Subject for a Ph.D. thesis: why did operatic music monopolize the cultural horizons of the Jewish immigrant from East Europe up to about twenty years ago? In this genre sketch Morris Freedman draws detail from the mysterious world about him in his boyhood, and offers us a freehand composite of a not often recorded side of Jewish life on the American scene. (Resemblances to actual individuals, living or dead, are, he reminds the reader, only coincidental.)
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My mother, who came to America when she was about sixteen, always talked of the home she ran away from on the border of Russia as a kind of sprawling, Chekhovian establishment. She gave the impression that her family and all her friends had been of the high intelligentsia, and her incessant conversation with me was of the Russian ballet, Nazimova, Chekhov, Gogol, and Tolstoy. She frequently took out books in Russian from the neighborhood library; and in our living room in the Bronx stood a Victrola, of the kind that had to be wound up before each playing, with records of Caruso, Galli-Curci, and Chaliapin. All of them came out, when played, in a rising and falling tinny screech. Although my mother always urged me to pay attention, I could never distinguish Galli-Curci from Caruso, but perhaps I didn’t really try; my main interest was that little white dog on the inside of the lid cocking an ear to his master’s voice.
Some years later, when I became aware on my own of the names that had been so constantly on my mother’s lips, I saw that most of her talk had been pure fancy, or gossip. To her Nazimova was a dancer, and she knew all the details of Tolstoy’s involved family life rather than any of his works. As for Nijinsky, whom I once mentioned, she had not heard of him. I remembered also that there was a record of Al Jolson, of all people, alongside the opera stars in the record cabinet underneath the Victrola’s turntable. Then I realized that I had never seen her open any of the Russian books except for a glance or to riffle the pages, at which times her face wore a faraway, reminiscent smile. But if I have an awed sense of the glory of the artistic life, I owe it to her, and on one occasion her fantasy and reality coincided, offering me a startling glimpse of her bohemian gods at play.
I was about twelve or thirteen at the time, and we were living on Belmont Avenue, a dismal, narrow street of tenements and a cavernous garage. A block down the hill was Crotona Park bordered by Arthur Avenue. It was the early 3O’s then, and refugees from Hitler’s Germany had just started settling in America. There arrived to live in a tiny black apartment on Arthur Avenue a former actress of the German and Palestinian stage. I don’t remember her name, but it was something like Shulamith Vishnak, which is what I should like to call her now.
My mother, always friendly and garrulous, got to know Madame Vishnak, as she always referred to her, the first week she appeared in the park, wheeling a stroller. Madame Vishnak was a tall youngish woman with a full head of short reddish brown hair, and a very broad smile dividing her small chin from her two apple cheeks. She spoke with a heavy accent, and she was pockmarked. She had been a member of a repertory company which had toured Europe and Asia and was now waiting for a Broadway engagement. Occasionally, my mother and she exchanged a few words in Russian or Hebrew. To my mother, Madame Vishnak was straight out of an opera by Tolstoy, and our lives began to revolve about her.
I spent a good deal of time in the park with my mother and learned, perhaps not so baldly as I remember them now, the most personal things about Madame Vishnak. She wore no brassiere, my mother once remarked half to herself, with a satisfied smile, while we were sitting alone on a bench. She went on to explain, as though’ I had asked, that this was the latest fashion of artists in Europe. Madame Vishnak’s three-year-old girl was, according to my mother, illegitimate. And the Mr. Vishnak who lived with her, a jolly-faced, unprepossessing man, was not her husband at all but her impresario-lover, and not necessarily the father of her child.
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My mother couldn’t do enough for Madame Vishnak. She insisted on helping her with her shopping and cooking. But her most extravagant gesture was to offer Madame Vishnak the Victrola. Galli-Curci, Caruso, Chaliapin, and Jolson, she said, would mean so much more to Madame Vishnak than to us. Madame Vishnak was really very grateful for my mother’s offer. She always maintained a charmingly aloof manner, but on this occasion she impetuously kissed my mother on the cheek. My mother, glowing, lost no time in carrying out her project.
That very afternoon, my brother, then ten or so, and I and a few of the other kids in the neighborhood played movers. My mother hurried us, for it was essential that the machine and records be transported before my father came home for supper; the Victrola was our most valuable piece of furniture. We managed in some way to maneuver without mishap the bulky, boxlike phonograph, which was almost as tall as I was, down the two flights in our apartment building and along the street to the top of the hill. Then, feeling quite important, we began rolling it down, front forward. Madame Vishnak was watching us at the bottom with some apprehension and waved to us once, but I waved back assuringly. Halfway down the hill, the Victrola teetered dangerously, and, though .we managed to keep it upright, the cabinet doors flew open and the records spilled out, most of them cracking violently.
Enough records must have remained intact for the gift not to lose all its attractiveness. For, not long after, when the Vishnak ménage moved to an apartment on Central Park West, Madame Vishnak sent a warm letter to my mother in Russian inviting her and the family to visit the new establishment. My mother determined that I should go alone. Her decision not to take the whole family couldn’t have had anything to do with my father’s feelings about losing the phonograph, for he didn’t become aware for two months or so that it was gone, and when he did he congratulated my mother for having got rid, as he put it, of the piece of junk.
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I made my trip on a late Saturday afternoon, and went, as was the custom with my mother and her relatives and friends, without a telephone call or a note to say I was coming. The visit meant a great deal to me. It was my first actual entry into the world my mother had talked so much about, and I was vividly anticipating, on the long and involved subway ride from the Bronx, a sumptuous, operatic-like reception. When I walked up one of the quiet brownstone-lined streets toward the rich openness of Central Park, I felt sure my dream was being fulfilled.
The first tinge of disillusion came as I stopped beneath the tattered canopy of the building. The elevator operator was a small dirty man who spat contemptuously when I asked for the floor, and the elevator itself was a wreck. I rang the bell of the Vishnak apartment, my face frozen in a smile. I could hear all sorts of noises from inside. Mr. Vishnak opened the door, and I squinted slightly and raised my eyebrows, putting what I hoped was a confidential man-of-the-world note into my smile. He was wearing an embroidered silk Russian blouse, and his face was flushed. ‘Yes?” he asked, not recognizing me. After I blandly explained my business, he stood there stunned, shrugged his shoulders, and yelled for Shulamith. “Wait here,” he said, and returned inside.
Madame Vishnak was much more hospitable. She had on a turtle-neck sweater (over a brassière), and she greeted me warmly, bending forward to kiss me on the forehead and rumple my hair. Then she swept me into the huge apartment, down a long dark hall, past a great many doors, and into a large well-lighted room facing the park. A party was going on. The women were dressed in sweaters and the men in sport shirts, and all of them seemed to be smoking cigarettes in long holders and sipping from small glasses. There were in the room a few upholstered chairs with the stuffing coming out in spots, two low sofas covered with green and purple throws, and perhaps a hundred small pillows of all colors scattered everywhere. The women, bright and continually tinkling with laughter, were draped over the men, in the chairs, on the sofas, and along the pillows on the uneven floor. Through the laughter and the foreign chatter, I heard a familiar noise. In a corner was the Victrola, playing a popular number as tinnily as ever, something about what kind of noise annoys an oyster.
Madame Vishnak gave me a drink to hold and sat down on a straight-backed plain kitchen chair. She put me on her knees. “Well, darling, tell me how is your little mother?” she said, pronouncing her words like Gregory Ratoff. “And have you finally decided to break away from home? Take a litde drink. It’s good for you.” I sat on her lap as rigid as a West Point cadet on Saturday inspection. I tasted the liquid, and while I had to sputter it out, I did so as genteelly as possible. She talked to me so about a half-hour, dropping Russian phrases, introducing me to some of the women there, all of whom had great red smiling mouths and phenomenally white, regular teeth. A few bent down to give me a hug and a kiss.
I finally bounced off her lap and said I had to leave. “That’s too bad,” she said, and, her arm around my shoulder, led me to the door. There she gave me a kiss right on my mouth, simultaneously terrifying and pleasing me. “If you see your mother sometimes, send her my regards. Goodbye. Come any time, my litde beauty.” She was as happily drunk as I was ever to see anyone.
My mother expected me to stay for supper at the Vishnaks, and so I had to spend several hours downtown. I had fifteen cents, and I bought a frankfurter and a bag of popcorn and wandered through Central Park and down to Times Square, where I finally took the subway home.
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My mother was waiting in front of the house for me, and she hurried me up and into the kitchen so that I could tell her privately of the details of my visit. My father was in the living room. I let her questions guide my answers, and I think I was able to fulfill all her expectations, including some of those she couldn’t bring herself even to hint at, however delicately. I was able to assure her that the Central Park West domicile was as romantically illicit as anything on the Metropolitan Opera stage. I told only one outright lie, that while I was there the Victoria played a Caruso aria from The Pearl Fishers, a favorite of my mother’s. I remember easing my conscience by thinking that, after all, oysters were involved in both selections.
When I was in bed, ready to go to sleep, she came in and sat down next to me. She was smiling and had tears in her eyes. “You had such a wonderful day,” she said. “You must go there often. It is too late for me to live such a life.”
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