When I was four years old, German spies landed on Long Island in a submarine. Although they were quickly captured, there were rumors of other planned landings. If I couldn’t help our war effort by turning myself into a superhero, at least I could look out for German spies. Over the next few summers, which my family spent in a rented room near Rockaway Beach, a police officer paid us kids a penny a day to be on the lookout for “Kraut subs.” We took our job seriously and spotted a few suspicious objects that turned out to be birds, or flotsam and jetsam.
I remember both VE (Victory in Europe) and VJ (Victory over Japan) days. There was dancing in the streets, block parties, and prayers. Our soldiers, including several of my uncles, were coming home. (My father received a medical deferment because he had an ulcer, which my mother said was caused by my bad behavior.)7
We weren’t told of the Holocaust or Shoah, just that we had lost many relatives in Europe to Hitler (Yemach Sh’mo—“May his name be erased”). We cheered Hitler’s death, which, according to a Jewish joke, we knew would occur on a Jewish holiday—because whatever day he died would be a Jewish holiday!8
The “greenies” (recent immigrants, “greenhorns”) who moved to Boro Park from the displaced persons camps never talked about what had happened “over there.” The tattooed numbers on their arms remained unexplained, though we knew they were dark reminders of terrible events. Even my grandfather rarely talked about the noble role he had played in saving family members, because he knew how many friends had lost relatives in Europe. My maternal grandparents lost nearly all their families, except for one couple who had managed to emigrate to Palestine before the war.
I grew up in a home entirely free of any racial prejudice. My parents admired black leaders (we called them “Negro” or “colored”). My father, who sold men’s work clothing and underwear, had several black customers, whom he treated as equals. My favorite college professor was black. Once every two weeks my mother hired a “cleaning woman” to dust and help her with the house. Some were black. Some were white. A few were Jewish immigrants. The only bigotry I remember was directed against Hungarian Jews by my maternal grandmother. She had obviously brought her prejudice with her from Poland. Following the end of World War II, several Hungarian Jewish families moved into the neighborhood. My grandmother immediately expressed a dislike. I recall her joking about the recipe for a Hungarian omelet: “First steal two eggs!”
Among my other memories was Israel’s struggle for statehood. My family members were religious Zionists. We had blue-and-white Jewish National Fund pushkas (“charity boxes”) in our homes, and every time we made a phone call, we were supposed to deposit a penny. We sang the “Jewish National Anthem” (“Hatikvah”) in school assemblies. I still remember its original words, before Israel became a state: “lashuv l’eretz avosainv” (“to return to the land of our ancestors”).
One particular incident remains a painful memory. My mother had a friend named Mrs. Perlestein, whose son Moshe went off to fight in Israel’s War of Independence. There was a party to celebrate his leaving. Several months later, I saw my mother crying. Moshe had been killed, along with thirty-four other Jewish soldiers and civilians, trying to bring supplies to a Jewish outpost near Jerusalem. My mother kept sobbing, “She was in the movies, when her son was killed.” Israel’s war had come home. Everyone in the neighborhood knew Moshe. He had attended my elementary school, played stickball on my block, and was a hero. It was a shared tragedy, and Moshe’s death—combined with my mother’s reaction to it—had a profound and lasting effect on me.
My friends and I formed a “club”—really just a group of kids who played ball together. We named it “the Palmach”—after the Israeli strike force that was helping to win the war. We memorized the Palmach anthem, “Rishonim, tamid anachnu tamid, anu, anu Hapalmach.” (“We are always the first, we are the Palmach.”)
Vidal Sassoon
Several years ago, I spoke to a Jewish group in Los Angeles, and among the guests were David Steinberg (the comedian) and the late Vidal Sassoon (the style master). Steinberg mentioned to me that when Sassoon was young, he fought for the Palmach. (If you think that seems unlikely, consider that “Dr. Ruth” Westheimer served as a sniper in the same war.) I challenged Sassoon to sing the Palmach anthem, and before you knew it, Sassoon and I were loudly belting out the Hebrew words to the amusement of the other surprised guests.
Israel declared statehood in May 1948, when I was nine years old. Following its bold declaration that after two thousand years of exile, there has arisen a Jewish state in the Land of Israel (supported by the United Nations, the United States, the Soviet Union, and most Western nations), the nascent state was attacked by the armies of the surrounding Arab countries. One out of every hundred Israeli men, women, and children were killed while defending their new state—some in cold blood, after surrendering. Many of those killed had managed to survive the Holocaust. That summer I went to a Hebrew-speaking Zionist summer camp called Massad (where the counselor in an adjoining bunk was Noam Chomsky, then a fervent left-wing Zionist). We heard daily announcements regarding the War of Independence. We sang Israeli songs, danced the hora, and played sports using Hebrew words (a strike was a shkeya, a ball a kadur).
Shortly after Israel defended itself against the Arab attacks, we learned of a new threat to the Jewish people: Stalin’s campaign against Jewish writers, politicians, and Zionists. Stalin became the new Hitler as we read about show trials, pogroms, and executions of Jews. We hated Communism almost as much as we hated fascism. We were also frightened of the threat posed by the Soviet Union, with its atomic arsenal. Our school made us practice running to the “shelter” in the event of a nuclear attack. During my latter years in elementary school, I wrote the following poem:
Engines all around us roaring with steam
Powerfull [sic, powerful] bombers and jets that gleam
Sources [sic, saucers] in the skyline, vechels [sic, vehicles] on earth
Atomic energy surrounding us from birth
Medical wonders, and scientific news
Wonderfull [sic, wonderful] progress, we hope to never loose [sic, lose]
But someday, in the future when energy turns to bombs
Atoms spliting [sic, splitting] all around us recking [sic, wrecking] homes and farms.
Someday in the future we shall be in the past.
Without electric bulbs to warm us—and without the funsets [sic, furnace’s] blast.
These early memories contributed significantly to my emerging ideology and worldview. My family’s politics were liberal, Zionist, and anti-Communist. Presidents Roosevelt and Truman and Mayor La Guardia were our heroes.
Although there were plenty of discussions about current events, politics, and religion, our home had few books, little music, no art, no secular culture. My parents were smart but had no time or patience for these “luxuries.” Our apartment was modest—the ground floor of a two-and-a-half-family house. The upstairs was rented to my uncle, aunt, and their two children, while the finished basement was rented to my cousin and her husband, who had recently been discharged from the army. We lived in two small bedrooms, the smaller of which I shared with my brother. We ate in the kitchen. My mother’s dream, never realized, was to have “a real dining room.” The living room, which had the mandatory couch covered with plastic, was reserved for guests (who were rare). The tiny bathroom was shared by the four of us. The foyer doubled as a dining area for Shabbos meals. The total area was about one thousand square feet. But we had an outside—and what an outside it was! In the front there was a small garden and a stoop. In the rear we had a tiny back porch, a yard, and a garage. Since we had no car, we rented the garage to another cousin, who used it to store the toys he sold wholesale.
We were not poor. We always had food. But we couldn’t afford luxuries, such as restaurants. We passed down clothing from generation to generation and ate a lot of “leftovers.” (Remember the comedian who said, “We always ate leftover
s—nobody has ever found the ‘original’ meal.”) My mother has always said we were “comfortable.” (The same comedian told about the Jewish man who was hit by a car and was lying on the ground when the ambulance attendant asked him, “Are you comfortable?” He replied, “I make a living.”) I worked at part-time jobs beginning in elementary school and throughout high school and college—delivery boy, deli slicer, babysitter, Bar Mitzvah tutor, camp waiter and counselor.
Deli Guy
My first job was as a deli guy in a kosher delicatessen on the Lower East Side of New York. I tied the strings on the hot dogs and took pickles out of the barrels. One day I was locked in the freezer with an elderly worker, who figured out, fortunately for both of us, how to open the door from the inside. I also made deliveries on my bike. I couldn’t drive, because I was only fourteen. One of my teachers, to whom I made a delivery, had suggested I become a deli guy.
Nearly half a century later, I opened a kosher deli in Harvard Square, in partnership with several friends. We called it Mavin’s Kosher Court. The reviews were great, there were always lines to get in, but we were losing about two bucks a sandwich. With the high price of importing good pastrami and corned beef from New York, and with the need to close on Friday night and Saturday, we simply couldn’t turn a profit. And so in less than a year, we paid off all our debts and closed shop. It turns out I wasn’t suited to be a deli guy after all.
The social heart of our home was the front stoop. We conversed on it, played stoop ball on it, jumped from it, and slid down the sides. It was like a personal playground. On nice days, the family was on the stoop. We listened to the radio—Brooklyn Dodger baseball games, The Lone Ranger, Can You Top This?, The Shadow, Captain Midnight, and The Arthur Godfrey Show (we hadn’t yet learned of his anti-Semitism)—with the radio connected to an inside socket by a long, frayed extension cord. We ate lunch on the stoop, had our milk and cookies on the stoop when we got back from school, traded jokes and even did our homework on the stoop. Mostly, we just sat on the stoop and talked among ourselves and to passing neighbors, who knew where to find us. In those days, nobody called ahead—phone calls were expensive. They just dropped by.
In front of the stoop was what we called “the gutter.” (Today it is referred to as “the street.”) The gutter was part of our playground, since cars were rare. We played punch ball in the gutter, stickball in the driveway, and basketball in front of the garage—shooting at a rim screwed to an old Ping-Pong table secured to the roof of the garage by two-by-fours.
Our house became the magnet for my friends because we had a stoop, a hoop, and a gutter in front of our stoop with few trees to hinder the punched ball. (A ball that hit a tree was called a “hindoo”—probably a corruption of “hinder.”)
The stereotype of the Brooklyn Jewish home during the post–World War II era was one filled with books, music, art prints, and intellectual parents forcing knowledge into their upwardly mobile male children aspiring to become doctors, professors, lawyers, and businessmen.9 (The daughters were also taught to be upwardly mobile by marrying the doctors, lawyers, et cetera.)
My home could not have been more different. My musical training was limited to a year of accordion lessons (we couldn’t afford a piano), which ended unceremoniously when my cousin who lived upstairs threw my accordion (which cost $20) out the window because he hated “the noise” I was making. The living room bookshelves were filled with inexpensive tchotchkes. The only books were a faux leather yellow dictionary that my parents got for free by subscribing to Coronet magazine. When I was in college, they briefly subscribed to the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. There was, of course, a Chumash (Hebrew Bible) and half a dozen prayer books. I do not recall seeing my parents read anything but newspapers (the New York Post) until I went to college. They were just too busy making a living and keeping house.
There were no bookstores in Boro Park, except for a small used bookshop that seemed to specialize in subversive books. The owner, who smelled like his mildewed books, looked like Trotsky, who he was said to admire. We were warned to stay away, lest we be put on some “list” of subversives.
My parents, especially my mother, were terrified about “lists” and “records.” This was, after all, the age of “blacklists,” “Red Channels,” and other colored compilations that kept anyone on them from getting a job. “They will put you on a list,” my mother would warn. Or “It will go on your permanent record.” When I was fourteen, I actually did something that may have gotten me on a list
It was during the height of the McCarthy period, shortly after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been sentenced to death. A Rosenberg relative was asking people to sign a petition to save the Rosenbergs’ lives. I read the petition and it made sense to me, so I signed it. A neighbor observed the transaction and duly reported it to my mother. She was convinced that my life was over, my career ruined, and my willingness to sign a Communist-inspired petition part of my permanent record. My mother decided that I had to be taught a lesson. She told my father the story. I could see that my father was proud of what I had done, but my mother told him to slap me. Ever obedient, he did, causing him, I suspect, more pain than me.10
In addition to the “subversive” bookstore, our neighborhood had a library that was tiny and decrepit. When I was nearing the end of high school, a spacious library opened. We went there every Friday afternoon because that’s where the girls were and because we could take out up to four books. The two reasons merged when Artie Edelman realized that we could impress the girls by taking out serious books. Up until that time my reading of literature had been limited to Classic Comics.
Don’t laugh! Classic Comics were marvelous. Not only could we read about the adventures of Ivanhoe, we could see what he looked like! My first erotic desires were aroused by the illustration of the dark-haired “Jewess” Rebecca. (I have searched for a copy of this Classic Comic at flea markets to relive my unrequited adolescent lust.)
I recently came across the Classic Comic of Crime and Punishment. Having now read three translations of this great work, I was amazed at how faithful the comic was to the tone, atmosphere, and even words of the original. I tried to give it to my granddaughter, who was reading the book for class, but she politely turned down the offer, with an air of condescension that one accepts only from a grandchild.
Among the first real books I read were several to which I had been introduced by the Classic Comics: The Count of Monte Cristo, The Red Badge of Courage, Moby Dick, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. (The first three were better than the Classic Comic; the fourth, not as good!)
During my senior year in high school, I became a voracious reader, to the disdain of some family members. My uncle Hedgie (a nickname for Harry) would berate me for sitting around the house reading when I could be working or playing sports. “Be a man,” he would demand. “Get off your ass.” But I would stay in my tiny room, with my tape recorder playing classical music I had recorded off WQXR, the New York Times classical music station, or off a record I borrowed from the library and recorded from my friend Artie’s turntable. I also saved enough money from my jobs to buy a used copy of the Encyclopedia Americana. My friend Norman Sohn had found an old bookstore on Fourth Avenue in Manhattan that sold used encyclopedias, and the Americana cost only $75, as contrasted with the Britannica, which was $200.
During my early years, all we had was a small plastic radio that lived in the kitchen, unless it was moved near the stoop. When I was ten years old, we bought a ten-inch TV “console” that included a 78-rpm phonograph player that opened at the top. But my mother had situated her “good” lamp on top of the console, so I couldn’t get access to the turntable. With my Bar Mitzvah money, I bought a humongous Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder, which must have been a foot cubed. I could barely lift it, and the tape often tangled or split, but it was better than the wire recorder technology that it replaced.
I loved classical music, especially opera. As an adolescent I had su
ng alto in the local synagogue choir, and I had a fairly good voice. My passion for music took me to the Metropolitan Opera House, where for 50 cents, a student could get a seat with a table and a lamp if he came with a score of the opera. We would borrow the score from the library, take a train to Times Square, and listen to Richard Tucker, Robert Merrill, Jan Peerce, Risë Stevens, and Roberta Peters sing Carmen, La Bohème, and La Traviata. (We were forbidden to listen to Wagner, because he was an anti-Semite whom Hitler admired.)
I also became passionate about art. All kinds of art, from Egyptian and Roman sculpture to Picasso’s Guernica and Rodin’s The Thinker. There were no art posters or prints in our home. The walls had mirrors (to make the apartment seem bigger). But there were free museums all around us, and the library had art books—with pictures of naked women! I loved Goya’s Nude Maja, especially when contrasted with the clothed version, who I imagined was undressing just for me!
The girls loved to be asked on a museum date, and we loved to ask because it was free and it showed them that we had “culture” (pronounced “culchah”).
To this day I have no idea how I fell in love with literature, music, and art. I was never exposed to classical music or art, even in school, where our music teacher taught us “exotic” songs like “Finiculi, Funicula,” American songs by Stephen Foster, and an assortment of religious and Zionist Hebrew songs (“Zum Gali, Gali, Gali,” “Tsena, Tsena,” “Hayveynu Shalom Alechem”). Our art teachers tried to teach us to draw “useful” objects, like cars, trains, and horses.
My friends’ homes were as barren of culture as mine, with the exception of Artie Edelman and Bernie Beck, whose parents were better educated and more cultured than mine. I must have picked up some appreciation of music and art from them. When I went to sleepaway camp as a junior counselor, I came in contact with music and art through the “rich” Manhattan kids who had attended the expensive camp as paying campers and were now also junior counselors.
Taking the Stand Page 3
