E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

She fell for him. Perhaps she knew then he was not to have a brilliant career in the revolution. Perhaps it didn’t matter. He was not a practical fellow and his practical political understanding of the necessities of daily revolutionary life had been fused by the heat of too much belief. They were members of a party, after all. Russia was the only socialist nation, after all. They sat the next summer around a campfire in Connecticut, and understood that Poland and Latvia and Estonia had been socialized, and that the pact was to buy time, and Stalin knew what he was doing, and the Popular Front was over; but Paul sat in the light of the fire, chemically transformed in his anti-Fascist purity, and he didn’t seem to hear. The day-to-day intricacies of strategy and tactics did not command his attention. The issues commanded his attention. The ends in view. They met an older man, Selig Mindish, and his wife, they met many interesting people in that progressive camp, they listened to marvelous lectures, they went to square dances, they were the youngsters in this crowd, shining college students who waited table, youngest of the grownups, apple of everyone’s eye, and one warm night, with the stars shining and the blackberry bushes, and the crickets’ fiddle and the frogs’ jug band, they knew each other and it was good.

Sunday

Dearest Rochelle,

When we were downstairs during the recess Thursday I glanced at a copy of the Daily News one of the marshals had folded to a review of a new Marlon Brando picture: about a gang member who decides to brave the wrath of his comrades and testify in court against their criminality which he has come to see is wrong. Thus is promulgated for the millions the ethic of the stool-pigeon! Does this strike a bell in view of the prosecution’s private remarks to Ascher?

P.

What else is to be expected of a Hollywood long since purged of its few humanitarian filmmakers? And what is to be expected of a jury picked however partially from a depraved culture? It is frightening.

8th day

Rochelle — Amazing the strong sense one gets of Judge Hirsch and Prosecutor Feuerman working together like a team. It couldn’t be my imagination, Hirsch makes no effort to disguise where his sympathies lie. Their collusion is quite shameless — they are like bricklayers methodically sealing us up. But their arrogance will destroy them in the end. Feuerman’s assistant is an ass licker if I ever saw one, an unctuous little b—. I recognize his type from the army.

My darling have you noticed how many of the characters in this capitalist drama are Jewish? The defendants, the defense lawyer, the prosecution, the major prosecution witness, the judge. We are putting on this little passion play for our Christian masters. In the concentration camps the Nazis made guards of certain Jews and gave them whips. In Jim Crow Harlem the worst cops are Negro. Feuerman in his freckles and flaming red hair, this graduate of St. John’s, the arch assimilationist who represses the fact that he could never get a job with the telephone company — Feuerman is so full of self-hatred HE IS DETERMINED to purge us. Imperialism has many guises, and each is a measure of its desperation.

P.

I have to laugh about that testimony re the radio.

(undated)

The floors are made of marble, there’s a guard at every door … Just like a bank. An altar for the judge, a lesser altar for the lawyers. Like some kind of church. Banks and churches and courtrooms all depend on the appurtenances of theater. On illusion. Banks, the illusion of stability and honorable dealings to hide the rot and corruption of capitalist exploitation. Churches the illusion of sacred sanctuary for purposes of pacifying social discontent. Courtrooms of course designed to promote the illusion of solemn justice. If there was true justice why would such trappings be necessary? Wouldn’t a table and chairs and an ordinary room serve just as well? What are they whispering about up there? Trial by tedium, that’s what this is. Rochelle, why do I feel so elated? Is it possible I believe this whole thing will collapse of its own absurd weight and we can simply walk out and go home? Let us write a musical comedy, my darling, and call it Foley Square!

Brushing her thick wavy hair, brushing it back from her temples, brushing it clean, maintaining herself in this cell with fastidiousness. She suffers most the shower rule. They will let her shower only twice a week. The humiliation is intolerable. Brushes her hair clean, brushes it, fires the scalp and learns to bathe at the sink in her cell. A matron, a woman like herself, with children, a clean decent woman who is sympathetic and becoming her friend, allows her to hang her blanket for a few minutes with borrowed clothespins over the bars each morning; and she removes her clothes and stands at the sink laving herself with the cold water, washing her body with soap and cold water, drying her body with the thin starched crusty prison towel and then washing the sink, and then washing her underclothes, and then washing the sink again. Enjoying the tensity of her coldness, the tightening stippled skin, the nerve thrill of coldness warming in its own blood. Walking barefoot on the stone floor of their prison.

The women in her cellblock have enormous respect for her, and though they call each other by their first names, they address her as Mrs. Isaacson. They ask her advice; they are hookers and addicts and thieves waiting for trial. She understands that part of the respect she is due derives from the seriousness of the charge against her. To herself she has to smile. But green shoots of concern go out from her to these women, and in the exercise yard she might explain to this one what she understands of the value of psychotherapy, and where, in what city agencies, it can be arranged for at no cost; or to that one that the burning feeling during urination is probably cystitis which is like a cold in the urinary tract, and that it should be attended to by a doctor, even a prison doctor, and can quickly be cleared up. They also like the way she plays volleyball, awkwardly, but with absolute determination to win. When her trial comes, in the tradition of this place she is offered different items of clothes out of different cells, so that she will make the best possible appearance before the judge. In the privacy of her bed that night, she cries; it can be heard, but at this time of night, before sleep, many of the women cry, and because it is not uncommon it is private. She cries not because she is so terribly moved by the generosity of the other inmates — that alone would not cause her to cry — but because she is so clearly one of them and the cellblock has so unquestionably become her home.

ASCHER & LEWIN

Interoffice Memo

12.14.53

Mitch, according to Mrs. Isaacson she believes Selig Mindish was born in Poland and came here as a young man sometime after World War One. One assumes he would have been naturalized in the twenties. This is easy enough to check out unless there is some change of name in the process.

JA

Jan 28 1954

FILE: Isaacson Case

Today I finally got what I demanded, the government’s list of witnesses, attached. They have gotten around this by listing nearly a hundred names, knowing I have no facilities for preparing cross-examination for such a number. Feuerman smiled as I was given the list. I am to understand that imbedded somewhere in the list are the real witnesses he will call.

JA

In her mind it is a ritual defense, a ceremony. Once Pauly took her to the theater, a workshop theater on Houston Street down at the bottom of Manhattan. There were these students on a stage without a curtain, and it was a Greek play with girls in togas doing this slow arm-waving dance to symbolize their fear their wish that what was going to happen would not happen, and they pushed themselves away from the terrible action, they pushed the air, ceremoniously putting their hands up to the sides of their faces and pushing away air. Nevertheless, what they feared and abhorred came to pass.