The Kid from Tomkinsville could as well have been...
The Kid from Tomkinsville could as well have been called The Lamb from Tomkinsville, even The Lamb from Tomkinsville Led to the SlaughterIn the Kid's career as the spark-plug newcomer to a last-place Brooklyn Dodger club, each triumph is rewarded with a punishing disappointment or a crushing accidentThe staunch attachment that develops between the lonely, homesick Kid and the Dodgers' veteran catcher, Dave Leonard, who successfully teaches him the ways of the big leagues and who, "with his steady brown eyes behind the plate," shepherds him through a no-hitter, comes brutally undone six weeks into the season, when the old-timer is dropped overnight from the club's roster"Here was a speed they didn't often mention in baseball: the speed with which a player rises--and goes down" Then, after the Kid wins his fifteenth consecutive game--a rookie record that no pitcher in either league has ever exceeded--he's accidentally knocked off his feet in the shower by boisterous teammates who are horsing around after the great victory, and the elbow injury sustained in the fall leaves him unable ever to pitch againHe rides the bench for the rest of the year, pinch-hitting because of his strength at the plate, and then, over the snowy winter--back home in Connecticut spending days on the farm and evenings at the drugstore, well known now but really Grandma's boy all over again--he works diligently by himself on Dave Leonard's directive to keep his swing level ("A tendency to keep his right shoulder down, to swing up, was his worst fault"), suspending a ball from a string out in the barn and whacking at it on cold winter mornings with "his beloved bat" until he has worked himself into a sweat' The clean sweet sound of a bat squarely meeting a ball" By the next season he is ready to return to the Dodgers as a speedy right fielder, bats 25 in the second spot, and leads his team down to the wire as a contenderOn the last day of the season, in a game against the Giants, who are in first place by only half a game, the Kid kindles the Dodgers' hermes tas hitting attack, and in the bottom of the fourteenth--with two down, two men on, and the Dodgers ahead on a run scored by the Kid with his audacious, characteristically muscular baserunning--he makes the final game-saving play, a running catch smack up against the right center-field wallThat tremendous daredevil feat sends the Dodgers into the World Series and leaves him "writhing in agony on the green turf of deep right center Tunis concludes like this: "Dusk descended upon a mass of players, on a huge crowd pouring onto the field, on a couple of men carrying an inert form through the mob on a stretcherThere was a clap of thunderRain descended upon the Polo Grounds Descended, descended, a clap of thunder, and thus ends the boys' Book of Job
I was ten and I had never read anything like itI could not believe itThe reprehensible member of the Dodgers is Razzle Nugent, a great pitcher but a drunk and a hothead, a violent bully fiercely jealous of the KidAnd yet it is not Razzle carried off "inert" on a stretcher but the best of them all, the farm orphan called the Kid, modest, serious, chaste, loyal, naive, undiscourageable, hard-working, soft-spoken, courageous, a brilliant athlete, a beautiful, austere boyNeedless to say, I thought of the Swede and the Kid as one and wondered how the Swede could bear to read this book that had left me near tears and unable to sleepHad I had the 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 comebackThe word "inert" terrified meWas 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 miu miu coffer 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 seamHere, 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 WardThe 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 amenitiesAnd 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 cultivatedAnd that to me was a big surpriseOther 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 schoolLevov 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 childrenFrom 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 rolex chain 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 even more agitated than the father whose anxieties were shaping my ownLevov was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, collegeeducated 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 seemsLimited 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 everythingAnd we were their sonsIt 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 MrLevov got rich manufacturing ladies' glovesHis 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 THowell, then the name in the city's oldest and biggest industry, the tanning and manufacture of leather goodsThe 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 waterIf 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 gucci back pack at dyeing buckskin by laying on the clay dye with a flat, stiff brush but also at sorting and grading skinsThe 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, 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 collegeWhat was amazing was not how tough he turned outWhat was amazing was how civil he could sometimes still manage to behe graduated in his early twenties to found, with two of his brothers, a small handbag outfit specializing in alligator skins contracted from RSalomon, 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 LevovsNewark 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 nightDown 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 uhr rolex hom