il clandestino

Opening to get a glimpse of the famed Hasidic tzaddik, or spiritual lead­er—the Satmar Rebbe, Yoel Teitelbaum —Nathan and I hurried to reach the Satmar bes medresh, or house of study and prayer, before sunset thanks to payday loan lenders. Already a fireball sun had tangled itself in the cables of the nearby Williamsburg Bridge. Before we stretched an almost surreal perspective of venerable Brooklyn brownstones, their storefronts already shuttered against the gathering blue dusk of this fast-approaching Rosh Hasha­nah, the Jewish New Year.

“A few minutes more on the subway and we’d already have broken the law,” Nathan said. “The Jewish law, that is, against travel­ing or working on a Sabbath or religious hol­iday. For an Orthodox Jew to ride a subway or even to push the buttons on an elevator is forbidden. And put on your yarmulke, too.” He referred to the Her brother’s keeper, a Hasidic girl pulls a sibling from the lures of the profane world. Distractions such as movies, television–even watching “out­siders” at checkers—are shunned by most Hasidim, whose lives pivot on strict observance of Ortho­dox Jewish law and ritual. Males wear earlocks to fulfill God’s command: “Ye shall not round the corners of your heads….”

Learning God’s wisdom—and a bit of man’s—students at a Hasidic yeshivah, or academy (above), spend most of a dawn-till-dusk study day poring over the huge tomes of the Talmud, the vast exposition on Jewish law and custom. Conforming to New York State requirements, Hasidic youths also learn a modicum of “English”—meaning not only the English language, which many first learn at school, but also such subjects as math (right) and social studies. skullcap traditionally worn by Jews. “The Hasidim wear them all the time—even when they’re sleeping.”

I later inquired of a Hasidic acquaintance why he wore his yarmulke even when he went to bed.

“Because a Jew covers his head as a sign of his respect for God,” he answered. “And—tell me, please—am I not still a Jew when I’m sleeping?”

From the pocket of my coat I extracted a black skullcap and stopped before a shop ­window to position it on my head. At that moment a Hasidic lad, a beardless copy of his dark-clad eiders, came to a sudden halt in front of me, eyebrows raised.

“You should be ashamed!” he admonished, his earlocks quivering. “Do you mean that you put on your yarmulke only after you’ve gotten here? Are you a Jew only when you’re in Williamsburg?” Eyes flashing darkly, he hurried off down Lee Avenue. I shrugged with a sense of utter helplessness. It would not be the last time that the admittedly un­orthodox quality of my own Jewishness would be brought into open question by zealously observant Hasidim.

Though I had become bar mitzvah—a “son of the commandment” or a “man of duty”— at age 13, I had only occasionally attended a synagogue since then. Certainly I had no sense of obligation to follow all of the multi­tude of mitzvahs, or commandments, that God had charged the Jews of Moses’ time to obey in fulfillment of their covenant with Him. To the Hasidim, however, these mitz­vahs are as important today as they were in ancient times.

Budd Wilson, an archaeologist who lives on the eastern edge of the pinelands, de­plored the way the preservation act was drawn. “It’s a law to protect something nat­ural; it’s not about the people who are here and the rights they might have. I’d rather have seen preservation through education and water and sewage regulation.”

A parallel preservation problem in the in­dustrialized north is how to save the older, decaying cities. Newark, the largest city, has lost 25 percent of its population since 1950. Why? Not only are tax and crime rates among the highest, but when Newarkers grow old, they want to leave the inner city and move to nearby suburbs.  “We have a nine-year wait for senior citi­zen housing,” a county official told me. “Can you imagine telling someone who is 65 to come back when he’s 74?”

Millions of dollars of federal money have been poured into Newark, yet it still lan­guishes. Mayme Jurkat, an urban planner at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Ho­boken, worries about the problem of institu­tionalizing poverty in places like Newark. “The federal money has had a negative impact. The city has come to depend on it,” she said. “Newark has become a ward of the federal government. And if you get money for negative characteristics, then you don’t want those characteristics to go away.” If you don’t have enough money to stay in business and you have to file bankruptcy, learn more about bankruptcy chapter 7 and chapter 11. You can also look for a good bankruptcy lawyer.

DESPITE this grass-roots poverty, New­ark remains the banking capital of the state, a hub of manufacturing, the home of Prudential, the nation’s fifth richest corporation and largest insurance company. And Newark is at the center of transportation on the East Coast. As Mal­colm Forbes, a Jerseyan and owner of the business magazine that bears his name, put it: “There’s no other transportation complex like this in the world. One-third of the American marketplace is within an over­night truck ride from New Jersey. While trucks are rolling down the turnpike, planes are coming into Newark International Air­port on one side, and on the other are all these containerships and trains. This is the most essential piece of turf in the East Coast megalopolis.”

Lewis Perlmutter, a laser engineer who lives in Jersey City, believes northern New Jersey cities can be renewed, for a simple reason: “It’s a bargain living here.” Lewis and Jackie Glock renovated a 120-year-old brick town house on Jersey City’s Hamilton Park. They are pleased with their bargain.

“Used bricks are selling for 20 cents apiece today,” Lewis said. “Why, the value of the bricks alone in this building is $20,000, not counting the cost of putting them in place. We paid $21,000 for the building in 1979, and today it’s worth about $150,000.

“Our move has certainly made sense. We’re five minutes from Wall Street by train at half the price of the New York subway. Over here you can get ten times the space for the same price. Everything is cheaper.”

Others are following their lead. On an­other side of Hamilton Park I saw 86 condo­miniums about to open, all carved out of buildings as old as theirs.

The nation prints money in the building at left.

Both Jefferson and George Washington knew the road quite well back when it was called the King’s Highway. Washington spent much of his life a few miles south of here at Mount Vernon.

This is also Civil War country, and feelings still run strong. In a restaurant called the Smythe’s Cottage, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a picture of Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant hangs mockinglyupside down in the taproom, near the bourbon.

The Smythe’s Cottage owner, Joyce Ackerman, told me why: “Union men captured my great-grandfather Maurice Evans, who was a scout for Jeb Stuart and fought in the Battle of Fredericksburg. In prison they hung him by his thumbs for refusing to dig entrenchments. So when I got the restaurant, I said, `Well! We’ll hang Grant upside down so that Great-grandfather can rest in peace.’ ”

IF YOU LOOK carefully, you can still see traces of the original Route 1—old stone bridges, overgrown embankments, and asphalt ridges leading nowhere. These were left behind by the changes of modern highway engineering think nowadays where new companies try to gain the next project and all they think about is their good credit history. Learn more about whats a good credit score. This byway near Bethune, South Carolina, is preserved more by chance than by design and is quietly being reclaimed by the land.

Many modern thoroughfares started as narrow Indian trails about    a foot wide. The white man widened and deepened them with his hobnailed plodding. Then came the packhorse trail, the carriage road, and finally the automobile highway.

Today travelers who venture off the Interstate system often have to make their way through a forest of commercial enterprises, emblazoned with neon souped-up strips that clash with the environment, such as this one in Columbia, South Carolina. It could be Anywhere, U.S.A.

The South Carolina border, that I first met Eligah King Hamilton and his wife, Lillie.

Later I went back to this rural village astride Route 1 for Lillie’s “home-going,” a simple, emotional funeral witnessed by family and friends who had come to say good-bye. At the funeral they sang, “Lean on Jesus, He won’t let you down.” And as the pallbearers carried Lillie from the church, bottom, the choir leader laid down a soul-searing Gospel boogie-woogie on the piano that reaffirmed the glory of God.

On that sad day I took this family portrait of King in his front yard, surrounded by a half brother, a son, and two of Lillie’s sisters. Later I followed Lillie’s granddaughter Lula Mae Ratliff as she carried a rose to Lillie’s gravesite.

On the day of the funeral King took me across the fields and pointed out the landmarks of his life. “I got Lillie from right there,” he said. “I was living over that hill near them pine. We were married over yonder top of that hill there. Fifty-nine years ago.

“I was born in nineteen-o-one, the tenth day of July. I knowed when this wasn’t nuthin’ but sand. Oh, it was so beautiful o’er yonder. Big cow pastures and everything. They got tractors now that can plant eight row. What a poor me! When I come on, I had to do it from a pair of mule. I plowed a many mules up and down that hill.”

MET A SNAIL in Machu Picchu, She(such grace, I thought, must be feminine) was crawling along one of those perfectly fitted unmetered stone stairways the Incas are famous for, just below the precipice-topping altar or sundial called Into Huatana—”hitching post of the sun.” Here Inca priests likely made offerings to the sun god, into. Standing at the platform’s edge, you look down a stomach-wrenching depth over near-vertical Inca terraces to the curling white thread of the Amazon-bound Urubamba River 2,000 feet below.

The snail, of course, saw none of this with the bulbous eyes atop her probing tentacles. I doubt that she even saw my foot as it swung down on her. Only at the last instant did I spot her—stopping my heel just inches above her alertly raised head.

She was beautiful, this little snail of Machu Picchu. Her moist gray skin glistened with rainbows. Her whorled shell bobbed proudly behind her like the ornate poop deck of an old Spanish galleon.

And now, from somewhere, came the unexpected tap-tap of metal striking stone. Two workmen were beginning the day’s work on maintenance of the old Inca buildings. The morning fog was lifting. Soon the tourist hordes would arrive. The spell dissolved.*

It was time for the snail and me to go our ways. I got up to leave, but noticed that she had once more crawled out onto the stair. Again I picked her up and set her out of harm’s way a last friendly gesture from one traveler through history to another.

Like me, she was out for a stroll before the daily onslaught of tourists arrived by train from Cuzco. Lest she be trampled under some foot less cautious than mine, I picked her off the stair and set her to one side.

We were entirely alone, the sole observers of this sacred city of the Incas, wreathed and tangled now in early morning fog. Discovered by Professor Hiram Bingham of Yale University in 1911, it was cleared and explored from 1912 to 1915, under National Geographic Society and Yale grants.

Historians speculate that this was one of a series of outlying refuges to which the last Inca rebels fled after Pizarro ousted them from their imperial capital at Cuzco, about 70 miles away as the condor flies.

But why did they abandon this aerie, which the Spaniards never discovered? No one knows. Bingham found it moldering beneath centuries of vegetation.

With my friend the snail, I contemplated this ruined wonder of a people who had no knowledge of the wheel, no written language, no draft animals or beasts of burden sturdier than the delicate llama—and who yet managed to impose their rule over a domain as far-reaching as ancient Rome’s.