My Father, My Self (a story)
Halperin, Irving
MY FATHER MYSELF A STORY BY IRVING HALPERIN The battle at Guadalajara some two weeks before, in early March of 1937, had induced several more young men from the Chicago area to join the Abraham...
...The worst thing is to be afraid...
...I would picture him carrying the book like a lantern through a long night...
...What I did not know then was that my mother worried that his ailment might be much more serious than ulcers...
...The lights of skyscrapers were beginning to appear...
...But of course that would have struck him as childish, as I was only fifteen...
...As soon as there was a lull, she would, I anticipated, attempt to soothe him, just as she had done in the past after he had fought with other customers...
...Looking back, I understand my father's passion for reading...
...made this same observation...
...I can manage," she responded enthusiastically (because she had long urged him, I knew, to spend more time with me—'Your son needs you, Chaim...
...Meanwhile, ihere were pogroms in other parts of Russia...
...I did not feel free to say to him, Get out of your head for a change...
...Goddamn this kind of life...
...He drove with one hand pressed against his side, his forehead showing the effort he was making to cope with the pain...
...Perhaps they were members of the John Reed reading club that had met in our apartment on occasion...
...I thought that I knew why my father was not prompted to introduce me to anyone there...
...I felt imposed upon by this change of plans...
...In me, their only son, they put all their hopes...
...Suddenly, abruptly, out of a long silence, I heard my father saying...
...For the first time since we had started on our walk, I looked directly at him...
...Then he was speaking with animation to one of the volunteers...
...So this is the story, son...
...But in Chicago his life was nickels and dimes...
...But then the sounds of more pages being steadily turned...
...then it was time to go back to the store to relieve my mother...
...When they shook hands, Father was smiling, something that he did not do often or easily...
...He came from a poor working-class background and knew what it was to go hungry and be ashamed of the holes in his shoes . . . He told the truth about the robber barons . . . You must read him...
...Remarkable that he was so hungry a reader of American writers, because in Chicago he had attended no more than two evening courses in basic English...
...they were the green underside of his gray existence in the store...
...In Russia, my parents were poor, but they were people with a taste for learning...
...I felt some concern, s^me pity for him...
...If you worked for them, you didn't have to go into the Red Army...
...There is a flurry of embraces...
...Plumes of smoke rise from steam engines that will journey to places I have only read about: New York, Washington, New Orleans...
...Even when the hour was past midnight, he would seem unaware of the time...
...When I was old enough, they took me to teachers for private lessons, because very few Jewish children were admitted to public schools in that town...
...I wrote to some relatives in Chicago, and before long we went there...
...he said after the old woman had fled from the store...
...The back of the store had only one small steel-barred window, and he was turned toward it...
...Maybe I will...
...They should receive medals, not abuse, he declared passionately...
...I remember it was a beautiful spring night...
...Six feet two in my 15th year then, I was taller than him by some nine inches...
...In the dusk his face was indistinct...
...Directly before us was the Palmolive-Peet Building...
...she whimpered in an accent that suggested she had once lived in Poland or Russia...
...And what about the Cossacks...
...Everywhere the Jew was the scapegoat...
...But, in all truth, I heard a vindictive voice within saying, "Good...
...I was too fearful to say it to him...
...After we got into his Buick, I assumed that he would drive me back to our apartment and then go on to the store...
...Sure...
...she proposed...
...I never heard from him again...
...We thought of it as a heaven on earth, a place where you could find peace...
...His mouth moves, as though he is repeating to himself the words of an oath...
...He did not indicate where we were going...
...Is it my fault...
...I checked an impulse to declare that as soon as they would accept me, I would join the Brigade...
...Chaim, are you all right...
...From where I stand they are not visible...
...I often sensed that he felt acutely uncomfortable when we stood side by side...
...I wore a khaki jacket and riding pants . and always carried a portfolio...
...This young man smiled, as though pleased by something that Father had said to him...
...We had been walking for some five minutes, but he still hadn't revealed why he had wanted me to come with him...
...What did I do to you, mister...
...His eyes bulged wildly...
...Twice in the same day he wanted me to accompany him...
...Your mother's parents invited me to stay overnight...
...saying this in a way that implied that had he been without family responsibilities he most certainly would have joined the Brigade...
...he reached out for certain books as though they contained the fragrance of Eden...
...She was accustomed to his rages and knew that they had to spend themselves...
...The doctor said you shouldn't—" "He doesn't have to deal with such dreck...
...They must be stopped...
...She would not criticize his outburst against the old woman, for she was inclined to make excuses for his temper...
...He believed that the working class would rise up and one day live like human beings instead of animals...
...The Beacon flashed, disappeared, reappeared...
...Somehow the thought comforted me that, in this same moment, lonely people all over the city were looking up at the Beacon...
...Now many in the crowd are waving at what must be the receding figures of the volunteers...
...I found no peace...
...I worked as a helper to a cutter in a clothing factory and your mother worked in a shop putting bones and stays into corsets...
...To the east, the lake, shrouded by a heavy mist, seemed to merge with the sky, so that there was no distinct dividing line between them...
...What the war in Spain was about I only dimly understood...
...The intensity of his remark startled me...
...I supposed that his thoughts were with the volunteers and anxiously waited for him to ask for my reactions to what had taken place at the station...
...Moreover, in the past year some new A & ? and National Tea Company supermarkets consistently undercut his prices, and the store was losing money...
...Did I ask to be taller...
...Father usually looked as though he was listening intently...
...Look around at the park, the skyscrapers, the Beacon...
...He stood there for a few moments longer before moving into the stock room, which was screened off from the rest of the store by a floor-to-ceiling partition...
...And, most of all, that he generally made me feel that I was a disappointment to him...
...On.the way from the store to where he parked the car, we hardly spoke...
...I do not know where my father is...
...We walked slowly toward 400 Row and the Palmolive-Peet Building...
...When he turned toward me, his eyes looked sad...
...He had an armful of books by George Bernard Shaw, H.G...
...I had checked out some novels by Jack London, Bret Harte, James Fenimore Cooper, Zane Grey...
...I follow him out of the station...
...I wished that he would snap out of his dark mood...
...I waited for him to continue...
...In the shadows of the room, his back to the partition, he presented the picture of a man in hiding...
...and then, one by one, the departing young men turn and pass through the gate...
...If it had not been her, someone else, some other incident, would have triggered his rage...
...In the morning, he would buy a loaf of bread and divide it into three pieces for breakfast, dinner and supper...
...Earlier he had wanted me to learn more about the struggle in Spain...
...songs of freedom, brotherhood, a better world...
...He broke off again...
...I was wary of looking directly at him to see what mood was registered on his face...
...The old woman lurched, as though her legs had buckled under her, turned and fled into the street...
...I know that this was my father's favorite walk in the city, that he often came here when he was distressed...
...But I was only somewhat reassured...
...doubly rare, since his smile clearly conveyed his momentary approval of the son whom he ordinarily viewed as childish and too shy to wait on trade in the store, fit only for unpacking merchandise, sweeping the floor and delivering circulars from house to house...
...Some of them looked just a little older than me...
...I cannot recall how it is that he came to speak of Dreiser...
...He would come home spent and gray from a long grinding day in the store...
...If he was tempted into eating two pieces at lunch, then he went hungry at suppertime...
...Let's go," he says, still staring beyond me...
...The farthest I have ever travelled beyond Chicago is some hundred miles to a summer resort in Michigan...
...Now the bandshell area was empty, its silence almost eerie...
...We moved into a small flat above the store...
...Still, these specialists admitted that the findings of the x-rays and the tests he had undergone were not conclusive, and they would not predict when the pain would stop...
...Shouts of "No Pasaran...
...Then the Bolsheviks started putting hundreds of Jews before the firing squads, claiming that they were speculators on the black market...
...To the north, Buckingham Fountain rose and fell, creating plumes of color, arabesques of line...
...When he had reminded her that the neighborhood newspaper advertising the specials had stipulated a limit of two cans of coffee to a customer, she had sarcastically muttered something about his being cheap...
...His tirade against the old woman, over so trivial a matter, was entirely unjustified...
...In front of the Drake Hotel, we came to a fork in the esplanade, one strand of which curved to the right and eventually led to Michigan Avenue, and the other to the left, passing before the entire length of 400 Row, then turning right and travelling beside a breakwater of boulders toward Municipal Pier...
...Later, he was caught by the Czarist police for holding a secret meeting in the woods and sent to Siberia...
...he had to open the store at eight...
...You have to get your sleep...
...And then his mouth becomes tightly compressed...
...We made just enough money to pay the rent each month and sometimes had to borrow from one of your mother's uncles to buy food...
...they were risking their lives to fight the Fascists...
...But I would not have dared to elicit his hot temper by making up some excuse for being unable to accompany him...
...He continued to stare toward the doorway, as though to deter the old woman from reappearing...
...Anticipating that he would compare me unfavorably with the volunteers, I was not eager to go to the station...
...After she went back out front to wait on trade, he stood up, removed his grocer's jacket, put on an overcoat...
...this made me look like a big shot...
...He snatched up a can from a floor display and cocked his arm...
...he despised the grocery business and loathed himself for not having the courage to get out of it...
...I never liked the grocery business but was afraid to give up what we had and start over again...
...When the music was boring, I would watch the stars...
...Almost directly after dinner he would retire to the living room and take up a book...
...As though waiting for my response, he paused...
...Neither of us could have known that in two months he would be dead...
...instead of going to our apartment where I would listen to Little Orphan Annie and Buck Rogers on the radio and drink a glass of hot Ovaltine, I would be stuck in the store...
...At first we stayed with relatives, and they gave me a job as a clerk in their grocery store...
...In his stiff white jacket, he stood in the aisle, trembling, the can still clenched in his hand...
...He had been having the same symptom for several weeks, so that our family doctor had recently placed him on a strict soft foods diet for what seemed to be a case of stomach ulcers...
...on top of its roof the Lindberg Beacon would soon be revolving...
...Overhead, the Lindberg Beacon had begun revolving...
...He made stew of the cheapest meats, and in the same cooking pot he made his tea...
...Though it was too dark to see his expression, I could feel it...
...Sometimes Mother would fall asleep...
...He broke off and was silent for a few moments...
...It will do you good...
...To please him, I proffered some banality about the braveness of the volunteers...
...In New York we lived on the Lower East Side...
...The train stopped in Volkovinitz, which was about 80 miles from my town...
...A moment later, he said softly, warmly, as though his mood(had suddenly lightened, that he felt better for having spoken to me about his past...
...A stream of cars moved along the Outer Drive...
...She held our her arms toward my father...
...he wanted me to help out there...
...But the public library became his university, and he subscribed to a number of literary periodicals...
...Was he referring to the brave boys in Spain...
...From their bedroom, my mother would cry out, "Chaim, come to bed...
...To the west, the sounds of traffic along Michigan Avenue were muted, like distant singing...
...Does he expect something from me now, I wondered...
...His eyes, which often were lackluster, came to life, and his voice grew animated...
...What accounted for his rage...
...Can I get you a cold rag...
...His pogroms all over Russia took the lives of 20 thousand Jews...
...he continued to stare toward the doorway, as though to deter the old woman from reappearing...
...His wanting me to accompany him to the station was a complete surprise, because we rarely went anywhere together...
...MY FATHER MYSELF A STORY BY IRVING HALPERIN The battle at Guadalajara some two weeks before, in early March of 1937, had induced several more young men from the Chicago area to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, and it was for the send-off of these volunteers that my father and I went to the railroad station...
...To the south, the headlights of cars wound around the Outer Drive...
...So we were able to pay back all that we owed to relatives and save up a few thousand dollars, enough to move to a beautiful flat and buy custom-made furniture...
...Reading was his one consistent solace...
...My mother continued to wait on trade by herself...
...A few of their faces seemed vaguely familiar...
...Father believed that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighters were idealistic and courageous...
...We lingered a little while longer...
...She would look at him with worried eyes and once again remind him that their family doctor had warned him to avoid becoming upset...
...We would sing revolutionary songs together...
...Or perhaps I had seen them passing out leaflets on Twelfth Street and, while walking on the picket line, singing, "Arise ye prisoners of starvation...
...Standing directly behind him, my mother placed a restraining hand on his arm...
...We had driven there in silence...
...He seemed to have forgotten about me...
...Having passed by the Pier, we turned west now and headed toward Michigan Avenue...
...And then, in an intense voice, he began to speak about how much the freedom of the world depended upon the outcome of the Spanish Civil War...
...If you travel east, far enough from here, you would come to the small town in the Ukraine where I was born...
...It was then that he first became aware of my presence in one corner of the room...
...After years of seeing him in his stiff grocer's jacket, I couldn't picture it...
...So we had to escape to America...
...Your mother knew an official in the Party, and he gave me a job as a secretary and a kind of junior commissar for a government office in a place called Czernestrow...
...She would offer to bring him a cold washrag for his forehead...
...If she bothers me again, I'll throw her out...
...Impossible for me to forget then that he often hurled curses at my mother...
...I still felt too uneasy to look directly at him...
...He sighed...
...Many arms are upraised in a clenched-fist salute...
...At the station he had raised his fist and shouted along with the others, "No Pasaran...
...He again was silent...
...so excruciating that he had to pinch his fingers to keep from screaming, from striking his head, from pounding at his stomach, as though to destroy whatever was causing such agony...
...he blurted out...
...Your mother and I watched every cent, and after a year I began looking for a store for myself...
...She was right...
...He would never forgive FDR and the government for not helping the Loyalists and, even worse, for threatening American boys who had gone to fight in Spain with the loss of their citizenship...
...A moment later, to my surprise, he asked my mother if it would be all right with her if I went with him...
...They used to hide it in the ground and basements...
...Right after our marriage, I had to choose between being drafted as a soldier or working for the Bolsheviks...
...he was so unathletic, small and thin...
...It's okay, go with him, she signalled with her eyes...
...When he gestured for us to stop, we were at Michigan and Madison, not far from the Art Institute...
...Surely not an altercation with an old woman...
...From a corner of the room, I watched him slumped over the carton...
...Soon after our arrival, he left my side and began to move among the crowd...
...he said, clenching a fist...
...In the far distance was the Buckingham Fountain and beyond it the Grant Park bandshell, where, because my parents liked classical music, we often went in the summertime to the free open-air concerts...
...He slumped forward against the wheel, staring vacantly at the windshield...
...There were the sounds of a clanging streetcar, a truck lumbering by and then the distant blasting of pneumatic drills along our street, Western Avenue, which was being widened to keep up with the Progress of Chicago...
...Chaim, please...
...Come, son, let's go...
...There are more shouts of "No Pasaran...
...I counted slowly: at thirty the revolving light returned to the exact place it had been at the count of one...
...Instead, he drove from the Loop to Humboldt Park, to one edge of the lagoon there, and parked the car...
...He turned to the east and stood-still, as though listening to the lake pounding against breakwaters...
...You could perceive the intensity of his attachment of books merely from the way that he held them—gingerly, as though they were the most delicate china...
...an early sunset in March...
...Without turning toward her, still glaring at the old woman at the other end of the store, he snapped, "Don't mix in...
...We had to escape to America...
...I found no peace...
...Or that he made everyone around him miserable...
...As to the old woman, what had she done that was so terrible...
...We knew that the peasants would be with them, that they would denounce Jews as Bolsheviks, and so we would be the first to be put before the firing squads...
...I feared that anything I could say would sound dumb to him...
...But, to tell the truth, I could not then picture him in a soldier's uniform and holding a gun...
...But I never used force...
...On summer nights the ground below would be crowded with people...
...she feared that he might have cancer, even though the two specialists he had seen did not think so...
...Our flat was cold and gloomy and your mother and I slept on folding cots...
...When I went back there a few minutes later to get some merchandise for a customer, he was sitting on an unopened carton, slumped forward, supporting his head with both hands, and looking as though he was oblivious to the ringing of the cash register and the blurred voices from the other side of the partition...
...The young volunteers, with upraised arms, stand with their backs to the gate, facing their supporters...
...Meanwhile, the terrible burning in his stomach was sometimes so intense that he struggled to catch his breath...
...Why don't you go away from the store for a few hours...
...I sensed that my father was about to speak...
...In a little while, by the time you were born, I worked up the business to 500 dollars a week...
...We wrote to each other...
...If democratic Spain fell, Hitler and Mussolini would dance on America's grave...
...utes, the crowd before the gate lingers and then begins to separate and disperse...
...He pressed his hands against his abdomen...
...How could they seem so composed, I wondered, when they were going off to war...
...A sizeable number of people were gathered before the gate for the train to New York...
...It hurled light like a javelin over the streets and houses of the city and beyond...
...I had heard him declare that History would never forget the sacrifices of these fighters for Freedom...
...My main work was to confiscate grain and produce for a Red Army unit...
...Then he spokeof other writers—Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, John Steinbeck, Albert Maltz, Albert Halper...
...Under a cold gray sky the lagoon was motionless...
...When I observed him in the stock room, his face pressed into his hands, I thought, cry baby...
...Perhaps so...
...No doubt my father had Irving Halperin is Professor of English and Creative Writing at San Francisco State University...
...It's the stomach pains, the worrying from them, that makes him fly off the handle...
...Finally I found one on Western Avenue and bought it from a Bohemian woman, who was taking in only 75 dollars a week...
...Finally there is the sound of the train wheels turning...
...My father comes toward me with a flushed face...
...We went toward home, one of the few times until then that we had ever walked together...
...I watched from the rear of the store...
...But, predictably, my mother refrained from criticizing him...
...He paused, as though hesitant to continue...
...Then his arm slowly lowered to his side...
...We went to his car...
...But at least there were no Petluras in New York...
...for a while we were happy in Czernestrow, but then we heard that the PetlUrists were coming back to the Ukraine...
...He shrugged, she sighed...
...he became an entirely different person from the depressed, morose looking one behind the counter of his grocery store...
...On a cold gray afternoon he phoned our apartment from the store to say that he was coming by shortly...
...All right, all right," he said irritably...
...The three of us would sit on a blanket...
...We thought of it as a heaven on earth, a place where you could find peace...
...Look up...
...Wells, Lincoln Steffens, Webb Miller...
...A poor person who had to count her pennies, who went from store to store buying only the specials that were sold below cost to attract customers...
...At once the crowd draws closer to the volunteers, as though to form their bodyguard...
...The crowd surges forward, as though to go with them, but it is checked by some uniformed guards stationed before the gate...
...some of them seemed to fall into the lake...
...People said that if you couldn't make a living in Chicago you couldn't make it anywhere...
...The old woman stopped, her back to the door...
...A khaki jacket and riding pants...
...White Russians, whose homes and estates had been confiscated by the Red Army, were robbing and killing Jews...
...We went left...
...If he was waiting for me to say something else about the volunteers, I felt too uneasy to do so...
...Out you...
...That was the spark, and he exploded...
...Presently Father turned and we resumed walking and did not stop until we came close to the Grant Park bandshell...
...We stood on a slight rise overlooking the outdoor platform...
...His eyes seem to be staring at a point over and beyond my head...
...This had never happened before...
...somehow they knew who my family was, a family with a good name...
...He had a big influence on me...
...The bitterness in his voice weighed on me like a stone...
...Somewhere in the distance train whistles are blowing...
...So Franco and his Falange must be stopped...
...and brushed her hand away...
...I was a good student, read everything I could get a hold of...
...A few even appeared exuberant, as though they were holiday-bound...
...What did he have in mind now...
...What didn't they do to our people...
...You have it coming...
...He lived in a basement, a cold dark room...
...Presently my mother entered, going directly to him...
...He was shaking his fist at an elderly woman wearing a babushka...
...Her question further provoked my father...
...My mother told me that walking beside the It t calmed him...
...Trees and bushes beside the shoreline appeared shriveled and turned in on themselves...
...Involuntarily, I glanced at my mother for a cue...
...I continued to feel anxious...
...Forty years later, I see again that scene in the railroad station...
...Why is he telling me this...
...It was not easy to get grain away from the peasants...
...He smiled warmly, a rarity for this unhappy man...
...What am I supposed to say...
...A voice booms out over the public address system that the train for New York will depart in five minutes...
...For a few minIn his stiff white jacket, he stood in the aisle, trembling, the can still clenched in his hand...
...Chaim is a good man," she would say apologetically to her relatives...
...In that moment, I would have wanted him to talk to me the way he had some weeks before when we met by chance one evening in the neighborhood public library...
...But on that afternoon in Humboldt Park, he did not speak of books, and our stay there was brief because the pain suddenly came upon him...
...Almost always a kind of paralysis handcuffed my infrequent attempts to speak to him...
...In a little while," he would answer...
...only passengers displaying tickets are permitted to enter the platform area...
...Your mother and I talked of many things...
...The volunteers stood about in the center of the crowd, and they appeared to be much calmer than those who were there to see them off...
...And I had overheard him, in speaking with my mother, sarcastically refer to me as the langer loksh, long, thin noodle...
...We had not been in the store a half hour when he burst out screaming, "Out...
...I met your mother in 1919, when young Jews like myself were fleeing from the pogromist, Petlura...
...Come in here again and I'll throw you out on your ass...
...He drove to the store...
...Six months later we were married...
...One of my favorite teachers was a revolutionary...
...Go ahead, Chaim...
...In Russia, I would learn after his death, he had daydreams about becoming a journalist...
...Terrified, she backed away from him...
...I wondered...
...I also dressed for going out...
...Son, I want to tell you, while there is still time, some things about my past...
Vol. 7 • July 1982 • No. 7
