We never called my grandmother anything but Bobbeh, a Yiddishizing of the Russian “Baba,” so let’s launch her here by that name.
Bobbeh arrived shortly after the Hollooeen disaster. Lee and I had been hearing talk about Bobbeh long before that, and also about one “Uncle Velvel,” both of whom my father was bringing over from the old country. Bobbeh was Pop’s mother, of course. Uncle Velvel was Mama’s half brother, son of Zaideh by the Koidanov stepmother. The Koidanov strain may help to account for Uncle Velvel’s peculiarities, as they unfold.
Pop’s father had by now died in what had become the Soviet Union. Bobbeh was alone and miserable, for the workers’ paradise was no place for a shammas’s pious old widow. So Pop decided to bring Bobbeh to America. Velvel would come over too, the plan was, and share a little apartment with her. Velvel was in his twenties, unmarried. Bobbeh would keep house for him, and he would work at the Fairy Laundry, or teach Hebrew or something. This was all Mom’s idea, the Velvel part. I am not saying, exactly, that Mom was maneuvering to avoid having Bobbeh under her roof; though if she was, why not? That would have been simple prudence, based on long human experience, even if she thought her mother-in-law sheer joy to have around. Mom had gotten to know Pop’s mother in Minsk. I don’t know what impression of Bobbeh she had brought away with her, but she was powerfully anxious to get Uncle Velvel to America.
So at supper for a while we heard more about Bobbeh, and Uncle Velvel, and shiffskartes, and visas, and passports, and money orders, and Ellis Island, than about the Fairy Laundry even; and most of all, about money orders for Uncle Velvel. Uncle Velvel was having a hard time settling his debts, bribing the Soviet immigration authorities, and buying clothes and luggage for the journey. Always something. Bobbeh’s arrangements went smooth as oil, but importing Uncle Velvel kept getting more and more expensive. Still, Mom was steely in her resolve to be reunited with her half brother. With every letter or cable that came from Velvel, another money order went shooting over to Minsk. At last all was arranged. Mama’s desperate push to have them sail on the same boat from Riga fell through, but Uncle Velvel was booked on the very next ship, leaving three weeks later.
Bobbeh arrived. Lee and I, peering down the narrow tenement stairwell, saw her come hobbling up step by step, assisted by my father. Our first impression was of a little old lame bewigged lady smiling shyly over her brown fur collar. She entered our flat talking old-country Yiddish, and in fact never did talk anything else. Bobbeh moved in with us then and there. No alternative. Uncle Hyman had no room, and Uncle Yehuda had recently broken off communication, in his disgust with the bank’s crass greed about the promissory notes. It was only for three weeks, after all, until Uncle Velvel came. Mom had already lined up a flat that would do very nicely for Velvel and Bobbeh.
So Mom and Pop made the best of it; gave Bobbeh their own big bed, displaced Lee and me from the davenport, and put us in the kitchen: Lee on a cot, and me on the floor. Things became fairly snug in Apartment 5-D. Snug, and pungent. Bobbeh used some old-world liniment for her stiff limbs, which it seemed that I could smell over in the public school, though that may have been an olfactory delusion. But as Mom kept repeating like a striking cuckoo clock, it was only for three weeks, three weeks, three weeks.
The three weeks passed. Lee and I went along with our parents to meet Uncle Velvel’s steamship. We all stood on the wharf behind a railing, watching the immigrant families throng down the steerage gangway of a huge rusty liner. Mom kept saying, “There he is! That’s Velvel. No, Velvel is shorter,” and so forth, running frantically back and forth to get a better look at the arrivals. The stream of immigrants slackened. No Velvel. Pop went aboard the boat, and returned with a very strange expression. He and Mom began talking in Russian. Whenever some topic was not fit for our ears they would talk Russian. This time the cover failed. Their gestures, their tones, their looks, said everything. Thus, more or less:
PAPA: He’s not on board.
MAMA: What! It’s impossible! (looking desperately about) Did we miss him when he got off?
PAPA: His name isn’t on the passenger list.
MAMA: But I called the company. His name was on their list.
PAPA: He didn’t sail. He wasn’t on board. The ship’s officers told me that.
MAMA: They’re crazy! He’s stuck on Ellis Island. You go over to Ellis Island and get him.
PAPA (with great patience): I’m telling you he’s not on the ship’s list, Sarah. Something happened, and he never left Riga. He’s still over there. With all that money.
MAMA (close to a scream): Will you stop arguing and get on the next ferry to Ellis Island? Velvel is on Ellis Island. Maybe he has sore eyes, or a bad back. You go and get Velvel off Ellis Island, you hear? Don’t take no for an answer. If there’s trouble call Assemblyman Bloom. He gets everybody off Ellis Island. I’ll take the children home. You telephone me from Ellis Island, so I can talk to Velvel.
PAPA: But suppose he’s not on Ellis Island?
MAMA (wild-eyed): Go! GO! He’s on Ellis Island!
Ellis Island was the screening point in New York harbor for incoming immigrants. Quite a few who made it past the Statue of Liberty never got beyond Ellis Island. I have an uncle in Minsk, now about ninety-three years old, who was turned away for an ear infection; he glimpsed the Manhattan skyscrapers, and sailed back to live out his life in the Soviet Union. We still correspond in Yiddish. Only he was left alive of all the Goodkinds and Levitans, after the Germans occupied Minsk. He somehow escaped and sat out the war behind the Urals.
Velvel was not on Ellis Island. When Pop came home with this report, Mama was beside herself. Gloom thickened the liniment-laden atmosphere of Apartment 5-D, and Bobbeh turned blue. Not literally, but still spectacularly. Bobbeh’s blue spells were to become a part of life in 5-D thereafter. I’d come home from school and Lee would whisper to me, “Bobbeh is blue.” This meant that we had to steer clear not only of Bobbeh, but of Mama, and that it was no time to get in Pop’s way, either.
Ordinarily Bobbeh was a smiling, almost chirpy little old thing. Her well-groomed white hair tucked under the prescribed brown wig of pious ladies, she would busy herself around the kitchen, possibly getting in Mom’s way, but turning out some very superior coffee cakes, egg breads, noodles, and strudels, which it seemed to me Mom never properly admired. But when Bobbeh turned blue, all changed. She was a fright. A bitter disconsolate look on her face, her wig discarded, she would stump here and there, endlessly combing white hair that fell loosened past her shoulders; she would not speak, and would not answer when spoken to; or she would hole up in the bedroom, silently emanating waves of misery and liniment. This ghastly business could go on for days; and it was triggered for the first time by Mom’s obvious agitation at Velvel’s non-arrival. Until then Mom had been sweet as pie around Bobbeh, but with this blow the mask slipped, and Bobbeh turned blue.
I’ll interject here that the Velvel mystery was cleared up months later by a long letter in Yiddish which came to the Fairy Laundry from Riga. Papa read it at the supper table. Bobbeh wasn’t blue at the moment, but Mama, as she listened, turned pretty blue herself. It went something like this:
Much respected and beloved Sarah Gitta, brother-in-law Reb Elya Alexander, and children Israel David and Leah Miriam, live well and happy, amen!
You owe me congratulations, I’m a bridegroom! It was a God-thing, decreed from Heaven. I met my destined other half in Riga, while I was arranging for the shiffskarte, and I knew at once that it had to be. She comes from one of the finest Jewish families in Riga, her father is a very well-to-do dealer in hay and feed and very learned, and her mother is distantly related to the Vilna Gaon. The dowry is very generous, though we are still discussing details and I haven’t collected it yet, and meantime we have settled down in a nice little flat in Riga. Malka, that is my beloved bride, does not want to go to America, she says people are not religious enough there, so we will stay in Riga.
The letter went on and on about the bride’s family, about the flat, about Velvel’s gilded prospects of becoming a partner with his father-in-law in the hay and feed business, and about the splendid Riga Jews. There was no mention of the large sums my father had sent Velvel. That I recall, because Pop said in a puzzled tone when he finished the reading, “Isn’t it strange? And what about all the money?”
Mama barked, “Money? He’s from Koidanov!”
And so the kitchen scene fades out. There is more to tell about Uncle Velvel—this was just his first move—but all in good time.
***
There was no way anybody could snap Bobbeh out of a blue spell. She usually did it herself, by making something: an unusual pie, a complicated soup, or some major old-country recipe, like home-brewed wine. Early on she made some superb wine, jugs and jugs of it. Prohibition was on then, and the only wine one could buy was purple slop with no kick. Bobbeh’s wine was the sensation of Aldus Street. Mom passed a sample to Paul Frankenthal’s mother for Sabbath use; not that the Frankenthals did much about the Sabbath. The next day, all white-toothed smiles, Mrs. Frankenthal was in our apartment, flattering Bobbeh in her discordant Galician Yiddish, praising the wine to the skies, and dropping hints like brontosaurus footfalls that she would appreciate a jug or two, and might even pay for it. Her husband just loved it.
Bobbeh sweetly referred her to her darling daughter-in-law, for whom, she said, she had made the wine. It was all up to Mama. So Mrs. Frankenthal had to start all over, and fawn on Mom. She carried on about what a brilliant boy I was, and how Paul said that I was the star of Mr. Winston’s class, and that her husband was always after Paul to be more like Davey Goodkind, and that I was breaking the hearts of all the girls in Class 7-A because I was so handsome. Mom’s appetite for such stuff was gross and insatiable, and I rather enjoyed hearing it myself, though we both knew that it was hogwash; that—in respect to us Goodkinds—the apartment across the hall was the next thing to a Coo Coo Clan lodge, and that Mrs. Frankenthal was just sucking around for some of Bobbeh’s wine.
Her rough spouse must have ordered her not to return without the goods, because she wouldn’t leave. Mom let her grovel and crawl until she was visibly worn out. Then Mom said that Bobbeh had of course made the wine for Passover; that the whole family gathered then and drank gallons and gallons of wine; but that if any was left after Passover she would gladly give Mrs. Frankenthal a jugful. Meantime, her compliments to Mr. Frankenthal and Paul. Mrs. Frankenthal gave up and left, with a Dracula glare much like her son’s, evidently a hereditary trait.
With this wine triumph of Bobbeh’s, tensions eased in our tight quarters. Still, Mama put heavy pressure on Pop to bring his married sister Rivka, husband and all, for Bobbeh to live with. Correspondence was already going on between Pop and Rivka, but Rivka’s husband was objecting to the capitalist system, and that needed some working out. Meantime, Mom had her eye on a big vacant flat on Longfellow Avenue, several blocks away but still in the P.S. 75 district. She wanted to settle the Aldus Street lease and move there at once. My sister Lee was getting on, she argued, and I was no infant, and we couldn’t go on sharing a davenport; or a kitchen either, even though I was on the floor and Lee in a cot. But for once Pop dug in. Velvel had drained our savings, he protested. Bringing over Rivka and her husband would cost another fortune. Moreover, things were not good in the Fairy Laundry. It was no time to take on a bigger flat at a higher rent.
***
A major crisis was in fact on at the laundry, just then. A Mr. Susslowitz, a lean choleric real estate man, very religious, had bought into the laundry as a fourth partner to relieve the debt load. He soon perceived that Brodofsky and Gross were dead weights, but it took him some time to get on to Brodofsky in all his dim-witted grandeur. The matter of horses versus trucks tore the veil.
The laundry bundles were still being collected and delivered by wagons such as Jake the drunk drove. Mr. Susslowitz figured out that two trucks could do the job of all seven wagons, bring in more business, and cost less to run. He offered to advance the money for the trucks. Brodofsky resisted. His interminable and incoherent arguments boiled down to two: (a) the wagon driver Morris was his brother-in-law, and Morris was too nervous to handle a truck; (b) the stable owner, Samuel Bender, was his cousin, and Brodofsky’s cry was, “Ve not shet Sam Bender’s bloot! Ve neffer shet Sam Bender’s bloot!” One night the partners met in our Aldus Street flat, and Brodofsky kept Lee and me awake for hours, pounding the dining-room table and bellowing, “Ve not shet Sam Bender’s bloot!”
Mr. Susslowitz remained after the partners left that night, and he and Pop went on arguing in Yiddish. Susslowitz had a way of throwing around Aramaic terms from the Talmud. “They’re both idiots!” Susslowitz shouted. “Idiots! The one difference is, Gross is a common-law idiot, and Brodofsky is a statutory idiot!1 An animal in the form of a man! How can you put up with them? How have you lasted this long, without turning into an idiot yourself?”
“They started me in the business,” Pop said mildly.
“That statutory idiot goes,” fumed Susslowitz, “or I pull out.”
“We can’t buy you out, Susslowitz. You know what condition we’re in.”
“Then get rid of Brodofsky. Brodofsky goes! What kind of business is this? Morris, the nervous brother-in-law! Sam Bender’s blood! An animal in the form of a man! A statutory idiot!”
“You’re asking me to do a very hard thing, Susslowitz.”
“Goodkind, you can die young, that’s your affair. You can eat your guts out, arguing with that statutory idiot. I have high blood pressure. I go or he goes, I say.”
Susslowitz went. Pop would not force out Brodofsky. To save the Fairy Laundry, he tried the banks, the moneylenders, and finally the big downtown firm that sold the laundry its soap and chlorine. To keep a good customer going, the boss of the soap company, a German named Mr. Kornfelder, bought out Susslowitz, and became a silent partner on harsh terms; and so partial control of the laundry passed into Outside hands. One of Kornfelder’s terms was an immediate switch from wagons to trucks. It was done forthwith. Brodofsky did not bring up the question of Sam Bender’s blood. Mr. Brodofsky never did open his mouth much around the gentile partner.
Morris, the brother-in-law, took over supervision of the boiler room, and in a month or so scalded half his skin off by turning the wrong valve. The Fairy Laundry had to pay him compensation, and when he recovered he went to work in Sam Bender’s stable. Brodofsky now had a new grievance against my father, the scalding of Morris. It would never have happened, he said over and over, if Pop had not yielded to Mr. Kornfelder in that weak-kneed way, and shed Sam Bender’s blood.
Well, with the buy-in of Kornfelder the crisis was over. Mom prevailed. The move to Longfellow Avenue was on. Rivka’s husband was still having problems with the capitalist system, and Mama’s back was breaking from the sag in the davenport, so she said; and she also kept complaining to Papa that the davenport was “too public,” a description that baffled me. I asked Lee what that meant, and she replied that I was a shayteh d’ooreissa, that is, a statutory idiot. Lee didn’t understand Aramaic, but she had gathered the import from Mr. Susslowitz’s tones, and she liked the snappish sound of it.
And so I found myself leaving Aldus Street and the hegemony of Paul Frankenthal at last. With this came the cataclysm of Bobbeh’s sauerkraut.
To make her wine, Bobbeh had required a number of crocks: huge clay vessels with extra-heavy lids. Pop knew just what she needed, bought them on the Lower East Side, and one by one hauled them up the five floors. Mama grumbled all through this effort, and she grumbled more when the crocks were lined up in our hall. We had to slide along the wall just to get into the flat. Bobbeh’s activities with cheesecloth, sugar, and grapes generated some curious odors, once fermenting set in. But as I’ve said, the wine was a hit, and all was forgiven.
However, there were the crocks, now clean and empty, and Bobbeh took it into her head to make sauerkraut. She asked Pop to buy her a few dozen heads of cabbage. At that Mom put her foot down hard. Nobody in the family liked sauerkraut! She could buy all she ever needed at the delicatessen, for ten cents! So what was the point? The right thing was to get rid of those big crocks; sell them, or even give them away. Bobbeh turned blue. It was a terrible weapon. Mom caved in, and my father bought the cabbages, an astonishing pile, and stacked them in the parlor, great round objects redolent of the great outdoors and of Mother Earth, an agreeable novelty on Aldus Street.
And Bobbeh turned to making the sauerkraut.