Pete Hamill: Snow in August

Then he sat on the floor, with his back to the bed, thinking about the Captain Marvels scattered on the floor of Mister G’s candy store, and how, when a real man was being hurt, he could utter no magic words to ward off evil. He started reading Crime Does Not Pay , wondering if someday they’d run a story about Frankie McCarthy. Written by Charles Biro. Drawn by Norman Maurer. The story would start in Brooklyn, and they’d show him stomping a drunk outside Unbeatable Joe’s, then hitting Mister G with the telephone, the blood spurting, calling the old man a Jew prick, then towering above the stricken man with the dead weight of the cash register. Then Frankie would graduate into the rackets, and have big cars and sharp clothes, surrounded by dames in New York nightclubs. And then he’d go too far: the cops would chase him down and catch him, and he’d go weeping to the hot seat.

Yeah.

Except they never used the word prick in comic books.

Or the word Jew , either.

He lay there thinking about this and saw through the window that the snow was falling again, very softly. And he remembered the rabbi, calling to him that morning through the snow and wind. He couldn’t believe now that he had been so scared about entering the darkened vestibule of the synagogue and switching on a goddamned light.

Abruptly, Michael got up. He stepped quietly into the living room. His mother was asleep in the chair, the book on her lap, a thumb wedged in the pages where she’d stopped reading.

He went past her to the bookcase where they kept the blue books of the Wonderland of Knowledge . This was an encyclopedia his mother bought by sending coupons away to a newspaper, enclosing a dime for each volume. He picked out the volume marked Jes-Min , with a drawing of construction workers on the cover, one welding steel beams, the other carrying stones in a basket on his bare back, with pyramids in the distance. He turned to “Jews” and found the entry on page 2080.

Persecution, hardship, and war have marked the long story of the Jews, a Semitic people who trace their ancestry back to the days of Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations. The 16,000,000 Jews in the world today have retained a purity hardly equaled by any other division of man, but their valuable contributions to the world have been of an international character. Greatest of these contributions is in the realm of religion. As the oldest people to believe in one God, the Jews laid the foundation of Christianity and other faiths based on this principle….

Amazing: first came the Jews, and then the Catholics! As he read the text, his excited eyes moved from a statue of Moses, heroic, stern, as muscled as Tarzan, to a picture of a beautiful woman named Judith. The caption told him that Judith entered a city called Bethulia accompanied only by her handmaiden, murdered the Assyrian general, and seized the town. In the picture she was wearing a headband, her long black hair tied in pigtails, and jeweled bracelets on her wrists, along with necklaces and earrings. She was walking proudly, swinging her arms. Behind her on the left was a bearded guy on a horse. Obviously he was behind her because Judith was the boss, the commander. On the right was a bare-shouldered woman in a striped dress, her head downcast under a shawl, carrying a bag. She must be the handmaiden, Michael thought, some kind of maid, the one who polished Judith’s bracelets and necklaces and earrings. There were more horses and a lot of guys with spears, and off in the distance there was the outline of a walled town. Bethulia.

It was like a scene from a movie.

Michael could see it now, in Technicolor, on the screen at the Venus. Hedy Lamarr slips into the town. She and the maid walk around, the general sees her, he looks at her in that certain way they have in the movies and he tells the maid to wait outside. The general takes her to his room. He’s telling her stuff and offers her wine, and as he lifts his own goblet to drink, taking his eyes off her, Hedy Lamarr cuts his goddamned throat!

The movie scene vanished. Michael read on, all about how God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, thus setting up the laws we were supposed to live by, most of them the same ones he had to memorize from the Baltimore Catechism. There was nothing about turning on light switches. And none of what he was reading was like the stuff he heard on the streets. There was no mention of the Jews killing Jesus. There was nothing about Jews being greedy and sneaky and vengeful. Were the people who wrote the encyclopedia hiding something?

The story in the blue book did say that the Jews, who were nomads, also set up laws about health and cleanliness. And they gave the world the Bible and the first alphabet. The goddamned alphabet! And music too!

The music of the Jews also has come down to modern times as a special contribution to art. It is a unique form of music — full of pathos and melancholy melody, yet beautiful and tender .

Michael realized he’d never heard Jewish music. He knew Catholic music, like “Tantum Ergo” and “Mother Dear, O Pray for Me.” He knew all the words, in English and Latin. And he had come to love jazz music, listening to it on the radio, wishing he could play some instrument. A piano. Or a trumpet. But Jewish music… what did it sound like? He read the words again— full of pathos and melancholy melody, yet beautiful and tender —and thought it must sound like the blues.

He glanced out at the falling snow, saw the blurred red neon sign of Casement’s Bar, and again felt a sudden darkness in his mind. What if the encyclopedia was lying? Maybe this was a terrible trick. Maybe a Jew wrote the story in the book. Or paid someone to write it the way the Jews wanted it to appear. To fool the Christians, make them let down their guard. That’s what they’d say down on Ellison Avenue. That’s probably what they’d say if he took the blue book across the street to Casement’s and said: What do you think of this , pal?

But that couldn’t be. This was an encyclopedia; if it was full of lies, someone would write to a newspaper or the mayor or some other big shot; they’d expose the lies. If they were lies. Maybe the stuff he heard on the street was the real lie. He would have to ask his mother about it. Or Father Heaney. Father Heaney was tough, but he wasn’t mean. He didn’t say much, but shit, neither did Gary Cooper. Father Heaney would tell Michael the truth. The boy didn’t completely trust what he heard on the street. The grown-ups knew a lot more than he did about most things. But he also knew that some of what they had to say was what they all called bullshit. Until he died, they talked lots of bullshit about President Roosevelt. They were talking bullshit now about Jackie Robinson. Maybe they were also talking bullshit about the Jews.

He turned from the falling snow and resumed reading through the entry, his eyes glazing over the details, seeing words like Talmud and Torah , and a long history of dates going all the way back to 722 B.C., about things that were done to the Jews and how, in spite of everything, they continued to survive. He wanted to find out more about Judith, but there was nothing else. Down near the bottom, his eyes widened.

Today persecutions and oppressive measures are still carried on in some European nations. In Germany the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler has deprived Jews of political and civil rights which they previously enjoyed. The result has been a gradually increasing exodus of Jews from Germany. Poland, where oppressive measures have existed for many years, has more than 3,000,000 Jews….

Hitler was now dead, so this must have been written before the war. He looked at the small type in the front of the book. Copyright… 1938? That was almost nine goddamned years ago. So even then, long ago, before the war, in 1938 , when Michael was three years old, people knew what Hitler was doing. And what he was going to do. His mother was right: Hitler hated Jews and killed millions of them. But if people knew, why didn’t anyone stop him from doing it? Why did they wait until it was too late? Better: why didn’t some Judith go in and cut his goddamned throat?