Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History

How easy can it be to write a memoir about your childhood when one of your earliest memories is of your grandfather’s attempt to murder you and your family? How pleasant can it be to write about your childhood home given its now ubiqitous reputation as America’s citadel of crime and corruption? The enormous moral and social courage alone Helene Stapinski had to muster to describe her life in Jersey City in the last third of the twentieth century make her memoir “Five-Finger Discount” worth reading. At times maddening, frightful, depressing and hilarious, the memoir magically brings us into the Stapinski family — with its heritage of crime, violence and family abuse — while simultaneously providing us with an enormously readable history of Jersey City, a place so corrupt, so venal, so thoroughly crooked, that its moral taint seems to rub off, along with sundry industrial residues, on its population. Indeed, theft is so common, that swag, as it is called, is not even considered wrong; it is simply a way of life. Thus, Stapinski’s subtitle, “A Crooked Family History” is appropriately accurate, both a description of of her own personal circumstances, but as that of the larger political community, whose criminality looms everywhere.

As a child, Helene never considers her family anything but normal. Living upstairs from a neighborhood bar, she accepts the arrest of her abusive grandfather Beansie (a nickname derived from the fact that he stole some beans from a truck earlier in his life) as normal, the most recent of “a string of family crimes and tragedies, which I thought most people experienced on a regular basis.” The diminuitive Beansie, nothing more than a small-time bully and crook, becomes the central lens through which Stapinski examines her family history. Not an intellectual crook, like some of her other relatives, Beansie “was more of a freelance criminal, committing crimes whenever the opportunity arose.” An abusive husband and father, Beansie’s welcomed disappearances into jail provide the family with its only opportunity for coherence and sanity.

As she grows, Helene prefers attending well-fed funerals than going through the Holland Tunnel to New York City to play with new toys in the showrooms of Macys. She relishes watching the numbers game, which to her was a community activity, and rejoices at the number of people who “hit” on her birthday. She learns from “my mother to stand up for myself and to dislike careless and unfair people. There were quite a few of them living in Jersey City.” This linkage with Jersey City and family identity emerges as one of the strengths of the memoir.

Stapinski’s portrait of Jersey City will stagger the uninitiated. Literally staring at the backside of the Statue of Liberty, this city, pillored as once and always “ugly,” was the debarcation spot for millions of immigrants who passed through Ellis Island. Jersey City, howeve, became a place “settled for,” inhabited by settlers “of a different kind, the kind who always feel cheated, because they settled for less.” It is a place where “people were actively illiterate and proudly went around saying things like ‘I never read a book in my life.’…I wanted to say, ‘Well, good for you, you idiot. Look where you are. You’re still in Jersey City.’” It is a city where spring is not announced by “tulips or crocuses,” but by the first “floated or dead body to wash ashore” from the Hudson River. The author gracefully ties the political corruption of the notorious Democratic Mayor, Boss Hague, to the personal corruption of her grandfather, Beansie.

The adult Helene Stapinski returns to Jersey City, despite an incomplete attempt at personal liberation through university life and intellectual freedom. Working in the “knewsroom” of the city’s newspaper, the Jersey Journal, Stapinski grows more reflective on her family’s place in this morass. Anger, disgust and outrage over civic graft intertwines and conflicts with family shame and a need to protect her mother. Uncovering family involvement in a civic scandal, Stapinski upbraids her own silence. “I told myself that journalistic ethics were for people more fortunate than I…They were for people whose parents could afford them, whose families didn’t have to rely [on politically connnected public jobs]. I was rationalizing, but it beat ratting out my mother.” She comments immediately after that if Stapniski were to report of “courthouse swag, I would have to get rid of at least half of my wardrobe. Then I would have to find Ma a new job, because she would be fired, or worse, ostracized from her circle of swag-buying friends.”

“Five-Finger Discount” never preaches, never loses its humanity, never pinches its nose in disgust. It is a dirty, messy, bloody, grinding work. Its majesty derives from the lucidity of its writing, the moral vision of its author, and its bold personal and historic intent. This memoir is personal history at its best. The memoir preserves a scarred city’s battered, ugly past and gives it life for current and future generations; it captures a trapped family — limited by poverty, hopelessness and resignation — and gives it the dignity of its own self-definition. Helene Stapinski’s work will emerge as a treasured addition to not only urban history, but to the growing body of literature of the very nature of the American family.