Daughter of the King Read Online Free PDF Page A

and wouldn’t turn his back on America during the war. As a kid, World War II terrified me. The air raid sirens for the drills made me think we were being invaded. The blackouts were even worse, because I thought the enemy had taken over and was going to kill us all. I was afraid to sleep in my room. I had to sleep in my parents’ big bed, in Daddy’s strong arms. He was fearless. He always reassured me. “Don’t worry, darling, we’re going to win.” One thing we didn’t have to endure during the war was rationing. Everybody else, even the rich people in the Majestic and the Beresford, complained about food shortages, clothing shortages, medicine shortages. The Lanskys had no shortages. It paid to be connected. Even as a kid, I sensed we were extra-special.
    Daddy quietly put his money where his mouth was, though he refused to brag about it, or any of his accomplishments. First, even before I was born in 1937, he used some of his old Lower East Side Bugs-Meyer musclemen to break up Nazi rallies in Yorkville, on the Upper East Side. There were a lot of Germans in New York then, and a lot of them were loyal to the Fatherland. If they could be true to their roots, Daddy had to be true to his. If Daddy had a special nostalgia for his young life, he never showed it to me. Daddy never discussed the past and didn’t dwell on the present. What inspired him was the future. What I learned of the past I got from Buddy. Daddy’s youth was a time of bootleg booze and bullets and danger, cracking skulls and shoot-outs that I still can’t imagine my buttoned-up banker-like father being a part of.
    It was an era that provided still more uncles, Uncle Red Levine, Uncle Doc Stacher, and my real uncle, Jack Lansky, Daddy’s younger brother, all a little rougher than the Dinty Moore elite. Unlike theothers from “the old days,” Uncle Jack Lansky seemed weak and timid, lucky to have a fearless big brother to protect him. The others seemed rough because they were , tough Jews to a man, living and laughing refutations of the brainy, nerdy, meek, rabbinical stereotype. These were Jews who could kill. Notwithstanding our Christmas trees, our liver and bacon, my brothers not being bar mitzvah’ed, Daddy would not abandon his pride in the faith of his parents and of his oldest friends, and he certainly would not give up his pride in being an American.
    New York was in real danger. Those air raid drills weren’t just for caution. The enemy was right here. This was brought home to me when the famous French luxury liner Normandie was sabotaged at the West Side docks and set ablaze. We could see the cataclysmic black clouds of smoke all the way uptown at the Beresford. If the blackouts were bad, this was worse. The sirens wouldn’t end, and I thought the city had been bombed and that worse was coming.
    Days later, on our way to dinner, Daddy drove his Oldsmobile (he refused anything show-offy like a Cadillac or Packard) down 10th Avenue to show me the wreck of the ship. The Normandie , he explained, couldn’t sail the seas anymore with passengers, because the German submarines would sink it. So the French had given it to us to use as a troop ship and we renamed it the Lafayette , after the French general who helped us win the Revolutionary War against the British. For a guy who never got to high school, Daddy was a whiz on American history. Whatever we called it, the ship was finished, destroyed. It looked like a giant beached whale, lying on its side, its innards burnt out, smoke still billowing from its ruined carcass.
    Why would Daddy take a five-year-old to Dinty Moore’s during wartime? Because I was too scared to stay at home without him. Plus I loved to go out with him. That night we had dinner with Uncle Joe, who was the big boss of the Fulton Fish Market downtown and as the head of the seafood workers’ union, one of most powerful men on the waterfront. His name was Joseph Lanza, but everyone called him“Socks,” I guess