American Pastoral Read online

  courage to address him, I would have asked if he thought the ending meant the

  Kid was finished or whether it meant the possibility of yet another comeback.

  The word “inert” terrified me. Was the Kid killed by the last catch of the year?

  Did the Swede know? Did he care? Did it occur to him that if disaster could

  strike down the Kid from Tomkinsville, it could come and strike the great Swede

  down too? Or was a book about a sweet star savagely and unjustly punished—a book

  about a greatly gifted innocent whose worst fault is a tendency to keep his

  right shoulder down and swing up but whom the thundering heavens destroy

  nonetheless—simply a book between those “Thinker” bookends up on his shelf?

  Keer Avenue was where the rich Jews lived—or rich they seemed to most of the

  families who rented apartments in the two-, three-, and four-family dwellings

  with the brick stoops integral to our after-school sporting life: the crap

  games, the blackjack, and the stoop-ball, endless until the cheap rubber ball

  hurled mercilessly against the steps went pop and split at the seam. Here, on

  this grid of locust-tree-lined streets into which the Lyons farm had been

  partitioned during the boom years of the early twenties, the first postimmigrant

  generation of Newark’s Jews had regrouped into a community that took its

  inspiration more from the mainstream of American life than from the Polish

  shtetl their Yiddish-speaking parents had re-created around Prince Street in the

  impoverished Third Ward. The Keer Avenue Jews, with their finished basements,

  their screened-in porches, their flagstone front steps, seemed to be at the

  forefront, laying claim like audacious pioneers to the normalizing American

  amenities. And at the vanguard of the vanguard were the Levovs, who had bestowed

  upon us our very own Swede, a boy as close to a goy as we were going to get.

  The Levovs themselves, Lou and Sylvia, were parents neither more nor less

  recognizably American than my own Jersey-born Jewish mother and father, no more

  or less refined, well spoken, or cultivated. And that to me was a big surprise.

  Other than the one-family Keer Avenue house, there was no division between us

  like the one between the peasants and the aristocracy I was learning about at

  school. Mrs. Levov was, like my own mother, a tidy housekeeper, impeccably well

  mannered, a nice-looking woman tremendously considerate of everyone’s feelings,

  with a way of making her sons feel important—one of the many women of that era

  who never dreamed of being free of the great domestic enterprise centered on the

  children. From their mother both Levov boys had inherited the long bones and

  fair hair, though since her hair was redder, frizzier, and her skin still

  youthfully freckled, she looked less startlingly Aryan than they did, less vivid

  a genetic oddity among the faces in our streets.

  The father was no more than five seven or eight—a spidery man

  10

  * * *

  even more agitated than the father whose anxieties were shaping my own. Mr.

  Levov was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn,

  undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, college-

  educated Jewish sons: a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for

  whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose

  compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking

  that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless

  energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most

  serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their

  sons. It was our job to love them.

  The way it fell out, my father was a chiropodist whose office was for years our

  living room and who made enough money for our family to get by on but no more,

  while Mr. Levov got rich manufacturing ladies’ gloves. His own father—Swede

  Levov’s grandfather— had come to Newark from the old country in the 1890s and

  found work fleshing sheepskins fresh from the lime vat, the lone Jew alongside

  the roughest of Newark’s Slav, Irish, and Italian immigrants in the Nuttman

  Street tannery of the patent-leather tycoon T. P. Howell, then the name in the

  city’s oldest and biggest industry, the tanning and manufacture of leather

  goods. The most important thing in making leather is water—skins spinning in big

  drums of water, drums spewing out befouled water, pipes gushing with cool and

  hot water, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. If there’s soft water,

  good water, you can make beer and you can make leather, and Newark made both—big

  breweries, big tanneries, and, for the immigrant, lots of wet, smelly, crushing

  work.

  The son Lou—Swede Levov’s father—went to work in the tannery after leaving

  school at fourteen to help support the family of nine and became adept not only

  at dyeing buckskin by laying on the clay dye with a flat, stiff brush but also

  at sorting and grading skins. The tannery that stank of both the slaughterhouse

  and the chemical plant from the soaking of flesh and the cooking of flesh and

  the dehairing and pickling and degreasing of hides,

  11

  where round the clock in the summertime the blowers drying the thousands and

  thousands of hanging skins raised the temperature in the low-ceilinged dry room

  to a hundred and twenty degrees, where the vast vat rooms were dark as caves and

  flooded with swill, where brutish workingmen, heavily aproned, armed with hooks

  and staves, dragging and pushing overloaded wagons, wringing and hanging

  waterlogged skins, were driven like animals through the laborious storm that was

  a twelve-hour shift—a filthy, stinking place awash with water dyed red and black

  and blue and green, with hunks of skin all over the floor, everywhere pits of

  grease, hills of salt, barrels of solvent—this was Lou Levov’s high school and

  college. What was amazing was not how tough he turned out. What was amazing was

  how civil he could sometimes still manage to be.

  From Howell & Co. he graduated in his early twenties to found, with two of his

  brothers, a small handbag outfit specializing in alligator skins contracted from

  R. G. Salomon, Newark’s king of cordovan leather and leader in the tanning of

  alligator; for a time the business looked as if it might flourish, but after the

  crash the company went under, bankrupting the three hustling, audacious Levovs.

  Newark Maid Leatherware started up a few years later, with Lou Levov, now on his

  own, buying seconds in leather goods—imperfect handbags, gloves, and belts—and

  selling them out of a pushcart on weekends and door-to-door at night. Down Neck—

  the semi-peninsular protuberance that is easternmost Newark, where each fresh

  wave of immigrants first settled, the lowlands bounded to the north and east by

  the Passaic River and to the south by the salt marshes—there were Italians who’d

  been glovers in the old country and they began doing piecework for him in their

  homes. Out of the skins he supplied they cut and sewed ladies’ gloves that he

  * * *

  peddled around the state. By the time the war broke out, he had a collective of


  Italian families cutting and stitching kid gloves in a small loft on West Market

  Street. It was a marginal business, no real money, until, in 1942, the bonanza:

  a black, lined sheepskin dress glove, ordered by the Women’s Army Corps. He

  12

  leased the old umbrella factory, a smoke-darkened brick pile fifty years old and

  four stories high on Central Avenue and 2nd Street, and very shortly purchased

  it outright, leasing the top floor to a zipper company. Newark Maid began

  pumping out gloves, and every two or three days the truck backed up and took

  them away.

  A cause for jubilation even greater than the government contract was the

  Bamberger account. Newark Maid cracked Bamber-ger’s, and then became the major

  manufacturer of their fine ladies’ gloves, because of an unlikely encounter

  between Lou Levov and Louis Bamberger. At a ceremonial dinner for Meyer

  Ellenstein, a city commissioner since 1933 and the only Jew ever to be mayor of

  Newark, some higher-up from Barn’s, hearing that Swede Levov’s father was

  present, came over to congratulate him on his boy’s selection by the Newark News

  as an all-county center in basketball. Alert to the opportunity of a lifetime—

  the opportunity to cut through all obstructions and go right to the top—Lou

  Levov brazenly talked his way into an introduction, right there at the

  Ellenstein dinner, to the legendary L. Bamberger himself, founder of Newark’s

  most prestigious department store and the philanthropist who’d given the city

  its museum, a powerful personage as meaningful to local Jews as Bernard Baruch

  was meaningful to Jews around the country for his close association with FDR.

  According to the gossip that permeated the neighborhood, although Bamberger

  barely did more than shake Lou Levov’s hand and quiz him (about the Swede) for a

  couple of minutes at most, Lou Levov had dared to say to his face, “Mr.

  Bamberger, we’ve got the quality, we’ve got the price—why can’t we sell you

  people gloves?” And before the month was out, Barn’s had placed an order with

  Newark Maid, its first, for five hundred dozen pairs.

  By the end of the war. Newark Maid had established itself—in no small part

  because of Swede Levov’s athletic achievement—as one of the most respected names

  in ladies’ gloves south of Gloversville, New York, the center of the glove

  trade, where Lou Levov shipped his hides by rail, through Fultonville, to be

  tanned by the best glove tannery in the business. Little more than a decade

  later, with the

  opening of a factory in Puerto Rico in 1958, the Swede would himself become the

  young president of the company, commuting every morning down to Central Avenue

  from his home some thirty-odd miles west of Newark, out past the suburbs—a

  short-range pioneer living on a hundred-acre farm on a back road in the sparsely

  habitated hills beyond Morristown, in wealthy, rural Old Rimrock, New Jersey, a

  long way from the tannery floor where Grandfather Levov had begun in America,

  paring away from the true skin the rubbery flesh that had ghoulishly swelled to

  twice its thickness in the great lime vats.

  The day after graduating Weequahic in June ‘45, the Swede had joined the Marine

  Corps, eager to be in on the fighting that ended the war. It was rumored that

  his parents were beside themselves and did everything to talk him out of the

  marines and get him into the navy. Even if he surmounted the notorious Marine

  Corps anti-Semitism, did he imagine himself surviving the invasion of Japan? But

  the Swede would not be dissuaded from meeting the manly, patriotic challenge—

  secretly set for himself just after Pearl Harbor—of going off to fight as one of

  the toughest of the tough should the country still be at war when he graduated

  high school. He was just finishing up his boot training at Parris Island, South

  * * *

  Carolina—where the scuttlebutt was that the marines were to hit the Japanese

  beaches on March 1, 1946—when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. As a

  result, the Swede got to spend the rest of his hitch as a “recreation

  specialist” right there on Parris Island. He ran the calisthenic drill for his

  battalion for half an hour before breakfast every morning, arranged for the

  boxing smokers to entertain the recruits a couple of nights a week, and the bulk

  of the time played for the base team against armed forces teams throughout the

  South, basketball all winter long, baseball all summer long. He was stationed

  down in South Carolina about a year when he became engaged to an Irish Catholic

  girl whose father, a marine major and a one-time Purdue football coach, had

  procured him the cushy job as drill instructor in order to keep him at Parris

  Island to play ball. Several months before the Swede’s

  discharge, his own father made a trip to Parris Island, stayed for a full week,

  near the base at the hotel in Beaufort, and departed only when the engagement to

  Miss Dunleavy had been broken off. The Swede returned home in ‘47 to enroll at

  Upsala College, in East Orange, at twenty unencumbered by a Gentile wife and all

  the more glamorously heroic for having made his mark as a Jewish marine—a drill

  instructor no less, and at arguably the crudest military training camp anywhere

  in the world. Marines are made at boot camp, and Seymour Irving Levov had helped

  to make them.

  We knew all this because the mystique of the Swede lived on in the corridors and

  classrooms of the high school, where I was by then a student. I remember two or

  three times one spring trekking out with friends to Viking Field in East Orange

  to watch the Upsala baseball team play a Saturday home game. Their star cleanup

  hitter and first baseman was the Swede. Three home runs one day against

  Muhlenberg. Whenever we saw a man in the stands wearing a suit and a hat we

  would whisper to one another, “A scout, a scout!” I was away at college when I

  heard from a schoolyard pal still living in the neighborhood that the Swede had

  been offered a contract with a Double A Giant farm club but had turned it down

  to join his father’s company instead. Later I learned through my parents about

  the Swede’s marriage to Miss New Jersey. Before competing at Atlantic City for

  the 1949 Miss America title, she had been Miss Union County, and before that

  Spring Queen at Upsala. From Elizabeth. A shiksa. Dawn Dwyer. He’d done it.

  One night in the summer of 1985, while visiting New York, I went out to see the

  Mets play the Astros, and while circling the stadium with my friends, looking

  for the gate to our seats, I saw the Swede, thirty-six years older than when I’d

  watched him play ball for Upsala. He wore a white shirt, a striped tie, and a

  charcoal-gray summer suit, and he was still terrifically handsome. The golden

  hair was a shade or two darker but not any thinner; no longer was it cut short

  but fell rather fully over his ears and down to his collar.

  15

  In this suit that fit him so exquisitely he seemed even taller and leaner than I

  remembered him in the uniform of one sport or another. The woman with us noticed

  him first. ” Who is that? That’s— that’s … Is that John Lindsay?” she asked.

&n
bsp; “No,” I said. “My God. You know who that is? It’s Swede Levov.” I told my

  friends, “That’s the Swede!”

  A skinny, fair-haired boy of about seven or eight was walking alongside the

  Swede, a kid under a Mets cap pounding away at a first baseman’s mitt that

  dangled, as had the Swede’s, from his left hand. The two, clearly a father and

  his son, were laughing about something together when I approached and introduced

  myself. “I knew your brother at Weequahic.”

  “You’re Zuckerman?” he replied, vigorously shaking my hand. “The author?”

  * * *

  “I’m Zuckerman the author.”

  “Sure, you were Jerry’s great pal.”

  “I don’t think Jerry had great pals. He was too brilliant for pals. He just used

  to beat my pants off at Ping-Pong down in your basement. Beating me at Ping-Pong

  was very important to Jerry.”

  “So you’re the guy. My mother says, ‘And he was such a nice, quiet child when he

  came to the house.’ You know who this is?” the Swede said to the boy. “The guy

  who wrote those books. Nathan Zuckerman.”

  Mystified, the boy shrugged and muttered, “Hi.”

  “This is my son Chris.”

  “These are friends,” I said, sweeping an arm out to introduce the three people

  with me. “And this man,” I said to them, “is the greatest athlete in the history

  of Weequahic High. A real artist in three sports. Played first base like

  Hernandez—thinking. A line-drive doubles hitter. Do you know that?” I said to

  his son. “Your dad was our Hernandez.”

  “Hernandez’s a lefty,” he replied.

  “Well, that’s the only difference,” I said to the little literalist, and put out