Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [158]
Still more tests were applied to his arms and legs by means of injections under the skin of other allergic materials. If an injection blew up and discolored, another culprit had been found. He had dozens of scratches on his little back. It made me cry to see it.
My brother was allergic to milk, wheat, red meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, butter, most cereals, most fruits, most vegetables, ice cream, chocolate, most kinds of dust found in most of the air, flowers, all weeds, reeds, most trees, cats, dogs, newspapers, all cooking oils, and peanuts.
He could safely eat turnips, stewed rhubarb, and certain varieties of onions. Every week he got allergy shots and silver protein Argyrol packs way up his nose, to clean out his sinuses. He spent a lot of school days in bed.
You would think, with his ability to read and stuff, he would be a good student, but he wasn’t. The main reason was that neither Gideon nor I completed a full term in one school, without changing neighborhoods or cities, until we moved to Norfolk, Virginia.
Most Sundays found Gideon and me in the lecture hall of the local Jewish Workers Federation, or a hall in which Communists were allowed to speak. We listened to a rotating show of out-of-town lecturers and sometimes the big guns of the Party like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder and the beloved Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor, who was always just back from the Soviet Union with another glowing report.
Sundays for us were torture, sitting on hard-back folding chairs and trying to understand Marx and Lenin’s manifestos.
We would alleviate the hours by staring at the cracks in the ceiling, or a repetitious design on the wallpaper. Gideon learned to sleep with his eyes open, an accomplishment I was never able to master. This is not to say that being a Young Pioneer was all drudgery. Sometimes the entire family would travel to New York for a giant rally in Madison Square Garden. When twenty thousand voices sang “The Internationale,” it was a very stirring moment. The comrades did everything together: lectures, picnics, social events, picket line duty. The best was May Day, when the workers of the world marched in unity.
Being in the movement, we had to be careful of which comrades were our close friends, because after we’d known them well for a year or two, some would simply be called up on charges and expelled. We couldn’t acknowledge members who had been thrown out, even if we passed them on the street. So we were both afraid of making close friends.
The same Comrade Dworkin who had managed the Ginzburg Brothers Twelve victory tour had become a much feared member of the Central Committee. But Dworkin came under suspicion when the Arab riots broke out in 1929 and, as an editor of Freiheit, he supported the Jewish settlers. Orders came from Moscow to reverse this position and support the Arabs. A lot of Jews quit the Party on that issue.
Dworkin was eventually expelled when something inside of him cracked at the death of his father and he committed the cardinal sin of going to synagogue to sit shim. None of us were really sorry to see him leave, but Nathan was called up for being a “Dworkinite” and received a humiliating demotion to Norfolk, a post considered one notch below a sewage treatment plant.
The Party allotted him a meager twelve dollars a week, which meant he had to take a second job. One of the comrades, Harold Sugerman, was in the wallpaper business and, on Party orders, took Nathan in as an apprentice.
“I tell you,” Nathan moaned, “that, worse than killing chickens, worse than the coal business, worse than splitting rocks in Palestine, is the paper hanging trade.”
Norfolk had a few new homes requiring quality work. Sugerman subcontracted for