Excerpt: Red Shellac Discs

In his earliest memories, he was dancing around a pole to Yiddish Klezmer ‘78’s in the cellar with Sister Claire. The leathery brown portable wooden record player, looking like Pop’s winged-tip shoes, seemed dug up from a Bolshevik battlefield. With power on to volume, getting electricity though a cracking power cord, the earthed wall replacement plug threw off sparks that threatened a power outage.

A slippery, felt, mustard-colored turntable top spun madly. The original iron tone arm, stiff like Les Paul’s elbow, had a twist screw that locked in place a needle. Sound, through primitive electrical amplification shrieked out from behind an oval, wood-mesh facade covered with course fabric; a speaker still pumping sound after sixty years of wear. Red shellac discs with ancient Hebrew lettering around the center spindle hole were new when first placed there. Like a loyal wife, was laid not on any other spinning table.

Pop pushed the swollen door upstairs open and came down the rickety steps to the cellar; he had to check why the furnace was giving not enough heat. Northern winds swooped down on Brooklyn blowing out the pilot through the chimney. Behind the stairs in the low-ceiling, 20’x40’ cellar space, a sinister-looking shack of grimy nailed hinges creaked open in the darkness of bogeymen where no grandchild would dare go alone.

Jonathan Livinsky and his big sister, Claire, were spinning around, hands-on tight, to a wrought iron support cylinder, in the center of the front room. Pop paid them no mind. In their own merry-go-round, a primitive pole dance, the tossed-back heads of glee and laughter ringing out to a Klezmer instrumental, clarinet honking over a sawing string section; it was spiffy! It was music, and it was Rosetta stone for Johnny Livewire. “Tootsie Mootsie darling dear…” Even the inner grove was danceable. Johnny and Claire spun around the pole after each other until, dizzy, they dripped to the dusty cement floor. They could hear the upstairs door open and a woman’s voice call out:

“Se-dra-ter kinder,” she shrilled. “Shiman, make it slower!” Bubby was not coming down; she had more important things to do in the kitchen. The old house was rocking. Shiman didn’t hear in the noisy furnace stall. Claire obeyed and turned the record player off. Dim light filtered in from the small front cellar window. Bubby had prepared dinner the day before the Shabbos and was going to “bench lich,” light the candles; the food would soon be warmed and dinner ready. Bubby didn’t mess with electricity or music on the Sabbath but it was okay for the kinder to do so, up to a point; no music or TV during candle lighting.

“Oy Rosie, I’m making heat,” called back Pop when the children went to tell him. A few steps across from the furnace bin, there was another forbidden room of darkened planks. Johnny and Claire had a chance to enter and explore it behind Pop. Behind him they slipped in and zipped under his arm. Pop went to get the homemade sauerkraut he had fermenting in a cool jar on a casually made wooden shelf near his workbench.

Saturday evening after a walk through Scandinavian Bay Ridge with Mom; Dad on shift at Idlewild Airport coming later. Leaves on the maple trees in Borough Park had turned golden and fallen well before Rosh Hashanah eve. They passed the row of white stone town houses with high patios, passed the roller hockey rink where the goyum boys made noise knocking their rolls of black electric tape around, across the street from the Monastery of the Precious Blood, a massive medieval church and retreat, a forest of tree limbs over red brick walls, perhaps tainted with the precious blood itself. It was enough to make Johnny and Claire shiver as they skipped and sang, “Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go.” Down a block of trashy little apartment buildings near Ft. Hamilton Parkway they went and into the Yiddish side of town. Straight from the Lower Eastside, the theater awaited with “Galloping Comediennes” with 78 RPM’s on Bubby and Pop’s Victrola; “The Good Ship Lollipop” with “Peter and the Wolf.” She was eight and he was six, they rode on horses made of sticks. Later, she would laugh and say, “Remember when we used to play ‘Bang Bang’?”

When Johnny slept over, on those rare nights his parents went to an affair, she sang him to bed with a lullaby. “Ahh-ahh-Joniliah,” sang Bubby. In the late afternoon, around tea time, it was Bubby singing “Yisroael, Yisroael, Du vas leban du vas blean…” All he knew is it was a song about Israel. The TV played Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour and Lawrence Welk, and sister Claire took to playing the accordion. There was never any radio on, and only Mitch Miller’s choir singing “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” on a portable record player his aunt had gotten free for opening a bank account at a new branch, but Johnny has music etched into his soul at an early age.

At Shabbos service for children, he lit the menorah candles sang the Hanukkah prayers and songs, though never as well as Claire, and he learned the Hebrew verb conjugations musically at Sunday morning lessons with Miss Greenspan.

Such sad melodies so many of the songs seemed to have. The melancholy melodies were his first blues songs, the half tones of Jewish prayers, the crying voices of the great cantors on those large 78’s, all seeped in. They opened doors in his mind that let the dim light out, but not the bright sun in. Johnny understood immediately his predicament in the world: the blues couldn’t be washed away.