Excerpt: Barney Ross: The Life of a Jewish Fighter
On
December 13, 1923, ten days short of his fourteenth birthday, Barney
was dressing in his ROTC uniform for a morning drill at the Joseph
Medill School when a gunshot echoed on Jefferson Street.
Rushing
downstairs, he heard a cry of “Gonovim!” A small crowd had formed
around the grocery, and Beryl pushed his way inside. His father lay on
the floor, blood soaking through his white apron, shot in the chest.
Beryl tore at his father’s clothes, ripped off the apron and his shirt
and tzitzis. “It’s alright, Beryl,” Itchik said. Ambulance attendants
rushed inside the grocery; Beryl heard the sound of his mother
shrieking as his father was carried away.
The shooting made the
afternoon edition of the Chicago Daily News:
GROCER, 60, SHOT IN FIGHT
WITH ROBBERS
Two Negroes entered the grocery of Isaac Rosofsky, 60
years old, 1303 Jefferson Street, this morning and purchased 5 cents worth of apples.
The grocer handed the apples to the men and they drew pistols and
ordered Rosofsky to “stick them up.” The grocer refused to obey and
made for the men. He fell in his tracks with a bullet in his chest.
Rosofsky’s family . . . heard the shot and came out just in time to see
the robbers flee south in Jefferson street.
In the county hospital,
Itchik hovered in and out of consciousness for thirty-two hours, then,
as Barney later remembered, he “awaked once to put a hand on a
rheumatic shoulder which had bothered him for years and whisper, ‘It
doesn’t hurt anymore.’” He rubbed his beard and muttered “Sh’ma Yisroel
[Hear, O Israel]” before dying.
The funeral was held in the cramped
Rasofsky apartment, women wailing, mirrors draped with blankets. Barney
and his older brothers stood to say Kaddish and the littlest
ones—Sammy, Georgie and Ida—strained to see their father’s casket as it
was carried through the crowd on Jefferson Street into the hearse for
internment in Jewish Waldheim Cemetery. In the days following the
murder, Sarah Rasofsky fell to pieces. She was hospitalized with a
nervous breakdown, said she could no longer bear to live in the
apartment across the street from the murder scene.
In Barney’s memory
of the funeral scene, his mother had been so grief-stricken that she
tried to throw herself into her husband’s open grave. Double-chinned,
she is often seen smiling broadly in the photographs from Barney’s
glory years as a world’s champion; yet the pain and rage was forever
smoldering.
Years later, visiting her husband’s grave site—still so
observant that she would not go with any of her kohain sons, only
entering the gates of Jewish Waldheim in the company of nieces and
female cousins—she would scare the little girls by convulsing as if in
some kind of seizure, shrieking out an inchoate Yiddish rage at her
husband’s headstone:
“Itchik, why did you do this to me?” Barney’s
oldest brother Ben, married and working as a bookkeeper, arranged to
sell the store and used the money to send his mother to live in
Colchester, Connecticut, where Itchik’s sister and elderly mother
lived. Ben didn’t have enough room to take in his other brothers—and
his young wife was already pregnant.
It was yet another cruel twist in
the fate of the Rasofsky clan: Isidore’s first grandson, named Yitzhak
(Erwin) in his memory, was born a little more than a week after the
murder. Barney and Morrie were sent to live with their father’s cousin
Henry Rasof, and the three youngest children were taken in by the Marks
Nathan Jewish Orphan Home at Albany and 16th Street. Barney later
remembered standing in front of the “gray, dingy-looking orphanage,”
with fists clenched hard, vowing he would make enough money “to get
them out of there.”
In his autobiography, No Man Stands Alone,
published in 1957 (as dictated to coauthor journalist Martin Abramson),
Ross says that the two men who killed his father got away with the
crime—an elderly customer had witnessed the shooting but was too scared
to testify. The killers’ escape, in Barney’s retelling, fueled his rage
at the world, and in every street fight to follow, he could see the
faces of the men who murdered his father. “ The bitterness and hatred
inside me made me a much tougher fighter,” he recalled. “Every opponent
in a street fight seemed to remind me of Pa’s murderers and so I seemed
to find extra strength in fighting them, or kicking them in the groin
and making them scream in agony.”
With his mother
drifting into madness on the farm in Connecticut, fourteen-year-old
Barney lost his pain in the torrent of the Chicago streets. He wandered
Roosevelt Road in the clawing cold—”a lost soul,” he later said.
Technically billeted to his cousin Henry’s care, he was a ward of the
wild West Side.
He started to smoke and curse, and learned he could
throw back bootlegged beer like a grown man. He had no time for his
oldest brother Ben’s lectures, scoffed when Rabbi Stein asked why he
hadn’t been to shul. He screamed that he no longer believed in God.
“In
my terrible bitterness and hurt, I wanted to take my feelings out on
something, and religion seemed the most logical thing to hit at.
Religion had been the biggest thing in Pa’s life and what had it gotten
him?… To teach Hebrew—to have anything to do with religious work—was
now the last thing in the world I wanted to do.” He stopped wearing
tzitzis under his shirt, rode the streetcar and handled money on the
Sabbath, and began to eat ham and pig’s knuckles in restaurants. “The
only Jewish custom I continued to follow was to say the kaddish three
times a day. But as far as I was concerned I wasn’t doing this for the
sake of religion, but merely to pay my respect to Pa and to prevent his
remains from turning to dust, which according to ancient belief was
what would happen if he wasn’t mourned.”
Copyright © Douglas Century Literary Enterprises, Inc.
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