For years I didn’t know who the dispossessed were. We didn’t go to school with them or live with them or even run into them on the street, and they certainly weren’t among Pop’s patients. I always felt a little different from the rest of the family. Sometimes I thought it was because I was the youngest of the three brothers. Sometimes I even thought it was because Manny and I were the only ones born in America. That seems a little silly because Eddie was only two when he came to the United States, but you never know.
Certainly we were never brought up as anything but Americans. Pop wouldn’t let Russian be spoken in the house; he did everything he could to get rid of the faint accent in his speech, as much a matter of speech rhythms as it was of anything else. We didn’t live in a world of samovars and blintzes, borscht, blackbread, and cabbage soup. Pop had turned his back on the Russian church and on everything else Russian, except its politics and those earth-shaking events that had been reshaping the entire world.
Pop got the money to pay for his medical education not only by working in the drugstore. When he started his medical practice he also began putting money into the business, became a partner, and after a while effectively took over, though his old boss ran the operation. They began acquiring drugstores all over the city—I suppose Faust & Hammer was one of the first drug chains in the country—and as Manny explained it to me later, that made a considerable amount of sense. In those days drugstores were still drugstores—pharmacies, apothecary shops, whatever you want to call them—and you made your money on the drugs you dispensed, not on all the other goods you supply these days, from candy to condoms to combs. If you ran a dozen stores rather than one, you could get volume discounts and pass the savings on to your customers, which gave you a competitive edge, or keep them for yourself, which gave you a financial edge. Sometimes you did one thing, sometimes you did the other. But, again, none of this much interested me. By the time we came back to live with Pop in the Bronx he had sold the drugstore chain for a lot of money, and was devoting himself to his practice in the Bronx and to advancing the aims of international socialism.
It may seem a strange thing to say about one of the founders of the American Communist party, but I think it was from Pop that Manny inherited his business ability. Years later when he became the head of Pacific Petroleum, one of the giants of the American oil industry, people used to wonder how somebody who had come out of a socialist family—he had managed to blur the communist affiliation—somebody who had spent all those years in the Soviet Union and ever after seemed to advance its interests—could have developed the skills of a horsetrader, a snakeoil salesman, and a petty capitalist tool. In my more cynical moments I would whisper to myself that you used the same skills no matter which side of the street you walked—you had no scruples about anything, you put the end before the means, you lied, you stole, you cheated, and all that mattered was what you wanted to achieve—money and power, which as Mama Eva used to explain in later years were really the same thing.
In those years, Pop always appeared to people as a model of ethical conduct. He always seemed ready to sacrifice everything on behalf of his idealistic commitment. And maybe he did. But I never believed that he actually sacrificed as much as some people thought.
When he sold the drug chain, he didn’t put all the proceeds at the disposition of the party, whatever he claimed. Sure, he bought them the party headquarters on 13th street, bankrolled their programs and propaganda efforts, and even bailed them out when they wound up in jail. But if I’m right, he gave the party only a fraction of his resources, enough to make it seem that he was one of the movement’s great benefactors. You don’t grow up as poor and embittered as he was and give it all away when it comes to you.
What I am sure of is he did keep enough back to buy an interest in one of the wholesale drug distributors that supplied the drug stores. I didn’t know about any of this until later, when Manny began making a lot of noise about how he had made the family’s first million, but Pop must have done nearly as well. However much he amassed, there was always plenty of money for anything we wanted to do, and Pop had no qualms about sharing it with us. He saw to it we had the best of everything. Pop had it himself. He was always carefully turned out. His Vandyke beard was beautifully cut, his doctor’s black coat and overcoat sleek and beautifully tailored.
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