The junction of State (NY 5) and North and South Pearl streets (NY 32) is the oldest settled area of the city (of Albany, NY), originally planned and settled in the 17th century. - Wikipedia
Background
When I was growing up, my siblings and I shared a drawer full of wires, motors, batteries, and light bulbs. This receptacle at the lower left of my brother Izzy’s desk, was known as the junk drawer (jd). In the jd were AC and DC materials sufficient to both fascinate and endanger me. Those who know me will not be surprised to learn that I electrocuted myself on several occasions. My father quite happily contributed to jd with stuff that had been torn out the walls of the large bank in downtown Albany where he worked in the maintenance department. Wikipedia describes that address as such:
The junction of State (NY 5) and North and South Pearl streets (NY 32) is the oldest settled area of the city, originally planned and settled in the 17th century.
The building was designed by Philip Hooker, who was a fairly renowned architect of stately brick buildings outside of New York City during the 19th century. Another of my Hooker favorites is The Albany City Hall. His work is a monument of the Gilded Age at the shores of the Hudson. It's a look that shaped Albany when it enjoyed status as the 10th largest city in the US, which was the case during much of the mid 1800’s.
69 State Street was a grand old building. It was consumed by an oily waft of peanuts constantly, regardless of the season. A cute little Planters Peanuts shop sat right at its foot, facing onto Pearl. When my mom and I would hang out a while in the women’s clothing store next door, waiting for my dad at end of a day, the smell of roasted nuts was positively intoxicating. I was certain that the smell of roasting nuts was better than any real peanut could ever taste.
I can only imagine what it was like to witness my dad, laced with his thick Yiddish accent—touting sensibilities wrought in Tomaszow-Mazowiecki Poland’s branch of HaShomer HaDaati—to work as a painter and interior decorator in the bowels of a building that is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He used to kid and kibbitz with the bank execs whose offices he remodeled. They let him "liberate" their assorted old typewriters, intercom speakers, and even a whole set of (admittedly old and somewhat outdated) Encyclopedia Brittanica. Our jd was always overflowing into the rest of the bedroom with the detritus of 69 State Street. In the bank workshop, my dad shared space with all kinds of wood and metal craftsmen, telecom specialists, and electricians. These are the various artisans to whom we owe most of our conveniences in a modern age.
Once as a teen while typically helping my dad fill out some form or another, we had occasion to laugh at his situation. This form was one in which he was being asked to evaluate his workplace. The form asked "overall, how would you describe your job?" We both cracked up as I suggested that the response be that he wears overalls, and that was the overall picture. As to the atmosphere in the bank? As peaceable as it usually was, it was quite apparently contentious too. Mavis Pushy (not his real name, but the surname was similar) used to taunt my dad (one of the reasons my dad despised a certain presidential patriarchate whose surname is a homophone for push). This guy at the bank was never known as Mavis—rather only “Pushy.” Referring to people by surname was very common then, by the way. It’s like a classic cliffhanger in the Six Million Dollar Man where the bad guys' chief thug is eyeballing our hero Steve from a distance, while popping some substandard store-bought peanuts into his wretched mouth. He says deviously, “we’ll get the money, but first, we gotta take care of Austin.” The music booms "dah dah daaaaaah!!!!” Good power.
“Pushy!” as dad belched his name, puffing out his cheeks, in a spittle-laced P, “pUshy, dis shtick cholera.” My dad often called people [shtik i.e. a piece of] cholera, even members of his family, when he was ticked off. I just read that one can die from cholera in one day. I think being called a cholera is worse than being called a turd. Yes, you get cholera from raw turds, but if you eat a turd would you die in one day? I think we have no idea how bad some lives are. I think modern sanitation is really wonderful, but it’s also dangerous because it makes us soft.
Soon after he died, about five years ago I started having dreams where my dad was leading me through the streets of a third-world city—some place in India, or something. We fly to a place where, just outside the airport, there are massive abandoned shells of office buildings, overgrown with ivy and vines, and shreds of gray yuck hanging from their gaping windows. Next I am trying to catch up with my dad who is walking on the street. He’s wearing a heavy herringbone trench coat, and his gate is spry but determined.
My dad both passively and actively encouraged me to learn things by accident and trial. I totally don’t do that with my kid. I’m so scared of having her hurt something or herself. I'm cautious for several reasons, partially because she loves the attention of being really hurt and her whining drives me bananas. But also because I think I might end up hating any thing or any person who hurts her, forever. Pushy threatened my dad with physical violence once. It was murmured that he once grabbed my dad by the suspenders, lifting him off the floor and threatening him. Hearing of this, I could have killed Pushy. In "Star Trek: The Next Generation" in an episode called The Survivors, there is an elderly couple who were the only survivors of a decimated planet. As it turned out the man, grief-stricken at the loss of this wife, had killed all the Husnak everywhere, the entire race, with a single thought. I wished I’d had Voldemort-like power to annihilate Pushies of all stripe when I heard that Pushy humiliated my dad. You don’t do that to people. I mean, what the heck! Why did my dad have to put up with so much garbage like that? As a kid, I dealt with a lot of antisemites on the street. However my dad’s earlier history had been a whole lot more intense than suffering the humiliation of being called a faggy boy by one of the hoodlums on Pinewood Avenue in 1975, as I had. Halevai that my dad’s experiences were ONLY so tame.
Being a survivor of the Nazi's ghetto and camp system, my dad’s interface with antisemitism wasn’t peppered with just the garden variety tough, working class neighborhood stuff. Pushy’s early childhood in Albany or whichever industrial cesspit that spewed him into existence, was probably as rough as my was my dad’s before the Nazis came into Poland. I’ll bet Pushy and his parents had it hard during the Great Depression. Pushy’s dad probably beat the tar out of him and his mom in front of him. I have to conclude this, because no self-respecting man acts like Pushy did with my dad, unless he feels constantly threatened. I mean, that’s just damaged; picking up a workmate by his suspenders. I don’t know, but I cannot imagine that my dad threatened this guy in any meaningful way to instigate that. It’s possible, given my own predilection for blurting out stupid things, that my dad said something that made Pushy feel like a moron. On the other hand, this probably wasn’t too difficult to accomplish, given my ideation of Pushy’s childhood. Only a person who is stunted in his adolescence behaves that way. I doubt anyone offered sliding-scale therapy to any of these people.
But whatever the case, my dad had spunk. He didn’t try to prevent me from hearing about that incident. He didn’t try to shield me from all the lousy behavior on the earth. He knew that fecal matter was just at the front door, if not over the treshholt itself, as he would have put it. In the same dream I alluded to earlier, I see his foot step in a puddle, as he deftly moves on down the street, under a steel gray twilight. He looks young. I am proud of him.
Dad worked with all sorts of people at the Bank. He befriended great guys, some of whom came to our home and performed astoundingly competent maintenance. Notably, there was Rick who fixed our pipes and was a general whiz with stuff. Why Rick went by first name and not surname, perhaps says something about friendship? I don’t know. Other immigrants used to call my dad “Singer.” My mom used to call one of the ladies “Likhta,” and I thought that was the woman’s proper name for years! The whole immigrant surname thing always seemed brusque. In contrast to the nice guys in my mind’s eye, when Pushy lifts my father off the concrete floor, I want magic powers that can destroy him. Pushy took another potshot at the statue that my dad had been, and my dad was beginning to tumble. But I don’t think my dad was too invested in being a statue. This whole rant is soaked with matters of behavior and hinukh. I love the mechanics of things, and of relationships.
Among the things I loved to do was take apart tape-recorders and see how they worked. I was pacified by such activity, over voluminous stretches, discovering that I could reproduce my voice in reverse by messing with the playback head. I spent endless, unsupervised epochs playing with electricity, radios, and cannibalizing things. My wife is most shocked at how unsupervised I was as a child. But I wonder, if I have impaired my child’s facilities by being too protective? I know this: during the next big disaster, say a Coronal Mass Ejection—you know, a really vengeful one—which wipes out electronics made before 1985, particularly tape recorders, I’ll be making the big bucks as a repairman, and of course my family will be safe. Come to think of it, something of a Divine scale SHOULD disable all the useless crap that’s piling up in my house. Then I’ll have an excuse to throw it out. It’s important to use whatever time we have to think about the well being of our families.
Resolve
There are usually no easy and clean solutions, but just because the task is lousy, we cannot ignore it. The mishnah in pirkei avot teaches that it is not upon me alone to complete the [veritable] task. But, the sage adds, "nor am I absolved from it [the task]." In so many words, the text says that I shouldn’t try to do everything at the expense of a decent personal life. It implies that it’s good to have labor laws that institute a sane workday for all, while we jointly build a better place to live. But in this grace of freedom and peace, I as a lucky white rab student am also granted no clemency from the prison of truth; I am in no position to slough away my responsibilities. It is on these and similar grounds that some make an urgent call for justice: that we not stand idly in the face of injustices, regardless of who is victimized by the injustice.
Does a just and civil society contribute to a world more desired by The Divine? Is Democracy truly mystical, as Dr. Aryeh Cohen would put it? It sure sounds nice to me, but is that what God wants? I don’t really know. Dr. Cohen's position presumes a particular construct of God. It is one in which we have great power. We have the power to ensure that the other is not being systematically victimized by the very same system from which we derive benefit. It sounds like a good start.
We the people perpetuate a privileged aristocracy that wields grotesque power over disproportionate masses. Is it incumbent upon us to modulate the influence of the barons, gated communities, and their aggregate new-found personhood. Could be. Here, I have a moment where I see that it’s not about antisemitism anymore. At least it’s not about antisemitism any more than it is about bad parenting. And I think a whole lot of antisemitism is a result of bad parenting.
Maybe we all need to get more accidental electric shocks as young children. But maybe too, if our kids learn together in cleaner, safer, classrooms, ones in which they’re not being rushed for time, where they are loved and respected for who they are, then candies will fall from the sky. Our kids can learn at their own pace in expensive schools, unfettered by federal education standards. They can succeed and take over the world, and inherit their portion of the 1%.
No, I would not give you false hope, on this strange and mournful day.
No comments:
Post a Comment