The Man Who Carried Cash: Saul Holiff, Johnny Cash, and the Making of an American Icon
392
The Man Who Carried Cash: Saul Holiff, Johnny Cash, and the Making of an American Icon
392Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781459737235 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dundurn Press |
| Publication date: | 06/20/2017 |
| Pages: | 392 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Man Who Carried Cash
Saul Holiff, Johnny Cash, and the Making of an American Icon
By Julie Chadwick
Dundurn Press
Copyright © 2017 Julie ChadwickAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4597-3723-5
CHAPTER 1
THE WHITE COAT
Two girls huddle in a modest wood-framed house in the village of Dmytrivka, not far from Ukraine's capital city of Kiev. The shouts of men on horseback grow louder, and soon they hear the sound of hooves in the mud outside. Then the screams, as the house next door erupts in flames. "It's time to run," their mother says in Yiddish, and throws each of them a coat — one white, one brown.
The screen door claps shut behind them, and they tear off toward the cornfields that lie flat and green on the horizon. The youngest, Ann, sees the men on horseback out of the corner of her eye as she runs. There are seven or eight of them. The sound of a gunshot cracks through the air. Her sister falls. Ann keeps running.
For four days Ann hides amongst the cornstalks with the other children, drinking cow's milk from a makeshift cup and subsisting on what grain and scraps are around until she can return home. Schuncha, her older sister, survives, but not for long; the bullet wound in her stomach becomes infected. About a month after she was shot, she dies.
"It could have been me," Ann said later. It was the coats; they were accidentally switched. "I got the brown one; she got the white one. There was only a year and a half difference between us, so either one would have fit. And that's when she was shot, because the white coat stood out." It was a sentiment also echoed by her aunt, who murmured, "Isn't it too bad that the beautiful child had to be taken?" when she thought Ann was out of earshot.
Ann's father was an intellectual, she was told. He worked as an advocaat, something like a lawyer. This made her proud. When the shadow of the First World War loomed, her father, Joel Holiff, was one of a flood of villagers who abandoned their dwindling shtetl to avoid being conscripted into the army. He left his homeland and travelled across the ocean to build a new life for his family in Canada, and his attempt to find work there was executed with single-minded determination. Not long after his departure, Jews in the Ukraine were pummelled by large-scale anti-Semitic pogroms and brutal raids that ground on in the lead-up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and continued for years after. Tens of thousands of Jews were murdered by Bolshevik armies and Ukrainian nationalists.
It would be almost eight years before Joel's wife, Esther, and daughter Ann were permitted to join him in Canada. During that time, life for Ann and her mother was simply a matter of survival, as the sound of horses drove them, breathless, into hiding among the dusty feed bags. The fear of discovery hung dark over their days like the sacking over the broken windows. The men would ride into the village and take over, stay a day or two, get drunk, rape and terrify the villagers, and then move on. Ann watched silently one afternoon as a man went into her house carrying a scythe and entered the bedroom where her grandmother lay dying. In a senseless act of cruelty, the man swept the weapon across the old woman's nightstand and sent all of her medicine bottles shattering to the floor. It was incomprehensible to Ann, who replayed the scene in her mind for years after. My grandmother didn't do any harm to him, she thought. She didn't even open her mouth.
The underground shelters weren't much better. At first they would make their escape carrying a few household items, uncertain how many days they would be gone or what would remain when they returned. However, their valuables were eventually all pillaged. The winters were so harsh, the cold gnawed into Ann's toes and made her bones ache. Ann's mother strained to quiet the noise of the little ones. She feared for herself also, as the attractive lines of her face and her long hair meant she was a target for the marauding men. Fear hung in the air, high and sharp, mingled with sweat and mouldering damp. During one pogrom, more than two hundred people crammed into the shelter. When one of the infants began to squall, Ann watched as a man took a pillow and wordlessly suffocated the baby so it wouldn't give them away.
Ann helped out when she could, and stood guard at the cellar door to watch for military police while her mother made bootleg liquor in the basement and then hid it in the wall to later sell to the goyim. This, along with some sewing work, allowed Esther to provide for the children and her bedridden mother, as all the money Joel sent home from Ontario was confiscated by the Russian authorities.
At least three times their escape plan seemed set, their passage guaranteed, only to have it unravel at the last minute when the Russians refused to let them leave. Finally, in 1921, with exit visas in hand, Ann and Esther boarded a train in Kiev destined for Hamburg. Thin and sickly, Ann tried to keep her strength up so she could pass the immigration examinations. At one station stop, Esther got off the train and went to find a pharmacy to get her daughter some medicine. On her way back along the platform, the train started to move. Ann, watching from the small train window, began to scream as she saw her mother break into a run. As she tried desperately to catch up to the train, her mother's long hair, held up with bone hairpins, started to fall. Just then, two men reached out and pulled her onto the train. Ann was in tears. She had nearly gone to Hamburg without her mother.
While switching trains in Germany, an elegant woman approached Ann and Esther on the platform. "You have too much luggage to carry by yourself. Let me help you," she said with a smile. A moment later they turned back to find she had disappeared, along with the two small bags containing all of Esther's valuables, purchased or bartered for through years of sewing and bootlegging. All that was left was their large wicker travelling trunk.
"My mother sat down and cried her heart out," Ann later remembered. "She wanted to show her husband she wasn't exactly a pauper, that she earned monies herself."
At Hamburg, they boarded the ship that would take them to Montreal. Three weeks of travel across the roiling Atlantic Ocean followed, as the pair was packed in steerage with hundreds of retching passengers and nothing to eat but herring, sour cream, and onions. The entire boat was crawling with lice, and upon their arrival in Montreal the immigration officials doused them in kerosene and roughly sheared their hair.
Then came the medical examinations.
"I remember vividly about a dozen people were put on the small boat to go back to the big ship and be taken back to Europe, because they had different diseases. We were fortunate. They let us through," said Ann.
Free to leave, they were swallowed up in the push of bodies leaving the immigration hut; struggling with their wicker luggage, they merged into the river of other passengers streaming onto the train station platform.
A man, eyes searching behind circular-framed glasses, stood tall and immutable amidst the jumble of bodies, derby hat clutched in his hand. "This is your father," Esther said to Ann in Yiddish as they approached him.
Husband and daughter stood staring at each other. Joel wore a double-breasted topcoat, all buttons, and underneath, a vest and high-necked shirt. A tie was just visible, held down with a tiny sparkling pin. His face was smooth and inscrutable, though this moment marked the culmination of days that had run into weeks and months and years. Time had blended together in an endless ream of rolled-up rugs and sacks of dried goods hefted door to door. It was nights measured by the clink of his fork as he ended the day at Wong's Garden, the old Chinese restaurant on Richmond Street. It was the creak of springs as he fell into bed at the boarding house where, he would later confess to his son Saul in a rare moment of intimacy, the woman who ran it once tried to lure him into a "compromising situation." And here, now, on the train station platform was his child — a virtual stranger.
Joel's arrival in London, Ontario, in 1913 had been swiftly followed by news of the war, which clouded out all else except the grinding years of waiting and working. Cent by cent the original fifty-dollar loan he had taken out was repaid, and dollar by dollar he trudged unwaveringly toward the goal of freeing his family. At first, he peddled goods on a bicycle; then, he moved to a horse and buggy until he scraped together enough money to purchase a panel truck.
By the time he led his wife and remaining child out of the train station, it was to the open door of a convertible Essex automobile, in which they drove to a trim little house on Rectory Street, which was furnished and complete with a wiggling bulldog puppy for Ann. Her old doll, fashioned from a linen kitchen towel, was replaced that day with a new one.
Ann remained an only child for two years until her brother Morris was born in 1923. Two years after that, her mother came home from the Salvation Army hospital across the street with a new baby they called Israel — and who later went by his middle name, Saul. The family soon moved from Rectory Street into a large apartment above the ladies' ready-to-wear shop they owned, where both parents toiled for thirteen hours a day. Ann was left to raise the boys, who were both still in diapers. Serving as nursemaid and housekeeper, cooking, making formula from scratch, and washing diapers, thirteen-year-old Ann often resented the lack of choice in her position as second mother. She juggled this role alongside the adjustment to life in a new country, where her family was dismissed as "greenhorns," and in which she was so ashamed of her inability to speak English that she often didn't speak at all.
Saul was a boisterous six-year-old when his sister, Ann, was first courted by Sam Paikin, a man from Hamilton who would later become her husband. Adored and admired in equal measure, Sam captivated Saul. When Sam came to visit, it was the high point of Saul's day, and the two soon developed a game in which Saul wheedled nickels and dimes from him. It always took a different form, but when Sam arrived, Saul would race out to meet him as he emerged from his car.
"Look, Sam! I found a billfold, and there was a nickel in it," Saul would call to him.
"Only a nickel, Saul? What'll that buy you?"
The way the game unfolded, Saul would typically end up triumphantly clutching two quarters. Throughout his life he viewed Sam as a mentor, though Saul struggled with insecurities that were exacerbated both by his father's constant belittling and Sam's impatience and criticism. Even when pushed away, Saul continued to watch Sam from the corners, taking note of his style and flair, his dominant personality and ability to turn a room to his favour with magic tricks and jokes. The way Sam jostled and traded barbs with his own siblings was curious to Saul. It stood in stark contrast to the pressurized, reserved atmosphere in his own home. Proper inhibition was the tenor of their household, and physical affection was in short supply. At times, Saul would become tongue-tied around his brother-in-law — Sam would tell a joke, and Saul wouldn't get the point. If Saul tried to be a smartass, Sam could cut him up and down with just a few words. Like a shamed dog, Saul would put his tail between his legs and run off. Over time, though, Saul went from feeling intimidated by Sam to wanting to emulate him.
By the beginning of the 1930s, Saul's parents were struggling to make ends meet at the dress shop. It was as though Joel and Esther were sliding into a pit, and no matter how hard they squirmed to get out, it only seemed to make them sink faster. Aware of this, six-year-old Saul conspired with Morris, and the two boys took to the streets. They slipped into the backyard of one of the nearby houses, raided their pear tree, and then went out and sold the fruit along Dundas Street. One of their customers turned out to be the very owner of the pear tree whence they had obtained their wares, a man who had a ladies' wear store nearby.
The two boys became adept at shoplifting from the variety store and the Loblaws supermarket down the road from their house, and would load up their windbreakers with jelly beans and licorice and chocolate maple buds. This continued until Morris brazenly bounced a huge beach ball away from the front of the store and was caught.
The boys also got newspaper routes, and Saul took pride in his notoriety as the youngest carrier in London. They did what they had to do, Saul later recalled with a sense of pride. More or less, the two boys were growing up on their own; but as self-sufficient as they were, times were going to get even tougher. By May of 1933, the bottom had dropped out of the business and the family faced bankruptcy. After much agonizing, Joel shut down the clothing store, and with Sam's help moved the family into a home at 315 Wharncliffe Road North, which they rented for $33 a month. Though small, their new home still allowed each of the kids to have their own bedroom. They also had a nanny — though she was faced with her own financial problems and would drink Saul's daily milk allowance until he came down with a case of rickets.
In addition to the strain of the family's finances, there was also a palpable atmosphere of anti-Semitism that was pervasive in the city at that time. The schoolyard bullies the boys had to push past every morning on their way to Lorne Avenue School were incessant in their torment. Particularly brutal were the Wiley family boys, the biggest being Tor Wiley, who took great delight in burying Saul in the schoolyard sandbox. The Holiff boys would spend the last two periods frozen by fear of what inventive taunts might lay in wait for them once the bell rang. The Italians had recently invaded Ethiopia, so some taunts involved strange slogans that associated Jews with Ethiopians somehow — a twist that was so bizarre Saul thought it verged on poetic. One Halloween, Esther went to answer the door and had a bag of flour thrown in her face. Before it slammed shut, Saul heard a voice call out, "Dirty Jew!"
As the boys waded through the challenges of the Great Depression, there was little time for distractions or hobbies, though they would often play street hockey until midnight, or strap on roller skates and head down Dundas Street to Queen's Park to watch buskers entertain the jockeys as they trained their racehorses.
Saul's father also found time for his own small pleasures. Well-read and highly skilled at chess, Joel continually lobbied the local paper to devote more of their coverage to the game via letters to the editor and articles. "It is better than Latin for teaching young minds to think," Joel once told a reporter, "and it will keep young men and women off the streets at night." As president of the London chess club and one of the top players in the district, Joel played both locally and internationally, by correspondence. Forms with chess moves would come in the mail from far-off places like Belgium, and Saul would watch his father as he set up the board and logged his own moves on the sheet. When Saul was eleven, Joel invited twelve-year-old chess prodigy Daniel "Abe" Yanofsky to stay at their home, and young Saul was awestruck by the boy's abilities. Yanofsky not only simultaneously played thirty games of chess, including one against Joel at the London Public Library, but he also demonstrated to Saul how he could read a page of the Bible and remember it word for word, a feat he explained by saying his head worked like a recording machine. By this point, Saul and Morris had taken up serious gambling of their own with a dreidel, and were engaging in every other kind of competition they could think of: gin rummy, poker, and matchstick races in the gutter runoff down the streets. The instincts were to kill, to win, to exploit, and Morris always prevailed and pressed Saul to play just one more game — and typically came out the winner.
Dark, awkward and uncertain of his place in the world, Saul was regularly subject to comparisons with tall, fair, and affable Morris, which didn't help their sense of rivalry as they entered their teens. Saul often had the impression his mother favoured him, though his father was toughest on him by far. This tendency of Joel's was most evident in the aftermath of conflicts that inevitably arose as a result of the boys' regular competitions. One time, while on a trip to a family member's farm outside London, Saul tricked Morris into a barn on the property and then locked him inside. When Joel found out he beat Saul so severely he was hospitalized. Another afternoon when a fight erupted between the brothers in their bedroom, Saul suffered two broken front teeth. The punishment meted out by Joel was so severe that Saul rarely talked about it afterward; it was another of his father's episodes that he later preferred to keep hidden. That incident was the beginning of decades of dental work and a lifelong self-consciousness that rendered Saul almost incapable of smiling. "Which seems to suit my personality anyway," Saul later liked to joke.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Man Who Carried Cash by Julie Chadwick. Copyright © 2017 Julie Chadwick. Excerpted by permission of Dundurn Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Prologue
- 1: The White Coat
- 2: “Showbiz Had to Be My Life”
- 3: When Saul Met Johnny
- 4: The Singin’ Storyteller
- 5: Carnegie Hall and June Carter
- 6: “My Career is Zooming”
- 7: The Flames Went Higher
- 8: One Hundred Percent Top Billing
- 9: “Saul, Help Me!”
- 10: Carrying Cash
- 11: The Proposal
- 12: The Crash
- 13: Camelot, Nixon, and the Fairytale That Wasn’t
- 14: From Jails to Jesus
- 15: The Richest Man in the Cemetery
- 16: The Gospel Road
- 17: The Wisest Man I Know
- 18: Cinnamon Hill
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Image Credits