She did more than that.
Aunt Faiga’s wrecking of the Fairy Laundry’s finances rendered moot the question of my college choice. Columbia was costly, about six hundred dollars a year (times have somewhat changed), and when Faiga got through with the laundry, Pop couldn’t afford the six hundred. This is a story you may not believe, but it happened exactly as I will tell you.
The new building was now operating full blast, occupying a square block, with a smokestack you could see for miles, with three stories full of crashing, thumping, steaming, sloshing machinery, with a horde of employees in white smocks and caps turning out mountains of bundles, delivered by a fleet of new trucks all over New York. The Fairy Laundry couldn’t have been more impressive, and it was going broke. Wall Street had crashed. Aunt Faiga’s Daily Worker bubbled happily about the long-awaited death agonies of capitalism. The huge expansion had put Pop in a cash bind. The bank wouldn’t renew the construction loans. Kornfelder and Worthington, pleading hard times, had put up such tough terms for more cash that Pop was desperately looking elsewhere.
Luckily, he had met at a laundryman’s convention a wealthy Californian, who was moving to New York and wanted to buy into a laundry. They got on well at the convention, and the man liked the operating statements Pop showed him. Pop invited the man to come and have a look at the Fairy plant. He told Mom that this man would be arriving in a week; a millionaire, a gentleman, ready to put in, on reasonable terms, whatever new money the laundry needed. All of us could hardly contain our joy. It meant release from Kornfelder and Worthington. It meant Pop could take a raise, we could move to Manhattan at last, and Lee could go to Cornell, instead of Hunter College. All our money pinches would be a thing of the past!
Well, Papa came home one afternoon looking greenish. I was reviewing the Talmud in the parlor, and I heard the whole thing.
“Why home so early, Alex?” Mom asked, her face anxious.
“The laundry’s on strike.”
“On strike?” Mama was flabbergasted. So was I. “On strike? You’re joking. Why, there’s no union. Everybody’s happy.”
“Faiga did it. She brought in organizers from downtown.”
“Faiga? Faiga!” grated my mother. “Oy! Koidanov!” She waved her fists wildly in the air, and beat her temples. “Koidanov!”
“That man is coming day after tomorrow,” Papa said, slumping down in an armchair.
“Settle the strike, then,” exclaimed Mama. “Settle it! I’ll talk to Faiga. Leave her to me.”
“You don’t know the demands. Those fellows from downtown are Communists. They want the workers to take over the plant, nothing less.”
“Why did your people listen to strangers?”
“Brodofsky.” Pop sighed in a heartbreaking way. “Brodofsky, again! Just before the vote, Brodofsky got up and made a speech. He said he would fire anybody who voted to strike. So the vote was unanimous to strike, and Brodofsky fired everybody, and they all walked out. I was at the bank, and when I got back, the place was empty. Outside, pickets were marching with signs. Signs about me! And they kept shouting a poem.”
“Signs? A poem! About you? It all sounds so crazy.”
“Faiga made up the poem herself. She was leading the march. She’s proud of it. I remember every word.”
And Pop chanted, in a mournful singsong,
“Boss Goodkind isn’t good,
Boss Goodkind isn’t kind.
Boss Goodkind sucks the workers’ blood
And steals the workers blind.”
Aunt Faiga came home at her usual time, in excellent spirits, and asked Mama what there was for supper. Mama ignored her. That set the tone of the evening. There had never been such a supper in our household. We sat around the dining-room table, the six of us, hardly saying a word: the four Goodkinds in shock, Zaideh puzzled, Faiga happily downing chicken and noodles, remarking that she was awfully hungry, or requiring someone to pass the bread, the salt, or the ketchup. Faiga had developed a heavy ketchup habit, shaking out half a bottle at each meal.
At last Mama spoke out. “So, you had to start a strike, Faiga, did you? After Alex gave you a job, only because I asked him to? What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m just another worker,” said Faiga. “The workers are waking up. It’s a historical process.”
“Did you start the whole thing, or didn’t you?”
“That’s ridiculous. How can I start a world movement? Please pass the ketchup.”
“No,” said Mama, firmly clutching the ketchup bottle.
Faiga looked surprised, and a little disconcerted. “What?”
Mama recited,
“Boss Goodkind isn’t good,
Boss Goodkind isn’t kind.
Boss Goodkind sucks the workers’ blood
And steals the workers blind.
Did you write that?”
“That’s the voice of the workers,” said Faiga. “I just gave it expression.”
“And you can still sit there,” Mom said with sledgehammer sarcasm, “and eat Boss Goodkind’s food?”
Faiga shook her head and said very patiently, “Why not? Personally, I have nothing against him.”
This reply so dazed Mama that she mechanically passed Faiga the ketchup. Faiga slopped great gobs into her chicken and noodles, and went on eating.
After a while Papa said, in the tones of Job on the ash heap, “Faiga, you’ve been in the laundry six months. Am I that kind of boss? Do I suck the workers’ blood? Do I steal them blind?”
The faint flickering smile on Aunt Faiga’s flat Slavic face might have been embarrassment. Then again, it could have been pride of authorship. “Alex, that’s agitprop for the masses. Agitprop must be simple and strong.”
Well, let me wrap up this painful scene. Mama told Faiga about the man from California, and the urgency of calling off the strike. Faiga insisted that Papa’s situation was just part of the class struggle. History had caught up with the Fairy Laundry. You couldn’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. (First time I ever heard that one was from Aunt Faiga.) And so on. They were getting nowhere, their voices were rising, and all this was in English. Zaideh was looking from daughter to daughter in bemusement. He struck in and asked in Yiddish what was going on.
Mama told him, with a free translation of Aunt Faiga’s agitprop poem. As she explained, Zaideh began to glance at Aunt Faiga, with thunderclouds gathering on that majestic bearded countenance such as I had never seen there before. When Mama finished, he and Faiga were staring at each other, and Faiga was pouting like a naughty little girl.
“Did you do this?” Zaideh asked her.
She whined something about the bosses and the toiling masses. Zaideh’s face grew sterner and darker. Faiga fell apart. She said the men from downtown were very tough. The strike wasn’t her fault. She had just talked to them about the Fairy Laundry, and they had come on their own and organized the strike. There was nothing she could do about it.
“Papushka,” she crooned, timidly stroking his hand, using her favorite endearment, “don’t be angry with me, Papushka. I can’t bear it.”
Zaideh stood up, and wrathfully left the table.
***
The strike soon disintegrated. Pop’s foreman told him that actually Brodofsky, more than Faiga and the downtown agitators, had precipitated it. But the man from California arrived at the height of the chaos. The machines were standing idle, the place was filthy, half the workers were back and milling uselessly around, and the others were absent, thinking that Brodofsky’s dismissal was for real. So the man returned to California on the first available train. Pop had to submit to the crushing terms of Kornfelder and Worthington, to keep operating. Lee did not apply for Cornell. My chances for Columbia went glimmering. Papa installed Zaideh and Faiga in a small apartment near the Minsker Synagogue, and we moved to the Pelham section of the Bronx.
Not long after the Boss Goodkind episode, Faiga was arrested during a riot on Union Square. Faiga hit a cop on the head, with a placard protesting police brutality. Shades of Mama and the brick! That placard must have been mounted on a two-by-four, because it laid the policeman out, and he left the scene in an ambulance. Faiga’s defense was that in the close quarters of the riot, the policeman had started to feel her up. Clouting him with the placard was not a political act at all, Faiga claimed, it was a reflex of offended female modesty.
Well, this was pretty thin stuff. Faiga was clad at the time in her Lenin cap, a leather jacket, and a wool skirt; a forbidding sight, not calculated to provoke a New York cop to lewd liberties. Faiga spent some six hours in jail with assorted shoplifters and whores before Pop got hold of Assemblyman Bloom and had her released. Some money also changed hands, to persuade the cop not to press charges; my father’s money, of course. Faiga was sobered by her few hours in the lower depths, and grateful to Boss Goodkind for springing her; and her Soviet brainwashing began to fade. In time Faiga changed a lot, as you will see.
Meantime the damage was done. It hit my sister Lee hardest. She had been promised Cornell, but now she was graduating, and there was no money. Lee rode the subway to Hunter College for four years. Her indignation still burns at this, an eternal light. After college, my parents staked her to a year of travel abroad, by way of recompense, and that was how she came to meet Moshe Lev in Palestine; but Lee never forgets that Yisroelke ended up at Columbia, and she at Hunter. For some unfathomable reason she holds this against me, not Aunt Faiga. She has utterly forgotten—Lee, of the elephant memory—the Boss Goodkind affair.
I have not, because it landed me in a yeshiva.