Chicago

(Author: Bernard Levinson, Vol. 72, No. 1, Pesach 2017) 

Snow is falling. I can smell the snow. There is always snow in my memories. My soul is layered with the cold winters of Chicago. I don’t know for sure if snow was actually falling on that day when my school announced the yearly ‘school concert’. Each class would do their magical thing. My class were going to sing. We would be sailors on a ship on Lake Michigan. We would form up on the stage in such a way to actually appear like a ship. Heading for the audience. As a child, I could hold a note and could actually sing. I was placed at the prow. We sang about Chicago. Our young voices filled the entire school hall. We sang until the words and the music embedded itself into our brain’s core. Now some eighty years later, I can still remember the words. I can still sing it.

I wasn’t sure what ‘bounty’ meant. My brother told me. Once a week he stood in an endless queue to accept the family issue of peanut butter, issued by the government, as part of the national relief plan. This was our staple diet. Cheap white bread and peanut butter.

Chicago was Kedzie Avenue. In the hot summer months, men worked in vests. I sold newspapers on the corner of Kedzie Avenue and Lawrence Avenue wearing my brother’s vest. This was my newspaper stand. This was my Chicago. I remember playing with friends. We heard gun shots. We ran down the alley, in the direction of the noise. There in the middle of the alley, surrounded by a crowd, was John Dillinger, shot by the  police as he left a theatre. I tried to get close. In front of me people were dipping their handkerchiefs in his blood. A national hero had died.

We had many heroes. Baseball players. Movie screen idols and John Dillinger. Any one of us could recite the names of all the notorious most wanted men. They were our serious heroes. They didn’t have to work…

My father did odd jobs on a hoist checking pipes on building sites. A tedious job in summer. A disastrous job in winter. He was lucky to have this work. My brother worked on a road digging team. My mother was the only real consistent wage earner. She was a kind-of seamstress. She sewed button holes for the few tailors who still had work. At home she practiced a unique wizardry. Articles of clothing metamorphosed into amazing creations that each of us in turn would wear…

My brother was ten years older than I. An adult. Converting his shirts was relatively easy. She shortened the sleeves and did a series of tucks and folds at the back of the shirt until the front of the shirt fitted. I was the youngest hunch-back in Chicago. Trousers were a serious problem. It was easy to shorten them, but the waist and the crutch posed formidable problems. She never really resolved them. In spite of her inspired genius with needle and thread, the transformation of trousers defeated her. I wore them folded a number of times at the back and hoisted up to the nipples in front.

Facing the audience on the stage I could have looked like an ordinary wild unkempt dishevelled midget of a child. As long as I didn’t turn sideways.

Then the teacher had an idea. We would wear sailor suits. Looking back, I imagine most parents saw this as a need to buy white pants, get a white shirt and find a sailor hat. Any five and ten cents store had sailor hats… My mother announced there was no need to buy anything. She would make me a sailor suit. My mother had never seen a sailor. She was Russian. As a Russian she had never seen a Russian sailor either.

I remember our first dress rehearsal. My teacher looked at me long and hard.

I stood, arms at my side, waiting.

“My mother made it,” I offered.

He nodded.

Silence.

I could see that the collar of his shirt had been turned inside out. A manoeuvre my mother was particularly good at. His shirt cuffs were badly in need of repair. He had his lunch in a brown paper packet. It smelt of peanut butter…. I also knew he was Jewish.

“You know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking. The most important part of a ship is the rudder. It steers the ship. Without it the ship would be lost. I want you to be the rudder.”There are two parts to every story. The outside part and the inside part. Like fruit, the outside part could be interesting, even instructive. A world of its own. The inside part is the seed.

What is the seed of this story?

A peanut butter generation of small hungry boys singing their hearts out on a bleak school stage?

Or it could be about a young teacher, struggling in the American depression, who went home at the end of another sad working day, and told his wife about the ‘Russian sailor suit’ and they held each other and cried.

Bernard Levinson is a distinguished South African poet whose work has appeared in numerous scholarly publications and anthologies, including Jewish Affairs. Professionally, he is a psychiatrist based in Johannesburg.