Fourth Street East: A Novel of How It Was

by Jerome Weidman, Alistair Cooke (Introduction)

Overview

A New York Times–bestselling author's poignant novel of a boy's coming of age on Manhattan's Lower East Side in the 1920s.
 
When Benny Kramer's father came to the United States, he was hungry, broke, and ignorant. Handed a banana and told it was "American food," he scarfed it down, peel and all. By the time he died, he was no richer, but much wiser, and everything he learned he imparted to his son. Growing up on New York's Lower East Side between the wars, Benny's life was just as chaotic as his neighborhood.
 
How many young boys have seen a man decapitated by a horse? How many know blacksmiths who got tangled up in a multiple homicide? How many win an elocution contest, only to find out it was rigged by the mob? For Benny, these are everyday events, and he remembers them with the biting wit that made Jerome Weidman one of the most beloved novelists of his day.
 
This ebook features a foreword by Alistair Cooke.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781480410725
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	03/26/2013
Series:	The Benny Kramer Novels , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jerome Weidman (1913–1998) was an American novelist and playwright. Born in New York's Lower East Side, he began selling short fiction at the age of seventeen to magazines such as Story,the American Mercury, and the New Yorker; the latter published twenty-three of his short works between 1936 and 1946. Weidman's first novel, I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1937), made him a national sensation. A story of greed in Manhattan's infamous garment district, it was as controversial as it was popular. Weidman went on to write more than twenty novels, including Fourth Street East (1970), Last Respects (1971), and What's in It for Me? (1938), a sequel to his hit debut novel. In 1959, he co-wrote the musical Fiorello!, about New York's most famous mayor, which won a Pulitzer Prize and a New York Drama Critics Circle award. Weidman continued publishing fiction until late in his life, and died in New York. 
Story,the American Mercury, and the New Yorker; the latter published twenty-three of his short works between 1936 and 1946. Weidman’s first novel, I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1937), made him a national sensation. A story of greed in Manhattan’s infamous garment district, it was as controversial as it was popular. Weidman went on to write more than twenty novels, including Fourth Street East (1970), Last Respects (1971), and What’s in It for Me? (1938), a sequel to his hit debut novel. In 1959, he co-wrote the musical Fiorello!, about New York’s most famous mayor, which won a Pulitzer Prize and a New York Drama Critics Circle award. Weidman continued publishing fiction until late in his life, and died in New York. 
Letter from America radio appearances on the BBC. Cooke was also beloved as the host of PBS’s  Masterpiece Theatre for twenty-one years. He wrote many books, both collections of his Letters from America and other projects. After his death, the Fulbright Alistair Cooke Award in Journalism was established to support students from the United Kingdom seeking to study in the United States, and vice versa.

Read an Excerpt

Fourth Street East

A Novel Of How It Was

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By Jerome Weidman

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1970 Jerome Weidman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-1072-5

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CHAPTER 1

The Head Of The Family

One thing I have learned. The only people who ever get rich on compound interest are bankers. The rest of us have to figure out a quicker way to do it. My father never did.

There are those who say my father never figured out anything. He was certainly not a brilliant man. I have heard him called stupid. Perhaps he was. If so, he was decent and stupid. I found myself thinking about this on a Sunday morning two weeks ago. That was the day they buried him.

Forty-eight hours earlier, after finishing his breakfast, my father dropped dead of a heart attack. Dropped is the literally accurate word. My mother, who was facing him across the table, says he stood up, then fell down. There was no noticeable pause between these two abrupt movements. The doctor tells me death was so sudden that he is certain my father could not have had a moment of pain. I hope the doctor is right. My father deserved that. He had just passed his eighty-second birthday. To my knowledge, not one of those eighty-two was ever celebrated.

Of the first thirty, I know only what I have heard. I was born when my father was twenty-eight, and during my first two or three years I seem to have been aware of only one parent: my mother. This is not surprising. Nobody ever called her stupid.

During my third or fourth year my mind began to record the impression that there was a third person around the house. Years later, long after I had accepted the fact that I lived with two adults, I began to hear things about my father's early years.

I heard them from relatives who came to call, usually on my mother. From neighbors who dropped in, always to see my mother. From shopkeepers in the neighborhood to whom I was sent, by my mother, for the breakfast rolls, or the saltpeter she needed for putting up a new batch of corned beef. None of these things I heard was said directly to me. They were scraps of sound that passed over my head. Some were accompanied by laughter. I did not realize then that to many of our relatives my father was a joke. Some of these sounds, especially the ones I heard in Deutsch's grocery or Mr. Lesser's drug store, had an edge that made for uncomfortable listening. I did not realize then that to many of our neighbors my father was an object of contempt.

Some of these scraps of sound vanished after they passed over my head. I cannot remember what they contained. Many stuck with me. I was unaware of this. They kept piling up without my knowledge, like bits of cigarette tobacco in the corners of a pocket. Sunday morning, two weeks ago, standing beside a freshly dug grave, the accumulated scraps of almost half a century suddenly began to fall into a pattern. Now that he was dead, I could see my father clearly.

Joseph Tadeus Isaac Kramer was born in either 1885 or 1886. The uncertainty about the date is due to the fact that neither my father nor I was ever able to locate his birth certificate. He did not recall that it was the practice to keep such records in the corner of Europe where he was born. It is possible that his birth was never officially recorded anywhere.

On his U.S. citizenship papers, however, which bear the date 1914, the year of his birth is given as 1886. Even if my father, pressed by the authorities to help them fill in a blank space on a form, had given them no more than a guess based on his best recollection, the chances are that such a guess would have been fairly accurate in 1914, when my father felt he was only twenty-nine years old. My mother felt differently.

There was no doubt about the year of her birth. The receipt for the steerage passage in the Dutch ship that had brought her to this country indicates clearly that Anna Zwirn was born in 1885. Thus, if my father's 1914 guess about the year of his birth was correct, Joseph Tadeus Isaac Kramer was one year younger than his wife. My mother did not like that.

Another thing she did not like was the complexity of my father's family tree.

His father had owned and operated a roadside inn near a town called Woloshonowa in either Austria or Poland. The uncertainty was irritating but understandable. The boundary line between the two countries at this point was changed frequently, not always as a result of the outcome of a war. My father's father—I find it difficult to think of him as my grandfather—was a prosperous man. His inn was on one of the tributary roads that fed the main highway to Warsaw.

My father was the fourth of seven children, all boys. None of them received any formal education. Perhaps there were no schools in the area. Perhaps my father's father did not believe in formal education. None of the scraps of talk that passed over my head when I was a child ever touched on this subject.

My father and his brothers worked in the fields that surrounded the inn, and while the passengers refreshed themselves, helped change the horses of the coaches that stopped on the way to and from Warsaw. I recall nothing about my father's feeling for farm labor, but I have a distinct impression that he liked working with the horses. This may be the reason why, when he was conscripted and went off at eighteen to serve for three years in the armies of Emperor Franz Josef, my father was assigned to the cavalry. I used to think this sounded romantic, but I doubt that it was. My father's services to the Austrian cavalry consisted of currying horses and cleaning stables. My feeling persists, however, that he enjoyed the work.

While he was away from home, going through his military service, my father's mother died. The only hard fact I can remember having heard about her deals with her death. One day, while carrying a tray of drinks out to the passengers in a coach that had stopped in the courtyard of the inn, she tripped and fell. Her head struck a stone. She was carried to her bed. Whether there were no doctors in the area, or whether my father's father felt about the medical profession the way he felt about formal schooling, I don't know. All I know is that my father's mother lay in a coma for four days. Then she died. When my father came home from the army at twenty-one, he discovered that his father had remarried. My father's stepmother was nineteen.

There is some confusion in my mind about the climate of this second marriage. In the scraps of talk that passed over my head there were, I see now, many variations of the traditional jokes about the old husband and the young wife. Just how old my father's father was, I don't know. However, when my father came home from the army at the age of twenty-one, the oldest of his six brothers was twenty-nine. None was married. My father went back to work beside them in the stables and in the fields.

Why he did not remain with his family very long after his army service is not clear. My casual efforts to get information out of my relatives were not rewarding. Again, all I have is an impression. It tells me that none of these adults felt it was proper to satisfy a boy's idle curiosity with facts that, in their opinion, he was too young to hear. One of the facts I did hear was imbedded in somebody's indiscreet observation—hurriedly stifled by somebody else's sharply spoken Shveig!—that of my father's father's seven sons, the new young wife liked my father best.

Perhaps she liked him too much. In any case, a few months after he came home from the army, my father left the inn near Woloshonowa and set out for America. I suspect he did not leave with his father's blessing. He certainly left with none of his father's cash. The journey from Woloshonowa in Austria (or Poland) to Castle Garden in New York harbor took three years. My father worked his way.

At what, I do not know. He never spoke about these three years of his life. Neither did the relatives nor neighbors who sent out all those ultimately revealing scraps of sound over my youthful head.

It is difficult not to wonder about those three years. Why the silence? And it was, I see now, total silence. I never heard a word of complaint pass my father's lips. Of course, I never heard him utter a word of joy, either. I mean about himself. He was always lavish with praise of his children, his wife, his neighbors, his bosses, his relatives, passers-by in the street. My father clearly held the firm belief that whatever evil existed in the world had not been created by the human beings who inhabited it. This was, of course, why there were those who called him stupid. As I consider the three years of his journey to America, common sense would seem to indicate that he must have been at least obtuse.

During the time he spent working his way across Europe and part of Asia, King Alexander I of Serbia, his queen, and many members of the court were destroyed in a bloody assassination; the repercussions of the Russo-Japanese War were shaking the complacent rulers of capitals from St. Petersburg to Vienna into a terrified hunt for scapegoats; Germany's Wilhelm II, on his way to Tangier to try to solve the Moroccan crisis, narrowly avoided three attempts on his life; Father Gapon's effort to lead a group of workers with a list of grievances to the Czar's palace gates ended in a savage massacre; street fighting broke out in Moscow; curfews for Jews were established in Warsaw and Berlin; the Young Turks, beginning to throw their weight around in their efforts to seize control of the Ottoman Empire, discovered the heady effects of anti-Semitism as an instrument of national policy.

It could not have been easy or even safe at this time for a penniless young Jew to keep himself alive—and accumulate the price of a steerage passage to America—during the course of a three-year trek across a couple of continents that were resorting desperately to repressive measures, many of them savage, designed to prevent themselves from coming apart at the seams. How my father managed it, I will never know. I am not altogether sure I want to know. I suspect it was the method of the management that sealed his lips. I believe it was his capacity to turn his back on evil, no matter how savage or degrading, that made it possible for him to survive the experience of those years and arrive in New York harbor with a smile.

The testimony to the smile was not, like most of my recollections, hearsay. There was an eyewitness. We, the members of my family, always called this eyewitness Uncle Yokkib. I didn't then know why, and I didn't care. I realize now that I hated Uncle Yokkib all the days of my life while he was alive. On learning a number of years ago that he had died, I remember being puzzled and distressed by the pleasure I got from the news. Two weeks ago, at my father's grave, I finally understood why.

It was Uncle Yokkib—so called, I am pleased to say, not because he was related to our family, but merely because he too came from Woloshonowa—who invented the oldest, if not the best, of the many jokes about my father that were told across my head when I was too young to understand them.

On the Castle Garden staff of the immigration authorities at that time there was a group of men known in Yiddish as "conductors." It was their job to conduct, to the homes of their nearest relatives or friends in the New York area, those immigrants who were not called for in person. The custom would seem to have been a sensible one.

Many, if not most, immigrants from Central Europe in those days were illiterate. Almost none spoke English. Very few had ever, save for the momentous journey that had just brought them to the New World, traveled very far from the small town, or shtetl, in which they had been born. Their innocence was, I recall quite clearly, often childlike. It is probably safe to say none arrived laden with the wealth of the Indies, but very few arrived totally penniless. Almost all had on their persons some pittance, the remainder of the tiny hoard that had paid their way to America. The pickings would seem to have been lean, but not so lean, apparently, that the underworld of the day was uninterested.

The continued robbery of the pitifully innocent in and near the dock areas might have continued indefinitely. The waterfront criminals brought the authorities down on their heads when they enlarged their activities to include white slavery: many of the female immigrants were, of course, pretty. The public protests began to make themselves audible. Into being came the system of sending out the unmet immigrant with a conductor.

Nobody was waiting for my father when he disembarked at Castle Garden. If anybody had been, it would have been a miracle; and perhaps he would not have been surprised, since my father knew, as most immigrants did, that he was journeying to a miraculous land. However, when my father set out from Woloshonowa, he told nobody he intended to go to America. It is possible that he did not know it himself. Pawing about among those scraps of sound that passed over my head as a boy, I get the feeling that when my father left home rather hurriedly, he had no destination in mind. He seems to have been sent on his way by one of man's oldest motivations: the desire to put space between himself and an unpleasant situation.

The desire to go to America—no immigrant, it seems, ever spoke of going to New York or Chicago or San Francisco, to anything less than the entire golden continent—must have taken shape in his mind sometime during his three years of wandering across Europe. I once heard him say that when he arrived in New York he believed he was the first citizen of Woloshonowa who had ever set foot on American soil. He was wrong, of course, as the authorities at Castle Garden soon proved.

Out of an experience that was obviously strewn with repetitive patterns, they had worked out an effective cross-indexing system. Everybody had to come from somewhere. If you kept track of where everybody came from, you had the beginnings of a method for disposing of everybody who followed. It certainly did not take the authorities long to discover that over the years quite a few men and women had come to America from Woloshonowa. In even less time they established that one, a man named Yokkib Berlfein, had been conducted, when he arrived in New York several years earlier, to the home of another ex-citizen of Woloshonowa, also named Berlfein, on East Fourth Street, between Avenue D and Lewis Street. A Castle Garden conductor was assigned to take my father to the Berlfein home.

This proved to be a crowded cold-water flat on the sixth floor of what later came to be known as an "old law" tenement, and was always identified as a fire trap. The Berlfeins had never before seen my father, and he could not remember ever having seen any of them. But they all knew the Kramer inn outside Woloshonowa, and they made my father welcome. Years later, at a party in our own cold-water flat given by my mother—my father paid for it, but my mother "gave" it—to celebrate my bar mitzvah, I heard an account of this welcome.

I had carried into the safety of the bedroom the eight fountain pens, one pocket watch, and six five-dollar gold pieces that had been presented to me by various guests as mementos of the occasion. I concealed the gifts under the shirts in the one dresser drawer that was my private terrain, and turned to go back to the party. My way was blocked by Uncle Yokkib and a group of guests he was entertaining just outside the bedroom door.

Perhaps he saw me. Perhaps he didn't. In any case, he neither got out of my way nor did he stop talking. He did not send the words out over my head, either, as people did when they talked about my father in Deutsch's grocery or Lesser's drug store. If anything, it seemed to me Uncle Yokkib, noting that I was immediately behind him, raised his voice. I soon gathered that he was describing my father's first night on American soil. I don't know, of course, what he had said before I came up to the group. From what I did hear, however, it was not difficult to guess at the nature of what I had missed.

"There's schlemiels and schlemiels," Uncle Yokkib was saying in Yiddish to his chuckling audience. "And all right, naturally, a green one, he's just fresh from the ship, smart like you and me you don't expect him to be. But God in heaven, a dope like this, it's once in a lifetime you see a thing like this. Especially now, it's already after we showed him the toilet, and he asked for a piece of soap, so he could wash his hands in the pot, and then he put his finger in the gas to see what made it burn like that, so blue. So I said all right, now it's time to eat. But now you're in America, so now you'll eat only American food, so I gave him a banana. Everybody, we all watched, and this schlemiel, he never saw a banana before, so naturally, he turns it around in his hands like he's holding something, I don't know, a pistol maybe, he expects it should explode. Go ahead, I said, eat. It's good. It's American food. Eat. So this schlemiel, guess what he does? He puts the banana in his mouth, and he starts to eat it, with the skin on it and everything. He eats the whole thing, the skin and all! And all the time, on his face, that stupid smile, like it's good! Like he's enjoying himself!"

It does not seem to have occurred to Uncle Yokkib that my father was enjoying himself. It did not occur to me until two weeks ago, standing beside his grave. Now, putting my mind on it, I see a young man who has just survived three years of a wandering struggle for survival across Europe and part of Asia. He finally achieves what must have long seemed impossible. He arrives on American soil. Why shouldn't he smile? A few hours later this same man, who has for so long been keeping himself alive on stolen scraps of garbage, is offered a piece of fresh fruit. Wolfing it down, skin and all, what could be a more natural reaction than a smile?

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Fourth Street East by Jerome Weidman. Copyright © 1970 Jerome Weidman. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword,
1 The Head of the Family,
2 Draft Status,
3 A Kid or a Coffin,
4 A Correction,
5 Mafia Mia,
6 In Memoriam,
7 Rowboats and Canoes,
8 "Departure",
Preview: Last Respects,