Just One Catch by Tracy Daugherty Read Free Book Online

the morsel Feltman claimed to have invented—the charcoal-cooked frankfurter—for five cents instead of the usual ten. Initially, the plan backfired. The public, long accustomed to rumors that hot dogs were made of horse meat or some other unsavory material, distrusted the inexpensive dog. To counter these fears, and lure more eaters, Handwerker hired transients from the beach to crowd the tables in front of his stand. The men’s disheveled appearance did not encourage anyone to approach. According to some stories, Handwerker then dressed the transients in rented lab coats; other accounts say he offered free hot dogs to interns from Coney Island Hospital. In any case, he advertised his stand as a place “where the doctors eat”—what could be safer than that? From then on, Nathan’s hot dogs became a famous Coney Island product (and a favorite food of Joseph Heller, in childhood and beyond).
    Coney was a confusing place for an immigrant to land, its basic nature as hard to grasp as one’s image in a house of tilted mirrors. The clearest picture we have of the perplexities facing the generation that shaped Joseph Heller is found in the Jewish Daily Forward ’s “Bintel Brief” (literally, a “Bundle of Letters”), an advice column for immigrants befuddled by modern America. “People often need the opportunity to pour out their heavy-laden hearts. Among our immigrant masses this need was very marked,” Abraham Cahan wrote in his memoirs. Problems between parents and children (kids quickly becoming accustomed to New World freedoms and abandoning old values), ambivalence about integration, ethnic tensions (“I am a girl from Galicia and in the shop where I work I sit near a Russian Jew.… [Once] he stated that all Galicians were no good.… Why should one worker resent another?”), and fears and temptations about intermarriage filled the daily column. Many letters addressed domestic tensions caused by new opportunities discovered in the United States.
    More striking than the confusions battering these uprooted souls was the series of mixed signals offered by the column’s wise men (sometimes Cahan himself, but more often S. Kornbluth, one of the paper’s editors). For example, some replies encouraged intermarriage as a way of becoming more Americanized; on different occasions, the editors suggested intermarriage was a curse, certain to cause isolation.
    The immigrant self was perpetually unsettled. As “The Bintel Brief” made clear, many people preferred to air their emotional struggles anonymously, not only because the pain was so great but also because the very nature of their problems, not to say the solutions, were hard to identify, and always shifting. The strongest impression one gets from these columns is that the wave of immigrants that included Joseph Heller’s father led double lives. They were never fully comfortable in their adopted world, but they were unable to return to their pasts (you will be “strangers to [your] own neighbors” in your old homelands, the editors warned). Of necessity, men and women of this generation were largely reserved, for their old languages lacked the vocabularies to define the conundrums they encountered.
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    IT WAS A WORLD of silence, but not a silent world. On summer mornings, the cries of Italian fruit peddlers drifted up from the streets through the open windows of the Hellers’ four-room apartment: “If you got money, come down and buy. If you got no money, stay home and cry.” Gull calls and the distant screams of roller-coaster riders droned just beneath soaring Puccini arias from the Kent radio in the living room, which Heller’s mother kept on all day while she hunched above her Singer sewing machine, its whirring and tapping an accompaniment to the music. Though the 1920 census indicates she was unemployed, she worked as a seamstress,