Son of a Smaller Hero (3 page)

When Melech Adler left the room after the meeting the others turned swiftly frivolous, giddy, like children running out to play after a great storm has passed.

Melech Adler was a short, swarthy man with smouldering black eyes and a greying grubby beard. All his gestures were quick and emphatic, as though he did not mean to waste any movements. He was strong with long, muscular arms and sturdy legs and nothing flabby about him. Even when he laughed with his grandchildren his eyes stayed solemn, watching them for any show of disrespect. He put some of his money in the bank, but apparently he had hidden the rest. Nobody knew where. Wolf was certain he had concealed it in the padlocked box which was kept in the office safe. He thought so because Melech Adler never took the box out of the safe unless he was alone and the office door was locked.

Melech Adler, who was the son of a scribe, was full of anger after the meeting. He stood in the kitchen doorway, watching his wife bake raisin buns. He saw the hairs on her face and the wrinkles under her eyes.

“Noah’s moved away.”

Mrs. Adler shuffled past him in her slippers, taking loneliness for granted and assuming the drudgery of her chores as a woman’s proper legacy, studying her husband solemnly with her laconic eyes. She pinched a dollar weekly from the grocery money and was paying up on the sly for a lot in the Mount Carmel Cemetery. She did not bother too much about most problems. Melech will know, she thought.

“Are you not well, Melech?”

“I am well. But –” He broke off, and began to tug at his beard. Several hairs came out. He stared at them in his hand. “I work hard. I work hard for them. I am not a thief. I work hard.”

“You work hard.”

“He should respect me.” Melech Adler sat down. “Your boy Max is waiting that if I should die he can run the factory on Saturday. Children I got. The youngest is a champion from de pool players and my first-born – Wolf – has a head like an I-don’t-know-what. I don’t understand what is? It used to be a man worked like a son-of-a-bitch but the children had plenty respect. Look at me, I’m a crook? All I ask is what is comink to me by right. Why should Noah move away from us? That boy will end up bad and that’s a fact. He’s got things comink to him he thinks. Such a squirt will tell me what I should and what I shouldn’t. If Wolf was half a man he’d pull him down the pants and give him one-two-three wid a strap. What for a men do they make in Canada? Sons they make, not fathers. Gimme, gimme, gimme. You know what my paw gaime. A prayer shawl. Phylacteries. But I’ll tell you plain we had a respect that was respect. Wolf says I should make him by me a partner. Why? ‘I’m your son.’ That’s a reason! Leah puts him ideas in the head. She wears de pants. Why is? I don’t pray? I don’t work hard?”

“We are old. This ain’t our country, Melech. Here they grow away from us.”

“So now you are telling me something I don’t know.
This is my house and I am the boss
. First, last, and always. The head of de family is de fodder. We are old – a new story. If I should die what would happen wid Ida? We are old. I pick up the paper to read so what is? – A friend is – has passed away. Funerals with funerals. Remember, Jenny, the weddings that used to be?”

“I remember.”

“And the children one after the other? Did
you
go to the hospital?”

“No.”

“No, is right.”

“It is different now. The girls don’t listen. I found for Ida a boy – remember Yidel Gold? Dis was a boy. So what happens? She don’t like it he got a beard. Her fodder hasn’t got no beard? She says it ain’t de modern ting I should pick her out a husband. But if not me – who? And she’s no prize package, let me tell you. So. So she’ll do widdout. She thinks I don’t know what for a business they make at their dances. She thinks …

“What? From this day no more dancing. Finished. No dancing, no movies. She stays every night in the house by us and quick up to bed at eleven o’clock.”

Jenny Adler looked down at the dough she was kneading. It felt good and pliant in her hands. She was a thin woman with a narrow face. Her dense black hair was done up in a bun. On many a summer night in the old days, in the good days, he had used to twine it for her whilst she hummed tunes for him. She had borne him thirteen children, three of whom had died in their infancy. She enjoyed making raisin buns for her children to take away on Sundays. They adored her buns. So did the grandchildren. She had no money or wisdom to offer them, so when they were in trouble she baked them extra buns. She did not want Melech to alienate her from the children. He turned the other way when she undressed herself. Or, if he looked at all, his eyes were sorrowful. She wished secretly that he would touch her sometimes. Or look at her lovingly. He had used to do that.

“No, Melech. Don’t be too strict again.”

“Why? Didn’t I teach Shloime a lesson? One-two-three with the belt and no more poolrooms until two in the morning. One Noah is plenty.”

“You can’t do that here, Melech. A different country. When we got married I didn’t know from no fridges and no washing-machines or anything. Today a girl won’t get married without. We are old. They are even ashamed for us.”

“Who? Who is ashamed?”

“Never mind.”

“Noah? Noah said something?”

“Noah, if you don’t mind, is better than all the rest put together. All right, he moved. Who knows what for? But when he comes in the house he talks a Yiddish word. He brings flowers. He …”

“That boy he breaks my – Jenny, what did I do him? I wanted one of them at least should be a rabbi. An honour in the family. Of all of them he is the only one I offered money. So what does he say? No. No money. So Noah will tell me what to do. Me and him we are men together.
I am his grandfather, I tell you
. I don’t understand what is.”

Noah woke suddenly and looked at his watch. 5:15. The meeting is probably over by now, he thought. His room was downtown. Downtown usually means St. Catherine Street. But, more specifically, downtown Montreal is shaped like a rectangle. It is bordered on the west by Atwater Avenue and on the east by St. Lawrence Boulevard. The northern border is Sherbrooke Street, and the southern Craig Street. This rectangle, which immediately suggests a colossal pinball machine, abounds in frantic diversions and a squalor that glitters. Running plunk down the middle of it, shimmering, going from east to west and being the most important alley of all, comes St. Catherine Street. Every ten seconds or so somebody drops a nickel in the slot, pulls the trigger, and zoom goes a streetcar or seventy cars or three hundred pedestrians down the alley.

Noah’s room was on Dorchester Street, a block away from St. Catherine Street. On a summer evening the men and women who live on Dorchester Street sit outside on the steps sipping beer and smoking. Sometimes they bring a portable radio or a gramophone out with them and listen to dance music. There’s a grocery store at nearly every corner and most of them have big neon signs which wink the word
BEER
at you on and off in big red or green letters.
The rooming-houses vary. They range all the way from a place where you can take your girl for the night to tourist hotels. The tourist hotels usually have an American flag in the window. That, and a sign which says:

The street isn’t too clean. The police often raid the more dilapidated rooming-houses looking for girls who take dope or men who drink too much. Sometimes they find suicides. Sometimes people complain about the police raids or the dirt. They write letters to the editor of
The Montreal Star
signed “Disgusted” or “Mother of Five.” But most of the people don’t mind the dirt too much. They are always planning to move away.

Noah got up. The couple in the room opposite his were quarrelling.

“If I wanna drink I drink. This is a free country. I pay taxes.”

“When you work, you mean. You pay taxes when you work.”

The old man, he thought, knows by now that I’m not coming. My mother, lonely in her kitchen chair, lonely even on a crowded streetcar, sits among them defiantly, her white, chapped hands folded on her lap and her swollen eyes outstaring them. My father dares not think what is in his mind. He stares at the floor, or at a chair, or at anything that is not his enemy. The others are surely pleased. This week’s anger, today’s invective, is not against them. Everybody is free to join in. Everybody except her.
It is necessary, at times, to hurt others. But I’m hurting her very much. I’d better be right
.

The room began to cool, and the chunk of sky that showed through the window was greying. Noah sat down on the windowsill and remembered that evening, a Friday evening long ago, at the hall of the local youth group. The speaker, a messenger from Israel,
had been an angry Polish Jew with bad memories and piercing eyes. He took off his jacket, Noah remembered, and spoke with one foot propped up on a chair, stopping every now and then to wipe his forehead.

“Look at me and think: How much can I do for Israel? I’ll tell you how much.
Not enough
. Do you know why? Because you are Jews, and that’s a crime in this world.”

The audience was made up of boys and girls not yet twenty. Children of an aspiring working class. Enthusiasts. Girls without lipstick and boys with bold notions of how they were going to fix their tormentors. Pictures of the leaders hung on the walls. Herzl, Weizmann, Ben Gurion. A map of Eretz had been pinned up on the window behind the speaker and a huge white-and-blue flag hung on the opposite wall.

“For the first time in two thousand years we are being given the chance to die like men. Only the ones who pray will stay home. Do you know them? The ones who pray.… If the Germans murder a thousand they go to the synagogue. If the Germans murder two thousand they hold a special service. If the Germans murder ten thousand they pray all day and all night. But they are noble, these men who pray. They don’t kill. The Messiah will lead
them
to Eretz. (Those who are not yet burnt.) But the Messiah won’t lead
you
to Eretz. The Tommies only make way for bullets. Arabs aren’t orthodox. But they go down like flies before a machine-gun.”

The speaker seized his crowd, held them with his heated eyes and shook them in his clenched fists. They watched. Laughing when he laughed, cursing when he cursed, glaring when he glared. He hated, and they hated right back.

“Worse even than the Germans are the ones who think they can become of them by shortening their names or their noses. Have you seen them? They say that anti-Semitism isn’t directed against them. It is directed against the obvious ones.
They
go to good schools. Even when the Gestapo broke into their houses it wasn’t their fault.
It was
your
fault. You’re the ones with accents. Big noses. Millions in the bank.”

Noah watched. He looked into the wanting eyes of his friends. Duddie Felder, Gitel Shub, Gas Weiner, Faigie Rosenblatt, Yidel Kogan, Zalman Seigler, Hoppie Drazen. He looked, and they slipped away from him. Strangers in a smoky room. He turned to the speaker. A monkey-faced man with burning eyes. The leaders. Old men on fading paper. A magnificent black beard, a balding head, a swirl of white hair. Strangers. Old men.

All eyes were on the speaker. Noah touched his forehead, his hair was soaking wet. He had an idea of what was slipping away and gripping his hands together he tried to hold on. We’re all of us Jews in this room, he thought. But a voice came back: All Jews and all strangers. He forced the conventional anguishes on himself. Quotas, Cyprus, Eretz, gas chambers. Gritting his teeth, he turned askingly to the speaker, demanding that he too be saved.

“Do you know what they are saying in the Foreign Office? The Jews are mad dogs. That’s true, you know. Poor Mr. Bevin. Poor Mr. Churchill. The sheep have turned into dogs. Funny, isn’t it? They want land. Aren’t you amazed? I am. Poor Mr. Bevin. We were all right when we fought for him on the desert. Heroes when we died in the Warsaw ghetto. Now they’ll read a new chapter.…”

That’s when Noah began to laugh. Yidel Kogan poked him hard and Noah sobered up briefly. He stared at his friend, the stranger. We used to play ball together in Outremont Park, he thought. But Yidel could no longer be reached. He had already been committed to memory.

The speaker banged his fist down on the table conclusively. The deal had been made. The man, orphaned by a furnace, and swindled by memory, had drained away the innocence of others. From now on explanations, curiosity, intelligence, could be done without. The enemy, so long elusive, had been shaped.

“Comrades, let us join in and sing.”

They came to their feet fast, answering him in full voices. Then they joined hands for the folk-dances. In the intense heat of the horah they seemed to shed their individuality like unwanted skins, trading in anguish and abandoning freedom for membership.

“Israel lives! Israel lives! Israel lives!”

Clammy hands, lolloping breasts. Arm in arm, locked in a circle ferociously, to and fro, this way, that way, they went, blurring themselves. One whoop between them, two took eyes, a shared soul.

“Who am I?”

“YISROAL.”

“All of us?”

“YISRO-YISRO-YISROAL.”

Noah smoked. He thought it obscene, ugly, to be watching but not taking part. Several times he started towards the dancers, but each time he turned back embarrassed. Finally, desperately, he tried to break into the circle. But they were whirling past too fast, and he was spun back and away from them defiantly, like a counterfeit coin from a cashier. The voices of strangers shouting, the boots of strangers trampling the floor. He watched, they danced. He slipped out and walked up to Park Avenue, where there were always crowds. Many of the coldly-lit store windows had been done up enticingly. He stopped for a long time in front of the 5¢ to $1.00 store, where he read the luncheon menu and the price tags on toys and an appeal for the blind. Then, working his way towards Bernard Street, he looked at lingerie, shoes, and hardware. Nobody he knew was in the Park Bowling Alley, but there were several free tables, so he played two games of snooker with a stranger. Upstairs, he watched them bowl. The loud clacking of the balls and the tumbling pins had a restful effect on him. Most of the bowlers were young couples. Several of the girls were pretty and when they ran up the alley their buttocks strained against their skirts. Outside, the snow came floating down in big lumps. He wandered back absently to the hall. The light from the window made a cold yellow block on the snow. From where he
stood he could see the crepe-paper decorations around the light bulbs and a part of Theodore Herzl’s head.…