This is a second contribution from S. T. HECHT’S studies of the not entirely tranquil Jewish shtetl located within Reedville, a town found somewhere between the Hackensack and the Hudson Rivers, and reflecting all the tensions of the half of American Israel that lies beyond the latter stream. Mr. Hecht’s first sketch, “Seven Men in Search of a Rabbi,” in our June issue, excited praise for its authenticity from many of our readers acquainted with small-town Jewish life.
_____________
When the richest man, the big personality, the primum mobile of the community takes it into his head, unexpectedly it would seem, to move out of town, the repercussions are bound to be wide.
“Why is Barney moving?” one asks. “Did somebody insult him?”
This from an innocent in the community, who somehow has not managed to learn that a rich man is never insulted—he’s generally on the giving end when insults fly.
“Isn’t Barney happy here any more?” another inquires, and this stirs circles of speculation on the life of a rich man in a small town. After all, what’s the use of being rich if you can’t spread your wings?
In Reedville and East Reedville we have some well-to-do folk, and some of the middling kind. We have a few poor too, God bless ’em, to remind us of our humanity, but not another Barney Rossman, not even a triplicate pale carbon copy. With whom then can he be at ease? The oppressiveness of his own wealth bears down on his invited guests. He senses their embarrassment. As for the rich goyim, he has tried already. John Thomas, president, and Andrew Bigelow, vice-president of the local bank at which Barney does business, again and again invited him for a round of eighteen holes at their golf club. He talked to Riba, his wife, and the two of them found reason why Barney should go.
“You can’t insult those people!” they agreed.
So Barney goes, and when Riba sees his car in the driveway home again, she rushes up to the door, all wings and flutter, while he pokes his bag away in the hall closet. “How was it, Barney?” she whispers. But really, she doesn’t have to inquire. It’s written all over Barney.
“You didn’t have a good time?”
“Mit goyim!” he drops into the vernacular, glad to be home again. “I have one drink while they take two, and when I have two they have four. I used to think I was a drinker. Now I know.” His head is still spinning. He had walked the golf course not so steady till at last they were back in the clubhouse. He looked around. Such faces! Trey/ vie chazert—Micks to the bone. And they all looked at him!
“Come on, Barney! Let’s have another!” “No thanks. My liver.” Riba is disappointed, while Barney, disappointed with himself, and upset, says, “Then they told jokes, and more jokes.” 259
So it wasn’t a success with the rich goyim; but the town somehow got to know that Barney and the bank president played golf together.
But how long can you draw pride and pleasure from such an experience? He must find others in his own class, Jews like himself. Could that be why he’s moving out? Thus the speculation and the gossip flow concurrendy, and each person according to his kind comes up with an explanation why Barney is leaving us.
But for the community as a whole this is no mere matter of idle talk. The community has very good reasons to take a sober view; it doesn’t find it so easy to turn the incredible into the acceptable; Barney, don’t you see, is the deus ex machina for the whole works.
_____________
Barney has been our United Jewish Appeal chairman for time out of mind. In his large house, once every March, are gathered the upper and the near upper crust for the famous Initial Gifts meeting. Who else but Barney Rossman can afford to burden his tables with such quantities and varieties of food, with drinks so stiff that when the guest speaker, after a big introduction which you better damn well give him if you’re going to impress the crowd—when this pearl of eloquence, this roving Demosthenes, assuring you that he won’t repeat the horrible Arabian atrocities—it used to be Hider’s butchers in the terrible old days—at last pulls out all the stops, the donations, brother, roll in of themselves! And who, by the way, during the High Holidays miraculously changes water into wine—I mean red budget figures into black?
At the big UJA breakfast who but Barney has the gall and the guts to stand up and bellow at his shul compatriots not to be pikers all their lives.
“Come on, boys, loosen up!”
His own donation, which by word of mouth the whole town knows already, Barney himself, in his capacity as chairman, calls out now. No maiden blush bepaints his cheeks as the applause slaps the walls like rain on a tin roof. Then he himself goes down the list of the chief contributors and reads the sums he has managed to wangle from them privately—but now in public he can pillory and whip them into giving more. He’s a high-pressure man, in business as well as in charity.
“You there, Charley! You should be ashamed to give only a miserable seven hundred bucks! Leave the ponies alone awhile and you’ll more than make it up.”
They smart under his tongue lashings and wish he wouldn’t do it. But who can get angry at Barney? He isn’t doing it for himself. He’d laugh all the harder if you showed you were touchy.
“Anybody that doubles what they promised me in private, I’ll give him a week at Grossinger’s.”
The UJA is Barney’s private baby, his toy, the real expression of himself as he enjoys seeing himself. It’s the one Jewish thing he does with a whole heart. He supports the shul handsomely, but it yields him no personal pleasure. The shul is there: you gotta support it. But it doesn’t mean a thing, really. Not like the UJA! The field man from New York lathers him with compliments. “Mr. Rossman, there isn’t another like you. You certainly know how to do a wonderful job.”
_____________
All of which is perfectly true. Early in February, even before the national goal is set, Barney says to Tessie Clayton, his private secretary, “Tessie, it’s UJA time!” Miss Clayton is the real McCoy, a smart shiksa and just the thing for Barney who when there’s need for secrecy likes to shift gears into mamme loshen—Yiddish. Tesslte- contacts by phone the special list of names Barney has drawn up and now hands to her.
“Tell ’em it’s for Monday night, right here in the office, and anybody says they can’t make it, let me talk to ’em.”
Not only is it an honor to be selected by Barney as one of his inner core of engineers for the UJA. He makes it worthwhile. In the company’s private dining room they drink a few, then there’s a catered supper. After supper, long cigars of pure Havana glow and tremble in the unaccustomed mouths; and come about midnight, the choicest of the chosen remain behind to get their pants trimmed off in a snorting game of poker while the others grope their way through Barney’s huge factory clothed in darkness now, and out to the parking lot where perhaps a touch of snow has whitened the midnight world.
A few months later, gavel in hand, at his first public meeting in the shul, Barney pounds the table and orders Gittleson, our dried-up impoverished shammes, to sit down already.
“Stop walking around and talking!”
But our shammes replies, “Nit mit dem hammer azoy pel”—stop banging so much with your hammer, and he continues to scold the smokers for throwing butts on the floor.
“Is ashtrays right there, so why you throwing on the floor? In your home you do like that too?”
Big Barney, with eyes and a voice used to issuing orders, stands impotent, defied by the shammes bravely doing his duty.
Everybody hollers, “Sit down already, Git-deson. You’re spoiling the show!” But Abe Klein pretends to champion the underling.
“Atta boy, Gittleson,” he cries. “Stand up for your rights. Ain’t you a paid-up member just like the rest of us?” And poor Gittleson grins through his thin teeth and says to Abe, “That’s right, Abe. You tell him, Abe. This ain’t like in Russia with the Czar. Is a free country.”
_____________
The women of Reedville wring their hands, hearing that Riba Rossman, a Sisternood ex-president, is going to leave them for good. But says Riba, “Don’t worry, darlings. I’m still gonna be one of the girls. You can count me in on everything.”
But everybody knows how it’ll work out. For a year or so she’ll keep up her memberships and her generous donations; but as she makes her way in the new town and joins all the organizations over there—you can’t keep on paying double. They will be seeing her less and less.
Such a gorgeous home she’s got! Plates with gold borders and painted pictures on every one and hanging mysteriously on the wall, each one different from the other, more than two dozen right in the foyer where you come in. And oil paintings. Sunsets! Windmills! Cows by a brook! Riba loves nature. And for Barney, in respect to his sporting blood, the interior decorator recommended a Spanish toreador with knee-length plush pants and a red cape bowing to a senorita with fringed shawl on her shoulders and a fan to her face with one arm akimbo on wicked hips. At night you push a button and the lights glare on the varnish, and the heavy gold frames look positively terrific. A vast living room, not with one sofa—with three! Wherever you turn stands a deep chair that takes you in like a feather bed. They gotta dig you out comes time to go home. Lampshades so huge you can’t see your neighbor’s face. From B. Altman’s yet, Riba tells you, at a hundred and fifty a throw. An alabaster female, naked, is poised on one foot. Her hair is wild. Her breasts are firm. The piece of resistance, somebody calls it. She stands on the mantel over the fireplace with its artificial birch logs. Her arms meet over her head. Between two delicate fingers she holds a gold clock. Seeing it the first time everybody exclaims, “How beautiful!” and Riba glows. It’s her own selection. The interior decorator didn’t like it. A lot they know, these decorators. A Steinway grand, open to the teeth, stands in the big bay window, useless nehech—the pity of it—as Riba sighs to her friends, “My girls won’t touch it. ‘Oh what’s the use, Ma. We’ll never be concert players.’ Maybe I should take lessons myself?” Riba adds disconsolately, smiling and trying to disguise her disappointment.
What wouldn’t she have given as a girl to have a piano! Mama would have sold her right eye for one. But that’s how it is with modern children. They don’t appreciate what they have. Everything comes too easy for them, and sighing she recalls what a hard life was her father’s and mother’s and even her own.
When Riba is alone she steals over to the Steinway and with two fingers, like an untutored typist, she pecks out her favorite, “A Yiddishe Mamme,” and she hums to herself sadly. If she had the nerve she would take lessons. But it’s too late . . . too late, she reminds herself, and she sings softly, sadly. Why is she sad, she asks herself, and she recalls that she’s going to move. Move from these nice people, her Sisterhood friends. After all!
_____________
So all this opulence, this prime source of community welfare, of local Jewish pride, is to be snatched away from Reedville—as if the earth had opened up!
Barney Rossman, of course, didn’t proclaim that he was planning to move out. The rich don’t do it like that. Only the poor babble about their plans. The rich look around quietly, and when they’ve found what they’re after they don’t go asking for advice. For advice everybody comes to them. Of course they’re smarter! Who makes the money, you or they? They don’t even go to the bank for favors. They call up. I want!
The bank cashier says, “Certainly, Barney. Is that all?”
A poor man they’ll ask a hundred questions, take away his life insurance policy, . make the wife also come down and sign, and if he’s late by as little as one day with a payment, God forbid—nu, nu! ‘stutzach mit notices! What a stir! But Barney they handle with kid gloves. If any papers of his fall due he gets a polite little reminder. Sometime, for just a month, I’d like to be rich and see what it feels like. I’d have nothing to worry about. Just open the checkbook and write.
But as mother, may she rest in peace, used to say, “It’s their America!” Barney is Barney; admired, courted, respected, and when he announces that he’ll move, you can build a house on it. He’ll move, even if the community doesn’t like it—feels betrayed in a sense.
In all fairness to Barney, you’ve got to allow that Teaneck and Englewood are fancier by far and more progressive than our poor little Reedville with its one-horse shul. And also, it’s quite possible, as my wife whispered when I told her the news about Rossman, that Barney is worried about his daughters. One, in high school, comes home and complains that there’s not a Jewish boy in school to ask her to the prom; and the other, in junior high, keeps chattering all the time about Johnny Wood and what a swell boy with blue eyes and flaxen hair. “Mama, he wants to take me.” Before you know it there could be trouble!
But in Englewood or Teaneck there’s a real live Jewish community that provides dances for their Jewish boys and girls. The grown-ups too are going places. They have a big Jewish Center and a Community Director. Famous speakers come out to address them, and sleep over in Jewish homes. In Teaneck and in Englewood you can find plenty of rich Jews, even richer than Barney. So why shouldn’t he move away from Reedville?
_____________
I couldn’t believe it at first. “Waddye mean he’ll move?” I said to Greenspan. “Who told you?”
“Is everybody knows, and you asking, ‘Who told you.’”
Gently by the lapel of my coat Mr. Greenspan drew me towards the interior of his store. He had something that couldn’t possibly be communicated on the sidewalks.
“Confidentially, Mr. Waxman, I wouldn’t worry if I was you.”
My face must have given me away.
In the few years I had been in Reedville I had seen that Barney was a dynamo. Occasionally he’d come to our Men’s Club meetings and then everybody itched to sit next to him. Not that some of his gold rubbed on to you, but your stock went up. In 46, my first full year in Reedville, Barney had given eight thousand to the UJA. In 47 he raised it to ten thousand. Now, in the YEAR OF DESTINY, the 48 campaign, when young Israel was making world history—that’s when Barney Rossman of all things had to decide to move out of town.
Who was going to run our UJA campaign?
Some of us were already determined to make it our highest quota ever—fifty thousand dollars! And Rossman was moving!
“Mr. Waxman,” Greenspan continued persuasively, “is not the worst thing as could happen. Myself personally, I don’t believe in rich people. Is not I’m glad Mr. Rossman is moving out or I don’t like him. Chas v’chulile!—Perish the thought!—But rich people, from what I seen, is always looking after themselves first—take it from Greenspan!” His eyes enfolded me. “Greenspan knows what he is saying.”
On his chair I observed the Jewish Forward. Is it possible, I wondered, that Greenspan is a socialist, at heart an anti-capitalist?
“So you shouldn’t misunderstand, Mr. Waxman, I wanna say that too rich is not good for a community. They drags the little people into a big expense and they make fency-shmentzy. Must be like this and must be like that and they make a burden for the people which has to work hard to meet the budget. So is all the time chasing around with affairs, and raffles and dances and journals, a big excitement all the time to make money, and meantime is nothing Jewish. Is like a big business, not religion. Is better small people, like you and me.”
To be equated by Greenspan with Greenspan himself was indeed a compliment. There was something about him, in the persuasiveness of his speech, its sincerity in the idiosyncrasies of his idiom. At meetings, man after man would speak and say nothing. It took Greenspan to stir things to a head.
One time we debated whether to retain a young man who was teaching our Hebrew School, such as it is, four times a week. Complaints from the children that he smoked while he taught them, that he was late frequently, brought the parents to a protest meeting where they kept belaboring the teacher, until Greenspan rose.
“Is hard to understand from you people. Honest to God is very hard. Comes time to hire a teacher and you don’t want to pay. You say is too much. So you hire this young man and now you are complaining. With teachers, mine friends and fellow Jews, is like with other things. You get what you pay for. For why you keep abusing this young man? First of all is absolutely un-American. He ain’t here he should defend himself. Second of all. Has he got what you want and he ain’t giving it to you? He ain’t got it! So what’s the use mit calling him names? Tell him he’s through and that’s all!”
Greenspan’s little store specialized in women’s things of the less expensive sort. He and his wife occupied the rear. I heard her stirring in the back, a radio tuned low.
During the war their son was shot down in combat and they had no news of him for months until one night a telephone call from a stranger, who merely gave his name as Tom Bailey, informed Greenspan that his son’s name had just been read over the radio as having been found alive in Italy. Greenspan broke out into the streets.
“Is good people in the world!” he shouted. “Is good people everywhere!”
That whole night he carried on, calling up his friends and relatives.
“A stranger, nobody from which I never heard before, a goy yet into the bargain, calls up from hundreds of miles to tell me the good news and before I could even think to say thank you, he hangs up. If only I could find him. I would get down on my knees. I tell you people is crazy that says goyim is not our friends. Takes a time like this to find out. Is all one people and one God!”
Next day there was a large sign in his window:
_____________
Mine Son, Thank God, Is Found Alive! Come And Get Goods At Cost For Two Days Only Anything In The Entire Store!
He and his wife worked quietly together, without hired help, observing between them a division of labor that showed itself when women appeared in the store asking for a corset or a brassiere.
“Is not mine department,” he would say modestly, and even jocularly, and as he called for his missus, he himself would disappear. It was she, by the way, who once tried to tell me that modern people o nowadays no longer bought cemetery plots. The shut at the time was having a drive to dispose of its extra lots at reduced prices to members only. “Is now the style to be created,” she assured me with all earnestness.
_____________
Greenspan continued. “You will see, Mr. Waxman, comes the time for the UJA and we will have a UJA, Rossman or no Rossman. In the old country was a saying: When the gvir—rich man-moves out, falls the town on its face. Not in America. Mr. Rossman will give his money somewhere else, and we here in Reedville will give just the same. Only won’t be with such fireworks.”
Despite Greenspan’s assurance that he harbored no ill feelings against Rossman, he failed to convince me. I had never seen him at any of our Initial Gifts meetings, where one came by personal invitation from Barney. Greenspan, like all the others who gave less than a hundred, came faithfully to the UJA breakfasts.
“Is some people gives ten dollars and means more to them than Rossman’s ten thousand. I’m giving seventy-five and for me is a lot of money. I must give a hundred to be invited to Initial Gifts. For twenty-five more I can come. Is baby play, Mr. Waxman! I don’t have to come. I seen already how the rich lives. But this year on account that business is better, I can afforder it and I’m going to double up from last year. But I don’t need no Initial Gifts to make me. Is in a man’s heart what he gives, or is worth nothing!”
This last sentiment came with such earnest conviction and such an outpouring of sentiment that I felt called on to explain why I, who certainly couldn’t afford to give a hundred dollars, was nevertheless invited to the Initial Gifts meetings.
“I do the publicity.”
Greenspan’s eyes opened.
“So is you is putting all them words together so smart. And all the time I’m reading Mr. Rossman says this, Mr. Rossman says that I’m thinking is Rossman doing it himself. That explains everything!”
He then offered me his congratulations.
“Is certainly a wonderful thing to be educated. Only last night I was saying to mine wife—”
He called out, “Mrs. Greenspan! Is Mr. Waxman here. Come and tell him what only last night I said about the UJA publicity.”
Tall, matronly, with gray hair and a brace of gold in her smiling mouth, Mrs. Greenspan came out from her apartment to welcome me.
“So is you, Mr. Waxman, mine husband is talking to. No wonder he don’t bother me the last fifteen minutes.”
She confirmed her husband’s admiration of my publicity while Greenspan listened quietly. Suddenly he turned to me.
“You know what I’m thinking, Mr. Wax-man? Would be wonderful when Mr. Rossman moves, for you to be the UJA chairman.”
“Not me,” I said forcefully. “That’s a rich man’s job.”
“Is again something wrong with the system. The rich is on top of everything!”
But he assured me that a well-educated young man like me, a father of two children, would have the people with him 100 per cent.
“But not their money,” I hinted.
“Their money, too, Mr. Waxman,” Mrs. Greenspan said. “Everybody laks you.” I could see a hundred tongues licking me.
_____________
Barney Rossman moved out in October, and it wasn’t until well into the month of March, quite late for us, that we heard the first rumblings of a UJA drive, a cryptic message on a penny postcard calling a Special USA Meeting.
It was a glum group that gathered in response to that call. The UJA field man had already canvassed the richer merchants, some of whom in the past had worked closely with Barney, but no one would accept the responsibility of the chairmanship.
At eleven-thirty that night, after much haggling and getting nowhere, the field man in desperation cried, “In Israel nobody is too busy!”
He made an impassioned plea for somebody to take over on a pro tent basis, and it was then that Abe Klein came up with his idea to give Rossman a farewell dinner.
For ten years or more, Abe said, Barney had been the moving spirit of our UJA in Reedville. It was time to show our appreciation. We should give him a testimonial dinner, and perhaps a gold watch as a gift.
“And when we give it to him, leave us say, ‘Barney, for the last time we want you should run our UJA this year.’“
His idea met with acclaim.
The Jewish War Veterans, knowing what war means, said they’d get the boys behind the drive.
“We’ll organize like commandos and anybody who doesn’t double his last year’s donation, we’ll have to know why.”
But Greenspan rose to object. Not everybody, he maintained, could afford to double their gifts. And as for that testimonial dinner, he didn’t see any need for it.
“A little something for a present is all right. But a gold watch is maybe a hundred and fifty dollars and Mr. Rossman needs a gold watch like I need a hole in the head.”
“I’ll give it for wholesale,” Bob Stein, the jeweler, called out.
But Greenspan argued that even at wholesale it would still be expensive. Klein, however, had set a tide in motion. A resolution was made, seconded, voted on, and a committee was appointed.
We’ll skip the details of the dinner except to record that it was a success. Barney in full dress, and Riba in low-cut sat at a raised table flanked by the committee. When the gold watch was presented Barney seemed stirred to the roots, and Abe Klein, master of ceremonies, hit it off when he said, “We’ll miss you, Barney. We miss you already so bad I can’t tell you. So now that you got the watch—”
We sat tense in our chairs. Would Barney be our Moses once more?
Barney said he would. A shout went up.
“Hurray!”
“Will you work with me?” he called back.
“Yes!” came the chorus, and somewhere in my head there clicked off the legendary Talmudic story of what happened at Mount Sinai. “Maase v’nishmo!” cried all of Israel at the foot of the mountain. “You command and we’ll do!”
_____________
The boys organized into teams and went hammer and tongs after every Jewish resident. I myself was part of a team with Harry Fogel, the commander of our local JWV, and we got a batch of cards and names, good and bad mixed together. We stumbled into one home to inquire about the house numbers, and the man answering, to my way of hearing, sounded like one of us, still in hiding.
“We’re from the UJA,” I blurted out, risking nothing, and I’ll be hanged if we weren’t invited in, and after some talk of this and that we walked out with a check for two hundred dollars.
“There’s a prospect for the shul,“ Fogel said.
“Not in a million years,” I replied. “What have we got to offer him?”
But it wasn’t all skittles and beer. In some places we had to work.
There was one guy who runs a prosperous stationery store in town who began giving us a hard-luck story. But we had been forewarned about him.
“We ain’t millionaires ourselves,” Fogel threw at him.
“We got you down here for a hundred dollars.” (We would have settled for fifty, but with this one we had been instructed to raise the ante.)
Fogel stood on one side of him. I stood on the other.
The prospect turned white. He groaned.
“You’ve got to give. . . . No. No. Not twenty dollars! What kind of a Jew are you anyway?”
Fogel said if he didn’t give a respectable sum we’d let the entire community know.
The fellow quaked and his wife called out to her daughter, “Quick come in and rescue Papa!” and to us she cried, “What are you doing to my husband?”
These were the exceptions.
Every night until the campaign was over we met in the shul and we set out like an army squad for detail. Some of the boys caught the fever of their military days, cried “Hip, hip,” and we all laughed. It was from that night on that Abe Klein became “Colonel” Klein, since he was Rossman’s deputy and started us out each night on our rounds. I still marvel at that man. You couldn’t sell him a rabbi, a prayer, or a synagogue. He came, as he once said, “strictly for the ride.” He needed friendship, and yet the thought that Israel was reborn lifted him out of himself, as if it had been his own personal renascence. “I don’t understand why I’m excited about this,” he confessed. “The rabbis will take over over there just like here.” Yet he kicked in a thousand dollars, and when Rossman named him co-chairman, he gave an additional five hundred.
_____________
As I watched Klein at the table with his big head and his huge ears, taking UJA cards, taking cash, swapping stories with the boys, not a prepossessing personality as you looked at him but spirited in a strange animal way, rising suddenly, I thought, to a new emergency, I couldn’t help but wonder if this, the excitement and the wonder of the doing, was the new Jewishness that I was looking for. It did seem like sound and fury, but I was not ready to say that it signified nothing. My own Jewishness, struggling to find a new foundation, was still uncertainly seated on childhood memories and practices. (My mother had a blue box and it was filled regularly, with pennies, of course. How fiercely observant she used to be of the Sabbath and kashrut. The old wooden drain board by the sink flashed through my mind, the meat and the fowl on it that she used to salt three times over and wash with cold water. My father, too, was a strict observer.
He would rise early in the morning and half through my sleep I could hear his prayers like the sound of a summer fly. “The Praying Alarm Clock,” Mom used to call him. Friday night at table we sang between courses. The gaslight burned with a tiny blue flame all night long, and on Saturday morning Tony came and put it out.)
“That sonofabitch should have given at least fifty! Throw that lousy check back in his face. What kind of a Jew is he? Only ten dollars! He just bought a sixteen-family unit in Jersey City!” “Colonel” Klein shouted.
(“Nu,” my father used to say on Saturday afternoons. “Fang’on—Begin!” and together we went through the portion of the week—the sedra, then a section of Avoth—“The Ethics of Our Fathers”—and last of all, Gemorrah—Babba Basra, Babba Metzia. It still runs through me like an ancient rivulet, quietly through the wilderness that is me: Hoyoh roichev al gaboy behaymoh vero’ oh es hametzioh—Riding on the back of an animal and spying something lying on the ground . . .)
_____________
We made it!” I announced to my wife ecstatically.
“Made what?”
“The quota! The fifty thousand!”
“So what?”
“Waddye mean ‘So what!’”
She had been waiting up for me. Our two youngsters were asleep.
“In another year Joey will be ready for Hebrew School. What’s the use of all your working and running around? There isn’t a decent school in town. I won’t send him to that dump you got down there! I hear it’s a disgrace. Why don’t you raise some money for a new building?”
No matter what you do, somebody’s always finding fault.
_____________