E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

But it was all a counterrevolutionary illusion. It seemed so easy to break free because it was what the world wanted of you. The world wanted you to forget who you had been and what had happened to you. The world did not want to visit the sins of the fathers. If, in their proud, snotty, tormented adolescence he and his sister tacitly came to the conclusion that Paul and Rochelle Isaacson were not worth their loyalty, there was, however, nothing they could do to squander it. The decision was out of their hands. Whatever they did, whatever view they took, it was merely historical process operating. And even faithlessness in their hearts, real genuine bitter-brewed carelessness of spirit, could not dissolve that. Under one guise or another they were still the Isaacson kids. “You poor kids,” all the comrades used to say. They were like figures in a myth who suffer the same fate no matter what version is told; who remain in eternal relationship no matter how their names are spelled. Or they were like those two horses in that experiment you learned about in high school who were hitched up to pull apart two hemispheres that had been fastened by vacuum; who heaved and strained, one pulling one way, the other the other way, to prove that nothing is more powerful than a vacuum.

Still, they did not talk. And when he was eighteen he went off to school and took an apartment in Cambridge, and for two or three years she might as well not have existed. And when he came to his senses, and the real life of his childhood, that had become a dream, became real again, he tried to make contact with Susan. But Susan was now a commanding presence: too bright, too loud, too hysterically self-occupied. She gave him glimpses of herself in her underwear. She let him know that she had been laid more than once. She was very busy with her life. And he mourned the little kid sister and he thought We should have talked, we should always have talked.

BINTEL BRIEF

My dear Mr. Editor, you who hear the troubles of so many, and share the common misery, permit me to say what I have to say if my heart is not to burst. Surely I do not have to tell you what my life has been: first the terrible fear of flight from the Czarist maniacs who would not let us live, and who killed us in his pogroms, and conscripted our young Jewish men for twenty-five years of slavery in the Army — from this terrible animal oppression I fled by paying the same torturers money under the table to slip across the border with only the rags on my back, from the Pale, the Pale with my poor old mother and father who felt too old to go kissing my head and blessing me and calling on YHVH to protect me, Mr. Editor, and I knew I would never see them again because I was their life and with me to America, their only reason for enduring this suffering on earth, just to know I was safe, a little piece of themselves going to live in America before they would lay down and smile under the Cossacks’ horses; I kept their brown picture; across in the filth of steerage, a boat for cattle, and we were cattle, and then the terror of the Immigration Officers who would or would not let us be Americans — the woman right next to me with her trachomatous eyes not going in, staying on the island in seclusion, in America, and yet never to be in America, and to her I had to say goodbye my own good fortune being my health and my youth and my strength. And a boy from the same town with me came on the boat behind the old man who couldn’t remember the name his sons told him to say, one that the American inspectors could pronounce, and the poor old man so bewildered said piteously in Yiddish, I forget, ich vergessin , and named like a newborn babe, this old man, Ike Fergusson, oh I could tell you stories … But this boy and I went right away for the license and with no further ado we became married and the next day went looking for work and began our life with needle and thread, my stout young protector and me in our paid room as boarders on Stanton Street, a couple neither smart nor dumb, neither fair nor dark, neither short nor tall or ugly or beautiful, but hard-working folks and for thousands of years my people stumbling through the world in their suffering looking for paradise on earth, righteous in our adoration of YHVH, trying to find a home on earth, an earth habitable in reason and peace and humanity, somewhere. And I tell you, Mr. Editor, for children who have seen the bottom of the pagan Cossack horseshoe and the drunken grin of the Czarist bureaucrat, to sew sixteen hours a day for pennies, in bad light, and to live in a one-room, with the children bathing in the laundry sink in the kitchen and the dead rat floating in the common toilet at the end of the dark stinking hall — it can be done. And you think you can stitch a life together, penny by penny, with the small muscles in your fingers drive the metal needle through the cloth a million nimble moments each day — it can be done. And anything can be endured with hope: My eldest runs into the street and is crushed under a wagon. My two younger sisters who I have brought to this country with my pennies are destroyed in the Triangle Fire, a hundred and fifty of them burned to death in that sweatshop. And my second son, Jacob, who wanted to be called Jack, and who loved to swim in the East River, he does not survive the terrible flu epidemic in 1918. And in this country, fifteen years, twenty, my old man and me, I recognize us one day cleaning ourselves for the Sabbath: we are my mother and father, and life, terrible life, has nailed us to the ground. Oh, Mr. Editor, there have been such sweetnesses though, and God remains pure and shining over Hester Street with the peddlers selling the fish for the Sabbath and the pushcarts with their notions, and the men in dirty vests and derbies bartering in their musical voices. And I think of the children running to school and learning English and reading in the library in such great thirst. And there are everywhere lectures and meetings of an intellectual nature and I, an ignorant woman, even I, understand the pride in common workingmen slowly admitting to themselves that their dreams are for their children. Yet nevertheless seeking in their nights or on their days of leisure the betterment of their minds, the satisfaction of mental exercise, the understanding of the universe. And that play that brought such tears to all of us of the greenhorn who came to America and had such hard lessons to learn, before, blessed G_D, our lessons, he was reunited with his mama and papa. And a glass of tea at the window with the cube of sugar in your teeth and if you listen someone will be singing a song in the alley, under the clotheslines. But what I cannot forgive, Mr. Editor, is the thankless child who becomes ashamed of his mother and father, and forsakes their ways, and blasphemes and violates the Sabbath to be a modern American; and is attracted to godless ideas in the street like a fly to flypaper. And who tells you to speak English. And who cries only when her father, my husband, finally totters to his knees like an old horse who has no more strength— mamaneu —under his pack of clothes, America, on the street to his knees under the day’s piecework going to his knees and he coughs and drops of his blood spatter the sidewalk and someone calls me Mrs! Mrs! your husband is dying, and his friend tuberculosis, which is bits of thread on the lungs, my young man from the same town where the truth is we were married for safety by our parents before we crossed the border, my young man who has never lifted a hand against me and who bore all his sorrow in the Synagogue, is at this moment old enough to die. And he dies. And I am alone in America with only my daughter, Rachele, born 1919, and the terror of my life is yet to begin—

A thin, small, caved-in woman dry to the touch,

Grandma gave me pennies and called me a good boy