Russak continues his look back at life in the famous mill town, and in doing so gives us a window into the world the bore among the richest radical working class traditions in the U.S.

‘Weavers of Silk: Further Memoirs of Paterson, New Jersey’ by Martin Russak from New Masses. Vol. 4 No. 10. March, 1929.

THE OLD MAN

The old man my grandfather was a model of system and exactness. One could tell the time from his movements. Year in and year out, at precisely the same hour, he ate breakfast slowly and thoughtfully, said a dignified goodbye, and walked slowly and thoughtfully down the street. He looked like an Italian with his dark skin, black eyes, big black mustache, and eternal cigar. He always wore a derby; when the style changed he stuck to his old bowler. His ways were ascertained, smoothly worn, and pleasantly fixed; no change, no caprice of human fashion should affect the little habits upon which his life was solidly built.

He was one of those weavers who get to work with time to spare. Before starting; whistle blew he had his loose ends tied up, his shuttle cleaned, his looms oiled, and a full board of quills on each loom. He was a finished weaver and took a secret pride in his skill; the joy of craftsmanship was his chief joy. He loved to weave a good piece of cloth and never permitted a flaw to pass by, for he hated bad work of any sort.

“What’s the trick of sending up a piece with floats and roughness in it?” he would say. “That’s all right for a girl or an Irishman, maybe; but I’m a weaver.” The cloth that came from his looms was of the first quality.

My grandmother was his second wife and stepmother of his children. They called her “aunt,” for they had loved their mother as few mothers have been loved. My grandmother’s silver-gray hair was beautiful; it gave a wistful appearance that became this quiet, soft-spoken woman. She was a cook, she worked at weddings and parties. She was religious. On this one point she manifested independence and my grandfather gave in. He allowed her to light candles on Friday night.

Her religion set her apart. To the end of her life she moved about like a stranger in our family.

She was a good servant. One could scold her. She was never in the way. When we noticed her we liked her. She was of those still people who go through life without playing a role in their own lives. She had one sphere of authority: the nook occupied by her mother, my great-grandmother. An old, old woman sitting pillowed in a rocking chair at the back window, fed baked apple out of a spoon by her daughter, peering ^strangely down at us boys at play among the garbage barrels in the yard, deaf, speechless, never emitting a sound save, sometimes, a smacking of her wrinkled chops.

My grandfather had a set of carpenter’s tools and wherever he lived managed to have a workroom or a work-corner of his own.

He divided his time between his tinkering and the saloon. He dreamt of living in a house with a basement, and when he moved into the house on Temple Street he established himself in the snug basement, built shelves for his lumber, a solid work-table, and a chest of drawers for his tools and hardware. He made curiously carved and delicately finished objects of furniture for his own use and for his sons. I would come in to watch him hammering, planing, sawing, whitling, and he would pause to puff at his cigar and chat gravely. He was fond of me; I was his first grandchild.

Beneath his grave exterior and dignified demeanor he was a boy. Jokes and witticisms honeycombed his talk. His stories and puns went the rounds and became famous. A whimsical old man; he could be unrestrainedly funny, with an almost tragic air. But he could be as serious as his air. Once when one of his sons yielded to tradition and allowed a newly-born child to be circumcized, he quarreled bitterly with him and for two years remained estranged from him.

I saw little of my grandfather in after years. When I reached independent age as a full-fledged weaver my life set in other directions. I came to see him at intervals, and he received me with dignity, as if I were an ambassador from a foreign king. He had my grandmother put brandy and cakes on the table, and after we toasted each other and drank, he offered me a cigar, saying as he held out the box: “These are the real good ones. Grandfather and Grandson Specials.” We lit up from the same match, and talked gravely. He asked after my prospects, and I sat astonished at the old man’s witticisms. There were no repetitions; all of them were new.

My grandfather did not indulge in reminiscences, and I could never loosen the tongue that seemed so facile. To the end he lived, consciously, in the present. My grandfather never gave me advice. He supplied me with humor.

He had four sons and two daughters; all had followed him to the City of Silk. Isaac and Nathan were weavers, Joe was a barber, Ben a tailor, Sarah married a twister and Pearl a capmaker. He kept the respect of his sons, and they helped him through the difficulties of his old age.

POETRY AND REBELLION

Nathan was the last to arrive in Paterson. He came on a ship’s ticket sent to him at Genoa by my father.

He lived in a little garret on Bank Street. I went up there certain evenings to help him with his English. You could stand erect in the middle of the room. The walls looked as if they had once been white-washed. Opposite the door a single window gave a glimpse of the street; a cot stood on one side against the ceiling that sloped steeply to the cracked floor; on the other side a dresser with books, pictures of Swiss mountains, pine cones odorous of balsam, and a photograph of a woman. Near the window, at a little table, his book open under a kerosene lamp, Nathan sat smoking his pipe and running restless fingers through his long, sparse hair.

He read aloud from the book and I corrected his pronunciation. When he came to a word he did not know, I would fail to explain it intelligibly and he looked it up in his German-English dictionary and supplied me with a definition. Each time his keen, expressive eyes looked deprecation and his hand waved rejection.

“Your American schools!” he said. “Now in Germany…! or in France…!” I grew drowsy as the evening advanced, and fell into a doze.

“Marty, Mart,” he said, shaking me, “sleepy? Just another page, look, and well be through with the chapter, and you can go home.” He looked at me caressingly and a smile flitted over his handsome face. At the end he gave me a dime for my services. He always had a bright dime on the table, prepared against my visit.

Some evenings I found Nathan stretched on the cot, pale, distressed, staring up at the ceiling. His eyes fell towards me, they seemed to welcome me, but there was no lesson that evening. He motioned me to a chair, and after a silence began to mutter, half to himself.

“Tired…tired…Can’t stand it. Never worked in a factory before, it’s killing me. ‘You’ll get broken in after a while,’ your father tells me; ‘the beginning is hardest.’ Broken in! What am I, an ox? Broken up, maybe; and meantime it’s killing me, killing me.”

“What a savage place this America of yours is,” he continued, in a rising voice. “A wilderness, a desert. Paterson ! What a forsaken hole in the mud! The City of Silk, no less. The City of the Living Dead! Dante’s hell populated by broken idiots. God, God, how lonely, how empty, how cold and ugly. Horrible factories, dirty little houses, filthy streets, a stinking river. And the people—always tired and silent. Work, work, work—that’s all they know. Brutes; the blood of dogs flows. in their veins; not worth spitting on. And that fool your father wasting himself upon them. A union, struggle, strike, revolution. Revolution, yes! I’d be the first one to take a gun. Don’t I know the dungeons of the Piaterkover Prison in Lodz? Wasn’t I shot, wounded, in 1905? But America, the Golden Land, the City of Silk—it’s different, it’s dead, its people have been born old and tired. A sty of sensual and stupid slaves!”

He broke off and lay still. Then, covering his eyes with his hand, he spoke again, very softly.

“Today, at the looms, I closed my eyes and saw—far off—the Jungfrau, beautiful, beautiful, her peak shining so pure, so white in the sun. And I saw the spires of Zurich, the blue lake, the glittering sails.”

I knew already when I should not question my strange uncle. After a while he rose on one elbow.

“Give me my Heine,” he said, pointing to the books on the dresser; “the little red book; that’s it. Now bring the lamp over and we’ll read some poetry.”

He read softly, tenderly, his eyes dimming, his delicate nostrils quivering with emotion. His lips, as they formed each German word, seemed to caress it. With zeal and fervor he explained those verses of his beloved Heine to me, anxious to penetrate me with that foreign music.

“Ah, how fine, how sweet,” he sighed. He stroked my hand as I sat there by him, he looked wonderingly into my face. “The child of Esther and Isaac,” he said. “Esther’s son! Esther’s son!”

Once I asked him who was the woman of the photograph on his dresser. He smiled wanly and deliberated.

“A woman I loved and who loved me,” he answered. “It’s a long story and a—well, not a happy one. You are too young to understand, Mart; and if you were older I should not be able to tell you.”

He came to eat supper at our house. His outlandish manners, his habit of throwing German and French phrases about, his air of strangeness—as if he were a transient visitor among aliens and on the point of leaving for some remote and blissful fatherland of his—puzzled and attracted. At table my father and he made a contrast; my father calm, deliberate, thoughtful; Nathan fiery and voluble, forgetting his food in the midst of speech.

“Come out of your cell, man, and become a human being,” my father admonished him. “Heavens, you’re no hermit in his garret or up in the Woods. I’ll bet it’s only as a favor to me that you belong to the Union.”

“No, no, can’t you understand,” Nathan answered; “I tell you there isn’t a person in Paterson I can talk to. No one; America is unpopulated.”

“Nathan,” said my mother, “do you remember Red Henech’s house in Berlin, the happy-go-lucky bunch we were, and all that poetical life before you went to France with Heinrich and I came to America? We could have the same thing here if we could live the same carefree way. The yoke, the yoke! It’s a heavy one, and we can’t dance under it. No, don’t answer me now, your soup is getting cold.”

At the end of a meal Nathan would rise and say “Mahlzeit” in the German fashion. He was nick-named “Mahlzeit” and the name stuck.

Nathan liked to remain with my mother when my father ran off to meetings. They sat in the darkening kitchen; night came on, and lights began to blink in the street; they sat and talked of old times and former happiness.

“Esther, Esther! What have the years done to you! Is it you that I have found again in this strange, America? Esther the wild, the rebellious; Esther our inspiration, our singer, what has life done to you! The years of toil lie heavy, so heavy upon you, there are lines in your face, you are a mother of children, your shoulders sag, your spirit—your bright spirit!—begins to sag too. Your songs, Esther, where are your songs. Ah, we grow tired and silent; we are captured, we are life-prisoners; soon, soon we shall be feeble and gray.”

“I know, Nathan, I know. But we shall never grow old, you and Isaac and I. We shall die young, as our dear comrades have died: Masha and Red Henech and Anna and Bairish and Leon. You are right, we have been captured. But not by life, Nathan; by the mills. And we shall not be free until we have captured the mills. Yes, and now the mills have taken you, too, our last one, the poet and the dreamer, and all your beautiful aspirations, all your love and fire, is a handful of bitter dust. Struggle alone remains to us, Nathan; the time of singing is long past. I have no tears left—only anger.”

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1929/v04n10-mar-1929-New-Masses.pdf