Authors: Joseph Mitchell
“What happened to him?”
“Well, he kept running all that night. He ran all over New Jersey and alarmed the whole countryside. Finally they caught him, and they had to put him in the insane asylum.”
“What happened to the conjure doctor?”
“He kind of disappeared. I think he left town. I think he moved out West somewhere. I haven’t seen him for two or three years.”
In the dining room of the Home of the New York Guild for the Jewish Blind, at 332 St. John’s Avenue, Yonkers, eighty-three sightless men, women and children sat down and celebrated the 109th birthday of Hirsch Smulowitz, a white-bearded tailor who called his late wife from the back room of their East Side
shop one night forty years ago and shrieked, “Rebekkah, I can’t see!”
Mr. Smulowitz was born on February 29, 1824, and according to the Gregorian calendar, he should have birthdays only on leap years.
Told that he was not due a birthday party this year, Mr. Smulowitz pounded vigorously on a table, shouted that he would leave the home and get a job shoveling snow. Mrs. Rose Z. Moschcowitz, director of the home, told him there was no snow to shovel, but his protests were so loud that she promised him a party and forthwith ordered three big cakes.
As proud and domineering as a landed patriarch, Mr. Smulowitz sat at the head of the table and ordered an attendant to cut the first cake. Then he shouted a command in Yiddish.
The attendant went at once to a cabinet, unlocked it, brought out a bottle and poured the aged celebrant a glass of schnapps. Mr. Smulowitz swallowed the contents and shouted another command in Yiddish.
“On a man’s birthday one glass is not enough,” he said, holding out the glass. The attendant filled it again.
“How do you feel tonight, Reb Hirsch?” asked Mrs. Moschcowitz.
“Not very bad,” he said, tapping the table with his glass.
“You hate to admit that you feel better than any of us,” she said. Someone turned on the radio. Mrs. Moschcowitz asked him how he liked the radio.
“I don’t like it,” he said, emphatically. “Tell them to stop playing at once. Tell them that noise is no good.”
“He doesn’t care for the radio,” said Mrs. Moschcowitz. “He never did. His principal pleasure is to hear someone read love stories in the Jewish newspapers. When the stories are finished, he says, ‘Now read me about the market. How is the market today, maybe?’
“We have to pay him $1 to get him to take a bath. We insist that he take a bath three times a week, and it runs into money. Here lately it got to be too expensive—we have a $40,000 deficit, you know—and so we cut out a piece of parchment paper in the shape of a bill and give it to him when he refuses to take a bath. He doesn’t know the difference.”
“What does he want with the money?”
“His mind wanders,” said Mrs. Moschcowitz, “and sometimes he forgets that he is in a home. He remembers the struggle he had to make a living in the tailor shop and he wakes up and yells, ‘I haven’t got money for the coal this month!’
“Every time a visitor comes to the home Reb Hirsch holds out his hand and says, ‘Any money for
me, maybe?’ The depression doesn’t interest him. He says he has been through a dozen depressions. He says it was worse after the Civil War, far worse, than it is now.”
Next to schnapps and wine he cares for snuff.
He keeps a six months’ supply in his pockets. The bladders of snuff cause his pockets to bulge.
Little is known about the past of Mr. Smulowitz. He was born in Riga, Russia. His wife died in 1927. For many years the Guild gave him and his wife a small pension.
After her funeral, Mr. Smulowitz was taken straight from the Brooklyn cemetery in which his wife was buried to the home in Yonkers.
He is cheerful and he likes to give orders.
On days of celebration he gets up in the middle of the floor and dances a surprisingly agile jig. He thinks he should have a glass of whiskey each day. After the celebration last night he stood up and commenced a jig. Afraid he would excite himself, Mrs. Moschcowitz asked him to sit down. He sat down, felt for his tiny schnapps glass.
“Fill it up,” he said, hitting it against the table.
The tall, red-haired Italian-American had only one arm; shrapnel in the Argonne tore off the other at
the shoulder-joint. The little Negro was sightless, blind as a rock, and there were ugly pink scars on his brown face.
The man they called Jumpy had only one leg, and it appeared to pain him to get his breath because of a little bit of gas he inhaled one morning eighteen years ago in France. He said he believes that with one pull on a cigarette you can get more smoke in your mouth than he got gas, but it still hurts. He said it hurts him a lot worse than an aching tooth hurts, or a terrible headache, and sometimes it hurts for days, hours on end.
The Italian and the one-legged man were playing checkers in the convalescent ward at United States Veterans’ Hospital No. 81, at 130 West Kingsbridge Road, in the upper Bronx. The blind Negro sat on one of the iron beds with his head in his hands. He sits like that for hours on end, not moving a muscle. There were two newspapers on the bed, and both were turned to the sports pages. The two checker players stared at the board.
The war between Italy and Ethiopia had just begun, and I had been ordered to find out what veterans of the World War thought about it.
“Have you been reading about the war?” I asked the man who had swallowed gas years ago in France.
“No,” he said.
“You must have read something about it.”
“I don’t have no interest in it,” the man said. “So far as I’m concerned they can blow Europe to hell. I feel sorry for those poor Italian dopes and those dopes in Ethiopia getting their guts shot out and their heads blown off so a bunch of rich guys can make more money. Poor dopes.”
“In one day they killed 1,700 men, and they wounded 3,000 over there,” said the Italian-American, moving a black piece across the worn, greasy checkerboard.
“Yeah,” said the gassed man.
“Where is Ethiopia?” asked the blind Negro.
“That is a lot of men to kill in one day,” said the Italian-American, “but that is just the beginning. They just started.”
“We killed a lot more than that in one day in our war,” said the blind Negro. “There was millions killed in our war. We bloodied up the whole world.”
“Would you go to war again if you were able?” I asked.
“By God,” said the one-legged man, “I would not go to war for nothing or nobody. They could came over here, even Japan, and take the whole damned country and I would not go out and get my head blowed off. It wouldn’t be any worse than it is now anyway.”
“It is better to be in the army than starving to death without no job,” said the Italian-American.
The one-legged man lit a cigarette for the Negro and handed it to him.
“A man that goes to war ain’t quite bright,” said the Negro. “He don’t show good judgment.”
I found that there was little discussion about the war in the whole hospital. The day fighting started a man said something about “those damned Wops,” and an Italian veteran heard it and picked up one of the cranks they use to raise and lower the hospital beds and said he would knock the man’s brains out if he didn’t take “Wop” back. The man did, and there was no fight. There was more talk about the war in the wards where men are permanently confined to their beds. They were stretched out in bed with radio headphones on their heads, listening. Each bed in the hospital had a headset attached to it.
“If you want to see the guys that know about war go upstairs to Ward 2-South,” said the one-legged man. “They are the guys that don’t leave here until they take them out in a box. Shell shock. And look in 4-South, where they got the guys with no jaws, and their eyes and ears eaten off, and look at some of the guys with tuberculosis they got after gas burned up their lungs. Look at the T.B.’s, and ask them if they would fight again.
“Those are the guys the public never sees. They never go out of the hospital. Every once in a while one of them goes off his nut, crazy as a bedbug,
thinks he’s fighting again, and they transfer him to another hospital. Thousands of those guys lying in beds still fighting in France. All the public sees is a guy on crutches now and then. It don’t make no difference. They can drum up another war and young fellows will trot off with smiles on their faces to get themselves blowed to hell. It’s a lot of fun.”
I was permitted to walk down the corridor in 2-South, but not allowed to ask questions. There was a man standing in the corridor in his bathrobe. He stared straight ahead, vacantly, and he was trembling all over. An orderly came up and guided him to his bed. A doctor said something to him. It took him long minutes to answer; the three or four words he said were uttered with great effort. The doctor said his brain is sound, but his nerves will not obey its commands. There did not seem to be much reason to ask him what he thought of the Italo-Ethiopian war.
Some of the beds in the ward had sideboards on them so the men would not fall to the floor. They have no control over themselves. Some are able to make reed baskets. They have a room at the end of the corridor in which they sit and make the baskets. Outside the leaves on the maples in the eighteen acres of hospital grounds were yellow and red, and on Kingsbridge Road kids were throwing a football about and yelling, and on the blue Hudson two young men were rowing a boat, and inside, huddled around
the radiators, five middle-aged men whose nerves had been blasted out of coordination by screaming shells were struggling with reed baskets. It takes them hours to do the work a child can do in no time. It made one furious watching them struggle with the lengths of reed, trembling and fumbling.
Walking along the corridor one could see the men in their beds, staring vacantly at the ceiling. Their cheeks were sunken and pale. One man screamed and his hands reached up wildly. One man was smiling, but his eyes were as startled as if he were watching a hand grenade with the pin out.
“Hello, doctor,” he said, smiling.
The doctor patted the trembling man on the shoulder.
“You’re looking better today,” he said.
One morning I had a good time in Red Hook, a rowdy waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn. I went over to visit Mrs. Anna di Massa Agnese, a sturdy peasant woman from Ischia, Italy. Mrs. Agnese was eighty-one years old. She had arrived the day before on the Italian liner Rex. It was 10 o’clock when I reached the Italian-American grocery operated by her son, Salvatore Agnese, at 504 Court Street, but the old woman was still upstairs, sleeping happily in a big feather-bed. In a little while she came downstairs,
rubbing her eyes. She had a wry taste in her mouth. She did not have a hangover. She said she had never had a hangover in all her eighty-one years. She went to the door of the store and spat into the street. This amused Salvatore. He sat down on a keg and laughed heartily. Then the old woman laughed.
The night before approximately sixty of her happy relatives—sons, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and assorted in-laws—gathered in the back room of the grocery and celebrated her arrival in the United States with a big dinner. During the dinner the old woman drank a large amount of home-made wine. She said the wine she drank on her way over on the Rex was too good for her taste, and so was the food. She said her son’s wife, Mrs. Salvatore Agnese, was a good cook, and that the dinner—macaroni, spring chicken, rabbit, and pickled peppers—tasted better than anything she ate on the Rex.
“Tasted like home,” she said, according to Salvatore, who translated every remark she made for my benefit.
“Glad you liked it, Mamma,” said Mrs. Salvatore, who beamed as she rushed to get her mother-in-law a tumbler of wine.
The old lady was extremely proud of her son’s grocery store. She has four sons in New York City, and they all run grocery stores. She wandered through Salvatore’s store, admiring the provolone cheeses hanging
in the window, slapping them affectionately with her wrinkled, capable old hands. She took the cover off the crock of black, ripe olives, and fished out a handful, eating them with relish and throwing the pits on the floor.
She was particularly pleased with the cases of spaghetti and macaroni, cases with glass fronts like sectional bookcases, cases stuffed full of many kinds of macaroni—shells, cow’s eyes, elbows, seeds, butterflies, and those twisted ones known as spiedini and little crested ones known as rooster’s combs (creste di gallo). She admired the cases.
“She said everything is magnificent in my store,” said Salvatore, who filled his mother’s tumbler with wine every time she emptied it.
“I’m glad she likes it. I’ve tried for years to get her to come visit us. I bet I wrote her five hundred letters begging her to come. She lives near Naples on a little plot of land, and she didn’t want to leave her chickens. She has ten chickens.”
The old woman broke into the conversation and talked loudly for a few moments. She was in high spirits. One of her grandchildren ran out of the back room with a drumstick in her hand. The child gnawed at the drumstick. The old woman pulled the child to her and kissed both her greasy cheeks. The child smiled with pleasure and kept on gnawing at
the drumstick, enjoying it. Then the old woman began talking again.
“She says they paved the street outside her home, and now it’s not so dusty any more,” said Salvatore. “She says she can keep the place clean now without breaking her back. She wants to sweep out my grocery store, but I won’t let her. I’m not going to let her do a lick of work. I want her to enjoy herself. I want her to eat a lot and get fat, and I want her to spend the rest of her days over here with me and my brothers.”
The old woman wore a long brown dress, a sort of Mother Hubbard, with buttons down the front of it, and she had a brown shawl or bandana wrapped around her hair. Her face was criss-crossed with wrinkles, but her old eyes were clear, and she held herself erect. She went to the door of the store and looked out at the Red Hook street. She was rather bewildered by what she saw, and she came back in. She was bewildered on the trip from the pier, her son said, but when she got inside the store she felt at home. The heady smell of cheeses and olive oil made her feel right at home.