In the room where my grandparents slept for nearly 50 years, I have installed a stained-glass window that is probably about 100 years old. One of the panes was broken and I had it replaced with one adorned with my grandmother’s name — Frances, 1906-to-1976.
When the sun sets behind the broken windows of a long-shuttered bottle cap factory in the near distance, the bedroom flushes red and gold in a stream of dying, 4 p.m. light. Hollywood calls it “Magic Hour,” and the other day the moment was amplified when I rummaged for treasure more precious than gold in a milk crate below the window.
The crate is crammed with dozens of reporter’s notebooks, pages scrawled with interviews done with hundreds of Jews in Baltimore during the past quarter-century. Like a kid reaching into a carnival grab bag, I stuck my hand in the crate, pulled a notebook at random and hit the jackpot: A 2003 conversation with local writer and teacher Ben Herman. The interview was never published and Ben died eight years later at age 84.
Although I’d never met Ben before our nosh at Attman’s — nor saw him again afterward — I never forgot the man with the heart of a poet and fealty to a single subject: life as it was lived along the trolley tracks of East Baltimore.
While many Baltimore Jews have written with love and yearning for the old neighborhoods — tears of sepia for Lombard Street and Reservoir Hill, and now Pikesville — Ben was different. He was formed by the eastside village of Dundalk, a community of steelworker gentiles where Ben lived nearly all his life, taught literature at Patapsco Senior High School and wrote, as observed Gil Sandler, “until he finally ran out of ink.”
“Growing up in a Christian neighborhood gave me a [bigger] outlook on the richness of life,” said Ben. “My Dundalk was old Dundalk,” modeled on the “garden city” philosophy of Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.
The Hermans were in the shoe business. Ben’s grandfather — a Polish Jew from Vilna — was a cobbler with a shop at 1516 E. Pratt near Caroline Street. The patriarch decreed that rough-and-tumble Fells Point was no place for children and moved the family to Dundalk when Ben and his twin brother, Sam, were toddlers.
Ben’s father — Morris Herman, also born in the Old Country — worked long hours in a Pennsylvania Avenue shoe store across the street from the Royal Theatre. Ben pretty much only saw his father on Sundays. The void was filled by his mother’s brother — Samuel “Uncle Bimbo” Berman.
Remember “Magic Hour,” the wondrous alchemy of light and legend?
“The moon would be rising red and gold around afternoon rush hour when Uncle Bimbo read aloud to us in front of his confectionery in the heart of Dundalk,” said Ben, summoning tales that never left him — the battlefield humility of Kipling’s “Gunga Din,” Noyes’ “The Highwayman,” ghostly with gusty trees and cloudy seas, and “Casey at the Bat,” told to youngsters without Major League Baseball in 1930s Baltimore.
“Uncle Bimbo” died young, just 55 when he passed in 1943 — about the time that Ben was a World War II medic — but story time with the storefront merchant so enchanted Herman that he traveled to Africa when he grew up just to see Mount Kilimanjaro.
You know how they say you can’t take it with you? It’s true for your coin collection and the Ford Crown Victoria. But the dead usually take their stories with them. I’m reminded of a friend who would pick up the phone to ask her recently deceased mother about a recipe, only to hang up before it started ringing.
Not Ben Herman. From Dundalk to Deuteronomy, he left it all behind in books titled “Red Trolley Days,” “The Rhapsody in Blue of Mickey Klein,” and “Green Dust of the Milky Way.” All of which can be found with not much more effort than it took to reach in the milk crate and pull out a plum.
Rafael Alvarez is the author of “Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highlandtown.” He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com.