Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son

‘Gott meiner,’ said my father to my mother. Again no money? But I gave you twelve dollars at the beginning of the week. What have you done with it?’

‘I don’t know. It went away.’

‘So quickly ... by Thursday? Impossible.’

‘It couldn’t be helped. Some of it I used to pay old bills. We’ve owed money to Herskovitz for I don’t know how long.’

‘But did you have to pay him this week?’

‘He’s right in the block. For two months now I’ve been coming home the long way around. I gave him three dollars.’

‘How could you! Haven’t you any sense? And what did you do with the rest? Joshua,’ he said, turning to me furiously. ‘Take a pencil and write these things down. I have to know where it all went. I bought eggs and butter on Tuesday.’

‘Seventy-five cents to the milkman,’ said Ma, earnest and frightened. She must have believed she had done something wrong.

‘Write it,’ he said.

I had taken a piece of Ma’s checkered stationery and placed the figures carefully within the tiny boxes. I was shaken, too, and eager to escape condemnation.

‘Willie had a tooth out. It cost fifty cents.’

‘Fifty?’ he said.

‘Yes, it’s usually a dollar an extraction. I sent him up alone and told him to say it was all he had. And after he was done, I waited for him downstairs. I was ashamed to show my face to Dr Zadkin.’

‘Did it have to come out?’

‘There was nothing left of it but the walls. Do you want to look at it? The child was in pain . . . Then there was fifty cents to have the boys’ hair cut.’

‘I’m going to buy a pair of clippers and do it myself,’ Pa said. He was always resolving to do this.

‘Fifty cents for the gas meter. Twenty cents for a coal shovel. Twenty-five cents to the insurance man. Twenty cents for a flatiron handle. Forty cents to the tinsmith for relining my copper pot. Leather mittens for Bentchka cost me thirty cents. I haven’t even started on the bigger things yet, such as meat.’

‘We have meat far too often,’ Pa said. ‘We don’t need it. I prefer milk soups anyway.’

‘Don’t expect me to stint on the stomach,’ my mother said with determination. ‘If I do nothing else, I’m going to feed the children.’

‘They don’t look starved,’ said Pa. ‘Especially this one. I never look at him but what he’s chewing.’

My appetite was large and I seemed never to have had enough. I ate all the leftovers. I chewed down apple parings, gristle, cold vegetables, chicken bones.

‘If I knew how to do things more cheaply,’ said Ma, as though she now consented to take the blame.

‘You don’t bargain enough,’ my father said to her harshly. His accusation always was that she did not accept her condition and was not what the wife of a poor man ought to be. And yet she was. She was whatever would please him. She made over our clothes. On the table there often appeared the thick Russian linens she had brought, but on our beds were sheets that she had made of flour-sacks.

‘Like your sister Julia?’ said my mother.

‘Yes, Julia. That’s why they’re rich. It was she that made him so.’

I had been with Aunt Julia to the farmer’s market and knew how she worked. ‘How much’a der han?’ she would say when she seized a rooster. ‘Oh, trop cher,’ she’d cry at the Canadian farmer, and she’d say to me in Yiddish, ‘Thieves, every last man of them. But I will beat them down.’ And in her Russian shawl, with her sharp nose jutting, she would shuffle to another wagon, and she always did as she promised.

‘A wife can make the difference,’ said Pa. ‘I am as able as Jomin, and stronger.’

‘They have grown children.’

‘Yes, that’s so,’ said Pa. ‘Whereas I have no one to turn to.’

He would often repeat this, and particularly to me. ‘You can turn to me,’ he’d say. ‘But to whom can I turn? Everything comes from me and nothing to me. How long can I bear it? Is this what the life of a man is supposed to be? Are you supposed to be loaded until your back is broken? Oh my God, I think I begin to see. Those are lucky who die when their childhood is over and never live to know the misery of fighting in the world.’

When he flew into a rage, he forgot himself altogether and lost his sense of shame.

‘Aren’t you taking money for your brother?’ he once shouted at Ma. ‘Aren’t you saving to send him . . . ?’

He meant her brother Mordecai in Petersburg. Her brother Aaron had recently died. The Bolsheviks had come to his house and slashed open the beds and the furniture in their search for jewels and gold. They had taken everything from him and he was dead.

‘No, no,’ Ma cried, and it was obvious to me that she was not telling the truth. ‘How can you say it?’

She greatly loved these two brothers. On the day she received the news of Aaron’s death, when she had been doing a Monday wash, she sat sobbing by the tub. Except to mourn, Jews were forbidden to sit on the floor. She hung over the tub, and her arms, in grey sleeves, trailed in the water. I came up behind her to draw her from the water. My arms felt the beating of her heart through her bosom. It was racing, furious, sick and swift.

‘Let me be, Joshua. Leave me alone, my son,’ she said.

‘Aha! You do save money for him, and for your mother,’ said my father.

‘And if I do?’ said Ma. ‘Think, Jacob. Did they do nothing for you?’

‘And did they do nothing to me?’ Pa was beside himself.

‘If I do put aside a little money now and then, it’s less than you spend on your tobacco.’

‘And do you know how much money I’d have now if it weren’t for you and the children?’ he roared at her. ‘I’d be worth ten thousand dollars. Ten thousand, do you hear? And be a free man. Do you hear what I say?’ he glared with a strained throat. In his rage his face wore an expression that resembled hunger. His eyes grew huge, like those of a famished man. ‘I say I might have had ten thousand dollars.’

‘Why don’t you leave then?’ My mother wept.

‘That’s what I will do!’

He hurried out. It was night. He was gone for about an hour, and then I saw his cigarette glow on the front step, and he said to me, meekly, that he had only gone to buy a package of Honeysuckles.

‘Will you please save the package for me, Papa?’ said Willie, and Pa said to him, ‘Of course, my boy. I’ll remember this time and not throw it away.’

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