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be a cop. Particularly not a Chicago cop, the definition of which (my father frequently said) was a guy with change for a five. He'd been a union man, my father, and had been jailed and beaten by police; and he'd always had disdain for Chicago politics, from the butcher down the block who was assistant precinct captain to "Big Bill" Thompson, the mayor who wanted to be known as the "Builder" when "Boozer" was more like it.
    Pa would've liked nothing more than for me to quit the force. It had been a major stumbling block between us, those last few years of his life. It may have led to his death. I don't know for sure. He didn't leave a note that night he shot himself. With my gun.
    The Hellers came from Halle, in eastern Germany, orginally, and so did their name: Jews in Germany in the early 1800s were forced to abandon their traditional lack of surname and take on the name of either their occupation or home area. If my name hadn't been Heller it probably would've been Taylor, because a tailor is what my great-grandfather, Jacob Heller, was, in Halle, in the late 1840s.
    Which were hard times. The economy was doing handstands due to developing railroads and industry; technology was making jobs obsolete for everybody from the guy who weaved the cloth to the oxcart driver who shipped it. Unemployment flourished, while crops failed and food prices doubled. A lot of people headed for America. My great-grandfather hung on. His business was suffering, yes, but he had contacts with the richer Jews in Halle- moneylenders, bankers, businessmen- and when the region was rocked by political unrest in 1848, great-grandfather watched from the sidelines. He couldn't afford getting involved: his business depended on an upper-class patronage, after all.
    Then the letter arrived. From Vienna, where great-grandfather's younger brother Albert had lived;
had
lived: he'd been killed in the March 13, 1848. revolt against Metternich. His brother left an inheritance, which had been placed in the hands of Rabbi Kohn, the rabbi of Vienna's Reform synagogue. Greatgrandfather didn't trust the mails during such troubled times, and he went to Vienna to pick up the money. He stayed for a few days with Rabbi Kohn. and enjoyed the company of this kind, intelligent man and his gracious family. He was still there when the rabbi and his family were poisoned by Orthodox fanatics.
    My great-grandfather was apparently hit hard by all this: political unrest had taken his brother from him; and in Vienna, he'd seen Jew kill Jew. He'd always been a very pragmatic businessman, preferring to be apolitical; and where religion was concerned, he practiced Reform Judaism rather than strict Orthodoxy. But now he renounced his faith altogether, and became apostate. Judaism hasn't been seen in my family since.
    Leaving Halle couldn't have been easy, but staying would've been hard. The secret police that grew up in the wake of the revolution of 1848 were making things tough. So were the Orthodox Jews who attacked my great-grandfather verbally for his apostasy, and who spread the word to his wealthy clients that their tailor's late brother had been a radical. The latter didn't help business, certainly, nor did the general economic climate, and my great-grandfather decided, all in all, that America had to be a safer place to raise his family of four (the youngest, Hiram, having been born in 1850, just three years before the family immigrated to New York City).
    As a youth, Hiram, my grandfather, worked in the family tailor shop, which was proving a moderately successful business, though Hiram never went into it. He went instead into the Union army at age seventeen. Like a lot of young Jews at that time, he wanted to prove his patriotism: Jewish war profiteers had been giving their fellows a bad name, and my grandfather helped make up for that by getting shot in both leas at Gettysburg.
    He returned to New York, where his father had died in his absence, after a long hospitalization.