Silent in the Supermarket
Kriegel, Leonard
One talks to these retired garment workers, these small, stooped men and women. They have aged as they have been used. Time is supposed to weather, not crumble. Things are not supposed to...
...And it is air-conditioned...
...She is a "progressive," a kind of password that she does not realize is out of fashion...
...Waiting for the end in America leaves one little but memories...
...I was tired of the lies...
...I know his wife, Sophie...
...Fashion now is the rage, and the truth of the matter is that they are not found interesting enough...
...Trade unionism and socialism—somehow they would bring "culture" to working people...
...I place them against their cooperative and I ask myself what has been left to them...
...Inflation hasn't done to us yet what it has done to them...
...Do you want to identify with the oppressed...
...In certain respects, Penn South, with all of its limitations, is as close as they have come to the commonwealth of their dreams...
...I went back to Russia in 1925...
...The past haunts them...
...For my daughter...
...One seventy-year-old, retired garment worker turns his face away from another seventy-year-old, retired garment worker in the elevator...
...That much, at least, they carried out of the past...
...But it bullies them...
...I tell myself it's a lot better than it used to be for old people...
...the young mothers walk along quickly, their heads reaching into New York's ripening air, their children marching to a quicker pace...
...He is finished...
...We are sitting on a bench in one of Penn South's two playgrounds watching children...
...Is it America that makes it this way...
...He is angry at those whom he calls "liberals," a word he does not so much say as spit...
...But all the time, I had to remind myself that I was working for the future...
...She does not really blame the muggers...
...And it was their dreams that distinguished LEONARD KRIEGEL them from other ethnic working-class groups in this America, just as it was their dreams that separated them from their children and grandchildren...
...Sarah had lived in her own apartment, but after her hip was broken she moved in with her sister who has an apartment in the same building...
...One talks to these retired garment workers, these small, stooped men and women...
...most are union members for whom labor consciousness has provided the most profound sense of group identification they have ever known...
...Goddamn fools...
...She lives in Penn South and just manages to get by on her social security and her small union retirement pension...
...Jacob," she says, "do you want to join us...
...The Jewish workers in the garment industry are being replaced by blacks and Puerto Ricans, and the fur industry is dying—a victim of changes in fashion and the kind of sentimental ecology that has seized thousands of Americans, who believe, apSILENT IN THE SUPERMARKET parently, the numerous plagues upon the land can be cured by insuring the preservation of the wild mink...
...But he is still angry...
...But this does not really upset her...
...He speaks without looking at me, his eyes on his grandson who is jumping happily up and down in the sandbox...
...He does not even hate the Poles or the Germans...
...Would you mind," he asks, "if I ask you to sing...
...This is the way it is supposed to be, even in the bad books one has read...
...This is all there is...
...To hell with it...
...The fur market was dying...
...And they all resent what is happening to them...
...It was going to be different...
...In the basement of the co-op supermarket stands a theater devoted to revivals of the classics...
...The only thing that hurts me is what some of them say about Israel...
...But he wants to speak of other things now...
...She likes my children and has always been alert to changes in their appearance...
...But I can understand...
...His grandson falls and hits his head against an empty watering can in the sandbox and begins to cry...
...But he puffs on his pipe furiously, occasionally muttering at the overcast sky...
...Jacob is close to seventy...
...She tells me how she has always dreamed of seeing Switzerland, ever since she had read The Magic Mountain...
...That's yours...
...Jacob runs over to him and picks him up...
...Still, there was a time in this country when such a fate seemed rich enough...
...In her insistance on the totality of "the system," she reminds me of my students...
...Jacob stops talking to me...
...You don't belong to anything...
...But I know men who live with their wives on their social security pensions and maybe $50 a month in union retirement benefits...
...It's better than nothing, isn't it...
...If the small pension from the union—some of them receive a mere $40 per month—combined with the social security check—some of them never made enough money to approach the maximum— dwindles each month in the face of a raging inflation, they have not been reduced to penury...
...Yesterday, they discovered that there was racism in the country...
...He tells me of what it was like, working for the Fur Workers as an organizer...
...By them, everything is police brutality...
...But I came back...
...And I began to sing...
...98 LEONARD KRIEGEL...
...In a way, all the older people here feel like he does...
...For they reached beyond the traditional American concern with the self, to project a collective salvation...
...When he speaks again, it is about what is happening in New York...
...In the trade union movement, the leaders are following the workers now...
...And so I watch them shop in their supermarket...
...To organize working people...
...I look at what it does to the blacks and I tell myself that they're right, they should be militant...
...Organize the unorganized, build a union...
...Because the person who knifed her was Puerto Rican or black...
...she never 96 married...
...After all these years, this adventurism, this stupidity...
...I want to record some of the old Yiddish worker songs...
...Like her husband, she believes that unions have grown old, have lost their idealism...
...But Penn South was not designed exclusively for union members, and its population embodies many of the contradictions and trials that can be found in New York...
...They are still afraid on the streets of their co-op, and they are aware that one cannot walk with dignity when one has to walk with safety in mind...
...She pauses, stares at the ceiling...
...In Russia I was a revolutionary...
...And this housing development, their housing development, has become for many of them a source of pride...
...The simple times died in the twenties, even before they could be born...
...Its ten standardized high-rise apartment buildings and grass lawns are bounded on the east by Eighth Avenue, on the west by Ninth Avenue, on the south by 23rd Street, and on the north by 29th Street...
...She has no children of her own...
...On the other hand, the parents in their thirties and forties who live here are usually not union members...
...A sweet, frail old lady in her late seventies, she has walked with a cane ever since, some five years past, she was mugged and punched to the ground...
...But he wanted nothing of the American Left now...
...No one really knows why...
...She is five years younger than Jacob, and she still works in the needle trades as an operator...
...he is angry at civil libertarians, who do not understand that if a man cannot walk the streets in safety then he possesses nothing of value...
...Penn South is still a better place to live than where they had lived in the past...
...It's in the family...
...But she had earned her living as a garment worker from the beginning...
...Anyway, it is one thing to storm the gates of heaven, and quite another to participate in the construction of a union...
...In this way, too, the reality of the present is shut out...
...And you don't want your children to do what you've had to do...
...After the union meetings and the picketing and the folk songs and the politics, after the causes and petitions and speeches have blurred into one another, they are left with little more than a sense of having been shortchanged...
...A few years later and Trotsky is kicked out...
...And then I look at those Jews who are so frightened, the ones in that Jewish Defense League, and I tell myself that they, too, are confused and frustrated...
...I ask her how she and Jacob live...
...One might speak of them as spiritual refugees, drawn to the very heart of that for which they feel a certain contempt...
...He listens...
...And the Italians, them too...
...There was greater trust...
...Not to be dependent on our children...
...I am sitting with her drinking coffee in her kitchen on a morning in early June, a day after Gotbaum's union has virtually closed down New York...
...So I came back...
...But I couldn't stay...
...And this is true of all of them, regardless of their past politics...
...the tennis club, a number of chauffeur-driven 92 limousines to a neighborhood not yet affluent enought to witness with equanimity the arrival of a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud...
...But unions you build for others...
...You see, the job of a union is to make life easier for its members...
...And these men and women are not so much confused as disappointed...
...She sips her coffee and shakes her head...
...Always the people who rob you want to judge you, too...
...He visits them once a year in California...
...It's not what they do...
...The supermarket insists on diferent prerogatives...
...I want to talk with him some more...
...They were asking for skilled workers to return to the Soviet Union to help build socialism...
...Or else small shopkeepers...
...I'm still working...
...The retired garment workers and furriers stand by and watch silently, their mouths drawn...
...They grow up and they don't know too much about what the labor movement was...
...And collective salvation, like any other kind of salvation, turns out to be drab...
...It is as true of the fiercely proestablishment ILGWU organizer whom I meet in the mornings with his New York Times under his arm, his strong, stocky frame belying his 75 years, as it is of the old woman in the laundry room who furtively glances at her copy of the Communist World, her face frowning and defensive...
...Things are not supposed to take the place of people...
...Remnants of old Chelsea are scattered throughout its grounds...
...And in their housing cooperative, in their supermarket, with money, admittedly much too little, from their union pension and their social security, they walk down these well-lit aisles to buy the air-filled preservative bread...
...What a world...
...they never really expected that to change...
...Am I an exploiter...
...Why I distrust liberals...
...She seems to feed on air, so frail is she...
...But she has never been particularly analytical when speaking of the boundaries of her political world...
...I learned that the Socialists on Eastern Parkway didn't know what they were talking about, and the Communists on Eastern ParkSILENT IN THE SUPERMARKET way didn't know what they were talking about...
...A pound of its own preservativepuffed bread is now 29...
...He shrugs...
...Another ten years and Bukharin is dead...
...The ILGWU Cooperative Houses is a Title One middle-income housing development situated in the heart of the Chelsea neighborhood on Manhattan's West Side...
...He shakes his head...
...Today, you make a suit like that...
...For this is it...
...But it hasn't...
...Sophie tells me of receiving a telephone call from a friend who had remained a Communist sympathizer long after Jacob and she had recognized that salvation would not come through the Soviet Union...
...I was tired of listening to all the old Jews on Eastern Parkway, the Socialists on one side, the Communists on the other...
...I came back here and began to work as an organizer...
...If they are not what Tom Wolfe had in mind when he coined the phrase "radical chic," it is not for lack of sympathy...
...Maybe there was no other choice, like they said...
...It finds its echo now in the voice that expands with pride when it recites the remembered names of shops organized, meetings attended, speakers listened to...
...Until yesterday, they didn't know about it...
...Where most of Manhattan continues to deteriorate, Chelsea seems to be on the way up...
...From the Left, too...
...All the while, he eyes his grandson, who is happily building a pile of sand in the otherwise deserted sandbox...
...A friend of mine also has grandchildren...
...Success should be more tangible, thicker...
...But there remains in her a quality that I have found in so many of these old Jewish radicals and trade unionists, a determination to see life through, to welcome change and, above all, "progress," and yet cling to the values of nineteenthcentury egalitarianism...
...Occupying the top floor and roof of that same supermarket is the Mid-Town Tennis Club, where for $680 per year two people can play 31 hours of tennis...
...I wanted to see the Revolution for myself...
...We thought we were building a new society...
...Would you want your children to work in the garment industry...
...They have knuckled under to the bosses, she tells me...
...Always they look to blame somebody...
...A memory here, an old acquaintance there...
...Listen, I owe this country a lot...
...He has been angry ever since he can remember, although he had always assumed that the anger would dissipate as he grew older...
...So much for the gates of heaven...
...says a retired garment worker...
...Yet they retain their belief in organization, in limited goals...
...Until Martin Luther King told them, they LEONARD KRIEGEL didn't know...
...But he doesn't want me to misunderstand...
...The ILGWU sponsored and financed it, and ILGWU members were given first opportunity to purchase apartments...
...She is thinking, remembering, and I feel out of place...
...The problems were immediate...
...In that building on Ninth Avenue, where that woman was killed in the hallway, I hear they have a defense fund...
...There's not enough to do...
...Their time has passed...
...I like your young people [she says to me...
...When she retires, maybe even before, she and Jacob will take a trip to Switzerland...
...She nods and smiles knowingly...
...I'd rather die than that I should have to be dependent...
...Before, it was the workers who followed...
...I try to ask him how he passes his days now that he is retired, so as to get him away from politics...
...They talk and drink coffee and laugh about the past, and then he brings out a tape recorder...
...It's difficult for him...
...When I was working on the bench, it was side-byside with Italians and Negroes...
...Politically, he trusted nobody, not even people on the Left...
...he is angry at William Kunst ler, who is a corporation lawyer...
...The job of a revolutionary is to make a revolution...
...That one I like...
...For him, for too many of my friends, there is little besides each other...
...The theater attracts a number of young people to performances of Shaw and Shakespeare...
...It's too difficult to understand the world now...
...She simply considers it inevitable...
...He is also angry at college students, black militants, the American Civil Liberties Union, Mayor Lindsay, the leadership of the unions, even at the Socialist party of the United States, of which he remains a dues-paying member...
...I nod...
...a small Episcopalian church with an exquisite 19-century interior that speaks of better days stands on the comer of 28th and Ninth...
...I did some acting...
...I am suddenly thrust back into my own childhood, and I hear working people listing names like Tolstoy and talking about something they called "culture" which they had not "understood" but had strangely revered...
...I could speak of them as victims of their own success, but that would be a hollow mockery...
...On the corner of Eighth and 23rd, there is a branch of the Carver Savings Bank, still one of the few black-owned banks in the city...
...More and more, between minorities...
...The Cornish Arms Hotel stands on 23rd Street...
...A great deal...
...For better or worse, Penn South has changed the neighborhood...
...Except on something like Vietnam...
...But she goes...
...Even its architecture speaks of its being a "union co-op...
...Even among retired organizers, the image of the shtetl grandfather remains...
...I spent two years there...
...But I worry...
...Their relationship to America is a mixed success and failure...
...But I walk into the neighborhood supermarket and I note how the new neonlit organic food section is crowded with the very same people who hum with the rhetoric of fashionable radicalism, while those whom our government describes as "senior citizens living on a fixed income" walk carefully down the aisles, pause as if the decisions were momentous, shrug their shoulders and pull out the cheapest package of tasteless preservative-puffed bread...
...When I meet her in the street, she is still a remarkably cheerful, even vibrant, individual for someone so frail and old...
...Occasionally, one can see one of the young prostitutes who operate around Madison Square Garden come down here to try her luck with a tennis-player...
...They just jump from one place to another, from position to position...
...There is a bond between them, a past...
...A man who carries a scar on the bridge of his nose from the fur strike of 1926...
...You know, I didn't know Yiddish very well when I first arrived here...
...I have never known her to travel...
...Of such bargains is the future made...
...These are an old man's memories...
...especially today, in this country...
...I don't agree with Jacob all the time, but I understand how he feels...
...The nation has passed them by, and our new radicalism is more than willing to leave them to their fate...
...They're workers, too...
...We lived through it...
...It is simply a question of snatching at reality in bits and pieces...
...The success of the labor movement afforded some of them their greatest sense of personal achievement...
...And from him...
...The longing is gone from his voice, the anger is back...
...But these vestiges of Chelsea's past do little to lend Penn South, as the development is known, architectural individuality...
...How ironic that the novelist of the German bourgeoisie should have found an impassioned reader in Sophie...
...He spends a great deal of time reading...
...At first Sophie is annoyed, then touched...
...Inside the cooperative, humorously, perhaps even pompously, the old wars continue to rage...
...On the whole, however, there are only two tenants that are slightly out of the ordinary...
...A trade unionist has to understand...
...With us, thank God, there is my daughter and her husband and the grandchildren...
...But it's not like what I was doing in Russia...
...That's what makes the difference...
...The Penn South Housing cooperative is theirs, and the co-op supermarket is theirs—and, God knows, these are not the gates of heaven...
...Few of them, I sense, hold a country of the mind in which a workingman occupies a place of his own...
...Why are the problems today between minorities...
...There are no alternatives to Israel...
...I tell myself it would be different if only one of these old men could adopt a posture, could conceive of himself as once again being in history...
...Years after the battles have been fought and the politics defined, their social relationships are still shaped by the politics of the past...
...It's a big problem...
...He is angry with his union, with all unions...
...The first fulfills the messianic urge, the second simply slaps a patch on the mundane world in which one lives...
...I met a woman whom I knew from the union...
...It's that they don't do anything...
...When one speaks to them of strikes or union activities in the past, there is recognition, a participation that creates a selfhood at the very moment that the memory is sentimentalized...
...a run-down Protestant church with a neon cross is on 26th Street...
...And then, one day, I just couldn't work any more for the future...
...These students you teach, they are the hope of this country...
...The view from the supermarket remains the same...
...And I'm not sure he knows why...
...They still walk cautiously throught their supermarket, which may be better than nothing but which shrinks their vision to such minutia as the weekly shopping price list that is slipped under each door on Tuesday...
...She continues to amaze me...
...One frames them, finally, against their isolation...
...He clears his throat, shakes his head, as if he were forcing himself back to the present...
...To go to Switzerland to see the mountains...
...So I went back...
...It is really very much like a picket line...
...He asks her to come over...
...I'm not retired yet...
...Like labor...
...In this she remains in the tradition of the Jewish Left, which has, perhaps surprisingly, never really been able to analyze itself in this country...
...But everything else, what they are doing about Vietnam, about the injustice to black people, in this I am with them one hundred percent...
...I wanted to see for myself what it was like...
...He rocks the boy back and forth, then swings him in the air until the boy laughs...
...Scarcity was theirs by inheritance, as was caution...
...She admires a few of the younger labor leaders, especially Victor Gotbaum...
...I came to this country in 1917, during the war...
...But the bitterness is deep and random, arrows hurled against the encroaching times...
...Always the need for victims...
...You're not a horse, to fall down and die in the shop...
...The more they live, the less they know...
...So what is that...
...Maybe it was necessary...
...When I arrived here, before I married Jacob, I first learned Yiddish well...
...One does not resort to such stock terms as "alienated" to describe their condition...
...She lives on next to nothing...
...I don't remember which...
...He smiles...
...They are usually college-educated professionals who have chosen to bring their families up in New York City and who recognize that Penn South is as good a housing buy as one can find in Manhattan...
...Try standing in such a supermarket while the historical vision of the longed-for millennium flashes across the mind...
...It's not like when you build something like a business...
...The biggest problem is when you wonder if it was worth it...
...The Left is united, somewhere back there, in her own vivid blending of memory and fantasy...
...better still, be part of a union...
...And while they enjoy both the moderate rentals and the air-conditioning, they begrudge the cooperative its lack of style...
...It is not from society that they feel estranged, it is from their own pasts...
...A lot of newspapers...
...Earning between '$15,000 and $25,000 per year, they simply do not possess sufficient status to penetrate the world of radical fashionability...
...It is easier to talk with her...
...Because they never learn...
...Rather, she blames "the system," and the mugging and Vietnam have become one in her mind...
...As a child she emigrated with her family from Russia to Canada, then came to New York as a young woman...
...The neighbor has turned her radio off...
...In memory's narrow eye, trade unionist and radical, Social Democrat and Communist, damn each other to similar perdition...
...They needed Martin Luther King to tell them...
...Jacob is...
...All those years of working, of organizing...
...It's a different time...
...He knows his workers...
...She identifies herself politically...
...Like Penn South itself, the supermarket embodies a certain sense of disillusionment that many of these older Jewish workers feel...
...The silence seems threatening until Sophie speaks again...
...Day after day, it does not change...
...If only one of them could stand in the playground where the mothers watch their young children and do something out of the ordinary, sing Solidarity Forever or scream to the smog-ridden New York heavens that the rights of labor are the rights of man...
...To see the mountains...
...She snaps her fingers at the ceiling...
...There is another bank on Ninth Avenue and 25th Street...
...Theirs are not the kind of lives out of which one creates drama...
...I am watching my youngest son, who is four, and Jacob is watching his four-yearold granddaughter, who is the playmate of my son, as well as his two-year-old grandson...
...He is angry at the Panthers, who are rabid anti-Semites...
...By me, it's a disease...
...Radicalism must now set forth on new goals, and retired Jewish fur workers and garment workers are an old and rather boring story...
...In the past an ardent radical, she remains contemptuous of the ILGWU leadership...
...They had to be solved without theory...
...The stores and businesses that rent space in Penn South are probably similar to those one finds in any private development in New York...
...By and large, the older people who live here look upon the co-op with a certain pride...
...We are at the gates of heaven...
...Still, it is better than nothing...
...He does not wait for a reply...
...Everyone, it seems, is angry at Victor Gotbaum, except Sophie who chortles with delight as she listens to the comments...
...It is a peculiar thing—shopping in a supermarket demands a kind of aggressiveness that one would automatically assume comes naturally to union people...
...The co-op supermarket is supposed to be their supermarket, just as Penn South is supposed to be theirs...
...I should join her...
...In fact, Penn South can serve as a prototype of the kind of development architecture that has so infuriated such critics as Jane Jacobs and Ada Louise Huxtable...
...He had come to this country a militant trade unionist at the age of fourteen, and he would die a militant trade unionist...
...There is not much there to stir the imagination...
...But all of this lies in the past...
...And whatever reservations one may have about its architectural blandness, the cooperative has succeeded in providing moderately priced and comfortable apartment housing for more than 2,800 families...
...A strange mixture of sentiment and toughness, a willingness to stick life out...
...And now, one group against the other...
...When I first came to America, I worked for Hattie Carnegie...
...Conditions were lousy for all of us...
...She waves her hand at the ceiling...
...It took two weeks then to make a suit...
...He has damned a world that offers him no place...
...He turns away...
...Not that it would do anything to alter his fate...
...I think of a man walking cautiously down the supermarket aisles...
...Let me call him Jacob...
...That's what you want to know...
...Like most of the former trade unionists who live in Penn South, she remains very much interested in politics...
...Most of the mothers who sit in the playground have gone to college, and they would undoubtedly sing along with him...
...The Holocaust, that is part of all of us...
...At least, you have a little bit of dignity, a little independence...
...The lawns are carefully tended, there are vivid flower beds breaking the monotony, however slightly, of the standardized buildings...
...Not like changing a society...
...A former organizer for the Fur Workers, he has been retired for more than two years...
...He does not hate Negroes, how could a Socialist hate any group of people...
...SILENT IN THE SUPERMARKET S arah has been retired for some ten years now...
...There are no sides that we can take...
...The grandfather comforting the grandson...
...It wasn't their blood that was being called for...
...He had been born a Socialist, he would die a Socialist...
...It makes it even more 94 necessary to have the union, and it destroys trade unionism at the same time...
...She is surprised, she has not heard from him for 20 years...
...And you know what I learned...
...I was tired of watching workers get kicked around in their own state...
...Toward the end, there had been little left to organize...
...A good many of them look upon the trade union movement in much the same manner as their Park Avenue and Great Neck peers...
...All the retired people in this co-op read newspapers and magazines...
...So he's angry...
...They become teachers, doctors, accountants...
...I cannot enter her world after all...
...even suits for the rich...
...With such strides does labor march...
...I worked in a steel mill, and by the second year they asked me to stay and help run it...
...She has begun singing...
...I ask her about how her friends live, what they do...
...Their eyes they didn't believe...
...But it is an idea given reality by the fact that once a year, the prices, which are no better than the prices of other supermarkets in the neighborhood, succumb to the men and women who bring their year's supply of sales slips into the market so that they can receive a rebate...
...It's hard to grow old...
...A good enough Jewish name...
...Across the hall, a neighbor's radio is blaring forth the news of the day...
...How do you make the only thing a workingman has, his ability to work, how do you make that into a weapon...
...Jacob and I don't have the problems that some of our friends have...
...a Roman Catholic church and school, once largely Irish but now predominantly Puerto Rican, occupy the center of 25th Street...
...To get the best bargain for the workers...
...I fantasize about them...
...cried Liebknecht...
...Perhaps it is enough to offer them a single moment of recognition...
...Her hip was broken...
...They distrust unions and scorn those whom they label "hard hats...
...For the moment, the old wars shrivel...
...For two weeks...
...So this is what we've come to...
...When he returns to the bench, I try to get him to talk some more about his politics...
...Am I living here off the fat of the land...
...At home, we spoke Russian...
...His 2 percent rebate comes to $15.17...
...What we want LEONARD KRIEGEL is what our friends want...
...He begins to talk about black militants...
...He sits back against the bench and lights the pipe he has been holding in his hand...
...So they line up, one against the other...
...A man can work better with problems when he can see an end...
...When he returns to the bench, Jacob's face, which is usually stern and distant, relaxes...
...Here it was different...
...They're confused...
Vol. 19 • January 1972 • No. 1
