PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC PLACES : No Nightingale on Pico

Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor, it will be remembered, turned away from his tiny nightingale to a jeweled imitation, and his soul languished. It is a fairy tale for our time.

Many years ago, in Beltzy, a village in Moldavia by the Russian-Romanian border, a boy spent his days catching birds in the park. In his aviary at home, the boy had about a hundred birds--brilliant and singing birds, celebrating life in his colorless days.

In a way, the Union Pawnshop on Pico Boulevard, resembles an aviary. The screen over the door gives an impression of beings fluttering and caged within. The customers have ornately beaded hair, expressive faces and voices, scarlet and royal blue silks. Others, in plainer, washed-out clothes, come with children who scamper and hide.

Many of them know David Zinberg, the pawnbroker. He is a tall, loose-limbed man in white sweats and running shoes. He has large, kind hands and as he takes the rings, necklaces and crosses from their owners, he is gentle with them. It is not hard at such moments, to see the small boy who once cradled golden finches and ran home with them from the park in Beltzy. In his pocket is a palm-sized pistol. Loaded. There were shadows then; there are shadows now.

He was 16 when his family finally left Russia. He had grown up fast and knew only one way of being--working hard and getting on. “Success,” he likes to say “is not a final destination. You’ve got to do it every day.” He left school at 15, sold shoes for a few years, made porcelain crowns in a dental lab for a few more. He is 32 now, married for five years, owner of the pawnshop for 15 months. “Dentists are a sorrowful bunch,” he says. “This--this is life.”

He bought the shop from an old man whose eyes were failing. He loves that old man, who owns the building still and comes in to shout at him and berate his new ways. The old man’s shop was empty: In 15 months, Zinberg has $300,000 in loans out on the street. He stores the pledges carefully in the back. The shop itself is a jumble of unredeemed collateral put up for sale, merchandise owners could not--or did not bother--to collect.

Electric guitars worth hundreds, stereo equipment worth thousands, VCRs, microwave ovens, computers and typewriters still in boxes, televisions, cameras, silver flutes, a violin. Who could have walked away from these, the symbols of our riches? How can we have turned everything into trash and trinkets?

Three cases are full of jewelry trays: great rings embossed as lions’ heads, a map of Africa encrusted with diamonds, watches like gold sculptures, chains as heavy as bricks, all thrown into pawn. Easy come, easy go. Against these, the other trays have a touching pathos: fine chains, crosses, wedding rings, engagement and eternity bands, the stuff of life, not of deals. “No, I don’t listen to the stories,” says Zinberg. “Not anymore. Most of them are lies. No matter if your mother died an hour ago, it’s the same loan. For me, it’s not a melodrama.”

He weighs the gold, tests the diamonds but mostly trusts his own eye. His eye and his word: It is still an ancient and old-fashioned business. An $800 engagement ring? Thirty years of life in a worn wedding band? To him, it is $7 of gold, a $25 loan. “Coins, silver, jewelry: garbage for me, pieces of metal,” he says.

Electric items have their own problems: Beta is finished, records are obsolete. “Can I eat 60 turntables?” On the other wall are the good loans: guns. Guns never go out of fashion. Pistols, shotguns, automatic weapons. “We’re ready if war comes.” Is this why he left his country, struggled for years, to be a gun dealer? “I’m not a judge or a jury--I don’t make assumptions about people. I do everything legal with the Justice Department. That’s America.” Who did the guns belong to, that they were left as forfeit: heavy military revolvers for $499, a handy Mom-sized pistol for $69? And in the midst of families worrying about $10 for a bracelet, $25 for a ring, there is the chilling spectacle of customers toying with a stereo, toying with a gun, as if both were mere shopping and pretty much interchangeable.

“People in this business are very, very tough,” Zinberg says. He means other people. Does it worry him that in a business with 95% black or Latino customers, that he stands before them the Jew of myth, the pawnbroker of old? Four months to pay, 10 days’ notice before forfeit, 40% annual interest: “A pawnshop is a bank for the small person. How come when a business person gets a $1-million loan, everyone thinks he’s so clever, and when a person comes in here for $100, then I’m a disease? I’m an honest man, I owe no one, I sleep very well.”

He talks as if he has not been altered by the way he lives, six days a week, pistol always ready, alert every second for the step, the enemy at the gate.

In the blare of stereos being tested, of keyboards being tried, one listens in vain for the innocent voice of the bird who once sang: the emperor’s nightingale.