Free East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's by Sidney Weissman Page B

their clamor a scrambled din rising up into the air.
    Up ahead, at the head of the mob, people were pressed against the doors of the closed bank, banging on the doors with clenched fists, shouting, yelling, screaming, demanding their money.
    “Ganovim! Ganovim! Thieves! Thieves!” Benny’s wife shouted out from beside him. “Give us our gelt, our money back!”
    Other frantic people had formed behind Benny and his wife and from somewhere in back of them a woman cried out, “What shall I do? It’s all I have, everything!”
    The policemen pressed, shoved the crowd back “ Cossackin! Cossackin! Cossacks! Cossacks!” people roared out. “Why are you doing this? What have we done? It’s our money, give us back our money!”
    The police pushed against the shouting people, the cries of the crowd unheard, unheeded, lost in the wind.
    “Go home!” someone up front shouted. From where Benny and his wife stood it seemed like a voice emanated from the visored blue cap of a policeman standing somewhere at the fringe of the crowd. “Go home,” it said with authority. “The bank is closed.”
    “How can we go home?” someone shouted out furiously. “When they won’t give us our money? What will happen to us?”
    “Go home!” the authority voice said.
    Benny looked around him. Not too far away stood a man, a stone man unmoving, ashen, mute, only the trickle of a large tear running slowly down each side of his face.
    Someone in front of Benny said, “They say we will hear from the bank.”
    Benny, his face white and gaunt, looked at his wife. Tears streamed down her face, she stared at him, shaking her head in complete bewilderment. Her mouth opened to say something, no words came out.
    “Two hundred and seventeen dollars,” Benny said in a whisper. “Alles, All. And now, nothing.”
    He tried to control himself, he felt as if he would burst out into tears but he must not allow himself to do it, not even like that stone man he had just seen. He, Benny, was the man of the house, the man didn’t cry, it was not allowed, never. Yet he felt he was crying, deep down inside he was crying.
    At last he said to his wife, “The rigeering, the bank was from the rigeering.”
    “No, no,” a man near him said in an English almost without accent. “It was just a bank. Private.”
    “No, no,” Benny said shaking his head vehemently. He felt beaten, lost, alone. “It can’t be. It’s a national bank, the building is so big, it’s like a palace. It’s the rigeering I tell you. Why would they have a name like that if it wasn’t?” he said to nobody and to everybody, to anybody who would listen and help him. He found himself suddenly crying, and he shook his head like a wounded animal, the tears flooding down.

 THE ORDEAL OF MR. COOLIDGE
    Early spring, those spring fever days, were crazy days. Your body wakes up from the cold bitter winter. It wants to move, to jump, to kick out. Your mind becomes unfrozen, you want to sing, strange ideas race through you like roaring locomotives, speeding here, there, everywhere.
    Nothing seems the same, not even at the all-boys junior high school on the Lower East Side that I attended, not even what went on in its playground, its classrooms. Even the Depression takes on a somewhat different tinge, maybe now, soon, something good would happen and the bad days would be gone. Just a bad dream.
    That sunny spring day, for some strange reason, all of us, the students, had congregated early in the outdoor playground. We had begun our handball games, a few-minor fights, mostly pushing and shoving matches, had broken out among some of the rougher boys, while many of the other boys, influenced by the new-born bright sun just stood silently, waiting for something unknown, something good to happen.
    I was playing handball with Goldie and Max and Joey DeSimone. The four of us were good students, good friends. We studied together for the mid-term and final exams and especially for the most