Scene: The Old New Haven Arena. The place is packed with Jews, refugees from Eastern Europe. In the ring is the Great Yiddish Hope, Julie Kogon, a pugilist whose punch serves as a symbol of ethnic pride and aspirations in a new land.
Standing ringside is one Jewish New Havener, a small-time hustler with big money on the fight. As Julie goes down, the hustler lets loose a cry for deliverance that, with a word or two changed, could have come from a mile west, at the Orchard Street shul, on the Days of Awe…
That scene took place in a sports arena that has long disappeared in New Haven, buried along with a nearby neighborhood that once served as the entry point for a generation of Jews who eventually moved westward and to better lives.
The scene also takes place, in fictionalized form, in a novel by a son of that neighborhood.
Fifty-eight-year-old Allen Ruff was born off Legion Avenue neighborhood, before urban renewal destroyed it. He went to the New Haven Arena as a boy.
He left New Haven decades ago. He has never left behind memories of that long-gone world. After his father’s death in 1989, Ruff spent years sorting out the meaning of the stories he witnessed and heard.
Ruff (pictured), a professor at the University of Wisconsin, has published Save Me, Julie Kogon (Trafford). The book follows the travails of one Harry Rabin, an “old-school” used-car salesman and would-be gangster with a closet full of secrets and stories that trace a transitional period in New Haven’s Jewish community. That period remains vibrant in books, historical society gatherings, even museum exhibits. It was a period when local Jews were just as likely to work for bookies or bathhouses as for law firms, doctor’s practices or or universities.
Ruff comes to New Haven this weekend for his 40th Hillhouse High reunion; then, on Sunday night, a reading from his novel, at cafe nine at Crown and State streets (Oct. 21, 7 p.m.). In advance of his visit he spoke with the Independent. Following are excerpts of that conversation.
How closely is your father based on the main character?
Lots of the stories are drawn from my father’s experiences and the experiences of his generation. The early chapter about the ham and the truck — my father in his 70s was still talking about his father giving him a wallop for taking a ham sandwich into the truck. “He gave me a backhand I never forgot.” He made him throw the ham out the window.
Did you ever live on Legion Avenue?
Sure. I was born in 1949. I lived on Ward Street. Ward ran into Legion two blocks down. We moved off of Legion Avenue when I was 6. Went into [the] West Hills [neighborhood]. I went to West Hills School, then Sheridan, then Hillhouse. I left New Haven to go to college in the fall of ’67 and never lived there again for a very brief stint in ’72.
My brother is eight years older than I am. When we still lived on Legion Avenue, he would put me on the handlebars of his bicycle. I would hold the fishing rod and the tackle box, riding on the handlebars. He would pedal all the way out at the Legion Avenue, to the end of the Boulevard, way to the end of Boulevard, to take me fishing.
Then my father gave him hell for skipping school. He was 14. I was 6. He said, “But I was taking care of Allen.”
All the main characters have some basis in New Haven characters.
Tell me about Julie Kogon.
If you read the fight histories, the boxing biographies, subtexually there’s a thing going on. Lots of the old-time sportswriters [wrote] that he was a wonderfully stylished, very marvelous boxer. But he didn’t have the ‘killer instinct.’ He wasn’t a “finisher,” they say. In the ’40s, if you read boxing history, it’s a nasty, dirty thing. Meaning, who knows what went on?
What do you take from those descriptions of Julie?
Did you ever read Rich Cohen’s Tough Jews? It’s a book not just about Jewish mobsters. It’s also a book about how it affected the Jews of a working-class era. There was an ethos. There was a Robin Hood mythos about them. There were gangster wannabes. Especially in the period after the Holocaust, there was this crap about what happened to them was because they wouldn’t fight. So to have tough working-class Jews in the ring or standing outside the ring, willing to put up their hands and fight back, was glorified by lots of working-class Jews of that generation.
When I was a little kid my father would show me the black and white glossies of Julie in his fight trunks. Publicity photos. What it was, all those guys fought with the Mogen David, star of David, on their trunks. There was one point, in 1942, when the boxers didn’t have the emblems. The Jewish boxers often, there was a whole long list of them, of course… Now if you tell a younger generation that there were Jewish boxers, they go, “What?”
[While working on the novel] I did a trip to New Haven and actually spoke with three or four old-timers, all of them in their 80s at the time. One of them was a Legion Avenue guy. Sherman Kramer.
We were sitting at his kitchen table in Orange. I said, “You know. I’m trying to get through this novel, and I need some local characters. Who were some of the characters you remember from Legion Avenue?”
He had a little laugh.
“What are you talking about? Your father topped the list. Your father took the cake.”
All of a sudden he said, “Oh yeah. I remember this one time, Julie Kogon was fighting in the Arena. I don’t know if you know this or not — your father was a big fight man.”
“Of course I knew that.”
“Julie Kogon was fighting. Your father was standing ringside. Your father was standing ringside the whole time, yelling the whole time. I don’t know if you should bring this up. Your father was big gambler.”
“That I don’t know?”
“Your father must have had serious money on that fight.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because Julie goes down at one point. He goes down on the mat. All the landsmen were there. The place was filled with the Legion Avenue crowd. Julie goes down on the mat. The place goes silent. You could hear a pin drop.
“The only thing you could hear in the entire New Haven arena, was the ref counting on the mat ’1, 2, 3…’ And your father yelling ringside, ‘Save me, Julie! Save me!’”
I knew at that point I had a plot line.
What other true stories did you base episodes in the novel on?
Gun-smuggling out of New Haven. That was the real McCoy. The Irgun smuggled guns out of Colt’s in Hartford. My father and other guys talked proudly about how they helped packing guns. In the early and mid ’50s, they used to do these big bags of clothing. I remember in West Hills School. Even at Welch School; I went there in first grade. We used to collect clothing for the refugees. My father talked about how they packed guns into bundles of clothing for the refugees going to Israel. So there’s all this kind of smuggling going on. That smuggling of course is a crossover…
When you think back on it, how do you feel about the old Legion Avenue era you capture? Does it look rosier in retrospect than actually living it? Like everybody else, you guys actually left.
I went to college at American University in D.C. The single and sole criteria for my choosing that schoolw as that it was furthest away from new Haven. I’m a historian by craft and training. I’m not a sentimentalist and romanticist.
It’s a very sentimental and romantic novel.
It’s very bittersweet. The people who know what I’m writing about know it intimately well. It was very harsh, a very brutalizing environment. The trauma of immigration in and of itself, being torn out of their roots in Eastern Europe. See, there’s this sentimentalized myth of the golden Medina, the American success story. Everybody went from rags to riches. That wasn’t true for everybody. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money. A friend turned to me and said, “This you should call, ‘Jews Without Taste.’”
There are all these reunions of all people who fled Legion Avenue long ago but are mad the neighborhood was torn down. It seems to me people miss community, not the rat-infested buildings.
That sense of neighborhood, connectedness to place and people. There are several references in the book to the community that was Legion Avenue/ Oak Street. That was devastated by, I call it urban removal — by urban renewal, by dispersal, by a new geographic diaspora. A new one which was suburbanization. Which was white flight of the ’50s and ’60s.
As in the other diaspora, Jews were seeking a better life. But a lot left long before the bulldozers.
The Legion Avenue of the bakeries and the fruit stands and delis and hardware stores held on as long as they could. When the guts were torn out of that neighborhood, people had no place left to go. There were life investments, not just material investments. Emotional investments. My father to his dying day, if someone asked him for directions in downtown New Haven, he would say, “You know where the corner of Elliot and Legion used to be? Where Oak Street used to come in?” He’d be talking to someone who was born 50 years later. “Now it’s the Connector. But it used to be…”