第2章A

November 1940–June 1941

Loudmouth Jew

IN JUNE 1941, just six months after Lindbergh's inauguration, our family drove the three hundred miles to Washington, D.C., to visit the historic sites and the famous government buildings. My mother had been saving in a Christmas Club account at the Howard Savings Bank for close to two years, a dollar a week out of the household budget to cover the bulk of our prospective travel expenses. The trip had been planned back when FDR was a second-term president and the Democrats controlled both Houses, but now with the Republicans in power and the new man in the White House considered a treacherous enemy, there was a brief family discussion about our driving north instead to see Niagara Falls and to take the boat cruise in rain slickers through the St. Lawrence Seaway's Thousand Islands and then to cross over in our car into Canada to visit Ottawa. Some among our friends and neighbors had already begun talking about leaving the country and migrating to Canada should the Lindbergh administration openly turn against the Jews, and so a trip to Canada would also familiarize us with a potential haven from persecution. Back in February, my cousin Alvin had already left for Canada to join the Canadian armed forces, just as he said he would, and fight on the British side against Hitler.

Till his departure Alvin had been my family's ward for close to seven years. His late father was my father's oldest brother; he died when Alvin was six, and Alvin's mother—a second cousin of my mother's and the one who'd introduced my parents to each other—died when Alvin was thirteen, and so he'd come to live with us during the four years he attended Weequahic High, a quick-witted boy who gambled and stole and whom my father was dedicated to saving. Alvin was twenty-one in 1940, renting a furnished room upstairs from a Wright Street shoeshine parlor just around the corner from the produce market, and by then working almost two years for Steinheim & Sons, one of the city's two biggest Jewish construction firms—the other was run by the Rachlin brothers. Alvin got the job through the elder Steinheim, the founder of the company and an insurance customer of my father's.

Old man Steinheim, who had a heavy accent and couldn't read English but who was, in my father's words, "made of steel," still attended High Holiday services at our local synagogue. On a Yom Kippur several years back, when the old man saw my father outside the synagogue with Alvin, he mistook my cousin for my older brother and asked, "What does the boy do? Let him come over and work for us." There Abe Steinheim, who'd turned his immigrant father's little building company into a multimillion-dollar operation—though only after a major family war had put his two brothers out on the street—took a liking to solid, stocky Alvin and the cocksure way he carried himself, and instead of sticking him in the mailroom or using him as an office boy, he made Alvin his driver: to run errands, to deliver messages, to whisk him back and forth to the construction sites to check on the subcontractors (whom Abe called "the chiselers," though it was he, Alvin said, who chiseled them and took advantage of everyone). On Saturdays during the summer, Alvin drove him down to Freehold, where Abe owned half a dozen trotters that he raced at the old harness track, horses he liked to refer to as "hamburgers." "We got a hamburger running today at Freehold," and down they'd shoot in the Caddy to watch his horse lose every time. He never made any money at it, but that wasn't the idea. He raced horses on Saturdays for the Road Horse Association at the pretty trotting track in Weequahic Park, and he talked to the papers about restoring the flat track at Mount Holly, whose glory days were long past, and this was how Abe Steinheim managed to became commissioner of racing for the state of New Jersey and got a shield on his car that enabled him to drive up on the sidewalk and sound a siren and park anywhere. And it was how he became friendly with the Monmouth County officials and insinuated himself into the horsy set at the shore—Wall Township and Spring Lake goyim who would take him to their fancy clubs for lunch, where, as Abe told Alvin, "Everybody sees me and all they're doing is whispering, can't wait to whisper, 'Look at what's here,' but they don't mind drinking my booze and getting treated to great dinners and so in the end it pays off." He had his deep-sea-fishing boat docked at the Shark River Inlet and he would take them out on it and liquor them up and hire guys to catch the fish for them, so that whenever a new hotel went up anywhere from Long Branch to Point Pleasant, it was on a site the Steinheims got for next to nothing—Abe, like his father, having the great wisdom of buying things only at discount.

Every three days Alvin would drive him the four blocks from the office to 744 Broad Street for a quick trim in the lobby barber shop behind the cigar stand, where Abe Steinheim bought his Trojans and his dollar-fifty cigars. Now, 744 Broad was one of the two tallest office buildings in the state, where the National Newark and Essex Bank occupied the top twenty floors and the city's prestigious lawyers and financiers occupied the rest and where New Jersey's biggest moneymen regularly frequented the barber shop—and yet a part of Alvin's job was to call immediately beforehand to tell the barber to get ready, Abe was coming, and whoever was in the chair, to throw him out. At dinner the night that Alvin got the job, my father told us that Abe Steinheim was the most colorful, the most exciting, the greatest builder Newark had ever seen. "And a genius," my father said. "He didn't get there without being a genius. Brilliant. And a handsome man. Blond. Husky, but not fat. Always looks nice. Camelhair coats. Black-and-white shoes. Beautiful shirts. Impeccably dressed. And a beautiful wife—polished, classy, a Freilich by birth, a New York Freilich, a very wealthy woman in her own right. Abe's shrewd as they come. And the man has guts. Ask anybody in Newark: the riskiest project and Steinheim takes it on. He does buildings where no one else will take a chance. Alvin will learn from him. He'll watch him and see what it is to work round the clock for something that's yours. He could be an important inspiration in Alvin's life."

Largely so my father could keep tabs on him and my mother could know that he wasn't surviving on hotdogs alone, Alvin came to our house a couple of times a week to eat a good meal, and miraculously, instead of his getting stern lectures about honesty and responsibility and hard work at the dinner table every night—as in the days after he'd been caught with his hand in the till at the Esso station where he worked after school and, until my father prevailed on Simkowitz, the owner, to drop the charges and himself made good with the money, looked to be headed for the Rahway reformatory—Alvin conversed heatedly with my father about politics, about capitalism particularly, a system that, ever since my father had gotten him to take an interest in reading the paper and talking about the news, Alvin deplored but that my father defended, patiently reasoning with his rehabilitated nephew, and not like a member of the National Association of Manufacturers but as a devotee of Roosevelt's New Deal. He'd warn Alvin, "You don't have to tell Mr. Steinheim about Karl Marx. Because the man won't hesitate—you'll be out on your keister. Learn from him. That's why you're there. Learn from him and be respectful, and this could be the opportunity of a lifetime."

But Alvin couldn't bear Steinheim and reviled him constantly—he's a fake, he's a bully, he's a cheapskate, he's a screamer, he's a shouter, he's a swindler, he's a man without a friend in the world, people cannot stand to be anywhere near him, and I, said Alvin, have to chauffeur him around. He's cruel to his sons, is uninterested even in looking at a grandchild, and his skinny wife, who never dares to say or do anything to displease him, he humiliates whenever the mood takes him. Everybody in the family has to live in apartments in the same luxury building that Abe built on a street of big oaks and maples near Upsala College in East Orange—from dawn to dusk the sons work for him in Newark and he's screaming and yelling at them, then at night he's on the house phone with them in East Orange and he's still screaming and yelling. Money is everything, though not to buy things but so as to be able always to weather the storm: to protect his position and insure his holdings and buy anything he wants in real estate at a discount, which is how he made a killing after the crash. Money, money, money—to be in the middle of the chaos and in the middle of the deals and make all the money in the world.

"Some guy retires at the age of forty-five with five million bucks. Five million in the bank, which is as good as a zillion, and you know what Abe says?" Alvin is asking this of my twelve-year-old brother and me. Supper is over and he's with us in the bedroom—all of us lying shoeless atop the covers, Sandy on his bed, Alvin on mine, and I beside Alvin, in the crook between his strong arm and his strong chest. And it's bliss: stories about man's avarice, his zealousness, his unbounded vitality and staggering arrogance, and to tell these stories, a cousin himself unbounded, even after all my father's work, a captivating cousin still emotionally among the rawest of the raw, who at twenty-one already has to shave his black stubble twice a day in order not to look like a hardened criminal. Stories of the carnivore descendants of the giant apes who once inhabited the ancient forests and have left the trees, where all day long they nibbled on leaves, to come to Newark and work downtown.

"What does Mr. Steinheim say?" Sandy asks him.

"He says, 'The guy has five million. That's all he has. Still young and in his prime, with a chance someday to be worth fifty, sixty, maybe as much as a hundred million, and he tells me, "I'm taking it all off the table. I'm not you, Abe. I'm not hanging around for the heart attack. I have enough to call it a day and spend the rest of my life playing golf."' And what does Abe say? 'This is a man who is a total schmuck.' Every subcontractor when he comes into the office on Friday to collect money for the lumber, the glass, the brick, Abe says, 'Look, we're out of money, this is the best I can do,' and he pays them a half, a third—if he can get away with it, a quarter—and these people need the money to survive, but this is the method that Abe learned from his father. He's doing so much building that he gets away with it and nobody tries to kill him."

"Would somebody try to kill him?" Sandy asks.

"Yeah," Alvin says, "me."

"Tell us about the wedding anniversary," I say.

"The wedding anniversary," he repeats. "Yeah, he sang fifty songs. He hires a piano player," Alvin tells us, exactly the way he tells the tale of Abe at the piano every time I ask to hear it, "and no one gets a word in, no one knows what is going on, all the guests spend the whole night eating his food, and he is standing in his tux by the piano singing one song after another, and when they leave he's still at the piano, still singing songs, every popular song you can think of, and he doesn't even listen when they say goodbye."

"Does he scream and yell at you?" I ask Alvin.

"At me? At everybody. He screams and yells wherever he goes. I drive him to Tabatchnick's on Sunday mornings. The people are lined up to buy their bagels and lox. We walk in and he's screaming—and there's a line of six hundred people, but he's yelling, 'Abe is here!' and they move him to the front of the line. Tabatchnick comes running out of the back, they push everyone aside, and Abe must order five thousand dollars' worth of stuff, and we drive home and there is Mrs. Steinheim, who weighs ninety-two pounds and knows when to get the hell out of the way, and he phones the three sons and they're there in five seconds flat, and the four of them eat a meal for four hundred people. The one thing he spends on is food. Food and cigars. You mention Tabatchnick's, Kartzman's, he doesn't care who is there, how many people—he gets there and buys out the whole store. They eat up every single slice of everything every Sunday morning, sturgeon, herring, sable, bagels, pickles, and then I drive him over to the renting office to see how many apartments are vacant, how many are rented, how many are being fixed up. Seven days a week. Never stops. Never takes a vacation. No manana—that's his slogan. It drives him crazy if anybody misses a minute of work. He cannot go to sleep without knowing that the next day there are more deals that will bring more money—and the whole damn thing makes me sick. The man to me is one thing only—a walking advertisement for the overthrow of capitalism."

My father called Alvin's complaints kid stuff, and to be kept to himself on the job, especially after Abe decided that he was going to send Alvin to Rutgers. You're too smart, Abe told Alvin, to be so dumb, and then something happened beyond anything that my father could realistically have hoped for. Abe gets on the phone to the president of Rutgers and starts shouting at him. "You're going to take this boy, where he finished in high school is not the issue, the boy is an orphan, potentially a genius, you're going to give him a full scholarship, and I'll build you a college building, the most beautiful in the world—but not so much as a shithouse goes up unless this orphan boy goes to Rutgers all expenses paid!" To Alvin he explains, "I've never liked to have a formal chauffeur who was a chauffeur who was an idiot. I like kids like you with something going for them. You're going to Rutgers, and you'll come home and drive me in the summers, and when you graduate Phi Beta Kappa, then the two of us sit down and talk."

Abe would have had Alvin beginning as a freshman in New Brunswick in September 1941 and, after four years of college, coming back as a somebody into the business, but instead, in February, Alvin left for Canada. My father was furious with him. They argued for weeks before finally, without telling us, Alvin took the express train from Newark's Penn Station straight up to Montreal. "I don't get your morality, Uncle Herman. You don't want me to be a thief but it's okay with you if I work for a thief." "Steinheim's not a thief. Steinheim's a builder. What he's doing is what they do," my father said, "what they all have to do because the building trade is a cutthroat business. But his buildings don't fall down, do they? Does he break the law, Alvin? Does he?" "No, he just screws the workingman every chance he gets. I didn't know your morality was also for that." "My morality stinks," said my father, "everybody in this city knows about my morality. But the issue isn't me. It's your future. It's going to college. A four-year free college education." "Free because he browbeats the president of Rutgers the way he browbeats the whole goddamn world." "Let the president of Rutgers worry about that! What is the matter with you? You really want to sit there and tell me that the worst human being ever born is a man who wants to make you an educated person and find you a place in his building company?" "No, no, the worst human being ever born is Hitler, and frankly I'd rather be fighting that son of a bitch than waste my time with a Jew like Steinheim, who only brings shame on the rest of us Jews by his goddamn—" "Oh, don't talk to me like a child—and the 'goddamn's I can live without too. The man doesn't bring shame on anyone. You think if you worked for an Irish builder it would be better? Try it—go work for Shanley, you'll see what a lovely fellow he is. And the Italians, would they be better, you think? Steinheim shoots his mouth off—the Italians shoot guns." "And Longy Zwillman doesn't shoot guns?" "Please, I know all about Longy—I grew up on the same street with Longy. What does any of this have to do with Rutgers?" "It has to do with me, Uncle Herman, and being indebted to Steinheim for the rest of my life. Isn't it enough that he has three sons that he's already destroying? Isn't it enough that they have to attend every Jewish holiday with him and every Thanksgiving with him and every New Year's Eve with him—I have to be there to be shouted at too? All of them working in the same office and living in the same building and waiting around for only one thing—to split it all up on the day he dies. I can assure you, Uncle Herman, their grief won't last long." "You're wrong. Dead wrong. There is more to these people than just money." "You're wrong! He holds them in his hand with the money! The man is totally berserk, and they stay and take it for fear of losing the money!" "They stay because they're a family. All families go through a lot. A family is both peace and war. We're going through a little war right now. I understand it. I accept it. But that's no reason to give up the college you missed out on and that now you can have and to run off half-cocked to fight Hitler instead." "So," said Alvin, as though at last he had the goods not only on his employer but on his family protector as well, "you're an isolationist after all. You and Bengelsdorf. Bengelsdorf, Steinheim—they make a good couple." "Of what?" my father asked sourly, having finally run out of patience. "Of Jewish fakes." "Oh," said my father, "against the Jews now too?" "Those Jews. The Jews who are a disgrace to the Jews—yes, absolutely!"

The argument went on for four consecutive nights, and then, on the fifth, a Friday, Alvin didn't report to eat, though the idea had been to keep him showing up regularly for dinner until my father wore him down and the boy came to his senses—the boy whom my father had single-handedly changed from a callow good-for-nothing into the family's conscience.

The next morning we learned from Billy Steinheim, who was closest to Alvin of any of the sons and concerned enough about him to telephone us first thing Saturday, that after having received his Friday pay packet Alvin had thrown the keys to the Caddy in Billy's father's face and walked out, and when my father rushed off in our car to Wright Street to talk to Alvin in his room and get the whole story and gauge just how much damage he had done to his chances, the shoeshine parlor proprietor who was Alvin's landlord told him that the tenant had paid the rent and packed his things and was off to fight against the very worst human being ever born. Given the magnitude of Alvin's seething, no one less nefarious would do.

The November election hadn't even been close. Lindbergh got fifty-seven percent of the popular vote and, in an electoral sweep, carried forty-six states, losing only FDR's home state of New York and, by a mere two thousand votes, Maryland, where the large population of federal office workers had voted overwhelmingly for Roosevelt while the president was able to retain—as he could nowhere else below the Mason-Dixon Line—the loyalty of nearly half the Democrats' old southern constituency. Though on the morning after the election disbelief prevailed, especially among the pollsters, by the day after that everybody seemed to understand everything, and the radio commentators and the news