Inventing Memory Read Online Free PDF Page B

listen to what he would say otherwise? No one! America only listens to what the rich have to say. And to get rich in America, you have to use other people as if they were animals, beasts from burden. One man's hands and heart will not make you rich in America—that's the truth of it, the emis ."
    I sensed that his bitterness had something of rationalization in it, as if there were a fear inside him that he was not good enough, or that by painting and drawing he would raise dybbuks and affront the Almighty. For a Jew to paint in those days was to rise in rebellion. Books we were allowed—books we worshiped—but images always smacked of the devil for us. The Jew who painted was always torn, whether Chagall or Pascin…or others I came to know later. But I held my tongue. I needed the job I had so audaciously demanded, and I was not about to block my own way.
    Better to be Levitsky's slave than Chaya's. Better to be Levitsky's slave than a Sidewalk Susie or a white slave in a brothel. The streets of the Lower East Side were full of Jewish girls who made their living on their back. They strolled the streets wearing nothing but their vivid kimonos, flashing a bit of breast or lewdly propositioning potential customers. They lived—if you could call it that—in storefronts, in tenements, in shacks behind tenements, and they charged fifty cents a night at a time when you could buy something for a penny—a lemonade, say, or a hot dog, or halvah covered in powdered sugar. Their pimps were as brazen as the girls. Some of these men became song pluggers or Second Avenue producers or later even Hollywood agents. A man who can figure out a way to get paid for what a girl does in bed with another man can figure a way to get paid for anything . In Yiddish, we call such a person a dreyer— a smooth operator. As Shakespeare said, chutzpah is all. On the Lower East Side, chutzpah was meat and drink and a roof against the rain.

    Once I began working for Levitsky, I had no time to mope about the family I left behind—neither the living nor the dead. Now I was running at double speed, like some heroine in a picture show. Levitsky was a ferocious taskmaster, driving his ghost painters on to greater and greater feats of productivity. First he had to conquer the catalogs, then he became fascinated with the possibility of making animated cartoons, and he would sit day and night drawing twenty or thirty pictures of the same horse, but slightly different in the legs, sewing them into a booklet and flipping the pages until the horse seemed to move. At such times he was so engrossed that I feared bringing him anything, even a cookie or a glass of tea. Sometimes he would show me what he was doing. And sometimes, when I expressed greater interest, he would draw suggestive female figures, again with slightly different motions of legs and arms, and flip them for me until I blushed. And he would laugh raucously, delighting in shocking what he presumed was my innocence.
    As for that commodity, I both was and wasn't innocent. Wasn't because I had borne a child. Was because I had never known the love of a man. Perhaps that was why it was so simple for me to decide that if I was going to work for Levitsky, I would sleep with him too. There was no sense in being coy, I told myself. Men were men, and if you couldn't celebrate the Sabbath in America—Saturday was a work day in America then—you might as well give up all your other illusions about virtue. But Levitsky was a funny man. He would not let me into his bed, saying (in Yiddish) that when the cock stood up, the brains lay in the ground, and that he would rather have my help than my distraction. Sometimes he would stroke my hair or put his arm around my shoulder, but that was all. Nor did he visit the whores. He spat at them when they importuned him in the street, saying, "Go to the mikveh " or " Shande! Shande!"
    "You're a nice piece of goods," he used to say to me, "but go to your own bed."
    And I