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seemed to have such a purpose come Sunday morning. Their families were together and although they were poor, they seemed happy. Tateh hated black people. He’d call the little children bad names in Yiddish and make fun of their parents, too. “Look at them laughing,” he’d say in Yiddish. “They don’t have a dime in their pocket and they’re always laughing.” But he had plenty money and we were all miserable. My brother Sam, he couldn’t take it and ran off as soon as he got big enough
.
    Sam was like a shadow. He was short and stocky, with a heavy head of hair, thick eyebrows, and heavy arms and legs. Because he was two years older than me, he had plenty power over me and Dee-Dee, yet he didn’t use his older-brother status over us. He was quiet and submissive. Mameh doted on him, but Tateh put the fear of God into him. Every evening after supper Tateh would sit me and Sam down and make us study the Old Testament. Dee-Dee was too young for that, but me and Sam weren’t. He’d read the words to us and make us repeat them back to him. The book of Ecclesiastes was Tateh’s favorite. “I said in my heart, God shall judge the righteous and the wicked; for there is a time for every purpose and every work.” That’s Ecclesiastes. I still know those verses, but I learned them out of…not out of love for God but just out of
…
what?…I don’t know. Duty. My father was a rabbi, right? Shouldn’t his kids know the Old Testament? We hated those sessions. Tateh had no patience, and he’d often stop you in the middle of your verse to scold or slap you if you showed disinterest in the Bible. Sometimes the scolding made you feel worse than the hitting. “You’re stupid. You’re nothing but a fool. A sinner. You’re unredeemed before God,” he’d say. Sam was his main target. He’d make Sam sit in the corner for hours and read Hebrew. He never showed any love toward his son
.
    You know, any rabbi who visited town, we’d have to put him up and feed him. Tateh would say, “You go show such and such around town,” and we’d have to drag this old rabbi, some old fart, around and do what he told us. We hated that. Of course the alternative was Tateh would pull his belt off and skin you alive
.
    I liked to play dominoes with Sam when we were little, but as he got bigger, he had no time to play. Tateh worked Sam harder than me and Dee-Dee. Sam worked like a man when he was a boy. We’d open up the store at seven A.M. and Sam would saw lumber, cut ice, stack the meats out, stock the shelves, feed the cow in the backyard, all before we left for school. He hated that store. After school he went right to work. When he wanted to get out of working in the store, he wouldn’t show up after school until almost dark, and Tateh would scold and punish him by making him work even longer hours. Sam had poor grades in school and low self-esteem from all that treatment. He had few friends because he was shy, and even if he did make a friend, we weren’t allowed to have gentile friends. That was forbidden
, aveyre.
    He got bar mitzvahed when he was thirteen. They put a picture of
him and Tateh in the paper and Mameh was proud of him. That was the only time I ever remember seeing him smile, because he made his mother happy. Then a couple of years later he ran off. This was around 1934. He just left home and never came back. He was about fifteen or so. He went to Chicago and wrote Mameh a letter from there. The letter was written in English, which Mameh didn’t read or speak, but I read it for her. It said, “I am fine. I got a job working as a clerk in a store.” He got a job working for Montgomery Ward or J. C. Penney, one of those stores. He didn’t know a soul in Chicago and made it there on his own. Mameh was beside herself with that letter. “Write him back,” she told me. “Write him back