Endless Blind Passions - Chapter 3
“She made us drink our urine. And she never gave us any of the jellies she made. She hid it all from us in the attic,” claims Golde about her stepmother, along with other stories that grow more grotesque as the years pass.Four foot ten, tightly corseted, Monty’s grandmother is a law unto herself, compact, self-assured, toughened from a fraught childhood. Barely sixteen years old, she left her homeland and emigrated to America, in part, like everyone else, searching for a better life, but also because she despised her father’s second wife. The woman’s Jewish Orthodoxy riled Golde’s secular, socialist disposition. She thought the woman superstitious and mean.
Arriving for processing on Ellis Island in New York in 1905, Golde was accompanied by her sister and two family friends, Shmuel and his brother, whom the girls soon married. Two brothers, two sisters, complicated kinship ties making for loads of double cousins. All four came from a tiny shtetl close to the border between Galicia and Bukovina, both then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Golde worked as a seamstress in New York and might well have perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, as did a hundred and forty-six other female garment workers, had she not secured a job a few weeks earlier sewing for a wealthy German Jewish family on Long Island. Germans were the elite among the Jewish population, having arrived in the prior century. The Galitzianers, like Golde and Shmuel, and the Litvaks (Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Polish Jews), like Monty’s paternal family, argued among themselves over who had higher status. Unlike German Jews, many of whom held professional positions in the Old Country, the eastern European Jews, with few exceptions, had farmed or worked in the few trades they were permitted to practice. The Galitzianers often fared better. Golde’s father, a mason, specialized in gravestones—a position of far higher status, she would point out to Monty’s father, than that of the horse traders and leather tanners in his family.
Golde and Shmuel, a tinsmith, moved to Detroit when he secured a job at Henry Ford’s first factory there. But he had a weak heart and had to quit in less than a year, a few weeks before Sarah was born. A son soon followed. Golde was helping to support the family by sewing aprons, handkerchiefs, and other casual items, which led to their opening a dry goods store and rising to middle-class status. When business collapsed early in the Depression, they sold their entire stock and moved to Los Angeles, where they bought a four-unit apartment building and later a second.
Now five, Monty often accompanies his grandmother to a nearby park and watches her as she marches briskly in front of the other immigrant grandmothers, glued to their wooden benches, gossiping like birds pecking for every last crumb. Golde paces back and forth, her back rigidly straight, chin held high, modeling conceit for her darling blond goyishe-looking grandson’s budding ego.
“You see, I am much strongker than them,” she tells Monty after sitting down. “I know how to take care on myself. They just kvetch.”
Her speech, heavily accented by a fusion of the eastern European languages she spoke in her shopkeeping days, is peppered with Yiddish words. Prone to boasting, she would hold up her chest and declare to her daughter-in-law, Monty’s aunt, “You see, I am much older, but I have much better buzem than you.” And to Monty’s father, “How come I am so much older, but my hair’s not groy like yours?”
When it came to her own children, her son had been favored, as was then customary, and was sent to college. Sarah had to stay home and work in the downstairs shop, forgoing an offer to study piano at the Detroit music conservatory. She’d shown promise and continued to teach a few friends but gradually gave up playing. For decades she kept her baby grand piano like an albatross around her neck. It was one of many inexpensive models of the era, branded with the names of classical composers. Monty and his brother before him both learn to play on the Brahms Bach that dominates one end of their living room, next to the bay window, with its one stained glass panel of fruit, looking through a tinted lens onto the rest of the world.
Two years after his two grandparents’ deaths, Monty’s own fears play out as repeating nightmares featuring a king chasing him along the edge of his bedroom ceiling, threatening to chop off his head with an axe. Terrified, he screams himself awake. When his parents rush into his room, he finds no comfort in their soothing words.
What is life if I’m going to die, and if all my family are going to die too? I must live forever. I will! And my mother and father must join me, and my brother, and my Aunt Beatrice. But their parents must also live forever, or they won’t be happy. And their parents’ parents and so on, back into the boy’s primordial roots, back to Europe, back to the Fertile Crescent of his ancestral origin. Only in this way can he and his loved ones guarantee happiness. The world will be bursting with Monty and his kin. But we must, we must all live forever. And I will save everyone!Death also looms large not only in a little boy’s thoughts and nightmares but in the nightly news. In the early fifties, footage of the Nazi death camps is broadcast on television for the first time, revealing mounds of purloined eyeglasses, lampshades made of human skin, extracted gold fillings, shaved hair, and emaciated corpses mangled together like rubbery squid but with human faces, trapped in nets and slung out in piles on rough cement—mouths gaping in death’s last throes; penises and breasts once adored and caressed, or lonely and abandoned, flaccid, hanging lifeless. Youngsters, Monty’s age, too, who once played games and laughed and cried. These squid all led happy, sad, rich, poor, satisfied, hungry, human lives, their histories methodically exterminated.
Monty’s family are latecomers to the new mass medium. Their first TV, small even for the era, with rounded corners, is housed in an American-colonial-style maple cabinet. It’s a mystery why his socialist-sympathizing mother loves American-colonial-style furnishings, and why his communist-sympathizing father indulges her taste. But here they are: colonial bookcases with curlicue corners, a coffee table with turned legs, matching end tables with lamps Leo fashioned out of abandoned antique coffee grinders, a captain’s chair, and a brass colonial floor lamp. On the wall are Currier and Ives prints showing iconic scenes of snowy New England that make no sense to a boy growing up in Southern California. Leo makes frames himself to hold the free art prints he gets from Chevron.
“They take better care of your car,” he declares, aping the Chevron jingle and driving extra miles to avoid loading up on gasoline from a Texaco, Richfield, or Union 76 gas station. “Never buy gas from them. They’re Republican companies,” he tells his credulous younger son, as if Chevron were left wing and benevolent.
Maybe Chevron is so powerful, imagines Monty, it can keep death away. Maybe so, for life is good in America seven years after the end of World War II, unless you happen to be Black or Hispanic. But Black and Hispanic people don’t live on the leafy west side of Los Angeles where Monty’s growing up. Where gas is only twenty-seven cents a gallon. And where Rosemary Clooney can be heard breezily crooning “Come On-a My House” on his family’s cream-colored Bakelite RCA radio sitting on the kitchen counter.
Though Monty’s been told his ancestors came from some unfathomable other place, he knows that everything on earth, not merely he himself, materialized right after the war. Like everything on earth is centered in Los Angeles at the corner of Sawyer Street and Robertson Boulevard in a modest three-bedroom, single-story tract house. Everything begins right here. And tonight it features scenes from the Holocaust.
“He shouldn’t watch this,” Sarah implores as Monty stares at the ghastly images on the TV screen, horrified and spellbound. “He’s only a child.”
“No, let him,” Leo replies sternly. “He should see how evil the world is. It could happen here.”
“Yes, you’re right,” says Sarah. “It could.”
Monty is convinced not only that it could but that it will happen here—any day. And I must be on guard at every moment with my magic flying cape and my army of boys behind me. We must all be ready at any instant to fly in and defend Jews and Black people and the starving Chinese and all the other poor people. Life is full of so many threats. Death, is it really inevitable? Why aren’t I dead yet? he asks himself in the shapeless abstract way of a little boy about to explore more of the world than the corner of Sawyer and Robertson.
Monty doesn’t realize that six thousand miles away, far from his own microcosm, young men who have no magic cape are dying right this moment, killing each other off by the tens of thousands in the hills and valleys of Korea while old men survey maps and make threatening speeches. These doddering warmongers honed their skills in the recent world war. One of them wants to use the ultimate new bomb only America so far possesses in large numbers. But Monty knows nothing of this. Or that the devilish Joe McCarthy will soon cause his father to lose his job and withdraw into valleys of his own frightened soul. Or that Richard Nixon, the evilest man on earth according to his parents and their friends, was recently elected to lead America in company with the chief of those same old doddering generals.
Today Monty knows only one thing: it’s his first day of kindergarten at Shenandoah Street Elementary School—the most exciting day of his life.