Son of a Smaller Hero Read Online Free PDF Page A

first-born son and Noah’s father – married Leah Goldenberg in 1927. Melech Adler had been pleased. The Goldenbergs were well known in the ghetto. Jacob Goldenberg, who had also approved of the match, died in 1936. He had been a Talmud Torah teacher and a Chassid. Everybody had read his wild, yearning poems written in Yiddish that had celebrated fields and forests that he had never known. Both families had been satisfied with the match.
    Only Wolf and Leah weren’t satisfied.
    Leah’s brother, Harry, was a doctor. One day she had told him: “We’re a family of strangers.”
    Sometimes Wolf went to two different movies on Sunday nights. Other times he went to an early movie and then to Panofsky’s, where he played pinochle with the boys. Occasionally Noah played pinochle with him. Leah was vice-president of the Ladies’ Auxiliary. She liked the poems of Byron and Keats, and some nights, when she was feeling lonely, Noah would stay home and read them to her in the kitchen.
    The Adlers, who lived in a cold-water flat on City Hall Street, spent most of their time in the kitchen. There was a big damp blotch on the ceiling (Mr. Twersky, the landlord, was too cheap to fix the pipes properly) and from time to time flakes of plaster spiralled downwards, but it was warm and cosy there all the same. Leah, however, was particularly proud of the parlour, which was restricted to guests and meetings. A deluxe chesterfield set, end-tables and antique chairs, a Persian rug and wine drapes, two bookcases with glass doors, and a breakfront had all been crammed into this room. The breakfront, which had taken two years to pay for, was a kind of solace to her. She polished it often and felt every scratch like a wound to her own person. The shelves swarmed with tiny china figures and gold-trimmed plates and silver trays and china flowers. She arranged and rearranged, and arranged again, her collection of oddcups and saucers. She enjoyed looking after these possessions even more than she did watering the Japanese gardens on the various end-tables, something that she did every day. The bedroom which she shared with Wolf was simply furnished. There were two beds. She would have enjoyed doing more about Noah’s room but he had objected to her fussing with the furnishings. The desk in his room, though, had been her father’s and that gave her plenty of satisfaction. Showing friends about the room, she would say: “He uses my father’s desk. You remember my father, don’t you?”
    The dishes cleared away, Wolf and Leah sat opposite each other at the kitchen table. They had just returned from his father’s house about an hour ago. The door to Noah’s bedroom was shut. Wolf, she knew, was impatient. This was Sunday evening and he would be late for the movies. The window that looked out on the lane was opened because of the heat. The cotton net that had been tacked up on the window frame to keep the flies out had been blackened by grit and smoke many seasons ago. Upstairs, Mrs. Ornstein’s baby was crying. And downstairs, just below them, the Greenbergs were gathered in the back yard. Mort Shub was telling them jokes. Wolf could hear him.
    “You haven’t even got the spunk to talk back to your father,” Leah said. “ ‘He isn’t coming, Paw. It’s not my fault.’ You should stick up for your boy. You call yourself a man?”
    Waiting for her to begin always unnerved Wolf, even after all these years. But once she had begun he felt easier. He knew his role and played it without fault. The argument was constant. She said this, he said that. Neither of them cheated.
    “Why should I talk back to Paw? He left so he left. Should I chain him to the door?”
    “He left because you’re common.”
    “Common. I worked like a nigger so that –”
    “Don’t say ‘nigger.’ Noah wouldn’t like it. He recognizes the niggers!”
    “Recognize. If you saw five niggers walking down the street you could recognize? A nigger is a nigger.”
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