The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, the Cantor's Son Read online

Mostly he guards against pilfering. You get a kahstemeh buying barley, you have to make sure she doesn’t help herself to a handful of raisins or pop a date in her mouth. Bumpy helps himself too. He told me how he once pinched so many raisins that he had a stomach ache for three whole days. His pay comes from carrying bags for the kahstemehz. Some of them give him a pehni or two. Once he even made a nikl—that’s five pehnehz in one shot. He can clear a dahleh a week. Back in Kasrilevke the only money he ever saw was on Purim, when the children tricked-or-treated. But Purim came once a year. Bumpy earns money every day.

  “Columbus, you should be sculpted in gold!” Pinye says. Once he saw Bumpy at his stend as he was walking down Rivinktn Strit, bought three cents’ worth of carob pods, and gave him a pehni tipp. A tipp is extra money from a kahstemeh.

  Moyshe the bookbinder keeps busy, too. He’s not binding books any more. In America, he says, it costs a fortune to rent a staw, buy equipment, and find kahstemehz. And he’s too old to work as a hiyud hend. He took some advice he was given (that’s one thing Jews have a lot of) and opened a book stend on Essiks Strit. He’s making a living from it.

  Pinye likes that idea so much he’s thinking of copying it. A man, he says, should deal in what he likes. Pinye takes to books like a fish to water. Once he sticks that long nose of his in one of them, you can’t tear him loose from it.

  Yoyneh the bagel maker has also left his old line of work—and for the same reason. You have to be a millionaire to open a bakery. Besides, he says, you have to join the yunye and he’s too old. Yoyneh is afraid he’d get his skull cracked in a streik if he worked for a non-yunye man. (In America there are streiks every day.) In the end he listened to some advice too. The advice was to make something else. Such as what? Such as knishes! Homemade knishes filled with cheese and sauerkraut.

  Believe it or not, Yoyneh is doing not badly. Not badly at all. His knishes have a reputation all over the Loaweh Ist Seid. If you walk down Essiks Strit and see a window that says homemade knishes sold here in big Jewish letters, you’ll know it’s him. And if you see another sign across the street that says homemade knishes sold here, you’ll know it’s the competition. Don’t give it your biznis. Buy your knishes from Yoyneh. You’ll know it’s him because he’s mean. And if you don’t, you’ll recognize Riveleh. She has a double chin like Pesye and a coral necklace. You’ll recognize Brokheh too by her big feet. The little girl with the braids and freckles is her sister Alte. We once were engaged. I’ll tell you about Alte some other time.

  WE LOOK FOR A DZHAHB

  We can’t complain. We’re welcome guests at Pesye and Moyshe’s. Life is pretty good there. We all have a swell time, especially on Sundays when the gang is off. That’s when we live it up. We all get together, my friend Mendl too, and go to the theater.

  It’s called the moofink pikshehz. It costs a nikl and you can’t believe the things you see. If I were the Tsar’s son I’d go to the moofink pikshehz every day and never leave. So would Mendl. Bumpy, too—I mean Herry.

  Not my brother Elye. Elye thought the moofink pikshehz were silly. He said they were for children. “If they’re for children,” I said, “I’d like to know what Pinye and Taybl are doing there. And how about Brokheh?” But Elye has an answer for everything. A woman, he said, has a child’s brains and Pinye likes to be annoying.

  Elye went on like that until one Sunday he came with us. Now he wouldn’t miss a moofink piksheh for the world. We all go together, the grown-ups too, Moyshe, Pesye, Yoyneh, and even Riveleh. Everyone except my mother. How can she go to the theater, she says, when her husband is buried in the ground? Her enemies shouldn’t live to see the day!

  Life is not bad at all. But how long can we go on being house guests? It’s time to look for a dzhahb. In America you have to make a living. That’s what Elye says. He goes around looking worried. Every day he drops by to talk things over with my mother. Brokheh joins them. So does Pinye. Pinye is full of plans and projects. None is worth a hill of beans. I mean they’re good plans, it’s just that Elye doesn’t like them. And if he does, Brokheh doesn’t.

  For instance, Pinye had the idea that he, Elye, Brokheh, and Taybl should go to work in a shahp and be tailors. In America a tailor sews on a machine and is called an ahpereydeh. For a high-class dzhahb like an ahpereydeh’s, Brokheh said, she didn’t have to leave Kasrilevke. “I suppose selling knishes on Essiks Strit is higher,” said Elye. Did that make Brokheh mad! Who was Elye to be talking about knishes? It was time he realized that her father’s knishes were all that kept us from starvation.

  I’d love Pinye just for the things he says. It’s a joy to sit back and listen once he gets going. Now he jumped from his seat, waved his arms, and cut loose. I remember every word:

  “O you primitive people! Deep in your hearts you’re still living in exile, in the dreary land of the accursed Tsar! America is not a pigsty to wallow in like Russia! Every millionaire and every billionaire started out working long and hard here, if not in a shahp than in the strit. Ask Rahknfelleh! Ask Kahnegi! Ask Mawgn! Ask Vendehbilt! Where were they when they were young? Do you think they didn’t work the strit? Do you think they didn’t run around selling peypehz and polishing shoes for a nikl? Take the king of kahz, Mr. Fawd, and ask him if he wasn’t once a plain dreiveh! Take the greatest Americans, Vashinktn, Linkn, Rawzvelt—I suppose you think they all were born prehzident! Take Prehzident Vilsn! You’ll pardon my saying so, but he was once a lousy heder teacher.”

  That was too much for Elye. He interrupted and said:

  “Eh, Pinye, show some respect! You’re talking about a man who is second only to God. He’s king of America.”

  Watch out for Pinye when he’s got up a full head of steam! He only laughed at my brother.

  “Ha, that’s a good one! King of what? King of where? There are no kings in America. It’s a free country, a democracy!”

  “Fine, so the king of America is called a prehzident,” Elye said. “So what?”

  “So plenty! A king is no more a prehzident than a horse is a house. A king is a king and a prehzident is a prehzident. A king is born a king and a prehzident is elected. If we elect him, Vilsn will be prehzident for four more years. If we don’t, it’s back to the heder. For your information, I could be prehzident myself one day.”

  “You? Prehzident?”

  “Me! Prehzident!”

  In all the years I’ve known Elye, I’ve never seen him laugh like that. Elye, as you know, is a worrier. He doesn’t laugh much, and when he does it’s with half a mouth. This time he laughed so hard that he scared my mother to death.

  Not that it wasn’t funny. It was enough just to look at Pinye with his hands in the pockets of his pants that were too short, his shiny new American shoes that were too big, his tie that Taybl couldn’t get to sit straight, his American cap that kept falling off, and most of all, his nearsighted eyes and long, pointy nose that stared right into his mouth. Good God, this was the future prehzident of America? A superman couldn’t have kept a straight face.

  Elye finished laughing, turned to my mother, and said: “All right, our future is taken care of. We’ll sew clothes in a shahp. And Pinye doesn’t have to worry because he’s going to be prehzident. But what about the boys?”

  He meant me and Mendl. He couldn’t stand the thought of our doing nothing. It made him sore to see us playing bawl or tshekehz in the strit. Each time he reached for my ear, he had to remember that I wasn’t his size.

  “The boys should be your biggest problem,” Moyshe said.

  That was Moyshe’s way of telling us that we hadn’t outstayed our welcome and had plenty of time to think about a dzhahb.

  Don’t imagine we lived like spongers. My mother helped Pesye in the kitshn with the cooking, baking, washing, and cleaning. Taybl made the beds and swept the rumz. Pinye worked with Moyshe at his book stend.

  Moyshe couldn’t depend too much on Pinye, though. That’s because as soon as Pinye sees a book, he’s into it nose first and bye-bye Pinye.
That’s not the worst of it. The worst is that he’s a scribbler himself. He’s gotten hold of a funtinpen that never runs out of ink and paper is cheaper in America than borscht. He sits at Moyshe’s stend and scribbles away.

  “Are you studying penmanship?” Elye asks.

  Pinye doesn’t answer. He takes what he writes and sticks it deep into the breast pockets of his jacket. His pockets are so full that he looks like a stuffed animal.

  Until we find dzhahbz, Mendl and I help the gang as best we can. I work with Log (I mean Sem) carrying cartons while Mendl is partly with Tomcat (that’s Villi) in the grawsri staw and partly with Filip (that’s Petelulu) selling the Jewish peypehz. For our pay we get tickets to the moofink pikshehz on Sundays and an eiskrim senvitsh and a sawdeh. Then we take a vawk in the pahk. There are lots of pahks in New York, all free. What a country! I go where I want and do what I like.

  For a while I hung out at the stend of my old friend Bumpy—I mean Herry—in my free time. But Bumpy’s bawss didn’t like seeing me there. She knew he sometimes ate a carob pod or a couple of raisins and almonds on the sly. The two of us, she said, were more than her stend could afford.

  So I don’t go there any more. But Bumpy always has something for me in his pocket when he comes home at night. Once Brokheh caught me chewing and ratted to Elye. Elye asked what I had in my mouth. “Tshooinkahm,” I said. Brokheh said tshooinkahm chewers made her nauseous. “They remind me of cows,” agreed Elye. Pinye objected to the comparison. He said:

  “How can you take the greatest, the smartest, the freest people on earth and compare them to cows? Just tell me this: where would we be now if Columbus hadn’t discovered America?”

  “In an America discovered by someone else,” Elye answered. He said it just like that, without even having to think about it.

  Hallelujah, we have dzhahbz! No more twiddling our thumbs. Our freeloading days are over. We’re working in a shahp. I don’t mean me and Mendl. We’re too young. I mean Elye and Pinye. What’s a shahp and what do you do in one? That’s the next thing I’m going to tell you.

  WORKING IN A SHAHP

  Don’t ask me exactly what working in a shahp is like because I don’t rightly know. I’m not allowed in one because I’m under thirteen. I only know what I hear at night from Elye and Pinye. Do they have stories!

  They come home bushed and hungry and we sit down to sahpeh. That’s a word Brokheh hates like a Jew hates pork. Another word she can’t stand is vindeh. Ask her to open a vindeh and she’ll say, “Vindeh is what comes before spring.” She has it in for stahkinks too. It doesn’t sound like anything she would want to wear on her feet. And dishehz is no better. Why can’t we say posude the way we used to? Or take lef l—you would think it was a good enough word. But no, we have to call it a spuhn! “Still, I suppose,” Brokheh says (she always has some new saying), “that if America is a kahntri, and steyk is a food, and a gopl is a fawk, English must be a language.”

  Elye and Pinye work in different shahps. Elye is an ahpereydeh. Pinye is a presseh. An ahpereydeh sews on a machine. That’s something you have to learn. The machine doesn’t run by itself.

  How did Elye get to be an ahpereydeh when our family never had a tailor or a machinist all the way back to our great-great-grandfathers? We’ve always been rabbis, cantors, beadles—that’s what my mother says. Who would have thought we’d fall so low? But this is America. In America there’s nothing you can’t do. You can be anything.

  Take a rabbi, for example. A rabbi is supposed to have studied for years. But in America there are rabbis called revrindz who were ordinary butchers back in Russia. Elye met a revrind who does circumcisions. In the old country he was a woman’s tailor.

  “You must be joking,” Elye said. “This is America,” answered the revrind.

  So how did my brother learn to run a machine? The same way the ladies’ tailor learned to do circumcisions. It took him a while to get the hang of it. First they gave him some leftover fabric to practice with. The next morning they told him to start sewing. You probably think he made a mess of it. Actually, he did pretty well. He did a lot better than Pinye.

  That’s not because Pinye is lazy. Nothing is further from the truth. Pinye is ready for any drudge work that will help him make a living in America. His problem is being nearsighted and in a rush. They sat him down next to Elye and gave him some leftovers too—and right away he has an eksehdent and sews his left sleeve to the machine! He’s lucky he didn’t sew his hand to it. Did everyone split their sides! All the ahpereydehz were hooting and hollering. Grinhawn, they called Pinye. A grinhawn is someone just off the boat who doesn’t know which end is up. It’s a bad name to be called, a lot worse than a thief. And that wasn’t all. Listen to this.

  In Elye’s shahp where Pinye tried learning to sew, there happens to be an old friend of ours: Pinye’s bugaboo, the tailor from Heysen. It was just Pinye’s luck to meet up with him again—and what a meeting! The tailor from Heysen is a big shot in that shahp. He’s not an ahpereydeh, he’s a kahdeh. That means he cuts the fabric that the ahpereydehz sew. And he thinks he’s too good even for that. He doesn’t plan to hang around long because he has his sights set on being a dizeineh. A dizeineh is big time. He can make fifty, seventy-five, a hundred dahlehz a week! When you strike it rich, you strike it rich. As Brokheh puts it: “God gives everyone a lot. He gives some a lot of money and some a lot of trouble.”

  Pinye ran into the tailor from Heysen his first day in the shahp. The tailor took off his snazzy glasses, stuck out a hand, and said: “Hallaw, homeboy! Hah duh yuh doo?” Pinye is so blind that he didn’t recognize the joker until he mentioned the Prince Albert. Then, says Pinye, he felt three holes in his heart. You might ask what the tailor from Heysen ever did to Pinye. But Pinye can’t stand the looks of him. He wouldn’t work with him in one shop if he were paid a thousand dahlehz an hour. That’s what made him sew his sleeve to the machine. He was that flustered.

  In short, Pinye’s not cut out to be an ahpereydeh. He’s found a dzhahb in another shahp as a presseh. Right now he’s an assistant presseh. Once he learns the ropes, he’ll be up for promotion. He can rise pretty high, he says.

  How high is that?

  “It’s anyone’s guess,” Pinye says. “The sky is the limit. Not even Kahnegi, Vendehbilt, or Rahknfelleh knew how far they would go.”

  Meanwhile Pinye is having a hard time. His problem is always being in a hurry. He doesn’t see too well, either. Every night he comes home dragging his tail.

  One night he came with a burned nose. What happened? He burned it on his own iron. How do an iron and a nose get together? Pinye blames the nose. He was bending over to look for some fabric when it ran into the iron.

  “A shlimazel! If he fell into a snow bank, he’d crack his skull on a rock.”

  I don’t suppose I have to tell you that’s from Brokheh. She has a big mouth, Brokheh does.

  Brokheh isn’t satisfied. Neither are my mother and Taybl. Have you ever seen a satisfied woman?

  They don’t like the men’s slaving to make a living in America. A dzhahb in a shahp is no treat. It starts at seven-thirty every morning and you have to allow an hour for travel, plus time for morning prayers and a bite to eat. You can figure out for yourself when that means getting up—and you want to be on time, because you’re docked half a day’s pay for each five minutes you’re late. How does anyone know how late you are? Leave it to America! Every shahp makes you tell it when you come to work. It’s called pahntshink deh klahk.

  The klahk hangs on a wall. Elye says it’s called a klahk because it goes klik-klahk. A klahk that fits into your pocket, he says, is a vahtsh. “So why is it called a vahtsh?” I ask. “What should it be called?” Elye says. “A tahk,” I say. “Why a tahk?” Elye asks. “Because it goes tik-tahk,” I say. Elye got mad and told me I’d learned to think backwards from Pinye.

  I’m glad Pinye wasn’t there. They would have fought over vahtsh just like they did over brekfish. Elye said it�
�s called brekfish because you eat herring. “In that case,” said Pinye, “why isn’t it called brekherrink?” “What a dope you are!” Elye said. “Don’t you know a herrink is a fish?” Pinye saw that Elye had him there and said: “You know what? Let’s ask an American.”

  Well, right away they stop a smooth-shaven Jew in the street and say to him: “Brother! How long have you been in America?”

  “Thirty years,” says the man. “How come you ask?”

  “We have a question,” they say. “Why do Americans call the morning meal brekfish?”

  The Jew looked at them and said: “Who says it’s called brekfish?” “Then what is it called?”

  “Brekfist! Brekfist! Brekfist!” The Jew shouted three times in their face and turned to go. First, though, he added:

  “Grinhawnz!”

  It doesn’t look like we’ll grow old in the shahp. Elye says there are problems with the fawmin. Every shahp has a fawmin who’s in charge. In fact, every floor has a fawmin. The fawmin on Elye’s floor is a rat. He’s an old ahpereydeh who was promoted. The workers say he’s worse than the bawss. There’s a rumor that he’s tinkered with the klahk to make you seem late when you’re on time. A real bastard! And Pinye has even nicer things to say about his shahp. You’re not allowed to look at a noospeypeh there, not even during the lunch break. You’re not allowed to smoke. You’re not even allowed to talk. Pinye says it’s so quiet that you could hear the flies buzz if it weren’t for the noise of the machines.

  The good thing is that the irons are gas-heated. The bad thing is that the gas stinks. It stinks in Elye’s shahp too. Elye’s bawss calls it gaass. Pinye’s bawss calls it gez. So now they argue about that too.

  To make a long story short, the gez gives the workers such a headache that they have to keep taking breaks. The bawss makes up for that on pehdeh, when he docks the lost time from their pay. And you can add being docked for coming late and leaving early, not to mention days that you’re sick.