The Tin Horse: A Novel (26 page)

As Aunt Sonya said, “Hershel Chafkin gets himself from Kiev to Los Angeles, breaks his back pushing a cart and selling vegetables door-to-door, and finally the man saves enough to start his own store so that when he drops dead of angina at forty-eight he can leave his beloved son a good business … and Eddie wants to go be a farmer in Palestine?”

I usually tuned out Sonya, who dripped scorn on virtually anyone of her acquaintance who wasn’t within hearing. But Papa, who prided himself on his objectivity, also got heated on the subject of Eddie’s Zionism. “The ‘Promised Land,’ that’s the gift Eddie’s father gave him by letting him be born in America,” Papa said. “He should be grateful to be an American citizen. What if Franklin D. Roosevelt came to Boyle Heights and saw those posters? What would he think, that Jews aren’t loyal Americans?” At least, Papa said, it was a relief that few people felt the way Eddie did; he’d heard that the Zionist Organization of America, to which Eddie belonged, had no more than fifty members in all of Los Angeles.

All of the adults had an opinion, and all of them were negative. Mollie—who wrote to me from the various cities where the union sent her—considered Zionism a reactionary movement because it made Jewish workers identify as Jews rather than uniting with workers of all faiths.

Zayde, too, despite occasional sentimental references to Eretz Yisrael, had no desire to actually go there.

So I was stunned, one day in April of 1935, when Danny was complaining as usual about working for Eddie, and I mentioned the ridiculous Zionist posters—and Danny jumped down my throat.

“What’s so ridiculous about a Jewish homeland?” he shot at me.

“We have it a lot better here. In Palestine, it’s all swamps with malaria,” I said, parroting comments I’d heard for years.

“What if you were in Germany?”

“You think Eddie Chafkin’s a fool. How come you sound just like him?” I said, automatically bristling against Danny’s fourteen-year-old arrogance—and because I, at fourteen, bristled at everything. Either that, or I fought humiliating tears.

And I didn’t know what to think about Germany. Adolf Hitler had become chancellor two years earlier, and he’d done crazy things, like firing Jewish government officials, boycotting Jewish businesses, even staging public burnings of books by Jewish authors. But that was just it: Hitler was crazy, and when the adults talked about him, the prevailing opinion was that the craziness would soon, like the bonfires of books, burn itself out.

“Shouldn’t the German Jews be allowed to go to Palestine?” Danny said.

“If they want to, sure. But I bet they’d rather come to America.”

“Wake up, Elaine! Haven’t you seen For Rent signs in Los Angeles that say ‘No Jews or Dogs Allowed’? You know how many hospitals here don’t allow Jewish doctors to practice?”

“Do
you
want to go to Palestine?”

“I … yes.”

I seized on his flicker of hesitation. “You want to be a farmer?”

“I want to live someplace where I don’t have to apologize for being a Jew. Where a Jew can be free and safe and proud of who he is.”

“That’s America!”

America, not Palestine, was where our relatives from Romania wanted to come—and they wanted it desperately. The world might be keeping nervous eyes fixed on Germany, but things had gotten every bit as bad for Jews in Mama’s native country, where two of her brothers and two sisters still lived, as did most of their children and a growing number of grandchildren. In letters that made Mama weep, they wrote about the harsh restrictions on Jewish employment and mentioned a popular political party that actually stated in its platform, “The sole possible solution to the kike problem is the elimination of the kikes.” One of my uncles was kicked
and punched in the street by uniformed thugs called the Iron Guards. A girl cousin escaped the Iron Guards by diving into a pile of trash, and she had to stay there for three hours until she felt it was finally safe to emerge from her hiding place. Mama and the Chicago relatives had agreed that each of them would file papers with the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society to sponsor one Romanian family member to come live with them—a young person, unmarried and healthy enough to take any kind of job. Mama and Papa had applied to sponsor the son of one of Mama’s brothers, a boy named Ivan who was two years older than me.

“The point is,” I told Danny, “they don’t want to go to Palestine, they want to come to America!”

I made this point often, since Danny and I had the same argument again and again. And he always replied, “Jews from Romania, you think America’s going to let them in? Jews need a place where, if they say they want to come, they’re in.”

Danny, I suppose, wouldn’t let the subject drop because Zionism became a mission for him. He got involved in the Boyle Heights chapter of Habonim, a Zionist youth group, and he was constantly after me to join. And I railed against Danny’s Zionism because I experienced it as a betrayal. I was the all-American girl that Papa had raised me to be, and I felt free and safe and proud living in the United States. How could Danny reject that? How could he feel more loyal to some abstract “Jewish people” than to America? I battled Danny over Zionism as if I were defending the law of gravity and the world would fly apart if I lost. And I battled well. Mollie had been the first to see the fighter in me, and she’d been right. I was actually developing a taste for combat, and Danny, persuasive and impassioned, made an ideal adversary.

There was another reason I persisted in these debates: to hang on to my friendship with Danny now that we’d entered the confusing terrain of adolescence. Instead of playing together in the park the way we’d done as kids, now he invited me to Habonim programs; I grumbled but went anyway, and we argued afterward. Just the two of us, since Barbara refused to have anything to do with Zionism. Which didn’t seem to diminish her attractiveness to Danny. My sister and Danny found another way to preserve their childhood connection: they became sweethearts.

At first, when we got into our teens and there started to be dances and boy-girl parties, Danny asked both Barbara and me to dance, to the extent that he or any of the boys got on the dance floor at all. Then one night, the summer after we’d turned fourteen, everything changed. At a dance at one of the community centers, I was chatting with friends, and I saw Barbara come in from outside. Danny was right behind her. Both of them looked flushed, and they were holding hands. He put his arm around her, and they wove through the crowd to the refreshment table, never losing contact. As he filled two glasses of punch, she kept her hand on his arm.

I didn’t know for sure what I’d observed, or maybe I just refused to accept it. But over the next few weeks, whenever a group of us went to the movies, Barbara and Danny sat next to each other; I’d glance from the screen and see that his arm had slipped around her shoulders. Then they had their first real “date,” with Danny picking her up at the house. When she returned that night and came into the bedroom we shared (she’d joined me in the room off the kitchen after Mollie left), I feigned sleep.

Just as I’d loved Danny Berlov from the first time I met him, I had always noticed a special energy between him and my sister, a charge I would recognize when I saw the first Tracy-Hepburn movies in the 1940s. As a child, I had moments of hurt when I sensed that intimate friction between them. Those childhood pricks of distress were nothing, though, to the hideous toad that now squatted inside me, spewing out misery and envy, along with hatred toward myself, for not being the one Danny had chosen.

Barbara had movie dates with Danny, evening walks, times when they disappeared from a party for half an hour and came back smiling mysteriously. I maintained my closeness to him by having fights over Zionism.

It was after a Habonim lecture, one muggy night the following August, that Danny and I took our argument to the dark playground of our old elementary school. He had snuck a Schlitz beer and a handful of Chesterfields from Chafkin’s. Sitting on the ground, my back against the school building, I smoked—which I enjoyed despite the harshness in my throat—and forced myself to sip the warm, nasty-tasting beer from the bottle that we passed back and forth.

“You don’t like it, do you?” he said after he’d taken a swig and was about to hand the bottle to me.

“Yes, I do.”

“Think I’ll finish it myself.” He raised the beer to his lips.

“No fair!”

I reached for the bottle. He grabbed my wrist, then pulled me closer and kissed me. It was a rough kiss—and awkward, my glasses jamming into his forehead, and beer splashing onto my hand.

I jerked back. “What was that for?”

“Guess I figured you should have your first kiss.”

“That’s generous of you. But I’ve been kissed, thank you.”

“By Fred the dwarf?” he cracked. So he’d noticed one of the two times I’d gone off at a party with Fred Nieman, a brainy and witty boy who was cursed with being short and baby-faced. Not like Danny, who followed a regimen of push-ups and calisthenics he’d learned from the bodybuilders at the beach. Danny was no more than medium height, but he was muscular and tough, a boy the school bullies avoided.

“Fred’s not a dwarf,” I said. “And he kisses better than you do.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” I tossed my head.

Danny’s kisses began softly, like Fred’s. But they were also teasing, and he didn’t just kiss my mouth; his lips touched my cheeks and eyelids and—who knew it could be such a thrilling place?—the hollow of my throat. With Fred, I had watched myself being kissed. Danny, I kissed back. He eased me from sitting against the building to half-lying on the ground, and something inside me melted.…

“No!” I tried to twist away, but he had me pinned. All that bodybuilding he’d done, he was strong. “Danny, no!”

He moved then, enough that I could turn to the side, but kept his arms around me. “Just a little more?”

“We can’t do this.” I pulled away. He didn’t stop me.

“Right. Sorry, I shouldn’t have.… You won’t tell, will you?” he added as we stood and smoothed our clothes.

I knew whom he didn’t want me to tell, and I briefly, intensely, hated him. “What kind of person do you think I am?”

“Smoke?” He held out a cigarette.

“No … Okay.” Smoking offered a lull in which my hectic cheeks could stop burning, so I could face Barbara when I walked in the door.

As we smoked in silence, it occurred to me that I might be able to avoid seeing Barbara tonight. If I got home ahead of her I could use my standard ploy, pretending to be asleep, when she came in from spending the evening with the Diamonds, her club of eight girls who gathered at one another’s homes, played big-band music on the radio, and danced. I joined them sometimes when they came to our house—Barbara had to include me—but I didn’t fit in with the Diamonds, pretty, socially adept girls who acted in school plays, took “modern dance” classes, and were popular with boys.

I had my own club with Lucy Meringoff, Jane Klass, and Ann Charney. All four of us were great readers—hence our official name, the Brontë Sisters—and had been told ever since grade school that if we fulfilled our early academic promise, we might get college scholarships. Though we privately made fun of our reputations by calling ourselves the Plain Brains, our get-togethers were often study sessions—we thirsted for those scholarships—and we cultivated a smart, ironic detachment from the melodrama of high school romance.

Irony was an attitude I did my best to summon as I smoked after necking with Danny. It had a lot of competition. My body thrummed with sheer physical excitement, and my emotions ricocheted from guilt at betraying Barbara to rage and shame at the suspicion that Danny was using me. Maybe I was the one using him, my ironic self suggested, but without much success. (Irony would prove to be an ally throughout my life, but in those days I was an amateur at irony.) And on top of all that, I couldn’t help it—I felt hope. Even the Plain Brains sometimes turned on the radio and swayed together with our eyes closed, imagining we were being whirled across a ballroom by Fred Astaire or Clark Gable. Or Danny Berlov.

“Walk you home?” Danny tossed the butt of his cigarette onto the playground, and the last shreds of tobacco glowed, then went dark.

“No, that’s okay.”

What if, I had dreamed, I were the sister Danny really loved? Barbara was lively and fun, and she was somehow born knowing how to flirt—a skill that, when I attempted it, made me feel like a giggling half-wit—and
what boy wouldn’t want to date a girl like that? But I had heard the Yiddish term
bashert
, the idea of two people destined for each other; when Danny was ready to get serious, I’d thought, would he choose Barbara, or would he pick his
bashert
, me?
Could he have kissed me like he just did if he didn’t love me?
Coming home, I nearly danced down the street.

Audrey must have been watching for me, because when I was two houses away, she burst through the door and flung herself at me, sobbing. “Where were you? Where were you?”

“Habonim. What’s wrong?”

“Zayde. They said you’d be home right away, and—”

I grabbed her shoulders. “What happened to Zayde?”

“He’s in the hospital.”

All I could get out of Audrey was that Uncle Leo had called and said Zayde was sick, and Mama and Papa had rushed to the hospital. They’d told Audrey to call Barbara at her friend’s house and said I’d be home any minute—

“But you weren’t!” Audrey cried. “And I tried and tried to call Barbara, but the line’s busy.”

Giving up on learning anything more from Audrey, I phoned Leo and Sonya’s. My cousin Stan, now twelve and as sober as his father, reported that Zayde had been sitting listening to the radio, and suddenly he cried out and lost consciousness. Sonya and Leo couldn’t revive him, and they’d called an ambulance. “The ambulance men think it’s a stroke,” Stan said.

I didn’t need to ask which hospital Zayde had been taken to.
The
Boyle Heights hospital was the Seventh-day Adventist White Memorial, where my sisters and I had been born. It was close enough that I could walk there, but Audrey would have a fit if I left. Oh, no, poor Audrey! Having satisfied my urgent need to find out what had happened, I realized Audrey was ashen and trembling.