A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom) by Her Bastard Son

Author:Sigal, Clancy [Sigal, Clancy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781480437197
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

9 Die, Yankee Dog!

Let’s remember Pearl Harbor

As we go to fight the foe

And remember Pearl Harbor

As we do the Alamo …

—jukebox favorite

7:55 A.M. HONOLULU TIME. In Chicago it’s a cold bright Sunday noon. People look up at the clear blue sky only rarely when they hear the engine drone of an overhead plane or the strange feathery rustle that sparrows and finches make when they impulsively dart around in packs. THWACK! I strong-armed the thread-trailing softball over the roofs of parked cars, over the heads of the Horowitz brothers on base, and it sailed up the street to land on the stoop of our latest home at 4104 Grenshaw by the Sears railroad siding on Chicago’s west side. It was the longest hit I’d made in pickup baseball all year. Finally, at fifteen I was getting into my stride as the next “Hammerin’ Hank” Greenberg, the Detroit Tigers’ first baseman.

Jennie, in a flapping flowered housedress exposing her naked thigh, instantly shattered my Hall of Fame dream when she came stumbling down the stone steps of the two-family graystone residence screaming, “The Japanese! Bombing Hawaii!” Rounding second base between manhole covers, I was mortified by another one of her lies; lately she’d been doing it a lot. “Ma,” I yelled, “g’wan home, okay, you’re embarrassing me.” What would she think of next?

Jennie’s cry of havoc in her housedress shamed me on the street. Normally she never left the house in anything but full Lane Bryant-and-Max Factor armor, so either she’d blown a gasket or the unthinkable had happened, the Japanese had actually torpedoed my winter baseball schedule. Soon there would be snow on the streets and I’d have no chance to practice my up-from-the-knees swing, the Super Jew swat. And, as neighbors came running into the street and Ma’s tale was confirmed, I was totally pissed because the Pearl Harbor attack simply didn’t fit in with my carefully constructed analysis of world events. How could I be so wrong?

In the 1940s you were not considered off-the-planet weird if you were into hard-core politics as well as street corner gangsterism. It was a sort of white ethnic pre-Blackstone P Rangers thing. (Later the Rangers would rule Lawndale.) Some boys coped with the “threat of world fascism” by invoking comic book fantasies—Captain Marvel zaps Adolph Hitler—others by denying it, but a few of us adopted a coping strategy of trying to understand as a way of saving our sanity.

For Midwesterners, certain truths were inalienable. First and foremost, “war is a racket,” in the immortal words of Major General Smedley Butler of the Marine Corps. The Pacific ocean was an unconquerable American lake, Europe the source of all our troubles. War profited only the “merchants of death,” the profit-greedy weapons makers who fanned the fires of brainless nationalism. Simple. America should stay out of other people’s fights. Or, as the popular radio comic, Eddie Cantor, sang every Sunday night, “Let them keep it over there.” Jennie and I argued about it at the time,

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