Except for his mother, Moses remembered, the women were glamorous beyond compare. They wore big floppy hats pricked by peacock plumes, and flowing black capes, never mind the patches. They favoured ivory cigarette holders. Zipora Schneiderman, Shayndel Kronitz and, above all, Gitel Kugelmass, Moses’s first unrequited love. The voluptuous Gitel, who usually wore an ostrich boa or a fox biting its own tail, missing either clumps of feather or fur. Chiffons, silks. The celebrated Roite Gitel, who had led the millinery workers out against Fancy Finery. Perfumed and powdered she was, her eyes kohled, her lips scarlet, her hands heavy with antique rings. Occasionally she sipped apricot brandy in a sticky shot glass to warm her kishkas in winter. Moses, anticipating her every need—emptying her ashtray—fetching her coffee—was rewarded from time to time with a perfume-laden hug or a pinch of his cheek.
Except for his mother, the women, who had never heard of inequality, poured oil onto the flames of every dispute ignited by the men, arguing along with them far into the night about the show trials that had been held in a faraway city as cold as their own, pitching into quarrels over the merits of Osip Mandelstam, Dali, Malraux, Eisenstein, Soutine, Mendele Moykner Sforim, Joyce, Trotsky, Buñuel, Chagall, and Abraham Reisen, who had written:
Shloime Bishinsky, a latecomer to the group, was an interesting case. Slight, droopy, seemingly the most mild of men, he was a fur dyer cursed with catarrh, a hazard of his trade. When Poland was about to be partitioned, he was caught in Bialystok, in the Russian zone. More politically informed aunts and cousins fled to the other zone. They knew, say what you like, that the Germans were a civilized people. But Shloime’s family, too late for the last train out, failed to escape to Auschwitz. Instead they were transported to Siberia, a journey of two weeks. From there, Shloime slipped into the Middle Kingdom and then Harbin, in the puppet state of Manchuko, where once grand White Russian ladies now stripped in cabarets. Eventually he reached Japan itself, sailing as a stoker from Yokohama to Vancouver.
“What was it like in Siberia?” Moses once asked.
“Like Canada,” Shloime Bishinsky said, shrugging, “what else?”
For them Canada was not yet a country but the next-door place. They were still this side of Jordan, in the land of Moab, the political quarterlies as well as the Yiddish newspapers they devoured coming out of New York.
Friday nights the men read each other their poems or stories in thundering voices, moving the group to outcries of approval or disdain. Quarrels ensued. Men, who deferred to goyishe bank tellers, addressing them as “sir”, who bowed their heads to the health inspector, on the boil over a clunky rhyme, a slipshod thought, a phrase like a splinter under a fingernail, slamming their fists against the table, rattling the teacups. Insulted ladies fleeing to the toilet, tears flying from them. Each poem, every story or essay, generating a morningafter of hand-delivered letters that provoked even thicker envelopes filled with rebuttal.
In principle the group endorsed racial brotherhood, burning both ends of the candle, an end to private property and all religious hocuspocus, free love, et cetera. But in practice they feared or scorned gentiles, seldom touched anything but apricot brandy, dreamed of owning their own duplex, paid Kronitz fifty cents a week for insurance policies from the Pru, and were constant husbands and loving parents. Mind you, eavesdropping from behind his bedroom door, an enthralled Moses learned that some hanky-panky was not unknown. Take, for instance, what became celebrated as the Kronitz-Kugelmass scandal. One morning Myer Kugelmass, fishing through his wife’s handbag for a streetcar ticket, blundered on a red-hot billet-doux from Simcha Kronitz, peppered with obviously filthy phrases in French, and invoking celebrated lovers from Héloïse and Abelard to Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. A triumphant Gitel Kugelmass, her illicit affaire de coeur revealed, packed her balalaika and her musical compositions and fled to a boarding house in Ste.-Agathe, dragging a terrified Simcha Kronitz with her. Myer Kugelmass, abandoned by his wife, betrayed by his best friend, wept at L.B.’s dining-room table. “Who will I play chess with now that Simcha has dishonoured me?”
A messenger was dispatched to Ste.-Agathe with a stinging letter to die Roite Gitel from L.B., quoting Milton, Lenin, Rilke, and of course L.B. himself, and the couples were soon reconciled, if only for the children’s sake.
The children, the children.
The children were everything. Friday nights they were brought along to L.B.’s flat, free to play run-sheep-run in the lane, stuff themselves in the kitchen, and finally flop four to a bed if necessary. They were hugged and kissed and pinched and squeezed and all they were obliged to do in return was to demonstrate, to cries of astonishment, the different ways in which they were bound to dazzle the world. Pudgy Misha Bloomgarten, who would later go into plate-glass windows, had only to scrape out a simple exercise on his violin for the names of Stern and Menuhin to be invoked. Giggly Rifka Schneiderman, who would marry into Kaplan’s Knit-to-Fit, had merely to stand up and sing “The Cloakworkers’ Union Is a No-Good Union”, her voice piercing, for the dining room to rock with applause. Sammy Birenbaum, the future television oracle, had only to recite Sacco’s speech to the court for it to be recalled that Leslie Howard, the quintessential Englishman, was actually a nice Jewish boy, mind you Hungarian. But it was Moses (after all, does the apple fall far from the tree?) who was recognized as the prodigy. L.B. flushing with pleasure, his mother summoned out of the kitchen, he would be called upon to deliver a socialist critique of The Count of Monte Cristo or Treasure Island, or whatever it was he had read that week, or to recite a poem of his own, its debt to Tristan Tzara duly noted.
Moses clung to his father, constantly searching for new ways to earn his love. L.B., he noticed, often delayed his morning departure to the dreaded parochial school, blowing on his pince-nez, wiping the lenses with his handkerchief, as he stood by the front window waiting for the postman to pass. If there was no mail L.B. grunted, something in him welcoming the injustice of it, and hurried into his coat.