Profusely Illustrated

1

Portrait of the Old Lefty as a Young Lefty

I had the good luck to have a warm, upbeat, beautiful mother who told me, when I was twelve, that I really looked better in eyeglasses, and that I was really very bright, though my teachers thought otherwise. She gave me unconditional love, and as a result I went to her with all my worries and insecurities, even when I was already a man. Here’s an example. I was twenty-three, and had finally succeeded in getting a girl into bed for the first time—bear in mind that this was the 1950s, not the ’60s—but I had failed in that crucial rite of passage. I was distraught. I told Mom, and after giving it a moment’s thought, she said:

I knew from seeing those Andy Hardy movies that the proper person a son should go to when such a calamity happens was his father. But my father was no Judge Hardy, and we didn’t live in a spacious Victorian house on a tree-lined street in a town called Carvel, somewhere in the Midwest. We lived in a fifth-floor walk-up in the Bronx, and there wasn’t a room suitable for a “man-to-man talk.” Furthermore, my father, Morris Schwartz, was not a justice of the court. He was a door-to-door salesman, and far from being wise and benevolent, he was stupid, insensitive, grouchy, mean-spirited, fault-finding, and a racist. Let me also add that he made slurping sounds when he ate soup and always had cigarette ashes on his jacket.

People meeting my parents for the first time surely asked themselves, “Why do you suppose she married him?” I wondered the same thing. Why did tall, beautiful, Rebecca Kleinberg marry short, jug-eared Morris Schwartz? (If you’re confused because my father’s surname is different from mine, I legally changed it to Sorel the moment—the second—I got a steady job.) Whatever reason Mom had for marrying him, I wished he would just somehow disappear. I clearly remember when I was eight or nine, being with him on a nearly empty subway platform, and thinking that, if only that one woman wasn’t standing there, I could push him in front of the oncoming train, and no one would see me doing it. Of course, when I grew older, I realized how wrong that would have been. The motorman would have seen me.

Clearly, I was going to be stuck with him until I could find work and move out. Yet I couldn’t stop myself from asking Yetta, the youngest of Mom’s four sisters, “Why did Mom marry him?” She was as flummoxed as everyone else. Even Aunt Jeanette, the college graduate in the family, who always had a Freudian explanation for everything, couldn’t come up with a reason. She assured me that Papa and Mama Kleinberg had begged Rebecca not to marry him. And Mom wasn’t pregnant. I was born two years after they married in 1927.

Of course, I couldn’t flat out ask my mother, “Why the hell did you marry him?” But when I was in my teens I thought I might get a clue to the answer by asking Mom how she and Morris met. Here, pretty much, is what she told me.

“I was sixteen when I heard about a job in a ladies hat factory on Houston Street. This was a few months after Mama and my sisters and I arrived in America from Romania in 1923. Papa was already here. He had come earlier and sent for us as soon as he had saved enough money to bring us over. Papa had rented a walk-up apartment for us just above the Third Avenue El in the Bronx. It was nowhere near Houston Street, so I asked Papa for carfare. He told me I was too young to work, but I insisted that I wanted to work, and so he gave me three nickels. Two were for the subway that would take me to the factory and home, and one was for lunch.

“I still hadn’t learned about the ins and outs of the subway, and I got so lost that I had to use my second nickel to get the right train to Houston Street. I made it there and told the man who did the hiring that I had come for a job. When he heard my English, he began speaking to me in Yiddish. He asked if I wanted to work by hand or by machine. I knew that machine operators made more than trimmers, so I said, ‘Machine,’ and he brought me over to this long table with dozens of sewing machines, all operated by men. Women didn’t want to work on machines, so the men weren’t friendly at first, but by lunchtime I was making straw hats almost as fast as they did. When the bell rang for lunch, the men left, but I had to save my last nickel to get home. While I sat at my sewing machine, one of the hat blockers came over and asked why I wasn’t going out. When I explained, he said he’d lend me the money for lunch and take me to the Automat. And that blocker, Eddie, was your father.”

Mom may have suspected that my question about how they met was really “Why did you marry him?” After telling me about the borrowed nickel, she added that Morris had come to America five years before she had, and so in those early days of their “keeping company” he spoke English better than she did. Was she saying that she mistook him for being educated? I said nothing. Then she murmured, “He told me he would kill himself if I didn’t marry him.”

What?!! She married him out of pity? Why couldn’t she give me an explanation that made sense? I could imagine a few. Who wouldn’t want to leave a bedroom that you had to share with your four sisters? But Yetta had told me that Rebecca had other suitors, and one was rich. Why didn’t she marry him? Was Mom afraid that a rich man would force her into a life of subservience to a husband, like the Jewish women in her shtetl in Romania? Was marrying a crazy man who threatened suicide preferable to a rich man who would tell her what to do?

Above is a reasonable facsimile of my parents’ wedding picture. I know it looks as though Morris is levitating ten inches above the ground. That’s because in order to appear taller, he stood on a small platform, which was later retouched out.

My mother was twenty when that picture was taken. Morris was thirty, but by then he was no longer a blocker of hats. He had bought a car and become a door-to-door salesman of dry goods in suburban Long Island, long before shopping centers dotted that landscape. Many of my father’s lantzmen from Poland became rich peddling goods on the installment plan. My father did not. When the stock market crashed a few months after I was born, going door-to-door became a hard sell. Mom was forced to end her years as a stay-at-home housewife and return to the hat factory. She once told me that she was the only woman in the United Hatters, Cap, and Millinery Workers union who was a machine operator. I know that’s not as much of an honor as being the first woman admitted to the New York Bar, but Mom took pride in it.

What to do with me while Mom was at work was solved when she rented rooms in the same building where her parents lived. My grandmother Pauline (Perel, in Yiddish) Kleinberg would take care of me. Her husband, Hyman Kleinberg, had a tailor shop in the East Bronx. He always seemed happy to see me when he got home. I loved both of them. Grandma made certain that, if there were any egg yolks in the chickens she bought on Fridays, I got them in my soup. In those days, chickens weren’t packaged as they are now, featherless and with their innards removed. Grandma had to hold the chicken over the gas range to remove the feathers, and when she cut the hen open she sometimes found a whole egg or a few yolks. Later when I started going to school, it was Grandma who saw to it that I looked neat and had a handkerchief for my perpetually runny nose. Of course, I loved being with Mom at night too, except that that’s when he was around, and when he was around there were always arguments, and in our tiny apartment there was no place to hide.

One afternoon when I was eight, sitting at one of those chair-and-desk combos that were bolted onto the floors at all public schools, I suddenly felt odd. I didn’t know what I was feeling, but I raised my hand, told the teacher I didn’t feel well, and asked if I could go home. I was told I would just have to sit there until the class was over. I managed to do that, but when the bell finally rang and I stood up to leave, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it the four blocks home. Fortunately, it wasn’t winter, and the walk was downhill, but as soon as Grandma opened the door I collapsed on the floor.

I don’t remember much after that, but I know that Dr. Minkin came over that evening. In 1936 doctors made house calls (it was two dollars for office visits, three for house calls), and that night he didn’t have to climb five flights. I was in my grandparents’ apartment, which happened to be on the ground floor. I’m told I had a very high temperature and was having trouble breathing. The doctor wanted to call an ambulance and get me to a hospital, where I could get oxygen, but Mom wouldn’t allow it. If I needed oxygen she would rent an oxygen tent, even though she was warned that it would be very expensive. The reason for Mom’s refusal to allow me to go to a hospital stemmed from her experiences in a Viennese facility for displaced persons during World War I.

When war broke out in 1914, the town of Dornavátra, where my grandparents lived, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and my grandfather Hyman Kleinberg was drafted into the imperial army. The town at that time was right on the border with neutral Romania, which would soon be joining the Allies—France, England, and Russia. When that happened, there would be skirmishes along that border and air battles above the Kleinberg home. During one of these, my grandmother watched in horror as machine-gun fire from one of those dogfights came close to killing her daughter Yetta.

Deciding then and there to flee, Frau Kleinberg bought a horse and wagon, took bags of sugar that she could use for barter, and started off for Vienna with her five daughters, the eldest of whom, twelve years old, was my mother. They made it to Vienna, and were placed in a fortress-like building with thousands of other refugees. They were now essentially prisoners. When Grandma began losing her hair she recognized her symptoms as diphtheria. There was an infirmary, but Grandma had heard from others that those admitted to the hospital never returned. When inspectors made their daily rounds, she hid all signs of her illness.

Grandpa, meanwhile, had been wounded at the front. Now on furlough, and learning from letters that his wife was in Vienna, he searched all the refugee centers until he found her. She was weak, but had managed to avoid being carried off to the hospital. Grandpa bribed a guard to allow him to take his wife “out for a walk,” and since she was leaving her five daughters behind, the guard was certain she’d return. Hyman—Chaim, in Yiddish—got Perel to a doctor, and days later he returned to rescue his children. In the interim, Rebecca cared for her younger sisters, constantly reassuring them that of course Papa and Mama were going to come back.

That experience was the reason Mom didn’t let me go to the hospital. She never spoke about how deeply she had gone into debt to pay for the oxygen tent and the private nurse that I eventually needed, or whom she had borrowed the money from. When I no longer needed oxygen, I was carried up to my parents’ apartment. A cute teenager named May—she was “colored,” a term that was politically correct in 1936—was hired to stay with me. I was still bedridden, but could sit up and draw pictures on the white cardboard placed in the shirts from the Chinese laundry. While so engaged I listened to soap operas on the radio. I remember drawing a Dick Tracy comic strip, but with my own story.

One Sunday, after many months in bed—remember, no penicillin—my mother said that it was such a beautiful day, we should go outside. I was bedridden for such a long time that my legs atrophied, and walking downstairs, even while holding on to the banister with one hand and my mother’s hand with the other, was very difficult. “But Mom,” I said, when we were halfway down, “if it’s this hard going down, how am I going to get up?” “Don’t worry,” she assured me, “now that you’ve had practice going down, going up will be easy.” I didn’t believe her, but when I did go up those five flights—very slowly—it really did seem easier.

I worried about being left back in third grade, since I had been sick for most of it, but Mom went to see the principal and got me promoted along with my old classmates. There was an art period in fourth grade, and now the action drawings that I had begun doing while I was recuperating were admired by both classmates and the teacher. A boy named Ernest, who had been considered the best artist in the class the last term, was furious to see that I was now the one considered an artistic wonder by our classmates. For me, who was always the last chosen in gym class for the baseball games, being thought of as the best at anything was something new. When Mom went to P.S. 90’s parent/teacher night, she was told by my teacher that I had unusual talent.

Unusual Talent!!! For the mother of a child who had never distinguished himself scholastically, talent at drawing was a straw to grasp at. Mom enrolled me in a Saturday art class at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn. The subways were safe then, and there was nothing unusual about a nine-year-old traveling for over an hour from the Bronx to Brooklyn by himself. A year later, Mom read about another Saturday art class for children, and this one was absolutely free. She enrolled me. The class took place at the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village. Mom traveled down there with me for my first session.