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

They were both silent, Ira in his straight-backed chair, the only spare one in the small bedroom, Zaida in his high armchair next to the rectangular black table. Brass studs about the tall horsehide headrest framed his discontented, humorless features, those visible between yarmulke and beard: brown eyes oppressed, lips between tobacco-yellowed mustache and beard downturned and cheerless. He sighed often, his broad paunch straining the pearly buttons of his dingy underwear. He pitied himself so ostentatiously, Ira continually felt torn between compassion and exasperation. Protocol required about five minutes of restive, stereotyped commiseration, and then he’d be off. No use spending any more time than that in giving plausibility to deference.

“You care to smoke a cigarette?” Zaida picked up the square blue box of Melachrinos. He held up the box rather than out, unopened and close to himself.

“No, thanks, Zaida.” Ira brought out his pipe. It would be a crime to deprive his grandfather of his budgeted and hoarded butts.

Zaida found a cigarette stub on the ashtray, struck a match and lit the charred end, then felt about for the quill-and-paper cigarette holder. He fitted the stained tip of the butt into the scorched holder. “It’s not good, it’s not good, that’s all.”

“No?”

“I tell you we live in botched times. Botched, ruined. Fit for burial, no more.”

“But if you’re Jewish, you’re not supposed to look at life that way.” Ira tried tilting with the weak lance of his own skimpy lore. “Aren’t you? A Jew is supposed to have faith in life.”

“Faith in the Almighty who gave him life. That I have, blessed be His holy name. But if the mill won’t turn, the millers quarrel. I’m not speaking of my life alone.”

“No?”

“No. Though I pray it would please the Founder of the universe to gather me unto Himself. I mean the lives of Jews everywhere in the world. Immeasurable the menace that hangs over them, the woe in store for them. Except here in America, where we are tolerated — barely, but tolerated. In a small compass. Didn’t my son Moishe tell me that when he first came to America, he applied for work in a company that makes these betterien for automobiles? ‘You’re strong and I like you. I can tell you’d be a good worker,’ the owner said to him. ‘You don’t look Jewish either. But I can’t hire you. There would be turmoil in the shop.’ So Moishe told me. And noo : his officer after the Great War urged him to stay. ‘You’ve learned how to command, and your men trust you.’ Noo .” Zaida puffed frugally on his cigarette. “Why are we tolerated today? Why was Moishe raised in the ranks, and given those stripes to wear on his shirtsleeves when he was in the military? Because true piety is ignored, because Orthodox observance is ignored — one in a thousand is observant. My own sons — the very ones who support me — pay for my room and board in a kosher home — which of them dons phylacteries in the morning, which eschews work on Shabbes ? None. Noo . I have to live, and live off their earnings. Do as you see fit, I say. What else can I say? A pious existence is for you to choose. Or not to choose. So at the expense of observance, they go unmolested, here in the Golden Land. They barter holy living for livelihood. Noo . I can see the day when the Jews will be hounded, sooner than later. Mark me. Soon they will not be permitted to earn a livelihood at all. I’ve seen it before: open Jew-baiting increases from day to day. And in Russia, no? They don’t hate Jews? It doesn’t matter whether observant or not, Jews they loathe.”

“I don’t think so, Zaida, from what I’ve read. Jews are treated as equals in Russia.”

“Go, don’t delude yourself. Why is Trotsky running to escape from Russia? From whom is he running? He’s running from the Russian goy , the khlop ? What is Stalin but a khlop ? You can see it in his face. And a khlop is a pogromist. He was for centuries a pogromist, a khlop under the Romanovs, under the czars. So he’ll be for God knows how long a khlop under the Bolsheviks. Why have they expelled a Jew from his high post in Russia, one that he shared once with Lenin? Heed me, were he a goy , it would be a different story.”

“You think so?”

“I know. And I know you won’t believe. The Jew is hated with a bestial hatred the wide world over.”

“Well, what do you do about it?”

“Do? You pray to God. May He send us aid. As the Jews in Russia when the czar oppressed them prayed that the next czar would be more merciful. Was he? He wasn’t. We pray that a new day will bring relief.” His cigarette holder had begun to reek with the proximity of the burning tobacco ember.

“Zaida, the end of your cigarette holder.”

He dislodged the butt, poked at the live end with a house key. “I won’t cite Talmud since you believe in nothing of Yiddishkeit .”

“I do, Zaida. Some of it.”

“It seemed to me, when we first came to America, that you were truly growing up in Jewishness. A child, I thought, blessed by the Almighty, my firstborn grandchild goes with me to the synagogue on Shabbes , on Shabbes at night as well, for the Havdalah .”

“ Shabbes at night, oh, sure,” Ira humorously parried his grandfather’s censure. “They used to have a little spread in the synagogue at the end of Shabbes : black olives and wine, brandy, fresh rye bread.”

“ Noo? ” Undiverted, the old man pushed his yarmulke back over grizzled gray hair. “They still do.”

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Zaida, but if I’m not the Jew I might have been, it’s because we left the East Side when you came to America. You know why: my mother wanted to be near you and Baba.”

“Azoy?” Zaida’s tone sharpened. “Because we came to America you’re not a Jew — and your father didn’t have crazy ideas of becoming an independent milkman?”

“I didn’t mean that was the only reason,” Ira hastened to palliate.

“Live among the goyim because he thought he would be closer to the railroad where the milk came into the city. Because you were living among goyim , you should have been more a Jew than before. Here was I, in this Harlem too. We could have expounded all of Talmud together.”

“It didn’t work that way. Here was Harlem. Yes. But here were the Irish — here were the other goyim: the Italians. They were in the street, and where else did I have to go?”

Zaida was becoming aroused. “Is it my fault? That my poor daughter has such a lunatic for a husband — I shouldn’t tell you that. He’s your father—”

“Oh, I know.”

“He could have lived in Jewish Harlem, like the rest of us. But instead he wedges himself on 119th Street, to save a dollar or two in rent. Live among the goyim at twelve dollars a month. Here on 112th Street still are Jews: 114th Street, 115th Street, 116th Street. He failed as a milkman. He becomes a busboy, thanks to Moishe. He learns to be a waiter. So don’t be a lunatic; show the proprietor of the restaurant the respect due the owner. No, he has to be Chaim — look at Chaim askance, and he’s enraged. Mamie lived across the street from us on 115th Street, and we came here from Galitzia, and from a cap maker Jonas became a ladies’ tailor, steady, quiet, decent. They lived among Jews. Do I dare go into your street, a Jew with a beard? That’s where he crawled to—119th Street, to live with Esau, and he dragged my poor daughter with him. Woe is me.”

“Well, we lived here too, on 114th Street east of Park Avenue when you came to America, Zaida. 114th Street. A Jewish neighborhood. But Mom didn’t like living in the back. No window on the street. It was too much like Veljish, she said. So it wasn’t his fault alone — even though I know he’s a mishugeneh ,” Ira conceded.