Dreams Bigger Than the Night Read Online Free

fruits and vegetables, bread, clothing, and paper goods, all at bargain prices. The busiest block, Jay’s, housed Kaplan’s Delicatessen, with its dull white, hexagonal tile floor. It served fat corned beef sandwiches and pickles to patrons seated on wire chairs at rectangular tables with bowls of cube sugar for the tea drinkers. A few doors away stood Moishe Hupert’s Fish Market, with “Moishe Fisher” painted on the double-glass windows. Inside, a large sheetmetal tank contained live fish—pike, carp, and perch for gefilte fish—which Mr. Hupert, as the housewives pointed into the tank, netted, killed on a butcher block with a single blow from a wooden club, scaled, and cleaned.
    Telling his father that he had found a job for twenty dollars a week—five more than his father paid—he quit the family business. Asked for details, he prevaricated, saying he was hired by a vending machine company—and passed along the phone number. He mentioned no names.
    “Jay,” his father sighed, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
    “Does anyone—really?” Jay asked defensively.
    His father reflected for a moment and kindly answered, “I guess not. To know is to know something, but what? That’s the mystery. Good luck with it.”
    Late one afternoon, Jay ducked into Kaplan’s Delicatessen for a chopped liver on pumpernickel, heard the clack-clack of checkers, and saw at one of the rectangular tables a group of the synagogue faithful with their yarmulkes. On the white tile top rested a board with black and red pieces. A fire-engine-red alarm clock stood on the table set for fifteen seconds. Rabbi Silverman, wearing a fedora, and a well-known Negro, sporting a derby, hunched over a game of lightning-fast checkers. A lot of the schvarzes played, also Eastern Europeans. After a day of trying to grind out a living or looking for work, the men in the Third Ward migrated to Kaplan’s. When the deli closed, players continued the game on the sidewalk, even in the rain. Standing behind a Polish tailor sucking on a sugar cube, he stood with the kibitzers watching the colored fellow, who spoke perfect Yiddish and called himself “T,” short for “T-Bone Searle,” rag the rabbi. “ Es vet dir gornisht helfen .”
    “T, I always tell my parishioners that win or lose if they play checkers, their wives have nothing to worry about, because they’re not drinking, gambling, or running around with women.”
    “Yeah, but checkers can’t do for them what their wives can.”
    The kibitzers chortled, as Silverman lost track of the clock and forfeited his turn.
    T-Bone, in his mid-thirties, had arms forged in brawny labor, having wielded a shovel for one of the government projects. The rabbi got beat badly. Jay waited until the next player likewise took a shellacking, which gave him just enough time to finish his sandwich and offer T-Bone a challenge. The two stacked up pretty evenly. Toward the end of the game, Jay ran off a sequence of captures but neglected to take the last piece and had to retract his moves, allowing his opponent to win.
    “You’re leavin’, Jay bird? If you want lessons . . .” T-Bone laughed.
    “I have an office just down the street. Why not meet me there for lunch tomorrow, if you’re working in the neighborhood.” Having bent a wire hanger into the shape of a miniature basketball rim and taped it to the wall, he added, “We can shoot buckets with a stuffed sock.”
    T-Bone showed up the next day, carrying two Negro newspapers, the New York Age and the New York Amsterdam News , which were featuring stories about whether or not colored athletes should boycott the 1936 Olympics to be held in Berlin. Naturally, most Jews opposed participation because it would serve as a showcase for Nazism, a subject and problem that all of America seemed to be talking about.
    “Shall we have a friendly game?” Jay asked, pointing to the board.
    Until his work project ended several weeks later, T-Bone never missed a