East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's (2 page)

When he was gone I said to my parents, “He’s sick.”

“Sick? What do you mean?” my father asked.

“Did you see how he put his hand to his stomach?” I said as my parents stared at me, shook their heads. “I did. I sat near him. A few times he held his stomach, like it hurt.”

“No,” my father said shaking his head. “He can’t be sick. He wouldn’t take that job on the radio if he was sick.”

“I’ll see,” my mother said. “I’ll go see him tomorrow and talk to him.”

But the next day he was gone again when my mother knocked at his door. She tried several times that day but there was no answer. We didn’t see him again until early one Sunday morning when he came to our flat. All of us were still in bed and I ran to the door. When I opened the door, Velvel stood there, all dressed up in his wide-brimmed fedora hat, the brim down on one side. He was wearing a coat, his arms in the sleeves. He looked like someone different from the person who visited us, sat at our table, drank tea and told stories. There was a different air about him, he looked like an actor, he seemed taller than usual.

My mother was at my side, her bathrobe wrapped around her, my father followed her and both of them exclaimed, “Velvel!”

“I can’t believe it!” my mother said.

“You’re a different Velvel,” my father blurted out.

“Come in,” my mother said stepping slightly away from the door.

“I can’t,” Velvel said. “I got to be at the radio station right away. I just thought I would say hello to you.”

“Go, Velvel,” my father said. “We’ll listen to you on the radio. Good luck.”

“Yes. Sure. Of course, of course,” Velvel said.

He said his goodbye and was gone. At the door, still open, my parents looked at each other in awed stares. I watched as Velvel sprightly walked to the staircase and disappeared down the steps. Still staring at the empty staircase, I slowly shut the door.

My father was shaking his head. “Here, he’s just a neighbor, like one of us. Now, he’s an actor. I can’t believe it!”

Later, they listened to the radio while I half-listened as I did my homework. The play was on, the voices flowed from the radio, the only character we knew was Velvel was the lawyer, but the voice was different, younger, much younger, we wouldn’t have recognized it if Velvel hadn’t told us in advance. And now and then my mother and father would attempt to identify Velvel in his three other parts, but they couldn’t, they really didn’t know for sure, he used his many other voices, those we were not acquainted with. And in the play, despite all the obstacles, the heroine was reunited with her true love, all was well, the play was over.

“Can you believe it?” my mother said to my father. “Velvel’s so good, except for the lawyer, I didn’t know which of the others was him.”

“He’s an actor, a good one,” my father said. “So he knows how to act, so he’s what they tell him to be.”

Later, as I stood in the brisk fall air on the stoop of the tenement, I saw a taxi come to a stop in front of our building. The driver left the wheel, opened the door to the passenger compartment, and inside, on the seat, I could see a form huddled there.

The taxi driver said to the form inside the vehicle, “We’re here, mister.” Inside, the form groaned, I noticed the fedora hat sitting awry on the form’s head and quickly I ran to the taxi as the driver turned and said to me, “You know him?” I glanced inside and it was Velvel and I nodded to the driver. “He looks like he’s sick,” the driver said.

I reached into the passenger compartment, put my arm around Velvel, said to him, “You’re home,” and with great difficulty I helped him out of the cab. As I had begun helping him his hat had come off his head. I grabbed the hat and clutched it while I was helping Velvel. Outside, in the street, leaning heavily against me, his face pale, his hands shaking, Velvel laboriously dug into his pocket, clawed out some money, handed it to me and I paid the driver.

“Come on,” I said to him as the taxi drove away. “I’ll help you up.”

A small crowd had formed around the two of us, there was a loud buzz of conversation and someone said, “He’s sick. I’ll call an ambulance.”

“No, no,” Velvel said weakly, his eyes closed. “Let me go upstairs. I want to go up.”

Two men came to help me, we practically carried Velvel to his flat. He was moaning intermittently as we crawled up the stairs. At Velvel’s door, the three of us who had helped him stopped to catch our breaths and Velvel turned slowly to me, his eyes open now and said weakly, “Well, how was it, the
shpiel,
the play?”

“My mother and father loved it. They said it was wonderful,

just wonderful,” I replied.

He attempted a smile. “Good,” he said, breathing heavily, and almost whispering, said, “I wanted it to be good.”

 ORCHARD STREET

He was twelve years old and he needed a new shirt and tie for the holidays. He himself had saved the money to buy the shirt, he had diligently, over weeks and weeks, saved up thirty cents, twenty-five cents which would go towards the purchase of a tie. He turned from Delancey Street into Orchard Street, looking uptown to the next cross street, Rivington, and below that to Stanton Street. Both sides of the street were lined with pushcarts, each cart an open table on two large wagon wheels at its rear, the back end held two curved wooden handles for pushing the cart when the day was done and the cart trundled back to its stable.

These carts were filled with merchandise of all description, uncounted items; in the street from Delancey to Rivington were those that sold items of clothing, shirts, sweaters, ties, leather goods, small articles of dress for women, shoes, used articles, some housewares. Below Rivington Street towards Stanton Street, then down further to East Houston Street, the character of merchandise, imperceptibly at first, began to change, towels, linens, fruits, vegetables, items of canned goods. And all over the streets there was the unabated noise, the yells of the pushcart peddlers shouting out their wares, their prices.

“I got the best shirts!” a man’s voice blasted out urging the passersby to his pushcart. “Bargains! Bargains!”

“Intervesch!”
yelled another,
“Fahr de menner! Koift! Zaynor! Koift!”
And in accented English, “Underwear! For men! Look! Look! Buy!”

Across the teeming sidewalks on both sides of the street were the stores, most of them selling more substantial merchandise, blankets, leather jackets, household goods. Away from the sidewalks, away from the pushcarts, was a flowing mass of humanity which moved in both directions, jostling, looking, shopping, talking, all of it a massive hive of noise.

On the street itself, a man darted between people. Strapped to his back was a large metal tank, a piped faucet was strung around the lower part of his chest. He boomed out,
“Kvass! Kvass!
Drink a
kvass!
Two cents! Two cents!”

The boy had heard that
kvass
was a Russian drink of some sort, made of stale bread and sugar and water, slightly fermented in some fashion. He had never drunk it, he didn’t know what its taste was. Somebody now stopped for a drink of
kvass,
the vendor quickly filled a glass with liquid from the tank, he had already taken the two cents, and as he waited for the glass to be returned by the customer, his eyes darted and he shouted out,
“Kvass!
Buy a drink!”

The boy walked on, shoving his way through the crowd. It was a sunny day, still early spring, a hint of winter remained in the chill in the air. Women, their shopping bags looped around their arms, still wore their winter coats. One of them at the edge of a pushcart was wrapping a corset across her coated body to see if it would fit. Satisfied that it would, she folded it lengthwise and said to the peddler, a woman, “The gorset, how much?”

The vendor pointed to a wooden sign nailed to the side of the pushcart and said, “A dollar.”

“What?” the other woman said. “A dollar? It’s a used one. That’s too much. No.”

“Used, schmused,” the peddler said. “It’s a good gorset, no? It’s a bargain. New, it cost—”

“I’ll give you fifty cents,” the other woman said.

“Fifty cents?” the peddler said incredulously, her voice rising. “What do I do here, stay here in the heat and the cold for nothing? Do I work for nothing?” She was studying the other woman’s face and now said in a normal tone of voice, “All right, all right. For you, eighty-five cents.”

“I’ll give you sixty-five. Not a penny more.”

“No, no,” the peddler said. “I can’t do it, I can’t. Go,” she said. “Go someplace else, buy yourself a gorset someplace else. Go. See what they’ll charge you. Go. Go in good health.”

The other woman had turned to leave but now she stopped, turned back and said with a heavy sigh, “Seventy-five cents. I can’t pay no more than that. Make it seventy-five cents.”

The peddler stared at the woman’s face for a moment. Then she said as she dropped her hands helplessly to her sides, “All right. Just for you.” Her face began to smile as she took the carefully counted coins from her customer and she said in a conspiratorial tone of voice, “Just for you. But you don’t tell nobody else. It’s just for you, you hear?” She raised her forefinger, waggled it in front of both of their faces and said, “Just for you.”

The boy walked on. There was a pushcart spread with bric-a-brac, used items, some drinking glasses that didn’t match, a few orange Waterman fountain pens, heaps of dishes, assorted single pieces of silverware, false teeth, eyeglasses, some children’s’ toys, metal-handled holders for containing tall glasses for hot tea, small cast-offs of all kinds, forgotten mementos of peoples’ lives. Someone was testing a pair of metal-rimmed spectacles, holding the eyeglasses in front of that day’s edition of the Jewish newspaper, the “Forward.”

The boy, fingering the three dimes in his pocket, stopped before a pushcart where ties were being sold. On the cart, between the piece of wood nailed to each end of it, was strung a display of ties that fluttered and flapped in the wind. On the flat bed of the cart itself, divided into three sections, was a display of ties, each section having a hand-lettered sign, one 25cents, another 39 cents, the last 50 cents. The boy stared at the 25 cent section.

He knew he couldn’t buy any of those others, those high prices were much too much, what was the use? He picked up a tie, held it, examined its back to see whether its inner strip of white reinforced cloth showed. He suddenly decided he didn’t want that tie, it had lost its appeal to him. He put it down and picked up another one.

“Nice ties, good ties,” the peddler, a man, said to him. “You can’t buy a better one for the price. My price is the best. You want that one?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said. “I’m looking.”

“So look around in good health,” the man said. “Twenty-five cents, it’s a real bargain, I can tell you.”

The man busied himself with another customer, all the while his eyes darting to all those who had stopped at his pushcart, sensing which one to approach to clinch a sale. He was shouting out in a singsong chant, “Ties! Cheap! Get your ties here for
yontiff,
the holidays. Cheap!”

The boy then saw the tie, its fabric dappled in many colors. That was what he had seen, a tie colored in similar fashion, not exactly the same, but similar, in Phil Kronfeld’s window of his haberdashery store on Delancey Street, a few blocks from the Bowery, where it was said the gangsters bought their clothing. So it had been priced at $2.95 in the window, so what? the boy asked himself. So they got the money, they can afford it, I can’t. He stared down at the tie in his hand, held it up against his shirt and looked down at it. It was the current style, he wanted it.

The peddler had appeared at his side and was saying, “You like it? Take it. For twenty-five cents it’s a real bargain. It sells for a dollar, at least, in the stores. Go, look. You’ll see.”

“I’ll take it,” the boy said. Reaching into his pocket, firmly grasping the three dimes, he gave them to the man along with the tie. The man folded the tie with an expert flip, placed it in a small bag, gave it to the boy, and digging into his short money apron came up with a nickel and gave it to the boy.

As the boy took the coin, the man said, “Go in good health,
boychick.”

The boy nodded. Clutching the bag he turned back towards Delancey Street, weaving and jostling through the crowd. As he passed the pushcart with the bric-a-brac, he glanced at the false teeth lying there. Who bought them? he asked himself. The woman at the corset pushcart was shouting out her wares in a loud voice, a shirt vendor’s shout mixed with hers.

Outside, some of the stores displayed items for sale, some on wooden racks, or display bins, or hung from one inch by two-inch lengths of wood extending from their doorways. A suede jacket slowly billowing in the breeze caught the boy’s eye, but he looked away. It was no use, he couldn’t buy it. Not now. Maybe some day... Some day...

He reached Delancey Street and turned left towards the Williamsburgh Bridge. As he walked, the noise of Orchard Street began to diminish and fade. He went to Essex Street, where there on the corner, the large store open above counter level to the sidewalk, was Levy’s. Fingering the nickel in his pocket he walked to the counter and said to the server behind it, “A hot dog and a root beer.”

The young man behind the counter served him the hot dog flavored with a swipe of mustard and a layer of sauerkraut. The heavy glass stein of root beer appeared. The boy placed his nickel on the counter top, picked up the hot dog and bit into it. As he ate, he looked down the street, the wide middle of Delancey Street running into the Williamsburgh Bridge, the left and right side lanes of the street running down and merging beneath the rise of the structure.

The boy took a long sip of the sweet foamy root beer. Ah-h! He took another bite of the hot dog.

Well, anyway, he thought as he ate, still clutching the small bag with the tie, I didn’t get a shirt, but I got something for the holidays. Not like last year when I got nothing at all.