Mr. Monday and other tales of Jewish Amsterdam

168 Air. Monday and Other Tales of Jewish Amsterdam

turtle-doves. Whoever invented the proverb "empty barrels cause quarrels" never had seen Duplikate and her husband billing and cooing.

Levi was a dock worker on a hire-and-fire basis, but he was more fired than hired. Every morning we heard him stumbling through the lower hallway. We could set the clock on him. He walked from Marken Alley where we lived to the docks. With hundreds of other dock workers, all on hire and fire, he stood pushing and wrestling before a huge gate down on the wharf, trying to get in.The bosses on the other side picked from the wriggling ant heap of humans as many dock workers as they figured they could use that day.The "chosen", as those lucky ones were called, were admitted through the gate one after the other in a much-envied single file. The rest of the men remained in the loneliness of the dockside, grumbling, until finally they gave up for that day and stumbled home again.

The bosses chose their dockhands according to their whims, and they had their favourites. The others could starve to death, for all they cared. If a boss had a grudge against you, you could only hope to get work in rush periods when there were more jobs than men on the waterfront. At such times not even a tyrant could leave you outside the gate. But how very seldom periods of over-demand for workers occurred.

Sometimes four or five weeks would pass before there were a couple of steamers in dock which had to be emptied or loaded in a hurry. Then Levi would work first on the day shift, and then again under a false name on the night shift. Sometimes he was very lucky. Under still another false name, he would pick a day shift again, three jobs in a stretch.