I Pity the Poor Immigrant Read online

  I imagine it through Lansky’s eyes, Lansky who came there at the age of twelve. A fight breaks out and everybody on the street scatters. Heads open up with blood. He sees them looking at each other and breathing, even as they swing with the iron bars. Three or four boys lie on the wet ground holding their faces, curled up in balls. When the gunshots start, the casings hit the street with a ring like coins. He can see them shining there.

  What is it that makes him stay and watch? What is it that makes him compelled and not repulsed?

  INTIFADA

  It’s 2001. They blow up the discotheque by the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv. They blow up a seder in a dining room at the Park Hotel in Netanya. A year later, twenty-one teenagers die outside the discotheque, most of them the children of Soviet immigrants. In Netanya, the dead are mainly elderly people without family, some of them Holocaust survivors. A place where children can watch dolphins or go to dance parties. A hotel that offers a seder for those alone on Passover. After a while, I can’t watch the TV coverage anymore—not the suicide bombings, not the bulldozers razing the refugee camps. In Tel Aviv, they are throwing stones. In Jenin, they are throwing stones. We’ve been through this all before, many times. My son won’t return my phone calls or my e-mails. It’s not a declaration, it’s simply an absence, a failure to respond. I wonder what, if anything, he thinks about the war going on all around us. It’s the Second Intifada and my son and I are both veering toward a state of homelessness.

  PERMANENT WAR

  The gangsters built their houses on pretense, hypocrisy, deception—that was the country in which they staked their claim. They owed their lavish homes and wealth to a law conceived by America’s heartland Protestants, people who feared immigrants—who equated immigrants and the urban places in which they lived with sin. But of course it was Prohibition itself that urged these fears into dismal reality. The immigrants really did form criminal conspiracies, they really did corrupt judges and politicians, they really did murder people, they really did take over whole cities and become wealthy beyond their dreams.

  The price of course was permanent war. On October 17, 1929, Charlie Luciano was tortured and almost killed while Meyer Lansky and his pregnant wife, Anne, were at their apartment in Brooklyn. It turned out to be the start of what would be called the Castellammarese War. Lansky’s first son, Bernard, or Buddy, was born during the Castellammarese War. No one knows for certain how many people died during its two-year course.

  Lansky’s younger son, Paul, who would go on to graduate from West Point, went first to the prestigious Horace Mann School in the Bronx, where perhaps he first heard the word “phony.”2 The Lanskys’ apartment on Central Park West was “phony.” Paul’s mother and her friends, the Jewish wives with their mink coats and jewels, were “phony.” No doubt the Horace Mann School itself was full of “phonies.” The older son, Buddy, stayed home all day—he had left school at fifteen because he’d been born with a kind of disability that no one knew what to call other than “cerebral palsy.” He had trouble walking. He limped along with the contorted shuffle of an elderly woman rising from a bed. For Anne Lansky, the mother, the apartments on Central Park West—first in the Majestic, then in the Beresford—became a kind of hiding place or ward. She withdrew into eccentricity, then madness, ultimately, Robert Lacey reports in Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life, attacking her husband with a kitchen knife. They divorced in 1947, the year Bugsy Siegel was murdered in Los Angeles. Before that, Anne had escaped from a psychiatric clinic—“all the way from Riverdale in a nightgown,” Lacey writes—only to collapse in front of Buddy, who, Lacey reports, would always remember “the knock on the door from the men in white coats, the protesting cries of his mother, the strange heavy jacket with the strings on the sleeves.”

  “Paul says everything about this place is phony,” Buddy blurts and sheepishly smiles, and his father, Meyer Lansky, finds himself confronting some warped and unmanned version of himself from a long time ago. He can see his own eyes in Buddy’s eyes, his own childhood self in Buddy’s tentative fatuous grin. It’s an immigrant’s grin, the open-faced smile of the newly arrived.

  CONSPIRATORS

  I don’t think my son Eliav even wants the power he has over me—he just has it. My ex-wife sees him from time to time, but when I ask her about his silence, she won’t offer any clues. I gather that if she tells me anything it will only jeopardize her own rare contact with him. Although she never says so, I also know that in some instinctive way she blames me for his deterioration. I of course blame myself. There’s no other way to feel about it, no matter what I try to tell myself.

  DISCLOSURE

  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.

  In the fashion of Hank Messick, I’m going to make up my own version now, improvising the scenes. Call it poetic license. Call it a countermythology. Having read the books in the bibliography and looked at length at the photographs, I’m going to do what most people do, which is to imagine what isn’t there.

  SEPARATION

  In the bedroom, Lansky opened the suitcase on top of the mound of clothes and put his laundry in the hamper, the suits in a special cloth bag. Sweaters and dresses and shoes and handbags—in his absence, Anne had left them in a pile that sloped from the bed onto the floor, probably living for a month out of that mess. He went into the bathroom, where the sink was so thickly cluttered with cosmetics bottles and shampoos and tonics and medications that he couldn’t wash his hands. He took a tablet for his ulcers, swallowing it dry.

  She was watching him from the doorway, her eyes swollen.

  “Buddy should be home soon,” she said. “He gets back four, four-thirty.”

  “We’re going to the ballgame tomorrow. I’ll see him then.”

  “You told me that. I forgot. You should take his friend Vince.”

  “Vince.”

  “Vince drives him to the clinic. He drives him everywhere in that little car of his. You should treat him to the game.”

  The gauze curtains were drawn against the sunlight. She did a certain kind of crossword puzzle that came in big cheap books made of gray paper with ink that smudged, and one of them was flopped open on the floor with a pile of quilts and blankets next to it. There were more blankets on the sofa, a pair of eyeglasses and a bottle of Bayer aspirin and a clutter of cups and saucers and the torn sleeves of soda crackers.

  “I just came to get some things,” he said.

  “I’ve been feeling under the weather lately. The pollen. It’s spring.”

  He stood there rigid in the effort of not saying anything. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’ve got someone waiting.”

  He replenished the suitcase with clean shirts in cardboards, half a dozen suits, socks, underwear, ties. Then he went downstairs and drove to where he was staying that week, his sister’s apartment on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn.

  DIVORCE

  My wife and I divorced when our son Eliav was ten. Eighteen years later, in 2001, she gives me a birthday present, a book of the paintings of the Israeli artist Ivan Schwebel, whose work conflates time. There are pictures of King David dancing in triumph, as in the Bible, but in the background not the Judean hills but cattle cars bound for Auschwitz. There are pictures of David spying Bathsheba across a highway or from the roof of a warehouse, the setting not ancient Jerusalem but the modern city’s Ben Yehuda Street or Jaffa Road or sometimes even the Bronx, barbed wire fencing off the rows of tenements. In some pictures, David looks like a grizzled man in his sixties, in others he is young, in others he is paired with a blurred figure of Jesus. In the pictures he is never at rest, never at home. At the end of the triumphant dance sequence, there are two paintings of David facing his first wife, Michal, who confronts him on a modern street at night in a sc
ene reminiscent of a Hollywood movie, her eyes moist and accusing in the way of a betrayed woman. In the next panel, they stand like two drunks in a moment of hopeless recognition. A mugging goes on behind them in the sudden illumination of a car’s headlights. He has indeed betrayed her and he will betray her further, and in the picture both he and his first wife seem to already know this.

  SON

  Buddy, the son, shuffled on his friend Vince’s arm, his father, Meyer Lansky, trailing behind them. They made their slow way along the mezzanine in half darkness, the field appearing in bright slivers at each gate, people standing at the chute’s mouth, waiting for their seats. They approached the usher, his crimped face glaring unshaven beneath a kind of gray sergeant’s cap with a white bill. It occurred to Buddy that he should just tell Vince he had to go to the bathroom now, get it over with, but his father was pushing forward with the tickets—he’d had to come up with an extra one today for Vince, arguing at the Will Call desk—and he turned to Buddy and put his hand on Buddy’s shoulder, his eyes full of crisis, raising his chin and saying, “This is us, we’re here.”

  The green diamond glowed beneath him and induced a kind of vertigo as Buddy bent forward with his arms out at the side, seeking balance. The whole row had not only to stand up but to leave their seats and wait on the steps as he went awkwardly by. When he and his father and Vince finally got situated, it turned out that the Browns already had a leadoff man on first. No outs, the next batter at 1 and 0—they had missed maybe five or six pitches, but they’d missed the first man on base. His father took a seat and looked at the field. It would not be easy for him to forget that they’d missed it. He made a note in his program. He liked to recalculate the batting averages after each hitter, interested in the game’s statistics, while Buddy lost himself in the slow story of it, watching the men move in the distance from his perch in the stands. The Browns used to have a player named Pete Gray who played one-handed—he had to catch and throw with the same hand, because his right arm had been amputated as a boy after a farming accident—but now they were just a lackluster team in seventh place—What were they doing with the leadoff man already on? his father would be thinking—they’d been a lackluster team all Buddy’s life, even Pete Gray had just been a novelty to attract fans during the war. Vince was thudding his hands together and saying Let’s go, as if it were the sanest, most natural thing in the world, but of course Buddy knew that with his father there any use of the voice at all was a mistake. Vince, the student teacher with the little Chevrolet who must be getting some kind of course credit for being so nice to Buddy, who lived with his mother amid a pile of laundry and who spent three days a week at the clinic having his legs pressed in machines.

  He watched his father watch the batter foul a pitch off to the first-base side, the count now full. If he had to get up and go to the bathroom, he would bother everyone in the row all over again—they would all have to stand up and let him pass. How mental the body was. He felt it burning down his groin and the more he resolved not to think about it the more he knew he wouldn’t last. The crowd was mostly men in hats and shirtsleeves, their ties loosened, except for an older woman in the row ahead who had a pocket mirror and tweezers and who was plucking hairs out of a mole on her face as if there were no one else there.

  He told Vince he had to go to the bathroom.

  His father remained still, looking at the field. At first it was as if he hadn’t heard, and Buddy felt grateful, but then his father gripped the armrest of his seat and started standing up, his eyes still on the game. Vince watched him, about to speak, but then didn’t. Why had Buddy assumed that Vince would take him and not his father?

  REHAB

  My son Eliav walks to the bus, on his way to work now like everybody else—a year later, 2002. He lives in a group home and my ex-wife says he’s doing better, though he never goes anywhere without his Walkman and its tinny patter of cymbal sounds. In the cafeteria, the light is gray and the air smells of refrigerated blood. There are stockpots as large as witches’ cauldrons and mixing bowls with long wooden oars. Cooks in hats squeeze dough and frosting out of guns. Behind a pane of glass, my son can see the butchers in their red-smeared aprons working with saws, the sides of beef encased in thin white membranes and whorls of white fat.

  He tells my ex-wife that he has come to live more deeply inside his own skin now, to see his mind as an obstacle or a trap, something he’s learning to step around or avoid. In addition to rehab, he is mandated to work in the kitchen thirty hours a week. He says he doesn’t mind the apron or the paper hat. He stands at the great stainless-steel sink, more like a series of connected counters or shallow troughs, and sprays water at dirty silverware. He separates forks, knives, and spoons and forces them into plastic canisters. He arranges the canisters on plastic crates, then he clears the muck from the draining alleys, and he walks the crates to the mouth of the dish line. Later, when the silverware is finished, he goes over to stack plates with the older men.

  What he wants, he tells my ex-wife, is to apprentice himself to the dish line, the anonymity of work. He wants to develop calluses on his hands and smoke cigarettes with the Yemenite men on the loading dock who treat him with a fairness that he doesn’t feel he deserves. The plates come out of the dish line so hot that only these older men can handle them, whisking them out four at a time—fast, fast—then handing them off to be stacked in the spring-loaded caddy. They hand them to my son. The plates are still so hot that he has to toss them aside almost immediately, the china taut as stone, lacquer-bright, hitting the caddy with a ring. He has to snap them four at a time from the old men’s hands, and sometimes a plate slips and explodes, shattering in a thousand shards of unleashed energy and heat.

  I imagine at night he rides in a friend’s car with the windows open and the wind blasting tight and cold on his face. They move fast beneath the arced lights, my son’s head nothing but wind and sound and the lights flicking by like small dark moons through the lenses of his sunglasses. He closes his eyes in the backseat, riding in the dark car, not thinking about anything but the feel of the motion, the sound of the air, the invulnerable feeling of distance.

  HOMELAND

  A place where children can watch dolphins or go to dance parties. A hotel that offers a seder for those alone on Passover. D9R armored bulldozers, painted beige like the dust, push the refugee camps into rubble. With their large blades, with the cages around their cockpits, they look mindless, like mammoth insects. The Palestinian boys throw stones. Some of them wear T-shirts, some have scarves over their faces like bandits or religious zealots. The bulldozers are impervious to the stones, impervious to bombs, machine guns, even rocket-propelled grenades. I watched it happen. I struggled against it and still don’t know what I could have done differently. It took less than sixty years for my country to devolve to this, less than the span of my life.

  THE “FAMILY”

  A GENOVESE FAMILY TREE

  JOE “THE BOSS” MASSERIA (1887–1931)

  Sicilian-American crime boss. Killed by five bullets at the Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant, Coney Island, Brooklyn, 1931.

  CHARLIE “LUCKY” LUCIANO (1897–1962)

  Founder of the current Five Families of American organized crime. Imprisoned, 1936. Deported to Italy, 1946.

  FRANK COSTELLO (1891–1973)

  Acting head of the Luciano crime family, 1936–1957. Retired after being shot by Vincent “The Chin” Gigante on orders of Vito Genovese, 1957.

  VITO GENOVESE (1897–1969)

  Assumed control of the Luciano crime family under his own name after the retirement of Frank Costello and the murder of his other chief rival, Albert Anastasia, 1957.

  * A note on the murder of Joe Masseria. The assassination took place after a long lunch meeting between Masseria and Charlie Luciano, who excused himself to go to the bathroom, whereupon four gunmen entered the restaurant and opened fire. The first, Ben Siegel, was murdered in 1947. The second, Albert Anastasia, was murdered
in 1957. The third, Joe Adonis, was deported to Italy in 1956, where he died in 1971. The fourth, Vito Genovese, died in prison in 1969.

  NO WAY HOME

  As I said, the gangsters built their houses on pretense, hypocrisy, deception—the country in which they’d staked their claim was more like a kind of dreamland, bordered by prison, exile, and death.

  On February 7, 1946, Meyer Lansky stood on the deck of the Ellis Island ferry with Frank Costello and a lawyer named Moses Polakoff, an excess of luster or glow about them even from a distance, despite their understated, impeccable clothes. They watched the Immigration Station emerge before them, the verdigris of its four turrets somehow Eastern European, circuslike, absurd. When the boat docked, they walked up the same gangway they had walked as children, Ellis Island in 1946 not a point of immigration but a point of deportation. Their friend Charlie Luciano was detained there, having spent the past ten years in Dannemora prison. They met him in the visiting room upstairs in the main building, which was eerily abandoned, its vast reception hall empty. Luciano slouched with his arms crossed over his knees, withered, pale, dressed like a custodian in gray pants and shirt. He was being sent back to the town of his birth, Lercara Friddi—some rubble on a hill in Sicily, the stink of sulfur, goats in the yellow grass. They entered the room with its big oak table and the guard closed the door, and before saying goodbye Luciano told them a story: