Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Steerage
by Robert Cooperman
Kelsay Books
Aug 2024, Paperback, $23.00, 104 pages, ISBN: 978-1639806386
When she catches her young sons Moshe and Eli “playing Cossacks” on the Messenger, the ship that is taking them from Liverpool to New York, pretending to be murderous Cossacks, a version of Cowboys and Indians, Rivka Abramowitz becomes apoplectic, as Robert Cooperman writes in “Eli Abramowitz, After Passing Through Immigration.”
Those monsters murdered
your zaidy and bubby!” she screamed.
“They’d have butchered us too
if we hadn’t hid while they burned
the whole shtetl. Why do you think
we lived in London and now America?
So we’ll never have to see those beasts again!”
Robert Cooperman’s new collection is the story of a poor Jewish family coming to New York at the beginning of the 20th Century not so much to make their fortune, though they’ve been lured by the “streets of gold” myth, as to escape sure death at the hands of the Tsar’s marauding men in their Russian peasant village. The father, Simon, is a schnorrer, a ne’er-do-well mooch, who decides to take his family to New York after a short stay with his brother-in-law’s family in London; ruminating on this in “Rivka Abramowitz in Steerage,” Simon’s wife understands this as “my brother making him feel a poor relation / in London, New York beckoning to him.” Simon has his pride. Along with the parents, the family includes the muscular older brother Moshe, the alluring sister Esther, and the baby of the family, the brainy Elijah.
We follow the picaresque adventures of the family on the ship across the Atlantic and their Ellis Island “welcome” to their ultimate Lower East Side destination “in America, / the land of dreams,” as Rivka sarcastically calls it at the end of “On Line at Ellis Island: Rivka Abramowitz.” Then the real fun begins.
The well-meaning but feckless and unreliable slacker Simon is ill-equipped to raise a family, so it tacitly falls upon the children to keep the family together. Simon works in a sweat shop doing “seasonal piece-work,” barely enough to support a family of five, but the tough-with-his-fists Moshe and his brainy younger brother Eli come to the attention of the shtarker Big Nathan Moskowitz, a “neighborhood hoodlum boss,” who sells protection to the local shopkeepers. As Eli notes in “Elijah Abramowitz, Age Ten, Thinks of His Career Prospects”:
If not for Moshe and me,
we’d be on the street, and oy,
I dread what Esther would have to do,
already a beauty…
Their mother sees things a little differently. In “Rivka Abramowitz Considers Her Children,” we overhear her musings:
Two trumbeniks I raised,
and a floozy mad to throw herself
at that cockroach, Moskowitz…
Moshe and Eli may not be the worthless loudmouths she calls them, but we can understand her anxiety. The poem ends: “How can a mother not worry?”
How indeed. Cooperman’s narrative proceeds with something of the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, all three children under Big Nathan’s thumb, Rivka and Simon the chorus supplying the agonizing commentary in their strophe and antistrophe. When Big Nathan promotes Moshe from the role of enforcer, beating up the delinquent shopkeepers, to prizefighter, Moshe starts to come into focus as Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. “I could have been a contender!” Big Nathan demands that Moshe throw a fight, so he can make a big score. Only, when he refuses and beats Moskowitz within an inch of his life, as well as his two goons, Eli steps in and the plot takes another twist.
But make no mistake, this is a story of treachery and betrayal to the very end. He may have rescued Moshe, but now managed by his brother Eli, Moshe, renamed “Mick O’Reilly” for the ring, so as not to sound “too Jewish,” quickly rises in the ranks of heavyweights until he earns a shot at the title. But Eli has other plans for him, not unlike Big Nathan’s.
“As kids, it was me / who’d protect him from bullies,” Moshe notes in “Moshe, Managed by His Younger Brother Eli,” but later in the poem observes, “But now, with his saykhel, he looks out for me,” acknowledging his baby brother’s savvy intelligence. Moshe is ebullient, optimistic. He even considers his future at the end of “Moshe’s Boxing Career Thrives”:
And maybe in a year or so,
after I’ve had my fun, I’ll find
that shining maiden to love forever,
and retire as champion of the world.
Esther, who has always had similar ambitions to be a star of the stage, is likewise now under her brother Eli’s management. In “Esther After Moshe’s Third Prizefight” she confesses that she wants “crowds applauding,
tossing me enough roses
to carpet the stage,
New York worshipping me.
Eli gets her a role in a play, though it’s a minor one, and of course she kvetches because it is not important enough. But Moshe has a moment of self-knowledge when the overweight champ decks him in the title fight. He may not be Oedipus or MacBeth or Othello, but Moshe realizes his limitations and can see his future ahead of him in black and white.
So why “Steerage”? It’s only a short passage in the overall story, but the ironic twist at the end concerning Moshe’s destiny – or “fate,” perhaps – provides the clue. Indeed, Steerage does read like a Greek tragedy, whose end is marked from its beginning, and if not necessarily a tragedy in the classic sense of the hero’s fall, certainly a melodramatic stage play that pulls the audience’s heartstrings. The poems are all monologues that further the plot and soliloquies that comment on the action, as if spoken by characters on a stage. Along the way, Steerage gives the reader a glimpse into the hardships any immigrant faces and in particular those who were part of the diaspora of the early twentieth century. The characters are all colorful and engage our sympathy. Steerage is a satisfying read.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.