From
Reading Room/6:
She's Alive
Clancy Sigal
J ennie Persily, this flamehaired
sexually alive, woman-friendly man-loving woman—my protector
and tormentor—was the
welfare-mother muse of my recently completed memoir about how
we survived each other in a bad time, the Great Depression. Naively,
I believed that writing about Jennie would absolve me in my current
life of her phantom presence that was so so intense I chatted
with her in my jogging routine around the Beverly Hills high
school cinder track. Trouble was, in death as in life, she had
a habit of answering back. When I reported her remarks to my
ten-year-old son Joe he so liked the idea that he too—for
example when examining himself in the mirror after stepping out
of a shower engaged in conversations with her. “Hi Granma,
I went three for three in baseball today at school.”
As I was finishing my book, A
Woman Of Uncertain Character, I even “heard” her try to correct me on points large
and small. “Are you sure it happened this way?” or “I
remember it differently.” We were an argumentative couple
when she was alive. We’d fight over my sloppy table manners,
my choice of streetcorner pals, food, politics, anything. My
mother was what the neighborhood Communists called a “right-wing
social democrat” (i.e. a Daily Forward reader) or, in angrier
moments, a “social fascist.” My cousin Charlie, who
fought with the Loyalists in Spain, insists, “Oh Jennie,
she was the conservative in the family.” So you have to
imagine what the rest of the Persilys were like when Jennie,
a stylish, kick-up-her-heels garment worker with “a mouth
on her like a red-hot river of gold” (my father’s
envious estimate), a John Reed Socialist and admirer of her patron
saint Emma Goldman, was seen as virtually the family Republican.
Mama despised Communists. Thus I’m not a Red-diaper baby.
She carried scars from fist fights with Reds from Ben Gold’s
furriers union and Party-liners in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers
and ILGWU. If I’m anybody’s “baby,” spiritually
I’m from Zimmerwald, the Swiss town where in 1912 international
Socialists met and swore, in a binding resolution, that the working
classes of their respective nations would never fight each other
in a capitalist war; two years later they were at each other’s
throats in the Flanders trenches. As much as anything else, the
World War One collapse of the Socialist-pacifist movement broke
Ma’s heart and shaped her beliefs.and ultimately mine.
I’m a child of those bearded Talmudic-disputing men in
fetid, smoky, disputatious meeting halls who chose patriotism
over solidarity and made the world my son and I would come to
inhabit.
Ma never walked a picket line except splendidly
in the height of working-class fashion—Hattie Carnegie knockoffs—and
having been to the beauty parlor the night before. (She died
of a heart attack on her way back from the beautician.) She preached
nonviolence and yet punished me for getting into street fights.
However, as a teenager I once caught her punching out a scab
who had threatened Jennie’s pickets outside the strikebound
Joy Frock Company with a fabric shears. One law for Ma, another
for me.
Our mutual career of crime—see James Cagney’s Cody
Jarrett in the film White Heat—began in Chattanooga, Tennessee,
where both of us were tossed into the local clink because Jennie
had been clandestinely organizing textile workers. I was five
or six, and after deputies escorted us to the train station and
told us never to come back we wandered all over the border and
industrial Northern states looking for work and shops to organize.
My all-time favorite was Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of
the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, where Ma had to leave me alone
in a levee-side hotel to play with the floozies and a wonderful
two-dollar Woolworth’s roulette wheel she gave me. I spent
hours gazing out the window at the river’s fork and gambling
against myself.
As the Depression deepened, and union jobs
harder to find, Jennie kept us alive by working as a domestic
maid, housekeeper, cook, elderly carer, whatever turned a penny.
Dad—Leo Sigal—was
largely absent, months sometimes years at a time, like many hobos
looking for work and, known to Ma but not me, indulging in his
secret life with another more legitimate family. She and I clung
to each other on the life raft of a fierce need and antagonism.
Whenever possible she returned to her first love and true genius,
union organizing. On a speaker’s platform she could melt
your heart by the merest lift of her mascaraed eyebrow.
In those days there was a gray area between
legitimate labor people and the Mob. When the union was flush
it could afford to hire gangsters to protect striking workers
against the company’s
hired goons, who sometimes belonged to the same crime family.
Chicago was the Paris of union labor, and in our home—a
montage of shifting apartments—we held open house for everybody:
professional arsonists, IWW Wobblies, road tramps, -ists of every
stripe (anarch-, syndical-, Trotsky-, Commun-, etc.), as well
as representatives from a South or North Side gang depending
on who wasn’t assassinating whom at any given moment. But
we steered clear of the most local gang, the Capones, because
Al’s brother Ralph, who had taken over the local Teamsters,
had once run my father out of town with a gun. (My dad carried
an old army Colt until Jennie made him throw it away which he
bitterly resented.)
In general, we regarded mobsters as more friendly
to us than police. In 1937 Chicago police mowed down unarmed
strikers carrying American flags outside the Republic steel plant
in the “Memorial
Day massacre” which was filmed, and then suppressed, by
Paramount newsreel. Ma took in some of the wounded who were afraid
to go to a hospital.
In a way, I was raised like a Mob kid faithful
to the rule of omerta. It was unthinkable to fink, rat, inform
or tell the truth to landlords or cops. Jennie’s was a complex moral universe
where “right” and “wrong” were socially
and politically, but not Biblically, correlated. My mother was
a brilliant rule-bender, a talent she passed on to me. Her self-image
was respectably righteous and maternal; her reality was deeply
sexual and ambivalent about the “place” of women.
Sometimes we were so close we were practically one person, and
had to devise ways to keep our distance.
I grew up adoring my absent father and his
macho strut—George
Raft stylish, topcoat with velvet lapels and a clean handkerchief
in the breast pocket, all I lacked was my Dad’s spats and
a cigar in my mouth. Jennie, feeling bitter and abandoned at
first, eventually flourished in my father’s long absences.
Other men came calling. “But where,” my cousin Charlie
says, “could you do it if the guy was married? No one had
a car or could afford a hotel room.”
Puberty and a girl-crazed adolescence coincided
with Pearl Harbor and the reopening, like Aladdin’s cave, of factory gates
to employ long-term jobless overlock sweater makers like Jennie.
For the first time in our lives we had money in our pockets.
Jennie dated and danced like mad. I got onto police blotters
and—prompted by Jennie’s anxious collusion—handed
an impossible choice by well-meaning ladies of the Jewish Social
Service Bureau and a city probation officer: ‘juvie hall’ or
a trade tech to finish out high school. Easy decision—until,
too late, I learned the trade tech was an all-girls’ school,
Jones Commercial. I was one of five boys in a school of 400 pubescent,
broadhipped, fullbreasted, lipsticksmeared young women. “Oh
you lucky bastard!” my pals jeered. They should only have
known the truth. The screen hero Erroll Flynn was on trial in
Los Angeles for the statutory rape of two underage beauties,
and the Jones Commercial girls, on my case, began catcalling
me, “Hey, Erroll!” Their hysteria spread through
the halls until I cowered under their fingernails scratching
at me and pulling my hair. They had called my swaggering bluff,
and I fought back in the only way I saw: politicizing my sexuality.
Jennie was horrifed when I shifted my gang
alliance from the local bums to the neighborhood leftists. It
gave us something else to argue about. My long-absent dad had
written me off in a letter as “Communist scum” because I wanted to
walk in his footsteps as a union organizer but for the “wrong” (i.e.
left-wing) union instead of his beloved AFofL. So that took care
of that.
Pearl Harbor—factory orders for the war—saved our
lives. Overnight the problem of mass uenmployment was solved.
Jennie didn’t have to worry about a career for me: like
all the other boys my age it was the army. I enlisted at 17,
went at 18, saw my first Wehrmacht soldiers, Afrika Korps blond
POW giants, at the army reception center at Fort Sheridan and
thought, holy shit, this is real and not Hellcats
of the Navy. Almost instantly, I found a home in the army and loved all the
crap that must have driven Joe Heller, Mailer, and James Jones
nuts: the saluting, hierarchy, yes sir no sir. I’d never
been so well-clothed, fed and paid.
An infantry replacement, I conceived a loopy
ambition to become the first Red general in the US army; my heroes
were General Smedley (“I was a racketeer for capitalism”) Butler,
Colonel Evans (“Gung Ho”) Carlson, and “Vinegar
Joe” Stillwell, all military mavericks who were cashiered
or shunted aside by the bureaucracy. I made staff sergeant, after
the war in Germany got shot at once by fanatic young Volksdeutsch “Werewolves” and
once by American soldiers in a race war with African American
GI truck drivers; attended the Nuremberg war crimes trial and
locked eyes for one whole dusty afternoon with Herman Goering.
I was finally shipped home as an armed guard on a freight train
carrying looted champagne and art treasures bound for Stateside
officers. Only the protests of a couple of sane buddies at the
separation center prevented me from re-enlisting.
When I returned to Chicago after discharge
what had once been my cozy autonomous universe—the one square mile of the
Lawndale district on the West Side—now seemed cramped and
dingy. It couldn’t hold me. Before I left for the service
I hadn’t even known that the University of Chicago existed—I
was a fairly typical grober yung, a streetcorner slob, but in
the army I met educated GIs who laughed at my ignorance and tore
open my horizons with their derision, and this time I knew that
there was a university in Chicago. Jennie and I took one look
at each other and probably felt the same thing: what do we do
with each other now that we’re grown up?
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