Degrees of Charity on 47th Street

Degrees of  Charity on 47^th Street

While the ancient rabbis speak of degrees of charity—the gift that is given openly, with a sweep of vanity, and in a loud promise to donate to such and such a fund in front of the congregation; or a published gift with no named benefactor, but still proudly made in honor of one’s family, if not quite oneself; the private donation, with an understanding of the unequal arrangement, and clearly intended to create an obligation and sense of dependency; and the gift made behind the scenes, without the recipient knowing from whom the miracle has come; and then even more holy the charity that is orchestrated in secret and so calculated that the person in need does not realize that he or she was in trouble—what they have neglected is the other side of the coin: the different ways of accepting a sacred gift. 

For this reason, let me tell you about Shmuel Bierstein.  If we didn’t know that our parents were always whispering about him, we wouldn’t have guessed.  We were too young to pick up any of the clues.  In our class, in our gang, though Shmuel lived several streets away and therefore was not a regular in our games, he was one of us—loud, silly, dirty.  Later, and I am talking years not even weeks or months, because when things happen to you when you are at most ten or eleven, you don’t have the social experience or the inner sharpness to understand—a person could tell you to your face, point out with brightly coloured crayons, with sharp pointed sticks, and you wouldn’t get the message.    So years later, it was so obvious.  He wore shabby clothes.  He didn’t have a father.  His mother never allowed people to visit in his house.  The teachers talked with a different kind of voice.  The principal would whisper at the back of the room with a lady from the Board of Education and she would take him out of class before the bell rang.  The list goes on and on.

As for Shmuel himself, if he was aware that the shoes he was wearing or the shirts he came to class in were the very ones we had worn less than a year ago, our mothers always getting us new garments as we outgrew but not outworn the old, he never showed it.  Nor did we, as it is highly unlikely any of us were aware of what we wearing on any given day, let alone what we might have put on to go to school three or six months previously.  Perhaps some of the girls in class noticed such things, as they already were clothes-conscious from the very beginning in first grade.  And whatever teachers or principal or deputy-principal may have thought about it all was like everything concerning them in the realm of mysteries way beyond our imagining.

Yet, when I come I think about it, it is likely that Shmuel did know some of all this.  I say likely because of two conversations that stand out in my memory.  Of course, as I remarked before, I hardly ever talked with him the way I did with the kids who lived on my block or who regularly came around from either 46^th or 48^th Street to play our games of stick ball or Ten Steps to Germany.  With them, we had to punctuate our sentences with punches, teasing and tickling; and words were a small part of the noises we made.  So these may have been the only conversations we ever had.  Communication was a kind of coded-dance and not a series of give-and-take propositions, questions or reactions.  Does that matter?

First, in the early spring, after the snow and ice disappeared and just as the first sprouts of grass were poking up, at a time when everyone knew it was the season to play marbles and mummbledy-peg, Shmuel asked if he could borrow a few of my iggies to start off the game, and then he lost them all to both of the Henries (one knkwn as as Hank, the other as Henry, because they had the same last names) who were the champs that year, but I was reluctant and then he started to whine and beg, saying it wasn’t fair for me not to because my family was so rich and he was going to tell his mother and she would call my mother and, boy, would I get it.  This seemed really odd.  How could we be rich when my father was always complaining about not being able to pay the bills and my mother wishing she could have a new this and a new that, and, if we were, how could he know?  I gave him three green and yellow swirly marbles that had chips. 

Second, perhaps a year or so later, in the fall, soon after school started, when all the kids in the neighbourhood were choosing up to play endless stickball games in the street, Shmuel kept not being picked.  He and Fatso Arnie were the last two, and nobody wanted either of them.  Arnie ran away crying, and everyone laughed because he was such a momma’s baby.  But Shmuel stood his ground in the middle, while everyone, now on one or the other team, stared at him.  Big Eddie and Itzie Feldenbaum, who were automatically captains because they were older and taller than anybody else, shouted at Shmuel to get out of the way so we could start to play.  When he stood there like a lump of coal—he didn’t look brave or threatening—they started to push him.  “Go home, you mamza.  You stink like a garbage pail.”  But Shmuel refused to move. 

He started to look around, and maybe I was the only one who looked back, and then he walked over to me, and with almost tears in his eyes, and in a very low voice, he said, “Why don’t you help me? “ I didn’t know what to say, but then suddenly I saw what I forgot again in an hour and didn’t remember for many years thereafter.  “Hey,” I said, turning to the rest of the guys on my team, “we may as well choose Stinko here because otherwise the other side has one more man than we do.”  That broke the impasse, I guess, because everyone agreed.  But as Shmuel came in to be with us, he came up past me and gave me a punch.  It was pretty hard but it didn’t hurt.  “That’s for you,” he said.

            If you think I answered him or paid any attention to him for the rest of the game, you would be quite wrong.  As I said, too, within a very short time the whole conversation disappeared into my unconscious memory where it stayed in some dark closet where such things usually end up.  It only came up when I was already bar mitzvahed and started to go to high school.  I went to Stuyvesant in Manhattan and I don’t know where Shmuel went. 

But one day, seemingly out of the blue, my mother said, “Do you remember Shmuel who used to be in your class in PS 164?” I nodded.  She waited a moment and then said, “His mother was very ill and passed away last week.” I didn’t know what to say, but I did start to remember some of the things I have just told you about.  Then my mother said, “What a poor boy he was.” That night, before I fell asleep, something hurt like a pin in my heart, and I started to cry.  I think the pin was really a key, and the key fit in the lock to that hidden-away closet all the way down there at the bottom of my brains, like a coal-cellar no one goes to any more after you install oil heating, and the super doesn’t have to stoke up the fire every few hours, in between taking out the piles of ashes and putting out on the street with the properly-named ashcans; and when the door was opened, a whole bunch of memories fell out and I stumbled over them and that’s why I started to cry.