In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  It is overlaid with a lifetime of education and I can, with very little trouble, enunciate carefully and make use of an enormous vocabulary and yet the Brooklyn in me will shine through. Not the most careful effort in the world will wipe it out completely.

  Without any effort at all, I can peel off the overlay of learning and speak pure lower-class Brooklynese, complete with all its peculiarities of pronunciation and intonation. Another peel, and I can speak, quite effortlessly, the Yiddish-accented English of someone not long off the boat, the kind my parents spoke. One last peel and I can speak Yiddish itself.

  We moved into the East New York section of Brooklyn, and the first apartment we lived in was located on the ground floor at 425 Van Siclen Avenue, between Sutter Avenue and Blake Avenue. 1

  East New York was heavily populated with Jews and Italians at the time and much of it was the respectable home area of quite poor people intent on making their way up in the world. Our own particular apartment was nothing lavish. There was no electricity; we used gas jets. There was no central heating; we had a cast-iron stove, which my mother started with paper and kindling.

  Fortunately, I didn't know that this represented slum living. It was home to me, and I was happy. My memories start here, for I remember the stove well, and I was particularly fascinated by it. I was always on hand to watch the fire start, or to watch my mother knead dough and make noodles, with the knife going so fast that the roll seemed to separate into fifty pieces simultaneously.

  It was not, however, a happy time for my parents. For the first

  1 1 feel a little silly giving statistics of this sort. I mean, who could possibly care what the exact address was? Yet these are among the questions I am sometimes asked: "Exactly where did you live when you first came to the United States?" I hope, though, that no one is thinking of making a pilgrimage to the site. It was lower class when I lived there and it has gone downhill steadily ever since.

  time in their life, they were functionally illiterate, since all around there were signs they couldn't read, even very fundamental ones, such as street signs and store-front signs. They could not even make out the letters and get some notion from the sound.

  My father told me that a short time after he came to New York, he saw a sign in Hebrew letters on a store front in the distance, and he rushed toward it in order to read and prove to himself that he could read. He got there and the sign said, as he pronounced the Hebrew letters, "Vindehz Gefikst." It was a kind of Yiddish-flavored sign announcing that a glazier inhabited the premises but it did my father no good at all.

  In Petrovichi, my father had been a leading citizen, both socially and economically, and so had my mother. In Brooklyn, they were "greenhorns/'

  The flavor of the word has been lost now that it has been a long time since the United States has been buried under an annual flood of immigrants. It was a bitter insult, however, delivered with contemptuous laughter by those who were not greenhorns—say, those who had been in the country for five years.

  To be a greenhorn is, of course, not just to be unacquainted with the language of the country. It is to be unaware of the subway system details, to be unhelped by guiding signs, to be unable to ask for advice from anyone who didn't speak Yiddish (or Russian) and no way of being sure whether some particular person did or did not speak it. It was not knowing any of the simple customs of the country, what you asked for in a store, how you paid, how you ate, what you ate.

  Every greenhorn was embarrassed and humiliated fifty times a day through an ignorance that was not his fault. All self-respect was gone, all feeling of intelligence. It was as though one were the focus of laughter—and this was from other Jews.

  Gentiles were no problem in a way, for to them the difference between a greenhorn Jew and a nongreenhorn Jew was too small to take notice of, and a Russian Jew didn't care what Gentiles thought anyway. To a true Orthodox Jew, a Gentile was totally unimportant—except to the extent that he might be dangerous. All that counted to a Jew was his status among Jews, and my parents went from top to bottom in the space of time it took them to go from Petrovichi to Brooklyn.

  It was no wonder that it took them years to stop speaking longingly of Petrovichi. It was only when they were sure I was getting advantages I couldn't possibly have had in Petrovichi that they were finally reconciled.

  In theory, Uncle Joe was our cushion. I imagine he got us the

  apartment. I imagine he helped my father find work to do. He must have instructed my parents in the ways of the country. He could even have been counted on for financial help in an emergency.

  He was married and his wife's name was Pauline and they had a son named Martin. In addition to an Uncle Joe, I had an Aunt Pauline and a Cousin Martin and, in the first few years of my life in Brooklyn, they were an important part of the family.

  In theory, also, my parents would have had to be grateful to Uncle Joe, since he had made it possible for them to come to this country; he had sent them money; he had met them at the ship; and he continued to be there to help.

  It didn't work that way. Both my father and mother found it difficult—indeed, almost impossible—to accept help and instruction from my uncle and aunt. My father undoubtedly felt far more educated than my uncle was in the only way that counted in my father's own social milieu. My father was a scholar who knew the Bible and the Talmud Commentaries thoroughly, who could quote endless miles of Hebrew. My uncle, I'm sure, had none of this.

  Yet my uncle acted as though he were the man who knew, and in a hundred ways the world seem to prove that this was so. And my mother was made to feel by Aunt Pauline (who might even have been native-born—I don't know) as a total boor.

  I am quite certain that both Uncle Joe and Aunt Pauline had no intention whatever of being patronizing, or of humiliating my parents. Intentions, however, don't count. It's what they did. I doubt that they could have avoided doing so, however they tried. I doubt that my parents were justified in feeling humiliated. Still, an unjustified feeling of humiliation hurts just as much as a justified one—maybe worse, if deep in your heart you suspect you are being unfair to an apparent humili-ator who doesn't really deserve your resentment.

  As for myself, I was completely unaware of this until years later when my mother told me tales of how cruelly Aunt Pauline had treated her. I didn't understand of what the cruelty consisted until more years had passed and I was able to look back on it and understand that my mother simply hated the feeling of having to be instructed in fundamentals.

  Naturally, as the years passed and my parents learned their way around the new world and became less greenhorny and even began to learn the English language, they drifted away from Uncle Joe and Aunt Pauline. We never broke off relations, but kept them friendly and proper. However, we saw less and less of them.

  This was too bad. Relatives are exciting to children, and we saw so

  little of these, that, in effect, I could relate only to the immediate nuclear family.

  I was a spindly little fellow in Van Siclen Avenue. I had never been particularly big ever since my undersized birth, and my mother told me that I had lost weight on the trip to the United States and was so thin and weak by the time we came to Brooklyn (the measles didn't help, I'm sure) that I virtually had to learn to walk all over again.

  Although I was only three, I spoke a high-pitched voluble Yiddish, and because I looked even younger than three, my volubility was the more amusing. It became a game with the women in the neighborhood to say, "Isaac, how do you feel?" (in Yiddish, of course) in order to hear me answer, "Nishkusheh" which means "Not bad."

  It dawned on me before long, though, that it was useless to give that answer when they pushed the button, because the laughter puzzled and offended me. I asked someone what "nishkusheh" meant in English and the next time I was asked, I said, "Not bad," and they stopped asking.

  I was a little greenhorn myself. It never occurred to me at first that there was anything wrong with standing on the curb and urinatin
g into the gutter. Undoubtedly, this was standard in Petrovichi, where indoor plumbing must have been unknown. It didn't occur to my parents to stop me from doing this.

  I found out that it was wrong when I took up my position next to a woman sitting near the curb on a folding chair, and discovered that she hastily moved some distance away, while muttering angrily under her breath. The fact that I still remember this now, over half a century later, is indication enough to me of the profound impression it made. I didn't do it anymore after that.

  If my body was undersized and weak, my mind didn't seem to be in a bad way. My mother came upon me wrapped in thought as I was standing at the curb one day (it's her story, for I don't think I remember it) and said, "What are you doing, Isaac?"

  "Counting automobiles as they pass, Mamma," I said.

  There weren't very many automobiles then, so that I wasn't forced to strain my counting ability—but I've been counting things ever since. When I am in a public place and bored, I find even today that I cannot stop myself from beginning to count light bulbs, repeated decorations, holes in soundproofed ceilings, and so on.

  You don't really change so much as you grow older.

  3

  What I remember most of all about my stay at Van Siclen Avenue was my incredible longing to understand what the various signs I saw all about me meant. I had learned English almost at once, of course, picking up words and phrases like blotting paper, but that wasn't enough.

  Perhaps my interest in the signs arose out of the fact that I knew my parents couldn't read them and that it made them unhappy not to be able to do so. Since they couldn't help me, I had to take my curiosity and my ambition to the older boys on the street. This meant I had to endure a certain amount of impatience and teasing, but I managed.

  After I had learned the names of a few letters, I suddenly realized that I knew them all, for we had a rope-skipping game that went to the singsong tune of "Ay-bee-see-dee-ee-ef-jee; aich-eye jay-kay-elemenoh-pee," and so on. That meant I had the alphabet, and I just had to fit the shapes to the letters.

  When that was done, I started dogging after my unwilling teachers to get them to tell me what each letter sounded like, and they told me that. I was amazed to find that most of the sounds were those of the names—that em sounded "mmmm" and en sounded "nnn" and pee sounded "puh," and so on. It was very easy to remember.

  They also showed me how to write the various letters, in script, of course, and I remember learning how to make rns and n's and us first. I therefore promptly wrote a long series of those letters in random order, convinced that anything you wrote made sensible words.

  I showed it to one of the more co-operative of the older boys (and by an older boy, by the way, I mean someone aged eight) and asked him what it said. He laughed. I endured that and continued to ask him what it said and he finally told me, "It says 'mmummumunnnunum-mum.'"

  That instantly taught me that letters had to go in certain orders and only certain orders, so I studied the signs to see what made certain orders correct. When I sounded out a word and it seemed to make sense, that was a triumph. When I could see that the sign that read V-a-n S-i-c-1-e-n, sounded out to "Van Siclen," which I knew was the name of our street, I was overjoyed. When I worked out a word I was uncertain of I checked it with an older boy and he either confirmed or corrected. I began to gather a reading vocabulary.

  To this day I remember the sudden surge of triumph when I realized there must be such things as silent letters. My mother was going

  somewhere on the elevated and took me with her (it was always an exciting experience to stand high in the sky and look down on buildings and then see a train coming into the station). Once on the train, I amused myself by studying the sign on the window just opposite my seat. It said CONEY ISLAND.

  Carefully, I spelled it out with no chance of any help, for my mother couldn't read it. It seemed to spell out "sohnee issland" and it made absolutely no sense. I didn't know what a sohnee might be and I had never heard of an issland.

  Of course, I knew that a c was sometimes pronounced as though it were a k f but I didn't know what a kohnee was either.

  And then there was a flash of insight. I had heard people speaking of something that sounded like "konee iland" and I suddenly realized that that was what CONEY ISLAND said. Not only did this teach me that the s in "island" was silent and that this might therefore, by extension, mean that other words had silent letters, but I also knew how people determined what train to take to get where they wanted to go.

  Life, however, is not always a series of triumphs. When I first came across the word "ought," I couldn't pronounce it. I consulted my older-boy mentors, they pronounced it in a thoroughly improbable way, which I was nevertheless forced to accept. Having learned to pronounce it, I asked what it meant, and no one could tell me clearly—but such failures were unusual.

  As a result of this, by the time I was five years old and had not, as yet, started school, I knew how to read. Of course, I could only read very simple passages and only haltingly, but I could read without anyone having taught me to do so in any formal way.

  Eventually I felt secure enough in my ability to demonstrate it to my parents. They were astonished. They had, of course, been unable to teach me themselves (my father had reached the point where he could read English about as well as I could) and they had not known what I was up to.

  Naturally, my father asked, "How did you learn all this, Isaac?" and I was at a loss over how to explain the process. The easiest way to get out of it was to say, "I don't know. I just figured it out."

  That gave my father the idea that there was something strange and remarkable about me; something he clung to for the rest of his life. Many years later, he looked through one of my books and said, once again, as on that day so long before, "How did you learn all this, Isaac?"

  By then, though, I had learned better answers to the question.

  "From you, Pappa," I said.

  "From me?" he said, astonished. "I don't know any of this."

  "You didn't have to, Pappa," I said. "You valued learning and you taught me to value it. Once I learned to value it, all the rest came without trouble."

  Of course, being admired by your father (when he was a father like mine) wasn't all ice cream and chocolate cake. Once he got the idea that I could do anything, I had to bring back perfect test papers or be greeted with patriarchal disapproval.

  "I/," he would say, with the Talmudic intonation he used when he was trying to demonstrate something by impressive displays of logic, "a person can only get a 65 and he brings back a 65, that is wonderful and he is to be praised. If another person, however, can bring home a 100 and comes home with a 95, then he has done wrong and should be ashamed."

  It was clear that he expected me to bring home a 100 every time, and I didn't always. Poor Pappa! He was always convinced I was lying down on the job and that perhaps being knocked around rabbi-fashion would teach me better, but he couldn't bring himself to hit me.

  What he did on that long-ago day when he found out I could read, however, was to buy me a small dictionary, "so you can look up words and know how to spell them."

  My first thought was that it was surely impossible to find some one word among all the incredible number, but after I studied the book for a while, the workings of "alphabetical order" became plain and I asked my father if that was how the words were arranged. My father, who might have told me this to begin with, had clearly held back the information to see if I could work it out for myself, and was terribly pleased.

  After that, he would have me look up words for people so that I could be admired. (I didn't mind, for I found out quickly that I had no objection to being admired.) I remember that when Uncle Joe was visiting one time, my father who, to the end of his life, never learned that boasting was an odious habit, 2 said, "Isaac can find any word in the dictionary."

  Uncle Joe looked upon my skinny little body and my stupid face (to this day, no one who doesn't know me estimates
me as extremely intelligent at first glance—sometimes I have to tell them) and said, "Impossible!"

  Thinking that that was the word I was being asked to find, I found

  2 Neither did I, except that I learned to do it ingratiatingly—I think.

  it at once. I didn't know what it meant, but fortunately the spelling was sufficiently straightforward to allow it to be found. Uncle Joe must have been terribly impressed, but he managed to restrain his enthusiasm, something my father complained about afterward to my mother.

  5

  In February 1925, shortly after my fifth birthday, I entered kindergarten. If you want further statistics, the school was PS 182.

  My stay in kindergarten produces very little in the way of memories for me. In fact, school in general produces few memories that involve my schoolmates.

  The trouble was that I was always primarily interested in the subjects being taught rather than in the boys and girls who filled the other seats.

  This has often proved embarrassing, since people who were my schoolmates at some point in my life from beginning to end sometimes meet me and recall themselves to my memory—and I draw a blank.

  And yet, if I think hard, out of the five-year-old memory-section of my brain comes the name of Sophie, as the girl my age who lived next door and with whom I walked off to kindergarten the first day, each or us with a handkerchief pinned to our outer clothing in the beautiful hope that we would not use our sleeves to wipe our noses with.

  There was another girl in the kindergarten also, who was having trouble following the directions required to produce an intricate patriotic display. We were supposed to center a red circle on a piece of cardboard, pasting it down neatly with such paste as was left over after we had carefully drenched our clothes with most of it.

  Having completed that part of our task, we then pasted a smaller white circle, neatly centered, on the red circle, and a still smaller blue circle, again neatly centered, on the white circle. We thus ended with a beautiful red, white, and blue design intended to make our little hearts beat with national pride.