HAPPY BIRTHDAY HENRY GOLDMAN

POSTED ON JULY 4, 2012 - ANDREW

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HENRY GOLDMAN

POSTS

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HENRY GOLDMAN

A tale by Andrew Goldman

Leibisch leaned back coughed slightly then rubbed the growing hematoma just below his fifth left rib. He then gurgled low in his chest, lurched forward on his knees and proceeded to vomit up copious amounts of blood. The receptacle, into which Leibisch was upchucking blood into, was the pail that usually served as the chamber pot for his 6 children, himself and his wife Tillie. Leibish Grubensky, thanks to a name changing passage through Ellis Island 22 years earlier, was now known as Louis Goldman. Louis would be dead in 27 days. Today is June 1, 1933, the day of my father’s birth.

Tillie was no more than 9 feet away from Louis. When Louis started bleeding in their closet bathroom, she was in the family’s only bedroom enduring the natural agony of labor pains. Pains that were further heightened by her untreated diabetes and hypertension. These factors are believed to have contributed to the large size of the son she was currently attempting, albeit unsuccessfully at the moment, to pass through her pelvis.

The bedroom wasn’t really a bedroom and the apartment wasn’t really an apartment in the vision of its creator. The entire dry flat was a subdivision of a much larger apartment that had been created using single sides of packing crates tacked together into something slightly resembling several walls and 2 doors. Again Louis heaved up a lung full of blood and through the packing crate wall Tillie groaned. All things considered, present moment excluded, Louis was really doing quite well for himself.

The North side of 98th street between Second and Third Avenue was a peculiar place in 1933. Dominating the neighborhood a few blocks to the south stood the all but abandoned hulk of the Jacob Ruppert Brewery. Jacob Ruppert, Brewer and Yankee Owner, the man who brought Babe Ruth to New York and the man who put the New York Yankees in their iconic pinstripes. The dormancy of this towering monstrosity, of barley and hop’s processing would continue for another 5 months and 5 days when the 21st amendment to the constitution would be passed repealing Prohibition. Without the industry of brewing yet able to resume, Mr. Ruppert paid a great deal of attention to filling the seats of his stadium just across the river in the Bronx. This was no small feat, considering that during the height of The Great Depression, most people did not have the meager amount of money needed to buy a ticket to any game and those few who did usually went to the nearby Polo Grounds to take in a New York Giants Game. It was to be a championship season for the Giants anyway. Undeterred, Ruppert, flooded the entire island of Manhattan with promotional trinkets and papers in every market front, 5 & 10 and illegal gin mill. It was hard to avoid all of the Yankee Combs, Pins, Pennants and Half Size Bats around the brewery neighborhood.

Tillie’s window faced the back of this quiet factory setting as she continued to labor. As the baby passed out of her and into the world, the landscape to her south with its citadel of cheap beer and low-rise walkups leading up to its gates, faded from her consciousness. The baby boy who would come out with an abandoned brewery on his horizon, a hemorrhaging father in the next room and sickly, put upon diabetic before him, was nearly 11 pounds. This was a very large baby, especially for 1933 standards, even considering that he was the 7th.

The midwife wasn’t overly surprised that Tillie did not make any attempt to hold Henry, in spite of her difficult delivery. It was not uncommon for the poor immigrant women of this neighborhood to have lost the majority of their maternal instinct somewhere around their 4th birth. Being number 7 was already turning out to be anything but lucky for this baby boy. After the midwife finished stitching Tillie, she cleaned Henry and handed him over to his oldest sister, a pretty girl of 11 delightfully named Rose. In a forceful Yiddish voice she commanded Rose to show the baby to her still heaving and bloodied father and instructed the girl to have Louis hand over 5 dollars for her services. Then she was gone. There was Rose, the oldest of 7 cradling and somewhat clumsily rocking a newborn who’s mother was already dead in spirit and who’s father was slowly bleeding to death into a bucket used to hold piss and shit through the night.

“This is anything but a blessing” thought Louis as he lifted his short but solid frame and made his way from the closet to his daughters side. The congealed blood and salvia on the front of his shirt and almost covering his jutting chin disturbed the 3 eldest and terrified to 3 youngest. Of course his ghoulish appearance had no effect on Henry who continued to wale away with the powerful small cry of a newborn. Louis was a self styled Shtarker who had acquired the moniker of Nasty Little Jew around the neighborhood of East Harlem. Had is wife bled to death during her long labor he would not have been overly traumatized and would have given it small account beyond its effects on his modest success and his mostly ignored responsibilities as a father figure. He was in some ways a man on the move. Arriving at Ellis Island in 1911 he was nothing more than another poor Jewish indigent from the rural fields that ringed Bialystok Poland.

Arriving in America in the time of Prohibition had proven to be something of a boon for a Nasty Little Jew who had little fear of laws, especially laws that he viewed as senseless in a land that he never truly felt he was a part of. Money was to be made. Money had to be made. Louis possessed an amazing talent for bottom feeding that would serve him from his arrival through the Grand Hall of Ellis Island until his pierced lung, the result of a splintered rib, would become infected and take Louis from Tillie. In less than a month from Henry’s birth Tillie would be alone with her newborn and her other six children; Bertha age 2, Lillian age 5, Mary age 6, Morris age 8, Frank age 9 and Rose age 11.

Louis sustained himself through his early years in America through a variety of back breaking but none to lucrative unskilled labor jobs. Barrel chested with a broad back, short neck and low to the ground 5’2” height, Louis was viewed as a natural pick and shovel man. This was back breaking, honest work and he despised it more with every plunge of the shovel and every swing of the pick. Luckily for Louis, the United States entered World War I in early 1917. This gave him the opportunity to enlist in the US Army for service in ‘The War to End All Wars.’ With the lure of enlistment bonus’, which at that time was paid at the time of signing, Leibish Grubensky demonstrated his newfound patriotism by volunteering in at least one recruiting station in every state on the East Coast and Mid West. Louis never reported for duty, however he did keep every Enlistment Bonus he procured. Before long it was November 1918 and the Armistice with Germany was signed. The war was over and Louis finally had enough money through some travel, some work, some misdemeanors and some reprehensible ingenuity, to finally bring his child bride Tillie to America.

In early 1920 Tillie joined her husband in East Harlem. Louis had been enjoying the benefits of Prohibition for almost a full year when Tillie arrived. Like so many others of his time, he flaunted the law and worked as a deliveryman to local speakeasies, alehouses and gin mills. Grunt work at any other time, but during Prohibition it was big money especially by the standards of a bottom feeder.

Louis continued making his deliveries, and Tillie continued making her babies. By 1932 they were able to purchase the building on East 98th Street where they occupied one of the 16 cold water and dry flats found in the upper floors of the building. On the first floor was a bar. Louis and his wife ran the bar, which was nothing more that a counter with a few tables. The patrons were all either derelicts and indigents or prostitutes and their John’s. The 15 flats not occupied by the Goldman’s were residents similar to the characters who frequented the bar.

It was the end of May in 1933 and Louis was working his bar alone. Tillie was at the end of a long, uncomfortable and complicated pregnancy marked by poor health for the entire term. Despite the fact that the bar was Louis’s, it was Tillie whom the patrons bonded with. Her sweet, unassuming, put upon nature was a common comfort to the already downtrodden patrons. Tillie brought out the humanity of the people in his bar. Louis was there to make money. Without her presence, the policy was drink or leave. His unofficial policy and general demeanor proved to be his undoing. A small Nasty Shtarker was no match for a few already drunk local derelicts whose money ran out but their thirst did not. Without Tillie present to soften the situation, Louis approached the group with a small bat he kept behind the bar. The bat was one of the Ruppert trinkets that had been given out throughout the neighborhood to celebrate the pending reopening of the brewery now that Prohibition was near it’s end, and to drum up ticket sales for his New York Yankees.

It was very quick. Louis threatened the group in his bellowing Yiddish accent. Instead of retreating, one of the derelicts lunged at him, snatching the small bat out of his hand. He was knocked down, and hit several times with his own bat. None of the blows hurt badly and he was soon able to get back on his feet, blaring out a string of Polish, Yiddish and English vulgarities the entire time. The group scattered and Lewis was able to catch his breath. Besides a few bump and scrapes he felt fine. He went about his business closing up the bar that night and feeling a little short of breath. As the adrenaline drained out of his body a pain was growing in one of his left ribs. He went upstairs to see Tillie and the children.

The metallic taste of blood first became present in his mouth on the morning of Henry’s birth. The pain in his side as well as the mark left by the small bat appeared to be growing since the evening before. He went out to collect any rent that could be had on the first of the month, which was a pointless endeavor considering the nature of the times and the class of the residents. Feeling a need for rest he went back to the flat and was told by Tillie to call for the midwife. The midwife was at the flat by 1 that afternoon. By 3 Louis could no longer comfort his laboring wife or children and had to bring himself to the closet where he could purge the warm metallic taste that had permeated his mouth, throat and lungs by this time.

My father had a father for 27 days. He was born into the worst possible circumstances. Within 3 years Tillie would also be dead due to complications from High Blood Pressure and Diabetes. Six of the 7 children went into the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York. Some died horrible untimely deaths, some found modest success in life, some lingered uneventfully until their own timely deaths and one became my father.