The Tin Horse: A Novel by Janice Steinberg

Author:Janice Steinberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Jewish, Family Life, Fiction
ISBN: 0679643745
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

ONE OF DANNY’S JOBS AT CHAFKIN’S GROCERY WAS TO TAKE care of the signs around the entrance to the store and on the walls inside. He would tack up the latest advertising posters for Campbell’s soup or Maxwell House coffee or Palmolive soap, and he kept an eye on the cork-board just inside the door, where people were allowed to post notices; the board in the 1930s was covered with offers of rooms to let and men willing to take any kind of work and “Rosenthal china, perfect condition: must sell.” To keep the board tidy, Eddie Chafkin had a policy that no notice could stay up longer than two weeks, and Danny weeded out any whose time had expired.

There were also two prominent places, right next to the message board and directly behind the counter where people would look when the bill was being totaled, that Eddie dedicated to a rotating collection of posters. These advertisements (really, they were works of art) featured such images as smiling, sunburned youths carrying hoes, or luscious, crimson-fleshed watermelons—the handsome young pioneers and bounteous harvests of a life spent farming in the promised land of Palestine.

Eddie Chafkin was a Zionist, as everyone in Boyle Heights knew. And what a crackpot idea, most people agreed. You want palm trees and nice watermelons, open your eyes—you’re in Los Angeles.

I doubt that it’s even possible to look back at that time and not see it through the lens of the Holocaust. And in 1947, I wept when the United Nations voted to establish the State of Israel; everyone I knew was in tears. But in Boyle Heights in 1935, Zionists were seen as a fringe, even an anti-American organization.

As Aunt Sonya said, “Hershel Chafkin gets himself from Kiev to Los Angeles, breaks his back pushing a cart and selling vegetables door-to-door, and finally the man saves enough to start his own store so that when he drops dead of angina at forty-eight he can leave his beloved son a good business … and Eddie wants to go be a farmer in Palestine?”

I usually tuned out Sonya, who dripped scorn on virtually anyone of her acquaintance who wasn’t within hearing. But Papa, who prided himself on his objectivity, also got heated on the subject of Eddie’s Zionism. “The ‘Promised Land,’ that’s the gift Eddie’s father gave him by letting him be born in America,” Papa said. “He should be grateful to be an American citizen. What if Franklin D. Roosevelt came to Boyle Heights and saw those posters? What would he think, that Jews aren’t loyal Americans?” At least, Papa said, it was a relief that few people felt the way Eddie did; he’d heard that the Zionist Organization of America, to which Eddie belonged, had no more than fifty members in all of Los Angeles.

All of the adults had an opinion, and all of them were negative. Mollie—who wrote to me from the various cities where the union sent her—considered Zionism a reactionary movement because it made Jewish workers identify as Jews rather than uniting with workers of all faiths.

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