The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

ALSO BY HESH KESTIN:

Based on a True Story

Dzanc Books

1334 Woodbourne Street

Westland, MI 48186

www.dzancbooks.org

Copyright © 2011, Text by Hesh Kestin

All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

All materials quoted in the text are used by permission under the fair use rule of copyright laws (Title 17, section 107 of U.S. Copyright Laws) or by the laws of public domain. These materials include references to the songs
The Great Pretender
(Ram),
Zog Nit Keynmol
(Glick),
You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To
(Porter),
Puff, the Magic Dragon
(Lipton/Yarrow),
Walk Like a Man
(Crewe/Gaudio),
Our Day Will Come
(Hilliard/Garson),
At Long Last Love
(Porter),
I Will Follow Him
(Gimbel),
Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh
(Sherman),
Da Doo Ron Ron
(Barry/Greenwich/Spector); WH Auden’s
To Christopher Isherwood
from “Poems,” 1930.

Published 2009 by Dzanc Books

Book Design by Steven Seighman

eBook Design by Matt Bell

Anachrony advisor: Evelyn Israel

06 07 08 09 10 11 5 4 3 2 1

First edition November 2009

Print ISBN-13: 978-0976717782

eBook ISBN-13: 978-1936873326

Printed in the United States of America

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

for
Margalit, Ariel, Ross,
Ketura and Alexandra
—with their father’s love

In the time and place in which this story is set it was common to use words like
wop, mick, chink, nigger, spick
and
kike
in normal conversation—sometimes with opprobrium, often not. In order to reflect the spirit of the time I have not bowdlerized its language. Readers who may find this practice vexing are forewarned.

The novel’s Bhotke Young Men’s Society never existed, though a Bodker Young Men’s Aid Association was very much in existence in the last century. My late father, Bernard L. Kestin, was a member. The actual Bodker Association was uninvolved in the events that follow, which are fictional.

So far as the author knows, the details of a vanished era in this book are all correct—but one. Find it if you can.

Let us honor if we can
The vertical man,
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.
—WH Auden

The notorious gangster Shushan Cats walked into my life through the doors of the Bhotke Young Men’s Society—in 1963 the only truly young man in the group was me—where I had become recording secretary the month before by a vote of 57 to 56 with three abstentions after it had been decided to switch the group’s official language to English. In one sense this was foolish, because while most of the members were fluent in Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Russian and Polish, in English there were few who did not sound like the character on the Jack Benny Show—when television was still mainly black-and-white—called Mr. Kitzel, whose voice, inflection and grammar made the average shopkeeper on Sutter Avenue, in Brownsville, the section of Brooklyn where I grew up, sound like Lawrence Olivier chatting airily with Vivian Leigh.

Why did the Bhotke Society make the change from Yiddish? In those days being foreign-born was somehow suspect. The Red Scare was still on, though somewhat evolved. Only a few years before, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed as nuclear spies, and now the US was engaged in, and apparently losing, a space race with the Soviet Union. Among the minorities Jews stood out, marked by a culture, to say nothing of a religion, that would not go away; aside from a few sects in odd corners, Jews were then the only non-Christians. In melting-pot America we were heat-resistant, tempered by several thousand years of being close to, if not in, history’s fires. In a largely Protestant nation, even the president, a handsome, charming and intelligent scalawag named John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had almost failed to reach the White House because many voters questioned whether his ultimate loyalty was to the Constitution or to the pope in Rome. While a younger and more affluent generation of native-born Jews felt as American as baseball, Frank Sinatra and Chinese food, the foreign-born, most of whom had escaped the Nazi ovens through pure luck, considered themselves marginal. For their sons the line between newly American and American never existed—many had fought in Korea, or in World War II, or both—but for the so-called greenhorns
American
was not a noun but a verb: you had to work at it. Even the longtime recording secretary, whose Yiddish was not only perfect but perfectly legible, voted himself out of the job in a flurry of nativism that would have given pause to the Ku Klux Klan. Because my late father had been a member, I was drafted: my English was perfect. In fact, it was at the first meeting at which I was in charge of the minutes that the doors opened with a flourish—they were double doors, and they were flung open—and I saw what would be my fate.

The figure who stood there—it seemed for minutes—was one of those small men native to Brooklyn who appeared to have been boiled down from someone twice the size, the kind who when a doctor tries to give him an injection the needle bends. Even in a belted camel-hair coat over a brown suit with sky-blue stripes he looked muscular, intense, dangerous. He may have had a baby-face and a baby-blue hat with a brown silk band, but believe me this customer was neither childish nor comical, though with the election of John F. Kennedy, bareheaded at his inauguration three years before, hats would already seem archaic, like music without a strong back-beat. (Whether as cause or effect, car roofs were growing lower every year, making hats impractical for men and women both.) The man at the rear of our meeting room could get away with it. Shushan Cats could wear a clown costume and cover his face in jam and feathers, but the way he stood there would nonetheless demand respect, if not outright fear. Unlike the Bhotke Society members, who had wives and children, who had jobs or businesses, who had in fact something to lose, this type, known in Yiddish as a
shtarker
, a hard-guy, had nothing to defend, not even his life. If you cut off his fists he would go after you with the stumps of his arms; cut off his legs and he would wriggle like a snake and bite into your femoral artery until you died and he drowned in the blood. Even the Italian gangsters stayed away. There was something in these tough Jews that created a micro-climate of anticipation, if not fear. These were the nothing-to-lose Jews who had fought to the death in the Warsaw Ghetto, the pimps who had run the white-slave trade in Buenos Aires, the Hebrew avengers who had strung up five British soldiers for every Jewish rebel hung in Palestine. In the thirties they had formed Murder Inc. to sell custom-made assassination to the Italian mobs. In boxing they had dominated the ring in the undernourished divisions. In business they had been ruthless. And after the war they had become the smooth operators who managed criminal enterprises for a Mafia that was long on muscle but short on the kind of entrepreneurial skills that would build Havana as the world capital of gambling, and when President Kennedy closed that down with an embargo to punish Fidel Castro, Las Vegas to take its place. It could be seventy degrees in a heated room in the Crown Heights Conservatory on Eastern Parkway, which rented such places to fraternal organizations, political groups and social clubs, but when Shushan Cats walked in he brought with him a chill.

Also he did not close the doors, which did not help.

The president of the Bhotke Society at the time was a dentist named Feivel (Franklin) Rubashkin (Robinson)—he was in the process of Americanizing his name, a popular occurrence in the sixties. Feivel stood six-foot-three, especially tall in those days, and was a health fanatic who lived on nuts and then-exotic items like avocados and artichokes that most people at the time would not even have known you could eat, much less how, and he kept himself in top condition by lifting weights and swimming a hundred laps a day at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association on Rockaway Avenue. But I didn’t need a microscope to see him give an involuntary shudder when the man in the doorway finally spoke.

“Is this the Bhotke club?”

Addressing over two hundred men this way—all were turned around in their seats, only Feivel and I on the dais facing the door—was as close as anyone could get to asking the perfect rhetorical question. Poor Feivel looked at me as though to ascertain the truth:
Is
it? Is
yes
the right answer? Could someone
else
answer?

Whether because I was naive or simply took my new position as an officer of the Bhotke group seriously, I said in a clear voice: “It is.”

The
shtarker
stood in the doorway, letting in the cold. “My name is Cats,” he said. “My mother was born in Floris, next door to Bhotke. I understand people from Floris can become a member because there is no Floris association.”

Again it was left to me. I turned to Feivel, who nodded. “That’s true,” I said with borrowed authority. I had never even heard of Floris. But I knew of Shushan Cats.

“So make me a member.”

“Please come in then.”

“I can be a member?” Cats said, so plaintively he sounded like a child who for the first time was offered love, or perhaps only acceptance.

“You have to fill out a card.”

“Okay.”

“And pay ten dollars initiation. Then it’s eighteen a year in dues, including for a cemetery plot.” As with most of the Jewish fraternal organizations, this was the big draw. The Bhotke group had a choice piece of real estate in Beth David Cemetery in Queens, squeezed in on either side between the Gerwitz Association and the Loyal Sons of Bielsk, and facing the huge plot of the Grodno Union.

“Not a problem,” the gangster said. Immediately he pulled a roll of bills the size of a baseball out of his pocket and peeled off a single banknote. “Ten to start, and another ninety, which takes care of five years. How’s my math?”

I don’t know where I got the nerve. “Maybe you’d like to shut the doors and come in,” I said. “There’s a draft.”

He took several steps forward. Behind him a large man in a light grey suit and a hat like a watermelon, both in color and size, appeared out of nowhere and closed the doors behind them both. Probably a bodyguard, he had a thin mustache like a dirty line over his upper lip. “That’s it, that’s the whole deal?”

Feivel, the president, looked to me. It appeared I was the designated speaker. “That’s it. Is there something on your mind, Mr...?” Everyone in New York knew who he was.

“Cats,” he said with amused patience. “Shoeshine Cats.”

Now the entire membership swiveled back to look at me. From the moment the gangster had entered everyone had turned around in their seats, magnetized. The man had been on the front page of the
Daily Mirror
the week before, being pulled along by two huge detectives in a perp walk on his way to an arraignment for a whole menu of crimes, the least impressive of which was racketeering. The headline was typical of the day:

HE’S NO PUSSY

MOBSTER CATS

BELLED BY COPS

SHOESHINE TO DA:

“DROP DEAD, NAZI!”

As he walked down the aisle toward me the gangster stopped to shake hands with those seated at the end of each row. It became a kind of triumphal procession. At each hand he would look the person in the eye and say, “How ya doin’?” or “
Shalom Aleichem!
” or “Good to see ya!” By the time he reached the dais even Feivel had relaxed sufficiently to press his hand. “Are you the boss?” Cats demanded.

“Dr. Robinson,” Feivel said to the accompaniment of a soft groan from several of the more unrepentent Yiddishists, who had never forgiven Isser Danielovitch, whose father had been a founding member, for changing his name to Kirk Douglas. “I’m the president. It’s not like a union, for life. My term ends in February.”

“A doctor?”

“Of dentistry,” Feivel said. He started looking for a card in his blue suit.

“A dentist ain’t no doctor,” Cats said, waving him off. “I got one. Fleishberg, on Pitkin Avenue.”

“Fine man,” Feivel said. He was becoming nervous again. There hadn’t been so much excitement in the Bhotke Young Men’s Society since the time—I was a child then but my father told the story—when Maurice Kuenstler’s wife broke in to accuse him of adultery with his secretary, a
shwartzer
at that.