On April 5^th, 1968, the day following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., three black undergraduates purposely knocked me out of their way as they came through a library door at the University of Chicago. Too astounded to respond, I thought: “Didn’t they know how sickened I had been by the killing? Why knock me out of the way?  Was black racism any better than white?”  Considering this incident later, I recognized that victims of racism tended at times to act irrationally.  I had seen this trait in holocaust survivors, people who found trouble accepting the existence of “Good Germans.”

Twice a year, in spring and in autumn, schools of Coho, or Silver, salmon migrated into Chicago’s harbors. At those times, I would take a study break, grab my tackle, run to my car, and head to Jackson Park near 63^rd Street, where a long stone jetty with a warning light for mariners at its end, curved northwards into Lake Michigan.

On one beautiful afternoon, a few days after the incident at the library, I walked to the end of that jetty, right next to the signal light marking the harbor entrance, and tossed out my Little Cleo lure. I cast into the lake for the next four hours without getting a strike. Late in the day, my arms and shoulders aching, I decided to cast once more and quit for the day. To my surprise and glee, I hooked a two-pound salmon, but as I struggled to lead it into my net, I heard behind me what sounded like gunfire. I glanced toward shore stunned. Flames and smoke erupted from buildings on 63^rd Street while, along South Shore Drive, a long line of armored personnel carriers belonging to the Illinois National Guard inched northward.  Sixty-Third Street was the center of the Woodlawn district, a desperately poor and crime-ridden black ghetto separating the University of Chicago in Hyde Park from the relatively affluent and racially mixed South Shore. Mayor Daley had called in the National Guard and, later, regular units of the 101^st Airborne, to suppress the rioting arising from King’s assassination.

Dozens of people, mostly men but a few women too, stood rooted in place on the jetty and watched their all-black neighborhood burning down while a seemingly all-white Illinois National Guard invaded it with heavy military equipment. I had seen the guardsmen bivouacked in a park near my apartment the day before.

Looking down the jetty, I suddenly realized I was the only white among all the people there. I stood at the tip of the jetty, faced with a long walk back to shore. This recognition did not immediately, however, translate into fear. I lived in South Shore in the first integrated apartment building in Chicago, felt comfortable among blacks, and had developed friendly relations with many. Still, I didn’t know any of the people on that jetty and, while I can’t say I became frightened, an inkling of concern began to course through my consciousness. At that point, one of the black fishermen, a man I guessed was in his late forties or early fifties spoke to me:

We walked down the jetty, passed the dozens of people standing there watching the violence unfold on shore. Everyone was courteous to me. A number of fishermen in a friendly manner admired the salmon I had hanging from a stringer. The momentary feeling of concern I had experienced when I first heard and saw the clash on shore evaporated.  But when we reached the parking lot, a sudden realization hit me that I could be in grave danger.

Dozens of black teenagers in gang outfits sat on cars watching the destruction of their neighborhood. It seemed to me I was the only white around for a thousand miles. At that time, ferocious teenage gangs from Woodlawn, the Blackstone Rangers being the most infamous, terrorized both Hyde Park and South Shore. Murders, assaults, robberies, and rapes abounded. The gangs often ordered twelve-year-olds to commit murders for them; twelve-year-olds couldn’t be prosecuted as adults.  I was aware of this fact as I glanced around the parking lot. The teenagers eyed us. What they saw were two fishermen with their gear walking side-by-side, one black and one white, as if they were old friends.

When we reached my car, I thanked my companion, but he just waved me off as if what he had done was nothing special, just one fisherman helping another, and then he walked off to his own car.

It was not until I was in my kitchen, a few minutes later, putting that salmon in the oven that the full realization of what that man had done for me hit home. He may well have saved my life.  I hadn’t thought quickly enough even to ask his name, a lapse I’ve regretted ever since.

This “Creative Non-Fiction” story was published in Sky Island Journal, Issue 8, Spring 2019. https://www.skyislandjournal.com

In winter, on an icy evening, if you had snow tires and four-wheel drive, you could usually make it to my Catskill mountain house but, just above it, the road curved sharply to the right and, even with snow tires and four-wheel drive, you were likely to end up in the ditch across the street. Digging stranded drivers out of that ditch constituted my not infrequent exercise in benevolence.

One evening, as I sat down to dinner, I saw unmoving headlights shining outside my kitchen window and, sure enough, there lay a car in the ditch, its driver standing shivering beside it. He looked so forlorn and helpless that, with a sigh, I put down my knife and fork, went downstairs, donned a pair of heavy boots and winter jacket, took a shovel and a bag of sand out of my garage, and helped him out of the ditch and up the road.

The driver seemed to be in his seventies and spoke with a German accent. He introduced himself as Max Kahn. I never expected to see him again but, next day, he stopped by to thank me and presented me with a bottle of fine scotch. I told him the gift was unnecessary, but he insisted so I accepted it. Max lived about a half mile above me at the end of a dead end road just below a beautiful mountain field. I got to know him over the next few years. He was childless, a widower, and lived alone.

Born in Berlin into a wealthy Jewish family of clothing manufacturers, he recognized, when Hitler took power in 1933, that Jews had no place in Germany. He moved to Paris and reestablished his factory. When war broke out, in 1939, Max enlisted in the French army. The French officers treated the German refugee enlistees very badly, not trusting them, refusing to place them in combat units, and using them as laborers with almost starvation-level rations. His brother, who accompanied him, nearly died from mistreatment. Whether there existed an anti-Semitic element in this mistreatment remains unclear. When France surrendered, in 1940, Max escaped over the Pyrenees. From Spain, he made his way to New York where he, again, established his business.

Just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, Max enlisted again, this time in the United States Navy. But the United States, like France, mistrusted the German refugees. He was sent to the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, naval base where he was interned with other German refugee enlistees.

“And I bet you’ll never guess who my roommate there was,” he said. Nothing came to me and I asked: “Who was it?”
“Hitler!
“What?” I exclaimed, thinking he was joking.
“Adolph Hitler’s nephew, Patrick Hitler.”

Max explained that Adolph Hitler’s brother had immigrated to Ireland, had married an Irish woman, and had fathered a son. When that son, Patrick, a young fellow in 1933, learned his uncle had become chancellor of Germany, he decided to go there and see what was what. He was wined and dined and rode around in expensive cars with Goering, Himmler, and other Nazi bigwigs. According to Max, Patrick decided he didn’t like the Nazis and immigrated to America where, like Max, he joined the navy and found himself interned at the Portsmouth naval base.

Max stated that Patrick, who looked like the perfect Aryan, was as nice a guy as you could ever meet. Patrick wanted to change his name but the navy wouldn’t let him, in case they wanted to use him for propaganda purposes. After the war, Patrick finally did change his last name, became an American citizen, and opened a small business on Long Island. You can research him on the Internet.

Postscript:
Max became ill and died a few years after our first meeting. Having no living family, he willed his country house and his luxury apartment in mid-Manhattan (with a garage!) to my family. My son lives in that apartment today. Amazing things can result from digging a stranger out of a ditch on a snowy evening!

©Eugene William Levich, 2019
WORD COUNT: 699
Dr. Eugene Levich, Ph.D.
7857 Lexington Club Blvd.
Apt. D
Delray Beach, FL 33446
561.499.3247
eugenelevich@yahoo.com

(This story was published in Connotation Magazine, Issue II, Volume X, November, 2018)
www.connotationpress.com

On my seventeenth birthday I found myself broke and close to starving. I had lost so much weight I needed suspenders to hold up my trousers; my waistline should have been taken in eight inches but I didn’t have money for a tailor. In a down market Paris haberdashery I learned that the French word for suspenders was not “suspendres,” as I had imagined, but bretelles. Wearing them, I looked and felt ridiculous, like one of those clowns in the circus who wears a suspender-supported beer barrel.

Usually I, or one of my three pals—two other Americans and an Arab—had enough money for us to eat. In desperate straits, we shared whatever money we had. We all lived at the Cité Universitaire, that wonderful campus housing students from all over the world. Ray, R. F., and I lived at La Fondation des États-Unis ; Djamel at the La Maison Algérienne.

Some days my lycée classmate from California, Ray, and I didn’t even have enough money to buy Métro tickets to school. We would wait outside the Porte d’Orléans station, looking for people coming out who looked like newcomers to Paris. These people often didn’t know that some of their tickets were good for round-trips and dropped the still usable tickets on the ground. We would pick them up and go to school. Sometimes, our wait was in vain, and we had to skip class that day.

I survived in the following way. Immediately after waking in the morning, I went down to a bar on Boulevard Jourdan and ordered a glass of Alsatian beer –une bière d’Alsace, s’il vous plâit, pas de mousse! No head on top! I needed every last drop of beer I had paid for. The beer dulled my appetite for many hours. What fended off total starvation was my university meal ticket; it provided me with one solid meal a day, lunch or dinner, often horsemeat, and a small box of wine.

The initials of our other American pal’s name were R. F. I can’t even remember his real name because everyone at first called him “République Française.” Later, this elegant moniker somehow morphed into “Rat Fucker.” I don’t know why this happened. He was a very likeable guy. I called him simply R. F.

R. F. was studying to be a mime; he was very good at it. His teacher was Marcel Marceau. One morning after having my glass of beer, I spied R. F. walking toward me down Boulevard Jourdan. I went into a crouch in order to look like a monster, something like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. My right hand was extended out, palm up, fingers bent, looking like a claw. R. F., seeing me, also mimed a monster, with his right hand extended out, his claw-like palm facing downwards. He was much more convincing than I. A Paris city bus filled with people headed to work was stopped at a red light next to the curb. When R. F. and I met, growling, our faces contorted, and shook “claws,” the onlookers in the bus cracked up laughing. I think we made their day. One day I asked our Algerian pal, Djamel, what he intended to do after his graduation from the Sorbonne. “Kick the French out of my country,” he answered. “Don’t you like the French?” I asked, being a devout Francophile. “Yes, I like them very much. I just don’t want my country to be ruled by them,” he concluded. I won’t say anything about California Ray’s odyssey because that would require a long story all by itself.

At an emergency meeting of the four hungry pals, we learned for the first time that R. F. was an accomplished jazz pianist, in addition to his skill as a mime. We decided to find a job for him in a night club, so he could earn us some money. We pooled our resources and found we still had just enough for two Métro tickets to Place Pigalle, the most likely place to find night clubs. But, besides R. F., which of the other three pals would accompany him? Djamel said he wanted to meet a girl that evening he had picked up at the Maison Franco-Britannique, the U. K. house on the Cité Universitaire campus. He asked to borrow my black shoes because he wanted to look sharp, and I agreed. That left only Ray and me; we flipped a coin and I won. I took Djamel up to my room to get him the shoes, and then sat down with a French-English dictionary to learn the most likely vocabulary needed to find a piano-playing job in a night club.

That evening, R. F. and I took the Métro to Place Pigalle. Once there, we were somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed. I saw a whore standing under a lamp light near a street corner and, with no better ideas at the moment, decided to ask her for information. As a walked up to her she spoke first: “Voulez-vous faire l’amour avec moi?” This much French I understood.

“Yes, I would, mademoiselle, but malheureusement [unhappily] I’m a poor student and have no money. We’re hungry. Do you know of a boîte where my friend could find a job playing jazz piano? She looked around and said, with a bright smile, “Venez avec moi.”

She was petite, pretty, with a good figure, and glossy, shoulder length black hair. She didn’t look at all like what I imagined a whore would look like. Probably in her early twenties, she spoke softly and well. Her facial skin appeared to be fresh and clean. She wore little make up. There was nothing flashy about her. Her skirt and blouse were simple and neat; her shoes were high heels, but not exaggerated. She carried a matching leather purse strapped over her shoulder. All in all, if one didn’t know she was a street prostitute, she would have seemed like a girl one would be quite happy to bring home to meet one’s mother. “What’s a nice girl like you . . . ,” I wondered.

She led us into one night club where she spoke rapidly to a young woman sitting at the bar. No luck there. She then led us to another boîte and explained our situation to still another bar girl. The prostitute who had taken us under her wing told us that this bar girl knew of a place, near the elegant Champs-Elysées no less, where R. F. might play piano. She then shook hands with us formally in the French manner, wished us luck, and walked back to her post on the street corner where we had first seen her.

R. F. and I, however, had only enough money for one Métro ticket to the Champs-Elysées. The bar girl, really a higher class prostitute, I think, paid for her own tickets back and forth, and later even for R. F.’s return ticket to the Cité Universitaire. I remained at Pigalle, penniless, without a Métro ticket and so was forced to walk from there back to the Cité. It took me all night. I crossed one of the Seine bridges at about three A. M. and arrived at the Cité at six. One thing I loved about Paris was that people felt safe, even at three A. M. on a deserted street. I passed a young woman, perhaps in her thirties, walking in the opposite direction on an otherwise totally dark and empty street. I said “Bon soir, madam,” and she smiled politely and answered “Bon soir, monsieur,” without a hint of fear.

The bar girl did indeed find a job for R. F. playing piano in a boîte just off the Place de la République. His job kept us in food for a couple of weeks, and then I received some money from home. We didn’t need R. F.’s job anymore and he quit. The boîte was a gay bar and R. F. didn’t like being constantly hit on. We remarked on how extraordinarily kind those prostitutes and bar girls had been, and how especially lovely had been the first one on the street corner.

I am almost certain I saw her once again, several weeks later. I was looking out a train window at the Denfert-Rochereau Métro station and saw her walking by, I think, for a split second. The train was moving and, while I feel certain it was she, cannot absolutely swear that it was. The woman I saw looked shockingly ill. Her face was ghastly white with a terribly drawn and frantic expression. Her beautiful hair looked lank and unwashed. I was shocked. I thought she looked as if she had just been beaten or diagnosed with some fatal disease. I flew home to New York the next day.

I felt then, and still feel today, an irrational sense of guilt, and of loss, when I think of that woman. I don’t believe I could have helped her—yet it disturbs me for some inexplicable reason that I didn’t try.

© Eugene William Levich, 2017

WORD COUNT: 1525

Dr. Eugene Levich, Ph.D.
7857 Lexington Club Blvd.
Apt. D
Delray Beach, FL 33446
561.499.3247
eugenelevich@yahoo.com