A Ritchie Boy Page 8

  Eli nodded across the table to Max. “Don’t be a sucker.”

  Hershel tried to hold in a grin, impressed that Eli correctly incorporated the slang in suggesting to Max that Hershel was bluffing.

  Max bid four hearts, Hershel instructed Meyer to pass, Eli passed as did Hershel, and the bidding contract was established with Max taking the lead. The game ended with Eli and Max one hand short of their bid just as aromas from the kitchen wafted over them.

  “Let’s take a break and visit with your parents,” Hershel suggested. In quick succession, Hershel collected and shuffled the cards, stacked them in the center of the table, pushed out his chair, and headed toward the back of the apartment. He knew his priorities.

  Eli, Max, and Meyer followed close behind. They found Mr. and Mrs. Stoff deep in conversation—in German—that Eli had no qualms interrupting. “Okay for us to get a snack, Mama?”

  Hershel noticed Eli’s discomfort whenever his parents spoke German. Mrs. Stoff must have been aware of this because she immediately shifted to English. “Sit down, boys. I’ve made a fresh batch of Viennese fingers.”

  The elongated butter cookies were covered with chocolate at both ends. Hershel scooped up a piece, still warm to the touch and practically crumbling in his hand. He popped it in whole, groaning with pleasure as it melted in his mouth. “Mrs. Stoff, you are an artist!”

  Eli rolled his eyes. “And you say I have a sweet tooth.” After motioning to Meyer and Max to help themselves, he turned to his mom. “What were you and Papa saying … about downtown and some neighborhood?”

  “Papa took the bus downtown to a hardware store last week, and he discovered a German neighborhood.”

  “Oh, that’s German Village, Mrs. Stoff.” Hershel had visited the area when he was younger with his mother as she was starting up the 571 Shop. They’d gone to several bakeries there so she could observe how they were run and what items seemed to sell best. He remembered the many German-speaking people, all of whom seemed to know one another.

  “Viele of the Volk—” Bart Stoff nervously smoothed his hand over his bald head and looked toward his wife. “I know. I need to sprechen Englisch.” He furrowed his brow and continued. “Many of the people in my work … at the stockroom … are from Germany and they live in this Dorf, this village.”

  “Your papa was telling me that a lot of German immigrants settled there in the early 1800s. They worked hard, opened up shops, and soon a third of the population of Columbus was German. They built businesses, schools, and churches. Obviously, these people are not Jewish.”

  Mrs. Stoff paused then, as if she was trying to choose her next words carefully. “I don’t want to sound like an alarmist—these local Germans have lived here for quite a while. But there are troubling signs in Europe that are hard for us, as Jews, to ignore. It’s why we left. And it’s getting worse.”

  Meyer didn’t seem to be listening as he placed two more cookies onto his plate. Hershel, Eli, and Max nodded self-consciously.

  “I’ve been called some pretty nasty names by kids at school,” Max said, shuffling from one foot to the other.

  “Yes, but we are safe here.” Mrs. Stoff smiled tenderly at Max.

  “What about that ship carrying Jewish refugees that sailed here from Hamburg last month? The U.S. refused to admit them as citizens, and they had to go back. What will happen to them?”

  Eli’s pressing questions were met with silence. Hershel wasn’t completely surprised by this impassioned side of his friend. He’d seen it in his reaction to the work of the priest in Boys Town. As their relationship deepened, Hershel had observed a trait of Eli’s that made him different—in a good way—a quality he couldn’t quite describe. Hershel tried to understand what life had been like in Vienna, but Eli didn’t talk much about it, at least not about how he felt. And now he realized Eli had been keeping abreast of news from Europe far more than any of their American-born Jewish friends. Even more than Hershel’s parents. Hershel wondered if they were all living in some bubble of willful ignorance.

  AS SUMMER DREW TO a close, Hershel dreaded returning to Central High without Eli. True to his word, Eli earned his hundred dollars for a year of college tuition working that whole summer in the junkyard, still making time to play bridge and check out the latest movies.

  Days before school began that September, word of a war in Europe started dominating the news and their conversations. They learned that Germany attacked Poland, the Germans portraying it as an act of self-defense after an alleged assault by Poles on a radio station in a Silesian city called Gleiwitz. In short order, England and France declared war on Germany. A cloud seemed to hover over their east-end neighborhood. As Hershel began his senior year of high school, Eli decided to delay college for a year and continue working at the junkyard. Hershel was glad Eli still lived around the corner and that the two could spend their free hours together.

  By mid-month, they read that the Soviet Army had invaded Poland from the east. By the end of September, Poland fell under the control of Germany and the Soviet Union. Hershel got most of his information from Eli, who seemed to know people with connections on the east coast, where news about the war was far steadier than the dribble of articles in the Columbus papers. By November, sparse coverage was coming from the front lines, and all the newspapers began referring to the war in Europe as the “Phony War” because it seemed like nothing was happening.

  Meanwhile, the Stoffs, who had been agnostic in Austria, joined the Bryden Road Temple, where all Jews from the east end belonged. There, Rabbi Zelkowitz would include bits of war news not found in the papers in his Friday-night sermons. Mrs. Stoff said she was eager to learn as much as possible about the situation in Europe, often talking to Hershel and Eli about her mother, who’d stayed behind. She translated a few of the letters she received—Aunt Miriam’s baking makes you look like Franz Sacher. … It’s a good thing my hearing’s gotten worse so I miss most of the bad news on the radio—leaving Hershel feeling like he almost knew Eli’s grandmother, a composed woman who seemed to master all the circumstances life dealt her. Given the uncertainty of the times and her own anxious worry, Mrs. Stoff voiced the importance of being engaged in the community. She decided to join the temple choir.

  IN EARLY DECEMBER, THE Stoffs invited the Goldsteins to join them for an early Shabbat dinner at their apartment, followed by a Chanukah service. While he didn’t particularly like going to synagogue services, Hershel was happy to spend an evening with Eli and his family. After the mothers lit the Shabbos candles, Mrs. Stoff served Hershel’s favorite food: Wiener Schnitzel, a freshly baked challah, and apple strudel for dessert.

  The chill of winter was already in the air as they walked the three blocks to temple. Hershel was surprised to find the chapel filled to capacity—about a hundred people. After the regular service and once the choir finished “I Have a Little Dreidel” and “Oh Chanukah,” Rabbi Zelkowitz wasted no time getting into the meat of his sermon: rumors he heard from several sources that the Nazis had deported Jews from Austria to Poland. Hershel looked around the chapel and saw the rabbi had the congregants’ rapt attention.

  “I can’t be positive, of course, but that’s the report I’m getting.” The rabbi stroked his beard and paused. “Which begs the question. Why?”

  Hershel’s eyes landed on Mrs. Stoff, seated among the choir members, just as she gasped loudly enough to be heard. The rabbi went on to share a British government report about what he called concentration camps being built in Europe for Jews and anti-Nazis resisters. He also said there were accounts of Polish Jews being ordered to wear Star of David armbands. At this point, audible groans could be heard throughout the small chapel.

  Hershel’s head felt heavy as they left the synagogue. He broke the silence, addressing no one in particular. “Why don’t we hear anything the rabbi said at school or read about it in the papers?”

  “I guess no one knows for sure, Hershel.” His father put his arm over Hershel’s shoulder. �
�The rabbi did say they were rumors.”

  Eli kicked a stone off the sidewalk. “Or maybe if the truth gets out, our country has to do something, and it would rather sit on the sidelines.”

  Hershel wondered what it would take for America to get involved. All of this seemed so far away to him. So unreal. Like watching a movie and getting lost in the action, but then as the lights go up, you can walk out. Remind yourself it’s only a story.

  Hershel looked back at Eli and then at his father. He wasn’t sure how long he could hold onto that comfort.

  Part Two

  ENLISTMENT

  Early 1943

  CASABLANCA WAS ELI’S SUGGESTION for Saturday evening. The film had captured the country’s attention when it premiered last Thanksgiving, just as the Allies invaded North Africa. He’d read all about it: an American expat and former freedom fighter caught between his love for a woman and his desire to help her and her rebel Czech husband escape the Germans from the Vichy-controlled city of Casablanca; the steamy pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. He couldn’t wait to see it, and tonight it opened in theaters across the country. The Loew’s Ohio added extra night showings to accommodate war-plant shift workers, making it easier for Eli and Hershel to fit the movie into their college schedules.

  As he walked across the Oval to meet Hershel at the student union, Eli found himself among a gathering of people in trench coats, umbrellas in hand. The temperature hadn’t dipped down to freezing even though it was the third week in January. The crowd’s eyes were on a slow-moving float with the sign “Weld Your Way to Victory” stretched across the tractor bed, held up at both ends by students tottering with each small bump in the pavement. Eli asked an onlooker what was going on. “Engineer’s Day Parade,” the man told him. “Seemed good to focus this year’s theme on the war,” he shouted above the commotion.

  No doubt about it: war was in the air. By the summer of 1940, Germany had conquered France, and that September the U.S. established the Selective Training and Service Act—the first peacetime draft in the country’s history. All men twenty-one to forty-five had to register. But then came Pearl Harbor, and just last November, with the war at its height, the Act was amended to lower the age to eighteen. Eli, at nineteen, was now eligible. He and everyone he knew became preoccupied with the draft and everything having to do with it.

  With winter-quarter midterms just a week away, the film was the perfect diversion from studying. Movies at the downtown Loew’s became a weekly event for the two while Hershel finished high school and Eli worked full-time. Eli had been in no hurry to begin college at age sixteen, having tested into his senior year when he arrived in Columbus. Now, the friends rode the bus together from campus like they used to from their east-side neighborhood to Central High. Eli couldn’t believe their junior year at Ohio State was halfway over already.

  Hershel sat right next to Eli in the back of the crowded bus, both bundled in winter coats, their book bags on their laps. “Do you remember when we first started going to the movies?” Eli asked him, smiling as he thought back to their Sunday-afternoon ritual that first year he arrived from Vienna.

  “How could I forget? And think how quickly your English improved.”

  “Yeah, but now my accent is barely noticeable. You agree?” Eli bumped his shoulder affectionately against Hershel’s.

  The bus dropped them across the street from the Loew’s. Walking through the theater lobby, they passed promotions for war bonds. “What if Garrett is drafted?” Hershel was referring to Roger Garrett, who played the Robert Morton pipe organ, a famed Loew’s attraction.

  Eli preferred the occasional live appearances by stars like Judy Garland and Jean Harlow over the uninspiring musician. “How do you know he isn’t an enlisted reserve but hasn’t been called up yet? I read there aren’t enough training facilities for everyone who’s now eligible.” He was more concerned with his own draft status than that of the organist.

  Eli moved past the line of people waiting to purchase war bonds and joined the long queue for popcorn. He told Hershel to get them tickets and seats and gestured him to go on. In an afterthought, he called after him, “You want yours buttered?” Hershel’s head bobbed as he kept walking.

  Last fall, Eli found himself mired in ambivalence. Should he enlist or wait for the Draft Board notice? Enlistees got a say about which branch of service they wanted, and even the specialty within that chosen branch. Draftees were assigned wherever the Draft Board saw the most need—likely the Army infantry, where he wanted to be assigned anyway. To Eli, enlisting was a voluntary act that fit with his desire to give back to his new country. And yet his real aspiration was to complete his education. War unmade one’s plans. War created uncertainty.

  Three students he recognized from his business classes stood farther up in the popcorn line. Eli nodded to them in greeting. He couldn’t help eavesdropping, their voices carrying over the lobby’s general tumult. There was no mistaking their eagerness to leave college and join the war effort. He understood their fervor. Here was a chance to make a difference. For one’s life to have real purpose.

  “All these American boys want to fight. Good for them. Good for this country. Good for the world,” his mother had told him in December as the deadline for voluntary enlistment was nearing. “But you need to finish school.” She’d wrung her hands as she spoke, her voice rising in pitch. “I can’t risk losing you too.”

  That last word—too—hung heavy in the air between them. Anxiety and guilt had continued to plague his mother since their escape from Vienna five years earlier. Their hope to get Gramma Jenny out evaporated after they lost touch with her a year later. Eli had heard all the rumors about the destruction of Jewish homes and businesses and the deportations of Jews. They all had. But it was easier to write it off as war hysteria. Until they couldn’t. After Pearl Harbor, with national radio broadcasts reporting on the fighting three times a day, Eli watched his mother drop everything to listen. At the bakery, she and other refugee women discussed the latest reports. Any announced casualties put her into a tailspin.

  “Lila, was ist, wird sein,” Eli’s father would tell her. What will be, will be. His father had become the less dominant parent because of his struggles acclimating to American life, nearly fifty when they arrived here. But during this tense time, Papa emerged as a calming influence. He’d always accepted his fate and moved on. When his small uniform company in Vienna was seized because of Hitler’s racial policies, he found piecemeal work to get them by until their well-timed departure. His continued difficulty with English stuck him with low-level work in Columbus, yet he remained affable and steady.

  “Papa’s right. I may not have a choice,” Eli had told his mother. To calm her fears, he shared with her what he’d gleaned from the student newspaper: that he wouldn’t get drafted until February or March and likely be permitted to finish the school year. He had figured, back then, he’d have at least a six-month reprieve.

  “Hey, did ya hear me?” The youngest of the OSU students had popped up beside Eli.

  “Sorry. Did you ask me a question?” Eli noticed a pin on the boy’s jacket lapel, a sterling silver eagle spread across the V symbol.

  “Just wondering what branch you signed up for.”

  Eli shrugged. In dragging his feet, he felt at odds with his own conscience and with most of the country. “Haven’t formally enlisted. You?”

  “I asked for the Marines, but I just want in.” Under his breath he added, “I’m actually only seventeen but wrote I was eighteen to register.”

  Eli forced a half smile before the guy turned back to his friends. After Pearl Harbor, young men lied about their age so they could get drafted. The appetite for all things war-related was insatiable. He recalled the recent ads promoting war bonds as “the best Christmas present for any American” prominently positioned down the street by Lazarus on Town and High, along with the store’s promotions for its Army officer uniforms. Still, something had held Eli back. And
before he could commit, voluntary enlistment closed.

  So here he was, waiting to get his official draft letter. Eli paid a dime for the two bags of popcorn and hurried down the aisle just as a newsreel headline filled the screen: “Everyone Joins The U.S. War Effort.” Spotting Hershel, he slid into the row, preparing to lose himself in that familiar darkness.

  THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY NIGHT, Eli, Hershel, Lenny Levine, Charlie Markowitz, and Kenny Shulman piled into Eli’s ’36 Chevy. The talk on the drive from campus was all about Ohio State football despite the fact that now, halfway into winter quarter, the season was almost a distant memory. Eli knew that football gave them an emotional outlet and that talking about it meant they didn’t have to discuss their uncertain futures. They were heading to the annual youth service at Bryden Road Temple, all likely as surprised as Eli was that this year’s featured speaker was Ohio State’s president, Howard Bevis. Eli expected to see familiar faces in the crowd since all the Jewish youth in town and on campus were invited, including his fellow Hillel members and the Jewish fraternities and sororities. The dance that followed the lecture was clearly the biggest attraction.

  Other than Eli and Hershel, Lenny was the only boy from the Columbus vicinity. Kenny was from Brooklyn, Charlie from Cleveland. They’d all met their freshman year at a Friday Firesides Hillel gathering.

  “Chuck Csuri was elected Buckeye captain for the fall.” Kenny was a walk-on and had attended the football banquet a few weeks earlier. “Csuri’s a good guy. Great tackle.”

  “I think Gene Fekete drove us to victory.” Charlie was the least athletic of the group but the most well-read on all sports. “And he’s just a sophomore, so we’ll have two more years with him at fullback.”