A Happy Man

By Bryna Hellmann

Martin Burke married his beloved Leah during the Roaring Twenties, raised three children during the Great Depression and ended up secure and successful. How did he do it? Marty thought everybody gets some luck, but not everybody grabs his chances and takes the risks, and the people who do, people like him, have the best lives. He was sorry for every guy who didn’t have his luck, he called it that, but he wrestled that luck from the bastards who wanted him to stay on Rivington Street, they wanted him to stay poor and stupid, hopeless and powerless, and not be their problem. He said he and his socialist buddies were going to fight them till they won. This is the story of a happy man. If he wasn’t always a good father, he was a good husband, friend and boss. As Amora-Rava, a rabbi and Talmudic scholar in the third century, said, “It’s luck. Bow your head.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryna Hellmann
• Release date: Apr 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9789491030864

Bryna Hellmann

Born in the US in 1928, I have lived in ‘interesting times’, those years when momentous dislocations occur in people’s lives: the depression in the ’30s, World War 2 and the Shoah, the Vietnam tragedy and the Berlin Wall. Yet nothing life-challenging has happened to me: I was always lucky enough to be on the right side of the Atlantic. In 1959, I visited my German husband’s family and ended up staying in Europe for 53 years. In 1977, I founded a Dutch private high school, and in 1987 I added a Dutch private college. I'm retired, both schools are flourishing, and I've written seven books in 10 years. A Happy Man is dedicated to my father, whose working-class life inspired it, and to Senator Sanders who, like my dad, "will fight them till they win".

Book preview

Translations

Some Yiddish words you'll find in the text and a little German.

A baleboste is a matriarch in charge of everything and doing a super job.

Bar mitzvah means son of the commandment. A boy is a bar mitzvah at 13 and a girl is a bat mitzvah at 12; the ceremony in the shul is also called a bar mitzvah.

A boychik is a dear little boy.

The chevra kadisha is a holy society. They prepare the dead for burial by washing and dressing them in shrouds; in English we say burial society.

Chutzpah is an arrogant assumption I'm right, well, of course!

A ganef is a crook or a swindler, a schnook is a sucker.

A kugel is a pudding, sweet or savory, noodles or potatoes; a kishke is a sausage.

Meyn gelibter zun: if you know German, you‘ll recognize this is mein geliebter Sohn. Yiddish mixes German grammar and vocabulary with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic and ancient Romance languages.

Shabbes, the Sabbath, begins on Friday at sundown and ends on Saturday when the third star appears.

Sitting shiva denotes the seven days of mourning for the immediate family; they cover the mirrors, tear their clothes or wear a torn ribbon, and stay home.

Shtum is not saying anything, even when you know you should.

Shul is derived from the German Schule (school); an Orthodox Jewish synagogue is a place to worship but also to study the Talmud.

Tateh is a dear papa.

Un az du bist raykh, Yidele, zolst du zikh dermonen in dem lidele, rozhinkes mit mandlen, shlof-zhe, Yidele, shlof. And when you are rich, Yidele, you must remember this lullaby, raisins and almonds, sleep, Yidele, sleep.

Einmal werden froh wir sagen: heimat du bist wieder mein. Someday we will gladly say: homeland, you are mine once more.

One

I must have been sleeping, because the sky I can see through the window across the room is darker blue than before. That blue is beautiful. They should paint this room azure with a little extra white and, really carefully, some cyan. I could mix it, but I’m not going to, I’m not going to do anything but lie here and wait for something to happen.

What could happen? Well, Leah might lean over me and say, I’m going out for breakfast, Marty. Shall I bring you something? Ice cream? Ginger ale? When I shake my head or just close my eyes, she says, All right, though she doesn’t think it is, and goes. She doesn’t tell me, when she gets back, about meeting that man whose wife is in the room next door, who joins her most mornings at the diner. I’ll bet he watches for her so he can follow her. A single man, a single woman, does it matter they’re both in their sixties if they’ll be free soon to try again, because we’re about to get out of their way? Oh love, let us be true to one another. Who wrote that?

I‘m pretty sure Leah’s been true to me from day one, and I’ve been true to her for most of that time. I wanted to be, and I’m pretty sure she thinks I was. I remember we were dancing the night we met, and she was beautiful, and the way she looked at me was beautiful. I guess I looked okay to her, why not, I was twenty-one and happy. When she comes back, maybe I’ll tell her about it and see whether she remembers how we danced that first time at Murray’s, and she laughed at me, because she was doing the leading.

I never learned to dance. I’m better with my hands than my feet.

You’re doing fine, she said, just stop thinking about it.

Let it happen?

Let it happen, she whispered, and I thought, she’s telling me we’re going to dance together again.

Murray, that bum, smart and educated. I liked him but he scared me. Isn’t the word I want scoundrel? Dorie could tell me, my daughter knows how to pronounce and spell any word you ask her about. So, was he? He never did what you’d call lasting damage, though with Ida he came close, and Leah hated him for that. Last thing she told me was that he’d gone out to Hollywood and become something dodgy.

Not like Abe, he’s a good man. A lawyer already when I met him. Never mind that joke about lawyers, I’ve heard it and so has he. I still don’t understand why I was his friend. Him a lawyer and me a house painter, and he was five or six years older, had his own office with two rooms, one for him and the client and one for Hennie. She was his secretary and wife too.

He said one time he never got his hands dirty, and he thought it was amazing what I could do. He watched me once cleaning my motorcycle, shaking his head and laughing. How do you know what you need to fix? he asked.

If something goes wrong, I told him, it looks wrong. It looks? I held up the oil filter. See all this crap? Dirt, dust, that’s what this thing catches before it gets into the oil. No different from your automobile. But he took his fancy Flink touring car to a mechanic, so he didn’t know.

The motorcycle was how we met, an Indian Scout, 1920s model. Why anyone would sell it beats me, but I got it for peanuts the year my ma died, 1921. The guy who had it was a jerk, that’s for sure. I took it apart and polished every damn last screw and bolt, put it back together and zoom, off we went. And then, a couple of thousand miles later, I was parking it in an alley next to Abe’s office building, and he came out and saw it, stopped, said, That is one nifty iron! and came over to look. And I got my first friend in Jersey City.

He had some time, so we went over to the Horn and Hardardt for coffee. Waving away my two nickels, he pulled out a handful, said he always had them ready, because he came in to drink eight or ten cups of coffee a day, while Hennie stayed in the office in case somebody called. I’m just getting started, he told me, it’s enough for us, no kids yet. What do you do?

Pretty much anything I can get. Wash dishes, move furniture. I tried once to get work in a garage, but the boss was Irish Catholic and wouldn’t hire a Jew.

Abe put out his hand and shook mine. I thought so, he said, a landsman! Most of us come from Bialystok, our parents, I mean. I was born right here. Name’s Abe Samson, and you? So I told him a little about where and who, a little being all I know, and anyway, why would he be interested? But he was.

I guess what’s interesting, if it is, is that my mother and father came to the US via Ellis Island, like a couple million other Jews smart enough to get away from the Cossacks, and some guy behind a desk, who had five minutes to sign my dad in, didn’t understand his accent and couldn’t spell his name, so this yiddishe boychik from the Pale became Edward Burke. You can’t get more American than that.

How he met my ma, Doris, I don’t know, I told Abe. Where? Somewhere around Rivington Street, the Lower East Side. He’d learned tailoring when he was so young and small that he sat cross-legged on a table with the coat or jacket spread over his knees. He was too short to work standing up, seven or eight, he must have been. Anyway, he was a master tailor, and he got a job in a suit factory a few weeks after he arrived over here. Ma sewed too, piecework, like putting together artificial flowers for hats or sewing collars and cuffs on blouses and shirts she got half-finished from a sweatshop. She could do that at home, in between taking care of us two kids, cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing and, once in a while, making a dress for a neighbor. It was enough until my dad just up and died one day, fell down in the street. Heart attack probably.

Jesus, that’s terrible, Abe said. How old were you? I was ten, and my sister Sadie was six. Did I remember him?

Not much, I said. I didn’t see him much, he worked fifty, sixty hours a week. Not on Saturday, the whole factory was closed for shabbes, but every other morning he was out of the house before we even woke up and, by the time he came home, we’d had supper and were in bed. Sadie slept on a cot in the bedroom, I was in their bed until my dad carried me into the kitchen and dumped me on the cot in the corner. Until then, I could watch him through the open door eating his supper, his head bent almost to the table, the fork going in and out of his mouth so slowly, it was as if he was already half-asleep, and my ma sitting across from him not saying a word. I don’t know if they ever talked to each other except for shabbes evening, after he’d had a glass of the cheap kosher wine he bought and measured out to last a month. When they did talk, it was Yiddish, of course, my dad didn’t need English where he worked and never went anywhere else. Ma learned some from me, I was in school where you had to speak English or get a rap on the palm of your hand.

I remember Abe staring at me, his coffee going cold. He must have been thinking about his own childhood, his educated, prosperous, attentive parents. His dad owned a chain of jewelry shops, a house in the Heights, Abe had his own bedroom, his toys, for god’s sake. High school and then college, and what I’d have given for the chance to just finish high school. Well, never mind, he never acted as though he was better than me, he knew other things, but he didn’t know more.

He wanted to hear what happened, so I explained that someone must have called the chevra kadisha to come, and they took him off the sidewalk and washed him and wrapped him up in a shroud and sent him to a big Jewish cemetery in Brooklyn. We didn’t see him even once. My mother couldn’t pay the synagogue or the cemetery but, a couple of days later, my dad’s brother Ben came down from Newport and gave the rabbi a donation. Then he helped her pack up whatever was worth moving and took us back with him to Newport.

That explains the accent, Abe said, you don’t sound like a New Yorker.

Maybe because I haven’t been back to Rivington Street since. End of story.

Abe looked at his watch. I have to get back. Where are you living?

At the Y, but it’s expensive, I can only stay there a few more weeks. I’m looking for a room. He stood up and waved at me to follow him. He had friends who rented rooms, so we went up to his office, and he phoned them.

Did I say I’d made a friend? It was three, just like that! Emma Gold was his old girlfriend, I think, and her husband Muncie was a house painter. They had a row house on a street off Summit Avenue and just one kid, Larry, so they had two extra rooms they rented cheap. Emma said I should come around right away, one of the tenants was moving out at the end of the month. He was a painter who worked with Muncie for a man who owned a dozen or so apartment houses, but he was getting married to a girl from Trenton and moving there. I got his room and his job, can you believe the luck?

I liked Muncie and Emma, and the kid was a good boy, not a sissy, but he never backtalked or defied them, maybe because they listened to him and took him seriously. Muncie told me once his parents were always angry about something, overworked, underpaid, stupid immigrants, right? Bad English, funny habits, they were foreigners who’d never fit in. They took a lot of their anger out on him and his brothers and sisters so, when Larry came along, he told Emma that was it, that one kid was going to get all his love and attention. Fine, she said, though she and her three sisters had a happy childhood, and he said she’d just forgotten all the bad stuff. Anyway, they were nice people to live with, they were nice to each other and to me, and they made me feel I was nice too. Emma said one evening the best thing was that Muncie had somebody to talk politics with. Just don’t let him shout at you, she said.

I don’t shout! Muncie protested.

You do when people disagree with you. Maybe Marty won’t.

What’s the fun in that? he asked, and I didn’t disagree, but I did ask a million questions, and he liked that. He reminded me of Uncle Ben, neither of them trusted authority, politicians, the police or anybody who claimed he knew what was good for you. They told you anything they thought you were stupid enough to believe, if it got you to do what was good for them. When we got into the war, Muncie told me, I was nineteen, called up for a physical, and I wouldn’t be sitting here if I’d passed.

When I asked why he wasn’t, he said, They never told me exactly. The doc with the stethoscope just said I’d better take it easy. As if I could! I’d been working since I was fifteen, and I’ll work until I drop dead. But at least, if I’m going to die of something, it wasn’t going to be a German bullet. That was his luck, for as long as it lasted.

About luck, everybody gets some, I believe that, but not everybody grabs his chances and takes the risks. People like me who do that have the best lives. I couldn’t have had a better one, work I enjoyed, people I loved and who loved me, books I read and paintings I saw, there’s no end to things to be grateful for. Even this bed and this room, clean sheets, soft pillow, that sky outside the window, the tube with the red button Leah pushes every once in a while, Leah here with me, days enough, so far, to get ready to die. I’m almost ready, I just need time to tell Leah once more how much I’ve loved her and thank her for being my family. I want to tell her to go on, to love another man if she finds a good one, and enjoy all the years she’s going to have.