Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [156]
The neighborhoods in all the cities looked pretty much alike, East Coast dinge, with row houses that were derelict on the day they were finished. The worst building was inevitably the one that Nathan leased for the Jewish Workers Federation. It held a few offices, and a couple of the rooms were used as Yiddish classrooms. The big meeting hall could be converted into a Yiddish theater. This was where the Freiheit Choral Society rehearsed and performed. Their emphasis now was songs about the South, usually about a lynching.
Nathan came to a new city with a nice letter from the federation, stating he was a local editor for the Freiheit and his salary was forty dollars a week. Actually, he was paid twenty dollars, but could buy repossessed furniture on the installment plan. Later it would be repossessed from us.
Gideon and I almost always slept together on a Murphy bed in the living room, except for those nights the cell held a secret meeting, usually to discuss a plan to infiltrate and seize the leadership of a union, or break up a public meeting of the rival Socialists.
We were dressed in hand-me-downs. The relatives were generous, but the clothes were either too big or too small. In some cities a Party member would be the butcher, grocer, or baker. As their contribution to the movement, Nathan was never sent a bill.
In other cities, our credit at the grocer and butcher was soon canceled. Momma would give Gideon and me a note and we would stare at the grocer like we were real hungry.
When things were really desperate, Momma would go to the Italian, or German, or Chinese neighborhood and plant a banana peel near the doorstep of a shop and then do a monumental pratfall, screaming as she went to the pavement, “My God, I hope I don’t have a miscarriage!” At that instant a lawyer happened by and it cost the grocer at least ten dollars to drop a lawsuit. Momma and the lawyer split it, five dollars apiece.
Once Gideon had a real bad toothache. Momma didn’t have any money and there was no Communist dentist in Akron. She told me to wait for Gideon and stay with him in the reception room until she came to pick us up. Six hours went by and Momma didn’t come back. Finally the dentist caught on and sent us home with a note pinned to Gideon, threatening to turn us kids over to the juvenile authorities.
Nathan would come to a city that had, like, six hundred Jewish Workers Federation members and half of them would be secret Communists. He would recruit and sell new subscriptions to the Freiheit. But as fast as he could recruit them, other older members were always brought up on some kind of charges and expelled. When we would leave about a year later, there were still six hundred members.
One small benefit of being a Freiheit manager was that Nathan got free press passes to the symphony, opera, concerts, and sporting events. He always gave the sports passes to Italian comrades on his premise that they were hoodlum games. He never went to the concerts, except if there was a Russian artist. He was afraid the Jewish artists might not be Party-approved. Momma took Gideon and me to everything, even when he was in diapers. I remember walking up as many steps as there were to our apartment to reach the second balcony and the fright of looking down the steep pitch to the stage, but the music and acting were wonderful and my brother and I became enthralled by them. Momma was always a lead singer in the Freiheit Choral Society and was certain she would have made the Metropolitan Opera chorus if she hadn’t given her life to the movement.
By the time Gideon was in second grade, he could sing the tunes of all the arias in ten operas and he had also memorized all the Beethoven symphonies and would spend hours before Uncle Lazar’s or Uncle Dominick’s windup Victrola, pretending he was leading the symphony orchestras.
Momma also believed Gideon was a genius in music, and she sent him to Bert