Abe Weisman, now seventy-seven years old and living in Washington Heights, spent most of his life on the Canadian frontier, where he kept store, prospected for gold, and turned his hand to many things, with varying success. Raymond Rosenthal, who here tells his story, is a writer whose own career has included organizing textile workers for the CIO, writing for the left-wing press, and frontline action with the American Army in North Africa and Italy.
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An old man, Abe Weisman wasn’t interested in pleasing any more, so he told his stories for their own sake, for himself more than for you. It was evident just by the way he sat there at that mahogany table in that dim Washington Heights living room, his hands cupped neatly in front of him with school-child passivity, his voice going along evenly, too evenly, his dry swart face closed and inward like a seer’s. Even his jokes passed by unacknowledged; you could laugh if you wished to, but it obviously made no difference to him. The truth was he was too deeply inside the story ever to pause and laugh. The force of an old man’s self-indulging pleasure holds him there, the slow, sour, always dangerous pleasure of unfolding your own past. He is lost in it.
He is impatient too, as only someone caught in the trance of what happened twenty, thirty years ago can be impatient. Out of the corner of mind’s dimming eye he espies a moment forgotten until now, a moment tossed miraculously up by the very effort of story-telling—and just then, when all is about to come solidly into sight, this young fellow, this writer, asks some foolish question and breaks the past’s returning flow. Sure, he is trying to tell his story, this young fellow is trying to follow it—but why so many questions? Better to sit quiet and listen when an old man talks.
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“You want to know how I came to America? To start with, I was born in Vilna, Lithuania, on January 21, 1872. That makes me an old man, I guess. Old enough. Well, my father was a big merchant, a broker. In the summer he sold oats to the Russian cavalry and in the winter he’d float shipments of wheat and tar down the river to Danzig and Koenigsberg. We had a bookkeeper who worked for my father, a cousin, Nat Prensky, and after ten years with us he went to America where his father was. That was Joseph Prensky, in the custom peddlers business in New York, outfitting peddlers with merchandise. Those days it was a good business. Anyway, when Nat left I was sad; he was my friend. So I kept pestering my parents they should let me go to America. I was only thirteen, but I was a big strong kid and terrible stubborn. They couldn’t get it out of my head. Finally they said I could go. My mother sewed up my money in a little bag for me to hang round my neck, and the day I left my father was so ashamed his son was going to America with the poor people that he wouldn’t come down to the railroad station to say goodbye. So that was how I left the old country.”
It was hard to place Abe Weisman’s way of talking. Having lived for fifty-odd years in Ontario, running a general store, prospecting for gold, selling mining machinery, his speech was an ethnological extravaganza composed of a whole frontier’s polyglot lingos—the sing-song endings of French Canadian patois, the abrupt salty locutions of the Scotch, the bluff high-handed flights of the Irish. Yet preserved beneath all the coatings and layers, like a mother element, a base metal that rang truer than the alloys, was his Yiddish accent, still resonant after all the years. It was the thread that led back to his beginnings, attenuated to filament thinness, yet somehow never snapped.
“That was my goodbye, but my welcome was worse. The ship docked and from Castle Garden I took a wagon straight to my uncle’s house on the East Side. As soon as my uncle saw me, a young kid, a greenhorn pushed on his hands, he began to curse and swear something awful: ‘So you wanted to come to America! Well, you’ll have to work here! We don’t like no loafers.’ And then he gave me my first present in the new land. He handed me a half bag full of coal, heavy like lead, and told me to carry it down to the store. So that was my hello. And then I went to work. I had a cot in the subcellar with the rats and every day I worked from seven in the morning until eleven at night delivering cases of drygoods to the freight sheds. I pushed them on a three-wheel cart. Every Friday my uncle Joe Prensky paid me my wages. It was ten cents, ten cents every Friday.
“But I had fun anyway. After all, I was just a kid. You know Walter Winchell. His father was my pal—Jake Wineschell. Jake’s father was at that time the biggest chazan on the East Side. ‘Chaim de Sulva de Chazan’ they called him. Sulva was the town in the old cotintry where he came from. On Saturday Jake and I and some other chaps would get the day off. I’ll tell you how we worked it. There was a biscuit factory near Grand Street and we’d go there and buy broken biscuits. Five cents for a big bag. And all day long we’d eat those broken biscuits and drink soda pop. On Fourth Avenue, just above the Bowery, was where all the teamsters’ wagons traveled, the main route through the city. Up there we’d jump on the tail of one of those wagons. Usually the teamster would let us ride, what did he care, but now and then a mean one would take his whip and beat us off. But when we got to Central Park we’d jump off ourselves—that was our destination. And we’d spend the whole day there, walking in the woods and looking at the animals in the zoo, but the big event was the carousel. That took my last five cents, the end of my wages. We’d all try to catch the golden ring for a free ride. The others got it, but I never did. Oh there was terrible jealousy about that gold ring. I used to brood about it. I thought I was in hard luck or something.
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“Then one day I left my uncle’s. Threw the keys in his face. Every Saturday morning my job was to look after the freight. This particular Saturday I wanted to get away with my chums so I asked the freightman to come over early, as a favor. ‘Sure,’ he says, ‘if you give me one of those pocketbooks your uncle sells.’ It was a cheap thing, made of paper, we swept them out with the trash. So I said yes and he comes and just as I was giving him the pocketbook my other cousin Philip Prensky comes down into the cellar. He’s dead now, poor fellow, but I’ll never forget the way he sneaked up those stairs without saying a word. After the freightman left, here he comes back and starts yelling at me: ‘You dirty little thief! You stole that pocketbook from uncle,’ he yells. Oh he was a mean little brute, a miser. I got so angry I threw the keys in his face and I walked out, left.
“But I didn’t have no place to go. For three nights I slept in an empty express wagon, three whole days without a bite to eat. One morning about four o’clock a policeman comes along and raps me on the feet with his club and wakes me up. ‘Don’t you have a home?’ he says. I tell him no. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘if you come with me I’ll get you put up’. ‘No you won’t,’ I says. ‘I don’t need a home.’ Now I’ll tell you something. That policeman walked away but he must have had a generous nature because right where he was standing I saw a little purse. He must have dropped it on purpose for me. I jumped down quick and, what do you know, there was seven pennies in it. I was rich! I bought a roll for a cent and a glass of milk for another cent, and that was the first food for three days.
“Soon after I landed a job. I met a kid I knew, a newsboy, Irish, and he was sure surprised to see me out by myself looking like a tramp. I told him I’d quit my uncle and was on my own. So he says: ‘Stay with me at the Newsboy’s Home.’ In those days it was near the old World building. For six cents they gave you your supper, a bed, and breakfast the next morning. I should say I got two jobs. The first one was in a brush factory and they fired me at the end of the week. Just handed me two-fifty and fired me. Why, I’ll never know. I went out and bought new clothes, a shirt and tie, new shoes, and when I was finished I still had fifty cents in my pocket. Then got another job as a messenger boy with a German concern. The Irish kid told me about it. Said you had to speak German. So when they asked me, ‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch,’ I said, ‘yah,’ and they gave me the job just like that. Of course I couldn’t speak German, only Yiddish.
“About this time Jake Wineschell took me into his house on East Broadway. I remember the old man Chaim was writing books all the time. All day long he would sit at the table, a big pail of beer in front of him, smoking cigarettes, drinking the beer, and writing his books. He was a free-thinker, an awful crank. What his books were about I don’t know. But as soon as he saw me come into the house he looked up and asked me if I wanted a glass of beer. I said no. Then he said: ‘I’ll tell you the rules and regulations of my house. Now, listen. The next time I ask you whether you want a beer, you say yes. That will save me a lot of tsoros. Because I know that when you say no you really mean yes, and if you don’t take it when I offer it to you, then you’ll steal it and I’ll just be out beer. Then there’ll be real tsoros.’”
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All this time I had kept silent but now I laughed so loud that Abe stopped, annoyed, yet in spite of himself looking at me with that dead-pan triumphant stare of the story-teller who knows he has hit home. I wanted to hear more about Chaim. “What was he?” I asked. “A socialist?” Abe didn’t believe so. “He was a free-thinker,” he said. “You know, one of these cranks.” That was all he could remember.
The term “free-thinker” I learned later covered a large and shadowy area of human aberration and cantankerousness in Abe Weisman’s private mythology. You were a “freethinker” if you voted the Liberal party ticket—Abe had always, as one of the more stable members of a free-floating community, voted straight Conservative up in Ontario—if you had a malevolent streak or peculiar ways, wrote books, for instance, and talked a lot about abstract, off-the-ground subjects. His tone when speaking of such examples of human folly was neither one of pity nor contempt, but rather as one might say, wonderingly, “Look, that’s what grown men waste their time doing.”
“You know,” Abe said, almost apologetically, for he felt my disappointment over Chaim, “ever since my son Jess told me you wanted to hear my story I’ve been thinking over the old days. I stay awake nights anyway, so now I got something to do in bed. I lay there and think and all the things that happened to me come back. They rush into my head, it’s hard to get them in the right order. I’m seventy-seven and I got a lot to remember. Things get mixed up; my memory’s not so good any more. For instance, you asked me to tell you the story about the rabbi, the one Jess told you about. Now that’s a real good story and I remember it, but once I start thinking about it I start something going in my head and a hundred stories that that rabbi hasn’t a thing in the world to do with come rushing into it.”
I assured Abe that no one could remember in any other way; and that it shouldn’t surprise him that everything was somehow connected with everything else. Just tell it as it came to him; it was my job to get it straightened out. Without further preliminary or apology, Abe plunged back into his story-telling.
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“Now we’re up in Canada,” he said, “where my life really begins. I got there by a fluke. A relative invited me up for a vacation while I was working for the Tower Novelty Company. That was in 1893. I liked it so much that I came for four weeks and I stayed four months. When I finally got back to New York my job had been given to a new man and they wanted me to take a position that didn’t pay half as good. So my mind was made for for me. I left New York and went to Canada for good. I started out peddling clothes, following the new railroad construction routes. Railroad construction in that part of Canada was nothing but trestles; one hill after another had to be crossed and they had to build trestles. I only carried men’s wear. There were no women around in those days. The way I’d work it I used to load my trunks full of goods on the trains. It was all through friends. I’d have a baggage man or a conductor who was my friend and he would see to it that the trunk was dropped at the right place. Then I’d come along and sell it to the construction men. By 1894, when I was only twenty-two, I had enough money to open up a general store at Chelmsford, Ontario. But then, in 1898, I threw it up and came to New York and got married. She was a girl from my home town in Lithuania. Her relatives tried to get me to stay in New York. I even opened a store on Broadway in Brooklyn, but I couldn’t stand the life. So dull, nothing to do all day long. I missed the country, the big snows, and the trips into the bush. City life wasn’t for me. But up to the last minute my wife’s relatives kept after her not to go to Canada. To hear them talk you’d think it was only outlaws and thieves lived there. Yes, Canada had a bad reputation then.
“When I brought my wife back to Canada with me, we went to Sudbury to live. It was just a little frontier town, about five, six hundred inhabitants, and two Jewish families besides us. And wasn’t she crying! No electric lights. No gas. Only coal oil. Every day we had to make the lamps. She cried for two weeks straight. We had two nice rooms, but still she cried. So I said: ‘Let me go out and start a business and I’ll settle down in Sudbury.’ So I went out for two weeks looking around for something. There was a fellow in town who owned a store, a Jew named Cohen. He was a free-thinker, always talking to people and never doing anything but talk, talk. He had asthma and went to the States, to New Jersey, to get cured. I spoke to his wife about the store, and she said she’d take three hundred dollars for it just as it was. ‘Come on over to the lawyer,’ I told her. There was only one lawyer in town and he signed the papers and the store was mine. ‘Course, I never bothered to look in the store, and Monday when I took over I found the place cleaned out, not a thing in it. She had taken everything with her. I didn’t have much money on me. I had given my wife three hundred dollars and had kept about three hundred and fifty dollars. That was what I had in my pocket. It was a fine place for a store though; two beautiful windows, two rooms downstairs and two up. Fifteen dollars a month rent. The owner of the place—a broker in Montreal—gave me a lease for ten years. ‘Now,’ I told my wife, ‘we got a business.’ Then I went out to see where I could buy some merchandise. I saw a fellow walking along and could tell by his sample case he was a salesman, so I said to him: ‘I want to buy some confectionery.’ ‘What store is this?’ he says. ‘Cohen’s,’ I told him. ‘I wouldn’t sell you for cash even,’ this salesman tells me. It seems that they never paid their bills either, those Cohens. So I said to him: ‘Stand still for a minute. I want to have a good look at you. Some day you’ll want my business and then I want to remember what you look like.’
“Then I met another fellow who traveled for a Toronto house. ‘Hello, Weisman,’ he says, ‘I heard you got married. Congratulations!’ I told him about the store. ‘It’s a darn good stand,’ he agreed. ‘Sure,’ he says, ‘we can get you stuff and we’ll trust you. We know you, Abe. And another thing,’ he says, ‘we’ll send the goods to you express pre-paid.’ That’s the way all the people are over there, friendly. Believe it or not, in thirty days I didn’t owe a cent to anybody.”
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Indeed, that’s the way it went always, friends everywhere. Hard luck, tough breaks, to be sure, but Canada, for Abe Weisman and his family, was swarming with friends, people who wanted to be helpful and kind. I had imagined something entirely different. To me, the pathos of being an immigrant, of being uprooted and remolded, seemed ridiculously foreign, even outrageous, when acted out in the unfamiliar setting of the Canadian bush. Some human adventures appall us just by their air of being too extreme, carrying its actor beyond the scope of our sympathy. The story that everyone told was inevitably the story we could all respond to; but the story one lone man told—that was another matter, almost by reflex we grew colder, suspicious of its teller.
The paradox was, however, that life in the Canadian woods was far less of an ordeal than life in the Bronx or Williamsburg. Abe Weisman, that impulsive, head-strong man, had rushed out to one of the last livable margins of civilized existence—and had discovered there a warmly hospitable community of fellow marginal beings. Concerned as I was with the unusual in Abe Weisman’s story, I had overlooked the simple fact that the frontier has always been the grand and indiscriminate haven. Among such a ceaselessly pouring riot of nationalities and tongues, what did it signify if one spoke with a Yiddish accent rather than a Hungarian or a French or a Polish one? Among an evershifting, ever-augmenting world of luftmenshen—gold-hallucinated prospectors, highbinding salesmen, fly-by-night promoters—how could one distinguish the Jewish luftmensh from the Irish, Scotch, and French Canadian varieties of the breed? And what did it matter, anyway? In the free and wideopen arena of the Canadian frontier there was no social top and bottom, no rigid form and custom, no touchstone of convention by which the outlandish and strange could be measured and condemned. Out there, in the barrenness of a Hudson Bay post or before the denuded clapboard of some jerry-built frontier town, Abe Weisman was more at home than those Jews he had left behind to struggle with the relatively fixed realities of Second Avenue and Broadway.
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“Everybody knew me in the North,” Abe said, a bit sadly. “Why there wasn’t an Indian in the whole region didn’t call me Abe. Take the lumberjacks. After the spring drive was over and they got paid off they’d all head straight for town and who do you think they came to first? Me, of course. They used to walk straight into the store and buy a whole new outfit, strip down to the skin. They stunk like anything; hadn’t taken a bath all winter. You should have seen how those lumberjacks lived in the woods. They had lean-to’s made of logs with a thatch of boughs on top for a roof. In the middle of their camp was a big sand-pit where they did all their cooking and baking. They’d line up with their kits and ladle out the food and then eat it on long benches right out in the open in all kinds of weather. They worked about twelve hours of work a day. When spring came they’d all be in town for a good time. Poor fellows, they all used to say, ‘I’m heading for Montreal,’ but they never got farther than the nearest saloon in Sudbury. But they always bought a new outfit; always the same thing, blue serge suit, white shirt and a celluloid collar. The celluloid collar was very important. Then they’d say, ‘Abe, here’s my money. Take it and if I come around later and ask for it, don’t give it to me.’ Then they would always get drunk and come back and demand I give it back, raise hell all over the store because I wouldn’t. Oh they all liked me, they were all my friends.”
I remembered what his sons Charlie and Jess had told me about their life in Canada. If there was any minority in the Ontario of those days it was the English; saloons had a sign, “No dogs or Englishmen allowed.” So, it appears, goes the track of empire. And being a Jewish child there meant fighting in the gang fights allied with the Protestants and Irish Catholics against the French Catholics, since, after the English, the French Canadians were most disliked, perhaps the closest to a downtrodden group.
“You can’t trust a Frenchman,” Abe told me. “They’ll steal your eye-teeth. I always had to lock my store.” But despite this one tinge of prejudice, life in Ontario seemed quite easygoing and pleasant. To Jess, the third son, being a Jew seemed to mean two vivid things: on Friday he would have to take the chicken to the slaughterer at the other end of the town, and on Passover he got a propitious holiday. “I always went down the back alleys and side streets; I didn’t want my friends to see me, somehow. Then I had to watch him slit the chicken’s neck, so I never could eat on Friday night. Then there was Passover. I remember it because it always came just at the time of the spring thaw. We kids used to go out then and pick up the whiskey bottles the men threw out the windows and sell them. And because we had a holiday, my brothers Charlie, Eckie, and I would be able to get the bottles before the other kids. There they’d be, near the old Polack boarding house where the railroad and mining workers boarded, sprouting out of the melting snow. We got one cent for a whiskey bottle, two for a small beer bottle and five for a quart bottle. Instead of going to the synagogue we’d hunt all day for bottles.”
It was the sons, now living in New York, who had primed me on what to ask the old man. They liked and respected him; their voices rose with real fondness when they said, “You go and ask him. Ask him about Isaac Beaudry, about that rabbi, he’ll know more than we do.” So now I asked the old man about the rabbi. It obviously was a famous family story.
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“You say my son Charlie mentioned a rabbi,” Abe said, “the one we had in Sudbury? Well, you got to understand what kind of a town Sudbury was in those days, just a stop on the railroad. But I always made it my business to get a rabbi. Not because I was especially religious, but the goyim had ministers and priests, so I figured we Jews should have a rabbi. But we always had trouble with our rabbis. Who wanted to come out to such a lonely place? One rabbi we had never wanted to start a synagogue, a congregation. He kept putting it off and every time I brought it up he thought of some new excuse. The reason? You see, as long as he collected money from each Jew in the town separately he could make more than if we paid him a salary all together. Then who knows how much he made on the side, slaughtering for Jews up and down the railroad. He traveled on a pass I got for him, so he went all over the province free. Finally, as the head of the Jews in Sudbury, I demanded he start a congregation, and that was when he left.
“So we were without a rabbi. I advertised for one in the Toronto papers, and we got an answer I’ll never forget. I don’t know what this fellow was—some kind of jail-bird. Oh, but he was clever, a regular actor. I’ll tell you. One day he gets off the train with his wife and she’s carrying all their belongings in a big red handkerchief. They didn’t even have a valise. So he comes to me and says: ‘Are you the Mr. Weisman who advertised for a rabbi in the Toronto papers?’ I said I was. So he says that he’s a rabbi. Well, I gave him the job. He was a good talker, smooth, with grand ways, you’d think he was born to it. I tell him that we would pay him one hundred dollars a month—a lot of money those days—and give him a house to live in.
“Well, we didn’t have a house right then, so, for the time being, I told him he would have to stay with some Rumanian Jews who’d just come to town and lived on the outskirts. They were wild ones, drinking and fighting all the time, never worked. The first day he and his wife’s out there he shows up at the store with a pious look on his face and he tells me: ‘Mr. Weisman,’ he says, ‘I can’t live with these people. They are doing bad things all the time. They have women there, prostitutes, and they’re doing sinful things a rabbi can’t believe his own eyes.’ So I told him: ‘Look somewhere else, rabbi, for at least a day or two.’ After all, we didn’t have a house for him, and that was that until we got one. Of course, I felt bad about it, this rabbi having to live with such lowlifes, with frisky French Canadian girls and drinking and fighting, but I advised him to keep his eyes shut and trust us to get him out of that place soon. We had a lot of wild customers up there in the North country, and who knows what these Rumanians were doing. Maybe running a whorehouse or something. I felt real bad for the rabbi.
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“But in a day or two we had a house for him, hired it from a Frenchman and furnished it all nice. I bet he never lived in such a house before. Well, one day there was a bris and the rabbi performed everything fine. Oh, he was a clever actor, that young fellow. After the ceremony one of the men in the congregation asks me to step outside he’s got something to tell me. ‘Weisman,’ he says, ‘I got good news for you. That rabbi of yours is bootlegging.’ And this man who tells me, he should know because he was one of the biggest bootleggers around that part of the country. I went back into the house and there was the rabbi. I was so mad I could have broken him in half. I motioned to him to come outside with me. All he had to do was look at me—in those days when I got angry I got red in the face and everybody could tell—and then he knew something was wrong. ‘What’s the matter?’ he says when we got outside. ‘I hear you’re bootlegging,’ I said to him. First he acts real high and mighty: What business is it of mine, he says, what he’s doing? ‘We don’t pay you enough,’ I ask him, ‘you have to start bootlegging and humiliate us in front of the goyim. If you don’t stop right away,’ I told him, ‘I’ll kill you with my own hands.’ So he promises he’ll stop, and everything was all right for a while. But then one day another man comes around to the store and he tells me a terrible story about the rabbi. Seems there was a wild woman, a French Canadian girl, who had been living with those Rumanians just at the time when the rabbi was with them and didn’t like what he saw there. This girl was so bad the police had run her out of town. Well, the rabbi had taken a trip up North a few weeks before and he must have met her. Anyway, this man tells me: ‘That rabbi of yours has rented a room in town for this girl. He must be setting up to be a pimp.’ When I heard this I was so angry I had to keep control of myself. I called for the rabbi. When I faced him with this new story he don’t even seem to care. Again he says it’s no business of the congregation what he does. Here was this poor girl and he gave her a Home—that was all there was to it. I told him: ‘You’re our rabbi and not a pimp. Either you get rid of that girl or we’ll get a new rabbi.’ So he got rid of her.
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“I guess you’re wondering why we kept him after all this. What could we do? If we fired him the story would run all over the province how the Jewish rabbi was a pimp and a bootlegger. Better to keep quiet about it. Of course, I watched him like a hawk from there on. Didn’t let him get away with a thing. But, as a matter of fact, we did get rid of him pretty soon after. I’ll tell you how it happened. The big rabbi in Toronto was Rabbi Gordon. One day I get a letter from him that he’s going to visit us: the synagogue in Toronto was starting a Talmud Torah and the rabbi was traveling all over to raise money from the Jews. The day he arrived he came right to my house, since I was the head of the Jewish community in Sudbury. So I says to Rabbi Gordon: ‘Rabbi, can we have the honor of having you as our guest?’ And the rabbi says to me: ‘Mr. Weisman, I know that Mrs. Weisman keeps a real kosher house and I can eat all my meals at your house and never worry for a minute.’ Oh, everybody knew how particular Mrs. Weisman was about keeping kosher. She even wrote away to Toronto every week to Cohen the butcher for her meat; she wouldn’t eat the local trefe. So Rabbi Gordon stayed at my house. We called a meeting of the congregation and he gave a speech about the Talmud Torah and raised a lot of money. If you go to Toronto now you’ll see my name up there in the synagogue, one of the original founders. After the rabbi’s speech we introduced him to our rabbi, that bum, and Rabbi Gordon seemed to smell something about him even though I didn’t mention his bootlegging and his French girl. Later that day Rabbi Gordon comes to me and says he wants to speak to the new rabbi. I don’t know what went on between the two rabbis, but I guess Rabbi Gordon must have given him some kind of test or something. After it, he comes and tells me that the new rabbi is a fake, we should get rid of him. So we did. But even up to the last minute that young fellow was such a good actor you’d think he’d been a rabbi all his days. He was awful indignant, made a big speech, but then after everything he went away. We didn’t hear of him for about six months and then one day I get a letter and inside there’s a picture of the rabbi but now he’s in cowboy clothes and he’s sitting on a bronco, with chaps and a sombrero, and he says in it he’s in Texas now and making big money herding cattle and that he’s damn sorry he ever had anything to do with us Jews in Sudbury. So that was the end of that rabbi.”
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This story hit on something crucial. On a frontier everybody was everybody else’s friend; but how could one really know a man? It was hard to say. If he talked “good,” he was a rabbi. If he knew how to talk better, then he was a promoter and super-salesman of anything that could be bought and sold.
If he carried a pick and shovel, he was a prospector. And, ultimate of ultimates, if he could assay ore and stake a claim—talked knowingly of veins and outcroppings and lodes—why then he was a mining engineer. With such a rough-and-ready method of identification, with personalities and skills floating in the air and waiting to be donned by the first comer, frontier life could not help being one of continual upsets, surprises, reversals, and disappointments.
Especially the last. Abe Weisman admitted he was disappointed. So many fortunes found under his nose, gold and silver lodes discovered right and left, all around him, and here he was in Washington Heights without the fortune he should have made.
“I was a victim of my friends,” Abe said. “They didn’t mean no harm, but they gave me bad advice. I could give you a hundred stories to illustrate. Take this one. I was sitting in this hotel lobby up North during the Cobalt gold rush, and this man comes up and says he represents a firm in Toronto that wants to buy claims, any kind, so long as it’s somewhere near the new find. I knew a lawyer from Sudbury who made a practice of sending out bums, they weren’t even real prospectors, but they knew how to tie on a claim. Tie on a claim? That means when you make a strike, find a vein, you write out a map putting your find in the proper township. It has to be tied on to a town nearby. Well, anyway, these bums of his would stake claims wherever they could around a find; he had a filing cabinet full of them, no good at all, but there was always a sucker who’d buy them. So I got this fellow from Toronto $1,250 worth of those claims, and I split it with the lawyer fifty-fifty. At the time they were selling gold units on the Rouyn-Noranda find, so I thought I’d take the money and go buy some for my wife. On the way to the office I met an engineer I knew, Travers, and I asked him about these gold units. ‘Don’t touch them,’ he tells me. ‘I just came back from that country and I can tell you there’s nothing to it. You’ll be spending good money on dirt, no gold.’ So I took his advice and didn’t buy the gold units and in a few years the people who did were all rich. Of course he didn’t mean me no harm; just wrong information.
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Wrong information; bum steers; experts who didn’t know anything and nobodies who showed up with a fortune in both hands—that was the sign under which all took place on the Ontario frontier. Abe Weisman spent a fortune trying to strike gold during the Porcupine rush—he had a chain of general stores by now, set up by hard work along the route of the railroad, deep in the woods—and he lost his chance for making a real killing by taking the most flighty of rumors seriously. “Sure, I got reports from the Hollinger boys,” Abe explained, “and I had a whole camp of men working with me. Well, the Hollingers told me one day that the option had been thrown up by O’Brien because he couldn’t find anything. That same day I left with our canoes and everything and worked down for about nine miles and started prospecting in another place, on the height of the land. Then we found out that Timmins had picked up the option for $350,000 cash. In two days more there we would have made our fortune.
“I spent about twenty thousand dollars in two years, scratching, scratching away in the hills. We found plenty of copper, but at that time copper had no market and we didn’t even bother staking claims on it. Finally I got disgusted and went home. All I left there was Weisman Lake, it’s still on the map. The government named it. As soon as they start to make some finds in the country, the government sends out geologists and engineers to fix up the maps. In that country there are lakes, one after the other. So they came to my property. They asked: ‘Who is the owner of those properties?’ So they named it Weisman Lake. They found a fellow at another lake; he was drunk. So they named it Whiskey Lake.
“You know who strikes it rich? The tenderfoot who hasn’t got one idea about anything. He believes in the good book. He comes to town straight from the city and gets a license for ten dollars. At the office they give him the rules and regulations and they show him the rock, mother rock. Teach him what a vein looks like, tell him how to scrape off the moss and rock and test it. Then he’s all ready. The old timers, they used to dig ten feet in the gravel and if they didn’t hit anything they’d go somewhere’s else.
“But when a tenderfoot comes around he keeps on digging and digging; he don’t stop. That way he’s bound to strike. Well, I wasted too much time up there. I went home. But they kept on finding gold; Kirkland Lake, Swastika, they were all big rushes. I was tired and I said I wouldn’t go. When I left Porcupine it was 1911 and that was the last big rush I was in. It’s all a gamble. Anyway, I had all the luck I could handle. I could take mud and the mud would turn into gold. What fortunes I had! I will tell you a story. A man walks into the store dressed in leather pants. . . .”
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But I wasn’t really listening any more. We had been in the narrow living room all afternoon, the old man talking, I taking notes and asking questions, and now through a haze of weariness I could hear Abe telling me of one deal after another, one business venture after another that came out beautifully.
It would always start with a stranger walking in out of the street and he would have a wonderful proposition to offer Abe. Sometimes Abe made a killing; other times he lost his grip somehow and the chance to strike it really rich slipped through his fingers. Was he making it up for me, for himself? I couldn’t be sure, and it didn’t matter. I simply sat there, nodding my head at Abe as he transacted his more spectacular deals, looking out the window into the areaway where a grimy, straggling, peculiarly metropolitan snow had begun falling.
It was late now and I had to leave. Abe had gone into his bedroom for some photographs he wanted me to see—pictures taken in Canada “in the old days.” “I found them,” Abe said, coming back into the room. He spread the photos on the table. They had the washed-out look old photos always have, that half-gray, primitive light you see in movies from the silent days. Here was the bleak square front of a clapboard house, the veins of the wood whitened by the weather, in the foreground a splayed porch and two empty black windows, and behind the house and all around it the waste space of Northern Ontario on an early spring day, still cold, but warm enough for the Indian kids who sat on the porch’s edge to be going barefoot and for Abe’s two helpers—this was his first general store, in Chelmsford—to be without mackinaws and hats, their shirt sleeves rolled. And here was a Hudson Bay post, farther north still, and two burly, unshaven French Canadians with their arms twined around a third man standing between them, wide grins for the camera, and a wreath of sub-zero fuming mist woven about all three of them like an ominous, concrete presence.
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Abe pointed to the man prominent in the second photo. “You see him,” he said. “Now who do you think he is?” I looked closely at the man at the center of the entwining arms: his face was fully fleshed and even in the grey dimness of the old photo you could sense the swarthy flush on the round of his cheek-bones; he was a stocky, big-chested man wearing a lumberjack’s shirt, over that a thin sweater, and on his hands woolen half-mittens out of which thick, lumpy fingers protruded. He looked like a very tough man.
“It’s you,” I said. The old man was surprised. “You mean you really could tell?” “Of course. There’s no mistaking it. That’s you all right.” “I’ve changed,” Abe said, “I’ve changed a lot.” Then, after a pause, “My troubles all started when I came back to New York; I did it for my family but I made a mistake. I should never have left Ontario. I had a good business there. Up there I was always healthy, but down here I lost my wife, my health, my appetite, everything.”
The snow suddenly began to fall thicker, you could almost hear it. I called attention to it, hoping Abe would forget his troubles. “Call that snow,” he said, contemptuously. “In Ontario we got real snow. Down here the snow’s too wet, it ain’t healthy for you. Up north it’s beautiful, white and soft like sugar. It don’t melt half way down the sky. But, you wait, you wait till I tell you the rest of my story and then you’ll understand what real snow means. . . .”
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