A niggun is the pen of the soul
I was an out-of-work artist when I landed a job in the circulation department of The Baltimore Sun in 1993. To qualify, I had to take a typing test, write an essay on the topic ‘‘What Work Means to Me’’ and answer a series of multiple choice questions. I sat in a room at 601 N. Calvert St. to take the test. About halfway through, a customer service representative tiptoed into the room; she had come to help me with the answers. A few minutes later, she tiptoed back to tell me one of them was wrong and correct it. It was my first taste of life at The Sun.
Subversive activities felt like home to me, as did efforts to expose authority via the written word. My Jewish immigrant family came to the United States on the wave of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. They left the shtetl with its intricately structured religious life and, without ever quoting the source, dedicated themselves to the Torah imperative, ‘‘Justice, justice shall you pursue!’’
I remember as a child in the late 1940s visiting my father on the Lower East Side of New York and finding him hawking The Daily Worker, for which he wrote, on the corner of Second Avenue and Fourth Street, near his tiny apartment. ‘‘Go into the house,’’ he said. ‘‘Quickly! Go into the house!’’ I couldn't understand the rush or why I couldn't stay and talk to him. During the McCarthy era, when the FBI questioned him repeatedly, he disappeared, to surface six months later as a chicken farmer in Southern California. A postcard from Nevada, which I received that spring, read, ‘‘Wish you were here.’’
My father joined the Communist Party as a young emigrant from a Ukrainian village where violence against Jews was part of life. The first party meeting that he attended was broken up by New York police. ‘‘They came in and broke heads,’’ he said. ‘‘So I joined.’’ After he disappeared, I was interested in any clue as to his whereabouts and sometimes my aunt pointed out his stories in the Morgen Freiheit (‘‘Morning Freedom’’), the Yiddish version of The Worker. One English headline stuck in my mind: ‘‘Venice, Jewel of the Adriatic, is Slowly Sinking into
the Sea.’’ I don't believe my father had ever been to Venice; more likely, his urge to expose a secret prompted the piece. Way ahead of his time, before his death in the early 1970s, he embarked, with much relish, on an expose of the corrupt actions of pharmaceutical companies. I never knew if any of it was published.
My mother was the literary one in our little family. She hung large sepia portraits of Jewish writers — Sholem Aleichem, Chaim Nachman Bialik, I.L. Peretz — on the walls of the Upper West Side storefront classroom where she taught Yiddish and Hebrew to American children after school. She used to say we were the only people so devoted to a book. Years later, while still at The Sun, I returned to religious observance and saw sepia photographs of Chassidic rabbis, done in the same style, on the walls of my daughter's seminary. I was stunned to learn that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are said, in Kabbalistic sources, to have preceded the creation of the world. My mother, an agnostic, had absolute faith in the power of the word.
My aunt, who lived with us, read little English. Apprenticed to a Polish tailor at age 9, she was shop steward in the dress factory where she worked in New York's Garment District. It was she who bargained out the prices for piecework: how many cents to sew in a zipper, stitch around a buttonhole, sew a seam or a dart. I was excited, as a child, to hear the deafening sound of the sewing machines and see steam rising from the pressing machines when I visited her at work. I loved hearing how, when workers were fighting to organize an industrial union, it was she who was chosen to jump over the sewing machines and hold the boss by the collar — he wouldn't hit a lady, she said — while others cut the telephone wires and drove the workers out onto the street to join a picket line. More than half a century later, when I came to work at The Sun, I proudly joined the Newspaper Guild.
The customer service reps answered questions, took orders for subscriptions and offered specials to
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