Histories and Herstories

By Gordon Cohn

A longstanding friendship is tested. A widower enters the dating world in late life with unexpected results. Three women deal with the challenges of marriage and respond in surprising ways. An encounter far from home recalls an ugly experience decades earlier. The binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 of the Hebrew Bible is cast in a different light. Children and adults reject the faith of their fathers—and mothers. Finally, a non-fiction memory of indelible characters in a Chicago neighborhood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669835554

Gordon Cohn

IVAN J. HOUSTON, a graduate of UC Berkeley, is the retired CEO of one of America’s largest black businesses. He was also the first black director of some of the nation’s largest corporations. He served in the US Army from 1943 to 1945. Houston lives in Los Angeles, California.

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Copyright © 2022 by Gordon Cohn.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/28/2022

Xlibris

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

T HIS SECOND AND perhaps final collection of short stories has been completed in its author’s ninetieth year. Like its predecessor, Hot Candy and Other Stories , it represents a lifelong dream: to translate the people and events I have observed into stories that entertain and provoke. Somehow, life’s appropriate demands and expectations combined with insufficient will to keep the words and music from making their way onto paper before the approaching ultimate deadline.

Now, with the unsettling awareness, created by the almost daily disappearance of notables dear and distant, that I am unlikely to realize my goal of living forever, I have taken the computer and my observation, curiosity, and imagination into the not-always sunny valleys of memory. It is joyful work though the characters and events that seem to remain longest in the mind are less than joyful. I hope you find some pleasure and/or provocation in these pages.

All reactions and comments are welcome. All and any.

GC

CONTENTS

Dedication

Friendship

The Dating Game

Just One

Counterpoint

Emily’s Story

At The Wedding

Bible Story

The Boy Who Wanted Nothing Jewish

The Family Of Malka Schwartz

The Boys On The Corner

Acknowledgment

Who reads short stories? one is asked, and I like to think that they are . . . read by discerning and well-informed men and women who seem to feel that narrative fiction can contribute to our understanding of one another and the sometimes bewildering world around us.

--John Cheever (1912-82)

Why I Write Short Stories

DEDICATION

For the gift of ninety years,

for those who read with serious intent,

and in memory of thirty-eight months, 2018-21

FRIENDSHIP

I T IS A lifetime ago, more than seventy-five years, yet I recall clearly the night when Sidney Schein first showed he was the smartest of us all. By all I mean Billy Hellman, Lenny Green, and myself—Joey Glasgow. We were four among many our age who lived on Kolin Avenue and neighboring streets in North Lawndale, Chicago, Illinois.

We had been together since the first day of kindergarten in 1938, and now it was July 31, 1945, just a couple of months after Sid’s bar mitzvah and a month before the Japanese surrendered, ending World War II.

That day the rows of brown, dried-blood red, or faded yellow brick three-story apartment buildings that filled our neighborhood for blocks around had baked all day as the temperature reached ninety-nine, with humidity to match. Radio reported it the hottest Chicago July day in history. Not a hint of a breeze.

Everyone living near the corner of Sixteenth Street and Kolin took to the street as they had done every night for most of the month. On that corner, where Goodman’s Delicatessen and Galler’s Drug Store faced each other, temporary relief was available. Galler’s alone offered air-conditioning four steps down from the street and a soda foundation where sodas, sundaes, and milk shakes were seventeen cents and a malteds in chocolate or vanilla a few pennies more and came with a cookie. Goodman’s did not have the benefit of refrigeration but offered cold drinks and distractions—a nickel for a six-and-a-half-ounce Coke in its shapely bottle or a chocolate phosphate—along with a busy pinball machine that went Tilt under heavy breathing.

Dozens of residents of all ages, knowing that easy sleep was unlikely on damp sheets in airless rooms, even those with portable fans, gathered in clusters of interest. The grandparents, Jews, most of them born in Eastern Europe, stood near the entrance to Goodman’s, arguing Trotsky versus Stalin, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, the labor movement and David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Harry Truman’s real or imagined view of the Jews. None were aware of The Bomb waiting to be dropped only days later to change the world.

Near them were our parents and those of our friends, in middle age, men in pleated slacks, short-sleeved sport shirts or sleeveless undershirts, and women in simple cotton house dresses. Everyone with a cigarette, a pipe, or a cigar. The women talked children, bridge and mah jongg, ration coupons, their charity organizations devoted to the aged and orphans, and neighborhood gossip. The men discussed, business in schmattas, wines and spirits and used cars, the Cubs’ racing the St. Louis Cardinals toward the National League championship, and the anti-Semites who during the night stuffed into vestibule mailboxes printed flyers mocking President Franklin Delano Rosenfeld, the Jew who got us into a war that the Jew capitalists of the world started.

And then there were the boys, from ten or eleven to beyond college age, gathered in front of Galler’s, the teenagers talking mostly sex and the youngers listening in— fantasies and sworn realities that were beyond belief or proof. Some dwelt on the breasts of their schoolmate, Faygie Leventhal, who had suddenly emerged one morning, it seemed, with acquisitions she was so proud of she wanted everyone to feel them, one boy at a time day or night in the dark urine-smelling passageway between Magid’s butcher shop and Sakolsky’s grocery. The boys, who always referred to each other as The Boys or One of the Boys, also argued the superiority of either the Cubs or White Sox although one was on the way to a championship and the other was mired hopelessly in sixth place, barely ahead of the other, lesser St. Louis team—the Browns—and Connie Mack’s woeful Philadelphia Athletics in the American League. They argued who was the better violinist, Leonard Green of Mason Elementary or Simon Melamed of Bryant Elementary across Franklin Park. The boys in fiercest argument would have trouble distinguishing a violin from a viola and would not have been able to identify Nathan Milstein or Fritz Kreisler, thinking the latter Fritz Crisler, the coach of the University of Michigan football team. They expressed dreams of finding a Northside girl with money in a pick-up at North Avenue or Oak Street beach. Could Barney Ross, the Chicago hero of an earlier time, beat Sugar Ray Robinson? Some would introduce names like Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, even Tolstoy and Dickens, but they provoked little response since only one or two had read any of them and the talk quickly reverted to dicks and pussy, who had lost his cherry and who was too afraid to try.

On that night in 1945, Hellman, Green, and I, in a departure from the usual, followed Sid as he moved from group to group. It was customary for him to trail the three of us, whether sneaking into a neighborhood or downtown movie house or dashing out of a distant delicatessen without paying. Now, on this torrid night we watched as he listened just long enough to hear the direction of the conversation before intruding to tell the gathered grandparents that Lenin had warned against Stalin’s rise as early as the 1920s and the guy now being called Uncle Joe had killed millions of his own through the thirties, including many of his nation’s intellectuals and generals. This slight, pale bar mitzvah boy told them that regardless of what they thought—and they seemed to claim that everyone of any distinction was Jewish unless proven otherwise—Leon Trotsky never considered himself Jewish in any religious sense. He never wrote Yiddish, didn’t keep kosher and never entered a synagogue. And neither did Karl Marx or Heinrich Heine, whose name they didn’t recognize. Sid at thirteen knew Heine. Christ, he could quote Heine. Who knew what he knew? He had kept his information stored in the wonder warehouse of his mind.

When we followed him as he joined the younger guys who could fill every night not only with sex but with sports argument, Sid announced that middleweight puncher Rocky Graziano, who had just won a title shot against champion Tony Zale, was indeed married to a Jewish woman. In their usual caustic way of challenging anything they didn’t know, The Boys told him he was full of shit, but Sid would just snicker and scurry away, moving on to another group with us in tow and thrust his knowledge into the conversation. Billy, Lenny, and I were suddenly in awe of a buddy who was in no way our equal in what we thought most important: playing seasonal sports every free moment from dawn to dusk, on the street between parked cars or in neighborhood fields and parks. Board games or three-handed pinochle were reserved for rainy days. Sid was always the silent observer. The only game he played was chess, and he carried a manual of moves everywhere to occupy him while the three of us indulged our lowbrow pleasures.

Sid could not throw a ball or run a block. His reluctance even to try may have been the result of his health. At the time, just touching five feet, Sid was almost pure white, bone thin, with ribs you could count, and he suffered from mastoiditis. Chronic ear infections crippled him every winter and he spent weeks closed up with his mother and brother Norman, two years younger—a pest with a perpetually snotty nose who tried to follow the four of us everywhere when Sid was well. There were no antibiotics for mastoiditis then, and as I recall Sid needed a couple of surgeries for his condition.

Mrs. Schein—Bertha—was a tall full-figured woman with hair dyed as lustrous black as anthracite. She was the head librarian at Legler Library and the only divorced person any of us had ever known. She had gone to college and was more cultured than any other of the mothers on the block except for Clara Green, Lenny’s mother. Mrs. Schein had accumulated almost three hundred albums of classical music, and when Sid was ill during those ugly Chicago winters we three would head for their second-floor apartment to visit. Mrs. Schein would allow us a few minutes with Sid and then force us into a space she had converted to a music room, where we were obliged to listen to some of her favorites: Gladys Swarthout, Jussi Bjorling, Licia Albanese, Ferruccio Tagliavini, even Caruso, and sometimes the Metropolitan Opera. Lenny, of course, loved those moments from the beginning. Billy Hellman and I were slow to awaken. Bill could hardly count the minutes until we could return to the street and games, but I found myself responding to the beauty of what I heard, and those afternoons and sounds have remained with me to this day. Mrs. Schein was a force, and I suspect it was she who made Sid the curious seeker and student he was, in love with learning and with social justice.

There was a Mr. Shein. Sid’s father was the projectionist at the White Palace second-run movie house a mile and half up Sixteenth Street, and he came around on weekends to pick up Sid and Norman, always called Brother, and take them out for the afternoon, either to a movie or on a double-decker bus ride to the far edge of the city and lunch. He was a short paunchy, round-faced balding man with a slightly hunched back, always in a suit and tie. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, and he seldom smiled or spoke to us except maybe to squeeze out a hello. He also looked about three-quarters the size of Mrs. Schein. To this day I cannot imagine what drew those two people together.

Sid never volunteered anything about those Saturdays with his dad, and he deflected any questions about the marriage or