“And here we have?” Mom challenged.
“No, I mean only there was a time, in old times, when we did go into battle for a country that was ours: in Eretz Israel. We fought the Canaanites. We fought the Philistines. We fought the Romans. It wasn’t always this way, cutting off a toe to avoid conscription. Before we were Jews, we were Hebrews. You know that yourself, Chaim.”
“Oh, that was long ago.”
“True, but we still celebrate Chanukah, no? I’m a free-thinker, but I celebrate it, too. And the Bundists in Russia? Jews who had the courage to oppose the Black Hundreds — with weapons. Noo?”
“Well, should I let him grow up to be a soldier?” Mom asked ironically.
“No. But it’s America. Why did we come here? It’s capitalist America — we know that — and we have our quota of anti-Semites here. But let it become socialist America and you would see: It would become the country of all creeds, all people. Jews as well — and those with no creeds at all, like myself. Such a land all would be willing and ready to defend.”
Mom grimaced in skepticism, then wagged her head.
“Just wait,” Louie emphasized. “It has already happened in Russia. And who leads the Red Army? Trotsky, a Jew.”
“Do you know I waited on him more than once in a restaurant on Second Avenue. I still see him, with his little beard—”
“Uncle Moe was a soldier!” Ira burst out. “He was a sergeant. He had a stripe more than a sergeant. You were a soldier, Uncle Louie. So why can’t I be an officer if I want to?”
“I told you, Yingle, they don’t like Jews. A soldier — well. But not an officer, they want an officer to be like themselves, people they think they can trust.”
“Go, stop nagging,” said Pop.
“With Jews for cannon fodder they’re satisfied,” said Mom. “Czar Kolki, may he rot, abhorred Jews too. But to be soldiers, ah, that delighted him. The Bolsheviki have my wholehearted support.”
“Well, would you consent to his being an officer for the Bolsheviki?” Louie asked.
“Who knows?” said Mom. “In the meantime one thing pleases me. If they don’t like to train Jews to be officers, I am obliged to them.”
“Have no fear,” Pop scoffed. “An officer. He’s meant to be a malamut.”
“You never spoke to him about the Dreyfus case, Chaim?” Uncle Louie addressed Pop.
“Go, expound with him,” said Pop.
“I told him about Dreyfus,” said Mom. “He knows. The Jewish officer they disgraced. You don’t remember?”
“I remember something,” Ira admitted grudgingly.
“Noo?” said Mom.
“He was a captain,” Uncle Louie explained. “And not only that. He was on the French General Staff, too. You understand what that means? It means that he could betray all the secret plans of the army. But so strong was the hatred of Jews that when it was discovered that somebody gave away these plans, he was found guilty. He gave them away to the Deutscher, they said, and sent him to Devil’s Island. To Devil’s Island noch.” Uncle Louis’s bony, hairy hand stressed his words. “A Major Esterhazy, a Gentile, was guilty of giving away the secrets of the French army—”
“I would spit in his face, if I could but see him,” Mom interrupted.
“They feel safe only with their own kind,” said Uncle Louie. “Do you understand? That’s why you don’t have Jewish generals. Bist doch geboyren in Galitzia,” Uncle Louie reverted to Yiddish, and smiled his wide, golden smile. “A Yeet. Do you know the first words you learned to speak in English?” He lowered his voice: “Goddemnfuckenbestit.”
If only Pop would talk to him like Uncle Louie, could show him the way, could have been there before, prepared the way. But there were only Mom and Pop — and those just ripened into America, his uncles and aunts. And it was always money, money, business, business with them. Te de benk, te de benk, te de benk! The goyish kids chanted in drum-beat staccato: “Football, baseball, svimming in de tenk. Ve got money, but ve put it in de benk. . ” It was no use. He might have sniffled maybe, if he were alone. America didn’t want him. Even though he was willing not to be a Jew, to try to be different, to avoid business, profit, commission and interest — the things he hated about the arithmetic books: If a gross of penholders cost. . If a ton cost. . If a barrel cost. .
What made him think all at once about H. S. M. Hutcheson’s book, The Happy Warrior, which he had finished reading only a few days before. Why did that passage come back to tease his mind: about the hero being a gentleman on a modest income of fifty pounds a year from a legacy consisting of shares in an Indian textile mill. How did that faraway mill by itself make him a gentleman? Those funny, swarthy people he had seen in geography books, barefooted, in crazy white diapers. How could that make an Englishman a gentleman? They didn’t count, that was why. So what did that have to do with him, with the Dreyfus Uncle Louie was talking about, with West Point that didn’t like Jews? If only he had Uncle Louie to explain it. What to do when you couldn’t find the way something went? Thoughts always ended in a. . in a tangle.
Why did he have to think about those Indians in their big diapers when no one else did? Out of a whole book, a long book, why should that have come back to him? He wasn’t an Indian. No, it was that he didn’t count. So he noticed what he wasn’t supposed to about what didn’t count. So they didn’t want him at West Point. He could never not notice what he wasn’t supposed to. Even if he tried. . He watched Pop listen avidly to Uncle Louie talking about the possibility of taking in a few guests for the summer in his new place in Spring Valley. . No, just because he thought about things that didn’t count didn’t mean he didn’t count. Just because he thought about Indians in white diapers in spinning mills that made the hero a gentleman of leisure — and Ira himself was Jewish and the son of a waiter, and they lived in a Harlem dump, too — didn’t mean he wasn’t a different kind of “high degree,” as the fairy tales used to say. He could put words to what he felt. If you could put words to what you felt, it was yours. You couldn’t tell that to anybody, but it was true. You didn’t have to have realms and estates to be a nobleman the way the book said. You could put words to the way life went, the way life felt, and be a nobleman too — even if nobody knew your title: maybe Mom, maybe Uncle Louis, maybe Mr. Sullivan. .
And finally came 1920, a newly minted decade, and with it, graduation from public schooclass="underline" It was a winter graduation, at the end of January. Schooling was over for the majority of Ira’s classmates; schooling was at an end forever. Petey O’Hearn had already been hired as a helper on an ice-wagon. Frankie Spompini (so adept at braiding raffia mats, so neat) was bound for his uncle’s barber shop. Scrawny Davey Bayer, who lived in Ira’s block, hoped to get a job as an office boy. Sid Deffer, who already worked after school in a photography studio, had his job there assured. Leo Dugonz, the Hungarian classmate of Ira’s with whom he got along well, had applied for a job at a materials testing laboratory and been told to come in with his diploma and his working papers.
Almost the whole class was going to work, almost everyone had his working papers or was going to get them. A kind of euphoria was in the air: euphoria at the last of school, euphoria at the future. Only a small number of Ira’s classmates were going to high school, or like himself, were persuaded to go to the new junior high school that had just been innovated in P.S. 24.