Chaim Our Next-Door-Nik

Here is a story about the McCarthy Era.  The witch trials, they were called.  Phone calls in the middle of the night, that was the reality without a name.  The knock on the neighbor’s door and the insinuating questions.  Do you know so-and-so? And this was enough to lose your job, be shunned, bring on a heart attack.  The anxiety.  The fear.  In case you didn’t know, it was not such a nice time.  If you do know, so you already know what I mean.

Our next-door-nik on 47^th Street, downstairs, on the other side of the alley way, was a man called Chaim.  He told me stories from a certain book.  Its full name was called The Aspirin Age 1919-1941: The essential events of American Life in the chaotic years between the two World Wars and it was written by a lady named Isabel Leighton.  The book was true and I learned a lot about politics from it and from Chaim, too.  He taught me mostly by songs.

From him I learned to be a radical thinker and political activist.  Already I was a dirty Marxist because people told me so, like they later told me I was an incomprehensible  existentialist.  Everybody knows what I am except me because those words, with their isms, ists and what not, made no sense to me.  At eleven years old, you think a person understands!

I should have learned to be cautious and self-controlled.  But everything you can’t have, can you?  It was the time of the televised witch hunts, McCarthy and his gang, the whole House on Un-American Affairs Committee—how could there be such a thing as an un-American?—and everything like that, when everything means people start looking into each other’s business, they should find reds under the beds, fellow travelers, spies, the whole shlamozzle.  But I didn’t know that yet.  Two years later, near the time of my bar mitzvah, in June 1953, my father would have his first heart attack and his friends would be every week losing their jobs.  A reporter for the Daily News here, a teacher who is a macha in the union there, a lady who is just minding her own business that once signed a petition for peace.  And my mother, who was already sick from everything, she told me every day, she  didn’t need this on top of everything else: she had once played the piano in a concert for the Spanish Civil War, so she was all the time worrying it would come a knock on the door by a neighbor “Do you ever see strange people going in by those people over there” or maybe a phone call in the middle of the night: Pack your bags and get out of town.  All this was real.  It was scary and also a little bit exciting.

This story I am telling you, however, was from a year or two earlier, when Chaim, the person I am describing for you, sat in the window, played his guitar, sang union songs, and taught me about the workers’ struggle.  He would sing about Joe Hill and Hold the Fort.  He even told me stories from a book called The Aspirin Age, as I said already, though this was a book I didn’t remember to take out of the library and read until maybe twenty-five years later.  Ideas did not take hold of my mind quickly or directly.  It was something like ideas, but not quite.  Eventually, ok, it would be ideas, but right then it was this something else.  You want to know what?

It wasn’t so new what he told me, this Chaim the Radical.  Maybe he was a Communist or a Fellow Traveller or just a sick guy who couldn’t work and liked to strum on his guitar and play old workers’ and wobbly songs.  All the people I knew were more or less the same, activists in, sympathizers with or supporters of unions and other leftwing causes, at least in the 1930s, before I was born, and they had all, in one way or another, helped raise money for the Spanish Civil War against the rebel Franco and his fascist allies.  It was, in one way, ancient history, from before the War, which was already over and now replaced by the Police Action in Korea, and yet in another way, the very material and emotional stuff of my reality, of my life, of the things that my parents and their friends believed in and worried about.  The difference was that Chaim seemed so much younger than them and he sang about it, rather than whispering, and arguing, and weeping real tears, the more the McCarthyites and the House Un-American Affairs Committee came into their careers and ruined them. 

So anyway, it happens that one day when I come home from school, drink my chocolate milk, eat a few fresh-baked oatmeal cookies, and get ready to go next door to talk to Chaim.  Then my mother says, " Oy, what a thing happened to today you won’t believe by it."  I don’t have to ask what is.  She tells me right away.  "In the morning, I am cleaning up the kitchen, I hear on the street a siren, and then an ambulance stops in front next door, and then also a police car, with two men in blue, and everybody goes to the door downstairs over there and they knock and knock.  I listen and lean a little out of the window I should learn what is happening with all this noise and commotion.  Nu, so the men shout and Chaim’s mother, you know how sick she is all the time, she starts to shout and scram, and she even falls down, the ambulance men have to pick her up.  She doesn’t stop making a big geshrei.  Then I look, because I have to run to the front door to stand on our porch and look over to see what is what over there.  The police and the ambulance man are lifting up Chaim in a straightjacket—I think that’s what it is—and they put him in the ambulance.  Someone helps his mother up when she is quiet.  She sobs big sobs and gulps and they take her inside."  

Now I only hear part of what my mother is saying and do not always understand all the things she says, but later when I think about it, some of the details appear like in a dream, and I can tell you now what I couldn’t have said back then.  This was then and even now a big deal for me, what happened to the man next door.  The whole of the McCarthy Period makes sense if you can understand this story.

After the police car and the ambulance drove away, even before maybe, my mother saw some of the neighbour women going into the door where Chaim’s mother was taken, and so my mother goes too.  This is how she could tell me about things you couldn’t know if you were just looking out the kitchen window or standing upset on the porch and trying to figure it all out, the noise and the commotion. Everything outside happens quickly.  Inside you hear more confusion but it is different, the people listen sympathetically, and they put together details and remember what went on for the weeks, months and even years beforehand, since they know Chaim’s mother a long time, and they also know Chaim since he was a little boy. 

My mother explains to me, she extrapolates from the whole bunch of noise and activity, and she tells me, or this is what I think now what she was trying to say then.  "First of all, from a long time ago, before even Chaim was born and his father was still alive, they move into the house across the alley; and they are not such nice people, with arguing and shouts, it sometimes comes a police car to make sure no one gets hurt.  But if they are not such nice neighbors, they aren’t all that bad, almost normal like everybody else.  Then a year or two after Chaim is born, his father goes away, no one knows why, he just does, and the poor mother somehow struggles and gets by.  Maybe some people bring her a pot of soup or a piece of meat, like I do sometimes, if it seems everybody over there is not so hotsy-totsy.  The boy grows up, goes to school, so maybe he’s a little bit of a tough kid, and so the teachers have a meeting, like some of our friends who come here to have coffee and a piece of Danish most days, you know them, so this is what they tell me.  The teachers help out a little.  They collect clothes from boys who grow fast to give to him and they make a bag of lunch he should have a full stomach like the other children.  So eventually your friend Chaim finishes school, you could leave when you are fourteen back then, it was the Depression, thank God you don’t know from that personally. 

"This Chaim," she goes on, "tries to get a job.  It’s not easy back then, and he really doesn’t try.  He falls down with a bunch of shleppers and no-goodniks and they make him get into trouble.  Instead of a job that is honest he can earn money to give his mother he gets a few dollars now, a few dollars then from bad things I don’t want to mention to you.  But then two very strange things happen.  One is that Chaim gets called up into the army from the draft, but they don’t take him, and he shows his mother a letter that says he has medical problems and he should see a doctor soon to fix.  Who can afford, so he doesn’t go, and in a few months, this boy is no longer going out of the house at all.  He stays home.  The second thing that happens is that a few people come to visit him.  Everyone wonders who they are, no one knows, and soon there is a rumor they are reds and wobblies and whatever else is not good for him to meet.  Some people on our street know these visitors.  It is the war, you know, and someone goes to tell the police maybe they are spies.  It’s only a rumor, still those visitors stop going to visit by Chaim, and still he sits at home alone.  His mother is almost never seen, except maybe she goes to do a little shopping, but with what money, heaven only knows.  Soon that stops and again there is someone bringing her a pot of soup or a half loaf of bread or something else so she and Chaim can keep alive. 

"Well," she says to me,  "eventually the war is over.  Men are coming home, those who are still alive.  The street is busy and new children are born and the ones like you are growing up and starting to go to school.  So, what with all these things, people don’t pay as much attention to Chaim and his mother, and not to who may or may not visit in their house.  But then, when you start listening to his playing his guitar by the window and sometimes going in to visit, some people start top get interested in it.  Some of your friends’ mothers, while you are at school, come to me to tell me this and that, that inside Chaim’s house there are lots of books about workers and revolutions, and that sometimes he has visitors for himself from men it could be they are reds or wobblies or anarchists or who knows what.  So they tell me I should watch out and not let you get too close to this boy, but I say you are alright, too young to understand politics shmolitics, and you like to listen to stories and hear music, when you are not in school or playing on the street stickball and other games with your friends. 
"One day, not so long ago, I went over myself to talk to Chaim and find out what’s what.  You know what, I think he’s a little crazy from what he says, but not so much, and I tell him you are a good boy and not to make trouble for you.  He laughs and tells me he likes you so I shouldn’t worry.  But when I am walking out, there comes his mother, she takes me by the arm, says she wants to talk, please stay for a little cup of tea.  Well, she is worried about Chaim, his health is not so good, he doesn’t sleep enough, and cries at night, but also she tells me she is glad you talk to Chaim and listen by him a little, he has no other friends, and she thanks me."

My mother stops for a while.  She goes to get supper ready for my father.  Then she comes back, I have been reading a book about the Lone Ranger at Haunted Gulch. 
"Please listen to me," she says, "there are people on this street (may they suffer for a long time) who are not very good people, they always want to make troubles, and they make up stories about your friend Chaim, I am afraid what will happen.  And you see, this morning while you are school, it happens, with the ambulance and the police and the straightjacket and all the crying and upset for Chaim’s mother."
She pauses for a little and looks me straight in the eye, it is frightening.
"Please answer me just this question and then you can go out to play with your friends.  Did Chaim ever say anything bad to you or try to touch you you didn’t feel good about it.  I shook my head."
 I wasn’t sure what she meant but I always felt good about Chaim even though I didn’t know what his stories or his songs were about.  If it’s ok it’s ok, she said.  Now go play ball with the boys.  Only be in by six o’clock we have dinner, a nice chicken soup and some boiled brisket, you like it."  

Well, she never mentioned Chaim ever again, and I really didn’t think of him for many years, until years and years later when I was almost eighteen and  I saw The Aspirin Age in the library and took it home to read.  Eventually over time I learned about Joe McCarthy and his committee and about the dirty tricks played on people who were a little but pink or red or just a little bit crazy, and so I came to understand what history was all about.