What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [21]
Harry’s interest in writing may have begun when he was nine or ten and his mother asked him to write letters to America for her. As she dictated, Harry penned pleas to Yankel’s relatives asking for money for passage to the United States. Over the years, Harry’s grandmother replied only once. “What do you think I am, the Bank of England? Or do you think I took the crown jewels with me when I left from England?” she asked, Harry wrote in The Dream. Still, the family attended each delivery of the mail filled with hope. They were shocked and then jubilant when the postman handed Harry a thick envelope, sent anonymously and containing tickets for the entire family aboard the S.S. Regina in 1922. His mother, who would later discover that Yankel’s father had sent the tickets, sat transfixed, holding her dream in her hands, as Harry and his siblings rejoiced. Their raucous celebration woke their father from a nap. He greeted the news with disdain, roaring, “Who the bloody hell wants to go to America?” And he swore that he would not go.
But to Harry’s bitter and everlasting disappointment, Yankel journeyed with the rest of the family, via Quebec, to the West Side of Chicago. He so dreaded his father’s brutish ways, Harry prayed his father would remain in England. His misgivings increased when the Bernsteins moved into an urban landscape that bore little resemblance to the imagined world of mansions, manicured lawns, and swimming pools he had seen in magazines. The discrepancy between the stirring visions of life in America that his relatives had described in their letters and the reality was not lost on Yankel either. After a brief respite, he renewed his cruel behavior, needling relatives with derogatory nicknames and provoking Harry’s grandmother, with whom his family was staying, to send them packing. Harry acted out the scene for me, raising an arm high in the air and mimicking his grandmother’s imperious voice, “That’s enough! Leave!”
After a year in which the family tasted poverty in Chicago and learned shattering truths about their relatives’ lives in America, the Bernsteins’ circumstances improved temporarily. Harry was again employed as the family’s letter writer. This time, however, in letters going to England, he transcribed his mother’s boasting about life in America. His brothers and sister were prospering, he wrote, and they were living in an airy apartment where they enjoyed having a toilet, electric lights, a telephone, and even a piano. “Harry is now going to high school and studying to be an architect,” Ada reported and Harry scribbled, proud to be using his new Waterman pen.
But the good times were short-lived. By 1927, Harry’s older siblings had left home—one to marry, one to hop freight cars west, and one to be a speaker for the Communist Party. To make matters worse, Harry’s father, after a brief respite of sobriety, was returning home drunk and abusive again, having spent his earnings on alcohol. Faced with his father’s hostility to them, Harry scrapped his plans to go to college.
Instead, he took the civil-service exam and got hired as a clerk in the grim fortress of the Chicago post office on Dearborn Street. He hoped his income would help ease things for his mother and allow him to save money for college tuition. The night soon came, however, when Harry lost patience with his father’s tyranny. When Yankel demanded that he hand over his bankbook, Harry finally let loose. He smashed his father in the nose and sent his blood flying. Amid the mayhem that ensued, Ada discovered that her husband had already stolen her savings from