Moonface

A goofy relic of a bygone vacation to nowhere special: an old-timey photograph of the five of us, my parents, two sisters and I, dressed as gangsters. You’re aware of this gimmick, I’m sure. A lesser theme park or local museum or beach boardwalk sets up a photo booth with an assortment of ill-fitting historical costumes. You dress as civil war soldiers, cowboys, Victorians. They take a sepia-toned photograph. My father and I wear fedoras and approximations of sharp, flashy suits. I hold a fake “tommy gun,” a Thompson sub-machine gun, a thrill for the bloodlust of an eight-year-old. My sisters and mother appear as flappers—gun molls, I suppose—wearing brocaded dresses with fringes, and fascinators with feathers and beads. It seems we made a sufficient commitment to authenticity and agreed to not smile. We stare grimly from the picture, as if we really are our own solemn ancestors.

I don’t actually have any gangsters in my family, but it was a near thing. In the 1920s and 30s, Julius Korn, my immigrant great-grandfather, operated a dairy restaurant of the type called an appetizing store in Brooklyn. It was frequented by low-level Jewish mobsters of Murder Incorporated, the stable of killers and enforcers employed by organized crime in the United States. According to family accounts, these brutal killers were quite fond of my timid pushover of a great-grandfather. Once, after a break-in robbed him of a day’s profit and some merchandise, his criminal regulars told him not to worry, they were on the case. In a day or so the goods and money were returned, with the ominous note, “Won’t happen again.” One of the mobsters, who is only known to family legend as “Moonface,” took a shine to Julius’ daughter, my grandmother Pearl. For once in his life, Julius put his foot down. “Pearlie is gonna date a nice boy,” he said. It is unclear to me if this is what Moonface was told, or if some other excuse was made, but the remark chastens him as he leaves the family story.

These early accounts of a wild Brooklyn seemed so far away from the staid, respectably bourgeois living room of my grandparents’ split-level in Bethpage, Long Island. Maybe that’s why Jewish gangsters began to fascinate me: the juxtaposition. The Jews around me, my own father included, were upstanding citizens, tax-paying, property-owning, profession-holding dreams of their immigrant forefathers. With such dependability anchoring me, is it any surprise that my own dreams turned noirish and sordid? It seems inevitable that I would daydream about exchanging my grandfather, Melvin the Marine, the “nice boy” prophesied by Julius’s decree, with the shadowy potential of notoriety and romance of being the grandson of a Moonface. 

I was an angry kid. I think all kids are angry, to a degree. It’s hard to be without power, to see the world, to know it should be different, that there should be, for example, more ice cream for you, or a later bedtime, or no bath, and to not be able to make that choice, affect that change. Besides contrast, my gangster dreams offered me, a verbose child, the possibility of wordless adult efficacy; the idea that a shrug, a flicked cigarette ash, a lowered newspaper, would send a signal to my guys, who would then lay down a burst of machine gunfire, throw a bomb, knock over a bank, change the world in ways I couldn’t. 

I’d read obsessively, in the way of children, about Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Dutch Schultz. I was looking for their Jewishness, a hint to what we shared. I was a Hebrew school dropout, but I took lessons to improve my prayer and reading skills. I was learning about being a frum yid, a good Jew, and trying to fit gangsters into that. All those Murder Inc. men in Julius’s restaurant: was the kosher kitchen my great-grandpa ran important to them? Red Levine wouldn’t kill on Shabbos. Was it possible to be a tzaddik and a stony-faced assassin? After all, hadn’t Abraham, when word came down to whack Isaac, unfazed, raised a knife over his own son? My Jewish ideals made room for the occasional mobbed up mentsch from Brownsville.

Even more appealing than the expression of my murderous rage and escape from my upper middle-class existence, was the pull of nostalgia. Perhaps this is why the photograph of me and my family in gangster duds still charms me. Hazy brown memories of yesteryear. A time well before I was born, still longed for. When Jews were tough and disreputable and powerful. When daring, adventurous men of action ruled Brooklyn. When even my warm, tobacco-scented grandmother could be swept away by a charming rogue. 

That nostalgia was partially a nostalgia for New York City itself, its shrinking—or at least changing—Jewishness. My mother would take me through the Lower East Side, to the tenement museum, where I’d learn about the neighborhood and the city as it was, and she’d point out the closed stores where her mother would treat her to shopping trips in the 60s. Back home in the suburbs, I’d read about urban childhoods of stickball and petty shoplifting becoming careers of criminal masterminds. Why couldn’t I be a gangster? Well, there just wasn’t much point to it anymore, now that we lived in New Rochelle.

If I lived in a fantasy of moonlit murder and icy cold crime, I couldn’t keep up the illusion long. Moonface always melted back into Melvin Martin. I found myself chilled by the words of a gangster who, turning state’s evidence, was asked by an astonished prosecutor how he could have murdered all those people. He said, “You were nervous before your first trial? And then the second one you were better? And so on? It’s like that with killing.”      

In my grandmother Pearl’s stories of her father, as I have said, Julius always featured as a nebikh, a poor little thing, barked at by his wife, my great grandmother Bertha, and even bullied into bad negotiations with business partners. My grandfather Melvin, with World War II under his belt, always projected a more confident macho air, but still a squeaky clean one. My father, the doctor, the apple of his mother’s eye, provided a culmination to this masculinity of decency and care. I didn’t seem to fit, with my bursts of temper, my longing for subversion and rule breaking or bending, collecting books on mobsters and maniacs. 

Life is long and love is powerful. I was an angry kid, it’s true, and in my twenties that anger turned to a crushing black depression. However, in the sweet embrace of a long line of gentle men, I learned gentleness. But every now and then, I dream about flipping a coin in a dark alley, the streetlight strategically cut, letting my cigar fall, crushing it underneath my heel, and then… well, you’ll be sorry you stuck around to find out.