. Seldon, where's your mother?"
"I'm just having a snack. I'm waiting for her to come home from work. I'm having some Fig Newtons. And some milk."
"Seldon-"
"I'm waiting for her to come home from work-she works late. She always works late. I just sit here. Sometimes I have a snack-"
"Seldon, stop right there. Be still a moment."
"And then she comes home and she makes dinner. But she's late every night."
Here my mother turns to me and makes to hand me the phone. "Talk to him. He won't listen when I speak."
"Talk to him about what?" I say, waving the phone away.
"Is Philip there?" Seldon asks.
"Just a moment, Seldon," my mother says.
"Is Philip there?" Seldon repeats.
To me, my mother says, "Take the phone, please."
"But what am I supposed to say?" I ask.
"Just get on the phone," and she places the receiver in my one hand and lifts the speaker for me to hold in the other.
"Hello, Seldon?" I say.
Softly tentative, unbelieving, he replies, "Philip?"
"Yes. Hi, Seldon."
"Hey, you know, I don't have any friends in school."
I tell him, "We want to speak to your mother."
"My mother's at work. She works late every night. I'm having a snack. I'm having some Fig Newtons and a glass of milk. It's going to be my birthday in about a week and my mother said I could have a party-"
"Seldon, wait a minute."
"But I don't have any friends."
"Seldon, I have to ask my mother a question. Just wait." I muzzle the speaker and whisper to her, "What am I supposed to say to him?"
My mother whispers, "Ask him if he knows what happened today in Louisville."
"Seldon, my mother wants to know if you know what happened today in Louisville."
"I live in Danville. I live in Danville, Kentucky. I'm just waiting for my mom to come home. I'm having a snack. Did something happen in Louisville?"
"Just a minute, Seldon," I say. "Now what?" I whisper to my mother.
"Just talk to him, please. Keep talking to him. And if the operator says the three minutes are up, you tell me."
"Why are you calling?" Seldon asks. "Are you going to come visit?"
"No."
"Remember when I saved your life?" he says.
"Yes, I do. I remember."
"Hey, what time is it there? Are you in Newark? Are you on Summit Avenue?"
"We told you we were. Yes."
"It's really clear, isn't it? It sounds like you're just down the block. I wish you could come over and have a snack with me, and then you could be here for my birthday party next week. I don't have any friends to invite to my birthday party. I don't have anybody to play chess with. I'm sitting here now practicing my opening move. Remember my opening move? I move out the pawn that's just in front of the king. Remember when I tried to teach you? I move out the king's pawn, remember? Then I put out the bishop, then I move the knight, and then the other knight-and remember the move when there's no pieces between the king and one of the rooks? When I move my king over two spaces to protect him?"
"Seldon-"
My mother whispers, "Tell him you miss him."
"Ma!" I say to her.
"Tell him, Philip."
"I miss you, Seldon."
"Do you want to come over for a snack then? I mean it sounds like-are you really just down the street?"
"No, this is a long-distance phone call."
"What time is it there?"
"It's, uh-about ten to six."
"Oh, it's ten to six here. My mom should already be home around five. Five-thirty the latest. One night she came home at nine."
"Seldon," I say, "do you know that Walter Winchell was killed?"
"Who's that?" he asks.
"Let me finish. Walter Winchell was killed in Louisville, Kentucky. In your state. Today."
"I'm sorry to hear that. Who is that?"
Operator: "Your three minutes are up, sir."
"Is that your uncle?" Seldon asks. "Is that your uncle who came to see you? Is he dead?"
"No, no," I say, and I'm thinking that, alone now out in Kentucky, he sounds as though he were the one who was kicked in the head. He sounds stunned. Stunted. He sounds stopped. And yet he was the smartest kid in our class.
My mother takes the phone. "Seldon, this is Mrs. Roth. I want you to write something down."
"Okay. I have to go find a piece of paper. And a pencil."
Waiting. Waiting. "Seldon?" my mother says.
More waiting.
"Okay," he says.
"Seldon, write this down. This is now costing a lot of money."
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Roth. I just couldn't find a pencil in the house. I was at the kitchen table. I was having a snack."
"Seldon, write down that Mrs. Roth-"
"Okay."
"-called from Newark."
"From Newark. Gosh. I wish I was still in Newark, living downstairs. You know, I saved Philip's life."
"Mrs. Roth called from Newark to be sure-"
"Just a minute. I'm writing."
"-to be sure everything is okay."
"Is something supposed to not be okay? I mean Philip's all right. And you're okay. Is Mr. Roth okay?"
"Yes, thank you for asking, Seldon. Tell your mother that's why I called. There's nothing to worry about here."
"Should I be worried about something?"
"No. Just eat your snack-"
"I think I've had enough Fig Newtons now, but thanks anyway."
"Goodbye, Seldon."
"I like Fig Newtons, though."
"Goodbye, Seldon."
"Mrs. Roth?"
"Yes?"
"Is Philip going to come visit me? It's my birthday next week and I don't have anybody to invite for my birthday party. I don't have any friends in Danville. The kids here call me Saltine. I have to play chess with a kid who's six years old. He lives next door. He's the only one I can play with. One kid. I taught him chess. Sometimes he makes moves you can't do. Or he moves his queen and I have to tell him not to. I win all the time but it's really no fun. But I have nobody else to play with."
"Seldon, it's hard for everyone. It's hard for everyone now. Goodbye, Seldon." And she placed the receiver onto the hook and began to sob.
Only days before, on October first, the two Summit Avenue flats vacated in September by the "homesteaders of 1942"-the one beneath ours and another across the street, three doors down-were occupied by Italian families up from the First Ward. Essentially their new living quarters had been assigned to them by outright government edict, though with the sweetening incentive of a rent discount of fifteen percent (or $ 6. 37 on their monthly $ 42. 50) over a five-year period, that money to be paid directly to the landlord by the Department of the Interior over the life of the initial three-year lease and for the first two years of a lease's three-year renewal. Such arrangements derived from a previously unpublicized section of the homesteading plan called the Good Neighbor Project, designed to introduce a steadily increasing number of non-Jewish residents into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods and in this way "enrich" the "Americanness" of everyone involved. What one heard at home, however-and sometimes even at school from our teachers-was that the underlying goal of the Good Neighbor Project, like that of Just Folks, was to weaken the solidarity of the Jewish social structure as well as to diminish whatever electoral strength a Jewish community might have in local and congressional elections. If the displacing of Jewish families and their replacement by the conscripting of Gentile families followed the timetable of the agency's master plan, a Christian majority might well be dominant in at least half of America's twenty most heavily populated Jewish neighborhoods as early as the start of Lindbergh's second term and a resolution of America's Jewish Question close at hand, by one means or another.
The family conscripted to move in downstairs from us-a mother, a father, a son, and a grandmother-were the Cucuzzas. Because of my father's years of canvassing the First Ward, where the customers whose tiny premiums he collected each month were by and large Italians, he was already familiar with the new tenants, and consequently, when he got home from work on the morning after Mr. Cucuzza, a night watchman, had trucked the family's possessions up from their cold-water flat in a tenement building on a side street not far from Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, my father stopped off first at the downstairs door to see if, despite his appearing there without a coat and a tie and with dirty hands, the elderly grandmother would recognize him as the insurance man who'd sold her husband the policy that had provided the family with the means to bury him.
The "other" Cucuzzas (relatives of "our" Cucuzzas, who'd moved from their own First Ward cold-water flat to the house three doors away) were a much larger family-three sons, a daughter, the two parents, and a grandfather-and potentially noisier, more disruptive neighbors. They were associated through the grandfather and the father with Ritchie "the Boot" Boiardo, the mobster who ruled Newark's Italian precincts and constituted the city's only serious competitor to Longy's underworld monopoly. To be sure, the father, Tommy, was but one of a bevy of underlings and, like his own retired father, doubled as a waiter at Boiardo's popular restaurant, the Vittorio Castle, when he wasn't making the rounds of the taverns, barber shops, brothels, schoolyards, and candy stores of the Third Ward slums to extract their pocket change from the Negroes who faithfully played the daily numbers game. Regardless of religion, the other Cucuzzas were hardly the sort of neighbors my parents wanted anywhere near their impressionable young sons, and to comfort us at breakfast on Sunday morning my father explained how much worse off we would have been if we'd gotten the numbers runner and his three boys instead of the night watchman and his son, Joey, an eleven-year-old recently enrolled at St. Peter's and, by my father's report, a good-natured kid with a hearing problem who had little in common with his roughneck cousins. Whereas down in the First Ward all four of Tommy Cucuzza's kids had gone to the local public school, here they'd been enrolled along with Joey at St. Peter's rather than at a public school like ours, brimming with brainy little Jews.
Since my father had left work only a few hours after the Winchell assassination and, over Uncle Monty's angry objections, driven back home to spend the remainder of that tense evening beside his wife and his children, the four of us were seated together at the kitchen table waiting for the radio to bring fresh news when Mr. Cucuzza and Joey came up the back stairway to pay a visit. They knocked on the door and then had to wait on the landing until my father was sure who was there.
Mr. Cucuzza was a bald, hulking man, six and a half feet tall, weighing over two hundred and fifty pounds, and he was dressed for work in his night watchman's uniform, a dark blue shirt, freshly pressed dark blue trousers, and a wide black belt that along with holding up his trousers supported several pounds of the most extraordinary collection of equipment I'd ever been close enough to reach out and touch. There were keys in bunches each the size of a hand grenade hanging to the side of either pants pocket, there was a set of real handcuffs, and a night watchman's clock in its black case dangled by a strap from the polished belt buckle. At first glance, I took the clock for a bomb, but there was no mistaking for other than what it was the pistol in a holster at his waist. A longish flashlight that had to have doubled as a blackjack was stuck lamp upward into his back pocket, and high on one sleeve of his starched workshirt was a triangular white patch whose blue lettering read "Special Guard."
Joey was also big-only two years my senior and already twice my weight-and to me the equipment he sported was nearly as intriguing as his father's. Looking like a wad of molded bubble gum plugging the hole of his right ear was a hearing aid attached by a thin wire to a round black case with a dial on the front that he wore clipped to his shirt pocket; another wire attached to a battery about the size of a large cigarette lighter that he carried around in his pants pocket. And in his hands he carried a cake, a gift from his mother to mine.
Joey's gift was the cake, Mr. Cucuzza's was a pistol. He owned two, one that he wore for work and the other that he kept hidden away at home. He'd come to offer my father the spare.
"Nice of you," my father said to him, "but I really don't know how to shoot."
"You pulla the trig'." Mr. Cucuzza had a surprisingly soft voice for someone so enormous, though with a raspy edge to it, as if it had been exposed too long to the weather during his hours of walking the watchman's beat. And his accent was so enjoyable to hear that when I was alone I sometimes pretended that the way he talked was the way I talked too. How many times did I entertain myself by saying aloud "You pulla the trig'"? With the exception of Joey's American-born mother, our Cucuzzas all had oddish voices, the bewhiskered grandmother's being oddest of all, odder even than Joey's, which sounded less like a voice than like the uninflected echo of a voice. And odd not just because she went around speaking only Italian, whether to others (including me) or to herself while she swept the back stairway or kneeled in the dirt planting her vegetables in our minute backyard or just stood muttering in the dark doorway. Hers was oddest because it sounded like a man's-she looked like a tiny old man in a long black dress and she sounded like one too, particularly when barking the commands and decrees and injunctions that Joey never dared disobey. The playful half of him, the soul that the nuns and the priests never saw enough of to save, was virtually all that I ever encountered when we two were alone. Why it was hard to feel too sorry about his hearing was because Joey was himself a very jolly, prankish boy with his own brand of hooting laughter, a talkative, curious, monumentally gullible boy whose mind moved quickly if unpredictably. It was hard to feel sorry for him, yet when he was around his family Joey's obedience was so painstakingly thorough that I found it almost as astonishing to contemplate as the painstakingly thorough lawlessness of a Shushy Margulis. There couldn't have been a better son in all of Italian Newark, which was why my own mother soon found him irresistible-his faultless filial devotion and his long dark eyelashes, the way he imploringly looked at adults, waiting to be told what to do, allowed her to set aside the uneasy aloofness that was her inbuilt defense against Gentiles. The old-country grandmother, however, gave her-and me-the willies.
"You aim," Mr. Cucuzza explained to my father, using a finger and a thumb to demonstrate, "and uhyou shoot. You aim and uhyou shoot and that's it."
"I don't need it," my father said.
"But ifuh they come roun'," Mr. Cucuzza said, "how you gonna protect?"
"Cucuzza, I was born in the city of Newark in the year nineteen hundred and one," my father told him. "All my life I have paid my rent on time, I have paid my taxes on time, and I have paid my bills on time. I've never cheated on an employer for as much as a dime. I have never tried to cheat the United States government. I believe in this country. I love this country."
"Me too," said our massive new downstairs neighbor, whose wide black belt might have been hung with shrunken heads, given the enchantment that it continued to cast over me. "I come-uh here I was uhten. Best country anyplace. No Mussolini here."
"I'm glad you feel that way, Cucuzza. It's a tragedy for Italy, it's a human tragedy for people like you."
"Mussolini, Hitler-make-uh me sick."
"You know what I love, Cucuzza? Election Day," my father told him. "I love to vote. Since I was old enough, I have not missed an election. In 1924 I voted against Mr. Coolidge and for Mr. Davis, and Mr. Coolidge won. And we all know what Mr. Coolidge did for the poor people of this country. In 1928 I voted against Mr. Hoover and for Mr. Smith, and Mr. Hoover won. And we know what he did for the poor people of this country. In 1932 I voted against Mr. Hoover for the second time and for Mr. Roosevelt for the first time, and, thank God, Mr. Roosevelt won, and he put America back on its feet. He took this country out of the Depression and he gave the people what he promised-a new deal. In 1936 I voted against Mr. Landon and for Mr. Roosevelt, and again Mr. Roosevelt won-two states, Maine and Vermont, that is all Mr. Landon is able to carry. Can't even carry Kansas. Mr. Roosevelt sweeps the country by the biggest presidential vote there has ever been, and once again he keeps every promise to the working people that he made in that campaign. And so what do the voters up and do in nineteen hundred and forty? They elect a fascist instead. Not just an idiot like Coolidge, not just a fool like Hoover, but an out-and-out fascist with a medal to prove it. They put in a fascist and a fascist rabble-rouser, Mr. Wheeler, as his sidekick, and they put Mr. Ford into the cabinet, not only an anti-Semite right up there with Hitler but a slave driver who has turned the workingman into a human machine. And so tonight you come to me, sir, in my own home, and you offer me a pistol. In America in the year nineteen hundred and forty-two, a brand-new neighbor, a man I do not even know yet, has to come here and offer me a pistol in order for me to protect my family from Mr. Lindbergh's anti-Semitic mob. Well, don't you think I'm not grateful, Cucuzza. I will never forget your concern. But I am a citizen of the United States of America, and so is my wife, and so are my children, and so," he said, his voice catching, "and so was Mr. Walter Winchell-"
But now, suddenly, there is a radio bulletin about Walter Winchell. "Shhh!" my father says. "Shhh!" as though in the kitchen someone other than himself had been the orator holding forth. We all listen-even Joey appears to listen-the way birds flock to migrate and fish swim in a school.
The body of Walter Winchell, slain that day at a political rally in Louisville, Kentucky, by a suspected American Nazi Party assassin working in collaboration with the Ku Klux Klan, will be carried overnight by train from Louisville to Pennsylvania Station in New York City. There, by order of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and under the protection of the New York City police, the body will lie in state in the great hall of the train station throughout the morning. According to Jewish custom, a funeral service will be held that same day, at two P.M. in Temple Emanu-El, New York's largest synagogue. A public-address system will broadcast the proceedings beyond the temple to a gathering of mourners on Fifth Avenue expected to number in the tens of thousands. Along with Mayor La Guardia, speakers will include Democratic senator James Mead, New York's Jewish governor, Herbert Lehman, and the former president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
"It's happening!" my father cries. "He's back! FDR is back!"
"We need him bad," Mr. Cucuzza says.
"Boys," he asks, "do you understand what is happening?" and here he throws his arms around Sandy and me. "It's the beginning of the end of fascism in America! No Mussolini here, Cucuzza-no more Mussolini here!"