When my grandfather was alive he could walk up and down six thousand years as though it were a little narrow room; for him, all history could be contracted to the span of memory; and, since the Jews were the People of History, the memory of each one was a monad which represented the history of all. The time was always now. When anything happened in the house or the neighborhood, he could fish up a correspondence from the Bible at the drop of a line. If you asked him a simple question he would answer by a parable; and all his questions were usually rhetorical, like God’s own. The Greek philosophers thought of God as an Engineer or an Architect, and the Christian theologians as a Judge, but the Jews made him One of the Family—and I think the God of the old days must have been like him, a brooder in dark corners, minding everybody’s business and keeping himself aloof, jealous, stroking his ego like a beard. Olav hasholem.
Anyway, my grandfather’s insight was true in at least one respect: fifty centuries after Moses my family still had traces of the old desert restlessness in their blood. Of the true breed of luftmensh! After living up in the air for a whole year, they would pack up the apartment like a tent and move off to a greener oasis, quieter, where the people are more refined, from Staten Island to the Bronx to Manhattan to Brooklyn (somehow by-passing Queens) so that with each shift I had to pull up my stakes in the gang and the neighborhood and start all over again.
By the time we finally settled in Brooklyn in the late summer of 1930, I had absorbed so much street savvy up and down town that I was already something of a Culture Hero, with new accents, new games, new angles. But with or without Culture—to be a new kid in a strange neighborhood is an all-day lonely drag. We lived in a lower-middle class section of Brighton Beach dominated by one gang of kids, the Trojans, who would have nothing to do with me.
At first I didn’t mind eating cold chicken by myself, since there was so much to see and do. From where we lived I could smell Coney Island in the daytime frying in its deep fat; and at night, of course, there were Wonder Wheels, Freak Shows, Arcades, Coasters, Whips and Reels in a blaze of neon down to the slums. On the other side was Manhattan Beach, “a community of prosperous homes and gardens,” fronting on Sheepshead Bay, which was filled with fishing boats and yachts. Brighton itself was the middle-class axis of this seesaw, sometimes tipping its families up and sometimes down. And in those early days of the depression, when capitalism was afraid of its own shadow and there was nothing to fear but fear itself, I could sense the anxiety of everyone to keep his place on the balance.
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Until the cold weather came, I spent the days hunting and exploring.
But nothing can be more barren than a summer resort in winter, especially when you’re without friends. Loneliness drives you out of the house and back up again—“Et faim [fait] saillir le loup des bois,” as Villon said, who knew what it meant. You can read the old books over once more, Bomba the Jungle Boy, Poppy Ott, Tom Swift, Baseball Joe, etc., but there’s no one around with whom you can trade and discuss the fine points. You daydream. At night the “heys” and whistles of kids aren’t for you. When you see them in school, or after school in the candy store wearing their blue flannel jackets with red blazon: TROJANS, there’s no familiar greeting, only a scraping of curious foils—but their eyes glance you through and through.
Any move you may make toward rapprochement in this stage must be lightfoot, delicate, since at the least blunder in protocol you can lose Face, or be tied with a nickname for years like a tin can to a dog’s tail. They ignore you, they cut you out. And then the contumely of nebichs, mama’s boys, and small fry! Your pride rebounds like a billiard ball wincing from buff to buff in angles of refraction.
But at last from hanging around so much, the day does come when one of the Trojans is missing from a punchball game and they need an extra man. If you’re any good, you’re in. And now that the breach is opened you learn their names, the same set as on any other block: of course a Peewee, a Fatso, a Lefty; and a Herb, Willie, Sy, Izzy, Delmore, Manny, Dave, etc. There’s always a sissy and a tough guy, a wisecracker, a bully, a nice guy, a blowhard. All of them size you up more closely, watching the way you throw a ball and your style at the plate with questions in their eyes: Can they beat you up in a fight? Will you take their place on the team? These issues can be settled only after months of playing ball together and one or two fistfights. If you can beat up Willie, and Willie can beat up Sy, then you can beat up Sy and your rank is proven by syllogism—but still, the social equilibrium is so unstable that the sissy, whom everyone despised, might suddenly shoot up to a hero or the wisecracker lose his verve. Because I had acquired so much outside experience, I already had an edge sharp enough to penetrate the Trojan enclaves. Ulysses was needed no less than Hector. And when, for example, I introduced the game of slug-ball from the Bronx, my position became really solid, since any new game is a victory in the constant battle against big-city cramp.
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The streets of New York must have been virgin once, artless and unenhanced. But, by our time, the vacant lots and fields where the kids used to play baseball and football had already been supplanted by five- and six-story apartment houses until there wasn’t a gap for miles. Where and how to play what was a problem. Parks were crowded with mothers wheeling baby carriages, and the schoolyards were taken up by girls playing potsy and skipping rope:
One, two, three alarey
I spy Mrs. Sary, etc.
It was no use trying to drive them out of the yards by terror, they would run to the custodian on any provocation. There was only one thing to do: take over the street. The brickwork and moldings of buildings, stoops, abutments, cornices, rungs on fire-escape ladders, the squares of sidewalks, even sewer covers were adapted to some sport which was then given a set of rules and a name.
Slug-ball was so conceived. The day I first introduced it was a hot afternoon in August, and a few of us were sitting around on the curb with nothing to do, wondering whether we should hitch a ride on the back of a trolley to Prospect Park or gyp some candy from Epstein’s store on the comer when, suddenly, I remembered slug-ball. A smash! Unless the war has broken the great tradition, the ball is still being slugged in Brooklyn.
Slug-ball is played off the sides of apartment houses on a court that is four sidewalk boxes in area, with the cracks serving as boundary lines. As one of a large family of games such as stoopball, boxball, hit-the-crack, etc., which are enclosed and restricted by the sidewalk, it demands an ability to manoeuver freely in tight Mondrian forms. Weight and strength are no advantage: only celerity, jump, a shrewd eye, and a quick hand. The kid who knows how to slice the ball and to cut corners with precision can trim anyone bigger and stronger than himself.
In the country, positions would have been reversed. But that is the difference between the City Character and the Country Character, which is, really, a difference in state of mind and disposition of soul. Between the two there is a breach as wide as that which divides Plato and Aristotle. The geometrical forms of the city impress themselves upon the consciousness of anyone who grows up with them; they impose a way of seeing and thinking. But the country is natural, that is to say, raw, contingent, unassorted and particular, and must itself be informed by the mind. If a ball is hit on a grass field it can strike a leaf or a stone and shoot off in any direction; but on the street, against hard cement, the angle of return is determined strictly by the angle of delivery, so that any kid with chutzpah, who knows all the angles, can always come out ahead of the game.
We played hard with a will to win so strong it willed itself. Sometimes we became so engrossed by a punchball or a stickball game that night would fall without anyone’s being aware of it, and only our fathers coming home from work cranky, on the El, or the cross yells of mothers from both sides of the street, frantic over dinner growing cold, could ever break it up. If any one of us tried to leave in the middle of a tight score, he had to fight his way out.
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When the immie (marble) season rolled around in the spring, a fever of acquisitiveness would erupt over the whole neighborhood, and we would play for them by day and by night under the street lamps. We pitched them along the curb, letting nothing stand in our way, sometimes scooping through puddles of mud and even under parked cars. My hands would be grimy and warted from the gutter; I smelled of the gutter—but O the sweet stink of property! To fondle in my pocket the cool, round smug glass immies like cats’ eyes, purple, green, orange, lemon; heavy reelies made of steel; transparent glassies; milkies as pure as the white of egg; to feel them there was a capitalistic joy that transcended and eclipsed the vulgar interests of Rothschild or J. P. Morgan.
Sudden passions for checkers, bottle-caps, political-campaign buttons, the tops of Dixie cups, would rise and fall like jags on the stock market. The currency didn’t matter much since everything was redeemable at the street exchange, six bottle caps for one immie, two buttons for a checker, etc., depending upon the season and the fluctuations of supply and demand. Sometimes the bottom would drop out of the Dixie cup market, leaving those who had speculated in them with a stock of worthless cardboard. But immies and checkers were always secure. You couldn’t go wrong with immies and checkers.
No matter what went on at the curb—immies, hop-scotch, ringelevio, or slug-ball—they were all attacked by mothers who complained because they had to complain, and, even more, by the old ones, those zedas with embroidered yamelkas and their white beards worn like orders upon their chests. They wondered whether we were Jews or a new kind of shagitz. On a sunny day they would take down their chairs and sit out on the street, massive and still as Druids, rarely exchanging a word with one another, but watching us with their slow eyes. At such times we would always take care to go to the other end of the street, as far as possible from their Klieg-light scrutiny like the stare of conscience. But sometimes we couldn’t help meeting one coming from the synagogue, and then we would all have to stand by sheepishly while he asked us questions in Yiddish about our mothers and fathers, how much Talmud we knew, etc., until he left us, shaking his head from side to side.
They cramped our style, these old ones. If we wanted to play a game which involved some roughhouse, like Johnny-on-the-pony—in which one side would line up against the wall with their heads under each other’s legs and their backs up, while the other team across the street would take running leaps and pile down hard on top of them, trying to break the bucking pony—for such games we had to go out of the neighborhood. And even then we could never feel secure. If anyone were hurt the news would surely be blown like a cloud over every family on the block and a gray continual nagging would rain indoors for weeks.
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Nevertheless, we couldn’t give up these games. Our text was not from Isaiah, but the Book of Kings. To the North were the Falcons: a gang of kids with names like Pat, Mike, Danny, Frankie. And to the South were the Wolverines: kids called Tony, Angelo, Pete, Rocky. When they burst out of their own neighborhoods and descended on ours, as they frequently did in rough gangs, we had to stand up to them.
Halloween was the traditional time for street fights. And the night before, we filled all the silk stockings we could find with flour, broke up crates and boxes and rubbed colored chalk on the slats of wood. In the morning when we met one another we compared our weapons, whacking them on the sidewalk and on fireplugs in anticipation. We were never disappointed, they always came.
“Here they come!” The street contracts like a heart. There on the corner, two or three Philistines, standing close together to pool their courage, survey the street. Behind them is the rest of the gang, the bigger and tougher kids whose faces we know from the past. Soon these too come from around the corner with a swaggering nonchalance. We exchange insults.
They: (personal) Hey Moe, ya fader sleeps wid ya muder.
We: (political-satirical) Hey Angelo, watsadama ya no lika da Mussoleen?
They: (religious) Hey Ike, we got what da Rabbi cut off.
We: (the last word) Send it back to da Pope; he needs it.
Suddenly we are caught unprepared by a fusillade of prune pits which they had concealed in their pockets. We rush them, and they fall back. They rush us and we fall back. A free-for-all begins. And the hullabaloo arouses the whole neighborhood. Somebody’s mother opens a window and heaves out a pail of water—pishach! A butcher, leaving his store and his customers, charges out in his bloody apron to separate us. Suddenly someone spies the blue coat of a policeman racing toward us, and the alarm is CHICKeeeee! We scatter.
It was all over in fifteen minutes. Later when we emerged from basements and lobbies, still pumping for breath, we sat down on the curb and crowed. We didn’t give a hoot for the interdictions and naggings and curfews which would follow. In that first release of tension and sweet lift of gravity after battle, none of these things weighed a feather.
When the Old Guard heard about it, as they always did somehow, they were triumphant—we were growing up hooligans, bums, outcasts, Cossacks! They painted a picture of our decline and fall stage by stage down to the steaming fosse of Perdition, until someday we would be eating pig and pulling beards on the streets of New York.
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The issue between them and us was drawn. And any kid who put on more than an outward show of religion was regarded as queer, on their own side. Our fathers mediated, improvisionary patchers, trying to play both ends against the middle. The dazzle of America was still so bright in their eyes, it blinded them to what was happening on our side of the street. Although it was their generation which had inverted the Messianic hope of the Jews into socialism, they could still not let go of the old ways. And who could have blamed them if sometimes they mistook the, vision of Elijah for the figure of Uncle Sam with his glad hand, high hat, and star-spangled vest? Confused, troubled, they were pulled by the old and the new, but, as time was on our side, they let us have our way which was more and more becoming theirs as well. And when zeda died, the old life he represented passed with him.
(His picture in a gilt frame was first hung in the parlor, but after a few years we found it didn’t look “nice” with the new furniture, and so zeda was relegated to the bedroom. A Van Gogh print was put in his place.)
American holidays began to displace the Hebrew, just as American newspapers displaced the Day and the Forward. The Friday night candles disappeared, and the two distinct sets of ware, one for meat dishes, one milk, were washed in the same sink. I remember—I am ashamed—I would shush my parents whenever they spoke Yiddish on the subway or the street. Everybody knew that the more Americanized families had the jump on success, and who didn’t want to be a success? Don’t be a sucker. $ was the sign of the Good Life.
Of course, certain of the more important Hebrew holidays were still celebrated: Rosh Hashonah, Yom Kippur, Passover. When zeda was still alive and could fire the four great questions at us over the matzoh and the wine, the Passover had a holy zeal.
Then it was: l’shana habaa b’ara d’Yisrael.
But now: This year in Flatbush; next in Forest Hills.
For two or three days of the festival there would be nothing but matzoh on the table—matzoh meal, matzoh balls, fried matzoh, egg matzoh, whole wheat matzoh, matzoh plain, until the whole family was thoroughly fed up with matzoh in any form. We longed for our daily bread. And once, this was the turning point, I think it was my eleventh or twelfth year, I was secretly given money in the middle of Passover and sent to an Italian grocery a few blocks away to buy a loaf. To avoid meeting anyone I knew I plotted a long route to the store, and I even carried an old knapsack to hide it from the neighbors. Everyone on the block must have been doing the same.
It was the neighbors who had to be placated by a show of religion, the neighbors who minded everybody else’s business; and as for God—he was a very distant relative who never visited us any more, in business for himself.
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My friends and I were at that time attending the Talmud Torah in preparation for Bar Mitzvah. Three afternoons a week after school, we would sit cheek to cheek with an old Rabbi who had a beard like steel wool, swaying and chanting with a copy of the Talmud open before us, he in his cracking bass, we in our rising treble. When things were going well, he would sit in his velvet chair, his eyes half shut, picking his great bearded nose with his little finger while he mumbled after us. But whenever the noises of the street pulled us away from the lesson, we were pulled back again by a rough rap on the knuckles or a cuff on the side of the head. We were glad to get up and get out.
The year of the Bar Mitzvahs—then we were alive! We were climbing the last hump of childhood. From an inner distance, we could hear the reverberations of sex growing closer and louder. Some of my friends were actually dressing up (no more knickers), and even—this was prodigious—giving up a punchball game to hang around with the girls. The girls themselves had known the exhilaration of heels and silk stockings long before, the little harpies, waiting to pay back the old grudges.
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In that twilight period when the values of the adult world came into collision with our own, some of us surrendered to them entirely, others tried to compromise, and there were some who resisted until as late as sixteen, joining groups of small fry. For the first time, the family position and fortune made a difference in our own status. Even a touch of anti-Semitism came in—it did not pay to look too Jewish, especially for the girls. There was, also, a breakup of caste—the athletes felt the mace of power growing soft in their hands, while the rich, the smart, and the merely good-looking felt it stiffening in theirs.
I remember the whole time as a continual bazaar of parties and celebrations. Every other week, one after the other, I saw my friends rise up and declare their manhood while the rest of us sat in the back rows, apart from the relatives, giggling and throwing spitballs, with our yamelkas slanted on the side of our heads at a sharp angle.
So then, we were admitted.
But where? For what had we been prepared? Certainly not for the ritual despair of our forefathers, the Wailing Wall, the lost Temple and the rest, although we knew we could never resign from the old contract with the past, our long history bonded by memory and always annealed in the present. But what was our point of view?
What, in short, was the angle?
A New York question, rhetorical, rebounding from its own answer! It was New York we were prepared for, and New York, half-Jewish, which took us in.
New York! Ghetto of Eden! We go back always where we come from, in memory, to and from ourselves. The things that made us what we are made you. With your five bright boroughs of a superlative quincunx and your streets laid out in gyres, diamonds, squares, and rhombs like those perfect forms which Plato thought lay in the burrows of the Mind and which Nature could only roughly approximate, to see you is an intellectual joy, to think of you is to be re-identified with oneself!
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