Ravage & Son E-Book

Jerome Charyn

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 404

Beschreibung

A master storyteller's novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early Manhattan, Ravage & Son reflects the lost world of Manhattan's Lower East Side — the cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth century — in a dark mirror. Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, serves as the conscience of the Jewish ghetto teeming with rogue cops and swindlers. He rescues Ben Ravage, an orphan, from a trade school and sends him off to Harvard to earn a law degree. But upon his return, Ben rejects the chance to escape his gritty origins and instead becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a quixotic gang backed by wealthy uptown patrons to help the police rid the Lower East Side of criminals. Charged with rooting out the Jewish 'Mr. Hyde', a half-mad villain who attacks the prostitutes of Allen Street, Ben discovers that his fate is irrevocably tied to that of this violent, sinister man.

Leseprobe

Praise for Jerome Charyn

‘One of our most rewarding novelists’ Larry McMurtry

‘Charyn’s sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable’ Jonathan Letham

‘Charyn is a one-off: no other living American writer crafts novels with his vibrancy of historical imagination’ William Giraldi

‘Jerome Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer – so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible’ Tom Bissell

‘One of the most important writers in American literature’ Michael Chabon

‘Among Charyn’s writerly gifts is a dazzling energy – a highly inflected rapid-fire prose that pulls us along like a pony cart over rough terrain’ Joyce Carol Oates

‘One of our most intriguing fiction writers’ O, The Oprah Magazine

Prelude 1883

He was a seller of metal pipes and bones who had accumulated his own dross, a graveyard of fittings and clamps and screws, and had to employ a blond she-cat as big as a church, with paws that could swipe at any intruder, twist a doorknob, or paralyze a monstrous rat that thrived on the lead inside his pipes. Her name was Chlöe, and she answered to no one but the boss himself. She’d hiss at strangers and his employees, but all he had to do was shout ‘Chlo-o-o-eeee,’ and she’d abandon the gray rat she was toying with, rise above that graveyard of pipes, and leap right into his lap. Sometimes the whirling force of her would knock him out of his chair, and she clung to him without her claws, while his shop steward muttered under his breath, ‘Lionel and his lioness.’

But he couldn’t spend his whole day with a cat. He wandered about and hunted like Chlöe, when he should have gone home to his wife. He’d tired of Henrietta before they were even married at Temple Emanu-El. He slept with her out of some rabbinical rule that had never made sense to him. He preferred Chlöe’s musk to Henrietta’s. He’d married into a tribe of Bavarian merchant princes, when his own papa was a prince of another sort, a hardware man, like Lionel, a speculator in real estate with husky arms, who collapsed when he was fifty-six and died in the street like a dog, without a soul to offer him a cup of water.

Lionel kept his papa’s signboard, Ravage & Son, continued to grab up tenements below market price, and went to Allen Street, hunting for female flesh. All he found were rotten sinks – fleabitten sisters who couldn’t amuse him with their practiced steps. And whenever he tore up a brothel and blacked out in a maddening fit, a merchant prince would arrive with a detective from Mulberry Street and bliss was soon restored at the brothel, even if Lionel was covered in blood after all his rampaging.

‘Ah, Mr Ravage, a gentleman like yourself shouldn’t be mingling with this kind of trash. These ladies have their cadets, and they might carve you up one fine afternoon. You’d leave us with a stinking mess of paperwork if we found you in the morgue.’

So he had a weapon handcrafted for him by a silversmith on Baxter Street. It was much more fashionable than a policeman’s billy or a baseball bat. Lionel Ravage had his own pinewood walking stick with a handle in the shape of a wolf’s head, burnished in silver. He could crown any cadet with his walking stick, and fend off robbers who wanted to relieve him of his rent bag. He sent more than one of these lowlifes to the Hebrew hospital with a good thwack. Lionel preferred to be his own rent collector. It was his way of meeting a plump housewife who was behind in the rent and whose husband was coughing his lungs out in some charity ward. Lionel was never crude. He wouldn’t hammer an eviction notice on her front door, wouldn’t call upon the services of the county sheriff. He’d permit three or four months’ rent to slide. The housewife would stare into his silver-blue eyes. He’d recite poetry to her. He’d had a semester at Amherst College before his papa pulled him back into their hardware empire, which occupied more and more of Canal Street. Lionel missed the countryside, not the college. His intimate sense of sewers and the arcane world of pipes had made him Amherst’s prize plumber. But he’d had to leave. And now, near enough to a bachelor of arts in plumbing, he’d deliver lines from Shakespeare to the housewife in the Yiddish he had picked up from his papa’s customers, and Lionel would play all the parts – Prospero one moment, Caliban the next.

You taught me language; and my profit on’t

Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you

For learning me your language!

The housewife was enthralled. She undressed in front of her lyrical landlord. And if a certain housewife was hard to get, he might offer to marry her on the sly. He plucked a renegade beadle from a Norfolk Street synagogue, produced a wedding band from a variety shop, kissed the bride under a prayer shawl, and drank a cup of kosher wine. Soon Lionel had a dozen mistress-wives, and was sick of every one. He returned to Allen Street with his silver club, like some Caliban of the Lower East Side, master and servant of his own appetites and ambitions, with a crippling anger against his papa’s associates, who tried to cheat him out of his patrimony. He ruined them all, bought up their assets, and increased his graveyard of pipes and fittings, with Chlöe as his constant companion. But he couldn’t make love to a cat with whiskers and claws, no matter how often she crashed into his lap. Lionel had to troll…

He met her by accident. He was collecting rent on Attorney Street, and she came to the door in a silk robe with loose threads that unraveled all around her. She had the carved cheeks and wild blond hair of a dybbuk. His tenant, Rabinowitz, was a consumptive philosopher from Vilna who sold apples in the street whenever he was lucky enough to locate a pushcart and a consignment of apples. Lionel didn’t care about the rent. He could discuss the notion of gravity with Rabinowitz, and the elevator cars that would soon command taller and taller buildings in Manhattan and miles of pipe that only Ravage & Son could furnish.

Lionel didn’t believe in dybbuks. He’d been to a college in the middle of Massachusetts. He hadn’t come to America in a cattle car – he was an aristocrat with an artisan’s grip. Still, he couldn’t take his eyes off this blonde in threadbare silk. She’d hooked herself to his own interior plumbing with those high cheeks of hers. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen.

‘Hey,’ he said, in that rough vocabulary of a rent collector, ‘are you one of those imported brides, huh? How did the old man pay for the passage? He doesn’t have a cent.’

She slapped his face. It was a wicked blow, with all the force of Chlöe, but Chlöe wouldn’t have been that unkind.

‘I’m his daughter,’ she said, in an accent that couldn’t have come from any school in Manhattan. ‘And he’s not your old man.’

‘Yeah, he’s an apple polisher who can’t pay his rent.’

She slapped him again, and those magnificent cheeks throbbed with malice. ‘I love this crazy girl,’ he muttered under his breath, and it frightened him. Lionel had never been in love, not with errant housewives, nor uptown princesses like Henrietta, with all their fine breeding, nor brash downtown girls, who would have robbed him blind if they could. All he had was Chlöe. Now he had to deal with this one, and he was at a disadvantage. Rabinowitz’s girl with the wild blond hair had much sharper claws than Chlöe.

Her name was Manya, she said. And she’d been raised at her father’s feet. Her mother had died giving birth to Manya. She had neither brothers nor sisters. Her father was a maverick in a community of religious Jews. He’d studied the laws of Russian grammar rather than the Talmud. A servant in the castle of a Lithuanian lord, hired to polish silverware, he became, in a matter of months, tutor to the nobleman’s son – only Rabinowitz, the Jewish polisher, could instruct the boy how to read and write. Manya lived at the castle with her papa, wearing the discarded silks of the nobleman’s daughters. The other servants grew jealous of this self-taught savant, and plotted to kill him and Manya. He couldn’t return to the Jewish quarter, where he was considered a pariah.

‘So you escaped to the Promised Land,’ Lionel said. ‘But I’ve visited your father many times. Where the hell were you?’

‘Hiding in the closet,’ she said. ‘Papa says you have an insatiable lust. He didn’t want you to feast on my flesh.’

‘And where did you learn all that pretty talk?’

‘From Papa,’ she said. ‘He’s an alchemist who can breathe languages.’

When he’s not polishing apples like the silverware he used to polish, Lionel reassured himself. Manya must have had the skills to work as a bookkeeper or a salesclerk, but Rabinowitz wouldn’t allow her to descend into the Lower East Side, where some cadet might capture her, and anonymous men with filthy fingernails could ogle her like wild beasts. So the princess would sit in the back room of their tenement palace and recite to her father the Russian and English classics he himself had taught her. And whenever she had to shop on Hester Street, she disguised herself in her father’s hat and overcoat.

‘Then what made you answer the door? You could have hid in the closet.’

‘I’m not a child,’ she said. ‘And I was curious. I could see you through a crack in the closet door. You have beautiful eyes, you know, when you’re not playing the landlord.’

Lionel was losing whatever little stature he had left. ‘But I am the landlord.’

‘Who allows Papa to live rent-free,’ she said, and laughed for the first time; her sweet roar was like the rasping jingle of toys he’d had as a child: Manya could have been Lionel’s own music box.

‘But how many savants do I have on my rent rolls?’ he asked. ‘Our talks enrich me. I don’t need to collect from him.’

And that’s when Rabinowitz returned in fingerless gloves, with a torn blanket as a cloak. He was in a dark mood. He couldn’t control the tremors in his jaw. His stoic nature was gone. He’d have butchered Lionel if he’d had a hatchet in his hand.

‘Papa,’ Manya said, ‘why such a long face? I’m a debutante in America. I’ve met the landlord. Now wash your hands and invite us both to tea.’

That’s how it began; Lionel neglected his business, neglected Chlöe, neglected his wife. He had some junior accountant at the office visit the sites and collect whatever rent was due. He did meet with his most important builders, and the pipes moved out of that graveyard. He bought presents for his children only when Manya reminded him. He was always there, at that flat on Attorney Street, with hissing gas jets in the halls and the perennial stink of cabbage. Rabinowitz wouldn’t allow Lionel to move him into a front apartment, where he might have had a glimpse of sunlight.

‘Ravage, my daughter is not for sale. I am not bartering her, do you hear?’

Lionel remembered the moment he first clutched her hand; Rabinowitz was padding about in his slippers, his memory shot as he was maddened by a jealousy he couldn’t quite comprehend. And Lionel seized her hand in his, like a brigand. The two of them were renegades in a rear, sunless apartment that Rabinowitz rented and Lionel owned.

They had to accompany him into the backyard whenever Rabinowitz ran to the privy. Lionel’s plumbers had begun to install indoor toilets in some of the newer tenements, but none of these pipes had come to Attorney Street, where the stench was unbearable, even in winter, when the privies froze. Lionel would lick her face like a lunatic while the savant sat on his splintered throne.

‘Landlord, we’ll lose you once and for all,’ Rabinowitz cackled from the privy, but he didn’t have the courage or the means to move. It was Manya who broke up their little engagement party. Lionel had never once felt her moistness, or fumbled under her clothes.

‘Lionel, we’re killing him, and he’s the last papa I’ll ever have.’

He returned to his graveyard on Canal with violent dreams. He meant to finish off Rabinowitz, send him to paradise with the silver handle of his cane. But he had some residual fondness for that savant. He didn’t hate Rabinowitz. He just wanted him to disappear. Meanwhile, his business seemed to blossom around him. Contractors stood in line to bid for his pipes. He had to install a Teletype machine. Chlöe could sense his moodiness. She bumped him with her head and brought him the carcass of a big brown rat. He was losing inventory. Pirates had come from the Jersey Shore to steal his merchandise, until Chlöe blinded their chieftain with her claws and sent the band back to Hoboken. But not even that victory could heal Lionel’s wounds.

A few months later, he heard of Rabinowitz’s demise. The savant had dropped dead on the privy. Lionel didn’t rush to Attorney Street. He still felt bitter and bruised. Finally he went there without his rent bag and with the wind in his eyes. A gale was blowing. The gas lamps had gone out. Attorney Street had descended into a pit of darkness. The Lower East Side could have been a barren island in a storm. Lionel lost his bearings for a moment. He suffered a kind of vertigo that was near enough to amnesia. But Chlöe came back to him in a flash, the huntress in that graveyard of pipes. He recognized Manya’s building in Attorney Street’s tenement row. He stood on the crumbling stoop and entered the pitch-black hallway. The banisters were broken. He had to mount the stairs with one hand on a wall of corrugated tin that might collapse and come crashing down on his head. The linoleum on Manya’s landing was like a wicked sea of lumps. He knocked on her door, announced himself. ‘Manya, it’s me – the landlord.’

The door was unlocked. He entered the apartment while the windows rattled, and the whole tenement seemed to quake. The gas jets hissed a poisonous fire, sputtered, and blew out with a final cough. She wasn’t in the front room, a parlor with a ragged settee that Lionel’s own men had supplied. They must have found it in a junkyard north of Canal. Lionel’s apartments were always fully furnished; that way, he didn’t have to endure the crisis of tenants moving in and out. A family came with their linen and left with their linen – and a few additional bedbugs.

He trod into the bedroom, frightened of what he would find.

‘Manya,’ he whispered, ‘I won’t harm you.’

She was lying on a rumpled bed in the same threadbare silk robe she’d worn when he first met her. She didn’t move, even when he touched her arm. He ran into the kitchen. The shelves were all vacant except for a spiderweb – there wasn’t a noodle or a slice of cheese in the house. He returned to the bedroom, wrapped her in his overcoat, and carried her down into the storm. She lay against him like some lanky doll with a bit of breath in her lungs.

The corner lunchroom was closed. Lionel knocked on the door with that silver skull of his cane. The cook appeared with a blanket around his shoulders and shouted through the window, ‘Are you meshuga, or what? The wind is breaking glass and knocking down trees. I haven’t had a customer since last night. Go away!’

Lionel knocked again, and now the cook recognized him as the young prince who owned half of Hester Street. Lionel was his landlord, in fact. He unlocked the door.

‘Forgive me, Herr Ravage. The wind was playing tricks. I didn’t…’

The cook wore a derby and long underwear under his blanket. He had to light a large candlestick – he was lost without his gas jets. Then he saw her wild blond hair and curious pale complexion, like an alabaster idol. Both her eyes were shut.

He went to his stove, almost by instinct. But he couldn’t prepare a French omelette or heat a pot of chicken soup on a dead flame. So he leaned into the icebox, with his derby still on, pulled out ingredient after ingredient like a master chef, and was still able to fry an egg on an old fire pit, fix up a cucumber salad and a farmer cheese sandwich, while Lionel fed her little pieces at a time – until she opened her crystal blue eyes, a fixture of the finest Lithuanian Jews. She even managed a slight, trembling smile that was almost like a twitch.

‘Landlord, you should have left me in peace.’

‘What peace?’

‘My father’s lying in a potter’s field. I want to lie there with him.’

‘He won’t lie there very long. We’ll bury him again, in my family plot.’

‘He doesn’t belong there,’ she said, suddenly ravenous. ‘You have your own children and a wife.’

‘You’re my family. Have you had enough to eat?’

‘Yes, Lord Lionel,’ she said, with a touch of amusement in her voice.

The cook prepared a great bundle of food but wouldn’t accept money from his prince. ‘Please come again, Herr Ravage. You’re always welcome in a storm.’

And Lionel carried her across the wind in his overcoat, back to her upstairs cave, where the windows rattled through the night. She fell asleep in his arms and woke with the same alabaster look.

‘You could work for me, you know. I’ll fire my bookkeeper.’

‘And create a scandal at Ravage & Son. You’ll lose the art of collecting rent.’

She reached for Lionel, her arms still dug inside his overcoat, and kissed him on the mouth. It was their first kiss. He was trembling now, not Manya. She had the sweetest taste on her tongue. She snapped his suspenders until the pair of them lay curled on the bed. She plucked off his pants and winter underwear like some courtesan in a dream. And he entered her while she was still draped in his long coat. Entwined, they moved together mercifully slow. He did not think of his accounts or his dead father or the cat that waited for him in that endless terminal of pipes. They didn’t talk. He listened to her heartbeat, and licked the salt behind her ear.

‘I’m embarrassed,’ she finally said. ‘Lionel, I haven’t bathed in a week.’

‘That’s perfect. You’ll live with my smell on you forever, like a Chinaman’s tattoo.’

He wasn’t sure how long he stayed with her. He kept no calendar inside his head. He knew that certain bills had to be paid, but his bookkeeper could worry about that. He should have notified his wife. What could he say? Henny, I’m on a long voyage. I might never be back.

They could have gone to Lord & Taylor, or another ladies’ shop on Grand Street. But she forbade him to buy her clothes. They never rode the horsecars into another neighborhood, never watched Yiddish jugglers on the Bowery. Lionel ran out of cash. It didn’t seem to matter. He signed his name on the grocer’s bill, and it was good as gold. The gas jets turned on miraculously a week after the storm, with a lick of blue flame. Lionel carried in pails of water from the leaky faucet near the landing, and he spent hours scrubbing her back. She read to him at night from the leather-bound books her papa had brought from Lithuania, books lent to him by the lord of the castle and never returned, classics of a kind with illustrations. Their favorite was Barnaby Rudge; they both reveled in Dickens’ greatest outlaw and grotesque, Dennis the hangman, who loved to lead a riot, turn around, and hang the rioters. They were convinced that Dennis could have thrived in America as a police captain on Mulberry Street if he himself hadn’t been hanged in the novel.

‘What a shame,’ Manya said. ‘We might have had Dennis knock on my door.’

‘Our door,’ he said, and then there was a sudden knock on the front door, as if they were onstage somewhere, thrust into a Yiddish melodrama.

‘Come in, please,’ Manya said.

Lionel’s shop steward appeared out of the blue, with a derby in his hands. He wore red suspenders, like Lionel. ‘There’s been a terrible tragedy, boss, or I wouldn’t inconvenience you.’

‘What happened? Was there a fire uptown? Are my children hurt?’

‘No, boss, but I think you’d better come with me.’

The shop steward had to stand in the corner with his eyes closed while Lionel crept into his pants and overcoat, which had all the dizzying aromas of Manya in every curl of wool.

‘Manya,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll be right back.’

The shop steward was silent all the way to Canal Street. Lionel entered that graveyard of pipes in a surly mood. And then he saw her dangling from a hook in the wall, with his best copper wire wound like a necklace under her ears; her blond coat was ripped through with blood, and her paws had been mangled.

Lionel sobbed in front of his own men. ‘Look at my little girl.’

He freed her from the wall with a pair of pliers, held that enormous cat in his arms, and ruffled her bloody coat with one hand. ‘Idiots, don’t we have watchmen around the clock?’

‘Boss,’ said the steward, ‘it was the same gang from Hoboken. They scared off our watchmen, and didn’t steal a thing. It was personal, boss. Them and the cat.’

‘Shut up,’ Lionel said. ‘They couldn’t have gotten near Chlöe, not a hundred of them.’

‘They blinded her, boss, with acid. Look at her eyes.’

She didn’t have any eyes. She had scorched pits where her eyeballs had been eaten away, and yet he could still feel the luminous green eyes of his dead cat – nothing could diminish her, not that band of louts from Hoboken, all of whom he swore to kill. He’d have to lure members of the harbor patrol to ride across the Hudson with him in a police barge and descend upon those Hoboken rats. He’d pay any price to avenge Chlöe. And while he dreamt of destruction, men in black coats arrived on Canal Street. They were a different kind of pirates, these merchant princes who were Henrietta’s uncles, nephews, and brothers, and Lionel himself was the outlaw with a dead cat in his arms.

‘Go away,’ he said. ‘I’m mourning.’

But they didn’t cower in front of Lionel like his shop steward. Nor had they come to bargain with him over a glass of schnapps. They ripped off his overcoat, thrashed him with their walking sticks, until he lay in the sawdust, in that world of copper and lead.

Henrietta’s favorite uncle loomed over him in his waxed mustache. ‘Nephew, you haven’t been home in a month. Your children are wild animals without their father. You wife is even wilder – with worry. She hasn’t slept. She won’t eat.’

‘Uncle,’ he cried. ‘I cannot help her. I have another wife.’

They thrashed him again and again, until Chlöe dropped beside him, and he saw nothing but the scorched black holes in her head. And then she disappeared, behind the Russian boots of the Bavarians.

‘Your father was a bankrupt,’ said Uncle Rainer. ‘We pulled him out of ruin. We gave our best flower to you – a bride you didn’t deserve. The richest men wanted her, handsome men, brilliant, and she fell in love with a silky blond snake. There are consequences, Lionel. You will lose everything, this shop, your real estate holdings, every plot of land.’

‘I’ll survive,’ he said.

Uncle Rainer smiled; he was the smartest of the lot.

‘The way your cat survived, eh? And what will happen to the apple peddler’s daughter when you’ve lost your fortune? It won’t be a pretty sight. We’ll have her arrested as a vagrant. And how will you help? Paupers can’t fight the police.’

Lionel lunged at Uncle Rainer, whom he’d always admired. Rainer had bailed out Lionel’s papa once the wedding contract had been sealed. He and Henny owned half of Ravage & Son.

‘I’ll kill you,’ Lionel howled in a ragged voice that signaled his own defeat. Rainer could afford to laugh. The Bavarian princes left him in the sawdust, with his dead cat buried in the pipes somewhere. The blood had gone out of him. He was as blind as Chlöe, but that didn’t matter much. He’d grow whiskers, and he’d prowl. He’d make love to Henrietta once in a blue moon, between her menstrual cramps. He’d buy up land, sell his pipes, sit inside the Moorish castle of Temple Emanu-El, pray with the Bavarian princes and plot against them. He’d mangle, he’d maraud, and wear that mask of propriety. Let them all invent their own Lionel Ravage – master plumber, hardware merchant, real estate tycoon. They’d never find the monster or the man. He sat in the sawdust and clucked in front of his shop steward and his pipe fitters, ‘Chl-o-o-o-eeee.’ But the cat never came.

One

The Baron of East Broadway

1.

It was well past midnight on the Lower East Side, and Cahan had one last article to finish about Congress’s latest attempt to shutter Ellis Island and strangle all the life out of the Ghetto. The editor left his falcon’s lair at the Forward building on East Broadway and decided to prowl the dark, viscous streets near the docks so that he might find some rhythm to write, and that’s when a lone rooster crossed his path, a refugee from some cockfighting school run by gamblers in the Ghetto; the rooster had very red eyes, and wattles that had been chewed to pieces. It had only one leg, and hobbled along, hiding from gamblers who resented its lameness, Cahan supposed, and would have chopped off its head with a cleaver. Cahan was tempted to adopt this refugee, but the Forward’s secretaries and accountants would have panicked with a one-legged rooster in the building.

And while he considered the rooster’s fate, he heard the familiar rumble of a pushcart with damaged wheels. Avram Polski appeared in his winter coat, selling merchandise to an invisible clientele; the peddler should have been locked up. But there was no Yiddish insane asylum, and Avram was better off in the streets with his stock of shoelaces, rubber bands, moldy erasers, splintered pencils, and ink bottles without ink. He was a giant of a man, who had lost his wife and three children in an outbreak of cholera that ravaged his tenement six or seven years ago.

‘Shoelaces, a dime a dozen,’ Avram wailed, like the mourner he was.

Cahan purchased the shoelaces and a clutch of rubber bands, as he always did in his nighttime encounters with Avram, who was still an avid reader of the Forward.

‘Comrade, why do you advertise White Rose tea? It’s poison in a teacup. You’d be better off listing recruits for a pogrom.’

Cahan could never win an argument with the peddler, who still knew how to poke him in the ribs, despite his endless voyages through the same dark streets.

‘Avram, I’ll wait for another brand of tea to come along.’

The madman wouldn’t listen. He counted his tiny treasure and shrank into the mist, but Cahan couldn’t luxuriate in his own solitude. Cadets were still on the prowl with their harems. One such queen of the night solicited the editor. She had a racking cough. Her fingernails were filthy, and her eyebrows looked like faded blue rubber bands. She couldn’t have been much older than sixteen. She wore nothing but a cotton dress, and must have been chilled to the bone. She blinked once at Cahan; that was her only mark of seduction.

‘Mister,’ she rasped in a hoarse voice, ‘would you like to go round the world?’

She belonged in a cot at the Hebrew hospital, not at a whore’s station on Cherry Street. Her cheeks were on fire all the while she shivered. Her eyeballs seemed to bulge right out of her head.

‘My dear,’ he whispered as gently as he could, ‘how much would it take to retire you for the night?’

‘A tenski,’ she said between coughs.

Cahan reached into his billfold and handed her a ten-dollar bill. He didn’t want to know her name; a name would have hobbled him, added skin and flesh to her skull and given him nightmares. But he hadn’t bartered correctly, and he’d complicated the poor girl’s life. Her champions arrived, a pair of cadets in identical beaver coats; they must have marched out of some primordial weather, where the crustiest men lived. They had deep scars on their faces that served as souvenirs or medallions of knife fights they had survived. Both of them were carrying firemen’s hatchets that looked like tomahawks. Cahan had stumbled upon some secret Wild West near the waterfront. He was furious, even with tomahawks in his face.

‘This girl should be in a hospital ward.’

The cadets slapped their thighs like Bowery singers, and swatted at him with their hatchets, missing his nose by an inch.

‘Mushke, what the hell, let’s scalp him. We’ll sell him to the tannery, skin and all.’

A foghorn bleated in Cahan’s ears as another man stepped out of the mist, with the mottled face of some rascal who had been caught in a firestorm. Not even that morass of skin and the wig he wore at a slant to cover the burn marks on his pate could blunt the menace of his blue eyes. He’d once been the handsomest cavalier in the Ghetto. And now he wandered the streets in the middle of the night, wielding a cane with a silver wolf’s head. He whacked at the cadets, who went down on their knees as the wolf’s teeth bit at them with a silent bark.

‘Jesus, Mr R, we didn’t know he was a pal of yours.’

‘He’s not,’ the man said. ‘But you shouldn’t take such liberties. Get out of here.’

And they both ran toward the Bowery.

‘Herr Ravage,’ Cahan said with a note of bitterness, ‘I’m in your debt.’ He knew the uptown princes loved to hold on to their Germanic roots. But this one was a rebel, who occupied his own fortress on Canal. He was also an enigma, who financed charity wards, hired Yiddish opera stars from the Metropolitan to sing the chant of the dead at some crumbling synagogue, helped establish a system of monitors at Ellis Island to guide immigrants through the maze of doctors and nurses and petty officials, but he was a ruthless landlord who emptied entire tenements and turned block after block into a sinister shell. He himself had walked out of a burning tenement, with half his face on fire.

‘You owe me nothing, Cahan. And you shouldn’t be so formal. Lionel is good enough.’ He tugged at the wig that resembled a lunatic’s straw hat. ‘I could have let them kill you. You’ve crucified me enough in the Forward.’

‘How many families have you evicted from your tenement palaces, Lord Lionel?’

The lunatic laughed. ‘Not without eviction notices. It’s strictly legal. And stay off the streets after midnight. This is my nocturne, Cahan, not yours. You grumble all the time about coppers and cadets. Well, one or the other could slap your brains into split-pea soup, and all that eloquence of yours would be lost. Good night.’

Suddenly, Cahan had the timbre he needed to scribble his story about Ellis Island, as if that ghost with white hair had awakened him. He returned to East Broadway, knowing he would never understand Herr Lionel Ravage, a man with his own harem, who had spawned a whole tribe of bastards that the editor didn’t dare write about, unless he wanted to be sued for libel and plucked off his own masthead without mercy.

2.

He was called ‘the Pulitzer of Yiddish Land,’ the Ghetto’s William Randolph Hearst. Cahan had a colossus – the Jewish Daily Forward. It had more readers than The Philadelphia Inquirer and the St Louis Post-Dispatch, and it was published for a population of immigrant Jews. Cahan liked to boast of his million readers, since entire families devoured each issue of the Forward, not only on the mean streets surrounding East Broadway but in Buenos Aires and Budapest and all the other world capitals where the paper was sold in 1913. But Cahan could taste the bile on his tongue as he looked into the heart of the Lower East Side from his lair on the tenth floor of the Forward building, as his operators next door composed the current issue with the hot-metal slugs of their typesetting machines.

There was a swirl of red dust outside and a din that had nothing to do with his compositors. The dust was no mystery to Abraham Cahan; it was bits of rubble and red chalk that flew off the walls and ragged roof lines of the tenements and other buildings, as if some monstrous sculptor was chipping away at every piece of property in the Ghetto: schools, synagogues, churches, the Ludlow Street jail, the Essex Market Court, the pushcarts, the pylons of the Williamsburg Bridge, the earth that was dug out of Delancey Street for a new subway line, the flanks of dray horses that attracted flies and more dust – the mischievous sculptor was time itself. And time was the great enemy of a Yiddish editor. Cahan could prosper only if new immigrants scrambled off the boat from Ellis Island with their baggage, their children, and their wives. One day soon, this immigration would come to a halt, and the Forward’s readers would disappear into the red dust.

And then there was the din, as shattering as the clack of malevolent birds. But East Broadway didn’t have an infestation of crows. This sound wasn’t the wail of mourners. Cahan would have remembered that. It was more like the rough, irregular purr of a dying animal. Cahan didn’t believe in embroidery. Stones didn’t weep in the columns of the Forward. Men suffered, died of the tailors’ disease – tuberculosis. Husbands deserted their wives. Children starved. Still, he wasn’t at the Yiddish theater, where whole choruses could cry. It was as if the streets had their own sinister chime, not a death knoll, but a sound that mocked him and all his exploits.

He’d been an outlaw long before he was an editor. He’d joined a band of bomb makers in Vilna after a pandemic of pogroms, where Cossacks in white fur caps rampaged across village upon village of Lithuanian Jews, violating old women and young girls, vanishing with their plunder while setting entire streets on fire. Cahan himself had witnessed several of these young girls, who had lost the power of speech and would walk with a limp for the rest of their lives. Other girls had gone mad, and mutilated their own dolls. Cahan had walked through the charred streets, with the burning carcasses of cows, and limbs buried in piles of ash like worthless plunder; he’d never witnessed such fear in his life. Some of the village elders couldn’t cease to cry or tremble. That’s when Cahan vowed to hunt Cossacks the way Cossacks had hunted Jews, though pistols blew up in his hands and the bombs he assembled sputtered like firecrackers. Another band of bomb makers had tried to blow up the czar’s carriage outside the Winter Palace and had succeeded only in maiming themselves.

Cahan arrived in America a wanted man, without a word of English in his skull. There were no night classes for anarchists from Vilna in 1882. He wouldn’t despair. He walked into a public school on Hester Street, begged the principal to allow him to sit with thirteen-year-olds in regular day classes; so he sat for two months, absorbed whatever he could, memorizing the teacher’s melodies of speech, and within a year or two he was bargaining with editors and writing about life on the Lower East Side for The Sun. He attended political rallies, talked of marching up to the capitalists’ domain on Fifth Avenue and murdering millionaires in their palaces with an ax. And now he was accepting advertisements from White Rose tea and Maxwell House in the Forward, couldn’t have survived without them. His enemies called him ‘a capitalist pawn in a socialist shirt.’ He’d abandoned the anarchists years ago, couldn’t see himself wielding a murderer’s ax. He became a police reporter, read Henry James, and began writing stories about the Ghetto – in English – for Cosmopolitan and The Atlantic Monthly, where James himself had published. Cahan had even written novels in his public school patter and a book of short stories praised in the Anglo-Saxon press.

His wife had pleaded with him not to return to the Forward – Cahan had quit three times. Anya, with her pince-nez, saw him as another Tolstoy. He did visit Petersburg once, as a fugitive, and sought out the streets he had memorized from Anna Karenina, but he found little solace in the boulevards and canals. Cahan wasn’t a cavalier. He was an ex-bomb maker from Vilna, at the Forward, probably for life. It was like a death sentence, Anya often parroted, with a hint of almond butter on her tongue.

He’d rescued the paper from bankruptcy and oblivion. He refused to publish moribund socialist tracts that whispered of revolution in the streets and the coming of some proletariat messiah. Cahan preferred Jacob P Adler in The Yiddish King Lear at the New National. That was enough of a messiah for him. Circulation leapt like a wild storm on the Lower East Side when he introduced A Bintel Brief (A Bundle of Letters), in 1906. He had to steal from other Yiddish papers and from Hearst. A Bintel Brief was a lonely hearts column, but with Cahan’s particular twist. He would receive letters from his readers – most of them garbled and illiterate – would revise them with a stroke here and there, so that the letters sang their tales of woe and grief. And then Cahan himself would offer his advice, not like some potentate on the tenth floor, but as a friend, a secular rabbi, like Elijah, the Gaon of Vilna, transported from the eighteenth century and the Vilna ghetto to the Ghetto of East Broadway. As a boy of seven, little Elijah ripped into the learning of every scholar and rabbi at Vilna’s Great Synagogue, and would be a sage for another seventy years, giving his advice to the poor and the disheartened without ever asking for a fee. Elijah had no time to sleep. He was always in demand. No one could inherit Elijah’s genius. But Cahan also had no time to sleep. He was always revising and answering some Bintel Brief. Men wrote to him as well as women, but Cahan knew that he had captured every second housewife on the Lower East Side as a willing slave to his column. Sometimes he had to disguise the writer of a letter, or he would have caused a scandal and heaped shame upon the heads of his own contributors. So he juggled names, addresses, like a Jewish acrobat. Was Sonya of Sheriff Street planning to run away with her star boarder and abandon a pair of little girls and a renegade husband, who was drunk half the time and beat her black-and-blue? ‘I love our boarder,’ she confessed. ‘He doesn’t have clumsy hands. He never pinches me. He writes poems while he’s at the shop. He loves my daughters. We’ll run to Canada, I swear to God.’

Cahan had touched some primitive cord. Adultery was a common enough theme in the Ghetto, where wives, husbands, and boarders were packed into tenements, rushed half naked in and out of some toilet in a darkened hall. Didn’t Cahan publish feuilletons that were fatalistic about love? And hadn’t he serialized a condensed version of Anna Karenina last year, with Anya translating Tolstoy’s electric rhythms into a Yiddish potpourri, filled with every kind of noodle that his readers adored, so that Anna was a fallen heroine who could have walked under the shadows of the Second Avenue El, and landed on the tracks of a trolley car?

His own Anya was a born littérateure, and their marriage was as dry and bitter as a decaying bone. He couldn’t have had a child, not with such a nun. But Cahan was also barren. He’d fumbled around with a girl from the gymnasium when he was a schoolboy in Vilna, had fondled her in a dark alley, and that had been his only preparation for marriage. He’d separated from Anya six times; somehow, it was just as difficult to live apart. And now they lived uptown, among all the Gentiles and the German Jews. But it had nothing to do with any desire to escape the Ghetto, to swagger on Fifth Avenue in a silk hat. He’d put his Anya in an elegant birdcage, a socialist-anarchist who stuffed herself with charlottes russes, while more often than not, Cahan slept on a table in the composing room.

He could admire the Master, pore over Henry James like a rabbinical scholar, sniff the perfume of every paragraph, but he himself was a creature with crippled wings. His novelist’s craft was entombed in the pages of the Forward, almost every word of which he wrote or revised. And he seldom had any peace from his subeditors.

While he was glancing out the window, Barush, his managing editor, marched in, clutching some copy, wound into a scroll, like a satanic Torah in bleeding black ink. Barush wore a pince-nez, the same as Cahan’s wife. He’d once been Cahan’s boss, on another Yiddish paper. He was a drama critic, a playwright, and a novelist, whose feuilletons appeared in the Forward, but no housewife or tailor could have untangled his high-toned Yiddish. Also, his policies were different from Cahan’s. He wanted to cooperate with the Kehilla, that conspiracy of uptown Jews, to police and control the Ghetto. Some kind of Kehilla had been around since late medieval times, when rich Jewish merchants spied on their poorer brethren in the ghettos of Eastern Europe, as roving bands of beggar Jews often committed petty crimes – stealing fabrics and half-rotten fruit – to keep from starving and freezing to death.

There were no such Jewish gypsies in Manhattan. But a furor had been created on the Lower East Side several years ago by a former police commissioner, a hothead and a blusterer named Howard Galt. He wrote an article about the Ghetto in The North American Review, where Cahan himself had published many times. So he couldn’t accuse the magazine of bigotry. Galt claimed that half the crimes in the city were committed by Russian Jews. ‘They are burglars, firebugs, pickpockets and highway robbers – when they have the courage – but, though all crime is their province, pocket-picking is the one to which they seem to take most naturally.’

The German Jews didn’t want such a plague to arrive on their doorsteps. Many of them had migrated from Bavaria to the Lower East Side, built their synagogues while making a fortune as dry goods merchants, then moved uptown with their synagogues and department stores and their retinue of uncles, cousins, and wives. These merchants and their allies were anxious to have Cahan and other downtown leaders join the Kehilla, so that they, too, could watch over ‘Russian recreants’ in that cradle of crime on the Lower East Side. But Cahan shunned the Kehilla and its uptown detectives, who were little more than snitches and police lackeys. They would have turned the Ghetto into one vast prison farm.

Barush pleaded with him. ‘Comrade Cahan, you can’t shut out these Allrightniks. They advertise in our pages with their department stores. And what about the Hawthorne School, eh? They’ve rescued delinquents from a juvenile asylum that was little more than a madhouse and a den of thieves. They had to fight the governor on this, tooth and nail.’

‘And what do we have, Barush? A Jewish reformatory on the Hudson that’s picturesque. Do the boys study Spinoza, Barush? They can become carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers, or printers. That’s the complete menu at the Hawthorne School.’

‘What do you expect, Comrade? Half the boys are brainless. Their souls were beaten out of them at the asylum.’

‘No, Barush,’ Cahan insisted. ‘Not their souls.’

He’d gone upstate with the Jewish magnates on a kind of picnic that left from the old Grand Central terminal. He’d shared grapes and wine and cheese with the magnates and their wives in satin slippers and veils that left deep puckers every time they whispered a word. Cahan had even brought Anya, as a kind of peace offering. But she had little to say to these wives. She wouldn’t share Tolstoy with them, and her husband had forbidden her to talk politics. So she sat in silence along the route, in her pince-nez, staring at the Hudson, until they arrived at a tiny railroad station with a tin roof, where a flotilla of black mahogany carriages was waiting for them with liveried drivers who could have stepped out of some Russian romance. Cahan had never seen such rehearsed opulence. The carriages drove along a very steep and rocky ravine, then started to climb, and stopped at a little fortress at the top of a mountain.

Cahan was appalled. The Jewish reform school had a baseball diamond, a garden, a synagogue, spacious cottages, and a brick castle, where the machine shops were located and classes were held; it had the antiseptic and chilling air of a penitentiary with a river view. He grew numb as he walked the grounds, and couldn’t wait to flee. Barush wasn’t wrong. Many of these wild boys had left their souls at some other institution. Yet why should Hawthorne’s young bricklayers have distressed him so? Surely the magnates themselves would find jobs for the school’s best graduates. But he read nothing in the boys’ eyes, not a parcel of emotion or curiosity, as if they dreamt and ate bricks.

‘Comrade,’ Barush said, waving the long rolled-up galley sheet of his article on the Kehilla, half of it scribbled over in the editor’s ubiquitous green pencil, ‘I am not a ventriloquist. You cannot make me swallow my own words. It’s for the editorial page, yes or no?’

Cahan knew Barush’s little tricks. All his subeditors were novelists and poets. He published their work as often as he could, but they longed for much more than an editorial or a feuilleton in the Forward.Barush and the others were hoping that the magnates behind the Kehilla would subsidize the translation of their work into English, and that one of them would become the new sultan of the novel, another Henry James. It was a madness born out of sipping too much tea with raspberry jam.

‘I can’t praise the Kehilla, Barush, I can’t. But we’ll run your feuilleton on the Polish riders next week.’

Barush was silent for a moment; he had his own wolflike cunning. ‘Did you like it, Comrade?’

Cahan hadn’t read a word of the feuilleton.

‘I adored it,’ he said.

‘And on what page will it appear, Comrade Editor?’

‘You can have the sixth page all to yourself – with an illustration. Now will you let me do my work, Barush? Go away!’

3.

Cahan thought he would have a moment of peace, but there were problems in the composing room, and he had to admit that all his printers’ apprentices had come from the Hawthorne School; these young printers could catch errors in a typeface that fell afoul of his untrained eye. They were wizards of detail, yet none of them could read without reciting every line like choirboys at the synagogue, and he was convinced that little of what these boys recited made any real sense. They learned – and lived – by rote. That was the abiding signature of the Hawthorne School.

He had to meet with his business managers, who didn’t want him to contribute to so many strike funds in the Forward’s name. But a socialist paper had to support the strikers and their families. And all he had to do was show his managers the Forward