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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).
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
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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,
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,
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.
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.”
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
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Seven days a week. Never stops. Never takes a vacation. No mañana—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.”
“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.
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—”
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
what Charles A. Lindbergh represented was normalcy raised to heroic proportions, a decent man with an honest face and an undistinguished voice who had resoundingly demonstrated to the entire planet the courage to take charge and the fortitude to shape history and, of course, the power to transcend personal tragedy.
Even worse for us than the election were the weeks following the inauguration, when the new American president traveled to Iceland to meet personally with Adolf Hitler and after two days of “cordial” talks to sign “an understanding” guaranteeing peaceful relations between Germany and the United States.
who condemned Lindbergh for dealing with a murderous fascist tyrant as his equal
Lindbergh can deal with Hitler, they said, Hitler respects him because he’s Lindbergh. Mussolini and Hirohito respect him because he’s Lindbergh.
America wasn’t a fascist country and wasn’t going to be, regardless of what Alvin had predicted. There was a new president and a new Congress but each was bound to follow the law as set down in the Constitution. They were Republican, they were isolationist, and among them, yes, there were anti-Semites—as indeed there were among the southerners in FDR’s own party—but that was a long way from their being Nazis.
As every collector knew, no president before him had ever commissioned his postmaster general to issue so many new stamps, nor had there been another American president so intimately involved with the Post Office Department.
knew FDR had a hand in designing or had personally suggested, beginning with the 1936 three-cent Susan B. Anthony stamp commemorating the sixteenth anniversary of the women’s suffrage amendment
snood.
You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.”
“With this act,” the president declared, “Adolf Hitler has established himself as the world’s greatest safeguard against the spread of Communism and its evils.
Under the auspices of Just Folks—described by Lindbergh’s newly created Office of American Absorption as “a volunteer work program introducing city youth to the traditional ways of
heartland life”—my
The announced purpose of the OAA was to implement programs “encouraging America’s religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into the larger society,” though by the spring of 1941 the only minority the OAA appeared to take a serious interest in encouraging was ours. It was the intention of Just Folks to remove hundreds of Jewish boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen from the cities where they lived and attended school and put them to work for eight weeks as field hands and day laborers with farm families hundreds of miles from their homes.
chignon,
Bengelsdorf announced to the Newark papers news of his engagement, at age sixty-three, to his thirty-one-year-old firebrand of an assistant.
the price for world peace and no German invasion of Great Britain will be installing in England an English fascist government.
“What about the Democrats?” I asked. “Son, don’t ask me about the Democrats. I’m angry enough as it is.”
my father, who had been silent and unmoving on the sofa since yielding the rabbi his favorite chair, got up and said, “I have to help Bess,” the way he might have said, “I’m now going to jump out the window and kill myself.”
when our father referred scornfully to Lindbergh as “our president,” he turned to me and made a face that revealed how far he’d spun out of the family orbit merely by making the ordinary American’s adjustment to the new administration.
Because there is ignorance as well among Jews, unfortunately, many of whom persist in thinking of President Lindbergh as an American Hitler when they know full well that he is not a dictator who attained power in a putsch but a democratic leader who came to office through a landslide victory in a fair and free election and who has exhibited not a single inclination toward authoritarian rule. He does not glorify the state at the expense of the individual but, to the contrary, encourages entrepreneurial individualism and a free enterprise system unencumbered by interference from the federal
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fascist thuggery? Where are the Nazi Brown Shirts and the secret police? When have you observed a single manifestation of fascist anti-Semitism emanating from our government? What Hitler perpetrated on Germany’s Jews with the passage in 1935 of the Nuremberg Laws is the absolute antithesis of what President Lindbergh has undertaken to do for America’s Jews through the establishment of the Office of American Absorption. The Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of their civil rights and did everything to exclude them from membership in their nation. What I have encouraged President Lindbergh to do is to
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It was strange to see trees grown by some tree farmer miles from the city massed along the wrought-iron railings out front of the city’s oldest churches and leaning in piles against the facades of the imposing banks and insurance buildings, and strange too, on a downtown street, to breathe in their rustic tang.
the month of December, if it smelled at all, smelled of something a hissing alley cat had tugged from an overturned garbage can in somebody’s yard, and of supper heating on the stove of a flat whose steamy kitchen window was open a crack to let in air from the alleyway, and of the bursts of noxious coal gas spewed from the furnace chimneys, and of the pail of ashes dragged up from the cellar to be emptied outdoors over slippery patches of sidewalk. Compared with the fragrances of North Jersey’s damp spring and swampy summer and unsettled, moody fall, the smells of a bitter-cold winter were
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mackinaw
galoshes
This then was the culmination of our quest—Jesus Christ, who by their reasoning was everything and who by my reasoning had fucked everything up: because if it weren’t for Christ there wouldn’t be Christians, and if it weren’t for Christians there wouldn’t be anti-Semitism, and if it weren’t for anti-Semitism there wouldn’t be Hitler, and if it weren’t for Hitler Lindbergh would never be president, and if Lindbergh weren’t president
The Depression is over, all you rich Jews tell me, and thanks not to Roosevelt but to Mr. Lindbergh. The stock market is up, profits are up, business is booming—and why? Because we have Lindbergh’s peace instead of Roosevelt’s war. And what else matters, what besides money counts with you people?”
My father had meanwhile finished as much of the Daily News as he could bear and thrown it into a trash basket. Since ours was a household where nickels and dimes mattered, I was as perplexed to see him discard the paper only minutes after buying it as I’d been to see him reading it in the first place. “Can you believe these people?” he said. “This fascist dog is still their hero.”
there was the agonized cough of our downstairs neighbor Mr. Wishnow, a cough that sounded from the cellar as though he were being ripped apart by the teeth of a two-man saw.
Oddly, there was nobody in gym class better than Seldon at scrambling up and down the
ropes that dangled from the gymnasium’s high ceiling, his aerial nimbleness integrally related—according to one of our teachers—to his unchallengeable adroitness with numbers.
Solitary Seldon
the enormous popularity of Lindbergh’s isolationist policies had begun to win even the support of many Jews—and
the tailor’s son was carrying over either shoulder a load of newly pressed clothes for delivery, and where Italian singing issued onto the street through the shoemaker’s doorway, his radio tuned as always to WEVD—the EVD to honor the persecuted socialist hero Eugene V. Debs—and
“Call me Don, why don’t you? And I’ll call you Phil. You know what a fascist is, don’t you, Phil?” “I think so.” “Did they call anybody a fascist that you remember?” “No.” “Don’t rush yourself. Don’t rush to answer. Take all the time you need. Try hard to remember. It’s important. Did they call anybody a fascist? Did they say anything about Hitler? You know who Hitler is.” “Everybody does.” “He’s a bad man, isn’t he?” “Yes,” I said. “He’s against the Jews, isn’t he?” “Yes.” “Who else is against the Jews?” “The Bund.” “Anyone else?” he asked. I knew enough not to mention Henry Ford, America
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I must already have begun to think of myself as a little criminal because I was a Jew.
We were now at the corner of Chancellor and Summit, and I could see the stoop of our house down at the end of the block. “Bye!” I cried, and didn’t wait for the light to change but ran for home before I fell into his trap, if I hadn’t fallen into it already.
What they cannot take away—unless the gullible and the sheepish and the terrified are patsies enough to return them to Washington one more time—is the power of the ballot box. The Hitlerite plot against America must be stopped—and stopped by you! By you, Mr. and Mrs. New York! By the voting power of the freedom-loving people of this great city on Tuesday, November 3, nineteen hundred and forty-two!”
