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I was born too late to be a Wobbly, one of the I Won't Work guys, the Industrial Workers of the World. Too bad. Over my crib hung a piece of tin embossed with the stern physiognomies of Vladimir Ilich Lenin and Leon Trotsky. It hung on one wall or another until I was in my teens. Finally, it was replaced by another piece of tin, this one stamped with the benign image of Joseph Stalin.
In Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop,, Father Latour asks his Indian guide, Jacinto, why the Acomas would live on the high rock, and Jacinto answers, "A man can do whole lot when they hunt him day and night like an animal. Navajos on the north, Apaches on the south; the Acoma run up a rock to be safe."
Cather goes on to say, "And the Hebrews of the Old Testament, always being carried captive into foreign lands--their rock was an idea of God, the only thing their conquerors could not take from them."
What is my rock? What notched stones do I climb for sanctuary?
A man stands among piles of wallpaper rolls as the sun slants in through a wide-open store door. He opens a slender tin and withdraws a small brown cigarette, tamps it on the lid and puts it in his mouth, strikes a match and lights it. He sees me climbing up and down one of the wallpaper piles and smiles. He is my father. I climb down and run to him and hug his leg. It is night. I am sitting in a highchair as my older brother and parents sit at the table under a glaring light. My parents are quarreling, shouting at each other. I begin to cry. They stop and look my way. They smile, kiss each other, then kiss me, first one, then the other. My brother Harry has never stopped spooning his soup. I remember running wildly across the back yard and starting up the outdoor stairs and losing it and feeling so ashamed. As she wiped me clean, my mother sang a Russian song. She sang a lot, sometimes old Russian songs, sometimes others from the Yiddish theaters in New York. She was an energetic woman, always singing, dancing, a coquette. Her flirtatiousness infuriated my father. Then he was dying; I remember that, too. It was 1919. I was four. He lay in the bed in their room off the kitchen. Doctors came and went. There were whispers. My mother began to cry frequently. Then one night she screamed. It was like the keening of a hound in pain. The entire neighborhood heard her. The white light in the kitchen was blinding. Neighbors came, relatives. People brought their own chairs. It was like an arena; in the center, death in an open coffin, people seated in circles around it. My father had died. My brother Harry, nine years old, cuddled me in his arms. My mother wouldn't stop screaming. She was thirty years old. Tante Golda, my father's sister, hovered over her. At the cemetery, while I watched a farm boy throw stones at a tree, wanting to join him, my mother tried to jump into the grave. She was restrained by Golda's husband, Uncle Dave, and his brother Charlie.
My father, Nathan Horvitz, was thirty-six when he died. All I know about him is that in 1909 he left Byelorussia, now Belarus, and came to Trenton, New Jersey, leaving behind my pregnant mother, who came a year later. He also left his mother and several sisters behind, exactly how many I don't know. After World War II my mother told me they and their families had been murdered by Hitler. As a young man, my father drank a concoction to weaken his heart in order to escape conscription into the tsar's army. That was probably what killed him at his early age. In Trenton he owned a wallpaper store and was himself a wallpaper hanger. We lived over the store. His only kin I ever knew was his sister, Tante Golda, who had come to America several years before him.
In Europe his name was Gurevich--Gu-RE-vich. The immigration officer at Castle Garden transliterated it into Horvitz, and Horvitz became Herrick when my brother Harry worked in the main office of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company at Madison Avenue and 23rd Street. Every year Harry took competitive examinations given by the Met and came out first or second but they never gave him a titled job, though they did give him a raise. Then in 1939 he decided to translate his Jewish name into Anglo-Saxon, and sure enough when he came out first at the next competitive examination he got a title. It wasn't that they were anti-semitic, they just didn't like Jews. When Harry changed the family name, he included me in the application. My sister Natalie refused and remained Horvitz until she married. In later years, I regretted the change, but at the time I had already used different names as a Communist, so it didn't seem to matter. What's in a name?
Cry today, smile tomorrow, my mother always said. Still, it took her several years to stop crying. She's buried in an Arbeiter Ring cemetery in New Jersey, on the other side of the George Washington Bridge.
Since her burial, I have never visited her grave. Mourn a stone, a yard of earth? She herself said that to me. Austere rules to live by. She loved often and rarely wisely. From the age of thirty-four to the time she died at eighty she suffered four cancers: sarcoma, uterine, breast, and lungs, and it was only the last which finally put her in her grave. Periodically over forty years she traveled to Montefiori hospital in the Bronx for radium treatments. She cried, she danced, she loved. When you give yourself, she said, hold nothing back. Give it all you've got. Enjoy every moment of it, store up the happiness, you will need it for the bad times.
It scared me. Why didn't she settle down with one man, live a normal life like everyone else? She was never at rest, never at peace. It infuriated me. Once when I was about eleven, a man with glossy black hair and greedy eyes sat on her bed to watch her comb her hair. I didn't like him much. I ran to the kitchen, picked up a long knife and came at him with it. Fortunately he was quick. My mother kicked him out of the room, sat me on her lap, and sang a Russian song to me. It was a love song, of course, she rarely sang anything else. In later years, I would run away, never even leaving her a note or writing to her while I was on the bum. When I became an adult I questioned her about it. She had an excuse. She loved Nathan so much she could never find another. It was, she said, like Anna and Vronsky. I laughed at her.
Finally, when I was about fifty, I arrived at a place of rest with her. It was too late. She had become paranoid, senile, crazy, the doctor said. She accused me of stealing money from her. When she became ill, I literally had to fight her off, carry her down four flights of stairs from her apartment, throw her--yes, throw her--into the back of my car, lock the doors, and drive her to the hospital. She didn't stop cursing me all the way and threatened to jump out the window if I didn't take her home. When I visited her she screamed so hysterically I had to stop coming. She was quiet during my wife Jeannette's visits, however, asking about the children and even about me. Three weeks later she died. The doctor said the lung cancer had spread to her brain. I buried her, we were at peace. It was 1968. Though she was an unbeliever, a rabbi said the prayer for the dead.
She was born Mary Saperstein, the youngest of eighteen children, many of whom died in early childhood, some of whom lived to old age, and not a few of whom perished at the hands of Hitler, including my grandmother. At ninety-five she was bayonetted to death by a Nazi soldier infuriated by her stubborn refusal to board a cattle car.
My mother went to work as a seamstress when she was ten, and stopped at the age of sixty-nine. In between she lived a life of great gayety and also of great bitterness, filled with tragedy--the death of her husband, my father; her son, my brother Harry, in the prime of his life; Paul, my sister Natalie's son; and Seth, my son, in early childhood. That she herself managed to live her full life after her many illnesses was a tribute not only to medical science but to her personal will and courage.
She was one of the finest dressmakers in New York, a woman whose talented hands made dresses and gowns for the wealthy and the aristocrats of our world, yet she was the best dressed of them all. During her good years she was considered the gayest, among the most beautiful and vivacious women of the Yiddish art world. She was sought after by the leading Yiddish poets and actors of the time to read their poems, to sing their songs.
For me to think of her alive is to see her at the sewing machine, the silks and the satins and the brocades and the spools of thread of many colors and the needles and the pins and the shears. It would be easy to say that she was a silk thread herself, and that the thread had run out and all that remains is the wooden spool.
But that wouldn't be true at all. The thread of her life goes on in her children and their children, her kin for whom she sang her songs and for whom she labored a lifetime.
She was a vain woman, a sharp-tongued woman, a woman of gaiety and wit, a very generous woman. She suffered all the faults of being human, and enjoyed all the virtues.
