A Knock on the Door

KNOCK AT THE DOOR

In my family there are four stories that are told about a knock at the door. That is how I identify them, but that's not necessarily the main thing about the narratives or the events that lie behind or inside them, and also there may be other things more important about doors in other stories by other people. Later you can decide for yourself.  If you don’t bother, well, that’s not my business, is it?

The first story is about my Great Uncle Jake.[1] It happened in New York City at the beginning of the past century, at the time of the strikes by the shirt-waist makers; you know, when the women were starting to agitate against the sweat shops and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union was first organized. Uncle Jake later wrote a history of all that. He even had a PT boat named after him in World War II.[2] Apparently you could still see it in mothballs way up the Hudson River at the Tappen Zee for years afterwards, into the 1950s.       So they said. I never saw it though. Nor have I been able to get hold of Uncle Jake's history of the union.[3]  It was written in Yiddish, and I've been preparing to find it for a long time; that is, you know, teaching myself to read Yiddish. My parents spoke a bit of what they still called “der djargon”, not too much; they were breaking away, and I continued the process, unconsciously mostly, for a long time, until I entered middle age. Having been told I had barely six months to live because of a cancer, I surprised my wife by announcing my intention to study Yiddish.[4] That's another story, isn't it? No time now. We must see what happened the first time there was a knock on the door.

"You answer it," said Uncle Jake. He must have been dressing, getting ready to go out to work. The strikes were probably on then. So my aunt went to the door.

"Sha, sha, sha," she kept murmuring, half to herself, half to whomever it was out there making such a racket, pounding and pounding away.

There wasn't a peek hole; no such luxuries in their cold water flat near Orchard Street on the East Side. Nor a chain you could sling over to allow partial and  saying in a half whisper: "So who is and what for?"

 "Mr. Jake Rosenberg" the door-pounder said, pushing through at the same time, my aunt's precautions proving useless against the combined weight of at least six huge and hefty characters, Irishmen she called them later, so that the story sometimes used an Irish lilt as part of its vitality and specificity.

The voice was neither identifying itself nor really asking a question; it was an accusation. To be Jacob Rosenberg and a union organizer was a crime against American society.[5] The group at the door was, so everyone always says, Pinkerton men, hired by the bosses, and when they pushed their way in they filled the whole kitchen with their threatening presence and the lingering echo of their pounding and the shrill, nasal tones of their statement of Uncle Jake's name. Who, of course, very quickly rushed into the room from the bedroom closet where he had gone to hide, his stiff white collar not yet fixed, his red suspenders dangling down over his shoes.  It was not that he was afraid; he reacted instinctively, as Jews had learned to do during the pogroms in Eastern Europe.  The pattern was to first run, then hide, and then face up to the mob.

"Jake Rosenberg?" the biggest of the burly Pinkerton men repeated, this time less accusingly than inquiringly, almost politely the story sometimes has it, as though a special irony had to be inserted into the narrative at this point for a kind of dramatic effect.

Uncle Jake looked straight at the man, but didn't walk up to him as he might have if there were his comrades or lonsmen around, instead of just his wife, already cowering in the next room with the children; sometimes he hung back, hesitated, or even started to ease himself out of the room. These were not people you could bribe or intimidate with a steady gaze.  They were just following orders…eagerly.

Anyway, according to the normalized version,[6] he always said, "Me?" and at that point, with no transitionary remarks, no stage directions, the only one of the half dozen private detectives in the kitchen who was allowed to speak, pulled out a big black gun, and, Bang! shot him right in the stomach.

The story ends.[7]

Everyone in the family understood what happened next: that while my aunt fell screaming over Jake's body, the blood from his wound staining her long white apron, the children raced in from various hiding places in the tiny flat, neighbors started to peer in, eyes, noses, or whole heads cautiously poking through the open door; and then, it was surmised, that very quietly, orderly, and certainly with no remorse, the six huge Pinkerton men filed out—out of the kitchen, into the street,  and out of the oral narrative. They returned to the anonymity of public history and they remain there in written texts, newspapers and formal histories of the American Labour Movement.

Obviously a doctor was also called but probably not a real medical doctor with qualification, as no one in the walk-up cold-water tenement could afford such a luxury, and eventually my great Uncle Jake recovered sufficiently and went on to make a bigger name for himself in the history of the ILGWU.[8] No longer able to organize on the streets, mobilize strikers, or other front-line actions, he sat in the office at a desk and learned to use the telephone.  By the 1920s and 1930s  in the big Labor Day parades, his name was on one of the banners the workers carried. Maybe so. I'd like to believe that, too, like all the rest of the story.[9]

* * *

Before I tell you the next story, I want to give you a little bit of my own.[10] This happened to me and is not so much my personal story as my participation in history. You know what the difference is? No, well, you will by the time you've finished with all this. The important thing is that what follows is my own reporting, and I am in control of the whole narrative, or at least so much as is possible because of what is true in it.[11]

Where was I? I was sitting at home in this new country a few years back, maybe twenty-five years.[12] Nobody else was home, they assure me, though I am pretty sure they were. They are my wife and children and they are assuredly part of the story, but, OK, so they don't remember. To me it is so important that I remember, while for them it was not a major incident, even though I've told it over and over, each time the details becoming clearer and clearer to me. Not that it's a so significant factor in my life. Not like the major changes and moves that brought me here to Hamilton and to what I am now—whatever that is. Of course not, as you can tell; just one of those nice episodes you like to remember because they are, well, so nicely memorable. Anyway, as such a story must, it begins with a knocking at the door.

"I'll get it," I said, rising energetically from the big comfortable chair I was sitting in, just getting bored enough with a book to feel the need for some exercise and some diversion. My wife was in the kitchen, the kids playing around in their cute little bedrooms, and it was relatively quiet; hence, as you can imagine, the length I had been able just to sit and read, and the absence of any desperation—what I usually felt in those days, so much work to do and so little quiet un-tense time to do it in.

On the doorstep were three young men. Immediately identified as Mormons by their short, slicked down hair, their white short-sleeved shirts and ties, and their chubby, angelic smiles, they looked expectantly at me.

"Yes?" I enquired.

The wrong thing to say, of course, because it was what they had rehearsed door-answers to say, and had their little well-planned spiel all ready to go. So I quickly fell to my knees, reached my two arms up to heaven, in a gesture of great exaltation and piety, and exclaimed: "Oh, a blessed revelation!"

I could see their faces beginning to drop and go white, so continued:

"Last night I had a vision. A vision of three angels, like those who visited my Father Abraham. Blessed are those who visit! Now, oh white goddess, creatrix of the universe, they have really come!"

Eyeballs spinning, mouths twisted in horror, the three angels were backing off, coughing and sputtering apologies.

"No, my beloved friends, come in, come in. We must pray together. Thank the eternal Leukothoe for this miracle."

I reached out, grabbed the chubbiest Mormon by the hand, and dragged him towards me, over the door sill, into the house. The others, like iron filings trailing a magnet, followed.

For the next ten or fifteen minutes it was a regular tug-of-war, they trying to bring the conversation around to Moroni, Mosaich, and his bizarre crew, and me dragging them towards the slough of pseudo-Robert Graves and crypto-James Frazer. My son and daughter peeked around the well-painted doorways,[13] we were making such a racket around the kitchen table. My wife entered, opened her mouth to say a word something like “Coffee”, but when she saw what was going on she beat a hasty retreat.

She, naturally doesn't agree, claiming that she did offer coffee, was rudely rebuffed by the chubbiest Mormon, and only then retreated to the laundry-room. Her family background gave her no impetus to hobnob with angelic beings.[14]

I don't know how it happened then, but somehow or other, before my game could be properly terminated and the unwanted heavenly visitors turned out of doors, they were down on their knees, their arms extended skywards, and their shrill voices aimed in a similar direction; all the while I tried to call them back to a sense of decent ironic attention. But it was no use; their enthusiastic gabbling went on and on, their faces redder and more puffy by the moment, so that my children were no longer wide-­eyed masks looped around the entranceway, but trembling, frightened masses of tears huddled under their beds yearning to breathe free. And my wife—It was time she took over, and so take over she did: an officious voice, a firm hand, and a determined look, and, wonderful to tell! out went one Mormon after another, plink, plunk, plink, right out the door, leaving me shamefaced and no little bit exhausted by the ordeal.

"You see," she had no reason to tell me then, but loved to repeat afterwards, "that's where your door-answering manner gets you."

I wanted to say, “And what about the tradition of confronting door-knocking in my family?  It is very dangerous, you know, and you have to meet fire with fire, or preclude violence by an act of holy insanity.” 

But instead I kept my mouth shut.

Well, obviously, with my background I would.   

***

Anyway and anyhow, I'd better go back to the other kind of family stories. It is much safer and much less embarrassing. A story from before the turn of the century. Uncles and aunts of my father, cousins whose names I don't know, all young then, but old beyond my imagining when I heard the narrative, and now, alas, beyond questioning, their names, their faces, their very histories forgotten except in this one story. They had only recently arrived in the Golden Land of America as green as greenhorns could be. Maybe it was in the 1880s or the 1890s, a time of great troubles in The Pale, in Odessa, in Czeronowitz, those pogrom-ridden places from which they would have come over, frightened, naive, utterly bewildered. It was early July, hot, steamy in crowded and tiny cold-water flats on the East Side of Manhattan where they were placed by the Amerikaners already there in the New Promised Land a handful of months or even a year or two before them. Familiar faces but still part of the frighteningly new environment. Men without beards, women without wigs.  Kina hura!

And then it happens.  A knock on the door. A bundle of whispers, a shuffling of feet, strange sighs and groans.

The knock again more insistent. Again and again, desperately.

Outside there was a slight breeze blowing acrid wisps of smoke about, and children scurrying by in gleeful wonder as crackers exploded, sparklers sizzling in their hands. It was early evening, still very light, and red white and blue flags snapped in the hints of wind.

The knock came again. Pound, pound, pound. No one answered but there were muffled sounds within, sobs and hushings—sha sha sha. A voice interrupted the pounding and it peeled away layer upon layer of protection covering the heavy frame door. The speech itself was incomprehensible but the rhythms of the voice sounded familiar. The intonations wriggled through the whorling grains of wood and began to touch one, then another of the shivering bodies hiding under the bed. A word sneaked through the heavy wooden door, crawled around the wide checkered linoleum-covered floor, reaching out, touching an ear sweating with heat and despair: "Tanta?"

Could it be?

One of the bodies climbed out from under the bed, tiptoed to the door and whispered into the tiny keyhole: "Tevya?"

There was another knock, a silence, and then a voice asked: "So who else?"

A futile gesture was made at the door and then the frightened body tiptoed back to the bed, stuck a hand underneath to a waxen figure cowering and returned with a key. It shook as it entered the lock and awkwardly turned.

Two worried-looking young Americans stared at the greenhorns, an aunt they had met only the day before, and other vaguely familiar heads sliding out from under the bed. They smiled and she looked sheepish and confused. She asked them in Yiddish how they have dared to venture out on such a terrible night.

"Terrible night?" they exclaimed.

"It's a holiday."

An uncle and three frightened children by them hovered over the woman, each of their faces white and wet with the ordeal.

"An Amerikaner holiday?  They have holidays here?"

The young people smiled,

"Yes. Didn't you see the flags, the parade, the big crowds?"

Of course, they did. That is what convinced them, and then all the shooting, "Phtui! we should have known too in America they have from pogroms.  What else?"

As usual the story ends there, the punch line supposedly sufficing to explain everything else, how everyone laughed, and how the greenhorns subsequently went on to become good upstanding citizens, mildly prosperous, their children all going to university and becoming those mysteriously present background characters, now nameless and faceless, to my childhood, doctors, lawyers, dentists, teachers, business people, manufacturers.   Even their children are strangers to me since I went on to cross other oceans and become a different kind of stranger in a land stranger than they could ever have imagined.

***

So I have one last little personal anecdote to report, again a minor matter, an incident in the life I lead here, so far away from anything real or important, in the life of exile I have constructed for myself, or perhaps allowed to be built up around me in a series of mistakes it would be too sad and frustrating to talk about.[15]

We were in our big old house by the bridge, high about the Waikato River, resting on what had been a British redoubt in the Land Wars of the 1860s. The children were a bit older then, and many of my so-called literary ventures launched on their trajectory to oblivion. It was very early in the morning, perhaps just before seven, as I was already wandering around in semi-dress listening to the morning news and preparing to sit down to breakfast.

There was a knock at the door.[16]

Time and space began their transformation into the narrative of family history. I opened it to see a young Maori with a sheepish grin on his face. He wore a leather jacket, had a small pack on his back, and generally looked like a freezing worker or gang member; all my prejudices were hard at work. But I managed to say, "Yes, can I help you?"

My wife, came from the kitchen and tightening her dressing-gown around herself, leaned against me. She smiled broadly, as only she can, to help the youth say the words he wanted to.                   

"Is this where," he asked, "the magazine is?"           

I was a bit further off balance, and my wife stepped in front, named the little literary journal I was then editing. The name registered a wave of relief over the young Maori's face, though most of his muscles were still nervously taut.

We invited him over the doorsill. He eased a little more. I introduced myself and my wife, and returned to my opening gambit, "Can I help you?" Then he mumbled his name. It took a few seconds to register, and I then said, “It's him,” and my wife recognized the name, too.[17]

"Come in," we both said, this time motioning towards the kitchen. "Let's have breakfast."

He said no several times but came in anyway and managed to chew a little of the food we put before him.  During breakfast he explained how he had actually arrived the night before, hitchhiking from the south, where he had been working in the freezing works, now heading north, "to Cape Reinga, to camp out", and find himself, his Maori identity. He had been afraid to knock on our door in the dark, so spent the night in the bus shelter across the road, and come to us only when he saw lights go on and some movement in our house. We chided him for his hesitations and made him swear he would knock as soon as he arrived next time. Any time.

Then he was gone. Like a spirit in the morning mist. From time to time we received little notes in the mail and occasionally he would drop in. Gradually his poems and then his stories started to appear, sometimes because I helped him re-write his rambling and unfocused narratives and published them, sometimes because he got up the nerve to send them to other editors. Soon he had books and became a leading figure in the literary world of this little country. He eventually married, had a child, lived for a long time hand to mouth, letting me know obliquely and then I would send little gifts for the child or money to help pay the rent. Dollars were slipped into baby booties and little notes to build his ego. Over the years we learned more about him and his background, but the image that will always remain is of that day when he knocked on our door early on chilly morning.

A few years later, as fame began to wrap around him like a feather-cloak, and he was interviewed in the press and on the radio, he would always talk about how hard it was for him, how the Pakeha literary establishment would not accept a Maori writer—a real, true Maori, not an educated, urbanized bloke—and that no one ever helped him when he was down and out, when he and his new little family struggled, and he would not have made it had he not gotten in touch with his ancestors and the spirits that hovered over him.

***

When all is said and done (nebech) and you look back over a whole life time—or as much as we are allowed—your own and that which you have inherited: what you have—what have you really got, I ask you? Nothing but memories. Not even that. Maybe a few images of memories you can't even put together properly. And that's life!  Opportunity knocks, to be sure, but she does not look like what you expect, does not offer all that she could, and you keep playing games in the hope that maybe you might win.

NOTES

---

[1] This was not necessarily his real name.  Historical documents and photographs in contemporary newspapers suggest otherwise, but I am telling you what I remember and in the terms of my memory, and that for me is the most important thing.  Later information corrects this name to Abraham Rosenberg, and there are also doubts about the family name Rosenberg—it may have been Czacza or Czarky or something like that.  Because I wrote this a very long time ago, I leave the name “Jake” to mark the degree to which the story is fiction and not memory.

[2]Now we know that it was a mine-sweeper, and it has long since been scuttled.  But this memory took shape in my mind a half century ago just after the key members of my family started to die, leaving me alone to make sense of what I could recall.  Two generations later, some young children of cousins, interested in genealogy, began to compile lists, gather official documents, and treat the whole matter systematically.  I wish them luck.

[3] Unfortunately, when I did locate a copy of the book, I was too ill and tried to concentrate my efforts and it lies somewhere in one of the boxes I do not have the emotional fortitude to open and sort out. 

[4] Time flies.  Now I look back another quarter of a century, through what might have been a heart attack and then a small stroke, then a kind of migraine, but none of these illnesses have been properly diagnosed, and my future as uncertain as ever.  In these bouts of vertigo and amnesia, does the difference between memory and fiction matter any more?

[5] Someone once pointed out similarities between this set of events and characters and the opening chapters of Franz Kafka’s The Trial.  Maybe.  But for me the details do not so much prove anything as much as that my uncle and Kafka’s K were victims of the same kind of bureaucratic society.

[6] If you tell a story many times, you smooth it out.  If none of the listeners know any better because they are too young and have no experience in the world, and also you are their father, they accept what you say, and you also by this method convince yourself it is true.  Not a complete conviction, as these notes, added from year to year, as the fancy strikes me.

[7] By “the story” I mean not just the fragmentary memory I have to elaborate, knowing in part that I am doing so, but the emotional impact it made on me as a child when I first learned it, and the mythical part it played in the family history I tried to pass on to my own son and daughter.  They are grown up now, and there is a granddaughter well into her twenties already.  The past grows dimmer while the story becomes more solidly located in literature, even if a poorly faded relation.

[8] That is, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.  I have since then read a short newspaper account of this event.  Nothing much: a middle-aged union official was shot by intruders, suspected of being in the pay of industrialists.  The victim was taken to hospital and is expected to live.  Other historical books add that Abraham Rosenberg lived another twenty-five years, although he had to give up his active leadership role in the ILGWU, and it was his retirement—and suggestion of who should be his successor—that changed American Labour history.  The photos of him in those books matched exactly those passed on in the family; so we are talking about the same man, but, as I have said, the trajectory of history and the architectonics of the fiction diverge more than ever.

[9] There are public statements in the press to prove that all these acts on the part of the union to commemorate his role in their founding are true.  The trouble is that the narrative constructed from what is public and official does not feel like a real story about my family.  On the other hand, since I never met the man, what do I know?

[10] If you are attentive, you will notice that the word-choice, the rhythms of speech, and the point of view change now.  My attempt is to try to reproduce the sounds and so the emotions, as well as the cultural ambience of the past; often to do this, not only do I exaggerate, but I have to make up things that were never in my experience or memory.

[11] Here is the first and original note that was once part of the story.  Now it is added for a bit of colour in itself : “But I can assure you the Uncle Jake story is true too. Pinky swear! And so where would that leave all the rest?”

[12] To show that this could have been a completely separate story but isn’t because time dissolves boundaries within fiction as well as memory,  Here is the note I put in about twenty years ago: “Already now it is closer to forty years and the new country is none other than New Zealand.”  Thus 20 + 20 = forty years ago.  Surely enough time for a narrative to mellow, mature, go a little soft at the centre and—you know the rest.

[13] So see, they must have been home to see this show.  You will really have to ask them if they remember, and if they agree on any of this, if they do.  That might settle the historical part of the argument, but not force me to change my memory, or to re-write the story.

[14] When this story was first put together with the other ones, a note was introduced to say: “She was born into a Protestant non-denominational Evangelical Christian family from southern Missouri.  Need I say more?”  Now it is up to my wife to speak, for me to withdraw my own comments and condescending question.  Yet the integrity of this document requires that I include embarrassing commentaries.

[15] Now although I have lived in New Zealand for close to a half century, not only do I never feel at home here, I understand it less and less.—And there is nothing to add or change about this comment.

[16] Of course, this is what these stories are all about.  This is the glue that holds them all together.

[17] Today, he is a well-known writer, playwright, actor and personality.  Or rather, that is what he became, but now—we are talking almost forty years on—he is part of the forgotten generation, the almost great writers of the Maori Renaissance.  Well, “today” has elapsed forward a quarter of a century or more, and maybe he is no longer as well known as he once was, though probably he has become a permanent feature of anthologies.  That I don’t know means nothing.  My own contribution to the literary history of this country may be faded into nothing but an occasional footnote on some quite irrelevant accident of having edited a little journal or written a brief review in a newspaper or magazine.