Organize
Chernin, Kim
ORGANIZE! Rose Chemin, the Communist Party and the Great Depression— excerpts from a remarkable life. The Proposal: The Daughter Speaks She is standing next to the fire, her foot on the rocker of...
...But now, after the campaign was over, I felt exhausted...
...There were Unemployed Councils in Los Angeles, too, there were strikes and there was talk of revolution...
...In her office she took off her shoes and sat down in a wooden chair that swiveled...
...It was a nightmare...
...And meanwhile, we were waiting to hear about the Soviet Union...
...Nina was very receptive to all this...
...What do you mean, giving such advice to this girl?' I asked...
...It's so simple...
...Remember," she says to me, "when I did not want you to learn typing...
...I used to wonder why other people didn't see it too...
...There was fear—the fear of losing a job, of losing an apartment, of not being able to feed the family...
...When Foster spoke we would cry out with one voice, jobs or wages, jobs or wages...
...are unemployed men who have had to take this job in order to eat...
...For me, these words have all the old, seductive charm I experienced as a small girl, learning to know this woman...
...She arrived in this country as a girl of 12...
...You are a writer," she says...
...Framed It is a story that will die with her generation...
...But the beginning, who can tell you...
...Anzia Yezerska," I tell her...
...You know how people lived in that time, in the tenements of the Bronx, there were brick buildings, most of them without elevators, old houses with dark staircases and narrow corridors...
...Papa...
...She didn't talk to anybody...
...She's the brightest girl in her class...
...Nina was three or four years old...
...All over New York people knew the work the Communist Party was doing for the poor, for the Negroes, for the unemployed...
...Others would know how to dance...
...Life changes when you are together in this way, when you are united...
...We'd stay there and wait for the husbands to return and then we'd put the furniture back into the apartment...
...We went to say good-bye to my mother and we told her that we're leaving for the Soviet Union...
...Meanwhile we would say: "Here, here is the money...
...In my usual fashion, I told myself it could never happen...
...But to the last day we were in Los Angeles, she asked the same question...
...The doors are locked...
...She was born in a village where most women did not know how to read...
...Or they'd say: "Most of us are unemployed, one is working but he expects to be laid off by the end of the week...
...When I came home, at night, I would say to your father: "I just don't know why I joined the Communist Party...
...Now we exchange that long, difficult look it has taken me almost 40 years to understand...
...We circulated a petition, house to house, in the tenements of the Bronx...
...But in the silence that pushes itself between us there is a new sensation...
...An immigrant, struggling for survival, she supported her family when her father ran off and deserted them...
...You'd bring a box or a little ladder with you, someone would distribute pamphlets and you'd introduce yourself as the Communist Party alderman candidate...
...I thought, this one maybe will grow up to be a Luftmentsch...
...her entire life she lived in the movement...
...Better," I thought, "we should just forget there is such a thing as the subway in Moscow...
...There was always another poor man to take his place...
...This man was to me everything my father had never been to my mother...
...There was always something to eat in the Councils...
...Another one laid off...
...He read and studied Marxism, he belonged to a study club and at night he taught a class in Marxist theory...
...Now, what would happen...
...But together, we felt our strength, and we could laugh...
...I would stand there and watch you weep...
...In New York a group of engineers was forming...
...She has straight As, doesn't she...
...Isn't it so, Gertrude...
...Rose," I'd say to myself, "with this fear you could have spent your life in Waterbury...
...And so of course one day the principal calls you in to suggest secretarial school...
...At night, when I was preparing dinner, she'd stand up on the chair in the kitchen and make speeches for alderman in the Bronx...
...Perhaps I was on my way back to the kitchen One day the principal calls you in to suggest secretarial school...
...Then, one day, we received notice that jobs were open in the Soviet Union...
...His words showed us the way out...
...This man is my husband...
...This strange matter of becoming a poet, its struggle so inward and silent...
...So the strike began...
...Milk for the children...
...People just couldn't believe we were asking for this...
...the I WO was very powerful, it had local groups all over the city, with musical performances and Yiddish folksinging, there were theater groups, schools for teaching children about political events, there were literary groups and even a mandolin ensemble...
...To me, to become what I became was inevitable...
...The marshal has brought the police to carry out our furniture...
...The older I get the more I think about Mama...
...And then people were running all around me, racing for the subway, screaming, crowding together...
...An image comes to me...
...On me, however, these words make a tremendous impression...
...Our main task was to try and get a congressman to introduce a bill for unemployment insurance...
...What she is grows up out of her past in a becoming, natural way...
...Mama was a literate woman," she repeats with a strangely wistful pride...
...My mother too shows signs of strain...
...You know what my mother used to say...
...Imagine," I'd think to myself, "this is Paul Kusnitz...
...1 was developing as a Socialist thinker, I had fought for my mother and now 1 was ready to start fighting for the people...
...Just think of it...
...Now, in a single instant, after a lifetime of longing, I have become her confidante...
...This is what you understand from the story...
...We have enough money to pay you off...
...And there was always a cup with a lipstick stain standing half full of coffee on the table near the door...
...The idea was to establish the right of Communists to file themselves as official candidates...
...Even the idea of a union was in this time a new concept in the world...
...I feel a cough of tension scratching at my throat and it takes all my discipline to fight it down again...
...Then, I heard from your father...
...And he admired me for the way I could speak to people and organize...
...The crowd used to heckle...
...She seems surprised at the crash as her face turns toward her grandmother, who nods conciliation, as she never did to me, the child of her anxious years...
...This was the golden time of our movement...
...People put their money together, borrowed from the bank, rebuilt the building and lived together...
...The people living in these hovels ate from rotting foods rejected by markets...
...We could see the men hesitating...
...The slogans we carried read: jobs or wages...
...She did not live in the same world we were in...
...My mother has crouched down in front of the oven, worrying about whether the cake will rise...
...Just a crack at first...
...And I ran with them, and I was thinking, this, this is the answer they give to the demands of the people...
...We would continue...
...When I joined the party and began to organize full time, I always took her with me...
...There was a tremendous amount of migration during that time...
...And finally the silence has become unbearable, I am not deciding any longer, I am talking...
...No Jews could live in Moscow...
...none of the engineers would accept it, they agreed...
...Is he working...
...And now she comes towards me, in all the extraordinary power of her presence, to touch me with her index finger on my shoulder...
...First-born...
...Yes, sure, I see something here to make me proud...
...Give this to her...
...Gertrude was married, and was in training as a nurse...
...But how could I become my mother...
...She was born in the first years of this century, in that shtetl culture which cannot any longer be found in this world...
...I felt angry, I felt exhilarated and I felt purposeful...
...She whispers to me: "A shame if that brilliant girl should spend her life baking...
...They were hungry people, talking, waiting...
...Come up here without the police and without the marshal and we will pay you off...
...We lived on our savings and we waited...
...Sometimes we failed and the furniture was carried into the street...
...They organized summer camps for the children and you will come across many important people, to this day, who could tell you about this cooperative, if they wanted to admit their beginnings...
...As soon as you left the cities you saw people begging rides, hopping freight trains or traveling in flivvers—old junk cars that were patched together...
...But my mother has been waiting to speak with me...
...He and another man would be playing chess...
...Suddenly someone screamed...
...He talked and thought about it constantly...
...you could see him there, at the kitchen table, the sleeves rolled up...
...They become overwhelming...
...Right away they wanted me to begin organizing...
...I was doing something so difficult...
...We could not wait for someone to give to us what we needed...
...You can't believe a word you read in the Daily Worker...
...A cock crows at the edge of the village...
...Then, frowning, she says: "Who wrote this story...
...We'd go out early in the morning...
...The whole world, waiting...
...Some would take the money and go...
...dabro nie daplevot...
...By that time the Unemployed Councils were well known: our workers were everywhere, leading demonstrations, circulating petitions, speaking on street corners...
...She never knew your mother...
...I see my mother standing by the window, the dark folds of the drape gathered on either side of her...
...She lifts her head, her breast rises...
...Do you remember...
...Another one with a kerchief on the head...
...So I took this one and that one, we went out into the streets, we walked, we went into restaurants...
...I'd come into your room at night," she says, "there you'd be...
...In the Bronx, at that time, we had a Communist Cooperative...
...In this activity I was already involved before I joined the Communist Party...
...I am torn by contradiction...
...The faces with a look of determination...
...And so we would harangue...
...I am praying that she will come closer...
...You'd be walking past the building and you'd hear a mother shout, from the fifth floor: "Leon Trotsky, come right up here, if you don't want to get a smack...
...Larissa pokes at the glow- -ing coals with a wire hanger...
...and silences we have kept...
...It was open house at our house on Wednesday nights...
...And there was Celia, sitting in the delicatessen store, selling salami...
...Everywhere you heard people speaking about the Revolution...
...Your father of course didn't believe in this saying...
...We see her for a moment beneath the hall light as she passes further into darkness and knocks softly on the bedroom door...
...they are charging too much for bread...
...But she would always have too little time to finish her coffee...
...She was born when there was standing no more wheat in the field.'" For a moment she catches her breath...
...She has no context for wondering at this achievement, so rare, so remarkable in a Jewish woman of the shtetl...
...Our doors were locked but they would break them in...
...The very idea of it changes me...
...With the unemployment, the evictions, the high price of food...
...She has given me this moment of truth...
...I worried," she says, "what if she becomes a secretary through this...
...What a terrible thing...
...You cannot solve these problems when you are alone...
...They stood at the docks, on street corners, waiting...
...Somebody from the crowd called out: "Mr...
...Sometimes, when I was on vacation I went downtown with her...
...It cost too much...
...She has refused telephone calls now, for the last hours, has been coughing and turning in the back of the house...
...How do you know...
...And so one day she eats up her niece's porridge, she steals food from the child in order to survive...
...We see the world differently...
...She was not an easy woman," she says, taking another step towards me...
...Basically, I felt that those who failed to join us had no confidence in themselves or in the fact that we could change the system...
...There were people in the basement apartments, people crowded into small spaces, living together, sometimes without a bedroom, sharing kitchens and toilets, and afraid to lose the little space they had...
...It was not a hostile crowd but it liked to taunt...
...Far away, there is the sound of barking...
...He'd call the marshal and the whole thing would start all over again...
...We'll have one more person to distribute leaflets...
...Let him do the work...
...And when we came back, she said: "Where did you live...
...This struggle of people against their conditions, that is where you find the meaning in life...
...At first, my mother looks warily at me...
...We could speak very easily to people because we also were working people...
...We were pressed together, shoulder to shoulder...
...This man was to Nina all that my father had not been to us...
...But he could never evict everyone...
...My mother, reassured that everything is in good hands, comes back into the living room...
...You never knew how to protect yourself," she says, "You never knew...
...And now, from a darkness no one of us wishes ever to visit, a wolf lifts its head and begins to howl...
...It can't be...
...And then the words rush from her, their intensity unexpected, shattering both of us...
...I'd pour another glass of tomato juice and my mother would climb up on a step ladder to bring down a tin of anchovies...
...If there were five apples, we cut them ten ways and everybody ate...
...But then, for an instant, I am standing outside myself...
...And now she turns from the bookshelf where she has been showing my daughter the old books she brought back during the 30s from the Soviet Union...
...This thought, although it remains unspoken, startles my mother...
...Mama...
...But we would joke: "Look at this little one," we'd say, "howling because she can't go out to'demonstrate for the people...
...But I cannot describe my day with these bold, clear strokes that sketch in her life...
...Everywhere was this same dread and worry: What will happen...
...We'd ask people to come and tell them to bring whatever they could spare...
...Grandma," Larissa calls out, beginning to sound just like my mother...
...a sacred dimension to daily life, which held its own alongside the terror and violence...
...Let's say we're striking for three months...
...Ah,"she says, "that one...
...She's old, I say to myself...
...He said: ORGANIZE...
...Here was my life: such purpose it had...
...Often, the hired men would come up anyway...
...We have the money for you...
...How could a person, a woman not even five feet tall, change the world...
...It grows dark as she is talking...
...And we were paralyzed...
...Today I will tell you about my life as a child," she says...
...I and another person would enter the building and knock on the first door we came to...
...Now she looks significantly at me and I know that we have come finally to the end of all this hinting...
...They were riding straight towards us, riding us down...
...Ruchalle, Ruchalle.' my mother would say, pointing to me...
...That old woman, living here in Los Angeles, dressing herself on the warmest summer day in three sweaters beneath her coat...
...Each one of us came with a child in the carriage...
...The tone in which my mother speaks them moves me even to tears...
...I was a mother, I was active in various political organizations, and your father earned the money to support us...
...I was proud of his understanding...
...We formed Unemployed Councils...
...he was working for the city of New York, on the Eighth Avenue Subway...
...And now we're going to live in Moscow and work on the subway...
...In New York the only jobs available for the engineers were in those cubby holes in the subway, exchanging dimes for nickels...
...The goat coughs in the cellar and on the window sill there is a baked potato, cut in half and holding a candle someone has just lighted...
...What we—my generation—long for, grew up in the shtetl in spite of hunger and dust...
...Here we have the true, hidden nature of your daughter...
...Five dollars...
...But now it was a terrible shock to me...
...She is growing up...
...Someone, usually a man, would open the door...
...Every morning she would exercise, bending and lifting and touching and stretching, while I sat with my legs curled up watching her on the bed...
...Immediately we would cover it with a tarpaulin so it wouldn't get spoiled, and then we'd hold a mass meeting on the furniture, using it as a platform...
...She stops now, looking at me for understanding...
...The whole world seemed to cause you pain...
...But it was not easy to live with...
...People would drop in, we'd get them to work on a pamphlet, we would involve them in a conversation...
...my father would go off to add lettuce to the salad...
...The Kusnitz family was still in the meat business and most of them had already moved toCalifornia...
...We discussed together the questions that were raised by the people in the crowd and we looked for answers...
...A Sholom Aleichem," my mother would say...
...I ask you...
...You, too...
...I heard, in that cry...
...I was scared to death...
...I leap over the coffee table and throw myself on the couch...
...We wanted unemployment insurance...
...Your father was always worried about what would happen if he lost the job...
...She said: "Where will you live...
...I'm afraid...
...The signs read: rent strike, don't rent apartments in this building...
...Your father would put everything aside and sit down and talk to me...
...For him it meant no wages, no rent, no place to sleep, nothing to eat...
...She ate toast with cottage cheese, standing up, reading the morning paper...
...I hated the system for doing this to him...
...I sit down on the edge of the gray chair that used to be my father's favorite reading place...
...And he, with that twinkle in his eyes, would always say to her: "Ninochka, my apple, better you should ask the scarf...
...We all felt it...
...But we're not going to let them move the furniture...
...In every neighborhood, you saw soup kitchens, and on every street corner people selling apples...
...1 said to her...
...This enterprise will take years of my life...
...She was your father's child, with the same twinkling eyes...
...And then we would run out onto the fire escape, grab the bull horn and shout to the crowd: "They're hitting us...
...For the shtetl still existed...
...A dreamer...
...She was a good-natured child, very easy to get along with...
...It's maybe not hot enough in there," she says to Larissa, who is standing in the doorway, her hands on her hips...
...The Story: The Mother Speaks It was 1931 or 1932, the beginning of the Great Depression...
...Finally, he came to me in Los Angeles...
...Look at the marshal standing there...
...When we were coming to America we made up the date for my birth...
...Mama," I shout over to her, putting my arm around Larissa, who is growing younger, her golden eyes deepening into the stories...
...She was the first great aching love of my life...
...But then, one day, the Communist Party called a mass demonstration in Union Square...
...No one moves to turn on the light...
...Mama...
...She looks at me with that serious, disapproving gaze that taught me, even as a small child, always to lie about myself...
...This girl is going to college...
...When I heard this, I went storming down to the school...
...A story of power...
...I see generations of women bearing a flame...
...Mounted police surrounded the crowd...
...Again, we came with the children in the carriage...
...You," she says to me, "from every scrap you make a blanket...
...After dinner...
...Mama," I say, intending to bring everything out into the open...
...her eyes fiery, as she renews once again this ancient battle against the limiting of women...
...She is vulnerable, uncertain whether she can continue...
...she says...
...The Party at this time was organizing the Young Pioneers and you could see these children all over the coop, running around with their red scarves around the neck...
...Then there is that closing down in her face, a lo&k of rage that her secrets have been exposed, a flash of accusation, of warning...
...In this small life of a person was something so big, maybe already the future of the world...
...We are whirling about on a treacherous obstacle course, between the red chair and the coffee table, out onto the polished floor, slipping and gliding together...
...This worry began to characterize his life...
...William Foster was the main speaker...
...But it is not so easy to turn from the path I have imagined for myself...
...The three of us took an apartment together and tried to find work...
...And soon you come to realize that in this gaze is also a look of vulnerability, insecurity, an asking for approval that, even when given, will not be believed...
...My grandmother could not adjust to the New World...
...In the Bronx you could get 200 people together if you just looked up at the sky...
...They had everything there—a shopping center, a nursery...
...You know what it means...
...We were very successful in our activities...
...Mama...
...What can she know about the breaking of a woman...
...I had come from New York, from the campaign, the strikes, the Council, from all our activity...
...I am aware of that peculiar quickening in my chest which comes before anger...
...So, finally it had happened...
...There must be some right word, a gesture, something so perfectly modulated it will be neither too little nor too much...
...She had no idea what the Revolution was...
...The twilight comes into the room...
...It is a tale of transformation and development—the female reversal of that patriarchal story in which the power of the family's founder is lost and dissipated as the inheriting generations decline and fall to ruin...
...We're not enemies...
...We picketed with the sign: don't patronize this grocery...
...And I would say to myself, this one I will strengthen...
...These were the early years of our movement and there was always an excitement...
...Sometimes, when I was going out the door, I'd turn back...
...1 know what I am going to do and I must take the risk...
...What can we do...
...The water is hot in our kettles...
...We represent the Unemployed Council and last night we made a collection among the unemployed...
...Larissa races after me...
...Always when I got up on a street corner, I was afraid someone will ask me about the theory...
...Why can't you forgive...
...The rents came down, the evicted families returned to their apartments, the landlord would stop fighting us...
...Always, in his life, he was a very optimistic man...
...You can't fool me, Leon Trotsky...
...Ruchalle, Ruchalle,' she wquld say, clinging to my hands, 'will we live until morning?' You tell it and the heart breaks...
...Mama...
...If they can't give us jobs, they have to support us...
...As your sister grew older, she became part of all this...
...It was the first integrated building in New York...
...Did I tell you...
...But I was a Communist, I felt that a Communist shouldn't be afraid...
...And I? Am I perhaps what she herself might have become if she had been born in my generation in America...
...this tragedy of women, always needing to sacrifice someone else in order to go after her own life...
...An entire apartment house or a whole tenement would refuse to pay the landlord until the rents were reduced for everyone in the building...
...Suddenly another person would come in and we'd say: "Hi, who are you...
...We are the wives of unemployed men and the police are evicting us...
...I had a terrible case of laryngitis...
...I cannot restrain myself any longer...
...In Moscow...
...We would go stepping together, all the women on the left foot, then all on the right...
...We couldn't get her to take off the red scarf when she went to sleep at night...
...Through us, the women of the world, only through us can everything survive...
...All my life I have wanted to do whatever she asked of me, in spite of our quarreling...
...A daughter.' Then, she would take hold of her ear...
...If someone moved everyone moved with him...
...This one 1 will make a fighter...
...We were only waiting for the police to leave...
...Wherever there was a strike I was there as a candidate, representing the Communist Party...
...It means: "Nothing good ever swims to our shores...
...Mama," something in me cries out...
...So why were we excited...
...As soon as the police came to begin the eviction, we roped off the street and people gathered...
...We promised that we would fight the evictions and help take care of the people who were thrown out...
...And we'd answer: "Yes, we're asking the government to give us jobs...
...Right after the election I went to California with Nina, for a rest and to visit my family...
...That Celia turned out a different way, that Gertrude, with her heart of gold, became still another kind of person, this, in all my life, I never understood...
...Our intimacy is gone...
...Then she added: "She must have wanted to become a writer...
...Sometimes we poured the hot water on the men...
...Today WE are being evicted...
...He always encouraged me, he supported me...
...I know there was poverty in the shtetl...
...Everyone begins to look as if they have been brushed with understanding...
...Within two years we had rent control in the Bronx...
...We never knew who might appear...
...We were poor...
...There everything was the same...
...The cooperative was an enclave, a little corner of Socialism right in the middle of New York...
...That's the way it was in those days...
...It seems . . . even, forgivable...
...We were behind those doors, with our kettles...
...Are you kidding...
...You are one of us...
...I fear, as any daughter would, losing myself back into the mother...
...Who put it on the pillow...
...And you should have heard the shout: "Horray...
...You cannot fail...
...Everything we feared...
...In Moscow, Mama...
...If a man would be hurt on the job, you think the employer would pay a cent to him...
...I did a lot of footwork at the time...
...She breathes deeply, shaking her head at some unpleasant impression life has left upon her...
...I had forgotten about it...
...What of that...
...It is a gift of fire, transported from a world far off and far away, but never extinguished...
...We said: "As long as we strike we certainly don't pay rent...
...But my mother has never seen us like this, it takes her by surprise...
...We would hear this when we went about knocking on the doors...
...There were many Jews there, of course, and many black people moved in too...
...someone asked...
...But none of this matters to me now...
...But I—1 am the one who has been chosen to set these stories down: "And so they reconstructed...
...I felt I had something to give to this little girl, an understanding to pass on to her...
...Shall I tell her there is no need to worry any longer, that we no longer need to protect this child from her grandmother's fate...
...she calls out, "I have a surprise for you...
...All this was part of the International Workers Order, which the Communist Party had organized...
...They are the ones who say: "We're just poor people...
...I'll tell you...
...They're big men and they're hitting us...
...I explained to her: "There is no czar...
...The same things were happening in Brooklyn, in Manhattan, in Harlem...
...He was the sort of man who didn't like to show he was upset...
...Someone who knew how to sing would start singing...
...I would watch her taking quick sips as she stood at the door...
...And now, raising her fists to her temples, she hammers upon them in a sudden excess of grief...
...Puzzled, my mother shakes her head...
...I, on the other hand, when I talked to people, could convince them to struggle against their conditions...
...I used to think about this because to me organization seemed so essential...
...The others, with the privileges, were born up there...
...I love this woman...
...How this came about we cannot say...
...They were spontaneous peoples' organizations and I want you to know about them because I helped to organize them from the first days...
...It's a good sttiry, because in those days we began to organize...
...There was no social security, no unemployment insurance...
...She says it once, softly...
...Tante Gertrude...
...How much are you going to get for evicting an unemployed worker...
...The things we take for granted now, part of the American way of life, these were revolutionary ideas when we began to demand them in the 30s...
...So we decided to ask for a reduction...
...Paul is going to build a subway...
...When you are standing, one to one, with an employer, he has all the power and you have none...
...They were houses made of old boxes, burlap bags, rags and refuse that littered the dumps...
...She was very proud to be a Communist when she was in high school and this pride began when she was a little girl, holding my hand when we walked in the coop in the East Bronx...
...Sometimes they would hit us...
...My sister Lillian, who was 16, seemed a very unhappy person...
...She sat in a rocking chair, listened and didn't say a word...
...The minute I came to Los Angeles I got in touch with the Party...
...For a moment, she says nothing...
...It was a center of culture and the workers who lived in it, I tell you, were proud of what they were...
...We said: "We're glad you're here...
...What will it take from you...
...No Jews could live in Moscow, "she hoots, understanding something she could not have grasped even a week ago...
...And yes, with all the skill available to me as a writer, 1 will take down her tales and tell her story...
...Soon, I know, if I hold silence, she will take a deep breath and straighten her shoulders...
...What do you think of the Soviet Union...
...I don't know even the day 1 was born...
...I will tell her, simply, the way the world looks to me...
...And so she was on her feet again, her fist clenched...
...Of course, we knew she didn't want to be left alone without her mother...
...Our fight was successful...
...We kept prices down, we kept pressure on the congressmen, we were making people conscious of their identity as workers and we were winning rent strikes...
...Always, in the history of every people...
...We, the workers, had to make demands...
...A typical encounter would go like this...
...But Larissa answers, after a moment, "It's hot enough...
...If an item became too expensive in a particular store, we immediately went on strike...
...There comes into her voice a strangely confessional tone...
...You lose the fear of being alone...
...There we were, unemployed people...
...You think this will do for a beginning...
...to me it seemed we were standing in a village and the Cossacks were riding down...
...You could go so far back in Jewish history and always you would find that cry...
...So, do you want to take down the story of my life...
...My fear was gone...
...One false move and I shall lose her again...
...It outraged me to see the way this man was forced to worry what would happen if he lost the job...
...She did not see a gas light until she was 12 years old...
...We knew we couldn't win the election, but if you were running you had to conduct a campaign...
...She attempted suicide...
...And their children (I am the witness to it) talked better Yiddish (and still do) than all the other kids there...
...She raises her eyebrows, asking me to respond to her...
...This fact makes no impression upon my daughter...
...This is a selection from In My Mother's House, copyright © 1983 by Kim Chernin, to be published by Ticknor & Fields...
...What happened to him...
...Mama was a literate woman...
...We can't afford food...
...Never to be like Mama...
...We went out onto the fire escapes and spoke through bull horns to the crowd that gathered below...
...She believed her father was alive there, that Jews could still not live in Moscow, that the Czar had not been deposed...
...My voice speaks these words calmly as if they were facts...
...The government was giving away beans and canned milk for children...
...Sometimes, they'd get so disgusted with all this fighting and hollering they'd take the furniture from the apartment but leave it on the landing...
...who else would carry on our struggle...
...I have heard this all my life...
...From that family, in those times, who could become some other kind of person...
...Always I regretted that you, my daughter, could not participate in it...
...when Larissa intercepted me...
...Mama, don't worry," I say to her through my tears, trying as always in the presence of this woman to keep watch of the extravagant emotion she awakens in me...
...At that time 1 was running for alderman in a borough election in the Bronx...
...We got into control of our lives...
...I have the curious sensation that I have spoken in some strange tongue which is incomprehensible to her...
...Give this...
...We never expected to win but the campaign itself was important...
...Larissa enters the room with a perfect oval of cake, a light yellow slightly browning, steam rising from it, her face flushed with an effort not to show her pride...
...This crowd was very powerful...
...That old woman, I tell you, carried a world around in her, still living, the rest of us have lost...
...And what," my mother says, pressing our intimacy further than before, "about her sacrifice...
...on a false murder charge...
...Good," she says...
...It is easier when you hear it about someone else's life...
...When 1 began to speak, I was very scared...
...Looking out the window...
...All of them younger than myself...
...They don't have unemployment there...
...That rent will never be paid...
...We knew that one day he would give some eviction notices...
...I certainly did not take a month's rest...
...And so, eagerly now, I surrender...
...When I heard this I went storming down to the school...
...But then something happened I will never forget...
...And meanwhile, the conversation, despite its futility, races on at even greater intensity, trying to overcome the judgment that has been passed in silence...
...You...
...Everybody is unemployed in this family...
...We told them: "We too are unemployed workers and we want Congress to pass a bill giving us either jobs or wages...
...Belief in our power...
...You can always go back to your own work later...
...If you went to a factory you could see 15, 20, 30 people waiting there, every day, all day long, hoping that somebody would get hurt, or fired, or die...
...This profound doubt used to infuriate me when I was learning to bake, this lack of faith, this certainty nothing left to itself could turn out right...
...Who are you...
...These strikes were very successful...
...but we were dancing...
...Since I was a small child she has been able to read my thoughts...
...already, just in being together, you have changed the personal tragedy, this despair, this hopelessness, into a collective endeavor...
...We had, at the time, about $200 in savings...
...We have no jobs...
...We're only, of necessity, a mother and daughter...
...It was, how can I tell you...
...I stood there, looking out at the crowd...
...We saw this happening around us and for everyone the dread was growing...
...She was sent to a mental hospital...
...Larissa will be fine...
...That was the great dream we had for her and in fact all this happened, exactly the way we dreamed...
...And we would go stepping together, all the women on the left foot, then all on the right...
...You felt proud to be a mother who had contributed also her child to building the future...
...She always worried...
...And I'll never forget his answer: "If I thought that you knew the difference between Communism and rheumatism I would tell you...
...Then, a cold shower and she would come from it shivering, smelling of rose water, slapping her arms...
...Six dollars...
...But this time, she is going to push herself further...
...Finally now, because I have opened myself to her, she has brought out this stark, confessional word...
...Twenty-five people...
...We'd break the lock, put back the furniture, install a new lock, and the landlord would have to go through the whole procedure another time...
...We're going to live in Moscow, Mama...
...And for years after that time some member of his family would drive across town on his birthday to pick up my mother and take her home to celebrate...
...But I used to wonder why everyone did not...
...In America, police on horseback rode into the crowd...
...So they'd say, not believing: "You're asking the government to give us money without working...
...You became the fastest typist in your school...
...My own child will know nothing of it if it is not told now...
...And there, above her head, where my daughter is now pointing, we see the slender cutting of a sickle moon, as my mother stands in silence, her arms folded upon her breast...
...Basically, failure is impossible...
...Singing, chanting: "We want milk...
...But now, although she works day and night to support herself, she is starving...
...We were going to Moscow...
...So, we would get 20 or 30 women together...
...And she will listen...
...Is there anybody unemployed in this family...
...And then she turns towards me expectantly, a raw look of hope and longing in her eyes...
...Quill, are you a Communist...
...Immigrants...
...Later, the Party gave her a car and finally she learned how to drive it...
...Da nashevo berega...
...Coming off the street in those days, out of that despair, you can imagine the impact the Council made upon them...
...You wept for everything...
...Milk for the children...
...To this day 1 rise early, eat a frugal meal, take a cold shower and laugh as I slap my arms, bending and stretching, touching and reaching...
...That was the day I joined the Communist Party...
...If a man would lose the job, a week later you'd see his whole family sitting out on the street...
...And now, in this very moment, my mother imparts the care of it to me...
...He had been down to Amtorg, the American Trading Company, and he heard they were starting to build a subway in Moscow...
...You can't live in Moscow...
...I'd say to Paul...
...she always came with me...
...The cooperative in the Bronx was part of this movement and it had its own educational events, clubs for men and women, lectures, motion pictures...
...I heard a speaker at that time who was a master of the street situation...
...We're not letting you in...
...There seemed to be no hope...
...I admit, already it didn't seem a life for Celia, but who could know then what was hidden in the future...
...And then we would hear my mother's car pull up in front of the house and 1 would go into the living room and kneel on the gray couch in front of the window to watch her coming across the lawn, weighed down with newspapers and pamphlets and large, blue boxes of envelopes for the mailing I would help to get out that night...
...I wonder why I feel such shame that I am crying, why I want to hide my face in my hands...
...Each night I would set the table carefully, filling three small glasses with tomato juice while my father boiled potatoes and tossed the salad...
...It was the invariable pattern of her life, as I learned to know it when I was a little girl, still hoping to become a woman like my mother...
...The most heartbreaking stories," my aunt echoed...
...September 14, 1903...
...I get to my feet...
...Our rents are too high...
...I felt the justice of what he said...
...No Jews are allowed to live in Moscow...
...Or maybe," she whispers and a look of great weariness comes into her eyes, "maybe I have forgotten...
...I feel my own lips, cold, unsure of themselves pressed against my mother's hand...
...I went to Cuba last year," she says, "1 took with me . . . what was it...
...We, meanwhile, were standing out on the balcony...
...We'd put a new lock on the door and the landlord would have to get a hew eviction notice...
...Wonderful...
...Don't you know how hard it is already for a girl to make the right choices...
...I do not move...
...One who never has her feet on the ground...
...We'd pull up an extra chair...
...They would grab a piece of furniture on one side and we would grab it on the other...
...In our home there was, between the husband and wife, something never known in our family before...
...I must keep it alive, I must manage not to be consumed by it, I must hand it on when the time comes to my daughter...
...What paper do you read...
...We used to move whatever we could from the Council to Harlem...
...Celia was working with her husband Harry in their delicatessen store...
...The Czar was put to death by the people...
...As soon as they were gone, the people standing around would pick up the furniture and carry it right back into the building...
...What if she strangles herself with the scarf...
...The landlord, of course, would rather die than give in to the tenants' demands...
...And from this maybe comes happiness, what else...
...not certain she will approve...
...She has not returned yet out of the story and now she falls to marvelling about the way her mother did not allow the world to change...
...Leave the furniture...
...They went to sleep...
...But then, clearing her throat, she says, "This is a different shtetl than the one I knew...
...They can't overcome us...
...And now she reaches out and pats my face, her hand falling roughly on my cheek...
...It was an opportunity to raise the issues concerning the people...
...He'd go in there, very quietly, he'd take off the scarf and lay it on the pillow...
...Yes, yes, this is what she's like...
...I'd say: "We're here circulating a petition asking a congressman to introduce a bill in Congress...
...There he'd be, a man with such a gentle look in his face...
...My brother, Milton, was a graduate student in college...
...So we would go into a building, introduce ourselves and ask the people to organize...
...1 tell her a story about a girl from the shtetl who has come to the United States...
...There is that piercing quality in her gaze that makes you feel you have been seen more deeply, more knowingly than ever before in your life, but not by a seer who is untroubled by this gift...
...You should be ashamed.' " She stares around her with a look of triumph...
...Tomorrow it will be YOU...
...One hundred thousand men and women came out...
...We would demand to speak to an alderman...
...Foster was the general secretary of the Community Party...
...How can you, a woman, advise her to sacrifice this...
...The police rode into the crowd and scattered the people...
...But this time he couldn't hide it...
...We shall win...
...Always I struggled...
...Her language is that haunting mixture of English, Yiddish and Russian, in which an old world preserves itself...
...Your father was not yet a Communist, but he surely was a sympathizer, and he was much stronger theoretically than I was...
...Every time I got up to open my mouth I'd feel the fear...
...A young black man...
...In Harlem the starvation was legion and soup kitchens couldn't supply the people with enough food...
...The alderman election was held in 1932 and, of course, I lost...
...Or sometimes we would address the workers who had been brought to take the furniture: "We are talking to you, you men who have come here to throw out the furniture of unemployed workers...
...But I had doubts about my knowledge of Marxist theory...
...Nobody would cross our picket lines...
...We're asking for jobs or money...
...Why should he care...
...It was the women who remained in the apartment, in order to resist...
...Here finally is the clear shape of the story my mother wants me to write down—this tale of four generations, immigrants who have come to take possession of a new world...
...I sit down on the floor, leaning against the knees of a white-haired old woman...
...She was a woman who woke early, no matter how late she went to bed the night before...
...The world hadn't changed for her...
...Never in my life, before or since, have I heard anything like that shriek...
...From the ruin of that woman's life you see something to make you proud...
...So of course we used to worry...
...Then, in the morning, she'd ask him, with her big eyes: "Papa, how did the scarf get off...
...My grandfather picked out a date...
...My father was as bad tempered as ever, just as cruel to my mother...
...This was the way we changed the terrible thing that was happening to this man, and to all of us, into productive action...
...I felt, on the one hand, it was my obligation to instruct the people and raise their understanding...
...Food was very cheap...
...I will never forget it...
...She is pointing to the window...
...Paul couldn't accept the job...
...Do I have to live to be 100...
...I do not take my eyes from her face...
...By 12 o'clock she would have made friends with the young man's mother...
...Hoovervilles sprang up on every vacant lot and city dump...
...In the worst situations, you are together with people...
...And why...
...I'd put down my box, I'd get up there, and let me tell you, 1 would be shaking...
...She clears her throat...
...There, it was a common thing for the children to be named Leon Trotsky Blume or Vladimir Lenin Jones...
...I would address the crowd gathered in the street below...
...We organized around our basic needs...
...Every Wednesday morning she prepared a big pot of beef stroganoff or a spaghetti sauce with grated carrots and green pepper, which I would heat up, to simmer slowly, when I came home from school...
...But you're asking for Socialism...
...And the tone implies: Well, she may not have been one of us, but she did not belong to the enemy either...
...I learned to understand my mother's life when I was a small girl, waiting for her to come home in the afternoons...
...I know you wet your pants...
...Singing, chanting: "We want milk...
...Nina had a little open face with merry eyes...
...But how can I remain silent in the face of this terrible vulnerability she is showing...
...The police put machine guns on the roofs, they pointed them down at the people in the street...
...And I know that between us the time has finally come...
...You can't fool me, Leon Trotsky, I know you wet your pants...
...Daughter," she will say, in a voice that is stern and admonishing, "always a woman must be stronger than the most terrible circumstance...
...They lived on garbage thrown out by hotels...
...Jews can live anywhere now, and we're going to live in Moscow...
...I always found it strange when people didn't join us...
...we wanted home relief, hot meals for children in schools and housing for the destitute people living in the city dumps...
...In those days you would walk down the street and see whole families with their children sitting on the sidewalk surrounded by furniture...
...We want unemployment insurance and we think we can get the government to give it to us...
...Sometimes we poured the hot water on the men...
...We lived in a small apartment, six floors up...
...So stand by and watch...
...If you're an organizer and you see how successfully people are coming together you feel fulfilled...
...It is hidden, buried deep within, yet they are handing it down from one to another, burning...
...But, on the other hand, who wants to stand there and have questions fired at you...
...What is happening to us will happen to you...
...Advanced typing already in junior high school...
...Do I know her...
...I read the Daily Worker...
...Happy, you say...
...And you know what they did at night...
...But we were on the bottom...
...If I heard someone talk about the Communist Party, I knew also they were talking about me...
...These were my people...
...Hundreds of people would gather...
...But there, with my family, everything was the same...
...My mother would talk about the beautiful letters she wrote...
...This guilt, spoken directly for the first time, changes everything between us...
...We tried not to think about the Soviet Union...
...In that time, who heard of the eight-hour day...
...In those years I was happy...
...I told them I was staying for a month...
...I believed in this struggle...
...The people listened, the idea appealed to them...
...Why should we celebrate that he was laid off...
...what do you mean...
...There was a wonderful mood in that cooperative...
...If somebody had a quarter, he went down to the corner and bought some bread and brought it back into the Council...
...That is all it takes to be an organizer...
...It spreads itself out on the stacks of magazines, the lacquered Chinese dish, the little carved man with a blue patch in his wooden trousers...
...Children were very important in our movement...
...My own child will know nothing of it if it is not told now...
...The work was completed and all the engineers were laid off...
...It occurs to me that I should reason with her, tell her how much it means to me now to go my own way...
...Take an example...
...I am safe here in this little house...
...Your father and I wanted to join them, but we didn't have enough money for the investment...
...Deeply moved, 1 shall do what she has asked...
...I don't care what the doctors tell me...
...But in the early years she went to work by bus...
...Everything was cheaper than in New York, especially the fruits and vegetables...
...When an entire building was organized and willing to participate in a strike, we formed negotiating committees for the tenants, put up large signs in every window facing the street and picketed the house...
...One sees the social meanings...
...In New York she could wake up and be terrified the Cossacks were coming...
...It is the sort of look women exchange between their words, determining the outcome of their relations, fatefully, silently...
...And now she says: "My mother knew how to read and to write...
...No one expected decent wages...
...I felt, during those early days as a Communist, my strength lay in my ability to organize...
...She will be going to write for the Daily Worker...
...We talked many times, from Los Angeles to New York, and one time he said there was maybe the possibility of finding work, as an engineer, in the Soviet Union...
...But my aunt has not wanted to keep us company today...
...In My Mother's House explores the story of Kim and her mother, a Russian-Jewish immigrant and visionary who became a leading figure in the American Communist Party in the 30s, 40s and 50s, and the relationship between the generations of women in their family...
...She looks over at me as if I have called her...
...And I say you can't believe a word you read in the Times...
...It will bring the two of us together to face all the secrets Kim Chernin is the author of The Obsession: The Tyranny of Slenderness, published last year by Harper & Row...
...Between us, there was no difference, only a difference of understanding...
...It was a real cooperative...
...Mama, it was a revolution for the people...
...The Dance Of The Generations Suddenly we are dancing...
...There were so many millions of people unemployed...
...The Proposal: The Daughter Speaks She is standing next to the fire, her foot on the rocker of Gertrude's chair...
...We were no longer victims...
...No more czar...
...We had a saying in the shtetl, it was in Russian, but the Jews learned it from the peasants...
...We wanted milk for the children...
...Always, the telephone was ringing...
...Millions of workers were unemployed...
...Something you just wouldn't see anymore in the world...
...We would go about the streets advertising the neighborhood councils...
...Sometimes they would hit us...
...I was just laid off...
...What matters to me, so long as I'm living, I'm alive...
...1 said: "Mama, there was a revolution...
...But if I didn't want to take her with me to a demonstration she would just howl...
...Organize into an Unemployed Council, march in the streets, demand food, demand unemployment insurance, demand social security, demand wages...
...Such happiness, in this life, is not for me...
...On the day of the eviction we would tell all the men to leave the building...
...But I am stunned to silence by the fact that she has not closed me out of her despair...
...She, too, was a dreamer and she lived through most of her days in that sorrow of mute protest which in her generation was known as melancholia...
...But even in this expression of weariness or sorrow, I feel the power of the woman, as she straightens her shoulders, strides back into the room, sits down on the coffee table in front of me and takes my hands...
...For everything we had to struggle...
...Never like that poor, broken woman...
...He was addressing an open air meeting...
...Are you going to let it happen...
...My voice got better and I immediately became active...
...There was a woman in a red sweater, rolled up at the sleeves...
...She says, echoing me: "Mama...
...This story," she says, "I understand...
...My head moves down...
...It will draw me back into the family, waking its ghosts...
...How can 1 tell her about | this life that has so little to show for itself in the outer world...
...People kept on the move, looking for work, looking for a better place to live...
...We were poor people...
...The women were organized to monitor the prices of food all the time...
...But these places, which no one would call exactly a castle, were better than the street...
...And the children, this one in a blue cap the grandma knitted...
...That was a victory...
...That was when I made my first street-corner speech...
...Now I was ready...
...and somehow she has managed to make her way to college...
...For her, it was all exactly the way she had left it 20 years before...
...And you, why can't you forgive me for wanting to teach you how to struggle with life...
...We felt the one thing the system feared was angry women...
...I find it impossible to talk...
...Put a napkin into your lunch," she'd call out to me, "I forgot the napkin...
...We would come into the borough hall...
...her eyes dart uncertainly from me to the picture of my sister, above the fireplace, and back to me again...
...Now could I sleep in a place like that...
...My mother, her daughter, was obsessed by the fate of her mother and this obsession has descended to me...
...We knew, when she grows up, she will be joining the Young Communist League...
...We raised the issues of the workers...
...We would open an office in the middle of a neighborhood...
...Larissa has been taking books out of the booksheFVes, stacking them up on the floor, overturning the stacks...
...Then I looked up and I could see those horses coming...
...We established our right to file as official candidates in an election...
...So who's crazy,' Aunt Gertrude might say," adds Larissa, in her new Yiddish style, "who's crazy...
...But now she tilts her head to the side, listening the way I have seen birds listen to what the world around them is saying...
...It is a story that will die with her generation...
...The first smell of almond and vanilla comes into the living room...
...I should never underestimate my mother...
...I was proud of his MIT education...
...But that's how it was...
...I read it in the paper...
...To us, the idea that we had the right to strike was something hard even to imagine...
...In those years I became what I have been all my life since then...
...Larissa tugs at my sleeve...
...Always, we respected each other...
...Then, when he saw we were not the landlord, he'd open it wider...
...My mother has stopped talking...
...he had a thick Irish brogue and he would stand there talking, easy, like he was speaking to his cronies...
...And now there is a hesitation in her face, as if she were listening intently for signs of danger, sniffing the air, looking at me from the corner of her eyes...
...He would look at us as though we were crazy...
...You wonder, maybe, why I became a Communist...
...That is how I remember it...
...My mother sighs...
...How could I have imagined that I, who am one of the few who could translate her memory of the world into the language of the printed page, had some more important work to do...
...I know that I can't easily explain the nostalgia I feel for that vanished world...
...There were 800 apartments...
...We'd come in during the morning, make coffee, people would bring doughnuts and we would talk...
...She's never asked anything from you as a writer before...
...Shame on you...
...I'm not going to rest...
...Are you living at least in the real world...
...Who could forget it, a sight like this...
...From the mother to the daughter...
...But who could have imagined these old stories would awaken my child to an interest in the family...
...We women are standing here with the furniture that is to be evicted...
...Very softly, whispering, I say to her: "Mama, tell me a story...
...I say to myself, she is becoming conscious, my heart already stirred by the magnitude of this, she is entering the mythology of this family...
...And both would start pulling...
...I loved her exclamation of surprise when someone came to our door, her arms flying out, her pleasure at whoever it was, dropping in on the way to a meeting...
...She is sitting forward in her chair, her eyes narrowing...
...People, fellow workers...
...We knew that the police were rough and would beat them up...
...They are twisting newspaper into tight coils...
...You could live on three or four dollars a week...
...a Don Quixote," I would say to him when we quarreled...
...We don't blame you...
...To me she gave everything she must have wanted for herself, a girl of 13 or 14, walking home from the factory, exhausted after a day of work...
...So what could be done about all this...
Vol. 8 • April 1983 • No. 4
