In 1952, Joel is a twelve-year-old boy surrounded by a colorful cast of
characters that find themselves in shady business dealings, including
loaning money, rigging and fixing teams or horse races, and so much
more. Set in post-World War II, other timely events take place, and Joel
acts as our eyes and ears to tell the stories of the aftermath of the
Holocaust, the Korean War, the polio epidemic, as well as his own
family's secrets.
"When you're a kid, they don't always tell you the truth." With an
opening line like that, it's easy to see why MY MOTHER'S SON by David Hirshberg should
become a classic like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, spanning the
length of one year from 1952 to 1953. This is a story that deals with an
immersive reality of living in 1952 when the Holocaust was a mere
shadow, polio a threat to life, and when coming-of-age meant figuring
out reality from fantasy, which the story presents in hefty doses. It's
impressive that the character of Joel is on target for his age, and isn't
asking me to suspend my belief that he knows everything there is to
know. Joel is very inquisitive and isn't afraid of asking tough questions
as well as finding out the tough answers for them.
MY MOTHER'S SON is a pure joy to
read, and a perfect antidote for today's times. This is really a story that
has something for everyone be it mysteries, suspense, sports,
romance, even history. Entertaining, comedic and extremely nostalgic,
MY MOTHER'S SON is a story of
the heart that echoes from today to 1952 and it dares to ask whether
things were as simple in the "good old days" as we'd like to think, when
in fact life back then was just as complicated. I would recommend
MY MOTHER'S SON by David
Hirshberg for readers who love historical fiction, baseball, coming-of-
age stories, family mysteries and Judaic elements.
In the spirit of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America
and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &
Clay comes MY MOTHER’S SON, the meticulously-crafted
debut novel from David Hirshberg.
The story is told by a
radio raconteur revisiting his past in post-World War II
Boston, the playground and battleground for two brothers
whose lives are transformed by discoveries they never
could have imagined. From the opening line of the book,
“When you’re a kid, they don’t always tell you the
truth,” the stage is set for this riveting coming-of-age
story that plays out against the backdrop of the Korean
War, the aftermath of the Holocaust, the polio epidemic,
the relocation of a baseball team, and the shenanigans of
politicians and businessmen. Hirshberg deftly weaves
together events, characters, and clues and creates a rich
tapestry of betrayal, persecution, death, loyalty, and
unconditional love that resonates with today’s America.
Excerpt
prologueThe yin and yang of my life
When you’re a kid, they don’t always tell you the truth.
They tell others that they don’t want to hurt you or they
think you won’t understand. But in reality, it’s just easier
if they tell you what makes them feel good, or what
gets them out of a jam.
That, as you devotees know, is how I opened each radio show
five nights a week for forty-seven years. I write it down
now on the anniversary of my last show as I glance at the
walls of the studio, where they taped up a photo of me from
each year, a mélange of shots that arrested a moment of
time, but they appear to be a film strip if you sweep your
head from beginning to end, taking in all the pictures, a
short reel that exposes customs of dress, grooming habits,
and attitudinal stances—the outsides, the two dimensions
that others recognized when they saw the me that they
thought they knew. I’m all too familiar with these men, some
of whom I loved; others, well, let’s just say I’ve taken my
leave without rancor but sometimes with embarrassment. No, I
don’t deny the veracity of the glossies, the snippets that
captured me with mustache, clean-shaven, long-haired,
crew-cut, with wide lapels (thank God, no Nehru jackets),
thin ties, aviator glasses, contacts, tie-dyed T-shirts and
cashmere sweaters, often wearing the red-and-blue Braves
cap, the Boston Braves that is, which meshes nicely
now with my speckled beard that still has a wisp of reddish
strands, a trick designed to fool me into thinking that I’m
younger than I am.
I acknowledge the optimism behind the first one, the 1964
headshot where I’m still in my army uniform, having mustered
out only a couple of weeks previously from active duty in
West Germany. I’d gone to my first interview wearing it,
perhaps to impress the station boss; he was, after all, a
high muckety-muck in the reserves, having won ribbons in
Korea, but the real reason I wore it is probably more
mundane, given that this was still the era in which it was
said that girls liked men in uniform.
He listened to tapes of some of my shows from Armed Forces
Radio. Then, suppressing a smirk, I presented documents to
him to bolster my case, including an article in the
Berliner Morgenpost about my private meeting with
the president after he gave his famous “Ich bin ein
Berliner” speech the prior June. Prominently displayed
on the page was a photo of him smiling broadly at me. I
could tell that the station manager was impressed. He asked
me if I had any other things that would support my candidacy
for the position. I retrieved an article that came from my
college newspaper my senior year, 1961, which featured a
picture of me with a famous radio humorist sharing a beer at
a local hangout, where I interviewed him about his stories
that captivated young and old alike, regarding his time
growing up in the Midwest during the Depression and
afterward in the War years (when it’s capitalized and used
as a standalone word, it always refers to World War II). And
finally, I handed him an amusing piece from my high school
paper that reported on a discussion I had in 1957 with my
dog, a black Lab, who was lamenting the fact that the
Russians sent dogs into space and all we sent were mice. It
contained a shot of him with a caption underneath that said,
“Depressed that he couldn’t be Muttnik.” I got the job.
I can recall the opening of my first show without resorting
to any notes: “On May 10, 1952, when our soldiers were
bogged down in a war in Korea, our doctors were battling the
polio epidemic, and our elected officials were assaulting
each other in a political campaign, my brother Steven and I
surreptitiously witnessed a shakedown that enmeshed us in
the events of the day in a way that affected us for the rest
of our lives. I was twelve and a half and my brother was
fourteen.” I’ve spent the intervening time between then and
now giving tidbits of what happened that year, intermingled
with other observations about actions big and small,
parochial and ubiquitous, that’ve occurred since those days.
Most studio visitors take in the pictures on the wall
chronologically, examining closely, pointing, noting
something in the background, muttering to themselves,
stepping sideways a few feet, wash, rinse, repeat, engaging
me in small talk about some particular thing that catches
their attention, usually relating it to an event in their
lives. Once a year my brother would take the occasion to
bring a new photo; he’d step back, alternating peering
between it and me and it and the other shots, and give the
imperceptible head bob, which intimated that he could
differentiate the glint from the prior year, the
presentation as opposed to the pose, the body language that
only he could interpret.
When the last photo was hung a year ago, Steven’s intense
scrutiny of the sags, the creases, the squint, the
distractedness that’s unambiguous to a sibling, was a signal
as obvious to me as a Morse code SOS. It’s time, life was
tapping out, dot dot dot, to say good-bye, something that
he’d just done, having announced to his partners his
intention to wind down his appointments with patients by the
end of the year.
I wondered if what my brother noticed was caused or
exacerbated by my recent finding of a trove of handwritten
papers that’d been nestled within the inside pocket of a
valise, stashed in my house for almost thirty years, the
keepsake that reminded me of a trip my aunt had made more
than seventy years earlier, now exposed as the chintzy
vessel that housed the real treasure.
I initially misinterpreted my brother’s advice as a call to
retire, when in fact he was simply urging me to walk away
from a daily grind, a two-hour radio show five nights a
week, Sunday through Thursday from eight to ten. From your
letters and emails you marveled at my ability to riff for
120 minutes, seemingly off the cuff, a stream of
consciousness about my life, starting with when I was a kid,
right after the War, with my friends Noodge Mauer, Myandrew,
Frankie, my brother, our respective love interests Zippo and
Susie, The Guy on the Radio, and my dog—adults making guest
appearances, certainly never getting star billing. I take
pride in your encomiums, thank you, but it wasn’t as if I
made it all up extemporaneously. I’d get up early, come into
the studio before anyone else—solitude in moderation can be
an ally if you get along famously with your conscience—and
establish an endpoint from which I’d work backward, a
deductively logical reverse process that served me well, a
way in which to come up with an outline, the sinew that was
all that was necessary to begin construction of the body
scaffolding for my soliloquy.
A few months ago, Steven accepted a dollar-a-year position
at the university hospital, coordinating efforts to better
understand and treat post-polio syndrome, the legacy of the
epidemic that we thought we’d conquered, only to be fooled
years later in the same way the balloon of our unbridled
optimism following the surrender of Germany and Japan in
1945 had been pierced by the Korean War in 1950. Witnessing
him make the smooth transition into a new role eased the
process for me to do the same, and that shouldn’t have
surprised me. He’d led the way for me throughout my
childhood, and while I was grateful, it wasn’t until I was
an adult that my admiration for him was further enhanced as
I recognized that no older sibling had been there for him,
the curse of the firstborn.
Yes, the last picture on the wall was the trigger for Steven
to offer that I, too, move on, which I did halfway through
2011. At first, my agent suggested that I go through the
station’s archives and pull out my favorite shows from each
year, have them transcribed and edited, a surefire way to
deliver a product to members of my audience, a built-in
group numbering about 250,000, the result of national
syndication that brought my show far beyond the Boston metro
area. While this might’ve made sense financially, it was
something I could’ve done while still at the station showing
up five nights a week and didn’t reflect the change that my
brother and I both felt was necessary.
After my last broadcast, they were kind enough to allow me
to come by the studio to write, at dawn, when it was
uncannily quiet, a perfectsetting, the only sound
being the sporadic whoosh of the air-conditioning kicking
in, generating an autonomous shudder, my body anticipating
the cool blast that would remind me it was summer, a
necessary cue to a person who’s in a space with no windows
and no other stimuli other than what he conjures up on his
own. With each shiver, I’d get up and pace, much as I did
when the green light went on and the young woman in the
control room provided the nod-smile that indicated the
lavaliere mike pinned to my lapel or collar was live, a
silent admonition to remind me not to clear my throat,
crinkle paper, or talk back to her when she’d occasionally
contact me through the earpiece.
Many times, in the middle of a program, I’d glance over to
the wall opposite the photos, where I’d hung my Braves
baseball cap and a souvenir bat, the former highlighting
fond memories of going to the park with my friends, the
latter being the proximate cause of a relative’s death and
another man’s murder, these two objects together bringing
forth a sobering juxtaposition of the yin and yang of my life.
But there’ll be no more control room signals, no more hushed
voices in my ear, no more green lights, no more writing the
outline for a two-hour show. No, that’s all behind me. Now
it’s about act two, a bit of uncharted territory. I feel
like Marco Polo, whose mission was clear but who couldn’t
tell you much about the outcome until he finished his journey.
So I start by staring into a mirror that I’ve hung next to
the most recent picture on the wall. Reflected in it is a
story both personal and universal that I’d skirted around
gingerly for all these years, a memoir about betrayal,
disease, gambling, death, bribery, persecution, kidnapping,
war, politics, escape, loyalty, forgery, unconditional love,
depression, marines, theft, girls, and a dog. In it you’ll
find extraordinary revelations about members of my family
and the world we lived in, beginning at a time when I caught
a glimpse into adulthood, or, as I think about it now,
perhaps this was simply the first peep into the rearview
mirror of childhood.
I told my brother that unlike my radio shows, here the
adults take stage, front and center, exiting only when they
depart, leaving behind their legacies, forever in the
penumbra of my imagination and displayed through my actions,
behaviors, and wants.
“You are your mother’s son,” he said definitively and
presciently, “so despite the fact that I’ve been there all
along, I don’t know what you’ll reveal or withhold or how
you’ll interpret your life.”
“My mother’s son,” I said in a way to hear the phrase in my
own voice. “Is that a double entendre?”
He smiled as he cupped his hand around my neck, a wordless
gesture that conveyed both affection and recognition that it
was the perfect time to take his leave.
1.A couple of drunks clinging to each other for support
Our aunt and uncle lived nearby in a garden apartment close
to the Fens, a fancy word for the swamp that was what
remained of the Back Bay. To get there, we’d ride our bikes
through the grasses that sprouted next to the remnants of
the tidal pools, which were more than twice an adult’s
height and swayed in the winds that blew off the Charles. We
were always careful to hurry out while there was still
sunlight, before they’d gang up with the thistles on the
flowering bushes, bending down to us, begging us with eerie
rustles to stay at night with the ducks, geese, rabbits,
raccoons, and bats that countered our reign during the day.
Steven and I’d usually time our arrival to when Uncle Jake
got back from the track, our welcome enhanced by the aromas
of the German-style bittersweet pastries and strong coffee
Auntie Rose would prepare for her husband, a prelude to a
much later meal. He’d sit in an overstuffed chair with a
large pillow behind his head and his feet on a hassock,
eating his snack, drinking his coffee, and going through the
mail, tossing the obvious bills onto the side table and
using a letter opener to pry the glue from the back of the
personal envelopes, almost reverently sliding the insides
out, then lowering his glasses to swiftly peruse the
contents, reading the German, French, and Yiddish ones
aloud, knowing we couldn’t understand, and lip-reading the
ones in English.
“Mein Gott im Himmel,” he shouted frequently (we
didn’t know why he was talking about his God in
heaven, was his different from ours, this was something that
we wondered about later back in our room), then would shake
his head, reverence replaced by disdain, rummage through a
file cabinet, select a copy of a note he’d written, and
deftly staple the letter he received that day to it, then
place it back in the folder within the cabinet. The letters
he received were typewritten and usually embossed with an
emblem or some other mark, while the ones he pulled out of
the file were handwritten, in his own script, which we could
tell, as we’d received letters from Uncle Jake when we were
away in Maine. His intensity when reading the letters would
abate only after he’d file them away; we could see the red
recede from his face, like the ebb of a tide, which was the
sign we could ask our customary question.
“What is it, Uncle Jake?” one or the other of us would
inquire, the patterns of our conversations having been
established years earlier. It was as if we were in a play,
knowing we’d utter these lines day after day, yet despite
the repetition, we knew to stick to the script, not to throw
anyone else on the stage off-kilter by an extemporaneous remark.
“News but no news,” Auntie Rose would reply, and Steven and
I’d pivot to look at her and then back to Uncle Jake to see
if he’d elaborate or simply take a sip of the coffee or a
bite of the cake, leaving us to wonder what she meant. It
was always the same: sip and bite.
To whom he wrote we didn’t know and agreed that it would be
intrusive to ask, and anyway, he wasn’t going to reveal
anything to us, so we let it go and didn’t bring it up to
Auntie Rose or anyone else in the family. Instinctively we
understood that this ritual was even more important to him
than his job because he never complained when there was a
snowstorm and he couldn’t get to the track, but the fact
that the mail couldn’t be delivered made him anxious and
irritable.
He’d come back to us after he settled down; he’d start up
with a comment on the stamp, which he’d delicately peel off
and place in a folder on the end table next to his chair.
“Take a look at this,” he’d say, holding the light blue
four-pence British stamp with the picture of the beautiful
young queen. “You know what ‘ER’ means?” he’d inquire, then
explain before we had a chance to respond, “Elizabeth
Regina, which means queen, in Latin of all things.”
“I was there once,” Auntie Rose chimed in, then sought her
way back into the kitchen to get some hot chocolate for us,
as if to choke off any questions we may have had about a
trip to England that surprised us, as Maine was as far away
as we thought anyone in the family had gone, with the
exception of Papa, our grandfather, who’d go to the
furniture factory in North Carolina once a year.
Stamps were a means for Uncle Jake to reconnect to his old
world and to establish his identity in the new one, but we
never thought of them as a device. On rainy days, we’d strap
our albums underneath our yellow slickers and spend hours
with Uncle Jake, listening to him tell us stories about the
countries from the stamps he’d peeled off letters, while we
sat on the floor, combing through approvals that came in the
mail for twenty-five cents in clear cellophane packages,
using magnifying glasses to make sure we could distinguish
between flat-plated prints and rotary press prints, counting
perforations, looking for missed cancellation marks,
checking single-line watermarks, hoping against hope to find
the one-in-a-million mistake, the next upside-down airplane
that’d be worth all the money in the world that we’d then
give to them, a bribe for Auntie Rose to tell us what she
meant when she said “news but no news.”
Uncle Jake’s passion for reading the letters was matched by
his obsessiveness when it came time to get up early in the
morning and listen to the shortwave radio. On those school
vacation days when we got to stay overnight with them, we’d
pretend to be asleep, nestled in between the radiator and
the sofa in our fort in the living room, when we’d hear him
stir at 6:00 a.m., which would be followed by the sound of
his slippers scuffling on the wooden floor; then at
precisely 6:10, the announcer would intone somberly in a
foreign language. It would go on for ten minutes and stop
abruptly at 6:20, when Uncle Jake would turn it off, never
uttering any words, usually making grunting or hissing
sounds. We secretly turned the radio on twice, once after
Uncle Jake went to work on a weekday and the second time on
a Saturday, when the station wouldn’t come in. Because we
didn’t know if this was something he kept from Auntie Rose,
we asked neither of them about it, just chalked it up to one
of his peculiarities, a harmless eccentricity probably
having something to do with his not being born in the United
States.
When we’d leave, Auntie Rose would make us promise not to
tell Mother that we’d gorged on her homemade cakes and
cookies, which were always laid out on the kitchen
countertop, the scents from the cinnamon, raisins,
chocolate, and warm jams as palpable to us as the sweet
smoke from Uncle Jake’s pipe. We had to be vigilant, though,
since she also made special snacks for animals that were
arranged side by side with our treats. Occasionally, we’d
see her in the Fens, taking nuggets out of a bag that hung
around her neck, feeding the ducks and geese that lined up
more orderly than we did at Hebrew school. On the block,
neighborhood dogs and alley cats would traipse behind her,
abandoning their natural animosities for a few moments to
receive the succor and gentle words from our aunt. When we
were ready to say good-bye, she’d tousle our hair or pinch
our cheeks and give us a kiss that became more of a nuzzle
as the years went by.
At the end of October, we knew not to visit for a month,
Mother having told us simply it was that time. So
we stopped going until we got permission, which we’d receive
in the beginning of December. This was just the way it was.
We’d overheard snippets of conversations between Mother and
Dad about that time of year, and for the longest
stretch, we thought that Auntie Rose and Uncle Jake just
didn’t like the onset of the cold, the overcast skies, and
the shorter days.
Steven and I talked about our aunt and uncle’s November
hibernation.
“It’s as if they’re humanized bears living like the ones in
the storybook,” Steven said.
“Yeah, but in this case, they don’t have any baby bears,” I
added.
To head off a conversation Mother didn’t want us to
initiate, she said, “Uncle Jake and Auntie Rose’s reclusive
month of November is due to the troubles.”
At first, Steven and I thought this must be related to the
Troubles we’d read about in the Weekly Reader,
something to do with the Irish fighting the Irish, although
that still didn’t make any sense to us either. This was one
of those times when it looked like we were going to get into
a discussion that was clearly uncomfortable for Mother, so
she pulled out an ace of spades, her special way of having
the last say, her words spilling out with no pause, to
emphasize that it was futile to come back with a rejoinder:
“Your Aunt And Uncle Need Their Rest.”
As I got older, I could tell when Mother was going to give
one of her pronouncements. I got the “I’m Telling You This
For Your Own Good, So You Could At Least Pretend That You’re
Listening” speech when she thought I wasn’t paying
attention. I was the recipient of the “Your Father Worked
Day And Night So You Could Have A Nice Life” speech to make
sure I didn’t take things for granted. And each time I left
the house, she’d wrap her arms around me, squeeze me hard,
and murmur, “I Miss You Already And You’ll Always Be My Baby
Boy.”
Our friends thought Auntie Rose was entertaining. Once, when
Noodge Mauer and Myandrew came with me for after-school
snacks, she bolted for her bedroom and paged through the
name-your-baby book that she kept by her night table, looked
under the Ns and Ms, and came back tsk-tsk-tsking.
“Something’s amiss, boys, see here, there’s Norman and
Mychal but neither Noodge nor Myandrew.”
Once, she let the phone ring until it stopped, saying, “No
one’s home,” feeling no necessity to answer despite our
urgings and anxieties. “More cake?” she offered us through
an additional dozen rings. She was paying attention to us
and was not going to be interrupted by someone who’d divert
her focus.
Steven and I adored her even when we were invisible to her,
which occurred more and more as we approached the beginning
of November. Occasionally we’d find her alone in a darkened
kitchen, not acknowledging our presence, while we’d scarf
down one of her confections, then give her a peck on the
cheek and bolt for the door. We were never sure she knew we
were there.
Yet her attentiveness (she listened to the rat-a-tat
effluvia that erupted from us about sports or bikes or
school as if it were the most important thing spewing from
the depths of our souls) and kindness (“Here, boys, it’s
cold, take my scarf”; “Remember to go to the drugstore to
call your mother if you’re going to be late”; “I’ll walk
behind you with a flashlight so you’ll stay on the path in
the Fens”) more than offset her oddities, and we were drawn
to her as if we were planets kept in an orbit around her by
the grip of an invisible force.
She was a bit taller than Mother, and although they looked a
lot alike, you could see where a fraction of an inch more
between the eyes or less on the slope of the nose could
affect an appearance in a disproportionate way. She was, in
a word, pretty, and when she was standing next to Uncle
Jake, both arms entwined in one of his, he became the envy
of every guy they passed on the sidewalk. Little did anyone
know that my aunt and uncle’s pose was akin to that of a
couple of drunks, clinging to each other for support, more
noticeable when Uncle Jake’s legs got weaker, which caused
him to stumble along.
Uncle Jake had darkroom eyes, which drew you into his world,
slowly, as it took a while for people to adjust to his
personality. Blinking and straining were common until the
outline of his nature would begin to emerge, initially in
blurry blacks that would add lighter and more vibrant colors
only when a mutual acclimation process had taken place.
He had what I can only describe as a War look: someone who
hadn’t been able to get an umbrella in time to ward off the
storm clouds. He would be forever drenched by a deluge of
grief and loss, which showed up in a downcast expression and
an inability to talk about the future. He could be short
with people he didn’t know and would answer questions he had
asked others before they had the chance to respond. He was
an authority on almost any subject, and his vast knowledge
generated resentment from those who couldn’t possibly
understand how he had come to accumulate it.
Yet when he was around us, his gruffness had a playful
element to it, and we wouldn’t shrink from his offers to
take us with him on errands. On car rides with Uncle Jake,
he’d sing “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön,” “By Me You Are
Beautiful,” which, by the way, could’ve meant only that he
was daydreaming about Auntie Rose. We’d listen to this
Yiddish tune, originally popularized by the Andrews Sisters,
good Lutheran girls, which most folks probably thought was a
Bavarian folk song sung by kids in lederhosen when they went
off to school hopping and skipping, accompanied by their
German shepherd or schnauzer.
Every half hour he’d pull over so he could stretch his legs,
a necessity for him to avoid cramping; these repeated
exercises were helpful to reduce the pain caused by his limp
even if only for a short period of time.
I can’t tell you how much we loved Uncle Jake. He was the
first adult who’d look us squarely in the eyes, not
dismissing us merely because of our ages, which is what most
grown-ups would do. He’d listen and we knew it wasn’t the
kind of listening that we could tell was phony, as when
someone would mumble an “okay” or “uh-huh,” ostensibly
acknowledging your comments or presence but, really, we
could’ve been prattling on about our bathroom habits, they
had no idea what we were saying. It was clear that Uncle
Jake cared about us and showed us the deference
that, in truth, we hadn’t earned, but now it’s apparent that
it was part of his teaching process, a technique that he
hoped we’d absorb and pass down to the kids we’d come in
contact with when we got older.
Those of you who’ve got relatives like this know what it’s
like to have someone invade your heart who, unlike an
unwelcome intruder, stakes out a claim for territory that
you’re never willing to cede even with princely recompense.
And although I wouldn’t have expressed it this way out loud
back then, I had the same admiration and affection for my
brother, so close in age, so much more knowledgeable and
sophisticated, a bit intimidating truthfully and a tough act
to follow, but I never felt as if I got the hand-me-downs or
the short end of the stick. Sure, I was “dickhead” sometimes
but it wasn’t uttered in a nasty way, no different from when
he called one of the Braves a moron for making an error.
As we got older, the difference between our ages seemed to
diminish proportionately to the similarity of our
exaggerated height, and oftentimes we’d get stares from
people who didn’t know us, assuming we were twins. Today, of
course, the vernacular would be expressed in terms of
cloning but a couple of generations ago it was all about
carbon copies, and despite the inferiority of the blue-inked
yellow paper compared to the crisp, white, digital printouts
we have now, it was a more accurate reflection of how we
were presented to the world, as smudges and erasures would
more naturally display the fact that we were not exact
duplicates. We both had dark hair but Steven’s ringlets were
curlier than mine and his smile was more vertical compared
to my more horizontal orientation. Perhaps what increased
the number of double takes were two sets of opaque brown
eyes that seemed to dart or alight simultaneously without
overt communication emanating from either one of us.
Uncle Jake was born in Germany, or East Prussia, or Austria,
or Hungary, or Poland, or that slice of Poland, Galicia,
that nobody remembers anymore, or maybe it was in Prague or
somewhere in the Pale of Settlement, supposedly a pretty big
place though nowhere does it appear on a map and no one at
school or the library had ever heard of it. He spoke German,
that much I can tell you, because we’d hear him at the
pastry shop near Sears, Roebuck on Park Drive, where there
were maps on the walls of Germany and pictures of a large
guy on a horse wearing a uniform with something that looked
like a pointy-topped ice bucket on his head and newspapers
with stories from Frankfurt and Hamburg, which cracked us
up. He spoke Polish when he talked to the ladies who’d cross
and recross themselves a hundred times when he’d run into
them at the laundry down the street from Noodge Mauer’s
parents’ store. And he spoke Yiddish with Old Uncle A when
he didn’t want us to know what he was talking about.
Uncle Jake had a beard as a young man in Europe. He showed
us pictures of himself that he’d taken out of a shoe box,
yellowed pictures of people we didn’t know in front of signs
we couldn’t read, next to cars we didn’t recognize.
“I shaved for the first time when I was twenty-three,” he
announced proudly, which made us laugh; we couldn’t imagine
him with a beard.
“It just doesn’t look like you, Uncle Jake,” Steven said.
“Yeah, more like Jingles,” I chimed in, convulsed about how
he looked like Andy Devine on The Adventures of Wild
Bill Hickok.
“Who? What?” he responded, not connecting with my TV
reference, then added a “Ha!” when he understood he was the
butt of the joke. “Mr. Smarty Pants thinks he knows a lot,”
he said to Steven, making sure I caught the side of his
smile. “We didn’t know of such things when I went to school
in Berlin,” he added, diverting attention back to the shoe
box of photos. “My school was a Gymnasium,” he
continued, which faked me out, because I thought that meant
he was always playing sports indoors, like basketball or
volleyball or wrestling, yet we never saw a picture of him
in athletic clothes.
Sensing a continental divide, he quickly added,
“Gymnasium, boys, with the g sound like in
get, is the German word for school.”
So I, Mr. Wise Guy, asked, “Then is school, with
the sch sound like in shoulder, the German
word for gym?”
“No,” he said, “schul means synagogue,” and with
that, he trumped my remark without making me feel
embarrassed at my attempt at humor.
Uncle Jake was born in 1900 and came to America in 1938, but
how he got here was something that we weren’t supposed to know.
“When you’re older,” he’d say each year on our birthdays,
when we’d ask.
“Older than what?” I’d ask, since we knew he wasn’t going to
tell us.
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