LEONARD KRIEGEL
101
Gardens seemed an indictment. Nine years in America and still a boarder. A
man needed his own place, a prerequisite for dignity. Living with his
mother-in-law, my father still had to look on himself as a
greener.
His worth
was impugned each day he remained here. An apartment that was ours alone,
no matter how small , was a kind of liberation . By 1941 , it was the best my
father could hope for.
It
was not only the lack of his own place. Both of my uncles worked in the
fur market and by 1941 they were making good money for the first time in
their lives. My father, meanwhile , moved from one backbreaking job to
another, glued by destiny to a series of penny-ante appetizing stores. My
father always compared himself to my Uncle Morris. Uncle Morris was our
American. He was not yet eleven when he came to this country and he went to
school for two years before my grandmother sent him to work as a messenger
in the fur market . But he learned fast, and at thirteen his Americanization was
already complete. A bachelor, an excellent handicapper, he dressed sharply
and expensively, especially in the Forties , when the furriers were among the
highest-paid workers in the country . "Hitler, that poddler, he made it so all
these other poddlers can buy mink coats from my boss. The son of a bitch."
Draping his skinny frame in meticulously tailored suits, he clothed his politics
in an aggressive class-consciousness. He used to come home from the fur
market with the
World-Telegram
in one hand and the
Datly Worker
in the
other, the one to maneuver the line at the track, the other to maneuver the
world. He would feed me stories about his gambling which he somehow
managed to end on a note of working-class uplift. He came back from his first
winter vacation in Miami with a small jackknife that had a picture of a blue
lagoon and the words "Miami Beach" stamped across its side. "Nothing is
too good for the workers," he said as he handed it to me.
Uncle Morris was a militant member of the militant fur workers union .
My father belonged to a union ofwholesale and retail clerks . The furriers had
been working a forty hour week since the great strike of 1926. In 1941, my
father worked sixty-two hours a week in a small Jerome Avenue market, for
which he was paid $39. It was hard, sometimes back-breaking, work. He
opened the store, prepared the counter displays, lifted heavy cartons of
canned goods to stock the shelves, rolled the huge pickle vats carefully out
onto the sidewalk, all the time trying to con the customers into one more
ounce of lox or whitefish. His fingers were already stitched and scarred from
where he had cut them. By 1941, he had given up the dream of owning his
own store. He had wanted a store of his own because that, too, had promised
him the dignity for which he hungered. Two years earlier, the old man who
owned the small appetizing store on Bainbridge Avenue had offered it to my
father. "I 'm old, going blind, got to get out. For $500 , Kriegel, and dollar for
dollar on whatever stock I got." My father asked my uncles to lend him the
