I Pity the Poor Immigrant Read online

  The first track was a kind of clownish singing, slightly embarrassing to hear. It was an old Broadway tune I didn’t know, the lyrics adjusted into puns about my grandfather’s jewelry store. My uncle—I assume it was my uncle singing—added a few bars of “The Tennessee Waltz” for some reason, letting his voice break like a yodeling cowpoke’s. Then my grandfather asked some questions of another little boy in the style of a journalist:

  Who is the best singer in the world?

  I don’t know.

  Caruso?

  I don’t know.

  My father turned and looked at me, his hand pressed against his lower back. His new wife has a house in Connecticut, an old family house, and she spends most of the weekends there. I don’t think he would have been playing me these recordings if she was around. She’s been around less and less since the accusations appeared in the newspaper.

  “It’s you,” I said, meaning the voice of the little boy.

  “Nineteen forty. Nineteen forty-one. Sometime before the war, I’m pretty sure.”

  “You sound happy.”

  He shrugged. I think he sensed already that I was going to write him into this book. He knew it before I did, as if my disloyalty was never in doubt. His shrug was like his resigned way of urging me not to. He had come as far a distance as Gila Konig had, I think he was telling me with that shrug. Not as a victim but as a self-invention. Not as a yored, but as one of the olim—no one was more ascended than my father in his Upper East Side town house, a world away from the Brownsville slum of his own father’s youth. He had no interest in the yordim. I’m sure he wondered why I did.

  3.

  Gila sent me an e-mail after two weeks. I didn’t open it at first, and when I did open it I didn’t open the attachment, the photograph of us at lunch. I could see it in miniature beneath Gila’s brief note. The note thanked me for having lunch with her and then extended an invitation to visit her sometime in Sag Harbor. I saw myself in the tiny photo, ghostlike, trying to hide my discomfort—I thought I would have hidden it better. The fact that Gila could have looked at that picture and still sent it to me was a poignant indicator of her aloneness. I’m lucky I know Hugh. I don’t have many people in my life. She had waited two weeks to thank me for a lunch she had treated me to, a lunch I had never thanked her for.

  The e-mail sat unanswered, shadowing me at odd times over the next few days. I don’t know why I didn’t want to face it. I wasn’t even particularly busy. When I look back over my inbox now, I see that it took me almost three weeks to respond. I have the response here in all its vapid, agreeable insincerity:

  Dear Gila,

  Yes, it would be great to see you again. I have given your story and its connection to my piece about David Bellen a lot of thought. I get to the Hamptons fairly often, so I’ll drop you a line the next time I’m out. Thank you for lunch, by the way.

  All best,

  Hannah

  And now it was my turn to face the silence of an unanswered e-mail.

  When she didn’t respond—one week becoming two—I began to feel somehow insecure. Despite my e-mail’s formal politeness, I knew it exuded an obvious lack of interest, if not outright rudeness. I hadn’t trusted her, but I didn’t know exactly why. Her pursuit of me had made her seem distorted, or inappropriate. But now that Gila hadn’t responded to me, I began to think differently. It’s the way these things go. I now thought that she had the dignity to know when she was being discounted. I considered writing her again, but I put it off. By then I was actually busy with other projects. Her silence, when I thought of it, took on a haughtiness, even a hostility. Eventually, I got a phone call not from Gila but from her friend Hugh. Gila, he told me, had passed away. It turned out she had not been avoiding my e-mail for the past three months but rather dying of cancer.

  4.

  She’d lived on a small side street in Sag Harbor, not far from Peconic Bay. I took the train to Bridgehampton, then a cab to the address that Hugh had given me. Gila’s house had been recently painted so that its white clapboard and black shutters gleamed as if still wet. Whatever I’d expected, I had not expected the pleasant quiet of the small front yard with its weeping cherry tree, the beds of dark ivy threading upward to cover the trunks of a row of pollarded sycamores. Hugh answered the door. He was in charge of Gila’s estate, including the sale of her house. He was a large man in his early fifties, his girth draped by a boxy dress shirt, pink with white stripes, the tails out over his jeans. Expensive eyewear, a very precise haircut. He invited me back into the house and in the living room he sat down in a leather armchair and lit a cigarette, asking only afterward if I minded. He spread out his hand to indicate the immaculate neatness of the place. There were no carpets on the floor, just the richly varnished wide plank boards. Plain sheer curtains hanging from black iron rods. I took a seat on a large white sofa before a coffee table made of black wood. On it rested one book, an oversized volume called David, The King, by Ivan Schwebel, the Israeli artist, placed there almost in vengeance, it seemed, against its qualities as an ornament. Everything was clean and so pared down that the air seemed more still than ordinary air.

  “This was how she liked to live,” Hugh told me.

  “Spare.”

  “There were seven people at the funeral. She didn’t like people very much. She was past all that, not interested in playing ball anymore.”

  He leaned back in his chair. He told me then that what he had liked about Gila was “all that turmoil in her head. All that self-generated struggle. You’d give her a compliment and she’d twist it around—you were not only insulting her but patronizing her. Thinking she was too stupid to see through your flattery. I’m a surgeon. I operate on people’s spines for a living. They’re spread-eagle on an inclining table for eight, ten hours. There’s no room for error, obviously. It’s not something I can talk about with everyone. Not even my partner. It’s not something that’s interesting to him. With Gila it wasn’t that she was especially interested, but there was something we understood about each other. Something about work, I guess. I don’t know what it was.”

  I asked him what she had told him about her private life.

  “Not much,” he said. He made a little breathing sound, somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. I looked at his cigarettes and then he nodded and I took one.

  “Everything was always this vague mystery,” he said. “There was the designer. The swimwear designer. That was a good story—I never knew if I believed it or not, but I always liked it.”

  The swimwear designer, he told me, had rented Gila an apartment in Tel Aviv. It was their love nest, he said. Even after she broke up with him, the swimwear designer had kept paying the rent and utilities for some reason. He said that eventually Gila had sold the furniture and left the place sitting there empty. It was with that money, he told me, that she’d come from Israel to America.

  I told him the very different version of the story that Gila had told me. I told him about the photographs of the empty apartment and about Gila’s venture to Etzel Street, a street associated with organized crime. I told him about Meyer Lansky. I told all this to Hugh and then I asked him whether he believed any of it and he shrugged, looking not at me but at the wood floor.

  “Lonely people can be difficult,” he said. “When they want you around, they can be desperate to keep you there. That’s why when she wanted to meet you, I encouraged her. I thought, fine, let her make the connection if she can. She needed it. She was, to put it bluntly, dying of cancer.”

  The sun outside found an opening between the clouds and it came streaming in through the window, lighting up a diagonal plane of swirling dust. I finished my cigarette and Hugh lit up another and we sat in silence for a while. I wasn’t sure I shared his skepticism about the story Gila had told me. I wasn’t sure I even believed he was giving me an accurate account of what Gila had told him. People conflate things. The “notorious” figure blurs into the “swimwear designer” when we hear a few stories
and aren’t paying close attention. I thought that even if that wasn’t the case, it was still possible that Gila had soft-pedaled the story for Hugh. If she’d wanted to intrigue me, perhaps she’d just wanted to titillate Hugh. The more I thought about it, the more sense this made. The alternative story of the “swimwear designer,” the “love nest,” selling the man’s furniture with an insouciant flourish, didn’t sound like the Gila I had met for lunch, nor the Gila I had known all those years ago. It sounded more like someone trying to be lighter and breezier than she really was. Perhaps it had always been easier for Gila, even with a friend like Hugh, to make her story lighter, breezier than it really was.

  5.

  Throughout this time, I’d been traveling a lot for work—teaching at a university in Montana, another in Chicago—and when I returned to New York in the summer of 2011, after more than a year away, I felt less at home than before, a condition that has not changed. I began to feel invisible. I don’t know how else to describe it. I’d begin to tell a story and lose interest halfway through. Whatever I was saying seemed unimportant or false. The people I spoke to began to seem more real than I was—by real, I mean that they seemed to occupy physical space while I hovered ghostlike, evaporating. Most of my friends had moved across the river to Brooklyn years ago. Their detailed interest in all things of the current moment induced in me a kind of hypnotic inertia. I didn’t care, but I knew I needed to care. It’s fine not to care until your not caring has left you so isolated that you have to either make an effort to care or you’ll disappear entirely.

  It was around this time that things began to deteriorate with my father. I had told him about my meeting with Hugh—I had told him I was going to write Gila’s story after all. His name had appeared in the papers again. When I asked if he was worried, he told me no, he hadn’t done anything wrong. When I asked him how he felt about my writing Gila’s story, he was more enigmatic. He said, “You’re my daughter,” by which either he meant he supported me despite his qualms, or that my lack of discretion had left him speechless. Or perhaps my betrayal simply reminded him of his own.

  I tell you everything, he had said that afternoon twenty-eight years ago when he’d told me about his affair with Gila. I tell you everything, that’s the rule. I think it’s an open question as to whether “telling everything” is the right thing to do. I know that ever since my father told me about Gila I have been insatiable in my need to tell everything, to expose myself and others, and I know by now that this has less to do with ethics than with the need itself.

  I see now that this book is my idea of a Jewish story. It’s an unflattering story, negative in many ways. I suppose it begs the question, why tell such a story? Perhaps my father has simply gotten tired of my need to tell such stories.

  I continued to think about Gila. Then, about a year after my visit with Hugh, I received an e-mail from David Bellen’s editor in Israel, Galit Levy.

  This will interest you, she wrote. Hope you are well.

  Part Three

  World of Our Fathers

  11

  I Pity the Poor Immigrant

  by David Bellen

  Books discussed in this essay:

  Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution, T. J. English, William Morrow, forthcoming, 2008.

  The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947–2000, Sally Denton and Roger Morris, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.

  The Man Who Invented Las Vegas, W. R. Wilkerson III, Ciro’s Books, 2000.

  The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America, Revised Edition, Albert Fried, Columbia University Press, 1993.

  Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life, Robert Lacey, Little, Brown, 1991.

  Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob, Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, and Eli Landau, Paddington Press, 1979.

  The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, Martin A. Gosch, Little, Brown, 1974.

  Lansky, Hank Messick, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971.

  He saw the world through the gangster’s eye, an eye educated by long, arduous training, through the assumption of a whole system according to which mankind consists of two distinct species, wolves and lambs, predators and victims, winners and losers, deceivers and deceived—the elect and the rabble. It is the elected few, of course, who grasp the truth of this irreparable division, who possess the courage and energy to act on it. And what distinguishes gangsters, so-called, from the rest of the elect—capitalists, politicians, law-enforcers, and all the others who are successful in their putatively legitimate vocations—is that they, the gangsters, are open and aboveboard, and transparently honest with themselves, i.e., free of illusion, self-deception, and hypocrisy. So, by their own perverted logic, they, the gangsters, define themselves as the most virtuous of the elect.

  Albert Fried,

  The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster

  in America

  PERVERTED LOGIC

  In his study The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America, Albert Fried reports that on October 24, 1918, the gangster Meyer Lansky, aged sixteen, “heard screams coming from an abandoned tenement house,” where two boys—Benjamin Siegel and Charlie Luciano (then known as Salvatore Lucania)—were fighting over a girl. “Without a second’s hesitation, Lansky leaped into the fray,” Fried writes, and hit Luciano with a crowbar. The police arrived and took all three boys to the Fifth Street station house—Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano. “It marked the beginning of one of the exceptional friendships in American crime,” Fried writes. His source for this, according to his own notes, is a 1971 biography-cum-pulp-novel called Lansky by a tabloid journalist named Hank Messick:

  Sprawled on the floor was a small black-haired boy of about twelve [Siegel]. The fly on his blue knickers was open, and his swollen penis jutted through it impressively. A girl-woman lay beside him, her skirts high enough to expose the pink bloomers beneath. Towering over both of them was Salvatore Lucania who at age twenty-one had a bad reputation. Even as Lansky watched, Lucania kicked the woman in the side.

  “You bitch,” he shouted.

  And now Lansky realized the woman was laughing through her tears.

  “I didn’t mean anything,” she spluttered. “He was so cute.”

  The boy crawled to his feet. His face was a pale yellow, but a knife gleamed in his hand. He gathered himself into a crouch, ready to spring.

  Lansky opened his toolbox and grasped a small crowbar. “Hold it,” he said.

  Hank Messick doesn’t cite any source at all for this “re-creation,” written more than fifty years after the incident allegedly happened. Albert Fried takes this already fictionalized scene and adds his own variants—his Lansky leaps into the fray “without a second’s hesitation.” There is no “toolbox” containing the “small” crowbar. A poet primarily, I simply argue that this is how myths are created, and myths, no matter how imaginary, not only distort reality but impinge upon it. My copy of Lansky—a mass-market paperback containing an ad for Kent cigarettes with a “micronite filter”—bears on its cover the slogan, The book that tore the lid off the syndicate and forced Lansky out of Israel. Indeed, Messick’s book did help chase Lansky out of Israel, and its mythology helped to keep him for the rest of his life in a kind of personal diaspora of fantasies, rumors, wishes, fears. “A Jew has a slim chance in the world,” Lansky said when the Israeli Supreme Court denied his petition for citizenship. It’s a stunningly strange thing for a Jew in Israel to say—a Kafkaesque thing to say. It’s like saying you can never live anywhere and can never learn the reason why.

  THE ELECT

  Wolves and lambs, predators and victims, winners and losers, deceivers and deceived. It’s twenty-nine years after Lansky’s expulsion—2001, a year into the Second Intifada—and my son Eliav is wandering the streets of Tel Aviv, shifting from pile to pile, collecting bottles and cans for the deposit money so that he can buy heroin. He’s a native-born Israeli, a sabra, not a Jew in some land of e
xile. He narrows his field of vision to the space directly in front of his feet—the gleam of schist in the pavement, the garbage sacks translucent and swelling in the sunlight—and reaches his hand into the damp opening. At night, he listens to the muffled bass of car radios and the occasional siren or helicopter, alone in a dark room with a hot plate and a water jug and a mirror and a lamp. After a while, he starts to see cans and bottles everywhere—in mud puddles and clogged sewer grates, bleached pale amid the weeds of vacant lots. After a while, it becomes a kind of challenge or a game to see what he’s willing to touch with his bare hands.

  LAND OF EXILE

  In 2006, I go to the Lower East Side of New York, where you can visit a tenement on Orchard Street left partly in ruins, a relic of what was once the most densely populated neighborhood in the world. The entrance is dark even in the middle of the day, a small orange bulb illuminating the corridor of the ground floor, where a row of closed doors punctuates walls covered in brown tin, the tin itself coated with soot that gleams like oil, or like the walls of a mine. At the top of the staircase is an old toilet in a closet. The ravaged floors have been partly stripped back to reveal successive layers of linoleum in a garish array of cheap patterns. A bedroom, a kitchen, and a common room for each apartment, no running water—the building is bleakly candid about the commodification of its former occupants’ lives. To have had children in such cramped quarters would have inevitably meant sending them out onto the street as soon as they could walk.