She got a laugh and a hand. The Democrats could nominate a right-wing lunatic in this district because they weren’t going to win no matter whom they nominated. Vogelman blew off steam for their party. He was loud and obnoxious and, for all practical purposes, harmless.
“We made mistakes,” Flora said. “I’m not going to try to tell you anything else. We should have been tougher on Jake Featherston as soon as he made it plain he was building up a new war machine. But Herbert Hoover was President of the United States from 1933 to 1937, and he and the Democrats didn’t do anything about Jake Featherston then, either.”
“That’s right!” somebody in the audience shouted. A few hecklers booed. But there weren’t many. Sheldon Vogelman was not only a reactionary nut, he was an ineffective reactionary nut. Best kind, Flora thought. The best-or worst-example of the other kind was Featherston.
She and Vogelman agreed on one thing: the war had to be fought to a finish. They had different reasons, but they agreed. She didn’t know of any Socialists, Democrats, or even Republicans running on a peace-at-any-price platform. Jake Featherston had been effective at uniting the United States against him, too.
“When this war is over-when we have won this war-” Flora began, and had to stop for a flood of fierce applause. “When we have won, I say, Featherston and his fellow criminals will face the bar of justice for their aggression against the United States”-more ferocious cheers-“and for their cold-blooded murder of tens of thousands of their own people.”
She got cheers for that, too, but not so many, even if she didn’t call a spade a spade. The painful truth was that not even her mostly Jewish audience could get excited about the fate of Negroes in the CSA. Flora had been banging her head against that truth ever since she started speaking out about Jake Featherston’s persecutions.
“Don’t you see?” she said. “Pogroms are wrong. How many of your ancestors-how many of you, ladies and gentlemen-came to the United States because of the Tsar’s pogroms? Come on-I know it’s more than that.”
All over the hall, hands went up. People raised them reluctantly and lowered them as soon as they could. If they’d had their druthers, they wouldn’t have raised them at all. They didn’t want to think about why they’d come to America. They especially didn’t want to compare their past to the Confederate Negroes’ present.
Flora wanted to make sure they remembered. She wanted that even if it cost her votes. Against a candidate like Sheldon Vogelman, losing a few didn’t much matter. If the Democrats had run someone stronger, she hoped she would have done the same thing.
“If you turn your back on other people when they’re in trouble, who’ll look out for you when you are?” she asked. “Don’t you see? If we don’t look out for the Negroes in the CSA, in an important way we don’t look out for ourselves, either.”
“We don’t want those people here!” somebody shouted. Several people clapped their hands. They weren’t all hecklers. She knew where the hecklers were sitting. Listening to them hurt more because they weren’t.
“The Democrats are the party for people who only care about themselves,” Flora said. “If your fellow man matters to you, you’ll vote Socialist next week. I hope he does. I hope you do. Thank you!”
She got a good hand as she stepped away from the lectern. She could have been caught pulling hundred-dollar bills out of a contractor’s pocket with her teeth, and she still would have won here this time around.
For lunch the next day, she faced a more critical audience. David Hamburger had come out of the Great War with one leg and with politics not far from Vogelman’s. He and Flora still got on well when they stayed away from political matters. When they didn’t-and they couldn’t all the time-sparks flew.
They met at Kaplan’s, a delicatessen that had been around at least as long as Flora had. David was waiting for her when she came in. That was probably just as well; she didn’t have to watch the rolling gait required by an artificial leg that started above the knee.
“Hello, there,” he said as she joined him. “So how does it feel to be slumming in your old stomping grounds?”
“Kaplan’s isn’t slumming,” Flora said. “Don’t be silly. Not a place in Philadelphia comes close to it.” The waiter was bald and had a gray mustache. Flora ordered corned beef on rye. Her brother chose pastrami. They both ordered beer. The waiter nodded and hurried away. “How have you been?” Flora asked.
“Not too bad-middle-class, or somewhere close.” David shrugged. “My son’s too little to conscript in this war, so that’s good.”
“Yes,” Flora said tonelessly. Her own son was heading toward eighteen, and Joshua wouldn’t hear of her doing anything to keep him out of the conscription pool. Having a nephew in harm’s way was bad enough. Having a son on the front lines would be ten thousand times worse.
The food and the beers came quickly. Flora took a long pull at hers. David drank more slowly. He pulled a dill pickle from the jar on the table and nibbled it with his sandwich and his beer. After a bit, he said, “Looks like you’ll be away for another couple of years.”
“Well, I hope so,” Flora said.
“You’ve done a good job, and Vogelman’s meshuggeh,” David said. “Between the two, that ought to do the job. If it doesn’t, this district is even more verkakte than I give it credit for-and I didn’t think it could be.”
Hearing the Yiddish made Flora smile. Like her brothers and sisters, she’d grown up speaking it more often than English at home. Now, though, she never heard it, never spoke it, unless she came back to the district. No one she knew in Philadelphia used it. Her husband, a gentile from Dakota, had learned a few phrases from her, but that was all. Joshua knew a few phrases, too. He couldn’t begin to speak it. Flora wasn’t so sure she could speak it herself anymore.
She thought, and then did bring out a Yiddish sentence: “What’s going to happen to this language in a couple of generations?”
“I don’t know,” David answered, also in Yiddish. He dropped back into English to go on, “And I won’t lose much sleep over it, either. We brought Yiddish from the old country. Now we’re Americans. They speak English here. So, fine-I’ll speak English.”
“I suppose so,” Flora said. “Joshua doesn’t seem much interested in learning it, anyhow. But I can’t help wondering whether my grandchildren or great-grandchildren won’t think they missed out on something special because they didn’t get the chance to learn it.”
“Well, if they do, there’s always night school,” David said, and Flora nodded. How many immigrants had learned all sorts of different things in night school? Hundreds of thousands, surely. Some were accountants, some were lawyers, because of the courses they’d taken in hours snatched from sleep and rest. Still…
“It won’t be the same,” she said. “What you learn in school isn’t like what you pick up around the house.”
“I can’t do anything about it.” David pulled another pickle spear out of the jar and aimed it at her like a bayonet. “I can’t-but you can. You can pass the Preservation of Yiddish Act and make it a crime for all the alter kackers”-he tacked the English plural onto the Yiddish word-“who can still yatter away in the old language to use English instead. And you can make it another crime for anybody Jewish not to listen to them and talk back in Yiddish.”
Flora laughed so hard, she almost choked on her sandwich. “You,” she said severely, “are ridiculous.”
“Thank you,” her brother answered, which only made her laugh harder. “And while you’re at it, you can have them make the Lower East Side a national park. Buffalo have Yellowstone. Why shouldn’t people who speak Yiddish have their own game preserve, too? And if we get too crowded, you could issue hunting licenses to anti-Semites, and they’d come in here and thin us out. Only difference between us and the buffalo is, we might shoot back.”