Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

She took my hand and led me into what I supposed was the living room. The ladies were seated there silently. They had heard the exchange in the kitchen, and were now awaiting my approach.

“Mom, this is Ike,” Rebecca said.

“How do you do?” Sophie Baumgarten said. She had risen from the couch or wherever she’d been sitting, and was approaching, I felt her approach. “Won’t you shake hands?” she said, and I realized her hand was extended, and I put out my own hand, and she took it. Her hand was trembling. This was costing her a lot. “Sit down, why don’t you? We were just talking about how hot it’s been this week. A record , in fact, I heard on the radio last night. Would you like something cool to drink?”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“And this is my sister Davina,” Rebecca said.

“How do you do?” I said, and extended my hand again.

“Nice to meet you,” Davina said. Her voice was pitched a trifle lower than Rebecca’s; her handshake was cool, and dry, and firm.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to drink?” Sophie asked.

“Thank you,” I said, “but Rebecca and I have to be going. Thank you, Mrs. Baumgarten,” I said. “Come on, Rebecca,” I said.

As she led me past the kitchen, someone at the table said, “Leaving so soon?”

“Shut up , Seymour!” Rebecca snapped. I had recognized the voice. Seymour was the man who’d made the request for “Far, Far Away.”

“I like your boyfriend,” Seymour said. “He seems like a very Gentile fellow.” He slurred the word “Gentile” so that it sounded almost like “gentle” — but not quite.

“Let’s go, Ike,” Rebecca said, and led me out of the apartment, slamming the door behind us.

“The lousy bastard,” she said.

To this day, I do not know whether she was referring to Seymour or her father.

Rebecca Baumgarten is four years old when her sister is born. Her mother names the new baby Davina, which in Hebrew means “the loved one.” Sophie intends no slight to her first-born daughter, whose name in the ancient tongue means “the captivator.” But in Rebecca’s four-year-old head, the new child is the loved one, isn’t that what they named her? She asks her grandfather about this.

“Zayde,” she says, “why do they love Davina and not me?”

“They love you both together,” the old man says.

They are sitting outside his dry-goods store on the lower East Side. It is the summer of 1932. The old man is in a cane rocker he bought from the sidewalk stand of Shmuel two doors down. Rebecca sits at his feet on a stool she has dragged from inside the store. The old man wears a black pair of pants, and a white shirt, and a brown sweater with buttons up the front. He wears a black silk yarmulke. She has never seen him without the yarmulke. He has had a white beard for as long as she can remember, and wire-framed eyeglasses perched on his nose. His nose is like the Indian’s on the buffalo nickel. He is a very handsome man, her grandfather. His name is Itzik Galdek, and he is her mother’s father. He came to this country in 1890, from a city named Bialystok, on the Polish border some twenty-five miles from Russia. He explains now that Rebecca’s sister was named Davina not because she is any more loved than Rebecca herself, but only because she came second. They are Ashkenazic Jews, he explains, and the Ashkenazim will not name a child after a living relative. When Rebecca was born, in 1928, her grandmother of the same name was already dead, and so she was named after her, which was a great honor because her bubbeh was a fine and wonderful woman.

“Rivke, that is your name in Yiddish,” he tells her. “Rebecca is what that means, Rivke. Now... if your sister had been born first, she would most likely have been named Rivke, she would have been given your name, do you see? But your sister was born only last month, isn’t that so, and Rivke was all used up already, they had used up this fine and honorable name on you , my bubeleh , and so your mother had to search around for another name, and she picked one that had been my beloved sister’s, who is now dead, too, may she rest in peace, and that is why she is Davina and you are Rivke, Rebecca, eh? Now tell me what you are learning in Hebrew school.”

In Hebrew school, she is learning Biblical stories, prayers, and a smattering of language. Whenever they have dinner at her grandfather’s house, she gives the Hebrew blessing. “Bo-ruch a-toh a-do-noy, e-lo-hay-noo melech ho-o-lom, ha-mo-tzee le-chem meen ho-o-retz” and each time she has to try very hard not to say “ ha-mo-izee le-chem Minnie Horowitz,” the way the boys do when they’re joking in the streets. She lives two doors away from the dry-goods store, on the third floor of a five-story tenement. The neighborhood is exclusively Jewish, but occasionally the goyim come in to make trouble; they are always making trouble. Her mother will not wear any jewelry if she is out at night, for fear she will be attacked by goyim and robbed of her treasures. This is what her mother calls her wedding and engagement rings, her pearl earrings, a garnet brooch that was Grandmother Rivke’s in the old country: her treasures.

“The goyim make trouble because they drink,” old Itzik tells her. He has been in this country for forty-two years now, coming to these shores when he was twenty-four. His name was Yitzchak then, the Hebrew for the Biblical Isaac. He is now known by its Yiddish equivalent, Itzik, and already everywhere around him he hears young men being called Isadore and Irving, anglicizations of the name he had proudly worn in Poland. “In Poland,” he tells her, “the goyim would drink all the time, and then they would come into the shtetl and do terrible things; I do not wish to befoul your young ears with stories of the terrible things they did. Sometimes, the Cossacks would ride in and take men away for the army, spirit them away from home and loved ones, never to be seen or heard from again. The Russians owned Poland then, bubeleh , they would come to take the young men, line them up in the square near the fountain, pick them out, you, you, you, you, tsssst , they would disappear from sight.

“I learned a trick,” the old man says, and chuckles with the memory, “ such a trick, Rivke, it fooled those farshtinkener Cossacks. There was a man in the ghetto, he knew already about army raids from the Crimean War, when they used to come, the Cossacks, and take away the young men to get killed by the French. So he showed me a thing to do with my leg, do you want to see, Rivke, I can still do it. I paid him plenty; it cost me, don’t worry. But when they came the next time, the Cossacks, I did the trick, this is the trick, bubeleh , see?” he says, and he rises from his rocker and before Rebecca’s astonished eyes he pulls his left leg up into the socket where leg joins hip and makes the leg a full two inches shorter than it normally is. Still chuckling, he grasps the leg between both hands again, and manipulates it, freeing it from the socket. “They thought I was a cripple, those paskudnyaks ,” he says, laughing. “I never went in their army; for what reason should I go?”

Every Wednesday night, when she is old enough, her grandfather Itzik takes her to the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue. She watches with her green eyes wide, catching only some of the dialogue, listening to her grandfather as he patiently explains what is happening on the stage and the people in the rows in front of them and behind hiss “Shah! Shah!” When she is eight years old and she catches the whooping cough, it is her grandfather who takes her out to Coney Island every day in the dead of winter, and stands on the boardwalk with her and tells her to breathe deeply of the fresh ocean air, this is the way to get rid of the racking cough. “Breathe, bubeleh , in, out, in, out, good, darling, good.” Her sister is a beautiful child, with green eyes like Rebecca’s, but with blond hair and a pert shiksa nose. “She looks like a regular Shirley Temple,” everyone says, and Rebecca knows this is because her mother rolls Davina’s hair into those long blond curls. One night, when her grandfather comes home from work — he works with her other grandfather, who owns a business in the garment center, and whom she does not like — he finds her sitting in the middle of her room with her Shirley Temple doll on the floor, her hand wrapped around its leg, the head caved in. He asks her why she did that. “Why did you do that, Rebecca? The doll cost me fourteen dollars! ” She tells him the doll slipped out of her hands.