“ISRAEL, ISRAEL,” HIS father was shouting downstairs in the living room of the comfortable two-story house in Harrison, “my name is Israel and I want you to get that man out of my house.”
Benjamin had never heard his father shout before. He was a short, sweet-tempered man, with a naive belief in the goodness of his fellowman, an overflow of forgiveness when that belief was proved ill-founded.
“Israel, Israel,” his father was shouting, and Benjamin went quietly down the steps and peered into the living room to see what was going on. His father was there in his American Legion uniform, and Benjamin’s mother and his father’s sister, Bertha, and Bertha’s husband, George. George had a bandage around his head. He was powerfully built, about thirty years old, prematurely bald, with a broken nose and large, rough, workman’s hands.
“Sssh, Sssh,” Benjamin’s mother was saying. “The children…”
“Let the children hear!” Israel Federov said. “Let them know about this thug.” He turned on George. “You go out and you go to Boston and you demonstrate, you make a nuisance of yourself, you disturb the peace, you yell, ‘Everybody is wrong, the Governor, the judge, the president of Harvard University, highly respected men, Americans!’ And who is right? Two Italians who throw bombs. And you get hit on the head by a policeman! This is America, not Russia! And ten days in jail. Ten years it should have been.”
“Sssh…,” Benjamin’s mother said, “the children…”
“And you have the gall to come to this house with my sister,” Israel shouted, ignoring his wife for the first time in fifteen years of marriage, “and ask for pity. You have no job, your boss doesn’t like jailbirds. What a surprise! You have no money, you spent all your money going to Boston to make trouble, a veteran of the United States Army should strip himself to the bone to support a bum, a man who fights with policemen, a man who thinks it’s the right thing to do in America to kill important men, to throw bombs, to call the president of Harvard a liar.”
“Israel…please…,” Benjamin’s mother said softly.
“That’s it,” Benjamin’s father said. “Israel. I go to the American Legion meeting, Israel Federov American Expeditionary Force. Corporal Israel Federov, born in Russia, a Jew, and what do they say at the meeting? I’ll tell you what they say. They say, ‘Jews are troublemakers, they are anarchists, they should be thrown out of the country.’ And if I say, ‘No, Jews are not like that, they are patriots, I was hit by the machine gun in France, I laid in the mud bleeding a day and a night,’ they say, ‘Maybe, but what about your brother-in-law George in jail in Boston for two Italians?’”
Standing unnoticed on the steps outside the living-room door, Benjamin knew his father was right. If he could have, he would have gladly dragged his Uncle George out of the house with his bare hands.
“Jew, Jew,” George said. He had a rough outdoor voice to go with his broken nose and his workman’s hands. He had been a day laborer and a longshoreman, and his last job had been as a truck driver for a furniture-moving company. “Why don’t you forget Jew for a minute?”
“Forget,” Israel shouted. “You forget. Me, I remember. In Russia, they came into the villages and they said, ‘I’ll take that Jidok’—and they tore a boy of sixteen from the arms of his mother and they put him in the army of the Czar for twenty-five years. Degradation, abuse, Siberia, a lifetime. Die.”
“They got no army of the Czar any more,” George said. “Finally, they got a decent government.”
“Decent,” Israel said. “Hah! Worse. Don’t tell me. I know the Russians.”
“Israel, please…,” Benjamin’s mother said.
Israel disregarded her and went up close to George, who towered over him. “When they ask me tonight at the Legion, ‘What about your Jew jailbird brother-in-law up in Boston?’ what should I tell them?”
“Tell them I’m not a Jew,” George said. “I’m an American. I was born in Cincinnati.”
“Why don’t we all sit down and have a cup of tea,” Benjamin’s mother said, “and not get so excited?”
“Cincinnati!” Israel said. “Don’t make me laugh. All they’ll remember is Jew. Get out. Bertha, get that bum out of my house.”
“Come on, Bertha,” George said. Even to Benjamin he sounded tired and beaten. “There’s no hope here.” He turned to Israel. “In the future things will happen and you will remember this day and you will say to yourself, ‘That bum George was right to get hit on the head by a policeman. I should’ve cried my tears, too, for the two Italians.’”
George and Bertha saw Benjamin as he stood there at the foot of the stairs, but they said nothing to him as they went out of his father’s house for the last time.
Israel Federov, aged six, had passed through Ellis Island on the long voyage from Kiev by way of Hamburg, and was made into an American in the slums of New York City, in vacant lots along the East River where they played with taped baseballs, homemade bats, and without gloves. Israel Federov was made into an American catching behind the plate bare-handed in the years between 1895 and 1910. Israel Federov was an American with an old catcher’s hands, with three broken fingers, who, even when he was forty-five, was still nimble on wild pitches and could throw out fleet young runners who tried to steal second base on him.
Israel Federov had accompanied his son Benjamin to Pennsylvania Station in 1942 and had tried to carry Benjamin’s barracks bag, because it was the end of Benjamin’s overnight pass and he was going down to Newport News to embark for the war. Louis was already overseas in the Air Force. Benjamin didn’t allow his father to carry the bag.
“I’m not an old man yet,” Israel said, but he didn’t make a point of it. “Myself,” he said as they went through the uniforms and clasped couples of farewell, “myself, I left from Hoboken in 1917.”
There never had been any question about the Federov sons avoiding the Army after Pearl Harbor. For Israel Federov, if there was a war and you were a young man, you fought it. Standing in the gray light of the station, with the massed murmur of good-bys making a different music from the drums that had marched Israel off to his war, Benjamin remembered the legend, now a fixture in the family history, of his father’s rage against his brother Samuel, the pianist, who had planned to have himself ruptured to avoid the draft. Recalling various accounts of the scene, which had taken place when he was little more than an infant, made Benjamin smile, even at that moment, when sixty seconds more would separate father and son, perhaps for years, perhaps forever.
Later on, when he had his leave in Paris, he had wandered into the Hotel Crillon, on the Place de la Concorde and had smiled again, thinking of his father, as he read the quotation from the letter of Henry IV to the nobleman whose name now was memorialized by the hotel.
“Pends-toi,” the quotation, in large gilt letters on the wall, had read, “brave Crillon. Nous avons combattu à Arques et tu n’y étais pas.” With the help of a pocket dictionary, Federov had made the translation: “Hang yourself, good Crillon. Today we fought at Arques and you were not there.”
Samuel, the almost-ruptured pianist, could hardly be confused with the Duc de Crillon, and Israel, a small, poverty-worn Russian immigrant among the uniforms in Pennsylvania Station in 1942, bore little outward resemblance to Henry IV. But in another language and in perhaps somewhat different terms, Israel had made much the same statement to his pianist brother.
“Hoboken,” Israel said. “The band played as we sailed out of the harbor. And I came back.” This was said with something related to a smile, but Benjamin understood that he was being ordered, as obliquely as possible, so as not openly to offend God in his mysterious decrees, to follow in his father’s footsteps and return. Israel was trying so hard to be an American veteran, an American father, that he almost succeeded in not weeping when he put his arms around his son and said good-by.