The Pinch by Steve Stern Page A

past. Much of what she revealed, though, Muni was already familiar with from the Pins’ account of her history: he knew, for instance, that she was an orphan, and was pleased to inform her that they shared that singular distinction. He knew also that, while the Rosens had taken her in, she had been throughout her childhood fundamentally the ward of the street, the entire community contributing to her upkeep. That he too was beholden to a community that had helped fund his flight to freedom was a topic he was not so anxious to discuss. While he had no thought of absconding, he still didn’t like to recall a debt that bound him in obedience to the Pinch, though no one else seemed to acknowledge the liability. In the ghetto tsedakah, or charity, was regarded a sacred duty that entailed no obligation on the part of the recipient. And in time, as Muni grew easier with Jenny, he became less oppressed by what he felt he owed North Main Street.
    Although she was full of curious facts about the neighborhood and the city at large, Jenny’s education had not advanced beyond grade school. “Me and my teachers, we didn’t ever see eye to eye,” she confessed, almost proud of her virtual illiteracy. She boasted of her recalcitrance, her refusal to submit to the tyranny of Miss Christine Reudelhuber, the severely coiffed, talcum-reeking principal of the local school. Declared incorrigible, she’d begun her haphazard waitressing career at Rosen’s while openly developing her acrobatic skills. Having found her body something of an impediment at street level, she set out to discover how it might function more nimbly aloft, for such was her reasoning. Following instructions in a mail-order pamphlet on the science of equilibrism, she hung a slack rope near to the ground in the Rosen’s backyard; eventually she graduated from the rope to a woven cable purchased from a ship chandler’s down at the river wharf. That was the wire with which she’d replaced the clothesline strung across the alley between the Rosens and the Pins. She’d made no secret of her ultimate ambition to join a circus and travel the world. Never once, however, did she allude to the fact that her injury had grounded her, perhaps permanently, and Muni tactfully avoided the subject altogether.
    “Now you,” Jenny said to him, demure again after one of her lengthy disclosures. They’d been sauntering along Main Street proper, past Court Square with its burbling fountain, peering into the dressed windows of the department stores owned by German Jews. These were the Jews who’d come to America with money and culture, and so bypassed the unventilated tenements of the Pinch.
    “Me what?” wondered Muni, stalling, because he knew perfectly well what she meant: it was his turn to impart a detail or two of his own past. It was a past that had obviously intrigued the girl since his arrival, had even given him something of a heroic cachet in her eyes. So why was he so reluctant to revisit his history? It wasn’t that he was ashamed—why should he be ashamed? Hadn’t he survived the unspeakable against all odds? But his memories had been lost and found and lost again so often that he was no longer sure of the veracity of those that remained. Sometimes it even seemed to him that his past didn’t count; his own life had not yet started. Or rather, it had started once, been aborted, and was only just beginning again.
    “Sure, the boy was fetched from out of the bulrushes,” Muni’s aunt Katie had informed the girl, mocking her nephew’s diffidence. “He fell from the moon.”
    She was relentless in regaling Jenny with spurious facts about Muni’s origins, whenever their neighbor, who needed no invitation, dropped by at dinnertime. Jenny brought with her cold cuts and blintzes for which Pinchas was especially grateful, such a welcome change from Katie’s spuds. Lately Katie had tended to sling their suppers at her men with a growing irascibility, her humor prickly to