October 12, 2012--Chapter 11: Safe In America

It took a while for Jews to develop a taste for turkey, much less Thanksgiving. 

We are a stiff-necked people.  Actually, we are more a brisket and roast-chicken people.  Especially if you include homemade gravy and a crispy piece of kuggel, a charred slice of this noodle pudding from the corner of the baking dish being the most coveted.  Not to mention dessert.  And though eager to assimilate in other ways, when it came to food, there was a limit to what we were willing to compromise in order to be considered American.   Thus Thanksgiving presented a problem.

Yiddish we were prepared to jettison, yarmulkes and other religious garments could be put away except for weddings and funerals, and our shuls would become synagogues before they became temples.   But do not even think about touching our gefilte fish.

Rosh Hashanah and Passover were everyone’s favorite holidays because they emphasized food.  The best celebrations of either were when the prayers got read at breakneck speed and the food arrived hot and before anyone fainted.  For the Malone family at Passover this meant not slowing down to answer the Four Questions posed by the youngest boy at the table and not allowing either my father or Uncle Henry to get away with too much tummling (translation—making audible side comments of a distinctly sacrilegious sort) because that interrupted the flow of the chanting; and, if their irreverence got out of control, it elicited a raised eyebrow or worse from the two elder uncles huddled at the head of the table for whom the ancient sounds, though neither they nor any one else understood the meaning of even one Hebrew word, evoked shivers in their tribal DNA, which slowed them down further and thereby delayed dinner.

“Hello, let’s eat,” could be heard from arriving family members at Rosh Hashanahs from New World ghetto to ghetto--from East Flatbush to East New York, from Borough Park to Bensonhurst, from King Highway to Kings Point.  There might be mortal disagreement about President Eisenhower or Stalin or about the Rosenbergs or Roy Cohn; but about a good gedempter bris (breast of beef) or a piece of rugulah (mini-Danish) there were only smiles and nods of agreement—to be able to put heaping portions of this kind of food on the table was why the Malones came to America.  Particularly for the sake of the children because in combination with the cod liver oil we were forced to swallow every morning, all this bounty would assure we would be big and tall and strong and smart—Americans!  Even if we popped out the womb with a beak for a nose and kinky hair—both could be straightened later in life. 

But what to do about Thanksgiving, the quintessential American holiday, which the revisionists and skeptics among us (the ones going to Columbia or City College) recognized as a Protestant, meaning goyisha, holiday?  And to make matters worse, did you ever have a piece of turkey that wasn’t so dry that you could choke on it?  It only reinforced the view that the gentiles knew nothing about food.  True, they may have been in charge of the country and had old money, but their cooking was a whole other matter.  No wonder, my Uncle Henry said, they all looked like “skinny wretches.”   So to truly embrace Thanksgiving was a challenge.  We could deal with the Pilgrims and the Indians, but that pumpkin pie, which tasted like orange library paste, was an entirely different matter. 

Aunt Linda and Uncle Carl and their three children, who were the first and until that time the only relatives to escape from the confines of Brooklyn to the suburbs of the gilded Northshore, saw it to be their responsibility to bring the family into the rituals of Thanksgiving.  It was, in a sense for them, an assimilationist metaphor.  If they could accomplish this, then we all would finally feel at home in America. 

They knew they needed to make Thanksgiving a family occasion for it to be authentic.  Families gathering from all reaches of the country was an American tradition and prerequisite.  So they began their conversion of our family to things American by luring us to our first Thanksgiving in Manhasset by putting both brisket and turkey on the menu in the certainty that that would assure we would show up.  That was the first step—getting us there.  Then, if we could get something good to eat, we would begin to see the virtues of Thanksgiving.  Especially if there was enough for second helpings and at least three desserts. 

We arrived in family groups—the Kapinskis, Morris and Hattie with their pudgy son Larry, the family’s best eater, always came early to assure Morris time alone with his brother-in-law Carl so they could talk Business.  Morris was in business for himself and in that saw himself equivalent to Carl though even he would acknowledge he was not nearly as successful.  In fact, Morris lived life barely one step ahead of the Italian loan sharks who were always hunting for him, threatening, if he didn’t pay off his mounting debts, to break his knee caps.  Thus to have some private moments of huddled in conversation with Carl, to in effect rub up against his success, sitting on the expansive lawn together, helped Morris forget his troubles for an hour and to muse, in the sunshine, about the what-ifs.

We Zazlos would be next, not so much to enable my father to have an audience with Carl, which is how they each would view it.  My father had too much pride to seek or submit to that.  We arrived right after the Kapinskis to instead assert our place within the family hierarchy--that because my father was the only one of his generation within the family to have been from German-Jewish stock and, more important, had actually been born in America, no one in the larger world could credibly call him a kike or machie.  There were for sure some significant competitive strains between Uncle Carl and my father—about two kinds of success that were most sought after, money and the comparative progress of their respective children.  When it came to economics, there was not much of a competition—just look where Thanksgiving was being sumptuously held.  But my father had one advantage that trumped his brother-in-law in this second, equally essential realm; something my father was eager to flaunt which trumped Carl’s economic success--the fact that my brother and I were already towering over Carl’s sons and doing better in high school.  Clear evidence that the Zazlos were doing a superior job at assimilation than Carl and his under-sized progeny.  And also, we had better posture.  

Then the other Kapinskis would arrive—childless Aunt Frieda and Uncle Henry.  There was never any public discussion about this lack of apparent fertility, just rumors among us nieces and nephews that Frieda did in fact give birth to a child but he or she died before coming home from the hospital. To this Henry allegedly barked, “Even a cat can have kittens.”

There were two sets of Kapinskis since Morris and Henry were brothers and married Hattie and Frieda, two Malone sisters.  The slightly younger Kapinskis also struggled.  Henry was in the “bar and grill” business, which meant he both never made a living (it was claimed that a Jew owning a bar was doomed from the start) and needed to spend all his evenings and very late nights dealing with the Irish and maybe, just maybe it was whispered, with a floozy or two.  So for Uncle Henry to be in the presence of Uncle Carl, who as an international businessman roamed the world among the goyisher elite, was enough to get Henry out of bed earlier than his usual 3:00 p.m. and onto the traffic-clogged Belt Parkway early enough for, like his earlier-arriving older brother, a little elbow rubbing with Carl.  

Next were the Cominskis—Gladys and Melvin.  Uncle Mel owned a gas station with two grease pits and though he did well enough to buy a new car every five years, he never was able to remove all the axle grease from under his fingernails.  This stigma served as a constant reminder to the most upwardly-aspiring of us that though we were seeing evidence within our family of personal progress, in truth, contemplating Uncle Mel’s battered hands, we hadn’t yet come all that far; and with a little bad luck, which we devoutly believed to be the basic force operating in the universe, we remained in danger of quickly reverting to Grease Monkeys, a kind of reverse evolution. 

The Schwartzs followed—Carl’s widowed sister Aunt Estelle, the oldest of her generation, her son Mark, his wife Judy, their two children, and Estelle’s daughter Rose, a dark and sultry teenage beauty who many thought already possessed the stature and potentially the bust line of Jane Russell.  The Schwartzs had a complicated connection to Uncle Carl because Cousin Mark worked for him.  That was a mixed blessing--both a great opportunity to be carried along with Carl’s success, but it came at considerable cost.  Uncle Carl, though immensely successful, operated his global enterprise as if it were a mom-and-pop operation.  Which meant that he kept all his business sechel locked in his head; trusted no one, including his nephew Mark; and what office documents he had he carried back and forth with him from home to office in empty cigar boxes.  This meant that Mark, who graduated NYU’s Night School, could not put any of what he learned there, “modern business practices,” to use.  

Though doing well financially, as a derivative result of his uncle’s acumen and moxie, Mark labored in huffs of understandable frustration.  One would then not expect him to be the first or even second to arrive.  In fact, one could easily surmise he didn’t want to be at his boss’ estate at all.   Enough was enough.  Being under his wealthy uncle’s scrutiny so many hours each week and haunting his dreams of thwarted ambition at night, could not be wiped away by a second helping of sweet potatoes at the Malone’s French Provincial table. But show up he and Judy and their two children did.

Mark’s mother Estelle would stand for nothing less—“There will be no family feuds until I’m dead,” she would insist, “Afterwards, however . . .” she didn’t complete the sentence. 

And finally, the last to arrive were the Goldhabers—Lorelei (Aunt Gladys’ and Uncle Melvin’s daughter), her husband Henri, and their four near-sighted children.  They lived in Oceanside, also on Long Island, about 15 miles from Linda and Carl’s, but on the déclassé Southshore; and since Harvey never seemed able to keep a job more than six months, no one could figure out how they managed to buy a house of their own, modest though it was, while all their other adult cousins lived in second- and third-floor walkup apartments above bakeries and appetizing stores. 

There was family speculation that back in the Old Country, in Germany, Henri’s grandfather had been a horse thief and his father a successful dry goods merchant who, as my father put it—“through improvement in the breed” somehow managed to sneak enough gold coins past the officials at Ellis Island to help his one son get launched. “Launched” defined as able to buy a small ranch house with a 30-year mortgage only a half mile from the bay.

Though geographically closest, they arrived last because Henri as a loosely assimilated Jew moved at the deliberate pace of a European gentleman.  Not that he was a gentleman by German standards (no Jew could be), he had simply been born there, managed to avoid the gas chambers, and then fled to America with his father and the gold at the end of the War.  But, compared to the rest of the family, he had an elegance about him and spoke with a movie-star accent.  Plus he had an aristocratic style of smoking cigarettes, between his two middle fingers, Adolphe Menjoe style.

European that he was, Henri sipped more black coffee each day than was consumed by all the rest of the family.  My father’s favorite Henri story was how one day, in his Oceanside kitchen, he sat smoking and sipping, barely noticing as his son Ralph attempted to stuff his sister Ruth into the broiler, saying ever so slowly, not making a move to intervene, in that killer accent, Henri said “Ralph, please, don’t put your sister in the oven.”  

My young cousins and I, eager to escape the anxious hovering that was so characteristic of our own parents, were attracted to these stories about Henri’s insouciance; and each Thanksgiving looked forward to his arrival because that meant he would bring along his own unique touch of class; and, as the last to arrive, it would signal that we could, at last, eat.

Aunt Linda was a bit of an artist and among the best of her creations were the hand painted place cards that she created for each holiday occasion.  They were meant to be taken home along with the floral centerpieces.  But their real intent was to enable her to decide who sat where.  My special place and assignment was next to her mother, Mrs. Gimelblatt, to make sure she would eat, which required little from me because once the food arrived, she plunged in with abandon.  She was nearly deaf so I was relieved of the need to make conversation with a 90 year-old—listening was all that was required and that took some effort since she talked, chewed, and swallowed simultaneously.  Thus I also needed to blot her face occasionally and pick up her spillings from the tablecloth and the Persian rug below her chair.

The seating arrangement was more than about who would get first helpings from the circulating platters of food—though that was to be sure not insignificant.  One’s location at the table was a judgment by Linda and Carl about your place within the family itself.  Admittedly their idiosyncratic view; but considering the provenance—Carl was the only male child among the six Malone siblings, a very big cultural advantage, and also a legitimate multi-millionaire--being literally put in your place by Linda and Carl was, well, being put in your place.

       It was location, location, location—a family real estate calculus that defined one’s worth.  This hierarchical derivative was made stark by the layout of their dining room.  Since their faux Louis XV table could seat only eight, an aluminum folding table was affixed to that end of it that was closest to the living room, extending the seating into there. But that too had it limitations—by butting up against the dining room table, it eliminated one end and added only seven places—the two tables then were able to seat fifteen. Six more places were needed to accommodate the full family and thus a second folding table was attached at right angles to the end of the first so that in their now full manifestation the three tables resembled a hugely enlarged set of domino tiles, thereby creating places for Carl and Linda’s family; both sets of Kapinskis; the Zazlo four; the Schwartzs; Goldhabers; and my dinner companion, Mr’s Gimelbaltt. 

       The first time the twenty-one of us were called to these tables we circled them, squinting at the place cards to find our assignments—clearly understanding that though all of us began the search for our seats at the head of the Louis XV table, being at the imagined self-assigned apex of family prominence, we knew that some of us would inevitably be destined for just that first Thanksgiving to the end, Siberia, that virtually stretched to the play room—the former garage, now-converted into a playroom.  This would be more than compensated for at future holiday occasions when we would find ourselves assigned to our more rightful place around that gilded dining room oval.  So we sorted ourselves out on that occasion, half of us looking forward to our improved lot at Passover, a few months hence.

       But then when that Passover arrived, when we circled the tables once more, all again squinting at the place cards in the formal dining room, it was thought to be an oversight that we found ourselves once more exactly where we had been that previous fall.

       And alas, by next Thanksgiving it was clear that Linda and Carl were thinking about our family status in immutable ways—no “understandable” confusion, no possible way to make excuses for them about this—the Kapinskis (the Hattie and Morris ones) and the Zazlos (plus my dinner mate, Mrs. Gimelblatt) were permanently situated at precisely where we were meant to be—in the dining room itself, in platter-passing proximity to multi-millionaire Carl and his beautiful Linda, while everyone else were strung out toward the garage.

       And when we were invited to our next Passovers and Thanksgivings, there was no wishful circling of the dining room table, no close reading of the golden place cards, we all dutifully went right to where we knew too well we belonged.  It was not a festive situation except for the chosen among us, which I felt, affirmingly including my parents, brother, and me.

      The most politically “progressive” family members immediately saw this for what it was—a assertion of American capitalism where class distinctions caused that historical imperative—the grand dialectic—to be played out amongst us.  This Bolshevik reality right here in America would make it impossible to convince anyone of this leftist persuasion that Thanksgiving itself wasn’t another opiate of commodification.  In fact, the very idea of “family” itself, within which we sought haven in a heartless world, was exposed in our very midst to be in fact a socially-constructed fiction.

       But for the rest of us, not so social enlightened, that time when the silver trays of turkey began to circulate, just as the aromatic evidence of a very special chestnut and prune stuffing began to emerge from the kitchen, the smell of which hinted that it might surpass in incandescent deliciousness the fixings from last year, and in savoring it, seeking second and third helpings, we would at last cross that final border between the Old and New, Aunt Estelle, the oldest of the sisters, and the most eager reader of that very progressive afternoon newspaper, PM, when Estelle realized that her distant place at the groin of where the living room folding table made a sharp right turn toward the old garage, denying and defying age and primogeniture, she was the oldest living Malone, that that table placement was evidence of the Running Dogs of Capitalism’s way of classifying and defining her, she bellowed out for all to hear—all in Manhasset, all in Brooklyn, all even in the shtetls of Poland, that she was not eating.  Not one more bite. 

       She declared, “I’m done!” and slammed her fork and embroidered linen napkin onto the brocade tablecloth with such force that her cut crystal wine glass jumped.

       She would not take, chew, or swallow another mouthful of that cursed turkey bird or allow herself to be tempted by that stuffing you-could-die-for.  She was prepared to die for something else, something higher and more universal.  She was at last drawing the line.  She proclaimed, “A pox on your turkey; a pox on your house and fancy dining room.  A plague on your cranberries and roast beef and Beaujolais.”  She was mobilizing herself for the resistance and long struggle of the proletariat; right there on Long Island in the very heart of the Imperialists’ stronghold.  The time had come.  It was her 1917. 

       Lifting herself with some effort to her full height, folding her arms across her bountiful chest, Estelle glared at Carl, her “baby” brother, seated unperturbed at the head of his bourgeois table, and exploded, confronting a lifetime of hurt and suppression, “No more!  I’ve had it!” 

       As always when with his sisters, Carl kept his eyes lowered, focused on the embroidered tablecloth.  Everyone fell silent, the rich ping of sterling silver flatware on bone china ceased. 

      The only exception was Cousin Larry, who, not listening, hadn’t missed a forkful and asked if there was any more sweet potato and marshmallow casserole. 

Uncle Carl had heard all this before from his sister and from some of his factory workers when they tried, unsuccessfully, to unionize. When one of the maids brought Larry his third helping, Uncle Carl signaled that he too would like a little more.

Though he didn’t look up, from my privileged seat, I saw him smile. I knew he was feeling how good it was to be safe in America.