The Founding Fathers fared no better. The thought of them curled his lip. “A bunch of slave owners, autocrats, smugglers. Tom Paine was the only one any damn good—and they got rid of him. Read the Constitution they came up with. See if you like it.”
As an adult I enjoyed playing the foil to his hyperbole; I might say, “President Johnson wants to leave his mark on history.”
To which the answer might come, after a caustic pause: “You mean, he wants to drop his turd on the sands of time!” He was fond of Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”
Mother said many times my father wore his crusty shell as protection against the pain of the world; the vituperation he used often was not for comic effect. He was in fact the gentlest of men. He never referred to Mother as his “wife”; he felt the term demeaned her. Rather she was his “life companion” and he meant it—although he was not above calling her “my ball and chain” in front of visitors for the naughty pleasure of watching them squirm. He preferred that Abe and I call him by his first name; he did not like the authoritarian implications of “father.” Nor did he demand that we respect him because we lived under his roof. “Respect me if you feel I’ve earned it,” he often said to us. You could argue with Sam, tell him to shut up as we did regularly, and he would do so, meekly. He was delighted when my six-year-old daughter Stephanie talked back to him. “I like a fresh kid! A rebellious child!” he’d say, and hand her a quarter.
Then, for no apparent reason, the broken baritone would burst through the crusty shell. He would start to sing: at home, on the street, wherever the spirit moved him, in and out of tune at the same time. He loved the great IWW songs printed in its Little Red Song Book. “Hallelujah I’m a Bum,” was a favorite, though there were any number of others.
Be cheerful and gay, for the spring time has come.
You can throw down your shovels and go on the bum
Hallelujah, I’m a bum
Hallelujah, bum again,
Hallelujah, give us a handout
to revive us again!
Beyond the obvious mockery and irreverence, Sam saw pathos in the lyric.
I suppose you could trace Sam’s rebellious personality in part to Grandfather Max and to his roots in a shtetl (that is, a tiny secure Jewish community) near Vitebsk, a city just inside the eastern border of Belarus. “Do not go back. Nothing is left,” a friend from that part of the world advised me recently. “The Lithuanian Fascists wiped out everything and everybody in 1941: thirty-five-thousand Jews in mass graves, at least. Anyone tells you he can trace your family is just taking your money.” But in the late 1890s Vitebsk was home to a vibrant Jewish culture that spawned Marc Chagall and so many others.
Grandpa Max was a contrarian from the start. He scandalized the shtetl by smoking cigarettes on the Sabbath and enraged my great grandfather, a rabbi, by renouncing religion altogether. He was an atheist during his waking hours. When he slept, though, between snores you could hear him recite the ancient Hebrew prayers in a clear voice.
Around 1900, Grandpa Max worked as a commissary clerk on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
They had a bunch of railroad cars where the track and train men slept and another car where Grandpa Max supplied them with cigarettes, tobacco, underwear, and different things. He also had charge of their feeding, and pinch hit as their timekeeper. So he got to know how exploited the men were and he bonded with them. When they struck for better pay and conditions, his supervisor, in the spirit of the times, called for the Cossacks, who clubbed them from horseback. “How can you do that?” Max asked. “These men slave for you every day. You know they are desperate.”
“You are management,” his boss said, “You have a good job for a Jew. You must decide whose side you’re on. That’s the way it is.”
“Nobody owns me,” Max told him and he was fired. At about the same time the Tsar wanted him as cannon fodder for the upcoming Russo-Japanese War. So Max skipped to America, where he learned to be a house painter, and sent for grandmother Anna and three-year-old Sam in 1905. Along the way he simplified the family name from Dolgopolski to Dolgoff.
Max was basically a kindly man, who accepted the world as it is and not as it should be. The true revolutionist of the family was Max’s brother, Tsudik, who remained behind. I’ll let Sam tell his story:
Through the many years spanning the 1905 Russian Revolution to my father’s death in 1945, we had no news about what happened to Tsudik and doubted strongly that he was still living. But (much later)… I was given a copy of the Russian Communist Jewish periodical Soviet Homeland which, to my great surprise, (contained) a photo and an obituary article about my uncle. It read, in part: “Tsudik Dolgopolski was born in the village of Haradok, not far from the Vitebsk. At 13 years of age he began work in a brush factory. In 1909 after many difficulties he became an elementary school teacher. In 1926, his novel Open Doors was published in which the great events of the October Revolution were graphically described. In 1928 his book On Soviet Land was published. Later, two volumes of memoirs, Beginnings and This Was Long Ago, appeared. Dolgopolski’s writing graphically described the awakening of Jewish life thanks to the achievements of the October Revolution.”
Sam continues, “This sketch omits the fact that Tsudik was sent to Siberia for fomenting strikes and demonstrations against the Tsar, that extracts from his Sketches of Village Life were printed in the New York Jewish Daily Forward, and that my uncle declined the Forward’s invitation to come to New York as a staff writer. More importantly, a full report from a reliable source revealed that my uncle (was) condemned to hard labor in Stalin’s concentration camps where he died.” I have since learned that Sam’s belief about his uncle’s demise was incorrect. It seems that Tsudik managed to survive both Stalin’s camps and the subsequent Nazi invasion. He died in 1959.
Imprisoned by two tyrants, Uncle Tsudik was a man for many a season. The only family anecdote about Tsudik that comes down to me through the years was from Sam’s brother, Louie. Seems Tsudik knew Stalin’s NKVD were coming for him, late at night, as was their way. So he left the door open and waited for them to thump up the stairs in their winter boots. “Pigs, can’t you see she has just polished the floor! Respect my wife,” he snapped at them as they burst in. And so they stood at the door, abashed, as Tsudik rose from his chair. The tale may well be apocryphal, but it moves me to this day.
There is another story that may well be apocryphal that also moves me. It arrives from that far away place in the mind where what you think was told to you merges with what you would like to imagine was told to you. Yet the image is indelible. I “see”—or do I feel?—my future father, the four- or five-year-old Shmuel, in the knickers children wore in those days. There is the carcass of a dead horse abandoned in a vacant garbage strewn lot, a feast for the flies and rats. And, in a metaphor of his life to be, my father-to-be is astride it, crying, imploring it back to life, while several adults, Grandpa Max among them, are yanking him off the fetid thing.
The diaspora of Eastern European Jews to New York’s Lower East Side has acquired a polyurethane coating of nostalgia as it recedes ever further in time. The upper-middle-class descendants of this Diaspora are taken on tours of a meticulously preserved nineteenth-century tenement and to colorful relics of the old days: Gus’s Pickles, Yana Shimmel’s Kinnishery, Katz Deli, and so on. Fiddler on the Roof makes for a good cry at a safe distance and allows for more than a bit of smug self-satisfaction. Not many people have read Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money, which presents a bitter, astringent picture of immigrant life—in other words, the way things were.
This is what Sam had to say as an old man, looking back:
Upon our arrival in New York we lived in a typical Lower East Side slum on Rutgers Slip, a block or two from the East River Docks, in overcrowded quarters. The two toilet seats for the six families on each floor were located in the common hallway. There was no bathroom. A large washtub in the kitchen also served as a bathtub. When another immigrant in need of shelter came, a metal cover over the washtub