`Happy As a Monkey in a Monkey Tree'

The grandfather of a junior-high-school friend lived with his family. The old man was Hungarian and his English was brusque and heavily accented. Whenever I visited, he was seated at the kitchen table with a bottle and a shot glass. In a 40-year-old memory, he resembles Maxim Gorky. He had a white mustache and gnarled hands, wore a cardigan sweater over his work clothes, and always asked the same question: “What they teach you in school besides bullshit?”

With a dash of Akim Tamiroff thrown in, it was the old man’s voice I borrowed Wednesday morning when I read Caps for Sale, by Esphyr Slobodkina, at my 4-year-old’s preschool. My kids love this book, published in 1940, about a peddler whose caps, worn in a tall stack on top of his head, are stolen by a tree full of monkeys when he takes a nap. Through inadvertent cleverness, he gets his caps back, and the resolution always reminds me of the line from “Sail Away,” Randy Newman’s song: “You'll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree.”

Slobodkina was Russian, born in Chelyabinsk, Siberia, in 1908, and grew up in Manchuria. She immigrated to the United States on a student visa in 1929, enrolled at the National Academy of Design in New York City, and so was spared Stalin’s most malevolent horrors. Esphyr is Russian for “Esther,” the great heroine of the Old Testament, whose name in Hebrew means “hidden.” The Biblical Esther was a Jew in Persia, modern Iran. Slobodkina was a Russian Jew in the United States, who died in 2002. Her modest story of a cap peddler, a free-lance entrepreneur, a parasite on the working class, would not have pleased the apparatchiks. For more about her and her work, go to the Slobodkina Foundation web site.

Here’s the peddler’s sales pitch, intoned four times in the 40-page book: “Caps! Caps for sale. Fifty cents a cap.” “Cap,” in Tamiroff-inflected Hungarian, is pronounced “Kyep,” to rhyme roughly with “hep,” as in cat. My youngest son knows the book by heart. I read it from the stage in the cafeteria to three classes from his Montessori preschool. Each time I came to the sales pitch, David yelled from the audience: “Fifty cents a kyep.” I faced 60 kids who, as the story proceeded and their uncertainty about this big stranger ebbed, stomped their feet and threw their imaginary kyeps to the floor. In the book, when the monkeys taunt the peddler, Slobodkina has them utter a knot of Slavic consonants: “Tsz, tsz, tsz.” This I rendered as “Tsh, tsh, tsh,” and the kids went along with it.

So, here’s what I gave them: some laughs, a brief Russian history lesson, a digression into the meaning of “peddler,” foot-stomping and sound effects. And the teacher promised they could make caps out of construction paper and practice throwing them on the floor.

“What they teach you in school besides bullshit?”