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- Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Every Wrong Direction recreates and dissects the bitter education of Dan Burt, an American emigré who never found a home in America. It begins in the row homes of Jewish immigrants and working-class Italians on the mean streets of 1950s South Philadelphia. Every Wrong Direction follows the author from the rough, working-class childhood that groomed him to be a butcher or charter boat captain, through America, Britain, and Saudi Arabia as student, lawyer, spy, culture warrior, and expatriate, ending with a photo of his college rooms at St John's College, Cambridge. Between this beginning and end, through a Philadelphia commuter college, to Cambridge, then Yale Law School, across the working to upper classes, three countries, and seven cities over forty three years, it maps his pursuit of, realisation, disillusionment with, and abandonment of America and the American Dream.
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iii
Every Wrong Direction
An Emigré’s Memoir
DAN BURT
Carcanet
Manchester, UK
vTo my daughter, Hannah vi
Contents
Author’s Note
At twelve, I took a first step outside my ancestral streets in Philadelphia’s poorer neighborhoods to work as a butcher boy in a North Jersey farmer’s market. Ten years later, I left those streets for Cambridge, England, and three decades later, quit America for good. This is my recollection of that span, the childhood, youth, and labors that made me an emigré.
The stories in this book are true, every one of them, as best I remember them. All persons are, or were, actual individuals and businesses and not composites. No lilies have been gilded. Only some names and identifying details have been changed to protect their privacy.x
Every Wrong Direction
He’s a poet, he’s a picker,
He’s a prophet, he’s a pusher,
He’s a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem when he’s stoned,
He’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,
Takin’ every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.
— Kris Kristofferson, The Pilgrim
Part I
Certain Windows
THE SPUR
You think it horrible that lust and rage
Should dance attention upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was young;
What else have I to spur me into song?1
W. B. YEATS, New Poems
We trail no clouds of glory when we come. We trail blood, a cord that must be cut, and a postpartum mess, which mixes with places, people, and stories to frame the house of childhood. We dwell in that house forever.
In time, there will be others, bigger, smaller, better, worse. But how we see the world, how much shelter, warmth, food we think we need, whether the outer dark appears benign or deadly, depends on what we saw from 2certain windows in that house. We may burn, rebuild, repaint, or raze it, but its memories fade least; as dementia settles in, first things are the last to go.
Childhood ended when I turned twelve and began working in a butcher shop on Fridays after school till midnight and all day Saturdays from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. or, as we said in winter, “from can’t see to can’t see”—dark when you go to work, dark when you leave. By sixteen, I was working thirty hours a week or more during the school year, fifty to sixty hours in the summers. “Certain Windows” recalls my world before I left to study at Cambridge: places, people, and tales from childhood and youth.
1. Ancestral Houses
Fourth and Daly
Joe Burt, my father, was born in Boston in 1916, almost nine months to the day after his mother landed there from a shtetl near Kiev. She brought with her Eva, her firstborn, and Bernie, her second. Presumably my grandfather Louis, whom we called Zaida (“ai” as in “pay”) or Pop, was pleased to see my grandmother Rose, or Mom, even though she was generally regarded as a chaleria (shrew).
Zaida had been dragooned into the Russian army a little before the outbreak of World War I. Russia levied a quota of Jewish men for the army from each shtetl, and these men invariably came from the poorest shtetlachim (shtetl dwellers). Zaida deserted at the earliest opportunity (which was certainly not unusual), made his way to Boston, and sent for Mom.
Mom and Pop moved the family in 1917 to a small row (terraced) house at Fourth and Daly in South Philadelphia, the neighborhood where my father grew up, worked, and married. Pop was a carpenter, Mom a seamstress, both socialists at least, if not Communists. Mom was an organizer for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), which seems in character. Yiddish was the household tongue, my father’s first, though Pop spoke and read Russian and English fluently. Mom managed Russian well, but English took more effort.
The family’s daily newspaper was Forverts (Forward), printed in Yiddish. Forverts published lists of those killed in pogroms when they occurred. Ukrainian Cossacks allied themselves with the Bolsheviks and used the Russian civil war as an excuse to continue the pogroms that had 3been a fact of Jewish life in the Pale from the 1880s. Pop was hanging from a trolley car strap on his way home from work in 1920 when he read the names of his family among the dead, all eighteen of them: father, mother, sisters, brothers, their children. He had become an orphan. He never went to schul (synagogue) again.
A few years later, he learned how they were killed when some of Mom’s family, who had hidden during the raid, emigrated to America. I heard the story from him when I was ten, at Christmas 1952. I came home singing “Silent Night,” newly learned in my local public elementary school. I couldn’t stop singing it and went caroling up the back steps from the alley into our kitchen, where Pop—putty colored, in his midsixties, and dying of cancer—was making what turned out to be his last visit. Zaida had cause to dislike gentile sacred songs, though I didn’t know it. He croaked, Danila, shah stil (Danny, shut up!), and I answered, “No, why should I?” His face flushed with all the life left in him, and he grabbed me by the neck and started choking me. My father pulled him off, pinioned his arms, and when his rage had passed, led me to the kitchen table where Zaida sat at the head and told me this story:
The Jews had warning of a raid. Zaida’s father, my great-grandfather, was pious and reputed to be a melamed, a learned though poor Orthodox Jew. As such, he was prized and protected by the community. Pop’s in-laws urged him to take his family and hide with them in their shelter below the street. Great-grandfather refused. He said, so I was told, God will protect us.
The Cossacks rousted them from their house and forced everyone to strip. They raped the women while the men watched. Done, they shot the women, then the children, and, last, the men. They murdered all eighteen of them, my every paternal forebear excepting Pop, who went on to die an atheist, as did my father.
* * *
My grandparents’ house at Fourth and Daly was a three-up, three-down house in a very narrow street. Cars were parked on the side of the street opposite their house, leaving just enough room for a small car to pass. Big-finned 1950s Caddies, had anyone owned one, would have had to straddle the pavement to get through. The front door stood two feet from the sidewalk at the top of three marble steps, with dips worn in their middle from eighty years of footsteps and repeated scrubbings. It opened onto a minuscule vestibule off a living room, after which came dining room and kitchen, all three no more than twelve by fourteen feet. There was a four-foot-wide 4wooden stoop past the back door, two steps above a small concrete yard where clothes hung out to dry and children could play. A six-foot-high wooden fence enclosed the yard.
Nothing hung on the walls: there were no bookcases, no books. There was no Victrola record player. But there was a large console three-band radio, which could receive shortwave broadcasts from Europe. The house was always spotless, sparsely furnished, lifeless. Two low rectangles projected from either party wall to separate the living from dining room; on each end of these little walls stood two decorative white wooden Doric columns pretending to hold the ceiling up and give a touch of class to what was in fact a clean brick shotgun shack.
We did not visit Fourth and Daly frequently. My mother was never keen to go, perhaps because she learned too little Yiddish after she married my father to make conversation easily or perhaps because Mom had refused to speak to her until after I was born. (My maternal grandmother had been Italian; hence my mother was a gentile according to Jewish law.) But while Zaida was alive, we always went for seder dinner on the first night of Pesach (Passover), the Jewish holiday commemorating the Exodus from Egypt. That tale had some heft when I was old enough to grasp it, a few years after the fall of Nazi Germany.
A year or two before Zaida died, my brother and I, aged six and eight, were dropped off at the house early on Passover, to watch him and Mom prepare the Passover meal. Boredom soon set in, and Zaida led us out to the back stoop, where he produced two blocks of grainy pine and proceeded to carve two dreidels, the square-sided spinning top that Jewish children have played with for centuries. With a hard pencil, he inscribed a letter in Hebrew on each of the dreidel’s four faces—the traditional shin, gimmel, hay, and nun—and explained how each letter determined the player’s fate once the dreidel was spun. If the dreidel came to rest with the shin side uppermost, the spinner had to put in the pot all the nuts, pennies, and so on they were playing with; if the topside letter was gimmel, they took all the counters in the pot; if on hay, half; and if on nun, zero. Then he counted twenty hazelnuts apiece into our hands and set us gambling on the stoop while he went inside to help Mom.
Three things always happened at the Passover dinner. Someone spilled the wine on Mom’s white-lace tablecloth, producing a scramble for cold water and lemon juice; there was a fight during which Zaida had to restrain my father; and Zaida lingered over the wicked son’s role in answering the Four 5Questions. The Questions are the raison d’être for the seder, a religious service-cum-dinner to celebrate and teach the story of the Jews’ deliverance from Egypt. Shortly after the service begins, the youngest boy must ask, Why is this night different from all others? and the leader of the seder will retell the story of the Exodus, the repeated experience of our wandering tribe’s history.
The dreidel Pop carved for Danny seventy years ago
Though Zaida wasn’t a believer, he was an ethnic realist who wanted his grandchildren to understand that Jewish blood is a perfume that attracts murderers, a pheromone no soap can wash away. So he dwelt on the role of the second son, the wicked one, who asks, What does this service mean to you? implying that he is different, that he can be what he wants, that the seder and his blood’s history mean nothing to him. The answer ordained for this son is It is because of what the Lord did for me, not for you—meaning, had you been there, you’d have been left to be killed.
Today, the dreidel Zaida made for me lies on my desk in Cambridge, as it has lain on other desks in other cities, other countries, down the years. I don’t know what happened to the one he made for my brother, who was cremated, a Christian, in San Francisco in 2005.
* * *
6At Fourth and Daly, my father—Joe everywhere else—was always Yossela, Joey. He was a thin, short man, five feet five, with intense blue eyes, dark skin, and thick black hair. He could have passed for an Argentinian tango dancer or a Mafia hit man; perhaps the latter image had attracted my mother to him. Broad thick shoulders, large hands, and well-muscled legs perfectly suited the featherweight semipro boxer he became.
Lust and rage beset his every age until he died in 1995. His fists rose at the slightest provocation against all comers and sometimes against me. Bullies and every form of authority were his favored targets. A local teenager who had been tormenting him when he was ten was struck from behind with a lead pipe one winter night. When he came to in the hospital several hours and sixteen stitches later, he could recall only that he was passing the Borts’ house when something hit him. He gave little Joey no more trouble.
Joe hated bullies all his life. One Sunday driving home from the store, he saw two bigger boys beating a smaller boy beside the SKF ball bearing factory. He hit the brakes, leapt out, and knocked down both older boys, then waited till the victim took off.
The Depression scarred him. He was twelve when it began. There was little work for carpenters, and for a time, Yossela stood on a street corner hawking apples with Zaida. But the family needed more money, so at thirteen, he left school without completing eighth grade and found work in a butcher shop on Fourth Street, a mile north of Fourth and Daly. His older sister and both brothers, older and younger, all finished high school. My father regretted his lack of formal education, because he thought it denied him the chance to make more money.
Yossela spent part of his first paycheck on a new pair of shoes. Zaida beat him when he turned over that first week’s earnings minus the cost of the shoes. The legend was that his father’s belt struck him so hard, there were bloodstains from his ass on the ceiling.
Jewish boys undergo two rituals: circumcision at birth, about which they remember nothing, and at thirteen, Bar Mitzvah, when they are called on a Saturday morning to read a passage from the Torah before the congregation as part of a rite admitting them to Jewish manhood. A celebration follows, however small, for family and friends. My father left schul immediately after his Bar Mitzvah, changed his clothes, and went straight to work, Saturday being the busiest business day of the retail week. 7
Ninth and Race
Prostitution, gambling, fencing, contract murder, loan-sharking, political corruption, and crime of every sort were the daily trade in Philadelphia’s Tenderloin, the oldest part of town. The Kevitch family ruled this stew for half a century, from Prohibition to the rise of Atlantic City. My mother was a Kevitch.
Not all Jewish boys become doctors, lawyers, violinists, and Nobelists; some sons of immigrants from the Pale became criminals, often as part of or in cahoots with Italian crime families. A recent history calls them “tough Jews”: men like Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, who organized and ran Murder Incorporated for Lucky Luciano in the ’20s and ’30s, and Arnold Rothstein, better known as Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, who fixed the 1919 baseball World Series. The Kevitch family were tough Jews.
Their headquarters during the day was Milt’s Bar and Grill at Ninth and Race, the heart of the Tenderloin, two miles north of Fourth and Daly. At night, one or more male clan members supervised the family’s “after-hours club” a few blocks away. We called Milt’s Bar “the Taproom” and the after-hours club “the Club.”
The Taproom stood alone between two vacant lots carpeted with broken bricks and brown beer-bottle shards. Bums, beggars, prostitutes, and stray cats and dogs populated the surrounding streets; the smell of cat and human piss was always detectable, mixed with smoke from cigarette and cigar butts smoldering on the pavement. Milt’s was a rectangular two-story building, sixty feet long and eighteen feet wide. It fronted on the cobbles of Ninth Street and, through the back door, onto a cobbled alley. Both front and back doors were steel; the back door was never locked. The front window was a glass block, set in the Taproom’s brown-brick facade like a glass eye in an old soldier’s face. It could stop a fairly large caliber bullet, and the wan light filtering through it brightened only the first few feet of the bar, the rest of which was too dark to make out faces.
More warehouse than pub, the Taproom served no food and little liquor. It was dank and smelled of stale beer, with too few customers to dispel either. I never saw more than a rummy or two drinking, or in the evenings, perhaps a few sailors and a whore. The bar, with maybe a dozen stools, ran from the front door for a school bus’s length toward the rear. Three plain iron tables stood near the back door with two iron chairs each. One of these tables had a large colorful Wurlitzer jukebox beside it that 8only played when a Kevitch—Abe, Big Milt, Meyer, or Albert—sat there to talk with someone. On those occasions, one had to wonder how the two men heard one another and why their table was placed so close to the Wurlitzer it drowned them out.
I never visited the Club, which began life as a “speakeasy” during Prohibition. My mother’s father, Milton or Big Milt (to distinguish him from his nephew Little Milt), and his brother Abe owned the Club and a nearby illegal still. “G-men”—federal Treasury agents—raided the still one day, razed it, and dumped its barrels of illegal alcohol in the gutters of the Tenderloin. Abe and Big Milt stood in the crowd as their hooch went down the drain and cheered the G-men on, as upright citizens should. The Kevitch family owned the Club for years after Big Milt and Abe died.
Big Milt was a Republican state legislator elected consistently for decades to represent the Tenderloin ward, which continued to vote 90 percent Republican for many years after the rest of the city went Democratic. It moved into the Democratic camp by a similar 90 percent margin after the Kevitch family struck a deal with the Democratic leadership in the early 1950s. I had little contact with Big Milt, a distant figure who drove a black Lincoln Continental his state salary could not have paid for. He did not like my name and preferred to call me Donald. One birthday present from him of a child’s camp chair had “Donald” stenciled across its canvas back. He handled what might politely be called “governmental relations” for the family and died in the Club one night, aged sixty-seven, of a massive lung hemorrhage brought on by tuberculosis.
His brother Abe headed the Kevitch family and ran the “corporation,” the family loan-sharking business, along with the numbers bank, gambling, fencing, prostitution, and protection. When I got into trouble with the police as a teenager, Uncle Abe told me what to say to the judge at my hearing and what the judge would do, then sat in the back of the courtroom as the judge gave me a second chance and I walked without a record. Abe sat on a folding canvas chair in front of the Taproom in good weather with a cigar in his mouth. Men came up to him from time to time to talk, and sometimes they would go inside to the table beside the jukebox and talk while the music played. Inclement days and winters found him behind the bar. All serious family matters were referred to Abe until he retired, when Meyer, the elder of his two sons, took over.
Meyer always greeted me with Hello, Shit Ass when my mother took us to the Taproom for a visit. In good weather, he sat on the same chair outside 9the bar his father had occupied and had the same conversations beside the jukebox. But unlike Abe, he did not live in the Tenderloin, his Italian wife wore minks and diamonds, and his son Benny attended a city university before becoming a meat jobber with lucrative routes that dwindled after his father died. Also unlike Abe, Meyer traveled, to Cuba before Castro, Las Vegas, and in the 1970s, Atlantic City.
My father began playing in a local poker game and, on his first two visits, won rather a lot of money. The men running the game knew he was married to Meyer’s cousin. They complained to Meyer that they could not continue to let Joe win, and Meyer told my father not to play there again. The game was fixed. Joe ignored him. At his next session, they cleaned him out.
Meyer had a surprising reach. Joe briefly owned a meat business with a partner, Marty. It did well for eighteen months, the partners quarreled bitterly, and Joe bought Marty out. A year later, agents from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) criminal division began investigating my father’s affairs to discover whether he had been evading taxes by not reporting cash sales, which he and many other owners of cash businesses in the ’50s certainly had done. The agents were getting closer, and jail loomed.
Joe spoke to Meyer, who told him, several days later, “Joe, it’ll cost $10,000,” a large sum then and one Joe couldn’t raise. Meyer suggested he ask his ex-partner to pay half since the IRS audit covered the partnership years. Marty told my father, “I’ll give it to you when you need it for bread for your kids.” Joe reported this to Meyer, but the price remained $10,000. Joe put a second mortgage on our house, which Abe cosigned. He paid Meyer, and three days later, the IRS agent called and said, “Mr. Burt, I don’t know who you know, and I don’t know how you did it, but I’ve had a call from the IRS National Office in Washington, DC, ordering me to close this case in one week.”
A year later, the IRS criminal investigators returned, this time to audit Marty. Nothing Marty’s tax lawyers could do put them off. He begged Joe to ask Meyer for help. But this time, Meyer said there was nothing he could do. Marty endured a long trial that ended in a hung jury. Before the IRS could retry him, he dropped dead of a heart attack; he was forty-six.
My mother’s brother, Albert, was a taciturn man. He lived with his wife, Babe (née Marian D’Orazio), and their four girls in a row home at Twenty-Fourth and Snyder in South Philadelphia’s Italian neighborhood. He had no son. Babe was a great beauty, hence the nickname that she still 10bore proudly at ninety-two, and her daughters were beautiful as well. From the street, their house looked like any other working-class row home in the neighborhood, but inside, it brimmed with toys, televisions, clothes, and delicacies; the daughters were pampered and much envied. Education for Uncle Al, Aunt Babe, and their daughters stopped with South Philly High. They attended neither church nor synagogue. There were no books on their tables or art on their walls except a mural of a bucolic Chinese landscape in their living room.
* * *
Uncle Al was a detective on the Vice Squad, the Philadelphia police department’s special unit charged with reducing prostitution, gambling, loan-sharking, fencing, protection, and other rackets. The opportunities for corruption were many; some said the Vice Squad’s function was to protect vice. Clarence Ferguson was the head of the Vice Squad. Babe’s sister was Ferguson’s wife.
We went to visit Uncle Al’s house one Sunday when I was ten. A week before, Billy Meade, the boss of the Republican machine in Philadelphia, had been shot and nearly killed in the Club. He was drinking in the early hours at his accustomed spot at the bar when someone shot him with a silenced pistol shoved through the inspection grill in the door when it was slid aside in answer to a knock. The shooter was short, he stood on a milk crate to fire through the grill, and he must have known Meade could be found in the Club in the wee hours of Sunday morning and where along the bar he customarily stood.
Billy Meade and Big Milt, Uncle Al’s father, were on the outs at the time, and Meade had done something that caused Big Milt real trouble. Uncle Al was just five feet five, had ample experience with and access to firearms, and would have known Meade frequented the Club. I watched the police take Uncle Al from his house that morning and confiscate a large chest containing his sword and gun collection. He was tried but not convicted because the weapon used was never found, and Babe said he had been making love to her in their marriage bed when the shooting occurred. No one else was accused of the attempted murder, and when Meade recovered, he made peace with Big Milt. They both died of natural causes.
Some years later, Uncle Al was again involved in a shooting. This time, there was no question that he was the shooter. He had stopped for a traffic light in a rough neighborhood on the way home from work. Four young 11Black men approached his car. According to Al, they intended to carjack him.
I never saw Uncle Al without his gun, a .38 police revolver he wore in a holster on his belt. When he drove, he always unholstered the gun and laid it on the seat beside him. One of the men tried to open the driver’s door, and Uncle Al grabbed his gun from the seat and shot through the window, seriously wounding him. The other three fled, and Al chased them, firing as he went. He brought down a second, and the other two were picked up by the police a short time later.
The papers were full of pictures of the car’s shattered windows, the two Black casualties, and the White off-duty detective who had shot them. The police department commended him for bravery. I never saw Uncle Al angry; crossed, he stared at you coolly with diamond-blue eyes and, sooner or later, inevitably evened the score and more.
All the Kevitch men of my grandfather’s and mother’s generation had mistresses and did not disguise the fact. Their wives and all the mistresses were gentiles, excepting Abe’s wife, Annie. Uncle Al had a passion for Italian women and consorted openly with his Italian mistress for the last twenty-five years of his life. Divorce was not unheard of in the family, but Al died married to Babe.
One of Uncle Al’s daughters described her father by saying, He collected. The things he collected included antique swords, guns, watches, and jewelry; delinquent principal and interest on extortionate loans the family “corporation” made; protection money from shopkeepers, pimps, madams, numbers writers, gambling dens, thieves, and racketeers; and gifts from the Philadelphia branch of the Gambino Mafia family run by Angelo “the Gentle Don” Bruno. Joe and Uncle Al died within months of each other, and at Joe’s funeral, Babe proudly told me how Al would make the more difficult collections, say from a gambler who refused to pay his debts. He would cradle his .38 in the flat of his hand and curl his thumb through the trigger guard to hold it in place, so it became a second palm. Then he’d slap the delinquent hard in the head with his blue steel palm. His collection record was quite good.
Angelo Bruno and Uncle Al were close for years, until Bruno was killed in 1980 at the age of sixty-nine by a shotgun blast to the back of his head. Albert had protected him and his lieutenants from arrest. In exchange, Bruno contributed to Uncle Al’s collections. Uncle Al often told his 12daughters what a wonderful, decent, kind man Bruno was and that he did not allow his family to deal in drugs. The Albert Kevitch family held the don in high regard.
Babe adored her husband, and my four cousins adored their father. They were grateful for the luxurious lives he gave them and proud of the fear he inspired. No one bullied them. Babe called the four girls together before they went to school the day the newspapers broke the story of Al’s arrest on suspicion of shooting Billy Meade and told them if anyone asked whether the Al Kevitch suspected of the shooting was their father, they should hold their heads up and answer yes.
* * *
My mother, Louise Kevitch, Albert’s younger sister, was born to Milton and Anita Kevitch (née Anita Maria Pellegrino), a block or two from the Taproom in 1917. Nine months later, my maternal grandmother, Anita, a Catholic, died in the 1918 flu epidemic; her children, Louise and Albert, were taken in by their Italian immigrant grandmother, who lived nearby. She raised Louise from the age of two until thirteen in an apartment over her candy store, its profits more from writing numbers than selling sweets. Louise was thirteen when her grandmother died; she lived with Uncle Abe and Aunt Annie in their large house across the street from the Taproom from then until, at twenty-one, she married my father.
Louise graduated from William Penn High School in central Philadelphia, wore white gloves out and about and shopping in the downtown department stores, went to the beauty parlor once a week and had a “girl,” a Black maid, three days a week to clean and iron, a luxury that Joe could ill afford. She did not help him in the store. She spoke reverentially of her brother, Al, and his role as a detective on the Vice Squad; of Big Milt, who worked in Harrisburg; and of Uncle Abe and the family “corporation,” which would help us should we need it. Meyer was Lancelot to her, though we never quite knew why. Louise constantly invoked the principle of “family” as a mystic bond to be honored with frequent visits to the Taproom and the Kevitches. Joe did all he could to keep us from their ambit. It was a child-rearing battle he won, but not decisively. Louise kept trying to force us closer to her family; they fought about it for fifty-three years.
My mother never bentsch licht (lit Sabbath candles) or went to schul, except on the high holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. She never told us her mother and grandmother were both Italian. When Babe revealed the secret to me, Louise didn’t speak to her for months. We never knew 13her father had married another Gentile shortly after her mother (Anita) died, and fathered aunts and uncles we never met. She never mentioned Big Milt’s mistress, Catherine, who was with him at his death. She never explained how four families—Abe and Annie’s, Meyer’s, his brother Mil-ton’s first and second ones—lived well on earnings of what appeared to be a failing bar and after-hours club in the red-light district. Why her brother was so important if he was only a detective, how his family lived so well on a detective’s salary—these were never explained. She did not tell us her mink coat was a gift from her brother or how he came by it. Any questions about what Uncle Al or Meyer actually did, any suggestion that any Kevitch male was less than a gentleman, infuriated her, brought slaps or punishment, and went unanswered. We learned about the Kevitches from observation, from what they told us, and from the papers.
2. Childhood Houses
716 South Fourth
My parents’ marriage was a bare-knuckle fight to the death. The early rounds were fought at 716 South Fourth Street, roughly equidistant from Fourth and Daly and Ninth and Race, where I lived from a few days after my birth in 1942 till I was nearly five. I watched the next fifteen rounds from a seat at 5141 Whitaker Avenue in the Feltonville section of North Philadelphia, where we moved in 1947. The match continued after I left.
Joe and Louise were introduced through mutual friends at a “clubhouse” in South Philadelphia that he and other bachelor friends rented to drink, throw parties, and take their girlfriends to “make out.” Respectable lower-middle-class girls in the late 1930s did not allow themselves to be “picked up,” nor did they copulate till married and then not often. Louise and her girlfriends lived in the Tenderloin, which made their virtue suspect even as it conferred allure. But there was no question that Louise Kevitch, Al’s sister and Big Milt’s daughter, took her maidenhead intact to the wedding sheets: a g ynecologist had to remove it surgically after my parents tried and failed for several days to consummate their marriage. This difficulty was a harbinger of my mother’s enduring distaste for sex.
She was an attractive woman at twenty when they met and, shortly thereafter, married: five feet, slim, brown eyes, with good breasts and fine legs, long soft brown hair, and the hauteur of someone with roots to hide, 14who sniffed at anything or anyone not quite comme il faut. But Louise was unacceptable to Grandmother Rose Bort because she was not Jewish, if not for other reasons. Louise would not consider converting. Rose did not attend their wedding.
* * *
The waves of Ashkenazim from the Pale who came to Philadelphia from the 1880s through the early 1920s settled near Fourth Street in South Philadelphia. Louise—or Lou, as my father called her—went to live with her husband above Joe’s Meat Market, the “Store,” at 716, in the heart of the cobbled South Fourth Street shopping district. Their home was the top two floors of a three-story, forty-five-by-fourteen-foot brown-brick late-Victorian building with a coal furnace. The ground or “first” floor was the Store. A refrigerated meat case extended some twenty feet from the front display window, also refrigerated, to a small area holding basic dry goods: black-eyed peas, lima beans, rice, Bond bread, Carnation canned milk, Campbell soups, tea, Maxwell House ground coffee in airtight tin cans, and sugar. The next fifteen feet contained a small cutting room, the “back room,” with two butcher blocks, hot and cold water taps, and a fifty-gallon galvanized iron drum for washing platters. Behind the cutting room was a ten-by-twelve-foot walk-in icebox, where rumps and rounds of beef, pork loins, frying chickens, and smoked meats waited to be cut up and put on sale in the window or the case. A decoratively stamped tin ceiling ran from the front door to the icebox. I came to live two floors above Joe’s Meat Market three days after I was born.
The Store’s front door was almost entirely plate glass, so that customers could see we were open if the door was closed, but, to avoid missing a sale, it almost never was. A screen door was hung in summer to keep out flies. Inside, just opposite the meat case, was a trapdoor that opened on rickety steps down to the coal bin and furnace in the cellar. The cellar also held fifty-pound sacks of rice, cartons of sugar, and other goods, along with the rats and roaches that fed on them. You had to tend the furnace once in the middle of the night or the fire would go out. If that happened, it was hard to rekindle.
Behind the case ran the counter on which meat was wrapped, chopped, cut, or piled while serving a customer. Bags in sizes that held from two to twenty-five pounds were stacked beneath the counter in vertical piles divided by wooden dowels. Midway down the counter was the register, which only my father was allowed to open. On a nail under the register hung a loaded .38 caliber revolver and a blackjack on a leather strap; a 15baseball bat leaned against the back wall by the cosh. All three were used at one time or another.
Three scales trisected the top of the refrigerated case. One-pound cardboard boxes of lard for sale were stacked two feet high on either side of the weighing pans, making it impossible to see the meat being weighed on them. The butcher slid a box of lard onto the scale as he placed the meat on it and stood back in a “Look, Ma, no hands” pose so the customer could see him. Slabs of fat back, salt pork, and bacon also stood in piles on enameled platters atop the case. Toward the end of the day in summer, beads of grease dripped from these piles onto the platters. Flies were everywhere, more in summer than winter, but always there.
Out the door to the left was a poultry shop where chickens, ducks, and turkeys in cages squawked, honked, and gobbled, and the stink of rotten eggs and ammonia from fowl shit mixed with sawdust drifted onto the street. These birds were awaiting death and let every passerby know it. To the right was a yarn shop and, next to it on the corner, the fish store. The odor of rotting fish heads, tails, scales, and blood rose from a garbage can beneath the filleting block, stronger on busier days than slow. Carp milled in galvanized tubs, finning and thrashing until Mr. Segal, the fishmonger, thrust his hand among them and snatched the one the customer pointed to. A brief commotion as he yanked it from the tub, then with his left arm, he held it still on the chopping block while his right hand severed the head and tail with one blow each. Mr. Segal’s right arm, the one that held the machete-sized beheading knife, was much thicker than his left, the result of dispatching fish Monday through Saturday. My father’s right arm and shoulder were similarly muscled from cutting meat.
Pushcarts lined the curbs for blocks like huge wheelbarrows, their rear two spoke wheels four feet in diameter, the front wheel a third that, with long shafts extending from the barrow, as if for horses. During business hours, the carts rested on their smaller front wheels with the shafts angled skyward. They clogged the street so that there was just enough room for a single file of cars or a trolley to pass, and fouled the curb with the smell of rotting tomatoes, cabbage leaves, and onions. In winter, rusty fifty-five-gallon oil drums stood between some of the pushcarts with trash fires burning in them all day. The pushcart vendors stood around them for warmth until a customer appeared.
Mr. Drucker—a tall, thin, kindly-looking man—sold fruit and vegetables from his pushcart in front of the yarn store. He smiled at me and 16asked, “Nu, Danela?” (What’s up, Danny?), as I toddled by. He was there Monday to Saturday, no matter how hot or cold, and always wore a cloth flatcap. He could have been a peddler in Lvov. At night, Mr. Drucker closed up shop by levering onto the cart’s shafts so that his weight brought the front wheels off the cobbles as his feet hit the ground and the cart balanced on its two large wheels. Then with a heave, he swung it from the curb, negotiated the trolley tracks, and slowly pushed it round the corner and down three blocks to the pushcart garage, where he locked it up for the night. The pushcarts, with their high wooden sides, steel-rimmed wooden wheels, and goods, were heavy and didn’t roll well. Moving them was a job for a horse, but Mr. Drucker had no horse.
Fourth Street south of Bainbridge, looking north toward the Store
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Fourth Street was declining as a Jewish shopping district when my father bought the Store in 1940. Jewish immigration from the Pale had been choked off in the 1920s by the new U.S. quota system and the diminishing anti-Semitism that accompanied the first stages of Bolshevism in Russia. The first Jewish generation born in Philadelphia prospered and promptly moved to better neighborhoods in Northeast and West Philadelphia. Poor Blacks from the southern states took their places, and with them came poverty, different foods, more alcohol, different violence, different street crime and prejudice. Rye bread, pickles, herring, and corned beef gave way to hominy grits, collard greens, catfish, and chitlins; the odor of garlic and cumin replaced by the barbecue tang of wood smoke mixed with pig fat. At 17New Year’s, Joe’s Meats had wooden barrels four feet high and three wide with mounds of smoked hog jaws for sale, bristles and teeth still intact. This ghoulish food, roasted for hours with black-eyed peas and collard greens, was the traditional New Year’s turkey for southern field hands and was supposed to bring luck.
There was a bar across the street about two hundred feet north of the Store, at the corner of Fourth and Bainbridge. Payday was Friday. Friday and Saturday nights, the sirens would wail their way to that bar; sometimes screams or shots were heard. Knife fights and back-alley crap games that ended in violence were common. Many customers on Saturday and Sunday mornings were hung over, and it was not unusual for the men to sport freshly bandaged hands and heads. Joe sometimes ate lunch at Pearl’s, a small luncheonette around the corner from the Store. One Sunday, we were sitting on stools at Pearl’s counter eating lunch when a young Black man said something, which led him, his companion, and Joe to walk outside and square up. The tough pulled a nine-inch switchblade. Joe crouched, called him a n-----motherfucker, and beat him bloody.
Joe’s Meat Market would have failed ten years earlier than it did but for the coming of war. The U.S. Navy Yard at the foot of Broad Street, four miles southeast of William Penn’s hat, was working three shifts a day when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Local woolen mills, machine shops, and foundries soon followed suit. They drew laborers, many of them Black, to the city; any capable man or woman in South Philadelphia who wanted steady work at good wages had it, including some of my relatives. And these workers bought their meat at Joe’s. For the first time, my father was making more than a living.
The U.S. government rationed meats and staples like coffee and sugar, which spawned a black market. It created a federal agency, the Office of Price Administration (OPA), with inspectors to police the ration system and prevent profiteering; this drove black-market prices higher. Joe struck a deal with a black-market slaughterhouse to assure his supply of meat. He fetched it from the slaughterer’s at night in a Chevy panel truck and unloaded it himself. Word got around that you could always get plenty of pork chops and roasts at Joe’s without ration coupons.
Whitey—an OPA inspector in his fifties, nearly six feet tall, fat and officious—walked into the Store one Saturday morning when it was packed with customers come to buy meat without ration coupons. If a customer asked the price per pound of a cut, the butcher called out Next! and she left 18meatless, business too good to humor a troublemaker. Whitey asked to see the ration coupons for what was being sold.
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South Philadelphia’s ghettos—Jewish, Italian, Irish, Black—produced many good semipro boxers, and Joe was one of them. At twenty-nine, he was fast, with an eastern European peasant’s arms and shoulders thickened from butchering; he could take a punch. He had little respect for authority, a Depression-era fear of anything that threatened his living, and an uncontrollable temper. Joe asked Whitey to come back on Monday when the weekend rush was over. Whitey asked again. Joe came from behind the counter, faced him, and told him to come back another day. Whitey started to shut the front door, saying he would order the Store closed if Joe didn’t show him the coupons. Joe knocked him through the front door’s plate glass.
The Kevitch family lawyer defended Joe at his trial, which Uncle Abe attended to see justice done. When Whitey was called to the stand, he rose, looked at Uncle Abe, and said, Abe, if my dead mother got up from her grave and begged, I wouldn’t lift a finger to help that kid of yours, then testified as damningly as he could. My father did not go to jail. He paid a modest fine; business went on as usual.
Joe began to teach his wife to drive shortly after they married. Those days, trolley cars ran frequently along the steel tracks in front of 716 South Fourth. The prewar family coupé had a manual clutch and gearshift, which Louise found difficult to master. She began to pull away from the curb one Sunday afternoon, my father in the passenger seat instructing, and stalled on the tracks. She flooded the carburetor trying to restart the car, while a trolley car, bell clanging, stopped inches from the coupé’s back bumper. The starter turned the engine over futilely while the conductor continued to ring his bell. After a minute, he leaned from his window and cursed Louise, her sex, her intelligence, and her parents. The passenger door flew open, and Joe ran to the trolley car, prized open the front double doors, dragged the conductor from the car, and knocked him out. The conductor lay on the cobbles, not moving. My father walked back to the car, got behind the wheel, started it, and drove away.
A few days before Christmas 1946, Joe won $250 in a crap game and blew it all on two sets of O-Gauge Lionel model electric trains, passenger and freight, for my brother and me. Lionel did not manufacture model trains during the war, and the first postwar sets were in short supply and 19dear. The freight set’s six-wheel driver workhorse steam engine pulled a coal tender and silver Sunoco oil tanker, an orange boxcar with the Baby Ruth logo, an operating black flatbed log car, and a caboose. A sleek ten-wheel Pennsylvania Railroad passenger steam engine with tender rocketed three passenger cars and a club car around the layout, their windows lit by a bulb inside each car. Both engines puffed fake smoke when a white pellet dropped down their smokestacks and melted on the hot headlight bulbs below. The whistle diaphragm was located in the tenders and activated by a button on a controller clipped to the track. Pressing a button on a remote-control track would trigger a plunger below the log car to tip the floor of the car up and dump the three logs it carried. Accessories included a gateman with a swinging lantern, which popped out of his gatehouse when a train rolled over a nearby contact; a half dozen streetlights; and a transformer to run it all. Joe and a buddy sat on the floor in the front room above the Store that Christmas morning, assembling the track and wiring the controllers. He ran those trains around whistling and smoking all Christmas day and every Christmas after until I was twelve. My father had few toys as a child and no trains. Sixty-five years later, I still run them around at Christmas.
Early in 1946, slicing abdominal pains doubled Joe up, and doctors diagnosed acute Crohn’s disease, or rotting guts—the consequence of Jewish genes, bad boyhood diet, and heavy smoking—shortly after I turned three. He left the hospital six months later, a surviving experiment in radical intestinal resectioning, eighty-five pounds, short-gutted, and permanently diarrheic. His bowels plagued him for the rest of his life: diarrhea irritated his anus, and for years, he drove sitting on an inflatable child’s plastic swim ring; there was talk of a colostomy as he trudged from doctor to doctor, seeking relief. His groans and diarrhea-browned toilet bowls were a fixture in our house. Into my teens, I was afraid he might die at any minute.
The famous surgeon who removed much of his rotted tripe in the pioneering operation that saved his life ordered him to convalesce and find a hobby. He went to Florida with Louise for his first-ever vacation and there, as a form of therapy, began to fish from a Miami pier. By the time he returned from Florida, he had his hobby. A diversion became a passion, then an obsession, and finally a calling; he died a charter-boat captain on the Jersey coast. But his bowels and stomach tortured him the remaining forty-nine years of his life; he developed stomach cancer at eighty, which would have killed him had a heart attack not carried him off first. 20
5141 Whitaker Avenue
Stacks of twenty-, fifty-, and one-hundred-dollar bills with rubber bands around them, the four-year fruits of war, covered the kitchen table on V-J Day, August 15, 1945, waiting to be hidden in a bank’s safe-deposit box. One year later, Joe returned from convalescing in Florida, thirty-two years old, with his newfound passion for saltwater sportfishing, an even chance he would die young, and memories of signs at southern hotels saying, No Jews or dogs allowed. It was the worst possible time to buy a house: demand penned by the war, servicemen returning with GI loans, and a wartime dearth of construction combined to inflate prices. But for the first time in my father’s life, a pigmy front lawn, grassy side plot in a private alleyway between the next row of two-story houses, garage, basement with oak floors, and a six-foot mahogany bar with three leather stools were his if he wanted them. Joe took some stacks from the safe-deposit box and bought an end-of-row house in Feltonville, a working- and lower-middle-class neighborhood in North Philadelphia to which we moved a few months before my fifth birthday. The house was never worth as much as it was that spring of 1947, and my parents lost most of their investment in real terms when they sold it forty years later.
Joe often visited the box over the next eight years. War work dwindled, and with it went Fourth Street’s shoppers. Each month, my parents spent more than the Store took in. Joe’s innards continued to rot, his money worries worsened, Louise grew fat, and bickering turned into screaming matches with fists slamming tables and smashed plates. But Joe’s visits to the shvitz—the local steam baths—each Monday of the year and fishing trips each Tuesday, March through mid-December, continued, as did Louise’s help, her weekly beauty-parlor visits, and the family’s annual two weeks at the shore, whether Atlantic City or Long Beach Island. They borrowed money for emergencies and took the last cash stack from the box when I was twelve.
My parents used my fifth birthday to display their new house to the Burts and Kevitches. (When Uncle Bernie changed his name after the war from Jewish-sounding Bort to a Waspier Burt to help his career as a lingerie buyer for a downtown department store, Joe followed suit.) The Burt family war hero, Uncle Moishe, showed up. So did his Kevitch counterpart, Uncle Milton. Both had served in the Pacific, Milton as a military policeman, Moishe as a paratrooper. Milton brought home a Japanese rifle 21and malaria; Moishe, a chest of medals, a metal right arm, leg, and chrome-claw hand, and addiction to morphine. He had charged and destroyed an enemy machine-gun nest on Guadalcanal to earn medals, prostheses, pensions, and federal benefits. Handsome, still dashing, Uncle Moishe married five times before he died, a successful chicken farmer, in Texas.
I met him for the first time that birthday and quickly told him about my Japanese rifle, which he asked to see. We went down to our basement, and when I showed it to him, he picked it up with hand and claw, made me promise not to tell anyone, then taught me how to make a bayonet thrust. I saw him once more a few years later at Fourth and Daly when Joe would have beat him unconscious had my grandparents not managed to drag him away. Moishe, the youngest of their four children and Mom’s favorite, had persuaded them to mortgage their house to fund a business deal. The deal, if there was a deal, went south, leaving Mom and Pop with a mortgage they couldn’t pay, Pop dying, and no other assets to speak of. We went to their house for my father to discuss what was to be done, but when he saw Moishe, he lost his temper and punched him. I never saw or heard from Moishe again; he did not attend either of his parents’ funerals nor my father’s. He had numerous children, my first cousins, whom I have never met and whose names I have never known.
The new house in Feltonville had a “breakfast room,” where we ate at a table for six, separated by a half wall from a small kitchen, the last of five modest rooms on the first floor. Joe sat at the head of the table on the two or three nights a week when he was home early enough for us to eat as a family. If he was not present, his chair stayed empty, as did the large red plush armchair with thick feather-stuffed cushions in the living room. We were forbidden to sit in it after the cushions were plumped for his return from work.
There was no art, no pictures on the walls, no musical instruments. Volumes of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club and a set of Encyclopedia Britannica and The Naked and the Dead stood on four shelves in the basement. Our periodicals were Reader’s Digest, Life, Look, Vogue, and Salt Water Sportsman. A television rested on the living room’s “wall-to-wall” carpet. There was a large prewar 78 Victrola-cum-radio with an amber-colored tuning face on a shelf in the basement above a small stack of “swing” and “big band” records from the 1940s, one of which contained Al Jolson singing “Anniversary Waltz.” The first two lines Jolson sang go “Oh how we danced on the night we were wed / We vowed our true love 22though a word wasn’t said,” which Joe rendered in a loud baritone as Oh how we danced on the night we were wed / I needed a wife like a hole in the head. Linoleum covered the breakfast room and kitchen floors.
The door slammed behind him when Joe came home and called out, Lou, is dinner ready? They did not greet each other, nor touch. I never saw them kiss. If dinner was late, a fight would start. On five out of six work nights, Joe came home too late to eat with us and had dinner alone, reading the paper. At breakfast, he would go over yesterday’s receipts and lists of provisions to be picked up at the wholesalers. When the family ate together, he talked to his sons rather than his wife. If he spoke to her at the table, it was about how bad business had been that day or week or month. After dinner, he flopped in his chair to read the paper, smoke a cigarette, and doze. He went to bed around 10 p.m.
Louise did not go with him. She sat watching television in the living room or in the kitchen talking on the telephone, drinking coffee, smoking, and doodling on scraps of paper and newspaper margins. After half an hour, he would call, Lou, Lou, come to bed. Most mornings, I found her asleep on the couch in the living room. They shared a bedroom, but she rarely slept there when he was in the bed. He was consistently unfaithful to her all their wedded life, either with whores or girlfriends. She set her brother to catch him in one suspected affair that worried her more than most. A scene followed: she presented the evidence in front of us children. He began to pack, she kept berating him, dishes flew, he raised his fist, and she threatened to call Uncle Al. Joe didn’t hit her, then or ever. In time, their marriage decayed into indifference. His excuse for not leaving was “you kids;” hers was “how would I support myself” and “what would people say?” The day began with screams and shouts. Our house had one bathroom with tiled floor, a single sink, shower, and tub for the four of us, and a basement water closet. We had a washing machine and later a dryer, but clean clothes often shirked the climb from the basement laundry room to the bedrooms. Mornings were a scramble to empty bowels and bladders, find clean underwear and socks, and get to work or school; the house rang with cries of Lou, where’s my shorts? or Mom, I need socks. Yesterday’s dinner dishes tilted at odd angles in a yellow rubber-coated drying rack by the kitchen sink, where unwashed pots with congealed rice or potatoes were piled.
Pop died in 1954, and Mom turned her kvetching (corrosive whining) on her children and their wives. She always worried about money—though 23between her social security checks and her children’s help, she had more than enough—and used a “limited” phone service. This allowed her two free calls a day for a nominal fee. She husbanded her free calls for “emergencies” and signaled with two rings when she wanted family to call her. Her signals became a ukase (a decree with the force of law), ignored at your peril. Almost every evening before Joe came home, while Louise struggled with supper, Mom signaled. Apparently bearing two sons, time, and an old widow’s loneliness had cleansed the shiksa (gentile woman) from Louise’s blood. If she didn’t ring back immediately, Mom would use one of her emergency calls to complain to Joe when he came home from work. Dinner was never on time; asked when it would be ready, Louise snapped, When I say so. We ate hostage to the signal. Mom died at ninety-nine and lived alone until her death.
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The neighborhood was about 60 percent gentile and 40 percent Jewish when we moved there, but the Jews were leaving for the suburbs. It was 70 percent gentile by the time I was twelve, and today it’s a Hispanic section of Philadelphia’s inner city. The Catholic kids mostly went to Saint Ambrose parochial school on Roosevelt Boulevard. Saint Ambrose was attached to a large Catholic church in the next block west from our synagogue. Fights with the Saint Ambrosians were a staple of Jewish high holy days. It was generally accepted that the gentile boys, the shkutzim, were tougher than the Jewish, with a few exceptions.
Non-Catholics attended Creighton Elementary, the local public primary school, teaching grades kindergarten through eight. It was a five-story ocher brick building set on a third of a city block. An adjoining concrete schoolyard and a gravel playing field occupied the rest. Six-foot-high pointy iron palings set three inches apart formed a palisade from the school’s north facade around the cement schoolyard and gravel ball field to the building’s south facade. There were heavy steel-mesh grills painted off-white on the ground-level windows. It looked like a prison. The gates were locked from 4 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. the next morning. There was an assembly hall where, every morning, we said a prayer, pledged the flag, and heard a reading from the Bible, mostly from the New Testament; an oak-floored gym half again the size of a basketball court, with several vaulting horses, sweat-gray tattered tumbling mats, rings, ceiling-high climbing ropes, and basketball hoops at either end; a woodshop where sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade boys learned to handle the tools they would need for adult 24jobs and made zip guns; and a home ec (home economics) room with stoves, refrigerators, and sewing machines where girls learned the skills of their sex. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter were the big holidays, with paper turkeys, crèches, dyed eggs, bunnies, and baskets in profusion. Few Old Creightonians went to college.
Our neighborhood was eight blocks long and four blocks deep, bounded on the north by the Boulevard, east by railroad tracks, south by a creek where we trapped tadpoles, and west by the Boulevard again. It supported eleven mom-and-pop stores on eleven corners: two groceries, two kosher butchers, two candy stores, a corner drugstore, barbershop, beauty parlor, shoe repair, and Polan’s, a luncheonette. The Northeastern U.S. headquarters of catalog retailer Sears and Roebuck—with a two-square-block, three-story department store attached—was four blocks away across the Boulevard. The department store entrance housed a popcorn machine and a clerk selling large bags of it for fifteen cents. A baseball, knife, or deflated football or basketball fitted neatly below the popcorn at the bottom of one of these bags, and the advent of spring and fall found groups of boys wandering the sporting goods aisles, munching popcorn and looking out for store detectives.
We played on Whitaker Avenue’s wide asphalt street, a six-blocks-long dead end. There were no parks or playgrounds. Boys played stickball with a cut-off broom handle for a bat and a hollow rubber ball two and a quarter inches in diameter; half-ball with the same bat but with the ball cut in half and inverted so it looked like a deep saucer, which dipped, curved, and floated unpredictably when properly pitched; and hose ball, again with the same broom-handled bats, and four-inch hose lengths cut from rubber garden hoses. Sensible neighbors kept their brooms and hoses inside from Easter until the players had stolen enough for the coming season. The street game from September till Christmas was rough-touch American football. Participants left these games cut and bruised from slamming into parked cars and curbs, sometimes with sprains, occasionally with a broken bone. The parked cars did not fare well either. There was a stop sign where a side street from the Boulevard intersected Whitaker Avenue. Joe drove down that street every day coming home from work but never stopped. The neighbors cursed him.
Competition from the national food chains (A&P and Food Fair), along with the Jewish exodus, slowly throttled the local stores, except for Polan’s, where the Jewish gonifs (thieves) hung out. Every Monday night 25
