that I made certain they never received, and frequently punished for what my teachers called poor deportment. They were feeble punishments, cloakroom detention and half-hearted paddlings, that only made me the more defiant. When my teachers, nervous women despite formidable busts and behinds, complained that my behavior was a waste of a good mind, I got even with them by refusing to learn anything at all. There were also girls in my school, some of them pink and comely, but for reasons I never examined I begrudged them their prettiness, as if they’d cultivated their attractions only to taunt me with. Often I was truant, trolling the uptown streets in search of an unpredictability that always eluded me in my own neighborhood. Then sometime during the summer of my sixteenth year, my papa, ostensibly to keep me out of trouble, invited me to come work in his ice house on Canal.
As the first facility in the city to manufacture industrial ice, Karp’s Ice Castle (no longer New) had once been the pride of the ghetto. But competing houses had since sprung up like mushrooms all over town, while the advent of the refrigerator (five dollars down and ten a month) had diminished their need to exist at all. For a while Karp’s had tried supplementing the sale of ice with a sideline of frozen custards, the proprietor himself having custom-built for that purpose a servo-motorized ice cream – making machine. But Karp’s Frozen Delight, sold in swirls to look like the Statue of Liberty’s torch, could never compete with the near monopoly of Good Humor wagons circulating throughout the city. Still, many families remained dependent on their outdated ice boxes, and though the fleet had been reduced in favor of expanding the storage capacity of the warehouse, Karp’s delivery vans endured as a staple of the East Side’s congested streets. Thus, while Papa’s business had to struggle to maintain its standing in the industry, it remained a going concern that continued to keep the wolf from the door. Not that it concerned me a whit whether the business succeeded or failed, nor was I especially eager to enter my papa’s employ, but I leapt at the chance to smirch myself with something akin to real life.
The old Tenth Ward, as I came to understand, had changed since my parents’ greenhorn days. For one thing, the rag trade, grown ever more prosperous, had moved steadily uptown so that the sweatshops were no longer as prevalent in the area. Many of the original immigrants, having unshackled themselves from pushcarts and sewing machines, became shop clerks, office hacks, bookkeepers, and the like, while those who stayed in the factories also saw improved conditions owing to the ascendency of the trade unions. Their children were moving out of the ghetto altogether—across the river to Williamsburg, uptown to Harlem and the Bronx—and since the government had had its fill of foreigners and put the kibosh on immigration, the old neighborhood enjoyed a bit more breathing room. I don’t mean to suggest that the Lower East Side had become a hospitable place; there was still plenty of squalor and disease to go around, and Prohibition had incited everyone, Jews included, to get drunk. But until Naf the Sport’s lieutenants waltzed into the icehouse to lean on my father, I had supposed that the underworld existed only in films, and it cheered me to discover that Jews could be ruthless as well.
Since the Castle’s inception Papa’s foremen had all been steadfast union men, beginning with old Elihu Levine (deceased) who’d inaugurated the tradition of resisting the arm-twisting of the local syndicate. This was a dicey position to take. But the heyday of the ice plant had coincided with a time when Yoshke Nigger, the ghetto’s chief goon, had withdrawn his energies from the standard extortion rackets to place them squarely in the service of Tammany Hall. Then along came the Volstead Act and Tammany be damned: Peddling hooch was now the order of the day. Yoshke’s successor, Naf the Sport, né Naftali Kupferman, however, was a more ambitious breed of felon with a penchant for diversifying. After his mentor’s unnatural death (via cement galoshes), he decided to reactivate old accounts, sending his gorillas to collect tributes from the businesses that Yoshke had exploited in the past. Meanwhile Karp’s Ice Castle still refused to cave in to mob intimidation, while Karp himself, absorbed in his latest pipe dream, paid no attention whatever to the renewed demands for protection