Streets Of Gold

"Streets of Gold" originally appeared in ZNet Creative.

Streets of Gold

Willy Heller stood in the frozen dawn before his family’s clapboard home in Luenski. He held a simple brown valise at his side, tied with frayed tan rope, held tightly in his right hand as if in its holding he would both stop the story of his life and simultaneously begin a better life. The house stood at the end of the shtetl’s main unpaved street, among lesser houses that could be called hovels. It was the second year of the second decade of the 20th century, and Willy would leave with few regrets. His mother and father would remain behind, as would his younger sister. His younger brother tugged at his innermost sense of loss and sorrow, as he had been murdered years earlier in a Cossack raid on the shtetl. Both Willy and his sister Rebecca watched along with their mother as the younger Samuel was bound to a thick length of rope whose other end was tied to the saddle of a Cossack soldier’s horse. Minutes later Samuel was dropped unceremoniously in front of the house, bloodied and unrecognizable to his siblings and mother.

Willy’s family was well off by the standard of the time. His father owned a small fabric shop in a neighboring community and Willy’s older brother Nathan had left for the United States three years earlier with the money that had been scraped together over years and years to establish a small lace finishing company.

The town of Luenski had moved between possession of Russia and Poland so many times in the past several decades that the townspeople of the shtetl scarcely knew whether they were Polish or Russian nationals. What they did know, however, was that they were Jews, since the anti-Semitism present in all the dealings of their lives imprinted itself forever in their hearts and minds, and as in the case of Samuel, upon his headstone.

At the present time, as Willy turned from his home without looking back, memories enveloped him and followed him down the main street of the shtetl. Luenski had fallen into the hands of the Russian government and Willy faced the imminent prospect of being drafted into the Russian army, a fate he could not accept given what had happened to Samuel and the possibility that he would remain an indentured servant in the military because of his religious heritage.

At the Polish border Willy boarded a train that would cross the European continent in several days and embarked at the French port of Le Havre for the two-week journey across the Atlantic in steerage class.

Willy’s arrival in New York and his examination at Ellis Island were unremarkable. In perfect health, a good sum of money in his pocket, and under the sponsorship of his brother Nathan, his weeklong stay at a cousin’s tenement in the Lower East Side of Manhattan passed almost without notice. Willy knew better than to search for the rumored streets lined with gold in the Lower East Side and he knew his fate would be substantially better than the immigrants huddled nearby with his brother already established in business in the small New England town of Jericho. A half-day’s train ride brought him to Nathan, who stood looking longingly for his younger brother on the platform of the capital city only forty minutes by trolley from Jericho.

Willy and Nathan hugged one another on the platform repeatedly. “You’ve gotten so much older,” Nathan spoke first, his mastery of English nearly perfect after three years of personal and business dealings. Tears fell from Willy’s eyes. “I’m so happy to be here and back with you again,” he said, his English halting and with more than a trace of Russian and Yiddish sounds and intonations. “You’ll love Jericho, Willy, and with a position already waiting for you…”

Jericho was not the Promised Land, but it was so much of an improvement from the life of the shtetl. Jews in the small town of Jericho were segregated from the rest of the community in what could be called an American shtetl. While no Cossacks would come thundering into town, Jews kept to themselves in the one small block of neat three-story tenements a few miles from Nathan’s shop. “I think this freedom will take some getting used to,” Willy said on the way to the shop on his first morning of work in his new country, while he sipped the dark Russian black tea that had been so much a part of his morning routine in Russia.

Willy worked twelve-hour days at Nathan’s shop. He was quickly appointed to the position as floor manager as the business grew dramatically. Soon, the one floor of space that the lace finishing shop occupied was not enough to fill the steady stream of orders, and Nathan moved the business into several floors of a nearby brick mill that was located on the shore of the single river that served the needs of the many mills that dotted its shores. Within a year of arriving in America, Willy was named mill foreman as the business expanded to weaving lace. Nathan, not one to shirk from challenges in business matters, saw opportunity in expanding into other areas of textile production and soon opened another mill in a nearby community, leaving Willy as the sole manager of the lace works. While Nathan began to prosper in ways he could not have imagined just a year or two before, Willy began saving money in amounts that were never dreamed of in Russia. One dark cloud appeared on the horizon, however.

With the middle of the second decade of the century came mandatory draft registration for men who were in either late adolescence or young adults. As luck would have it, Willy now faced the jeopardy of military service for a second time in just a few short years. For months he was tortured with the prospect of being drafted along with the nightmare of his memories from Russia and the fate that had met his younger brother. He came to the conclusion, after agonizing turmoil, that he would postpone seeking full citizenship until after the threat of war passed. Tormented, between conscience and duty, he chose to passively wait until the fury was over. No one noticed as he led a respectable life and caused no trouble.

During the war years the Jewish community had prospered to a degree, through business ventures both on a grand scale, and as small as the corner mom and pop variety store, that a meeting was held at which time the assembled decided to build a small wood-framed synagogue in Jericho. Though anti-Semitism was prevalent in the U.S., the larger community, composed primarily of French Canadians, took little notice of the “Jewish church,” whose golden stained-glass windows—each decorated by a great Star of David in the upper half—glowed on Friday evenings and on major Jewish holidays. The community began to use the finished basement of the synagogue for both social functions and for the itinerant Hebrew teacher who met weekly with the growing number of children among the membership. It was at such a social gathering that Willy met Phyllis Shravitz.

Phyllis was also from the Ukraine at the border between Russia and Poland. Petite, intelligent, and pretty, she also had left her family in Russia and was living with cousins in Jericho’s shtetl. Willy and Phyllis began dating regularly. Of equal intellectual prowess, but of hugely disparate economic means, their attraction was nonetheless mutual. A picture of the two, enveloped within a heart in the photographic style of the early 1920s, shows Phyllis with smiling eyes and delicate features beneath a stylish curled coiffure. Willy is next to her, handsome with his piercing blue eyes, thick hair above a strong face; he wears a fine suit that was his usual dress as superintendent of the Jericho mill now one of the burgeoning chain of textile mills Nathan owned across New England. That picture was in stark contrast to one that stood near it that showed Willy in plain slacks and a band-collar shirt, flanking his mother who wore a babushka as was the style among Jews in Russia, while Rebecca stood grim-faced at her other side. One year later Phyllis and Willy would marry in the newly built synagogue.

Along with unimagined prosperity, Willy and Phyllis decided to raise a family. Shana was born two years later, and another two years would pass before Samuel was born, named after Willy’s brother—as is custom in Jewish tradition for the naming of a child—who had been killed in Russia by the Cossacks. Both Shana and Samuel were precocious and were raised amidst comforts that first-generation Jews could never have envisioned in Russia.

As the years passed, Willy developed a habit peculiar to societies that produce large amounts of disposable income among professionals. He began to spend occasional afternoons at one of the several horse and dog-racing tracks in the area. Leaving the office in the mid afternoon, he would arrive at his chosen destination still wearing his fine clothes from the factory. He cut a handsome figure and began smoking cigars to further enhance his image as he stood by the fence of a track on a fine New England spring day watching the horses and jockeys stampede past him, his betting receipts in hand.

Throughout the 1930s Willy began betting more and more. When Samuel’s bar mitzvah was celebrated at the synagogue in the mid 30s, the event was elaborate, and to an outside observer, nothing appeared wrong. Phyllis, however, who managed their accounts, knew that Willy’s gambling habit had kept the family from purchasing a house and they continued to live in a spacious apartment not far from the mill. Phyllis did not bring up the subject to Willy, as the rumors of what had begun to happen to European Jewry had reached the shores of the U.S., Phyllis worried about what would become of family that remained in Europe and Russia and had the additional worry that Samuel might come of age just as the ravages of war engulfed even the U.S.

The 40s brought U.S. entry into the world war and Sammy left for training in the Army Air Corps while Shana began attending college. Sammy was assigned to a bomber group in the South Pacific and served out the war as a gunner within a bubble on the underbelly of a B-29 high above the endless blue waters and tropical green islands of the sea below. Phyllis worried in silence about his safety and the fact that Willy had avoided military service was not lost on him as he wearily listened to news from Europe and the Pacific. To assuage his guilt Willy enthusiastically served on a committee of Jewish professionals and businessmen in Jericho who assisted resettled Jews from Europe and Russia find jobs and housing. His guilt was heightened by the fact that the quotas on immigration were so low that the number of fleeing Jews arriving in Jericho for help amounted to only a handful of souls.

Sammy returned from the war in 1945 and Shana married during the war, dropping out of college to begin a life with her new husband. Economic hardship lurked close by, however. Willy’s brother Nathan knew how to make money in America—that he had proved. Nathan sensed that the future of textiles existed not in the cold climes of the rust belt where the majority of his factories were located, but in the south where both heating costs and labor was substantially cheaper. This, however, bode poorly for his brother Willy. As the decade of the war came to a close, Willy worked in his office on a Friday afternoon, while the whir of the machines producing lace hummed in the background, the floors gently rumbling to the sound. Suddenly, Willy looked up as he noticed a change in the intensity of light entering his office. His brother Nathan, a stranger to this his first mill, stood in the open doorway.

Willy got up and walked around his desk while Nathan drew nearer to him. The two brothers hugged affectionately. “You didn’t say you were coming to town. What a surprise!” “ I thought it would be better to talk this way,” Nathan intoned, a worried, preoccupied look on his face. “Something wrong with our product…costs…trouble I don’t know about?” Willy asked. “Willy, I think we’re going to close up shop here at the end of the year.” “Close shop! But we’re a going concern…we’re making money for you and the company here and employing a lot of people.” “Willy, listen to reason. We can add significant profit to this operation by moving to the South.” “The South! I’m a Jew…what would I do in the South?” Willy asked, his face reddening. “How would my family live?” “Willy, look, think about it. If you decide against following the factory south, I’ll set you up in business right here.”

So, at year’s end, Willy opened up a huge fabric shop in the center of Jericho. The business made money, but not enough to supply Willy with the clothes and disposable income he was used to betting at racetracks. Soon, he was operating in the red, a fact that was not lost upon Nathan who had been generous in paying all of the costs to start the business. Less than five years after opening the business Willy was forced to shut its doors.

With little money in the bank, Willy was forced to turn to Nathan again. This time he backed him in purchasing a luncheonette a few blocks from where the fabric shop had been located. Again, the business made enough for Willy to support the family, but Phyllis began working several hours a day because of the long hours that the store had to remain open to make a decent profit. At about the same time she began to experience chest pains, and an examination by her family physician and a specialist revealed the ominous diagnosis of angina.

Willy began to feel guilt ridden. Phyllis, a woman he loved dearly, had raised two wonderful children who both now had children of their own, and he could not even afford a suitable home for her. Willy began to blame himself, justifiably so, for squandering huge sums of money at the racetrack while Phyllis had developed a potentially life-threatening disease.

Phyllis suffered three moderate heart attacks. One early morning as a new decade began Phyllis lay on the couch of their apartment having experienced chest pains throughout the night. When the doctor arrived, Willy left for the luncheonette to see whether his stand-in had opened it without problems in his absence. In the short time he was gone Phyllis uttered a loud sigh from the couch that the doctor heard where he sat with a cup of coffee down the hallway in the kitchen. He put down the cup and rushed into the living room, but it was too late. He attempted to resuscitate Phyllis, but his efforts were useless, as she had suffered a massive heart attack.

During the week of shiva after Phyllis’ funeral, Willy stayed with Shana and her family. Although there exists in Jewish tradition an admonition to stay away from the gravesite of a close relative for a year after the burial, Willy spent hours each day at Phyllis’ grave, hiring help to run the luncheonette. Shana would take calls from people who had seen Willy on the cemetery grounds at all hours of the day. To add to his grief, he ate almost nothing, and appeared listless and uncommunicative to others. Two months after the funeral Shana was called by the police to come to the scene of an accident that Willy had been involved in only blocks from her home.

Even though the accident was quite minor, Willy’s speech was slurred as Shana led him into the family room upon returning home. He appeared disoriented, and when their family doctor arrived, he ordered Willy to check into the hospital for tests. During the first night of his stay he suffered a major stroke and by morning he had lost most of his ability to speak and became paralyzed over the entire right side of his body. The paralysis was so severe that even his facial muscles were involved and his mouth turned down sharply at its right corner from which saliva flowed freely. When he attempted to speak, the sounds that were emitted were unintelligible, and his temper—which had always been one of his worst features—flared as if the person with whom he attempted to communicate was responsible for his suffering.

After a month’s stay in the hospital, Willy was released, having made no progress, and returned to Shana’s home where a hospital bed was set up in a spare room on the first floor. Shana soon found that she was ill equipped to care for her father. Willy now wore a huge stainless-steel brace fastened to the bottom of his shoe and rising to mid leg height that he dragged slowly as he walked. After a year of caring for Willy, Shana’s nerves and family relationships were frayed beyond repair. Willy’s temper was getting worse and worse, and he would rail at whomever didn’t understand his undecipherable commands. He would often emerge from the bathroom trailing a great, unrolled portion of toilet paper that clung to the bottom of his right shoe that grated as he dragged it along the floor. Finally, not able to continue any longer, Shana found a nursing home a few blocks away that agreed to take Willy on a temporary basis until more suitable arrangements could be made.

After several months Willy was admitted to the geriatric ward at the state hospital, and then to a Jewish home for the aged where treatment and care could be provided at a higher level than at any of his earlier placements. The home was only a few miles from the train platform where Nathan had first greeted Willy on his arrival from New York.

No one could have imagined or predicted that Willy’s symptoms would not improve as one year followed the next. Seasons paraded by Willy’s window on the fourth-floor of the modern facility. Visits from family members became fewer and fewer as Willy would call a visitor by the wrong name and fall into a massive rage when the person attempted to correct him. He called Shana by his sister’s name, Rebecca, and when Rebecca visited from New York, he called her Shana. He called Sammy by his father’s name, and continued the pattern until visits were so few that names and his temper meant little to others.

When one of Willy’s grandsons, Shana’s son, Hershel, was married in the early part of the decade of the 70s, his wife Ellen was shocked when she learned that Hershel had a single surviving grandparent and that he would not be invited to the wedding. Hershel saw Willy only infrequently and would routinely stop and buy him a cigar before visiting, as smoking a cigar seemed to give Willy pleasure and reminded Hershel of his grandfather of times past.

“I can’t believe how your grandfather has been relegated to almost nonexistence,” Ellen intoned in a manner that suggested disapproval. “Why doesn’t anyone in your family mention him…why wasn’t he at our wedding…I don’t care what physical condition he’s in; he’s still a human being.” Hershel explained that the last time Willy attended a family celebration was at Hershel’s sister’s wedding ten years earlier. He said that it seemed like Willy recognized no one at the synagogue where the wedding was held, and that he had attempted to leave the synagogue many times during the ceremony and the dinner that followed. Visits to the nursing home by family members became more infrequent and Willy had become a more and more distant memory for Hershel rather than a living member of the family.

One day Shana was called from the home and told that Willy had wandered off and was found walking the streets miles away. When workers at the home tried to get him into a van from the facility, he began yelling and waving his cane at them as if in macabre rendition of a swashbuckler. Other calls punctuated the years. Twice, Willy had to have growths removed: once from his vocal cords and again from a kidney.

Years turned into decades and Nathan’s family ignored requests that they help with the cost of keeping Willy at the home. Nathan had died a decade earlier and his family felt no sense of responsibility in sharing the wealth he had accumulated with his younger and ailing brother. They felt that Nathan had helped Willy enough when he was alive.

Willy did not realize that his son Sammy had died from the complications of circulatory problems in Willy’s twentieth year at the nursing home. Sammy had been the most assiduous member of Willy’s family in paying visits to his father.

Willy died twenty-two years after suffering the stroke, just eight months after Sammy had died. The ground was frozen with December and the earth from the grave lay in icy clumps at its side. As his wooden coffin was lowered into the ground beside his beloved Phyllis, one of his grandsons thought of the days when people found him at this place overcome by guilt that would separate him from consciousness through a stroke much as he had been separated from Phyllis by her death. Willy had come so far from his home in Russia…his refusal to fight in the wars of two separate and distant countries…his rise to a position of responsibility in his brother’s factory… his fall to ignominy—and to almost complete disappearance in the minds of his family, and finally to this lonely place beside the highway.