Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [152]
Conditions at the factory were very bad and the strike was long and bitter. Just when it seemed that the strike was going to be smashed, two union organizers came down from New York from the Jewish Workers Federation. One of them, Nathan Zadok, was to become my pretend daddy.
I’ve heard the story a hundred times of how the union organizers tricked the Baltimore police into making a mounted charge against the women pickets at the Ginzburg Brothers gate. They were clubbed and twelve of them, including my mother, Leah, were taken off to jail and received six-month sentences from a crooked judge.
This created an incident to exploit, because the women became known as the Ginzburg Brothers Twelve and eventually the union won the strike. Although my mother spent only ten days in jail, she seemed to like being a martyr.
WELCOME HOME, LEAH! a big sign read over the front door. A hundred people must have jammed into the house. The whole family was there, Uncle Jake and Uncle Lazar and all my cousins and Aunt Pearl, even though her husband, Uncle Dominick, was a member of the police force.
Later that night, when they had all gone home, Bubba heated a pan of hot water, added Epsom salts, and placed it on the floor so Momma could soak her feet.
Momma had given me a thousand kisses that day, so I’ll never forget it. She was braiding my hair when Bubba said to speak Yiddish so the child won’t understand. Even at the age of four, I could understand Yiddish pretty well, but pretended not to. That way, I could learn more family secrets like just how much Bubba hated Zayde Moses.
“... There was this huge woman jailer, who takes you into a little side room and orders you to take off all your clothing in front of her, down to the last stitch. I promise you, she hadn’t had a bath in three weeks,” my mother said. “You could see in her hair, little white lice eggs.” I found out later that any woman my mother didn’t like had lice eggs in her hair.
“Don’t worry, darling,” Bubba said, “every uphill has a downhill.”
“Oh, she enjoyed her job, if you know what I mean. She implied to me that in exchange for favors to her, I would be given special treatment. She couldn’t take her eyes off me. It gave me a chill all over.”
“I always have said that the road to hell is just as bad as arriving there.”
“We learned that the strip-search room had a two-way mirror, so the policemen could watch. They were looking upon me without a stitch on. You can’t believe my humiliation. One of the girls, the Italian, Teresa, was having her period. It didn’t make one iota of difference.”
“Here, darling, eat, I have to put some flesh back on your bones.”
“I nibbled a bit here, a bit there, until we called the hunger strike. But there were mice droppings on everything, and the cockroaches were the size of dogs. It was almost a relief to go on a hunger strike.”
“I tried to get food to you,” Bubba said. “I begged on bended knees. That police sergeant was a regular hoodlum. Maybe they thought I’d baked a gun inside the cake already.”
“As a principled human being,” my momma said, “I don’t hold it against Dominick Abruzzi that he works with animals, but Pearl, God help her, would be well rid of him.”
“Let me tell you, darling, that for five days after your arrest the yellow journalist rags hardly printed a word about it. They are as dirty as that judge who sentenced you. Only when it became a national scandal did they put it on the front page. A mother could die.”
“Thank God I was in prison with them,” Momma said. “The others weren’t as strong as I was. Frankly, I became their inspiration. Only when I thought of Molly here, of never seeing my precious child again, did I falter.”
I was hugged and kissed and patted. It was nice.
“On the third night of the hunger strike, I began seeing visions,” my momma went on. “I swear, on Molly’s name, as I sit here, I heard—get a grip—the voices of Saul and Uncle Hyman. I felt myself growing weaker and weaker.