Red Love by David Evanier Page A

dark and handsome, which Sid couldn’t help admiring, and had a lock of hair that kept falling over his forehead. “Sid Sid Sid Sid!” (Imagine, hearing his name said over and over again.) “Sid-Sid-Sidney,” said Alexei, gazing at Sid fondly, licking a vodka martini, “I don’t expect our boys to be social butterflies, but this is ridiculous. What can we do with you? You’re so pale. You don’t play cards, you have no girl. You think we don’t care about these things?”
    Sid sat, his head down, eating it up. Come on, Alexei, you guys don’t care that much. Blood came to Sid’s face. To have such friends—and to help the USSR at the same time, the only country where anti-Semitism was a crime against the state. Anything that strengthened the USSR would help to save the Jews.
    Tears came to Sid’s eyes when Alexei told him that Stalin had struggled to learn Yiddish, that he davenned when he prayed. This was no normal leader.
    The Jew thing, who could ignore it? Sid had gone to the library every day as a boy, walking the two miles. The Neckers festered near the city dump amid mosquitoes, raising hogs. They were kids who lived in the marshy wasteland of Stonehouse Lane and did lightning forays on Sid’s neighborhood, throwing bricks and smashing windows. When he was fifteen, they beat him. Blood dripping down his face, he watched the legs of his friends skitter away into the bushes.
    Sid’s father, one of the only Jews at the factory, was baited by the other workers. They stole his chisels; they put glue on his good clothes. Yus Smorg struck a man who grinned and ran together the words “Hi Jew?” and almost lost his job because the man had a weak heart and fainted.
    Yus Smorg’s foreman told him, “I’m going to make you quit.” He moved him to a quicksilver production line where Yus was the only worker hand-sanding cabinets. He came home at night with the skin rubbed off his fingertips. Sid’s mother would bathe Yus’s fingers and put ointment on them. Sid’s father went back to work the next morning without a word of complaint.
    Sid graduated from the university in 1932 and went to work as a laboratory worker at the Richmond Sugar Company. He was now a main support of his family.
    One week before Christmas, he was laid off. He searched frantically for a job, walking in a perspiring heat in snow and slush against tides of smiling, happy employed workers with tinsel on their faces, bearing green, gold, and red Christmas boxes with silver bells to their families as carols tinkled from storefronts. This was capitalism. As he approached a factory gate, a bundled laborer walked toward him and asked what he wanted. When Sid told him, the man snarled, “Better go back, boy. Enough people out of work here.”
    One night a old co-worker of his, Fred Stone, came with the news that a former classmate of Fred’s, Pete Boston, was leaving his job at the Terrill Manufacturing Company in Jersey City and might be able to put Sid in his place. A week later a telegram arrived: Sid was told to come to Jersey City that night to see Pete Boston. He anxiously packed a brown cardboard suitcase, borrowed six dollars and a jacket that closely matched his pants, and took a Greyhound to Jersey City. Boston was waiting for Sid in front of his house. Pete Boston’s biceps could make a man blush. Plus a huge, friendly, freckled face, pug nose, the grin, the feel of the bearlike grip of his hand.
    They sat up until morning talking. Boston briefed Sid on soap chemistry. Then there were “complicating circumstances.” The boss, Roger Whitman, would never hire a Jew. Sid would have to say that, despite his name, he was really not Jewish. His grandfather had converted and married a Christian girl.
    Then Boston got down to brass tacks. He told Sid he was a Communist Party member, and that he had purposely selected Sid because Fred had told him that Sid was a Socialist. Pete said, “We figure that when you really know the score