To answer in english—a Heroic decision

He is now in the Dominican Republic. He has no passport … it is very much to our interest that he come to New York … The question is, can we do anything to help things along. The voyage took eight hot and fretful days because the ship was delayed for three in Puerto Rico. When it finally docked at a small port on the north coast of the Dominican Republic, no explanation was given for why they were not going to Ciudad Trujillo, as planned, and everyone was ordered off. Steinberg discovered that Spanish was an easy language to learn for one who knew Italian, and he was able to speak enough to hire a car that drove him to the capital city through the inferno of midsummer heat. He arrived on July 13 and immediately became aware of how bribery and corruption fueled the government of the megalomaniac dictator, General Rafael Trujillo, who had even renamed the venerable city of Santo Domingo after himself. Steinberg was struck by the kaleidoscopic profusion of color in the local landscape, the abundance of tropical foods, and the bustle and fervor of the people who crowded the streets. But the strongest impression for a European coming from a colder clime was the intense and suffocating heat, and within days he was sick.

He spent most of his first month in bed under a canopy of heavy netting, felled by malaria and trying to fend off voracious mosquitoes with a variety of the medicines and spray guns of Flit insect repellent his cousins had provided. He was in a pleasant enough hotel room, paid for by Cesar Civita, who sent fifty dollars every month as an advance against future earnings, and he still had a little left from the funds his friends had contributed before he left Italy, supplemented by what his uncle and cousins had given before he left New York. He drew his room in a letter to Henrietta Danson, complete with an arrow pointing to the green lizard on the floor beside his bed, which ate all the flies, roaches, and gnats who tried to invade it. “I shall try to answer in English—is an heroic decision,” he told her in his still imperfect command of the language, and he followed the declaration with an arrow pointing to a squib of his sweating self sitting at a desk with a large dictionary open in front of him. By October he had still not recovered from the malaria, but he tried to work, even though it was “impossible to be very well” in such a dreadful climate.

Cesar Civita had arranged for him to draw daily comic strips for Dominican newspapers, which he did because the pay was decent, even though none of them engaged his interest. He told Henrietta Danson that he had generated more good ideas for cartoons in a single afternoon in Milan than he did in an entire month in Santo Domingo. Otherwise, daily life was dull and he did little. He managed a daily ocean swim but was too lethargic to practice English; he thought the Dominican people “much primitive” and socialized only with other Romanian refugees, befriending an architect from Bucharest, Paul Rossin, and his wife, Tina, and brother, Pierre. He went to their home for meals or to pass evenings with them and other Romanian refugees, particularly a family named Godesteanu. They all knew each other from Bucharest, and talked frequently of Leventer, who had returned home hoping to work as an architect, and the peripatetic Perlmutter, who was rumored to be in Hollywood but was actually in Algiers. All the reminiscences overwhelmed Steinberg with a sense of what he had lost, as they brought back memories of other Romanian friends and summer outings in the countryside.

By the end of his first month in Santo Domingo, he realized that he was getting a lot of good news, all coming steadily from the Civitas’ New York office. Gertrude Einstein, the woman who ran their office with the utmost efficiency, told Steinberg that Cesar had sold some drawings to various American publications, but the real excitement came when The New Yorker bought one and wanted more and Mademoiselle bought “four or five” for a double page in the Christmas issue and wanted another double-page spread for Valentine’s Day. He told his Danson cousins (still in imperfect English) that he knew of “the very goods English like Punch and Humorist, but I think The New Yorker is the top. Is very flattery for me.” Then The New Yorker asked for more drawings, and suddenly he had so many commissions that even doing work he loved became almost more than he could handle.

He thought his malaria was cured, but by mid-October he was ill again and described himself as looking “like a x‑ray picture full with quinine, fever, etc.” He was in bed during another heat wave, which lasted through November and made him even more “ill and furious.” He had been in Santo Domingo for four months, and for more than two he had been bedridden and often unable to work. That was his chief frustration, but there was a long litany of others, starting with parcels of clothing the Steinbergs and Dansons sent from New York. Customs officials expected bribes, so they refused to give him a package containing trousers and shoes valued at $25 until he paid an unofficial “tax” of $19. Since he was against it in principle and short of money besides, he asked a Dominican acquaintance who knew the customs officials to offer a smaller bribe, which was successful.

NO MATTER HOW SICK, TIRED, OR DEPRESSED Steinberg was, he always forced himself to write relentlessly cheerful letters to his parents, even to the point of stretching the truth by exaggerating how much money he was making and how, if his good fortune continued, he would be able to bring them “over here soon.” Hoping to placate Rosa, he adopted his Aunt Mina’s flowery style of letter writing and used her religious exhortations to preface almost every statement. His letters were full of expressions asking for God’s help or hoping that God would bless his various undertakings. The only unvarnished truth he told was to describe how his good fortune in escaping from Italy had made him so aware of his Jewish heritage that he fasted on Yom Kippur, not only for himself but also to honor his parents. And yet no matter what he wrote, it was not enough to calm his mother, who was convinced that her twenty-seven-year-old son was dejected and depressed and his spirits would rise only from being in her presence.

After the United States entered the war, Rosa insisted that Saul was in greater danger in Santo Domingo than he had ever been in in Italy. She chose this moment to write hysterical letters to Harry Steinberg, alarming him and irritating Saul when he learned of them. Harry tried to pacify her by telling Moritz that “the main thing is to calm Rosa.” Patiently, and “especially for Rosa,” he described the peril Saul had faced in Italy, but she was still determined that he must return to Bucharest. Harry tried repeatedly to tell her that her wish for him to return was unrealistic, and he begged her to have faith that Saul would be successful and bring her “great naches,” using the Yiddish expression for the pride or pleasure a Jewish parent gets from a child. Rosa ignored everything he said, including his careful descriptions of how much Saul was earning, of his excellent diet amid the abundance of food, and of his pleasant life in a paradise that tourists paid handsomely to visit. She ignored everything, insisting that Saul was in danger, and at that point Harry lost patience, writing, “You don’t help him by being upset … on the contrary, you discourage him, and he has to be encouraged.” Whether Harry ever persuaded Rosa to calm down became a moot point, because mail service to and from Romania was severed, and for the next several years only an occasional cryptic message sent through the auspices of the National Society Red Cross of Romania reached any of them.

ROSA’S OUTBURST PALED BEFORE THE WORST blow of all, which came just when Saul was weakest from malaria. Aldo sent a letter saying he could no longer keep it secret that he and Ada had had an affair. The letter was Saul’s first real contact with either of them since he arrived in Santo Domingo, and it left him reeling. They had written to him in Tortoreto and Lisbon, but mail delivery was sporadic, and for every letter he received, many others were either delayed or lost. One of the first things he did after landing on Ellis Island in July was to write a letter to Aldo begging for news. Aldo did reply in August, but Saul did not receive that letter until October, and the only news it contained was of the affair. Aldo said he needed to tell Saul because their friendship meant everything to him, and he begged Saul not to end it. Even though Saul was stunned by the confession, he did not wait to hear Ada’s side of the story before taking Aldo’s: “He makes it clear that she is the guilty one … that the thing lasted for a while, that it was he who ended it when he received the letter from me from Ellis Island. She had wanted to keep it secret.” In a fit of self-pity, he added “poor me.”

Several days later he received two letters from Ada with her version of the affair. “She writes bullshit,” he decided. In her usual blunt manner, Ada was brutally frank about what had happened between her and Aldo. She took full responsibility, asking Saul not to “feel rancor toward Aldo because he certainly regrets it greatly.” She told him her “heart had nothing to do with it” and the encounter was purely physical. She insisted that she had controlled it and if she had not wanted Aldo, or anyone else for that matter, “no one would have touched me.” Ada was especially angry with Saul for believing that the only reason she had told him was that Aldo and perhaps some of his other friends had already done so. She insisted that she would have told him herself, probably sooner rather than later, but as he had done throughout their relationship, he needed to invent some reason to doubt her. She said that she had told him because she needed to get it into the open, but “as usual I did the wrong thing.”

In response to Saul’s continuing criticism, Ada wrote several more letters trying to explain how little the affair mattered. He dismissed them as further attempts to justify herself, and he worked himself into melodramas as each one made him “suffer anew” and relive the shock and anguish of his first awareness of it. In these letters Ada tried to explain how it happened by describing how she had been thrown into constant contact with Aldo during the months when the two of them were working frantically to secure the money and transit visas Saul needed. She reminded him again of how she had written over and over to him in Tortoreto, begging him to write directly to her rather than addressing letters meant for the two of them to Aldo so that he could read them first. Ada claimed that Aldo had an irrational need to hoard Saul’s letters; he would not even tell her when he received them and would let her read them only if she found out from others that they had arrived. Aldo never volunteered that letters had come; even worse, he would not let her see the pages but would read them aloud and keep them for himself. Often, to find out if Aldo had received a letter, she had to go around asking other friends if they had heard news of Saul. If they had, she then had to track down Aldo, and that was never easy. She usually began at the Grillo, and if he was not there she went to his studio or various workplaces. Once she trekked to a nearby village where he was visiting his mother, and another time to a village where his sister lived. Ada tried to make a joke of it, albeit a grim one, when she told Saul how she had to involve Aldo’s entire family in order to get news of him.

For whatever reason, Aldo did not like Ada, perhaps because he did not trust her. She hinted at Aldo’s resentment in almost every letter that reached Saul in Tortoreto, as if she hoped he would do something to resolve the situation. Usually she began positively, by describing the frenzy with which Aldo was working to establish helpful contacts within the bureaucracy, how he was raising money to pay “small fees” (that is, bribes), and how he would send her to Genoa while he went to Rome so they could save time and cut through red tape by pleading with separate ministries. It was not until after she praised Aldo’s efforts that she told Saul the truth about how they related to each other. Ada seemed puzzled by how cryptic and cold Aldo was to her, and how he was so uncomfortable in her presence that he would sometimes walk away abruptly in the middle of a conversation, leaving her to worry about what, if anything, he knew about Saul’s incarceration that he was not telling her.

All that changed after Saul was safely on board ship for the Americas. As neither Ada nor Aldo was receiving mail from him, each contacted the other routinely to see if anything had arrived. Gradually strained conversation led to easy conviviality and then to unexpected intimacy. Ada told all this to Saul in the hope that it would be the end of his endless demands for her to rehash the details of the affair. She hoped he would soon tire of brooding so they could put it behind them, but his very next letter asked her to describe yet again every intimacy that had transpired. She begged Saul to realize how lonely she had been after he left and how she simply lost control of herself momentarily. She was not seeking to absolve herself of blame, but she wanted him to stop picking at the scab of something that should be allowed to heal: “You are making a big deal out of it, and you hurt me by dwelling on it.” Still, he was unable to let it go; “I have to vent,” he declared. Whatever he did to assuage his anger seems to have worked: several days later, when Ada sent a photo from Genoa of herself with her husband and dog, he merely commented that he had received it.

The photo did not come as a surprise, for Saul had known since the early days of their relationship that Ada was married. He simply didn’t care, and apparently neither did she. From then on her letters referred casually to her husband, never by name but always as he or him, and how he was waiting for mobilization, and how she would sell his house to finance her move to the United States once Saul was safely ensconced there. At one point she even told him of an abortion— cryptically, because censors read the mail: “That which we had hoped for when you were here has happened, but now was not a good time.”

Saul’s thinking about Ada fluctuated daily, if not hourly. On any particular “today” he was seriously thinking of marrying his beloved Adina, whereas on various “yesterdays” he never wanted to see her again. He went back and forth in this fashion for the remainder of his stay in Santo Domingo, but most of the time he yearned for her and she was his “poor dear Adina” who “writes beautiful things, she loves me, my dear Adina.” When he wrote in his diary that “I really am thinking of marrying Adina,” it was one of the very few times that he ever made such an admission. After the Pearl Harbor attack, when it seemed likely that mail service to Europe would be suspended, he had the recurring dream that he lost her somewhere in Milan and was chasing through the streets looking for her: “Dear Adina, poor little thing. The good times are over, Adina, dear and good with me.”

He may have been pining for his lost love, but that didn’t keep him from being with other women. When he wasn’t sitting in the dentist’s chair for the escalating problems with his teeth, he had to find another doctor, “in great fear because of a pimple near my dick. Fortunately, it was nothing.”

ONCE HE HAD MOSTLY RECOVERED FROM the malaria and a head cold that hung on for weeks, he moved from the hotel to his first set of furnished rooms. A child next door cried so constantly that he could neither sleep nor work, so he moved again several months later to an apartment where things were more tranquil. He had been on the island for a little over six months and was desperately trying to recover from the topsy-turvy life his illness had foisted upon him, realizing that he needed to focus on the two things that mattered: trying to work, and finding a way to get himself to the United States. The Civitas were continuing to send commissions his way, one of them being a book jacket for Simon & Schuster. He was also finishing the Valentine’s Day spread for Mademoiselle, but otherwise there was ominous “silence from New York,” much of it due to the interruption of mail service after most of the Americas entered the war. The Civitas had raised his monthly stipend to $70, but it was often delayed. “I continue confusedly my work … because I’m almost penniless now,” he told the Dansons, and he was grateful for the three pairs of shoes and the $50 they sent at Christmas. To keep himself busy, he began to paint and entered three pictures in the annual exhibition sponsored by the local Museum of Fine Arts. He was pleased with his success but somewhat puzzled to find out that he had been labeled “a surrealist.”

Things picked up after the New Year, as Civita sold drawings and cartoons to the newspaper PM, the magazines Liberty and The American Mercury, and once again to The New Yorker. In January 1942, Steinberg told the Dansons, “Is a pity I’m not in New York. I have a lot of goods ideas for cartoon, but when they arrive at New York they are too old or not interesting yet.” By March his frustration was mounting: “It’s a pity I’m not in America now, it’s the moment all magazines and papers needs cartoons.” He was not working well “without stimulant [stimulation]…day after day I’m waiting for some good news, with little hope.” His attitude had changed since he first arrived, when he was “so happy to be free here, after Italy and so on, but now I really need New York.”

Enough time had passed that he could start the New Year by trying to get a place in the Romanian quota, but once again, just as in Lisbon, he feared the specter of the “other, Communist” Steinberg. Saul Steinberg was afraid to go to the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Trujillo because he feared the authorities might ask him if he had ever been deported from the United States. While he was being held in Ellis Island, his English was so poor that an Italian interpreter was assigned to take his information for immigration officials. In the process, the interpreter asked a routine question about why he had been sent back from Lisbon, and Steinberg thought he had to explain about the confusion with the “Communist Steinberg” that had sent him back to Italy, which he equated with deportation. The interpreter stressed that if he had indeed been deported, he could not apply to reenter the United States for a full year. Somehow Steinberg confused this conversation with a deportation from the United States, and after so many months he could not remember how he had answered the interpreter’s question. All he remembered was that when the ship bringing him to Santo Domingo had docked in Puerto Rico, the crew had confined him to his cabin and he had overheard the guards outside his door describing him as a “dangerous deportee.” He was convinced it had something to do with the Ellis Island questioning, which might have raised red flags in his immigration file. Now that he could speak passable English, he wanted to know if he should try to explain the situation to the U.S. consul or just keep quiet and worry about what to answer if anyone asked the question.

Also, his application for the Romanian quota required that he submit forms in both Washington and Ciudad Trujillo. Since he could not go himself, he painstakingly prepared an English curriculum vitae in a letter to Harold and Henrietta Danson, which listed his birth date, residences, and education for Harry Steinberg to use when he made the trek to D.C. on Steinberg’s behalf. Steinberg described his work experience first as an “architect designer” and then as a “publicist” for Bertoldo and Settebello, but he cautioned the Dansons to tell his uncle “is better don’t mention any my work in a wartime Italy.” He did say, however, that when anti-Semitic laws prohibited him from working after 1939, “I published [just] the same without signature.”

Another possible glitch arose when he tried to obtain the Dominican certificate attesting that he had been in residence there. To get it, he had to provide his “born certificate” and two police certificates—one from Romania, the other from Italy—establishing that he did not have a criminal record. He could not attain any of them, and his only hope was to garner enough positive testimonials from United States citizens that consular officials might say “Never mind.”

Indeed, many people were working diligently and were eager to testify on his behalf. Cesar and Victor Civita collected letters from editors at Esquire, The American Mercury, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, and PM, all affirming that they had bought his work in the past, assumed that he would continue to do good, if not better, work in the future, and believed that he possessed admirable personal qualities. Civita also furnished a statement of Steinberg’s earnings as proof that he had every likelihood of continuing to support himself, and handsomely at that.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., who was now a major in military intelligence stationed at the Metropolitan Military District in New York, directed his letter to a high-level contact in the Department of Justice’s Immigration and Naturalization Service. Vanderbilt pulled out all the stops as he described Steinberg’s “considerable reputation” in Europe and then went on to speak of how Life called him “one of the foremost European caricaturists.” Vanderbilt described how “partly through my interest,” Steinberg was able to get to the Dominican Republic and submit work to other American publications: “I have seen his work on the editorial pages of PM, where on many Sundays he has had cartoons that satirically struck at our enemies…[Others] have been accepted by Liberty, The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Harper’s Bazaar, and The American Mercury. ” Vanderbilt concluded with a statement that showed how remarkable Steinberg’s nine-month sojourn in the Dominican Republic truly had been: “This is an extraordinary record for an artist who has not yet seen our country and yet has captured the interest of the editors of these great magazines.”

Indeed, before Steinberg ever set foot on American soil, his particular vision was capturing the tenor of the times in oblique and offbeat ways, so much so that James Geraghty, the art editor of The New Yorker, who had seen his work in other magazines, persuaded the magazine’s legendary editor, Harold Ross, that it was “very much to our interest that he come to New York, [where he would] become a major artist almost at once. I’m told he’s in his twenties, and a man of ideas.” Even better was the agreement Civita arranged on May 14 that The New Yorker would have the right of first refusal for all of Steinberg’s cartoons and other drawings.

These testimonials paid off at the end of April, when Steinberg’s visa was finally granted. “I’m so happy, I can’t tell you!” he wrote to his Danson cousins. His application had been approved and he would soon be given his quota number, so that within two to three weeks at the most, he could leave for the United States: “New York at the end of May—I cannot believe it!” He had his visa in hand on May 16, but it arrived just in time for another round of worry and frustration.

Civita and his relatives in New York decided that Steinberg should fly to Miami and could make his way to New York as he pleased, most likely by train. Gertrude Einstein (“Miss Einstein” to Steinberg then and for several years after) was put in charge of making the plane reservation for an open date, meaning that he could fly whenever a seat was available. The problem was that flights were limited and there was a long line of people with higher priority. With the open ticket, he assumed that all he had to do was go to the airport and wait for his name to be called, but he still had the nagging worry that when his turn to board the plane finally came, the confusion with the “other, Communist” Steinberg might keep him from realizing his dream “to be in New York, to work really.” He begged his uncle and cousins to tell him what he needed to do so there would be no trouble about what he had begun to call “my matter.”

By the end of May, even though Harold Danson and Gertrude Einstein assured him that his ticket was on its way, it had not yet arrived via the mail. And even as he admitted that it was “stupid” to bore Harold Danson with more questions about “my matter,” he could not resist doing so. Danson seldom lost patience with anyone in the fairly emotional family he had married into, but he did so after one too many letters about “my matter.” He turned it over to Miss Einstein, who told Steinberg she was conveying a message from Danson “which sounds very sensible: he is a bit angry with you for talking so insistently about ‘your matter.’ There is no special ‘matter.’ You are just a normal immigrant and should not behave as if you were not, lest people start wondering.”

After telling him that Civita had rounded up an Italian refugee to meet his plane and help him on his way, and that the New Yorker editors were also enlisting their own connections to help him, Miss Einstein ended her letter sweetly: “Don’t you think you should have sweet dreams now and stop worrying about self-made spectres?” But this wasn’t soothing enough for Steinberg, and she had to write again: “There is not the slightest danger that the events of Lisbon will again take place. I repeat what I said in previous letters: stop worrying, take the plane whenever Pan American Airlines will have a seat for you and come. You will see that everything is very easy with a regular immigration visa in your pocket.”

AND SO, ONCE HIS TICKET WAS in hand, he spent the month of June going to the airport every day and returning to his furnished room every night. He was utterly frustrated: “I’m wasting my time here, I cannot even work, my baggages are made, ready to leave every day. I cannot say how much [longer] I’ll have to stay here waiting.”

Every day he chatted with others who were standing in line and sweating in the summer heat. More people were leaving every day, but on flights to Haiti or to Maracaibo and other South American cities, where they hoped to find easier connections for Miami. Steinberg was being advised by them and by some of his American contacts to take his chances and go to Port-au-Prince, but he was afraid to do it for fear that by leaving the comparative safety of the Dominican Republic, he could land in a country where untold new troubles might arise to impede him. He apologized for complaining, but every day seemed to be forty-eight hours long: “Now I cannot do nothing but wait and smoke bad cigarettes.”

Finally, on June 28, 1942, the long wait ended and his turn came to board a Pan American Airlines flight to Miami. Vittorio Nahum, the Italian refugee enlisted by Civita, met him at the airport and took him to the Embassy Hotel in Miami Beach. Steinberg spent one night in the hotel and the next morning went to the Greyhound bus station, where he bought a one-way ticket to New York.

“Traveling by bus, if you manage to sit in the first row, you enjoy the ideal view, the rarest and most noble one,” he later said. And that was how he got his first view of the American Dream as the bus wended its way up the Atlantic seacoast.

CHAPTER 8

Дата добавления: 2015-10-30