The Day My Mother Cried and Other Stories: and Other Stories

Humoresque

9 Humoresque ne of the great disappointments of my father’s life was that I never became another Yehudi Menuhin. Here was this nice Jewish boy from somewhere out there on the West Coast who was stupefying audiences all over the world with his fiddle, and in the process raking in barrelsful of dollars, British pounds, Japanese yen, or what have you. If that nice Jewish boy in the Buster Brown haircut could do it, why couldn’t I? After all, we were about the same age. This was Pop’s rationale. My father came from fiddle country. He was born in some unpronounceable village in the Ukraine, not too far from Odessa, which was the birthplace of Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Leopold Auer, and other violin masters. To hear Pop tell it, every Jewish boy in the Ukraine was teethed on the bow of a fiddle. When I asked him how it happened that he missed out on the violin lessons, he told me that from the age of eight he was obliged to go with his brothers into the marketplace every day of the week except the Sabbath in order to put kopecks on the kitchen table. When I suggested that he might have studied after dark, he gave me his “don’t be stupid” look and I retreated fast. In my time, every Jewish boy on my block and, I often suspected, on every block in the United States was forced to take violin lessons. Whether the boy liked it or not, and most did not, fiddle playing was a “must,” like not eating on Yom Kippur. One Friday afternoon, my mother and older sister took me, sullen and complaining, to the Lyceum, as it was called, where I was enrolled for weekly lessons. The first lesson, which I got that very afternoon, was free. It was what they 10 | William D. Kaufman called an orientation and involved giving the new student “a feel of the instrument.” My mother signed me up for twenty-four weekly lessons at one dollar a session. With the signing of the contract I was given a violin and bow and a stained maroon canvas bag with a drawstring to hold the instrument. The bag was big enough, I discovered later, to hold a baseball glove and ball and even a sandwich or two. For the duration of my lessons at the Lyceum, my violin smelled of salami. In the classroom there were another ten or twelve boys and one girl. If anything, she was even less musical than the rest of us. She invariably stroked up when we stroked down, to the extreme annoyance of the instructor. He was a very young man with a hardly visible red moustache that hovered above a pair of thin lips like a smattering of lint. He imagined himself as something of a wit because he had pasted a large sign on the blackboard that read “Nero Studied Here”— which none of us understood. The violin issued to me was no bargain, but it was the reason for our overcrowded classroom. At the end of the twenty-four lesson contract , the fiddle became the property of the student. This was a deal that a violin maven like my father could not pass up. It was his estimate that for a $24 expenditure, I could end up with a sound fiddle education plus a sound fiddle worth at least $10. Not a bad investment, Pop said. The violin had a curlicued marking on its bridge that read “Made in Genoa,” which thrilled my father who never wavered in his belief that Columbus was a Jew who was born in Genoa. The Lyceum, which was something of an overstatement, had once been a furniture store. It was partitioned into several classrooms, and novices, such as I, were sent to the one farthest back, which was located next to the boiler room. Our classroom was hot in the summer and even hotter in the winter. The sounds issuing from our room were loud, tuneless, and scratchy. We were sold, at a quarter apiece, squares of rosin that were supposed to keep the horsehairs on the bow snowy white and scratchproof. This never happened with mine, which, almost from the beginning, took on a greenish hue that never went away and emitted scratchier sounds than ever. Humoresque | 11 One of the early tunes we were taught was...