Nebbish is the Yiddish word for dork. But in some families it doubles as a pet name for a beloved ne’er-do-well. That was my Uncle Jerry.
As one fellow who married into the family described his introduction to our tribe’s notables: “Meet Uncle Ike. Has three pawn shops. His son runs a race track, for the mob. Mrs. Mass. She’s the pastry chef at Joe Stein’s Romanian Restaurant. Bob David is in advertising. Designs tchotchkes, like key rings, for a car dealership.
“And then, there’s Uncle Jerry.”
His resume was far too long to recite. He’d landed and lost umpteen jobs. As he knew the tricks of the gambit, an unemployment-benefits office hired him to spot applicants who weren’t looking for work, as required for getting a check. He lost that gig, too.
But he was worth the world to me. Uncle Jerry showed me the miracle of books, good books. The kind that can give a reader a whole new take on life.
My father was also a reader. He’d go through what he proudly called “trashy novels” — one a day. He took pains not to be known for having cultivated tastes.
Once he took me with him on a visit to an Old Town art gallery. It had exposed brick walls and a proprietor who approached customers with the precise movements of ballet dancer.
“I’m looking for a painting to hang over the couch,” my father said. “Something to pick up on the silver thread of the slip covers.”
Uncle Jerry, though, believed in the finer things in life and thought everyone should have an equal shot at them. He was an apostle of George Bernard Shaw, the celebrated British dramatist and advocate of socialism.
Shaw’s prophecy was light years distant from Uncle Jerry’s reality. His mother was my maternal grandfather’s second wife, and he was raised by my grandfather’s third wife, Rosie, in a tenement in Lawndale. They shared a bathroom, locking another family out when using it and vice-versa.
I never saw my grandfather when he wasn’t behind a sewing machine installed on the kitchen table. For a piecework tailor, knocking off at dinner time was unaffordable.
Jerry was short and a bit hunchbacked. But a bookish male, shy around girls, could find a social life in the Jewish People’s Institute at 3500 W. Douglas Blvd. Jerry had bit parts in plays staged by its theater group. He met another bookish young man who was studying accounting and spoke the lingo of the ambitious.
A believer in the power of words, Jerry intuitively sensed he could put his life together by mimicking his friend’s phrases.
The shoes Uncle Jerry wore to compensate for his height became “lifts,” a coinage of Hollywood columnists for a cheat employed by short movie stars like Alan Ladd.
“I hope it’s not a snow job,” Jerry said of a tip on an employment opportunity he hoped was genuine. That drove my father to distraction: “What is this snow he’s always muttering about?”
His bookish friend got married and moved on, but the loss was mitigated by a young lady showing an interest in Jerry.
That panicked Rosie. My grandfather had died, and the thought of losing Jerry’s companionship prompted a propaganda campaign.
“You’re going to marry her?” Rosie thundered. “She won’t know how to cook for you!”
Actually, the only thing Rosie ever served was stringy chicken.
My mother also boiled chicken because that yielded two meals: the boiling water became soup. Putting the carcass under a broiler with a swab of ketchup produced a palatable facsimile of barbecued chicken.
Jerry heeded Rosie’s counsel and forfeited his chance of marrying and having children. Black residents were replacing Jews in Lawndale. The JPI became a public school. Years later its students, fascinated by the Star of David and other Jewish icons that were part of the building’s architecture, mounted an exhibition of their community’s Jewish origins.
Some Jews moved to the suburbs, but Jerry and Rosie couldn’t afford a home there. For the life of me, I couldn’t say how they paid the rent even in nondescript neighborhoods. When she died, he would have been alone, except that my brother and I had gone off to college. That left a bed open, and my parents took Jerry in. It proved to be an unanticipated burden. My mom and dad were still employed part-time. Jerry had never been alone. The minute his hosts came through the front door, he demanded attention.
They wanted to put their feet up and relax. So they rented a room for him at a YMCA. That triggered a nervous breakdown.
The JPI theater had some long-ago connection to a communist organization. Jerry was convinced that some Leftist literature was missing from his YMCA room. That meant the FBI was on to him.
Befuddled, my parents asked me to talk to Jerry. I got the same story. On any other subject he was lucid. But the paranoia of the missing papers was impenetrable.
He couldn’t remain at the “Y” or return to my parents’ apartment.
A psychiatrist admitted Jerry to Dunning, a sprawling mental hospital on the far Northwest Side. Visiting him, I’d ask: “How are you doing, Uncle Jerry?”
“Just trying to get better,” he’d reply.
He was transferred to a halfway house in Uptown. The theory was that a smaller facility was more humane. The reality was it was a shabby apartment the proprietor couldn’t rent.
Uncle Jerry received no attention, let alone treatment. I found it so depressing that I’d take him for rides. “How you doing?”
“Just trying to get better.”
Finally he realized that wasn’t going to happen. He stopped eating, and died.
A few family members gathered at his newly dug grave. His friend from the JPI showed up. A rabbi who never met Jerry recited the Hebrew prayers for the dead. Then said: “His was a wasted life.” Was that supposed to console us?
I got there just in time, having flown in from the University of Nebraska. I was livid. My fists were clenched.
“You don’t know the first thing about him,” I told the rabbi.
“I’m a professor because Uncle Jerry showed me the power of books. So keep quiet!”
