WHAT KIND OF JEW PULLS A TRIGGER? -- part 2

My grandfather, Louis, my father’s father, chose to leave Russia instead of serving in the Tzar’s army. He would have been about fifteen, and he traveled with a brother, whether older or younger I don’t know. Also, I don’t know my grand uncle’s name. What I do know (although I don’t know how I know) is that the two brothers decided to separate, my grandfather to stay in Baltimore, and my grand uncle to go out west and look for employment with the railroads. There must have been some correspondence between them because the story goes that my uncle actually did get work with the railroad. First payday came, but as the list was called out my uncle realized his name had been omitted. Same time he noted one of the names called belonged to a dead man he’d seen dead with his own eyes. Uncle’s hand shot up in the air, and the pay envelope went right to him. He took the dead man’s name as his own, so, right then and there, a whole chunk of family disappeared down the rabbit hole of immigration history.

My grandfather, Samuel, my mother’s father, is the root of another story. I tell you this as it was told to me by my Uncle Milton, the first scribe in our family. These were coalfield Jews, part of an immigration wave that came over from the Pale of Settlement in eastern Europe throughout the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century and settled in southern West Virginia, North Fork, to be exact, a small town on the north fork of the Elkhorn River. The Pale where Jews were forced to live by law included Lithuania, Poland, and western Russia. The way my family got to West Virginia was a love story, sort of, perhaps in the manner of one written by Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Enemies: A Love Story.” Here at last is the Hermanson version.

Somewhere in the vicinity of eastern Lithuania and the Russian border (what today is Belarus), love bloomed between my grandfather’s brother, Mischa Lazar, and Tante Pesha, a distant cousin and the daughter of an important man. According to Uncle Milton, their love was like a flower: it budded, it bloomed, it died, it rotted. Again, according to Uncle Milton, Mischa Lazar was a shlemazel, not to be confused with a shlemiel, the difference being that the shlemiel spills the soup on the shlamazel. Soup, Soup, Soup, Soup, Soup! One spilled soup too many and Pesha became a raving maniac, shrew of shrews, a bite like a weasel. She tore into him from tooth to tuchos. If people were around (as they usually were), she implored them to see how cursed she was: Mischa Lazar, the dunce, the dim, the damned. Who didn’t hear her?

One day Mischa Lazar disappeared, vanished as if he’d never been. Dogs were brought in. Trackers sent out. No sign. No sign never at all. It was assumed he was set upon by robbers and no doubt smoldering in a shallow grave by now. Pesha herself was sure of this. Ever since he disappeared she’d been getting chills in bed at night that meant a ghost walked over her grave. Who else could it be but him, that despicable lowlife, that “vantz”, that “shtucke drek?” But, the chills abated, and the days began. Days. Weeks. A month. Two months. Nothing. And then. Something. Word came back from a distant town, Vitebsk, that Mischa Lazar had been spotted, so the family sent my grandfather, Samuel, to bring him back. Samuel actually found him in Vitebsk (a town of some size) even though Mischa Lazar did not want to be found, and wanted even less to go back to Pesha. How my grandfather persuaded him to return home I do not know, but within a week he took off again, stole a horse in the middle of a moonless night, and disappeared into it. Remember, Pesha’s father was an important man. A big shot. A man of influence. He thrust a fat wallet at my grandfather and ordered him to bring that “mamser” back. So, this time, Samuel tracks Mischa Lazar all the way to Scandinavia, Sweden, where it was. That’s how we got the “son” tagged onto our name. Hermanson. How hard could it be to find a Jew fresh from the shtetl in Sweden (long black beard, long black coat, muddy clodhoppers)? Well, Samuel found him again. That night Mischa Lazar produced a bottle of aqua vit, drank his brother blind, and took off once more. Samuel wired Pesha’s father for instructions. “Find him,” bellowed the important man. Pesha wailed that she missed her Mischa, but no one believed her.

This time Mischa Lazar’s trail led across the ocean. He did not enter this country through Ellis Island, we know that, and some think he might have come through the port of Galveston. If so, why go all the way up to Baltimore, because that’s where my grandfather found him next, rather, found of him next: Baltimore, Maryland; the Hebrew Free Burial Society. The name Mischa Lazar was on its books. No last name. A nobody. A doctor claimed the cadaver for his experiments. My grandfather took to his room at the boarding house for seven days without shaving or shoes and sat mourning on a low and uncomfortable stool, the Jewish way: he sat shiva. On the eighth day, Samuel took stock and decided here was a business opportunity.

Sam outfitted a peddler’s pack with notions, gadgets, candy, toys, overalls, and other assorted ready to wear clothing, nothing fancy, just good quality. His plan was to head south and sell his wares on the way with hopes of setting up a business whenever he got to wherever he was going. By trade he was a butcher. The pack weighed a hundred pounds, so my grandfather bought a horse, too. While piecing together the bits of information about my grandfather’s travels, I came upon the most surprising old photograph: a well dressed young man on horseback – clean shaven, jacket, tie, fancy boots – with a huge smile on his face and a cigar in the side of his mouth like a big shot. Both horse and saddle were fit and fine. This young man was ready for business. This young man was a pack peddler! Why was I surprised? Because for years I had carried the image of an older, bent over, rabbinical type with a beard and clothes from the old country who trudged the hills and hollows of the south peddling his wares. The young man on horseback was anything but that. He was sure, confident, ready for the world. “Here I am,” he seems to be saying, “Just watch me!” He had an uncanny resemblance to my Uncle Josh, Samuel’s first born.

Samuel traveled across Maryland and down into West Virginia, way down deep to the Tug River, just this side of Kentucky, feuding grounds of the Hatfields in West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky, right there across the river from each other. My mother was actually delivered by Dr. Hatfield from this same clan. Early into the fever that propelled the world into its first world war, Dr. Hatfield came across a Negro giving a stump speech about how the “colored men’s gonna get all the white womens when their mens be away at war.” Hatfield pulled his pistol and shot the speaker dead. That same Dr. Hatfield was shortly thereafter elected to the U.S. Senate.

Anyone who has ever fully experienced Elizabeth Hermanson, fourth child of Samuel, will understand the irony of this situation.

By the way, Sam Hermanson actually ran into Mischa Lazar again. He had paid the funeral parlor to have his name put in their books. Sam wasn’t looking for him, but there was Mischa Lazar in West Virginia with a peddler’s pack of his own.

“I’m not going back to that “chalerya” again,” Mischa Lazar told my grandfather,

“Go where you want,” said my grandfather, “I’m staying here.”

He did, and brought the family over to join him, the only kosher butcher in North Fork, West Virginia.

WHAT KIND OF JEW PULLS A TRIGGER? -- part 1

My father must have known the difference between a stool pigeon and a buzzard. He certainly knew the difference between a bob-tail and a jackass. However, he would not have known a wild duck from a canary, or a rack of antlers from a rack of lamb. Why then was I forever giving him birthday cards and father’s day cards that featured men of Anglo-Saxon character with sensible pipes clenched in their mouths and a smidgeon of grouse feather in their hatbands? If they were sitting in armchairs in their studies, there would be a brandy snifter on a side table. A fine double barrel would be displayed above the mantel. The men stared up and out yonder without blinking as they followed flights of mallards far above no doubt thinking of hunts past and hunts to come with their Eagle Scout sons whose names were followed by numbers.

Reuben Henry Foreman was not that man (and my Boy Scout career went south without ever going north). He smoked El Producto cigars, a five pack for a buck, drank a single shot of Four Roses in the morning and one again in the afternoon, put a quarter on the numbers every day, and was the only white man I ever saw read the “Baltimore Afro-American”, the city’s only Black newspaper. He didn’t do it for any particular reason other than he liked to read newspapers. If he could have read Chinese he’d have read a Chinese newspaper. One time I did see him with a book -- “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”. It was upside down in his lap, and he was asleep. The men depicted on the greeting cards I gave him read “Field and Stream.” If you had asked him, Ruby would have told you his firm belief, but if you never asked him you’d never know.

Many years after his death, Jamie and I went to Baltimore so she could meet my family for the first time. My mother kept some old photographs under a glass top cut to fit her bureau. Jamie called me over, pointed out a photo of my father, and asked, “Who’s that?”

How could she not know who it was?

“My father, J. Who d’ya think?”

“You never told me he was crippled.”

“Who’s crippled?”

“Your father.”

“My father was not crippled.”

“Is this man in that snapshot not your father? Come here and look at this,” she insisted and pointed to a frayed, black & white photo of my father standing there smiling at the camera. The metal canes with arm support attachments that he used are clearly visible. They made a soft, clanking noise, pocket change, when they struck the ground. He was never without them

“Yeah, what’s crippled about him?”

“He’s got crutches! Two of them.”

“Canes!”

“OK. Canes.”

“Thank you. He got around just fine.”

“Yeah, Stephen, the man in this picture might’ve gotten around just fine, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a cripple who did it. Look at him. If the man in this picture is your father then your father was a cripple.”

The man in the picture is my father is a cripple. That man. There. Got it?

Finally, I did. Wow, did I! I was well into my thirties, but, not until that moment, did I ever think of my father as a cripple. Trying to grasp it for the first time staggered me some. I had never even heard the word “cripple” used in our house. It wasn’t avoided. It simply wasn’t, as if the word were magically deleted from every book and magazine that ever followed us home. If the word occurred within earshot outside of the house, if it registered with me at all, I would never have associated it with any image of my father.

I’m trying to find words to describe my feelings as this information made its determined way through to the bedrock of my heart. Little by little I got it. If you wanted to change a single word and only one single word in a manuscript of thousands of pages, millions of pages, you’d start on page one, program your computer, and instantly it would adjust. He would be She. Her would be Him. Past tense would become Present tense. It might become You. You’d feel the change – register a ping on the radar -- but you’d go on, and everything will be what it is.

Many years later (not to mention many years ago), I sat in the Los Angeles Public Library in downtown LA at a carrel stacked with books doing chump change research for a textbook company in Virginia and fondly remembering those by-gone days when people actually paid me real money to write things. I needed a nap. It came upon me suddenly like mustard gas. My head went down, I’m guessing with a thunk. I was gone, bodily gone, time gone, Dorothy in the poppy field gone, nothing there gone. I was deep inside that silence when the pocket change sound of my father’s canes was suddenly as real and immediate as it had ever been. My father was here, there, right next to me – Where? -- and what was happening instead was that an old woman with two metal canes was walking by. My father had never been more real to me than in the instant it took for my eyes to open. I heard him. He was there.