THE JEWISH IMMIGRANTS FROM EASTERN EUROPE WHO SETTLED in Brooklyn in great numbers were most influential in the early part of the 1950s. But Jews were not the only immigrants who came from Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century.
Dave Radens, who grew up in mostly Jewish Williamsburg, was the son of Muslim immigrants, although in those days the spelling used was Moslem. His father, whose given name was Radlinsky, was a Lithuanian Tartar in the fur trade, who, as a teen, walked east from Vilna across Russia and China, then got on a ship and crossed the Pacific Ocean to the New World, settling first in Ontario, Canada, and then in Brooklyn, where he helped make mink coats and helped organize the Fur and Leather Workers Union.
As a teenager, Radens developed a keen interest in the printing business. When his dad forbade him to go to college to study it and ordered him to get a job, the boy, with the help of a friend’s father, ran away from home and enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technology. After fighting in Korea, he returned to RIT, where he completed his BA and met his wife, Margaret, a Jew. When his mother refused to consent to the marriage, the couple defied her. His mother boycotted the wedding and cut him out of her life as though he had died. She is still alive, and it is going on forty-eight years that they have not seen each other. She has never seen his grown children.
Dave Radens on a pony, 1941.
Courtesy of Dave Radens
DAVE RADENS “My father was the first generation to come over to this country. He was born in Vilna, Lithuania. The border of that country was like a rubber band. Sometimes it was Russia, sometimes it was Lithuania, and at one time it was even Poland.
“I was raised in the Moslem church. In the early days the Moslems took great chunks of Europe. We were descendants of the Tartars. You talk about persecution. All the male members of my father’s family, except my father, had their trigger fingers chopped off. Members of the family began fleeing to America, settling in Brooklyn, and in the late 1800s his father arranged for him to escape, and he and six or eight others headed east, largely walking across Asia. At one point, they were in a Mongolian village, and they were surrounded, and the Chinese took all the males and inducted them into the army. My father served in the Chinese army for a while, and he was one of two who snuck off in the dark of night, and the route they took from there got all muddy and confused, but he lost track of the other and never saw him again. He eventually wound up in Ontario, Canada, where he was hired to work in a coal mine in the town of Timmons.
“While he was in Canada, he contacted the imam of the Lithuanian mosque in Brooklyn, and he made the trip down. When he arrived, the families thought he was a gold miner—they had misunderstood him when he said he was coal miner, and the legend was that he was pictured as a very wealthy man, and so the elders paraded their daughters in front of him, and he was attracted to my mother, and when his visa was up he returned to Canada. He communicated with my mother’s family, and a marriage was arranged. Dad came down, and they got married in Brooklyn, and he took her back to Canada. I was conceived in 1935, and my grandmother wanted me born stateside, so in her eighth month my mother got on the train, came to the States, and I was born in Kings County Hospital, and as soon as I was able to travel I went back to Canada.
“We stayed until I was four, and we returned when my father wanted to return to his relatives. One of the Mos (we called Moslems ‘Mos’) had a decent job in a dairy, and offered my dad a job pasteurizing milk. The rest of my father’s relatives in Brooklyn were dirt farmers, very poor. Other members of this Mo community were in the fur industry, and my dad’s family was highly regarded in that field. Dad’s family were skilled craftspeople—tanners of minks. He was what they called a flesher, and that meant removing the meat from the hides. It was considered a skilled position in that industry. Between fleshing and the actual tanning of the animals, there was a chemical process that removed the skin, and he knew the secret of the formula that had been passed down from generation to generation. Dad did it, his father did it, and his father’s father did it, and so did my younger brother.
“When he did his work, he put up a curtain so no one could watch him, and part of the secret was to dump half the chemicals, because they weren’t part of the process but part of keeping the thing a secret. There were other formulas, but not one was ever able to produce as fine a mink as his formula.
“My father was involved with the founding of the Fur and Leather Workers Union, which at first was part of the Meat Packers Union. In the process scabs were brought in, and they would bust up union meetings with baseball bats and lead pipes, and my dad would come home with his head all bandaged up. There were a lot of beat-up heads. The goons would come in and break up union-organizing meetings, and there’d be bloodshed, frequently and regularly.
“The stories I heard were pretty brutal. There was a large population of Lithuanians down around Coney Island, and they were hired to bust the union. My dad would try meeting with them, and my mother was petrified. I remember her being in a frenetic state. I can remember ten men with their right hands cut off by the union busters. If you don’t have a hand, you can’t work. My mother wondered, Are they going to get him? Is he going to lose his hand? But he had the secret to the formula, and they wanted it—they also knew if they cleaved him, they would never get it. They tried bribing him to get it—but he didn’t give in because he knew the fur-and-leather guys depended on him heavily.
“His union activity led to his becoming a member of the Communist Party, which represented the working people. Back then they were still arguing about the forty-hour workweek. They were talking about social security, all the things my dad thought were right and proper. When my mother’s brothers got wind of this, they didn’t like it. They called him ‘that damn Lithuanian.’ Even though they were all Lithuanians. They thought my dad was some kind of Commie, not American. They felt it was un-American.
“It was a knee-jerk reaction, but deeply, strongly felt. They were the ones who were going to benefit from my dad’s union activity, but the owners kept telling them that the result would be that they were going to lose their jobs.
“We built up the union, and it was strong until the 1950s, when the Puerto Ricans got in big-time and spearheaded a movement that the old guard felt was a sellout. Because they had no jobs, they were willing to settle for less. They wouldn’t go out on strike. They wouldn’t support the union, and eventually the union was virtually dissolved. They sold out. They were bought out. And in the 1960s my dad’s formulas were duplicated in China, and it was all downhill from there. My dad retired in the 1970s, and he was in his nineties when he died.
“What I remember about Williamsburg were all the shuls. A shul is a small chapel, smaller than a synagogue. There were tiny shuls in storefronts. There’d be three shuls on a block, and each had differences with the others.
“There were a lot of Hasidim in our part of Williamsburg. They wore skullcaps and talliths and they had curly hair and beards. My grandmother, who lived a walk from where we lived, made dear friends with them. I knew all those kids. We were good friends.
“Yiddish was the dominant language. My grandmother even spoke Yiddish. That’s what was spoken in the stores. Where else were we going to shop? Where do we buy our chicken, and butter, and groceries? So she learned Yiddish in Williamsburg. My wife’s family is Jewish from Westchester, and they didn’t know Yiddish. When they heard this Moslem woman speaking Yiddish, they were blown away.
“What the Hasidim couldn’t understand was how we got so close with the mafioso. They were different, and so they had nothing to do with them, and the Italians had nothing to do with the Hasidim. Our involvement was largely due to sheer accident. Our neighborhood was chopped up into blocks. From Marcy Avenue to Union Avenue, Graham Avenue, Manhattan Avenue, was Yiddish. East of there, toward Flatbush, was Italian Catholic. St. Catherine’s Cathedral was huge. The building we lived in was owned by a goombah, a man named Provatera, the local godfather. He owned several buildings, several factories, the local Cadillac dealership, the local pool hall, owned a lot of stuff.
“He would send his nephew Frank, who looked like one of the mobsters from an Al Pacino movie, to collect the rent. He had a thick Italian accent. One day my father discovered a pair of legs sticking out from under the bushes, and there was Frankie Provatera, lying with his eye slashed. A rival gang had attacked him. My dad took him to the hospital, and that put us in real good stead. They were forever grateful. Frank’s son Dominick and I became close friends, and I would dip into the goombah’s wine cellar and get smashed.
“I was golden. I would eat at their home. There were seven-course meals seven nights a week. I mean feasts. They served every kind of fowl—partridge, hen, duck, chicken—steaks like you couldn’t believe, pastas, a full seven-course meal—soup, salad, dessert—every night.
“Lena, the goombah’s nephew’s wife, and her daughter, Gracie, did all the cooking. Gracie was allowed to go to the movies with my mother Wednesday nights and collect dishes. In those days just before the war it was two for a nickel to get into the movies, and you’d get a free dish. Gracie was joyous that her mother would let her go to the movies with my mother and bring home those dishes.
“I had to walk through that very heavy mafioso neighborhood to get to Junior High School 49. When the Hasidim kids walked there, the Italian kids would beat them up. I didn’t carry a zip knife, but I did carry knuckles. You ripped the handle off a certain kind of garbage can, and they made perfect metal knuckles, and I would hide the knuckles under the front stoop. There was a special brick that would come out of the wall of the stoop cellar, and I would hide my knuckles there. Any time I left the house, the first thing I did was to go under the stoop and get out my knuckles. And I used them. You had to. I was part of a small group of boys who were always together. There was Sam Setzer, who was Jewish; myself, the Mo; Billy Hasstler, who was Protestant; Tony Virella, who was Italian Catholic; and another kid, named Phil. We were together constantly, liked each other, got along real well. We were tall, physically large, and no one would mess with us.
“The six of us played a lot of handball at a housing project in a public park nearby. They had handball walls, and the six of us were good to the point where the local bookies would come by on Sunday afternoons, and we would draw straws from the parkie’s broom to see how we’d be broken up into teams, and the bookies would set the odds, and they’d bet big money, $100 a game, on the outcome. They’d supply us with pizza and soda. It was great fun. Other kids tried to get into the games, but the bookies would decide who would play and who they would back.
“We lived a full life, even though we didn’t have much money. When my dad first came to Brooklyn, he was bringing in $5 a week. We were poor. We lived a roller-skate away from Ebbets Field, but I never saw a game. It was 50¢ to sit in the bleachers, and I couldn’t afford it. I would roller-skate to Ebbets Field with a lot of other kids, and we’d stand outside the outfield fence and wait for a baseball to be hit over, and that we would fight for.
“That didn’t stop us from rooting for the Dodgers. When Jackie Robinson joined the team in 1947, he was adored. There were no black people in our community, zero, none, but everyone rooted for the black heroes. Joe Louis was a great hero. When he fought, it was on the radio, and everybody listened. You didn’t have to be in your own apartment. It reverberated through the building. And when Robinson played, you could hear it on the radio. Everybody was tuned to it.
“They rooted for Louis and Robinson because they were underdogs, and they considered themselves underdogs.
“The movies, as I said, were two for a nickel. Some kids got 2¢, and some kids got 3¢, and the kids with 2¢ would line up against the wall, and the kids with 3¢ would come strutting by and flick a finger at you, and you’d go in with that guy. Except for the six of us—we went to the movies together.
“When we could get the 2¢ or 3¢, we’d start off at ten in the morning, and there were serials—Captain Marvel, Captain Midnight, Zorro, and Gene Autry. You’d be there four or five hours continuously.
“On Friday nights we went to services at the mosque, which was on Powell Street, right around the corner from Metropolitan Avenue, on the border of Flatbush and Greenpoint. My mother and father weren’t really all that religious. Well, yes and no. Except for my father, who was president of the church society, these were illiterate people. During Friday night services the people could sing songs from the Koran because they trained themselves to recognize symbols in the book, but they didn’t know what it meant. It was Arabic, and these people didn’t speak Arabic. They spoke Lithuanian. We would sing these songs, and I would ask my dad, ‘What does this mean?’ He could read Lithuanian and English, but not Arabic, and he asked me if I really wanted to know. I said, ‘Yeah, I’m curious.’ And he took it upon himself to go to the United Nations and he hunted around and found an Egyptian who was totally fascinated by this Tartar/Mongol/Lithuanian/Moslem sect, and he came and taught us Arabic at Friday-night school.
“And what we discovered was that this group, which had no idea what they were reading, had been using as a wedding ceremony a sultan talking about monitoring horse trades. What they were using as a funeral service, one of the most revered services of any faith, was the sultan admonishing his people to grow watermelons.
“When word got out, my dad was in trouble. Ooh, he was in big trouble with the church elders. They were ready to throw him out, but the kids said, ‘We wanted to know, and now we know. We don’t have to change it. As long as we feel the same about the music, that’s all that matters.’
“For a while there was a panic, but it eventually subsided, and things went on as before. They kept the same songs.
“I was a top student. My mother made certain of that, though in fact and in deed, there was an element of cruelty in it. One time I brought home a C in penmanship on my report card, and that was not acceptable, and she took a cast-iron skillet and beat the daylights out of me, and I was hospitalized several times as a kid. I skipped grades twice, and I started college at sixteen. At the time, the educational system was such that there were so many totally illiterate kids who had to learn English as a second language that if you knew your ABCs, you were practically skipped. So it was not that big a deal.
Dave’s parents, brother, and sister. Courtesy of Dave Radens
“When it came time for me to go to high school, I wanted to go to Boys High, which was an academic high school, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. After school I worked in the corner print shop as a delivery boy and as a printer’s devil—I would distribute type, which was hand-set. And you would have to put the type back in the cases. I got interested in it, and so I went to the New York School of Printing [now known as the High School of Graphic Communication Arts] in Manhattan, right around the corner from Macy’s. One of my teachers took an interest in me and said I could go further, and he introduced me to the idea of the Rochester Institute of Technology, one of two colleges—Carnegie Tech was the other one—that specialized in printing-plant management.
“When I told my father about RIT, he said, ‘No way. You get a job.’ I said, ‘I think I can make it in college and build a career.’ He wouldn’t hear of it.
“I had another friend, Vinny Costello, whose father was a longshoreman. Vinny’s dad would get us work chits. Most people had to give a percentage of their pay to get them. But Vinny and his father knew I was trying to save enough money to run away and go to college, so he gave me the chits and countersigned a secret savings account for me. I saved up about $3,000 for tuition and living expenses, and I went off to college. My parents were beside themselves.
“I went to school full-time days and worked full-time nights, and I loved it. I slept two hours a night. I was doing it my way, and it was wonderful. I loved every minute of it. But after two years I got a bit tired, and after earning my associate’s degree, I volunteered for the draft. I went down to the draft board, and they said, ‘Sorry, we met our quota. We can’t take you.’ And guess what happened? The Korean War broke out. I went back to the draft board and said, ‘Let me out.’ This time they said, ‘No can do. We got your name. We got your number.’ After meeting their quota three more times, they finally got me, and I went to Korea in the fall of 1950.
“They made me a medic because I was big and strong, and I could carry the equipment. As a medic, you were supposed to wear the cross on your helmet and on your arm, and you were not supposed to carry a weapon. Even so, I killed more people than you know the first names of.
“The weapon in Korea was the M-1 rifle, a big, heavy, cannon-like rifle that could shoot a thousand yards accurately. Which was totally useless in Korea. When the hordes came over the hilltops, you wanted an automatic weapon. You didn’t want to aim. You wanted to spray. And because I was a medic, in charge of bandaging their asses, the outfits I was attached to made sure I had an automatic weapon. To be sure, they wanted to keep me alive.
“It was something, to see the hordes come charging over a hill at you. Some of them didn’t even carry a stick. They would try to overrun you and slit throats and stab you and beat you up. Our guys were very demoralized. It was wicked.
“The soldiers would get off the ships at the big landing base at Inchon. And talk about cold. That place was cold. Civilians would be throwing rocks at us. Not because they hated us; because they were jealous. We had socks, and we had food, and they had nothing.
“One afternoon our troops were out on a mine-clearing detail, and every time they went, a medic had to go along. The kid next to me stepped on a mine, blew off one of his legs, and I got it tied off, got him on a chopper, evacuated him, and the next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital with a cast from my armpit to my knee. And I had no left knee. I was hit by the shrapnel that hit him. And I didn’t even know it. Fear and adrenaline make you tough.
“Later I watched the movie and television show M*A*S*H. That was a mockery. They made the Korean War out to be a Sunday-afternoon tea party. It was sacrilege. A lot of guys died, and those guys on TV basically were having a party.
“The strangest group I was ever exposed to was the Greek troops in Korea. They were insane. Those guys were notorious. In the middle of it all, there was a Greek celebration, the equivalent of the French Bastille Day. They had roast pigs on spits and a bottle of ouzo for every person who was invited. You drank and sang and danced until you fell. This was a whole brigade, and they arranged with the Turks to guard their perimeter so they could have this party.
“The Greeks and the Turks were enemies, but not in Korea. It was insanity. People are crazy. We still are. When the hell are we ever going to learn? Advance of progress? We just learn to kill more people in a single stroke. It peeves me still, and I grit my teeth. We know more about the other side of the planet Mars than we do about what happens in our own country. People are starving here, and we’re putting rocks from the moon in our laboratories. What craziness. How are historians going to write about this?
Dave in uniform. Courtesy of Dave Radens
“’Cause the Korean War was the most misunderstood war. We hear a whole lot about the Vietnam War. Well, the Korean War was even crazier. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing there, or why we were there. We knew these were hungry, starving people who would slit your throat for a pair of socks. We knew it and felt it and didn’t want to be there. But we didn’t know enough to rebel. Civil disobedience wasn’t fashionable until Vietnam.
“Three times I got busted from corporal down to private. Because I was a medic, I had two guys from the Korean military—what they called KATUSA, which was an acronym for Korean Attached to the U.S. Army—basically they were litter-bearers. These two guys would tell me horror stories. These people were so destitute and primitive. The way they heated their houses, they would dig a shaft under the house and would feed weeds into a fire at the bottom of the shaft, and the smoke would come up in the cottage, and the wind would blow hot ashes up into the thatched roves and set the whole village on fire. Women and children burned literally to a crisp. There was also a lot of sickness among the populace. The KATUSAs asked me if I could help their people. Sure, why not?
“I would get penicillin by the truckload, a-deuce-and-a-half-ton loads, and I distributed it as best as I could to the sick civilians. Well, the IG got wind of this and examined and explored and talked to countless people and discovered I was not selling it. If I had been selling it, I’d still be in jail. But he found I was giving it away to the natives, and he called me into his office.
Dave and his wife in mid-1960s. Courtesy of Dave Radens
“There were three levels of court-martial. The lowest level was to be busted to private and given a pass, a little leave, a vacation. I got this three times.
“The second time I was called to a scene where a half-ton truck filled with troops was hit by mortar, and a lieutenant colonel was ordering his men to load up the injured into jeeps—and by moving them, he was killing them.
“I yelled out, ‘Don’t touch them. Keep your hands off them. You’re not helping them. You’re killing them.’ The lieutenant colonel was embarrassed, and he said I didn’t follow military procedure and I wasn’t courteous. But when the adrenaline starts to flow, you don’t know what you’re doing or saying. So I got called in front of the inspector general again, and he said, ‘Private Radens? Another pass back to the trenches.’ The whole scene was nuts.
“Then came New Year’s Eve of 1952. The army would only guarantee your health for eighteen months, and I was in month fifteen, and the way it worked for clap, if you got clap three times, it was an automatic bust. And I was supposed to write up any officer who came in with the clap. Well, if an officer came into my hooch with a bottle of whiskey tucked into his trousers, I’d give him the penicillin—again, I didn’t sell it—and I wouldn’t report him. I put together a hoard of about sixty quarts of whiskey, and I had me a New Year’s Eve party. I invited everyone I knew, and we had us a party, I want to tell you. Everything was on the up and up. Anyone assigned to guard duty took his shift. Human lives were at stake, and we knew that. And we got smashed. And word got out, and I again went before the colonel—the same guy—and I was made private again and got my pass and went off, and that was that. I once again was promoted to corporal, and I got out of the army in 1952.
Dave and his wife today. Courtesy of Dave Radens
“I had received a Purple Heart for bravery, and on the ship on the way home I threw it overboard. We all threw our medals overboard. Big batches of us got up on deck. The prize emblem for an infantryman is his rifle on a blue shield, about half an inch high and three inches long. If it’s on a white shield, it means you never saw combat. But we had combat infantryman badges and Purple Hearts and whatever else we had, and we threw them overboard. Some of the men on the ship snickered and called us Commies and Pinkos, but all I could think was, Poor bastards, they don’t know any better.
“After I came home, I returned to the Rochester Institute of Technology, and I earned my bachelor’s degree. I also met Marge, and we decided to get married. She was Jewish, from Westchester, and by that time my parents had moved to the Brighton Beach area in Coney Island.
“I phoned my mother, and told her we were coming to visit. My dad insisted we be guests in their house. My home was more kosher than Marge’s house, and it was the first and only time my mother served pork chops.
“She did it to give offense. I was totally surprised, and I laughed. It was so petty and beside the point. I knew my dad wasn’t aware of what she was doing. I felt hurt for him. But my mother refused to go to our wedding, and I never saw her again. My father would come to visit us in Riverdale under the guise of going to union meetings. Once I even smuggled him off when we lived in New Hampshire, under the guise of going to a weekend union meeting. Even my grandmother, my mother’s mother, would come to visit. But I had defied my mother, and this was above and beyond. My mother saw herself as the keeper of the faith of Islam, and I was marrying a Jew. To show you the extent of my mother’s alienation, I was not allowed to go to my father’s funeral. Or my grandmother’s. My mother doesn’t know my children. My sister came of age and was quite talented musically. She got a scholarship to Juilliard. My mother was dead-set against that. I cooked up a deal with my father where my sister left home and came and lived with Marge and me and went to Juilliard. And she eventually wound up with the Moonies.”