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By Darren Kaminsky

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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three.  The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C.  As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.

Click here for a Chapter Index.

Chapter Fourteen

Prison. Has anyone in my family gone to prison? I couldn’t remember any stories like that and, for me to think it glamorous, it would had to have been prison for politics or religion, anyway. Concentration camps don’t count. You didn’t have to do anything (except exist) to get herded into one of those.

Maybe I would be our family’s first felon? Not because there weren’t others, but because my family history is mostly lost...just a mishmash: stories, rumors, clues, and legends tied in a narrative with string and duct tape.

The idea of recorded history itself is pretty suspect even from the moment when a couple of guys coming off a particularly good hunt (and several thousand years too early to have a Budweiser) decided to commemorate it by drawing themselves as stick figures on a cave ceiling.

People are still painting hunting scenes, but, luckily, hunting just isn’t that necessary anymore so the paintings just don’t have that raw hope -- we’re going to live another day! -- of the originals. That’s history for you...endlessly repeating, never the same. Unfathomable and chaotic. A street protest in Togo transforms overnight into a full-scale insurrection. A street protest in Washington D.C. transforms into a no-gluten, soy-cheese, all veggie pizza party. Primeval man painted hunting be-cause it was all important. Nowadays, Sue Coe paints slaughterhouses as terrifying, bloody animal Auschwitzes, and, yet slaughterhouses are the answer to the problem set out by the cave-painters: How do we ensure survival?

My second cousin tells a good story: As the ship that brought my grandfather’s family to this country steamed into New York Harbor, my grandfather and all his brothers and sisters ran up on deck to watch as the ship glided passed the cold, noble gaze of the Statue of Liberty. I’ve always imagined them holding hands, bundled, the boys wearing fur hats, the women capped with scarves...all their heads forming a little height-ordered line as they gazed at the marvelous copper signification of their new freedom.

The only problem with the story is that my grandfather’s eldest sister was less than a year old at that point and the rest of the siblings weren’t even born; they were born in America. The story is an extreme exaggeration, an outright fabrication or a nice lie.

“I was born on Catherine Street. My sister on Chrystie Street,” my shrunken, three-quarters deaf, half-gnome of a grandfather barked in his Brooklyn accent. Maybe I should say, ‘grudgingly barked.’ He’d only answer my questions during commercial breaks as he sat in his big brown leather chair and watched TV in the small room off his bedroom. The TV room always stank of pipe smoke and mold.

Even when he would answer the questions, he kept the answers crisp and short, letting you know that he regarded any examination of the past to be an absolute waste of time. When I asked him where his family was from, he answered,

“Brooklyn” as if that explained everything.

“No,” Grandpa, my 10-year-old self asked, “Where were they from?” as if re-asking would somehow get a more complete answer. “Coney Island,” he replied, leaving me to wonder if all I’d been told about American History was wrong and I was descended from some type of Jewish Native American tribe that -- I surmised from photographs -- built Ferris Wheels as totem poles, gathered ketchup and relish plants to garnish their food, and hunted a species of large schnauzer to make hot dogs.

When I lost interest in the attempt to pry information out of him, I’d go into the yard and catch the chameleons that ran across the face of his house. As they ran from me, their pixel-like-scales would shimmer instantly from green to white depending on whether they were standing on the white painted brick or the green ivy that roped over it. Sometimes, I’d grab for one and only catch its tail, which would fall off right in my hand the way a shoe might pop off a foot; leaving me holding only a scaly little growth as long as my pinkie.

It wasn’t until later, when I was 14, that my remarkably young looking great-aunt Maureen visited and I got some part of the real story while drinking instant coffee and eating stale doughnuts.

My father’s family had come from a town called Larus in Bellorussia, where they had been pious Hasids. ”Everyone was a Hasid in those days,” she said. "They were followers of the Laran Rebbe.”

My grandfather’s father, Tevya, hadn’t wanted to come to the United States. He hadn’t wanted to leave his town, his father, or the Rebbe, but his wife, Miriam, insisted. Tevya was a very religious man and prayed and studied all day, every day so that his wife, a seamstress, had to support the family. She also made all the decisions. “She was a strong woman,” Maureen said. “And she wasn’t from Larus or any other small town. She was sharp and didn’t believe in anything that didn’t get her some advantage in life. She was really a capitalist, but her brothers were all communists and zionists,” she’d told me. If anyone had been in prison, it was probably from her side of the family. Maybe we even had an actual bomb throwing anarchist on that side. There’d be serious bragging rights to having had a relative exiled to Tsarist Siberia.

It was Miriam who propelled the family from a one room apartment with no plumbing on Chrystie Street, to a three-room apartment on Catherine Street, to a small neatly-kept house in Coney Island. The Laran Jews, meanwhile, had, by that time, begun to establish themselves in the Lower East Side and then Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Tevya never stopped complaining about how far it was from Coney Island to either of those places. His wife didn’t care.

My grandfather took after his mother. He’d had no time for worship or Talmud study and, after a few years of public school, had become a newspaper stringer, sometime proofreader, part-time salesman and, probably, something of a con man.

While writing a story on a crackdown on pickpockets (for which the Herald city desk editor paid him 2¢/word), he’d met Rashid Abjani Walters, a half English, half Turkish (or in another version of the story: a quarter Chinese, third Cheyenne and half sub-Continental Indian) used book-dealer, whose entire business consisted of whatever he could fit in the wheelbarrow he used to move from one Lower East Side street corner to another.

Maureen didn’t know how or why but, with the presumption that Abjani was a better con man than Grandpa and backed by Grandpa’s small savings and some money from his hyper-thrifty mother, my grandfather and Abjani, the book dealer, had gone into the tropical bird business together. Importing directly from Havana.

It was hugely successful. Their first shipment sold out within a day of its arrival. The second sold before it arrived. A third sold before it had left Cuba and a fourth was sold before the expedition to capture the birds had even returned out of the mountains.

“Your grandfather was a millionaire before he was even 25,” Maureen said.

“Really? A millionaire?” Even at 14, I knew that the likelihood that my grandfather had -- during the 1920s -- somehow become a millionaire from the tropical bird business seemed highly unlikely. But, even then, I knew that “millionaire” was short hand for very rich.

“Yeah, a millionaire. He had a big apartment and women? Oh lord. They were everywhere. He was very handsome you know. You’re lucky you have those same eyes. Always had a twinkle in them.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“That Abjani was a crook! He stole everything! He disappeared. Your poor grandfather was left destitute. And the girl he wanted to marry left him when the money disappeared. That’s, you know, what you get when you want a shikse. They’re greedy. They love how clever a Jewish man is until he runs out of money...then pfff! He’s not good enough for her. Never forget, Nathan, Jews were literate scholars when the Europeans were painting themselves blue and living in the huts with cows.”

“I’ll remember that, Aunt Maureen,” I promised.

“He was so depressed,” she said. “He went back to stringing, moved back in with his parents. It was terrible. Your other aunts and I decided to drive him to Florida. It took us days. We stopped in Atlanta to see some cousins from Larus and they told us to stop in south Georgia to see some of their friends who had a store. They were the only Jewish family in the town and they had no one for their daughter to marry. They offered to set your grandfather up in business if he’d marry their daughter. That’s how he ended up in Jenkins, Georgia.”

“An arranged marriage?” I asked bewildered.

“Believe me, Nathan. It’s just as good as any other kind.”

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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn.  He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.

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