Who, Me? Read online

  Who, Me?

  A Memoir

  by

  Hugh Fox

  Who, Me?

  Copyright © 2011, by Hugh Fox.

  Cover copyright © 2011, by Sunbury Press, Inc. and Hugh Fox.

  Cover image “Hats” by Lawrence von Knorr.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information contact Sunbury Press, Inc., Subsidiary Rights Dept., 2200 Market St., Camp Hill, PA 17011 USA or [email protected].

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  FIRST SUNBURY PRESS EDITION

  Printed in the United States of America

  June 2011

  ISBN 978-1-934597-51-4

  Published by:

  Sunbury Press

  Camp Hill, PA

  www.sunburypress.com

  Camp Hill, Pennsylvania USA

  “Hugh Fox is the Paul Bunyan of American Letters, part myth, part monster, and, myself-as-subject, a magnificent non-stop storyteller.”

  Bill Ryan

  The Unborn Book

  So my grandmother was Jewish, but instead of just being my Jewish grandmother, “I’m your Jewish grandmother, let’s go for a walk,” she never said a word about it.

  She was supposed to be just Czech.

  She spoke Czech. I remember out in Cicero, west of Chicago, she lived in this big Czech community. It could have been Prague, for god’s sake. She’d be talking over the back fence with Mrs. Stephan, we’d go down to the butcher and buy everything in Czech, all her cooking was Czech. Czech, Czech, Czech, Czech, Czech. Everything was ham and roast pork and carraway seeds, garlic, big fat sausages, sauerkraut, baked or boiled potatoes, you went to her place to eat, man, and you really ate.

  I barely remember my grandfather, her husband, James Patrick Mangan. He died when I was a kid.

  But I swear I remember him standing over me, a grey tweed cap in his hand, putting it on my head.

  “I bought it for you, my boy, always wear a tweed cap, that’s the thing to wear.” And guess what? Here I am sitting typing this up on my iMac, October 25, 2001, and I reach up and what’s on my head? A grey tweed cap.

  My super-Irish grandfather, pale, blonde, skinny. A streetcar conductor. I remember my mother always complaining about him coming home with his uniform on: “He’d come home with his uniform on and I’d be ashamed. Everyone knew he was a streetcar conductor, and what was that? Lower class . . .”

  My grandmother always represented herself as an orphan.

  “My parents died not long after they got to the U.S., and Mrs. Seidel took me in and raised me.”

  Mrs. Seidel out in Cicero.

  We’d go there all the time.

  More sauerkraut-soaked potatoes and huge fat sausages.

  We’d pick cherries off the cherry trees in the back yard, and my grandmother would make cherry jam. That was always a delicious treat, my grandmother’s cherry jam. She’d keep half for herself, half for Mrs. Seidel and her daughter, Eleanor.

  When my grandfather died, my grandmother kept her big old bungalow in Cicero for a while, and I’d go out there summers and stay for three months at a time.

  Absolutely great.

  She’d take me down to Frolich’s for ice cream every day, over to the local pool to swim. I couldn’t do wrong.

  Around Easter out would come matzahs and wine.

  What did I know about Passover? But she was celebrating Passover.

  I was Mr. Super-Catholic and, of course, saw the links between the unleavened bread of the host (Christ’s body) and wine (Christ’s blood) used in the Catholic communion service in the Mass, but for Gram it was just mute ritual, a little matzah, a little wine, something you did around Easter.

  Just like around Christmas she’d always make piles of potato pancakes. Christmas was potato pancake time.

  That’s what Czechs do, I thought, make potato pancakes at Christmastime. Some fifty years later, after I’d become Jewish myself and was over at the house of Cantor Bruce Wetzler for Chanukah, Miriam was making potato pancakes (latkes), and asked me, “I suppose you’ve never had latkes before . . .?”

  “My grandmother used to always make them around Christmastime too.” Miriam laughed. She knew my whole story. “Oh, that’s funny, your grandmother was being Jewish full time and not a word about what she really was about . . .”

  It was all so sneaky.

  So she spoke Czech. OK. My father spoke German (German mother, Irish father), and when I was growing up lots of time my father and grandmother would be over in a corner someplace talking about language.

  They were comparing languages. Czech and German?

  What did I know?

  But in later years when I started to hear (and study) Yiddish and German, and discovered that basically Yiddish was a form of Southern German, I realized that they’d been comparing Yiddish and German. My grandmother knew and spoke Yiddish. Not to me. With me the screen went up—censored. But there she was, this old Yiddisher-speaker comparing German and Yiddish.

  German Yiddish

  Devil - Teufel Tayvl

  To dance- Tanzen Tants-’n

  Daily - Taglich Teglakh

  Deep - Tief Tif

  I could have learned Czech, right? But didn’t. Could have learned Yiddish, right? But didn’t.

  After she lost her house in Cicero and moved into this apartment next to my father’s office, I’d go out shopping with her and we’d pass Weiner’s tailor shop and Weiner would look up and wave, “Hello, Mrs. Mangan.” That kind of special wave, that special “intimacy” between Jews that I’m so familiar with now that I’m a Jew myself.

  Down to Herz’s fish shop with a painting of a big fish on the window that looked just like Mr. Herz.

  “Ah, Mrs. Mangan . . .” then something I didn’t understand, “sholm a leykhem,” (“Peace be with you”) or “vi halt es mit aykh,” (“How’s it going with you?”)...who knows, I wasn’t taking notes.

  Buy a little fish. More special warmth, mysterious words.

  We were Jews in a Jewish neighborhood, surrounded by other Jews. They knew, didn’t they? I mean Jews know Jews, don’t they? I can go into a room with twenty people in it and pick out the Jews instantly. It’s not just the way they look—skulls and coloration—but mannerisms, ways of being.

  Jake, my mother’s brother, couldn’t have been more Jewish.

  Jewish-looking, the mannerisms, his whole way of being.

  He worked at the First National Bank in downtown Chicago. Was a “general man,” which meant that he was a substitute for anyone in the bank who might get sick, from teller to president.

  Irish father, Czech mother, right?

  His name was James. Like his father.

  Only he called himself Jake. Light skin, black hair, always slicked back. A little moustache. He’d never eat “normal” food; on the way home every day he’d stop at Stop and Shop in downtown Chicago, come home to the south side (just a block away from us on Cottage Grove Avenue) with a big bag filled with rye bread and coleslaw, kosher corned beef, dill pickles, all kinds of little pastries that I later found out were Jewish. He was a walking delicatessen.

  And at the bank instead of just being a normal banker he carried on a wholesale business on the side. You wanted a fancy gold or silver watch, earrings, tires, whatever, just ask Jake.

  Some Irish Catholic him!

  On Sundays he never went to Mass. He’d be down on Twelfth Street in
the Jewish wholesale area, selling. Max this and Sam that . . . it was is real world. To be a Jew among Jews.

  His wife, Gertrude, was an Irish Catholic and his youngest daughter, Jackie, even became a nun, Sister Jaqueline, but Jake was Jake, a Jew among Jews. I even remember going down to Maxwell Street a couple of times when I was a kid, this Jewish Sunday outdoor “fair” in downtown Chicago, walking around with Jake, Jake this, Jake that, “How ya doin’, Jake?”

  And like all the old Jews I’ve ever known, always a thousand jokes.

  I can just imagine the kinds of jokes he’d be telling nowadays, if he were still alive:

  “There’s this Arab terrorist talking to a bunch of his buddies/‘students,’ a bunch of bombs connected to his belt, his hand on the trigger, ‘Stand back a little you guys, and pay attention, I’m only going to go through this once.’”

  I mean my mother was just as Jewish as her brother, with all her diamond watches and ankle-strap shoes and diamond earrings. I spent half my childhood at Jewish jewelers watching my mom buy jewelry.

  And she’d always be playing games that I didn’t understand until I was much older and inside Judaism myself.

  Like she’d invite Maurey and Natalie Greiman over for Easter. Maurey was my father’s lawyer. He had to have a Jewish lawyer, right? No Irish lawyers in Chicago, right?

  She’d serve ham, Natalie would be “bothered,” Maurey would calm her down, he’d serve himself a couple of huge slices of ham and say “This is the best salmon I’ve ever eaten.”

  What did I know? Ham . . . salmon . . .?

  Games, games, games, games games.

  I only had this one grandparent, my mother’s mother, and she was the greatest Jewish grandmother ever. And all the endless hours I’d spend with her I was learning how to be Jewish, wasn’t I? It wasn’t just little specifics, food or matzahs at Easter, potato pancakes at Christmas, but a whole way of looking at the world, what the Germans call Weltenshauung: worldview.

  I’d go into her apartment, after she had lost her bungalow in Cicero and moved into the apartment next to us on Cottage Grove Avenue. She’d be sitting in the dark, the middle of winter, say six o’clock in the evening, snow coming down outside, the usual brutal, punishing Chicago winter.

  No TV on, no lights, just there in her old rocking chair sitting there looking out the window.

  “Hey, Gram, what’s going on?”

  “I’ve got the blues.”

  “About what?”

  “About everything. No money, no husband, no house, hardly any friends, what’s it all about?”

  “You’ve got me, pal.”

  “True enough. I was just thinking about that, one hour thinking about what I don’t have, just now moving into what I do have . . . and you and Judy were at the top of the list.

  “How about Jake?”

  “Him too . . . and your mother, and there’s always Gertrude for laughs. Like I was over there the other day and I was nosing around, opened the front closet door, this horrible smell of mold. Never smelled anything like it before in my life. It turns out Gertrude had wet down all her freshly washed clothes with water in order to iron them . . . and then forgot about it,” starting to laugh, “a couple of weeks ago I was there when she got a run in one of her stockings and took them off and they were stiff with filth...and she told me she always wears them that way, just keeps wearing them until they fall apart . . . don’t ask me how she doesn’t stink to high heaven. But I never smell the filth, that’s the funny part. What a shanty Irisher, you’d have thought that Jake could have done better, him and all his energy. But I guess she’s good for one thing . . .”

  “What’s that?”

  “Come back in ten or fifteen years and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Laughing and laughing, the blues gone now, all it took was a little joshing around and she was back in the real world again.

  Patience, that’s what I learned from her. Stick-to-it-ive-ness.

  Like she’d be baby-sitting for a quarter an hour, this one family she especially liked, the Shapiros. They lived a couple of blocks away. She’d walk over there and when they came home they’d always drive her back to her place. Give her a couple of extra dollars.

  One night they didn’t drive her home. In the middle of winter, all icy and snowy out. She took a shortcut down the alley, fell, broke her hip. Luckily someone saw her on the ground, suffering, and called an ambulance. Otherwise she could have frozen to death.

  But she went to the hospital, got herself into a cast, somehow limped around until she healed. No big bitching out of her. You endure. That’s what life is about, suffering, enduring the suffering, keeping going.

  And once she was healed she went back to the Shapiros again.

  Continuity.

  Even with Gertrude. Always bitching about her shanty Irish sloppiness. But when she ended up living with Jake and Gertrude after they had retired out into the desert outside of Tucson, she told me on the phone one day, “Remember how I used to always bitch about Gertrude? Her and her shany Irishness. Well, no one in the world could have treated me better than the way she has treated me out here. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful . . .”

  Fairness.

  Always correcting, rethinking, revising.

  And always patient. As if pain, horror, suffering were all part of the human condition.

  So here I am at seventy, a catheter in my urethra after prostate surgery, and I suffer quietly, always believing there will be a light at the end of the tunnel, at least until I get into the final tunnel and there’s no light at all. But accepting that, too. That we are candles that burn out, period.

  Another thing I learned from my grandma was, how shall I put it: not exactly how to live poor, but to maximize what you have, never overspend, never buy anything that’s not discounted, on sale, about to be thrown out.

  My grandmother’s greatest day of the year was the day after Christmas in downtown Chicago. 50% off. 75% off.

  There was a store named Goldblatts, and that’s where we’d always head on the day after Christmas. Now, Goldblatts is a division of De Paul University, which tells you a lot about where downtown Chicago is headed.

  But in the old days, back in the thirties and forties, Goldblatts was the el cheapo version of Marshall Fields. You wanted to get a deal, that’s where you went. And when the 50% -75% off signs went up, man, we’d be down there with a vengeance. Just me and her.

  “Now’s when you buy things for next winter; at the end of summer, when the summer prices go down, then you buy for next summer . . .”

  So you were always one year behind when it came to fashion trends.

  My mother would give her money to buy stuff for me, and I’d come away with next winter’s pants and shoes and shirts, underwear, she’d always find a stack of her horrible old lady one-piece dresses and another couple of pairs of horrible old lady black leather laced-in-front square-heeled shoes, a couple of dresses for Judy and Jackie, maybe a tie or two for my father, a couple of shirts for Jake, some stockings for Gertrude, and, if she could find it, one of those horrible cone-shaped (with the conical top sliced off) old lady hats she always wore. Maybe she’d find a winter coat, a couple of scarves.

  And then we’d go eat in the Goldblatt cafeteria.

  You won’t believe this. We always ate a slice or two of bread covered with gravy; a penny a slice. A penny a slice! A glass of milk for me, a cup of coffee for her. And that was it.

  A streetcar ride from 8000 south all the way downtown, maybe forty-five minutes, then walking around all morning, penny a slice bread and gravy. Maybe we’d take a look at Marshall Fields, Carson Pirie Scott, but we wouldn’t leave the loop (as they called downtown Chicago) until late, late afternoon, totally bushed.

  The message: BARGAIN HUNTING IS AN ART, THE EQUIVALENT OF BEAR-HUNTING, DEER-HUNTING, A TREK TO THE TOP OF MOUNT EVEREST.

  When she went shopping around our neighborhood, like the A & P right across the street from our apartment
s, the same rules applied: cheap is good, expensive is evil. There’d always be a last chance bunch of shelves at the back of the store and she’d buy the most bruised and beat out bananas, meat that was way past its prime, barely (but still) edible, stiff, hard bread, a penny a loaf, bread you could always dip in gravy or coffee. Potatoes, tomatoes, oranges a little on the withered side. Canned goods that nobody else wanted. Sauerkraut and beans, chick peas.

  The irony is that she lived to ninety-four.

  The exercise didn’t hurt, walking around to stores looking for bargains and then carrying home big bags of stuff she’d bought.

  Sometimes we’d visit Jake over at the First National Bank downtown, and he’d take us to Stop and Shop and we’d have some nice kosher corned beef on Jewish rye. Like a second home for him.

  “Hey Jake, how ya doin’?”

  “OK, Sol, how about yourself?”

  “I don’t like what I’m hearing from Warsaw.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  The thirties . . . 1939, the Nazis invade Poland.

  I was a kid, what did I know. But the Jews knew . . . should have known a little better and gotten out, period.

  I mean there was a WHY behind my grandmother’s hiding her Jewishness. There was a time when to be Jewish (in the wrong country) was to be dead.

  But not in Chicago, man, why hide it there?

  I must include here the story of one particularly weird meeting. Very weird.

  During one of our shopping trips to Goldblatt’s, we’d finished our one-cent bread and gravy lunch, and suddenly my grandmother brightened up, smiled, and said, “There’s someone I want you to meet,” dragged me by the hand into the kitchen, way in the back to where there was this fat blonde woman standing washing dishes; years before automatic dishwashers.

  “Hi.”