AMELIA EARHART IS LOST OVER THE PACIFIC, 1937 * Sundaes on Sundays 2:00. THE BIKINI DEBUT IN PARIS, 1946 * MARC CHAGALL BORN, 1887 Morning Stretch BR 10:30 Mind Boosters BR * MILTON BERLE BORN, 1908 * Caribbean Party w/Gary Lovett * JOHN DILLINGER KILLED BY THE FBI IN CHICAGO, 1934 * Spanish for Beginners BR 4:00 Poker Pals GR 2:00 JFK JR. CRASHES OFF MARTHA’S VINEYARD, 1999 Shabbos Service 10:30 Schmooze & News BR
Out on the brick terrace, I sat down on one of the striped-cushioned chairs and tilted my head back to drink in the sun. It wasn’t long before my uncle Sidney emerged, sockless in espadrilles, with an issue of The Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm. He was moving more stiffly than I remembered. “Julian, my boy, good to see you! Sit back down.”
“How’s the colon, Uncle Sid?” I said.
“Very good. Doctor says I have the longest colon he’s ever seen in a man my size. A spool of kishkes a mile long. Apparently, I’ve got plenty more to snip if the day comes again.”
He was letting me off the hook. I felt terrible for not coming to see him sooner. Despite the easygoing way he managed to speak about it, the physical signs of his recent surgery and chemo were difficult to disguise. His lightweight khakis hid the sticks of his legs well enough, but his polo shirt couldn’t do the same for his thin arms and wrists, his sharply protruding shoulders. My mother’s brother Harry had passed away before we’d arrived in America; his children now lived in California. Sidney was the only one who remained who still remembered Mama.
“So you’re feeling good?” I said.
“That’s a different question.”
“Looks like they keep you busy as a cruise line here. Spanish lessons. Board games.”
“I skip all that kindergarten stuff.”
“Poker your game?”
“Gin. I’ll play a hand with anyone. What do you want for lunch?” he said when a member of the staff appeared. “Get him a cup of coffee, Deborah,” Sidney instructed. “With cream, and some herring. You like herring? Good. An egg-white omelet for me, and a coffee, black.”
The scrub-attired Deborah smiled and left with our unopened menus.
“How’s Judy?” I said.
“My daughter and her husband are in Myanmar. Last spring it was Turkey. Each year a more exotic destination. I don’t think middle New Jersey is far enough away for them to visit. But you know what they got here now?” he said, almost perking up. “Computer tutors! Twice a week, they teach us how to email our grandchildren, like nobody can pick up a telephone anymore. But me—I’ve started doing my stock trading on the computer now—just a bissele.”
“I didn’t know you still played the market.”
“I don’t play. I read the papers, I look at the numbers, and I only listen to myself.” Talking about stocks always got Sidney animated. “Last week,” he rushed to add, “my broker called, said he had a tip for me. I told him, ‘Jeff, you’ve known me for twenty years. You know my name and you know where I live. The day you start giving me advice on trading is the day you’re no longer my broker.’?”
I’d loved Sid’s disarmingly gruff manner since the first time I’d met my uncle, back in Moscow in 1959. I was fifteen; he, thirty-nine, a dapper vision in a gray flannel suit, brimmed hat, shiny black wingtips, striding to greet my mother and me in Sokolniki Park. As an executive at Dow, he’d managed to score himself a visa that year as a delegate to the Moscow World Exhibition, an enormous trade show intended as a technological pissing contest between Nixon and Khrushchev. My first memory of him is still engraved in the Kodak colors of that day, along with all the panoramas of American houses and automobiles, the “model kitchens” and washer-dryers of tomorrow and the other marvels of domestic technology meant to teach us Soviets about the humanity of our rivals. I saw him again twenty years later, at JFK Airport, upon our arrival in America. It was Sidney who, along with his now departed wife, Stella, had welcomed my family that first cold evening in New York, with his reassuring warning that the United States was just a labor colony with better food. And Sidney who, while giving Lucya and me our first nighttime car tour of luxury Manhattan, told me, “You’ll do all right here, Julian, as long as you don’t let envy clog up all your senses.” We’d found a mutual language right away; all the things I’d never had in common with my mother, I finally had with Sidney. Like me, he was no justice crusader. After he’d gotten out of the army, he’d taken his GI money and picked up a master’s in chemical engineering at Northwestern, then spent the next forty years pragmatically embracing the American Dream his sister had turned her back on.
“It’s good to trust only yourself. I guess that’s why you haven’t lost money,” I said to him now.
“Oh sure, I’ve lost. Never enough to break the bank. I’m not a gambler. I grew up during the Depression, when folks was tossing themselves off buildings.”
“So did Florence,” I said. “I guess it taught her a different lesson.”
Sidney took a moment to think and finally shrugged. “I was a kid. Florie, she was older. Folks who lived through that time, they were like survivors of a war. And your mother was always very sensitive to all the injustices. She’d get into fights at the dinner table with our father every night. At the Sabbath dinner, we all had to agree not to talk about politics.”
“What would you talk about?”
“Well, I remember they once argued about the Harlan County miners who were getting beat up by the police for striking. Dad said, ‘Nobody got jobs nowadays, and those ones are striking!’ Well, Florie, she was quick, she said, ‘They starve while they work, they might as well strike while they starve!’ Every night it was something like that.”
“Sounds like a slogan she probably heard,” I said.
“Yeah, maybe,” Sidney said charitably. “But she believed it. Once, she came home all bruised up after some demonstration. She claimed she struck a policeman who’d grabbed her. Clocked him with her pocketbook. We were just happy she didn’t land herself in jail.”
“Speaking of the police, Uncle Sid,” I said, “I was wondering if she ever had any run-ins with the police in Russia. I mean the secret police. They would have kept tabs on American expats.”
“What makes you wonder about that?” Sidney asked, a groove of disapproval forming between his brows.
“Just curious. Did she ever mention anything to you about that?”
“You mean when they tossed her in that dungeon?”
“Or…before that.” I hesitated. “Did she ever say anything about getting harassed by the NKVD, or, I don’t know…” I wanted to say “recruited,” but couldn’t get my lips to form the word. “…intimidated,” I uttered at last.
Again Sidney’s mouth got that sewn-up look of displeasure. “No, no, no. Florie wasn’t scared of anything,” he said.