Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

The Great War came closer. The Huns impaled babies on their bayonets — though Mom ridiculed stories of German atrocities. “What, the Russ is better? Czar Kolki [ kolki meant bullet] iz a feiner mensh? Who in all the world is more benighted than the Russian mujik? Who doesn’t remember their pogroms, the Kishinev pogroms, in 1903? Pogroms led by seminary students, especially on Easter — Kishinev when I was still a maid. And after they lost to the Yaponchikis when I met your father, immediately they take it out on the Jews. Go! More likely the Russ impaled the infant on his bayonet.”

And for once, Pop agreed wholeheartedly. “Don’t you remember Mendel Beiliss when we still lived on the East Side?” Pop prodded Ira. “Where is your head? You don’t remember the turmoil there was when the Russ tried and sentenced him? And why? The Jew butchered a goyish child for his blood to make matzahs for Passover. And the mujik believed it.”

“Maybe a goy saw us eating borsht on Passover.” Ira suggested. “That’s red.”

“Go, you’re a fool.” said Pop. “A mujik is a mujik and he’ll die a mujik . Who doesn’t know a mujik? ”

“I’ll tell you, child,” said Mom. “It’s thus with Jews: When two monarchs are at war, and one scourges the other’s Jews, the second one says, ‘Since you scourge my Jews, I’ll scourge your Jews.’” Mom laughed mirthlessly. “You understand?”

The Great War drew closer. Oh, the confusions in a child’s mind! Uncle Louis, still wearing his postman’s uniform, came to the house with the Socialist Call in his pocket, and unfolding the newspaper on the green oilcloth-covered kitchen table, read from it what Eugene Debs said about the war — and always drew Mom into the orbit of conversation: “You hear, Leah? Debs said it was a capitalist war in which the workers paid with their lives for capitalists of one country to become more powerful than the capitalists of another country, to take over their trade, their colonies — which were seized by force from the simple people who lived there, stolen, you might say. But no matter who won, the workers would still be wage-slaves.”

Pop listened intently, his whole face taking on a new appearance, as if illuminated; Mom more distantly. “Woodrow Wilson talks about defending democracy. You have no idea of how much the anti-Semitism in the Post Office has grown.”

“Where is a Jew liked?” Mom asked rhetorically. “Nowhere. He makes good cannon fodder. That’s the way it is in Russia, in all of Europe. Even in Austria where Franz Josef tolerates the Jew. He won’t allow Black Hundreds to instigate pogroms, as they do in Russia under the Czar. So the Jew is a little safer, he can breathe a little freer. Still is the Jew liked? Need I ask? One thing they like him for: Give me your Jew to be a soldier. He at least has learned to read and write.”

Uncle Louie regarded her admiringly, looked away, his lips spreading as he swallowed. And to Pop: “You almost became a soldier yourself.”

Pop beamed; he loved to reminisce: “When I returned to Austria where I was inveigled into marrying her.”

It was joke Mom didn’t appreciate. “Naturally, you quarreled first with Gabe,” she reminded him. Gabe was Pop’s oldest brother, and lived now in St. Louis. There was a whole web of relatives on Pop’s side of the family, almost all of whom had immigrated to Chicago or St. Louis, relatives too numerous and too remote to hope to keep track of. As disclosed by Mom, it was mostly their scandalous behavior in America or Galitzia that provided Ira with the meager sense of kinship with them he possessed.

What if they had settled in New York, as Pop eventually did? Then there would have been two clans, the long-established Americanized first generation, the “yellow-ripe” Americans, as the Jews termed the acculturated immigrant, and the “green” Americans, Mom’s family. What a web that would have made as he shuttled back and forth between Zaida’s orthodoxy and traits, and Uncle Gabe and Sam in St. Louis, and Uncle Jacob in Chicago. It was safe to say there would have been an affinity, or similarity, between Uncle Jacob and Zaida, but not much, or much less, with the other two uncles on his father’s side. Though they were close to Zaida in age, temperamentally, Ira gathered from Mom’s report, their outlook and behavior were much closer to that of his more recently arrived uncles.

Oh, it would have been some web — Ira paused to thank his lucky stars he didn’t have that to struggle with. The merest outline of what he recalled would suffice — if it wasn’t already superfluous:

Sam, Pop’s next older brother, strong and strapping, had been a soldier, and had fallen in love with someone else’s wife — to the great disapproval of his father, the stern, bearded Jew with ear-locks, next to the portrait of his equally severe-looking wife on the front-room wall. And they quarreled, Sam and his father, who had lifted his cane to strike his son only to have it snatched from his hand by his son and be struck with it himself. Sam fled to America with the other man’s wife. So Mom, the source of all these stories, related, and that Gabe had married a woman considerably older than himself. Clara by name, and a termagant. “ Oy , is that a Clara,” said Mom. “And jealous. And a shrew. Fearful!” Pop’s nearest brother in age, Jacob, the one in Chicago, the one who had irruptions on his skin, was a weakling, and often when studying Talmud was baited by his younger brother, Pop, until the two came to blows. And once Jacob was so badly beaten by Pop that he had to hide out from his father’s retribution. He slept in an outbuilding, was fed surreptitiously by his mother late at night. There was an older sister, Khatche, who married a dandy by the name of Schnapper, an extremely handsome man and a libertine. They too lived in the Middle West, though not in St. Louis or Chicago. And so tortured was she by the knowledge of her philandering husband’s ill-concealed and continual amours , that one day she poured kerosene over herself and set herself on fire (Mom lowered her voice in the telling). And Ira would note, yes, years and years later, when visiting Fannie, a very pretty, regular-featured woman — no mistaking she was Schnapper’s daughter — Ira would note how the old man, Schnapper himself, now in his nineties, sitting by the window on the ground floor, would appraise every female that went by: It was like a reflex, the way he would twitch at the sight of a skirt. And since Pop was the youngest of his parents’ children, while Uncle Louis was the first-born of Pop’s older sister, that was how it came about that the nephew was older than the uncle.

And Pop’s father — though Mom said that the night before she and her child were to leave for America, Ira, a tot of two years and a half, had danced so fetchingly before his grandsire that tears had sprung to the old man’s eyes as he leaned on his cane watching — Pop’s father Ira never remembered. Out of another age, truly, Ira would feel — as he did about some of his very old grammar school teachers — this grandfather in his eighties who died in 1914, soon after the outbreak of the War. Seized as a rich Jew by Czarist soldiery, when they invaded Galitzia he was held for ransom. He was thrown from the wagon into the ditch when the Russian troops fled in disorder before the counterattacking Austrian army. The weather had already turned cold; he suffered frostbite, and was only rescued because some peasant passing by heard the old man’s groans and recognized him as Saul, superintendent of the baron’s distillery, and known far and wide for his skill as a veterinarian. The peasant took the octogenarian to his hut, cared for him until relatives were notified and came for him and brought him back under their own roof. But the exposure and shock were too much for his aged constitution, and Saul, the superintendent, Shaul Shaffer, as he was known, died soon after — in the fall of 1914, the fall of the same year Baba and Zaida and their offspring came to America. Pop hadn’t quarreled with his in-laws yet. He went to their home, when Ira was there, and squatted on a footstool close to the floor. It was the first time Ira had ever seen anyone sit shivah , as the seven days of mourning were called. .