Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [154]
“And the rest of the day? There was no heat in the apartment, so we gathered at the public library on Fifth Avenue to read the Yiddish periodicals and stay warm. The end of every day I put part of the Forward in the soles of my shoes, to cover the holes.”
During Nathan Zadok’s first winter, he went on, he got jobs as a floor sweeper, a shoveler on city snow removal crews, a custodian of the mounted police stable, also as a shoveler of horse manure.
“By springtime I got a permanent job with Barney Bloom, the goniff coat maker. Most of the garments were subcontracted to family sweatshops in the Bronx. I delivered unsewn parts and picked up finished coats. I had to fight my way into the subway, with two boxes that weighed forty pounds each, and walk six, eight blocks and up five stories with my shmattes. For eleven hours a day, six days a week, I was paid the glorious sum of ten dollars. This is your America, Mrs. Balaban? I’ll tell you about America ... with its lynchings and Jim Crow and KKK. With chain gangs, racketeers, police brutality, union busting, sweatshops, a yellow press, slums, sharecroppers, political prisoners.”
“Oh, Nathan,” Momma cried, “it’s so awful!”
“What did you expect, gold on the streets?” Bubba argued. “We are all like salmon swimming upstream. Some make it, some don’t.”
The rest of Nathan’s story we already knew. Nathan became a Communist to fight all the evils in America. The Jewish branch of the Party published a small Yiddish-language newspaper, called Freiheit, and he was sent to Baltimore to form a secret Communist cell and get subscriptions for the Freiheit Also, to infiltrate and gain control of the Garment Workers’ Union.
MY MOTHER and Nathan Zadok and four women from the Ginzburg Brothers Twelve went on a victory tour. At first they wanted to leave me at home, but someone in New York decided I could be useful.
Every day we went to a different city by train or bus. We were put up in the homes of comrades. At night there would be a meeting at the local Workmen’s Circle hall, and I became a very important part of the evening.
“Fellow workers! Comrades!” Nathan Zadok would yell. “We serve notice that we will no longer accept the exploitation from the bourgeoisie like cattle to the slaughter! The Jewish trade union movement of America is on the march!”
He would get everybody stomping their feet and screaming and collections were made and people signed up for the Freiheit. Sometimes it was scary, because plainclothes police and stool pigeons tried to get the names and addresses and photographs of the people in the audience.
The Freiheit Choral Society would stretch across the stage and the big bosoms of the women heaved and the bald heads of the men shone.
Schwab! Schwab! Charlie Schwab!
Life’s unhappy lest you rob, from the bakers in your mills,
And the miners
In your hills.
I never really knew who Charlie Schwab was, except that he exploited the workers.
They would introduce Momma and the other four ladies of the Ginzburg Brothers Twelve and the building would creak because the noise was so thunderous. Mother would come up to the speaker’s rostrum and all the lights would be dimmed. Momma would then recite a poem she wrote in jail:
“Shackle me not to any machine,
I am flesh, I am real,
I want to see my child play in daylight,
In the sun.
Therefore I labor, I toil, I sweat,
And we will march,
From this sewer of debasement
To a golden throne,
Where only the masses are allowed, Immortal!”
I really didn’t understand it then and don’t understand it too much now, but people would be crying and clapping and whistling and Momma would cross her arms over her bosom and bow.
Then came the pledges.
“I have a pledge from the Furriers’ Union, Local 24,