Greenhorn
Bluestone, Naomi
the greenhorn naomi bluestone I write this story with the clear and uncomfortable realization that it will appear so familiar to some as to render me foolish for putting it on paper, while to...
...Did they know him...
...His name was Arkady (changed in this case to protect both the guilty and the innocent, which we both are and probably were even then...
...We know you don't want to take a year's lease...
...Diana said he could leave his bags in her front foyer, but she wanted the key back...
...Don't even consider taking this fellow into your home...
...He was assured housing and financial support for 6 to 12 weeks, if he played his cards right...
...The lovely social worker, my beleagered cousin, my sensible husband, all recognized that this would be almost impossible for me at this time...
...Of all people...
...Was Isaac a middle name, a pseudonym...
...I told him that in the United States we do not refer to Negroes as Niggers...
...Arkady calls me at last...
...That is a derogatory and unacceptable term...
...It is better than being thrown out on the street...
...There is no time to lose...
...And those old men in the syno-gogue in Riga...
...We call them Black people...
...Please take the apartment," we begged...
...He has gone to another city to try to borrow money from someone, so that he should not have to live in a slum...
...He would take me, for example, to shops, to show me the monotonous pyramids of uniformly labelled cans of fish...
...Surely there is a reason besides neurosis that Arkady makes us feel like the original Mr...
...friends later told me that he'd appeared crestfallen, brokenhearted...
...Shall we tell you that even as this is being written, we know, deep in our hearts, that we will never be rid of this man who haunts us, in body and spirit, with his proud haughtiness, his defiant refusal to accept our standards, his unwillingness to thank us for what he perceives to be unjust and cruel treatment...
...By now I am interested only ambivalently in the latest saga in the ongoing history of this wolf boy from Brooklyn...
...Will there ever be an end to this story...
...Arkady spent the weekend, we discover on Tuesday, with the cantor of one of the synagogues which he visited in his first burst of capitalist religiosity...
...The only thing that I am certain of, at this point, is that there is still a great deal I do not know about the phenomenon of physical resettlement, particularly when two such disparate cultures are involved, and one of them is the tangled mess we call modern American society...
...will not live in a slum...
...There it is...
...Go about your business," I advise, "And I will do mine...
...Graciously, she offered to speak with him herself, but the need had passed...
...Would she be able to cope with Arkady, and he with her, and both with the situation...
...Diana and I decide to wait until Monday...
...You need not stay there forever...
...He puts me in touch with a Russian woman who has done extensive refugee resettlement over many years...
...He had called her, nearly hysterical, barely coherent, from an unspecified phone to tell her that he was about to be thrown out onto the street by American Jews and could she put him up for a few days...
...His longing for the synagogue seemed incompatible with his total ignorance of what it represented...
...My original impression that Arkady might have done better had he not been subjected to the unrelieved tyranny of a woman social worker, a woman hostess, and a woman sponsor (since he proved himself early on as macho a specimen as the world can produce), had to be tempered by the realization that he rejected at least three men who reached out to him during the stormy course of his settlement...
...Apparently that, too, had been known to happen...
...The Sabbath was approaching...
...Can you imagine...
...The social worker, who had talked with us on her dinner hour the night before from her home, had said that she would try to get the rules bent a little in view of the urgency of the situation...
...Pikuach nefesh meant more than shomering the Shabbat...
...And I will send a follow-up to the editor of this magazine, so that your curiosity will be satisfied, and your conscience stilled...
...Arkady Isaac, he said his name was...
...And I do recognize it...
...His virulent anti-Communism was attributable only to the checks it put on his personal freedom to manipulate, take advantage and buy cheaply, selling dearly...
...It is hard for a grown man, accustomed to being on his own, and fighting the system, to be confined, like a small boy, in the house of a maternal woman...
...Yes, I knew his date of birth...
...What did he do wrong...
...We are not all suckers, bleeding hearts, liberal spenders...
...He was Jewish, a virulent anti-Communist, and a prowler of the street since he was left orphaned at the age of five by a terrible war...
...We were more concerned for Diana...
...In vain Diana and I struggled to convey a Puritan ethic that could not have fallen on deafer ears...
...Living in Riga...
...Not that she thought he'd really steal the silver...
...In vain he asked her to slow down...
...Nothing to do now but wait...
...There he stands, his own unique form of dead soul, surrounded by his bags, (and they are matching luggage, too, I may add), the conscience, the accuser, the auditor of the quality of care offered by the organized Jewish community...
...Take me to your leader," he seemed to say, so, frantically fielding airport thieves, taxicab dispatchers, limo drivers and cops, I brought my small car around, loaded it up, and carried my human cargo with his five brown appendages off into the wilds of Brooklyn...
...I should have known...
...Arkady has been unable to locate either his friends or his money...
...And there was that unbounded enthusiasm, the boyish charm and belief in the power of money to buy happiness, and the power of the will to buy that money...
...A greenhorn...
...I also note that it is the first Friday night of the month, payday, the night my emergency room used to hum with knife wounds unleashed by alcohol-induced rages...
...He was borne away by a man his own age with a heavy Russian accent, and an apologetic twist to his shoulders...
...The Russians had all looked so fat, so disheveled, so frumpy and so unhappy...
...My husband was right...
...Or perhaps he has located this friend and is not telling us for devious reasons of his own...
...Nothing disturbed his ebullience, not even the rapid realization that my perverse auto no longer had headlights or a horn, and that we were in severe rush hour traffic on a major highway...
...I give Diana the psychotherapy she badly needs and certainly deserves...
...There I was treated to the sight of Israeli prutot, carefully hoarded, burnished, worshipped like St...
...Whenever people start throwing doctor's notes at me in support of a situation that reeks of conflict between conscience and emotional need, I require no further assurance that they must have real relief...
...NYANA can not oblige...
...None of the NYANA approved apartments met with his standards...
...I kept a dog in Leningrad," he thundered, suddenly finding his English again, "My dog had a bigger room than that entire apartment...
...Please encourage him to start apartment hunting immediately...
...Please reiterate...
...Mechanically I note the weather...
...I call Arkady...
...His adjustment has been difficult and painful...
...There was no time to reflect...
...I remembered how well he had taken to the graduate student from Japan, who was also temporarily sharing Diana's home, and wondered if Ikito had indeed made them rice for breakfast, a custom Diana dismissed good-naturedly as pre-bar-baric...
...Diana hangs up in relief...
...I have told him that there are certain house rules about times for meals, because I cannot sit around all day and wait for him, but he appears to have no sense of time, or utter contempt for it...
...He raged that they were dirty, evidently considering this a permanent and irrevocable state of affairs, as if dirt were made of concrete, and cobwebs steel...
...But he is a madman, he is having a culturekampf, which makes him an hour late for breakfast...
...I slap it down when it conjures up pictures of the slab in the morgue that rolls out like a file drawer on ball bearings, carrying a well-built, Caucasian male of unknown origin with a tag on his left big toe...
...Incisive and masterful questioning on my part rapidly elicited that the speaker was a Jewish stewardess for the airlines that had flown Arkady, (as well as a third of a planeful of other Russian Jews) in from Rome...
...He handled it so nicely I was not sure he'd understood me...
...As for me, I shall go and collect Arkady's bags, and give them the solicitudes I would have given him, had he let me...
...My cousin Diana agreed to house Arkady, under terms which were generous in the extreme...
...Why were we wasting our time and energies, a handful of do-gooders and social workers and representatives of the Orthodox Jewish community, when we were dealing with a past master of manipulation, survival and street smarts...
...They are not like the other Israelis...
...With what I thought was great insight, and an undiluted, if slightly harried, sense of caring, she pointed out the adjustment difficulties he appeared to be having...
...If there is, I shall be happy to tell you about it...
...Christopher medals, as tokens of a remote paradise devoutly to be reached...
...The next morning, Arkady gave me a report of his findings...
...She would call me later in the evening with details...
...Shall I tell you when I attempted to remove the five aforementioned bags from Brooklyn to Great Neck, a vengeful deity sent us the blizzard of the season, rendering all of us impotent...
...He had no parents...
...He legitimately belongs to the refugee association that is supported fiscally by the organized Jewish community of New York...
...It was only as we arrived that I remembered to advise Arkady that I had just been married three days before...
...This did not stop him from breaking into a mammoth smile when informed of my identity...
...Never had I met someone who raged so against his situation, or was so totally committed to smashing it, even if he had to take himself along in the process...
...Cautious as well as romantic, I inquired what would be expected of me as the man's sponsor...
...To take a complete stranger into your home, to offer so much, to make so few demands...
...One thing was sure: he was now a freeman, and no one, ever again, would tell him what to do...
...He had wanted out so badly, so fiercely...
...As if realizing that too much might have been said, and that some day I might go back and reconstruct the conversation in a different light, as indeed proved to be the case, the voice on the other end merely ! explained, "Many of our Jews don't ! want to be bothered with the new refugees from Russia, it is easier to say no...
...Not only him, but his innocent bags, who have hurt no one...
...Of course...
...Bob and I returned to our new home in Great Neck in separate cars that evening, sliding over a sudden sheet of roadway sleet that prolonged our trip by over an hour...
...He had it made...
...She reports that Arkady's moment of truth came the night before, Friday night, at 11 p.m., when he ran out of the house, onto the streets of New York, to lose himself in the night and the rain...
...He is discouraged...
...I will store them in a clean dry place, and see that they are secure...
...I stand in awe of the undiminished desire to help another human being so spontaneously drawn from so many people, and how relatively sustained it proved to be in the face of tremendous provocation.'I marvel at the patience of the professional worker who tried so hard to understand the situation and work around it...
...no snow, not too cold...
...Continue to sulk and mooch...
...Another call from Diana...
...Also, he is unusual in that he is single, no longer young, without friends...
...The Russian Jews are a problem...
...I think you have been generous, open, supportive beyond all measure...
...Or would they...
...We will find another spot for him...
...he could come at any time...
...The report from his social worker at NYANA seemed only to corroborate my growing dread...
...Diana took advantage of the opportunity to develop a sudden intimate relationship with the cook in the household, a professorial and gentle former immigrant from Eastern Europe, who radiated a grace and uprightness which cut the ties that separated them...
...My greenhorn was deposited in my lap with five very large brown suitcases, and no recognition of my face...
...My overgrown street urchin, my enfant terrible, was clearly turning out to be less a prisoner of conscience than a prisoner of greed...
...He put his wet glass down on her table, leaving a ring that etched glisteningly, glacially...
...I will not call the police to come and get them out of my house until at least six months have gone by...
...Then once he took me to the apartment of a friend, who would not let us in until we had replied properly in Yiddish...
...It is 9:00 p.m...
...Brocklehurst...
...Perhaps I am doing him a disservice, but it is entirely possible that he is indeed a parasite...
...Accustomed to wheeling and dealing and handling himself in the Russian netherworld, there was no doubt in our minds that some day he would buy and sell us all...
...You did a wonderful thing," she consoles me...
...Which was wise...
...The first was to find a place among my friends for a month's sojourn...
...The God in whom you do not believe will send you your reward...
...In fact, his English was proving selective, lapsing from his mind whenever unpleasant topics were discussed...
...And many with problems not all that dissimilar from Arkady's...
...Another cousin agreed to stand by for the airport run, and I went to bed with my head tingling with good Samaritan fantasies, and ruminations on the passage of time and oceans...
...Here is my story...
...He pointed out the drab sameness of building facades and heights, the absence of lights, color, signs and the like...
...Arkady was higher than his flight had been...
...Why should another friend be stuck with a man whose adjustment problems have succeeded in enraging all who try to help him...
...Naomi does...
...He can have the guest room and bath," she said, "and his breakfast, too...
...On Monday I was informed that the refugee in question had been living in Leningrad, was a truck driver, of the correct age, and had stated that he knew no one in the United States but me, and that he had not seen me for many years...
...I read, I write, I discipline my mind when it produces visual images of a mute man being rolled and dumped in an alley in the rain in the dark...
...Angry with you...
...Arkady had apparently made it back to Diana's, who had continued to push the deadline ahead, day by terrible day...
...And on February 27, at 5:30 p.m., I arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport for the long wait for the greenhorn...
...The prayerbooks (in Yiddish and Hebrew) left discretely on the seat of the synagogue...
...That's what he told me...
...He, too, had cautioned her that she had done all that she could...
...I won't dwell on it, since it is well known to those who know it, and not pleasant for those who do not, nor even all that important to this story...
...Unspoken was her acknowledgement that I was not in collusion with this man to defraud the Jewish community of the costs of resettling one undeserving refugee...
...But others have done it and so can you...
...Grabbing me in a Russian embrace, he smashed his teeth across my lips, tearing open a carefully nutured healing of a herpes blister...
...He was consumed with his plans, most of which seemed to center around getting rich very fast...
...What is his power to make us feel that we have not been empathie, that we are lashing him with a distressed Puritanism that we would not wish for ourselves or our children...
...You must search again...
...URGENT CONTACT 674-8000 RE ARKADY FLECK-MAN NOW IN ROME...
...No one cares about him...
...In a sense it is easier for those in the hotel, where they have three weeks to confront the reality and provide a support network for themselves...
...Or perhaps there never was such a friend...
...Additionally, he was not a displaced professional or aristocrat, but a driver, a mechanic, with manual skills easily exchanged for bread...
...It begins, romantically enough, (and we will need a sense of romance to carry us through to our conclusion), with the white nights of Leningrad, when the visitor in summer could stroll along the Nevsky Prospekt and pause at any point along the water to pull a paper from the pocket and read without benefit of additional illumination...
...I know my countrymen," she said, "Please be very careful...
...After all, Brooklyn is now the "inner city...
...The following morning, my phone rang again...
...It seems a bad moment to give my greenhorn a lesson on the evils of capitalism, the extremes, the haves and have nots, the realities of the Welfare system...
...Who was I? He had given her my address, and that of my cousin, but she knew little else...
...Why does she want him out...
...or until an approved apartment is found...
...We are ashamed of him and his values...
...Interlude...
...On his own, he found an apartment cleaner and larger than most...
...He lurked and skuttled and crept around corners like a hit man in E. G. Robinson movies...
...He should be in his own apartment as soon as possible...
...the greenhorn naomi bluestone I write this story with the clear and uncomfortable realization that it will appear so familiar to some as to render me foolish for putting it on paper, while to others the discoveries and realizations will be as new as they were, unfortunately, to me...
...A widow in her seventh decade, living alone in a large house in the decaying Flat-bush section of Brooklyn, she had been accustomed for years to foreign physicians, exchange students, visiting professors and the like sharing her home and fertilizing it with their various opinions and knowledge of the world...
...They are not to his liking...
...i uiloLiiit' Arkady came back for his bags, in a morose, sullen, arrogant mood...
...We knew her to be a determined and forthright woman, who had stayed on in a home that she found emotionally fulfilling even as all her friends and relatives were fleeing, and helping to justify their flight by encouraging her to do the same...
...A good woman...
...Once, I picked up the phone and called HIAS...
...I choked...
...The third was too small...
...Do you want to hear more...
...When he came to say goodbye, I'd already boarded the bus and did not see him again...
...Surely there could never be a human example better illustrative of their dread than this man who uses the wrong fork and leaves rings of water on the table...
...The sun is shining...
...He is raging, depressed, bewildered, clearly seeing an America he has never before conceived...
...I am a physician myself...
...In short, 1 began to suspect a lemon...
...Diana wants NYANA to come get his things...
...If you don't behave yourself, I'll put you in an orphanage...
...When he appears to claim them, I will control my hostility and make nice...
...She attributes his initial difficulties to "personality problems" and an unrealistic level of expectation of what this country and its Jews have to offer...
...God, was I getting a liberal education...
...He did not leave Russia for this...
...You tell us more than all the handkissers...
...She is still concerned...
...But he must arrive by one, in order not to be m'chattel Shabbos...
...Arkady needed no further encouragement than an ultimatum from Diana that he leave her home within the next 36 to 48 hours...
...I call NYANA...
...Having done so, I let him produce one more terrible concept...
...It was, to say the least, an interesting dinner...
...We all have...
...Arkady's social worker muses upon the conservatism of this generation of Jews, who harp upon the sacrifices made by their forbears in the sweatshops of the Lower East Side, and seem to want this most recent group of greenhorns to go through a similar ritual ordeal...
...On such a prolonged evening in 1970, I was approached by an athletic young man who tried to buy the clothes off my back...
...I took a few moments (o.k., half an hour) to enlighten the young woman, who hung up giving every impression that she had not learned her lesson and would probably offer housing or her bleeding heart on the altar of conscience...
...Arkady used the wrong spoon...
...Somewhere in Rome, a man was sitting, waiting, on the last leg of a desperate journey, waiting to fly over the torch in the Harbor of New York, one more in the stream of hopeful immigrants who had made this country what it now is, or at least what it used to be before it fell on hard times...
...She is a lady, decent, supportive, cultured...
...With heavy heart, I maintain my work at the hospital...
...In one case, "for two weeks," in another, "for one month...
...I recalled the discussion that ensued in broken and highly accented English when both discovered that they were Karate students, and had in fact broken their hands in pursuit of the mastery of this graceful methodology of warfare...
...Diana and I have become close, as the result of our battering...
...The next call was with good news...
...We chat now like old friends, who pass the time of day...
...The witching hour had come and gone, and our pumpkin was still loose in the streets...
...I thought about him often during the next three days in Moscow, where it rained and was cold, and the next five years, too...
...I grow tense...
...No doubt he will be working soon...
...By three Arkady had still not kept his appointment at NYANA...
...Should she stay home and wait for him...
...His social worker reports four months later that he has maintained contact with her, and has done rather well...
...He appeared not to know the meaning of gratitude or the English word for "Thank You...
...The weekend is spent purposefully...
...The sad, suspicious remnants of a community...
...Did you know that he had three wives in Russia...
...This man is worse than the Israelis...
...I gave him money, not much, just a small contribution, in American Dollars, to the $200 bribe fee he mentioned across some remote Finnish border, the going rate at the time, he said...
...I will refrain from asking him if he has bought Kor-vette's yet...
...What a lovely man," she reported, "Not like those terrible Chassidim...
...Particularly when his English has suddenly died an apoplectic death...
...With so divided and diametrically opposed an audience, the pressure to provide a new and fresh approach is almost enough to make me stop before I start...
...She was talking too fast...
...The phone rang during our Sabbath dinner...
...Yes, so we understand...
...This generation of immigrants seems to suffer not only from the rejection of their Eastern European kinsmen, but their (the tatters') conversion to the attitudes of their Germanic co-religionists, who demanded civility, gentility and submersion of identity as well...
...Don't get involved...
...Her heart had gone out to him...
...Not only was the first one especially dirty, the second one was too far away...
...Why should my friendships be endangered for a stranger, whose only kinship is the star of David he wears around his neck...
...Arkady, however, knew his rights...
...He could not be a full hour from the center of the city he had struggled so long to reach...
...He has precipitated more Jewish guilt...
...His mood has shifted...
...I explained to him that I do not go to the synagogue but I will be happy to find him one...
...As the immigration official brought me my greenhorn, one of the women pulled me aside and volunteered some information, after first disclaiming her right to profer it...
...I will put it aside for him to help him in his adjustment...
...Diana, a Vassar graduate like her mother before her, and her daughters after her, was interested in the state of Soviet Jewry, an area of concern to which she brought a well developed background in atheism, civil-libertarian-ism, and a cultural interest in the Bible...
...Would I ask my cousin to reconsider...
...You gave a stranger an opportunity for a new life...
...It can be difficult...
...She began what was to become a growing list of incompatibilities, resentments and emotional and cultural abrasions...
...This was clearly a man who could make his way in this world...
...You have no choice...
...Stay in touch...
...In vain...
...He whispered in my ear and clutched my elbow to his chest as we walked, hurriedly, past the old babushkas who made change for the telephone kiosks...
...Unless he's got a gun, he'll get creamed...
...Someday he will tell the world what these American Jews have done to him...
...We hang up our phones...
...In this case, the hospitality might prove simultaneously bilateral, for Arkady would be a man seen entering and leaving a vulnerable dwelling, and would provide company more needed now than in days past...
...I have been unhelpful...
...Four weeks...
...We know you have to begin all over and how hard it is...
...She just wanted her key...
...She said she'd send him a check...
...United by the Magen David he wore defiantly around his neck, we discussed Jews, Israel, America, sundries of that sort, as well as his limited but surprisingly fluent street English would permit...
...We do not like this man...
...He cannot accept my explanation...
...It is clearly expected that I will drive in to Brooklyn and take Arkady onto my honeymoon with me, meager as it may be, what with my problems on the job, and my overworked spouse...
...Shall I tell you that, yes, we shall attempt to pick them up again, and yes, we shall hold them until such time as we shall be driven to Japanese self-immolatory practices (Ikito, do you give lessons...
...This story, actually, now falls into suspended animation for a large piece of a lifetime...
...On the whole, Arkady seemed to have the world by the tail...
...She's afraid he'll come back for them when she is alone in the house...
...Dare I presume on their kindness...
...You'll be deported...
...A sweet, almost frightened little girl voice came over the phone...
...In all deference to the fact that she did agree to care for this man, she agrees to take his poor five innocent brown bags who have hurt no one into her home until such time as life and fate have broken this fellow in half and made him listen to reason...
...Dr...
...You won't go to Israel," I replied...
...He asked to call his friend, the one with the $3,000 that had been entrusted to him when he emigrated to New York five years before...
...I doubt that I will hear from him again...
...Now go home...
...And she vanished into the crowd...
...Funny," I reply, "He told me that he would never marry as long as he had to do it in one of those wedding palaces...
...The sense of decay...
...He thinks the greatest Jews in the world are Meyer Kahane and Meyer Lansky...
...That was one place to which he would never return, voluntarily or involuntaily...
...He wants nothing to do with the other Russians in the neighborhood...
...So am I. I call a friend...
...I hope you don't think I'm letting you down, Naomi," she said miserably, "but you know I have a heart condition, and my physician has advised me that I am under too much emotional strain with this man...
...Indefinitely...
...Undaunted at being told by the operator that there was no one of that name listed at that address, he chattered on about his rich relatives in Brazil...
...I am consoled...
...The effusions of gratitude seemed inappropriate, and I said so...
...Unable to get assistance, we crept onto Diana's block one hour late for the dinner she had prepared...
...Gallant to the end, Diana climbed into her car, and drove our Bad Boy out to Sea Gate...
...My cousin will maintain him no longer because he is headstrong, stubborn, insensitive and angina-producing...
...Don't lend him any money...
...Of course he must leave tomorrow...
...He brought it on himself...
...Nevertheless, if he does not yet own Macy's, neither has he bought the Brooklyn Bridge...
...Very well," I said, with little hesitation, "I can do that...
...she asks...
...As I went off to work the next morning, my first thoughts were of the greenhorn, and the exciting new life that lay before him...
...But I have never yielded to foolish challenges and I won't start now...
...Bob comes into the room...
...We started schmoozing...
...His knowledge of English, though limited, was clearly better than that of many...
...He said that if he didn't get out in five years, he would kill himself...
...Diana went through the litany of her grandfather, and all the peddlers who lived in fifth floor walk-up slums with five dependents, a boarder and four sewing machines...
...Why can't he stay where he is...
...I am still at the office...
...Yet strangely, this expectation is only of me and by me...
...The second was to find a replacement to meet Arkady at the airport should my schedule conflict irretrievably...
...I see him as the quintessential hero-anti-hero who represents good or evil (or the gray area in between), a complete allegory unto himself...
...or that he had perhaps not fully accomplished his purpose...
...He is our pathology, not our physiology, and it is always from the pathologist's knife that we learn the most about what we have done wrong...
...Forwarded from my former address in Brooklyn...
...He can take care of himself...
...He said he wanted a Jewish girl...
...Already he has kept her from appointments...
...He expressed due recognition of the rumor that I could get seven years in a Russian jail for the small exchange...
...No, they didn't know him...
...How could I be...
...So I begin some phone calls...
...A kinsman, three generations removed...
...But she lived alone in a small apartment outside of Philadelphia and she couldn't put him up so far away...
...We know it is hard...
...Let them send me back to Vienna," he said...
...We shared the same birthday, the tenth of August, and this made him just two years younger than I. (You note that I do not give you his age, as that would give you mine...
...A peach...
...And then, the entire three weeks had been depressing...
...A boarder on the Lower East Side...
...Give him back to NYANA...
...Out in the open...
...I hung up, concerned only with the two immediate tasks at hand...
...It matters not that someday he will buy and sell HIAS, NYANA, and the entire Jewish community he remembers for its insensitivity to him in his hour of need...
...A refugee in a land of almost total Jewish prosperity, assimilation and integration...
...Sensing some adventure, if also a little sleaziness, in the friendship, I readily turned back my Bolshoi and Circus tickets to prowl the streets with this local person, in the hopes of achieving a better understanding of the reality of daily life there for Jews...
...It was Erev Shabbat, too late to call, and the weekend did not suffice to answer my question, was it the same Arkady...
...We had both been having pretty much the same thoughts...
...by the unresolved tension generated by this maddening fellow...
...I hang up the phone without making any of my calls...
...They are accustomed to being taken care of, they all were rich in the old country, they are unwilling or unable to lower their standards, they pose a unique resettlement problem...
...Perhaps to Russia...
...So of course I was totally unprepared for a vehement phone call from Diana several nights later...
...Diana told him that she had to be out of the house by 10 the next day, and that his breakfast must be completed by then...
...That will stretch his $4 a day allotment a bit more...
...The next communication pulled me out of a shower, but brought welcome clarification...
...Do you know what he said...
...He said that the one thing all Jews have in the world is their ability to make money...
...In due course, I received communications from the Pre-Migration Department of HIAS, asking me to have forms notarized and signed indicating my half of the agreement, which was somewhat ambiguously worded...
...He took one look and ran away, notifying half the street that he wasn't going to live in a slum...
...Did I think it would be all right to house him with her 85-year-old grandmother in Mount Vernon...
...Take care of yourself...
...that guy can take care of himself on any street...
...He is quite isolated...
...February 4, 1980...
...Arkady would have none of it...
...There was no way to get him re-admitted legally to Russia...
...I was surrounded by a cluster of Russians, fairly recent immigrants themselves, who were waiting for the second round of relatives released from Soviet servitude...
...He had an entire agency for immigrants working on his behalf...
...His bags are safe at her house still, so even if he is mugged for the cash in his wallet, he will not have lost everything...
...Naomi Bluestone, Clinical Associate Professor of Community Health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is a public health physician and a freelance medical writer...
...Perhaps my Israeli friends would like to have Arkady...
...That I expect it of myself, on some level, is a tribute only to my Jewish masochism...
...NYANA (New York Association for New Americans) will pay $125 a month for an apartment, and $4 a day for food, which is not a lot...
...This man has succeeded in eliciting from me, unguarded, my worst prejudices, my most unspeakable, unacceptable thoughts...
...Corroborating all my growing suspicions, she had given me the courage to do what I suspected had to be done...
...As I landed in Paris, and saw, rather than heard, the baggage handlers laughing and calling aloud as they unloaded the plane's cargo beneath me, I realized that in three weeks in the Soviet I'd never heard loud, spontaneous laughter on the street...
...Arkady may not realize it, but I have commitments to persons other than he...
...Arkady begged for the streets, for jail, for anything but more of what he saw as involuntary servitude...
...I would like to call his social worker, but she is home on her well-deserved weekend, after a bad week of tussling with a caseload of 70...
...What ideas this man has," proclaimed this bookish and cultivated lady...
...He has been to see a few apartments...
...Throwing open his arms, he embraced the airport, the city and the universe with one massive rotation...
...You cannot solve this by yourself...
...He is the ultimate consumer, the object of our communal funds, and if he is not happy, neither can we be...
...He enrolled in an English class which he is close to completing...
...Unfortunately, it was...
...Why did he let his human ambivalences and culture shock and despair and fury interfere with his comfort...
...Then a telegram came from HIAS...
...A week has passed, and with it Diana's deadline for departure, by now 48 hours past...
...Could she have some information that would help her make a decision...
...Perhaps he has been had by an ungrateful countryman...
...Alone among my confidants she treats me as I need to be treated, not as a competent physician cooly solving a crisis and sustaining all others, but as a guilty, foolish-feeling, suffering person whose pride has been hit and who is by now looking for a graceful way out...
...After all, they are not like the other Israelis...
...You must make him find an apartment, for his own good...
...Hey," he says, "Feel sorry for the guy that tries to roll him...
...With horror I stop and listen to what I have just said...
...It was the first of a number of things that no one would ever compel Arkady to do again, most of them vital to the maintenance of normal households and relationships...
...The dope...
...An Orthodox home had agreed to shelter Arkady over the Sabbath, giving him two more days of grace to reconsider his adamacy in refusing legitimate low-cost housing, however drab...
...I want to go to Israel...
...Go home, my child," was his advice, and finally, at long last, she wised up and did just that...
...Arkady went back into my memory bank, along with the Kennedys, William Kin-caid, Paul Robeson, Robert Hillyer, and others who'd touched my life briefly and left it, not to return...
...It is explained to me that NYANA can not put him into a hotel on an emergency basis because I have agreed to house him two weeks...
...Each night, I would hang up the phone with that deepening sense of foreboding in the pit of my stomach, well known to every woman with an overactive super-ego and congenital sense of inadequacy and doom...
...Now, be of good cheer...
...You can well imagine what went through my mind...
...Arkady, please come back...
...Would I sponsor him...
...We want him to take six weeks to learn English," she said, "but he feels that since he is not a professional, this is not necessary...
...You must provide shelter for him for several weeks, or a month, or as long as it takes for him to be processed and find a job...
...I, who spend so much time trying to fight the stereotypes, trying to defend, to explain, to rationalize, when pressed to the wall admit the same feelings...
...After all, a group of college graduate students, all sharing a dive on 43rd street, accustomed to countrymen crashing for indefinite periods on corners of the floor, would surely welcome an oppressed successful refusenik...
...I am grateful to be part of a community which has provided the machinery for a social I operation of this magnitude, however flawed it may be...
...We had not failed to notice the deterioration of what had once been a bustling thoroughfare, the shuttered gates on all her windows, the small, red alarm button which made Arkady's entrances and exits a matter of keys and combinations and shut-offs and turn-ons...
...The cantor, once as romantic as Naomi Bluestone, and as tender-hearted as a stewardess, has had enough after only several days...
...The man was a living, breathing anachronism...
...They have seen this sort of things many times...
...Over ten years, and the gunshot had not been heard...
...What is required of me...
...You are true blue...
...I would think it appropriate for members of the ? Jewish community to educate themselves about this interesting movement so that those to whom this piece comes as a revelation will quickly move on to more sophisticated assessments of the needs and responsibilities involved in opening doors to innocents, and providing havens to marginals...
...If his behavior was almost psychotic, if he indulged in unrelenting "acting out," it was for reasons that are still not clear to me...
...I control guilt...
...There was no conversation, not even a civilized "Good-bye...
...As you would expect, I resisted this impelling offer, and instead began a conversation that lasted on and off four days, the length of time that In-tourist had assigned our group from the Citizen's Exchange to remain in this gorgeous town...
...He hangs up on me...
...The social worker tells us that all these stories are not uncommon...
...I thought about Arkady every year on my birthday, and when the fifth year came and went, I wondered deeply if it had brought freedom or a gunshot to the man who wanted to buy my clothes...
...And I don't need that $125...
...He wanted to go to Alaska...
...As I sit here, worries still unresolved, it seems to me that Arkady has all the makings of a great literary figure...
...After all, as he himself had stated, "As long as there is something to sell and someone to buy and a price differential, I will get rich...
...It seems the Orthodox home in Sea Gate had relented...
Vol. 5 • October 1980 • No. 9
