Outskirts Press, INC.

If you don’t know Jack . . . you’re missing someone special.

Yankel Krutiansky was supposed to go with his father to America in 1913. Instead, his brother was chosen and twelve-year-old Yankel was left behind in the collapsing Russian Empire. It was supposed to be just for a few months, but it turned out to be eight long years. Eight years of war, revolution, poverty, and murderous anti-Jewish pogroms. Eight years in which Yankel—the family clown, the family bad boy, and the oldest son left at home—was responsible for keeping his mother and four little siblings alive, smuggling them out of Soviet Russia, and reuniting the family in America. All of which he did, and, as he would be the first to tell you, nobody even thanked him! This is the story of Yankel (a. k. a. Jacob G. Carton, a. k. a. Jack): refugee, immigrant, charmer, reluctant capitalist, and satirical observer of both the Old World and the New. It’s also a story about family rivalry and family loyalty, a story about what changes and what doesn’t change when you have to leave one life for another, a story about the 20th century and about America.

Chapter 1: How I Didn’t Go to America

I was born with a chip on my shoulder. And I can’t say I ever brushed it off, or shrugged it off. But what I will say is that nobody ever wore the chip on their shoulder as lightly, as jauntily, as I wore mine. Imagine that I'm saying this with a smile—with my trademark, mischievous smile. With my charming, disarming, twinkly-eyed smile, I’ll go so far as to call it, because, as you’ll see, I had some times in my life when, without that disarming smile, I would have been in big big trouble.

In Russian, which I still speak, I’m Yakov. But I was never called Yasha or Yashka, like the Russian boys of that name in the Podolia province of the Russian Empire that I thought I’d left for good in 1914 but had to leave again in 1919. By that time it was Soviet Ukraine—same place, and no better. Luckily, in Hebrew, which I must once have spoken but don’t remember, I’m also Yakov. So, at least in name, I fit in with some of the Christian kids—even the Jew-hating ones—from the countryside and rural villages that surrounded our shtetl, the little market town of Peschana, which most people confuse with the slightly bigger market town Peschanka, a hundred miles or so to the northwest. The confusion doesn’t stop there. If you look Peschana up, you’ll find the town listed as Pishchana, its Ukrainian name, Pieszczana, its Polish name, and Peshchannaya, its Soviet name. No wonder I could never spell!

In the shtetl, the Jewish enclave at its center, we always just called the town Pischon, so that’s what I’m going to call it (and how I’m going to spell it) here. In Yiddish, "Pischon” means  "pee already,” but we called our town that affectionately, as we had insulting yet affectionate nicknames for most of our fellow townspeople. Before he was killed, my uncle Azriel always used to say to me, in Yiddish of course, “Yankel, who made you such a big shot? You’re just a little pisher from Pischon.” Yankel or Yankele was my Yiddish name and what my family called me. But since I got to America, even before I spoke much English, I’ve been Jack. Well, actually, to get into America I called myself Nathan, which was the name of my older brother who was already in America, but that’s another story.