The Emigrants

vital to the distilleries had developed as a side-line almost by itself, without his doing anything to encourage it, alongside the main business of the soda and seltzers works, and so he simply did not have the heart to cut it back. Seckler always praised my work, but he was reluctant to pay, and gave a poor wage. At least with me, he would say, you are on the first rung of the ladder. And then one day, it was a few weeks after Passover, he called me in to his office, leaned back in his chair, and said: Have you got a head for heights? If you have, you can go over to the new Yeshiva, they need metalworkers like you. And he gave me the address -500 West 187th Street, corner Amsterdam Avenue. The very next day I was up on the top of the tower, just as I had been on the Augsburg Synagogue, only much higher, helping to rivet copper bands that were almost six metres wide onto the cupola that crowned the building, which looked like a cross between a railway station and an oriental palace. After that, I worked a lot on the tops of skyscrapers, which they went on building until the early Thirties in New York, despite the Depression. I put the copper hoods on the General Electric Building, and from '29 to '30 we spent a year on the sheet-steel work on the summit of the Chrysler Building, which was unbelievably difficult on account of the curvatures and slopes. Since all my acrobatics were done two or three hundred metres above the ground, I naturally made a lot of money, but I spent it as fast as I earned it. And then I broke my wrist skating in Central Park and had no work till '34. And then we moved to the Bronx, and life up in the dizzy heights came to an end.

After lunch, Uncle Kasimir became visibly restless and paced to and fro, and at length he said: I have got to get out of the house! — to which Aunt Lina, who was washing up, replied: What a day to go for a drive! One might indeed have thought that night was falling, so low and inky black was the sky. The streets were deserted. We passed very few other cars on the road. It took us almost an hour to cover the thirty kilometres to the Atlantic, because Uncle Kasimir drove more slowly than I have ever known anyone drive on an open stretch of road. He sat angled up against the wheel, steering with his left hand and telling tales of the heyday of Prohibition. Occasionally he would take a glance ahead to check that we were still in the right lane. The Italians did most of the business, he said. All along the coast, in places like Leonardo, Atlantic Highlands, Little Silver, Ocean Grove, Neptune City, Belmar and Lake Como, they built summer palaces for their families and villas for their women and usually a church as well and a little house for a chaplain. Uncle slowed down even more and wound his window down. This is Toms River, he said, there's no one here in the winter. In the harbour, sailboats lay pushed up together like a frightened flock, rigging rattling. Two seagulls perched on top of a coffee shop built to look like a gingerbread house. The Buyright Store, the Pizza Parlour and the Hamburger Heaven were closed, and the private homes were locked up and shuttered too. The wind blew sand across the road and under the wooden sidewalks. The dunes, said Uncle, are invading the town. If people didn't keep coming in the summer, this would all be buried in a few years. From Toms River the road ran down to Barnegat Bay and across Pelican Island to the eighty-kilometre spit of land that stretches along the coast of New Jersey and is nowhere more than a kilometre or so wide. We parked the car and walked along the beach, with a biting northeasterly at our backs. I'm afraid I don't know much about Ambros Adelwarth, said Uncle Kasimir. When I arrived in New York he was already over forty, and in the early days, and later too, I hardly saw him more than once or twice a year. As far as his legendary past was concerned, of course there were rumours, but all I know for certain is that Ambros was major-domo and butler with the Solomons, who had an estate at Rocky Point, at the furthermost tip of Long Island, surrounded by water on