Saul Bellow's Heart Read online

  In 1912 the police cracked down on Grandpa. Abram was convicted of illegal residence and was nearly deported to Siberia before a Gordin brother arranged for the family to get out of the country. According to Saul, the papers that allowed them to leave Russia were “the best forgeries money could buy.”

  The entire family was on the same boat to Canada, but because they were traveling on forged papers the children were instructed not to acknowledge their father during the journey. The Belos landed at Halifax, Nova Scotia, where their westernization began. An immigration official changed Grandpa’s name to Abraham Bellow, while Zelda and Movscha became Jane and Morris. Samuel and Lescha’s names survived unscathed.

  The family left the material comforts of Russia for a perilous life in the New World. My grandmother was permanently separated from her family. All of our relatives in Canada were on the Belo side of the family. Lescha never returned to Russia and dearly missed her family. When news of a brother’s death from typhus arrived by post, she wept bitterly. By all accounts, my grandmother was often sad and morose. The strains imposed by poverty and an immigrant life weighed heavily upon her. Furthering her isolation, Lescha learned neither French nor English. In the New World she read sentimental novels in Yiddish that frequently brought her to tears.

  By 1913, the Bellows were living in Lachine, the Montreal suburb where several Belo siblings had settled already. The factories and streets were filled with immigrant populations in a polycultural community my father captures in a 1992 autobiographical sketch, “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son.” But inside the house the Bellow family preserved the old country along with its religious and cultural customs. Lescha kept a strictly kosher kitchen and insisted that her children study Hebrew, the Torah, and music. Yiddish was the family’s primary language, and even in later years when discussing serious family business, Saul and his siblings would lapse into the familiar tongue of their childhood.

  The struggling Bellow family rented a small house in a slum where rat droppings encrusted their front steps. Sam and Morrie shared a bed. In the 1990s several family members were granted brief access to the house, and my cousin Lesha told me later how tiny and dark the rooms were. Soon the Bellows moved into the same house as Rosa and Max Gameroff, Abraham’s sister and brother-in-law. Rosa was a sharp-eyed businesswoman, and the Gameroff children, several years older than Morris and Sam, were hardworking boys. Uncle Max didn’t share Rosa’s ambition, but she had enough drive for two, and the couple began buying up property in town. Because Abraham was unable to make comparable success, frictions boiled over between a brother in need of money and a sister who not only refused to help him but twisted the knife when she said no. Kindhearted Uncle Max actually lent Abraham the capital to start a dry goods store after Rosa refused because she considered her brother’s partner lazy and their location poor. Sure enough, the enterprise soon failed, fueling Rosa’s doubts and sharpening her tongue. In addition to the dry goods store, Abraham began a series of failed enterprises that included the junk business and even a brief foray into matchmaking. Things were so bad that my grandfather considered farming, a vocation for which he was ill suited, but Lescha vetoed a rural life, which would have isolated her children from the schooling and cultural pursuits upon which she insisted.

  Abraham could not make any economic progress in Lachine. A man full of ambitions and schemes to get rich, he was unwilling to work for someone else but unable to support his family as a businessman. My grandfather was always either unemployed or working fitfully. Saul’s narrator Moses Herzog, in the novel that takes his last name for a title, describes his father as a man of sufficient charm to lure birds out of trees. Abraham possessed a similar charm, but his skill as a raconteur did not suit him in Montreal as it had in St. Petersburg. Out of work and often at home, his audience was now limited to his wife and children and his stories were told around the kitchen table.

  The family’s precarious financial situation was worsened by a schism between my grandparents when it came to spending their limited income. On one side was the struggling Abraham, egged on by Rosa Gameroff, a pragmatist bent on making money in the New World who wanted his children to earn their keep. On the other side was Lescha, who insisted her children be exposed to learning, culture, and scholarship, which Abraham considered expensive, time-consuming enterprises that took able hands away from the work that would ease his financial and physical burdens.

  Abraham’s failure to earn an adequate income aggravated his already volatile temper. He often blamed parenthood for his impoverishment and gave each of his boys a whack to cover their presumed sins when he got home from a day of hard work. Morrie, the oldest, largest, and most willful, silently took the brunt of his father’s abuse. Abraham called him the Yiddish equivalent of “Tubby,” which was meant to shame my uncle for his costly habit of eating too much. As adults, Saul and Sam charitably chalked up Abraham’s anger to the frustrations of immigrant life, but Morrie rarely, if ever, talked about his father’s beatings.

  Into this family, Solomon Bellow was born on June 10, 1915. According to a story Saul told over and over, perhaps embellished and perhaps not, the doctor who delivered him was found in a tavern, intoxicated, by one of the Gameroff boys who was sent to fetch him when my grandmother went into labor. When Saul arrived, Jane was nine, Morrie seven, and Sam four. The family living quarters were so cramped that he slept in a perambulator his first year. Morrie always claimed to be his mother’s favorite, but a nursing baby brother was a serious competitor. Lescha doted on her youngest, who was frail and often sickly. Saul’s aunt Jenny, Uncle Willie’s wife, who was childless during Saul’s first years, also doted on him, singing him popular songs in English that she mangled with her Yiddish accent. Once he was deemed old enough to leave the perambulator, Saul joined his brothers in a common bed, where Morrie got his revenge on his baby brother by pinching him and stepping on his toes or fingers. Yet, outside the house, Morrie looked out for Saul and they were very close. Sam, while not blameless in picking on Saul, avoided as much of the family strife as he could.

  Saul loved to tell the earthy story of his weaning, which he claimed to remember. At three or four, he made a noise signaling a desire for Lescha’s breast. Abraham, irritated, opened his own shirt and exposed his useless nipple, a message that Saul was too old to nurse and that all he could expect from his father and the world was cold comfort. On another occasion, Sam was very sick and kept the household up all night with his coughing. Annoyed, his father said, “Let him die already.” Yet Saul made it clear that somehow, despite his complaints and beatings, Abraham let his sons know he cared about them.

  Saul emphasized the family’s poverty and often told a story about asking his father to buy him an ice cream cone as they walked down the street in Lachine. My father gave two versions of Abraham’s response. In the one he usually told, Grandpa opened his coin purse and showed Saul that it did not contain even the required penny. In the other, he hid the coin from Saul, who discovered it behind a fold. The first version touches on the extent to which the Bellow family lived on the edge, while the second hints at Abraham’s resentment over the financial demands of four growing children. Saul attributed the absence of toys in the house to a lack of money, but there was a trunk full of fancy memorabilia and clothes left over from St. Petersburg that became playthings for the Bellow children. A symbol of the opulence left behind in Russia, its contents became Saul’s repository of imaginative possibilities, and he co-opted the handle of a Russian samovar to use as a pistol.

  All the children studied Hebrew, but Morrie and Sam were being groomed by Abraham to go into business. However, Lescha insisted that funds be set aside for music lessons for Jane, the marriageable daughter, and for Saul, despite her husband’s complaints about every penny she spent. She was frugal and even saved enough money to send a bit to her brothers in Russia, who had fallen on hard times after the Revolution of 1917.

  Jane studied the piano and Saul took violin lessons. His
teacher, as was the custom, administered physical punishment for poor performance. My father told me that he kicked the teacher in the shins, an unthinkable act of defiance for which he was severely punished by his father. Saul adopted his mother’s cultural values, which descended from the Gordin family’s roots in Talmudic scholarship. His facility for language and prodigious memory enabled him to quote long passages from Genesis in Hebrew at three or four years of age. Many years later, Abraham told my mother, “The family thought Saul was a genius until he was five.”

  Like many immigrant families with insufficient incomes, the Bellows took in boarders. One, a man simply called “the boarder” by the family, made a deep impression. Separated from his family in Russia, he spent time with the Bellow children in lieu of his own, and confided in Lescha. A lonely melancholic, he took to tippling and frequenting bordellos, drinking up his pay and dooming any possibility of sending for his wife and children. The boarder would come home in his cups, complaining about his boss or singing in Yiddish: “Ein, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, die vanzen dansen” (One, two, three, four, five, the bedbugs dance). Another of his songs, the meaning of which became apparent when I grew up, translates as: “Alone, alone, alone with my ten fingers alone.”

  In Herzog, as seen through the eyes of young Moses, the family’s boarder returns home drunk, disheveled, and singing loudly enough to awaken the family and the neighborhood. At the urging of Mother Herzog, Father Herzog, who is wearing his fine St. Petersburg nightshirt, gets out of a warm bed to help the boarder up the stairs and out of his soiled clothes. His wife’s compassion is enough to stir even Father Herzog to sacrifice his own comfort for the benefit of another human being. Even as a young boy, Saul could see the benign effects of his mother’s kindness and her ability to soften my grandfather’s harshness.

  The extra money from the boarder’s rent allowed the Bellows to buy my aunt Jane a piano after she showed a musical aptitude so strong that she pretended to play an imaginary piano on the walls. By 1920 Jane was fourteen and a budding young woman whose marital prospects took high priority. In typical Jewish fashion, Jane was being groomed to marry a “professional” man. In order to cultivate the refinements that were required to attract such a match, she was accorded privileges, such as elegant clothes and a musical education, as soon as the family could afford to pay for them. Abraham, initially scornful of such luxuries, did not hesitate to show off Jane’s musical accomplishments to impress guests in the Bellow home.

  In his seventh year, Saul, suffering from a misdiagnosed case of peritonitis, spent six months on the children’s ward of a tuberculosis sanatorium. A surgical drain made out of a safety pin was placed in his abdomen. The doctors held out little hope for his recovery. Saul read his chart and understood the gravity of his condition. Around him, little kids died in the night, leaving no trace but an empty bed come morning.

  Used to being doted on by his mother, Saul woke up every morning eager for his family’s company. Now, away from everyone familiar, he was lonely and bored. There was little to do on the ward; reading the funny papers filled but a few minutes. A woman volunteer who read the New Testament aloud to the children served as one of the few distractions. She made a deep impression on Saul by exposing the lonely and frightened boy to Jesus. Saul secretly fell in love with Jesus as a man who loved mankind and suffered without complaint. Surrounded by other boys who taunted him for being Jewish, he quickly realized that loving Jesus was a complicated matter best kept to himself on the ward and from his parents. Though I never heard Saul make a connection between his love of Jesus and his indirect style of personal communication, I have often wondered whether Jesus’s use of meaning-filled parables strengthened my father’s inclination to communicate via stories.

  The weekly visits to the children’s ward were limited to a single adult family member, so Lescha and Abraham took turns riding the tram to see their son. Both cautioned Saul to behave, pressing him to control his temper when teased. On one occasion, Saul’s siblings accompanied both parents to the hospital, even though they weren’t allowed to see him. After the visit, Saul went to the window to look down on his family. He opened the window as they tried to throw a bag of forbidden candy to him. When they failed to get it to him, they left and ate it themselves. Saul told this story with humor that barely concealed his disdain for the readiness of self-interest to assert itself among the Bellows.

  Living in the sanatorium required a different form of emotional toughness than enduring his father’s beatings or teasing from the non-Jewish boys without complaint. Saul was, no doubt, bereft after visits that reminded him of life at home. But he put up a brave front and reserved his tears until after his parents left. In Herzog, Saul touches on the kind of toughness, the suppression of self-pity, he came to think was a requirement of day-to-day immigrant life. A young Moses Herzog is dragged into an alley and sexually assaulted. After the attack, the lad returns home and eats his soup, uttering nary a word. Later, as an adult, Moses observes that there was no room to be a frightened little boy and remarks that “the tender-minded must harden themselves.”

  Unhappy with Saul’s absence and concerned by the slow pace of his recovery, Lescha took him out of the sanatorium to nurse him back to health sooner than the doctors thought safe. My father often described the journey back home, during which Lescha pulled him on a sled rather than making him walk. A similar scene is described in Herzog when Moses’s mother drags him through the snow on a sled as they return from the hospital. Watching Mother Herzog struggle, an old woman warns her not to sacrifice her strength for the sake of her children. Moses, who well understands the old woman’s warning, knows he is taking advantage of his mother but selfishly lets her continue to struggle. I must wonder if, when Lescha passed away ten years later, my father asked himself whether her life had been shortened by the family burdens she so willingly assumed.

  After nearly a decade in Lachine, Abraham remained unable to support his family by legitimate means. He built a still on the outskirts of town and began selling a few illegal bottles of whiskey to locals. Many Jewish immigrants were making larger profits running rum into New York State during Prohibition, and Abraham soon acquired an ambitious partner who urged him to expand. But in order to make the whiskey salable in America, bootleg hooch had to pass for legitimate brands with recognized labels. Abraham had labels printed, and it became a family game to sit around the kitchen table gluing them onto bottles filled with the cheap stuff. It was great fun when he asked, “What shall we make this bottle, children, White Horse or Three Feathers?”

  The life of a bootlegger was fraught with dangers for which my grandfather was ill prepared. Unlike the large operators, he could not afford to pay off the police, hire a truck, or form reliable New York connections. Spurred by ambition, the two small-time bootleggers tried to move a truckload over the border only to be double-crossed, most likely by the driver they recruited from a large operator unwilling to tolerate new competition. Hijacked and beaten, Abraham walked home bloodied, his bootlegging career over.

  During the years the Bellows spent in Lachine, living on the edge drew the young family close. Everyone pulled his or her own weight, and individual needs were deferred for the common good. In the middle of winter, five-year-old Saul’s chore was to go out into the backyard, break the ice that had formed over the brine, and retrieve several pickles for the family meal. As the kid brother, he took great pride in his contribution to the sense of shared responsibility that he later called “family feeling.”

  Despite the external chaos, privation, and even his father’s beatings, Saul treasured the years in Lachine and looked back on them wistfully whenever life dealt him a blow. Uncle Willie’s story offers a partial explanation. Having escaped from his fate as a brush maker in Russia, he worked in a fruit store in Lachine, where, with great aplomb, he would snap open paper bags for his customers before filling them. To my father, that confident gesture personified a type of order and optimism the New World offe
red immigrants.

  The deep roots and the sense of belonging that my father felt within his family are revealed in Dangling Man when Joseph, as a child, takes it upon himself to shine all of the family’s shoes. Blissfully happy in the service of those he loves, the boy feels such a sense of belonging that nothing can dislodge him from his chosen spot. As an adult, the duty, loyalty, and shared sacrifice that had afforded Saul a sense of safety became a sacred memory. My father returned to that “family feeling” in times of personal adversity, and it was so powerful in him that he expected it to extend into the next generation through his sons.

  My father talked of Lachine as an Eden, a place without evil. In Herzog, a young Moses, touched by his father’s palpable suffering after a flawed bootleg deal, creates a paradise by finding nobility in his father’s failure. Though just a lad, Moses understands Papa Herzog’s poor judgment and the threat to the family’s survival it has caused. Rather than turning his back on his father, Moses calls Papa Herzog “my king,” ennobling him as a man brought low by immigrant circumstance. A son not only turns a blind eye to his father’s failure but also finds admiration rather than the pity or the blame that might crush them both.

  Chapter Two

  Paradise Lost: 1924–37

  Failure as a bootlegger was the last straw, and Grandpa left Lachine for Chicago to work in his cousin Louie Dworkin’s bakery. It was a comedown for a man of high ambition, but four hungry children allowed him no choice. Six months later, in the summer of 1924, Lescha and the Bellow children were smuggled across the U.S. border in the back of a bootlegger’s truck. In Detroit they boarded a train for Chicago, where Cousin Louie and his wife, Rose, picked them up at Union Station in their convertible. Rose drove the Bellow family to their new home. She was the first woman Saul had ever seen behind the wheel, a sign of the heady air of freedom my father felt the moment he set foot in Chicago.