“What You See” by Susan Daitch, page 2
Leonard Jerome Lazarus was born in Brooklyn to Berel and Rose Lazarus in 1939. His father was worked as a printer for a Yiddish language daily, Der Ovent Shteren (The Evening Star) which Rose, impatient with the paper's hard line Communism, called Der Ovent Schlemiel (The Evening Fool). It was eventually eclipsed by other papers particularly Freiheit, its main competitor, and as speakers of the language dwindled following World War II, Berel Lazarus eventually found himself out of work. As Berel never learned English adequately he was doomed to a series of jobs which he considered beneath him: janitor, waiter, clerk in a store which sold religious articles; a trial for an adamantly secular man. He didn't last long at any of them. Creditors began to bang at the door, and the dominant memory of Lenny's high school years was being told not to answer the door or the telephone. They changed apartments many times, usually in the middle of the night in order to avoid landlords. His mother kept track of their debts, adding columns of numbers on a chipped formica table, but even she didn't know the half of it. The debts and language difficulties all contributed to Berel and Rose's feeling that they never belonged in this country. They never went to restaurants or the movies. They considered Yiddish film and theater to be frivolous and sentimental, but these biases were only part of the walls they were busy constructing around themselves while they lived in actual danger of becoming wall-less. The parents relied on their children to act as their connections to the city. Lenny, whose verbal ability was recognized at an early age, was a particularly nimble voicebox. "My father's not here," he would say from behind a locked door. "Come back on Friday. He gets paid on Friday." By Friday the family would be long gone.
It was from his father Lenny acquired his interest in conspiracy theories. He described an early memory of his father reading the paper and whether the subject was the eager beaver Senator Joseph McCarthy finding Communists among script writers and boyscouts, the conviction of the Rosenbergs, or the Alger Hiss/Whittaker Chambers trial, he would shake his head, and say, "It's a racket. It's a racket." Berel had a way of finding connections between very strange bedfellows that once in awhile turned out not to be so strange after all: the President of Ford Motor Company and the bankruptcy of small oil companies in Brazil, the Pope and Swiss banks, Swiss banks and anybody. Whether he was sitting in a wing chair Lenny's brother found in the street, or standing in the hall waiting to use the bathroom, Berel would wave his papers and shout at the molding. From the kitchen his mother, attempting to join the conversation without really following it would only add, "That way they can charge more."
Berel was as hungry for information as a starving rat. Truman, Eisenhower, Adenauer, and De Gaulle were all marched out, characters in a livingroom (when they had one) or kitchen drama that was repeated nightly. The overriding theme was the stupidity of those minding the shop whether the shop was located on Capital Hill or Flatbush Avenue. They took their hothouse of complaints from apartment to apartment, but discussions at home were global in scope or nearly so. This view would stay with Lenny all his life, and it is the subtext of What You See. When the papers Berel could read dwindled in number, and he didn't trust radio or TV, he would shout at his son, "Tell me Lenny, what's going on with that shmendrick, Nixon?"
Berel and Rose continued to look at Brooklyn with anger and distrust. It never looked up to ill defined expectation, although they didn't want to go back to Russia either. American food was limp, bland, abysmal, smacked of dilution and cost far too much. Nothing gave them pleasure, and Lenny grew irritated with them, devising ways to spend more and more time out of the house.
A university education was considered out of the question for any of the Lazarus children. Only Lenny's beloved but remote older sister, Ruthie, got a scholarship to Pembroke College and disappeared into Rhode Island, rarely to be heard from again. His older brother used heroin to treat his depression and faded into the Lower East Side. Lenny would use the vanished Ruthie as a model for Stella, the narrator of What You See, and his brother makes an appearance in the character of Pip Karadurian.
In 1960, after a stint working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Lenny joined the Merchant Marine which he quickly grew to hate. His fellow sailors thought Jews had horns and when the harassment grew unbearable he jumped ship in Marseilles, and it was there Lenny became the writer we now recognize. Unlike his parents Lenny had an uncanny ability to learn new languages, and he was also a terrific mimic. This may have sprung from growing up in a house where Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and Polish were spoken by his family as well as by the neighbors and relatives who were never too far away. (Especially after the war, such relatives who lived in the city moved closer together and often housed the Lazarus family when they were between apartments and rent was not something Berel could manage.) It is said that the comedian Sid Caesar used to go from table to table in his father's New York restaurant speaking a nonsensical imitation of Italian, Russian, Greek or whatever language was being spoken much to the amusement of the patrons at that particular table. Lenny possessed that same ability.
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