Uncle Alex

In 1917, when something happened to most Russians, something strange happened to Alexander Alexandroff. A reticent man, six feet tall, brown-haired, who had served in the Tsar's diplomatic corps, he had wound up with a job in the foreign department of a Manhattan bank. In Russia's great year, as Kerensky gave way to Lenin, Alexander Alexandroff quit his job, moved into a small store building on Manhattan's East Side, and painted a dingy sign, "Steamship Agent," on his window.

It was a good neighborhood for him. On East 4th Street, near the river, he was on the coast where the tides of Manhattan's racial mixtures endlessly swirl and boil. Around him were Italians, Poles, Russians, Rumanians, Germans, living in an area of employment agencies, meat markets, secondhand clothing and furniture stores. Around him too were hordes of immigrants who knew no English. Alexander Alexandroff spoke English. French, German, Polish. Italian. Hebrew, Russian, and understood several other languages besides. Soon his neighbors began to use his office as a place to receive mail. Soon they began to rely on him to write their letters, advise them about the strange ways of the U. S., or translate for them letters that they could not read. For each service Alexander Alexandroff exacted a fee--as little as 5-c- , as much as $1.50, sometimes a package of cigarets, but always something, and always in proportion to a client's ability to pay.

The years passed. Dust veneered the walls that Alexander Alexandroff would not repaint. Dirt grimed the windows that he would not wash, settled thickly on the unswept floor. Deeds, bank books, letters and records of his clients were stacked on the floor, in chronological order, the oldest on the bottom, until they towered in huge, confused piles.

Clients never saw the back room where he slept, never heard him speak of his family, knew of no confidants. In a neighborhood where world politics is the breath of life, he said nothing of politics; in a period when Russians were Bolsheviks, Whites, or something in between, Alexander Alexandroff listened to arguments, rolling innumerable cigarets, said nothing. Wearing the same clothes until they wore out, he imperceptibly became Uncle Alex, the most familiar figure of the neighborhood--a portly man now, kindly but frugal, helpful, but insisting on being paid for it, his brown hair reduced to a faint fringe, stumping along with his blackthorn cane to a nearby restaurant, observing Sunday by changing his tie and eating a better meal.

At 7 one morning last week, neighbors began to arrive as usual to get their mail at Uncle Alex's office, found his door locked. Soon a crowd filled the sidewalk--people who wanted Alexander Alexandroff to deposit their money, or register their deeds, or give them his advice for a fee. By midday the crowd was big, and Mike Sawicki, who repairs umbrellas in the same tenement, called the police. They found Alexander Alexandroff in bed in his back room, dead. One of his many cats was crouched at the window.

In the junklike jumble of records, the police found bank books showing that Alexander Alexandroff possessed a fortune of about $20,000, also that he had become a U. S. citizen in 1937 under the name of Alexander Isaac Slowly, and owned more property under that name.

The Public Administrator carted off the 23-year accumulation of papers. No kinsman stepped forward to claim Uncle Alex's wealth. And throughout the East Side dazed citizens did not know what to do about their income-tax statements that Uncle Alex had kept, their deeds that he had filled out, their citizenship papers, their contacts with the old country.

Mike Sawicki remembered that Uncle Alex had said he was not feeling well, but Mike had been afraid to ask what was the matter. Said Mike: "He would have charged me for telling me."

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