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

Two parents and their four children arriving in the new world: two sons, two daughters, all four unmarried.

At one stroke the number of Zaida’s and Baba’s offspring in America was doubled; at one stroke Ira acquired not only two grandparents, but four new uncles and aunts. Six close relatives all at once. It was a little bewildering at first.

Ella was the oldest of these four new siblings. Quiet, plain, self-effacing, she was extraordinarily gifted in needlework. (Years later, Ira would muse on what these, like millions of other immigrants, might have achieved in the new world, given the least guidance, the least assistance.) Products of Ella’s handiwork were the delightful Hebrew samplers on the walls of the new apartment, the only adornments other than savings bank calendars. Ella’s were the traditional lions of Judah rampant over the tablets of the Law embroidered on the sapphire velvet of the bag in which Zaida stored his phylacteries and prayer shawl; hers the charming gold-threaded designs on the scarlet velvet matzah caddy that graced the table on the Passover.

Next in age, and quite unlike her older sister temperamentally and in many other respects, was Sadie. She was very homely; she was rambunctious; she was rashly impulsive and willful. She was illiterate as well. Perhaps due to her extremely defective vision, which, in the hamlet where the family dwelled, had gone uncorrected for lack of an oculist, Sadie was the only illiterate one of Zaida and Baba’s brood of nine surviving children. So myopic was she that twice she poked her head through the panes of closed windows in the Harlem apartment. Taken by Mom to be fitted for glasses, when Sadie was asked to read the eye chart, she began a pathetic alphabetic chant of “Ah, beh, tseh, deh. .” Commented Mom dryly: “The oculist understood what he had to do.” Later, when she was engaged to be married to Max S, a waiter, from whom her illiteracy was concealed, Sadie, by now fitted with eyeglasses, gave herself over to an earnest attempt to learn to read a little English under her juvenile nephew’s tutelage. The effort was vain. Fitful, spasmodic, she seemed unable to focus on print — and after awhile, the adolescent Ira was unable to focus on teaching her. Her twitchings, her flutterings of helplessness aroused him — which she noticed — and sessions were suspended.

After her vision was corrected, Sadie too displayed exceptional manual aptitude. Following her initiation into the ways of the American shop (and the ways of getting there and home), she became highly adept in the making of feather ornaments for ladies’ hats, earning by piecework higher wages than Ella did with her fancy embroidery. Her very good wages, after deductions for room and board to the common household fund, left her a tidy surplus; part of this, of course, she deposited in the savings bank, and part of it she spent on finery and cosmetics. It was the cosmetics that drove her older brother Saul beside himself. Not only long since Americanized, but well acquainted with the subdued elegance of the suave patrons he waited on in the high-toned hotel dining rooms — and the high-tone harlots he pined for — he objected violently to the strong perfumes, the thick shingles of face powder, the lurid rouge with which his sister bedizened her features. A frenetic he was, and his sister, in her willfulness, a match for him: fierce spats broke out between them, in which “whore” and “whoremonger” were bandied about, until such a vortex of acrimony was reached, especially on a Sunday, when all were still in bed, that the other siblings were drawn in, egging on or protesting. The apartment became a babel, an uproarious babel in Polish, Yiddish, Slavic and broken English, a babel only Zaida could quell. And quell it he did, wading in with cane and yarmulke and flailing adversaries and adherents right and left without distinction. Two or three of these hideous squabbles Ira witnessed: Impecunious little shnorrer that he was, Sunday mornings were the best times for him to visit Zaida and Baba’s house, to collect a few coins, the small gratuities of kinship. Once, he entered the house just as his uncle Saul leaped out of bed, and rushing over to Sadie’s bed, slapped her; she retaliated in kind. Instantly the apartment became bedlam. Poor, patient, wrinkled Baba retreated to the kitchen murmuring to herself unhappily; and Zaida, uttering towering imprecations, restored order in customary fashion: with cane and yarmulke.

So there was Ella, there was Sadie, and what hatred she and Pop harbored for each other! Die blindeh , he dubbed her: the blind one — because she stood her ground, refused to be intimidated by his wrath, as Mom so often was in those early years. Not in the least cowed, Sadie would fling back at her brother-in-law: Mishugener hint! Mad dog! (And too often, alas, Ira secretly agreed with her.) “Why didn’t I learn to read?” she confided bitterly to her young instructor during those fruitless and now ambiguous sessions, when it was becoming all too evident that his flighty, twitching pupil couldn’t curb her restlessness, nor Ira his carnal hopes. “I didn’t learn to read,” Sadie said, “because I was sent to be a little serving-maid in your parents’ home in Tysmenitz where they lived with your father’s father — on his bounty. At a time when I should have received some schooling I was there instead, tending to you, an infant.” Her brown eyes behind thick glasses trained an angry gaze at her nephew; whose own glance wavered between distraction of her thick, plastery powdered nose and fierily rouged cheeks, and distraction of his guilty desires. “And do you know what your father would do to me, when your mother was heavy with you, when your mother was in labor, and I took care of the housework? He would fart in my face.”

“Yeah?” Ira projected sympathy. Strings were a single strand; ropes were twined: ambivalence about the genuine: What if Baba’s twins had lived, the boy and the girl, the girl, the girl his age to teach English to? Maybe. .

There were Ella and Sadie. The former married Meyer D, owner of the then-thriving kosher butcher shop across the street, where Baba traded, and continued to trade when she realized Meyer was an eligible bachelor. He was a heavyset man, taciturn, quite middle-aged, his sole diversion apparently a game of pinochle played in a café on 116th Street. So Ella was married first, and then Sadie. She married the tall, slender Max S — who discovered too late, so well dissembled was it, that his bride was an illiterate ( Ut azoy und ut azoy , ran the Yiddish ditty, nahrt m’n uhp a khoosin . “This way and that way the groom is duped.” Max S made light of the revelation. He had found what he sought, a compatible, faithful and diligent Jewish wife.

Ira’s two new uncles were the youngest members of his grandparents’ family. Of the two, Max F was older than his brother Harry — and far more beguiling, whimsical and humorous. Average in height (for those times), Max was close-knit and well-proportioned; his eyes blue, his nose snub, Slavic, like Baba’s — and like Mamie’s too. His hair was chestnut in hue, and surpassingly thick and wavy. In addition to being ingenious, inventive, a great “fixer,” Max was a self-styled Hero (It was one of the first English words that Max learned; his use of it puzzled Ira at first, who associated the word with a warrior of great daring. Only afterward Ira realized that Max meant “ ein Heldt ,” which in Yiddish didn’t necessarily signify a person of great valor, but a stalwart person, or even one who was merely hale and hearty.). Max actually undertook to prove he was a Hero — and an ingenious one as well: With a contraption of hooks connected by cords to a heavy comb, he sank the teeth of the comb into his dense locks, and engaging the hooks at the other end under a weighty bureau, he lifted the bureau from the floor. Could Samson himself brag of more heroic hair?