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

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  Since I had never been told anything at all about blacks, I accepted my teacher as someone with a different complexion, as I would have accepted a redhead as someone with a different color of hair. She was a warm, comforting teacher who smiled readily, and she was delighted with me when she discovered she didn't have to teach me to read.

  She was, in fact, too delighted with me, for ignoring the fact that I was equally delighted with her, she got rid of me. After about a month in her class, she had me put ahead into 1B2. (That was the only time I was ever in the 2 classification, and it was done so that I wouldn't be too disadvantaged at beginning a class a month late.)

  4

  One of the big excitements in school was the terrific question at the end of each term: Will you be "promoted" or "left back?" Being left back was an unspeakable disgrace that would bring shame on your parents. Fortunately, few children were left back. (Nowadays, I think no one is, which may be a good thing, since children who were left back were so endlessly humiliated at being with other children younger than themselves that they tended to resign from the human race and never learn anything again.)

  What happened, on rare occasions, was being "skipped." That meant being shoved ahead a grade in the course of the term. That had its good and its bad, of course. (Doesn't everything?)

  The good was that you weren't held back by the others so that (a) you yourself didn't become frustrated and bored and (b) you didn't get beat up by the other kids for showing your angry contempt for them, and (c) your parents were very proud and wrote letters to all their relatives and friends, thus making themselves and you well hated.

  The bad was that you were younger than the rest of the class and got to thinking of yourself as younger. Thus, when people ask me if I was a child prodigy, my invariable answer is, "Yes, I was—and still am." It made it difficult to make friends on an equal basis, of course, de-

  stroyed friendships that had already been formed, and encouraged an obnoxious and insufferable air of superiority that surrounded one with universal hostility.

  At the time I was skipped, however, none of these things bothered me. Thanks to the skip and to my mother's lie about my age, I was a year younger than anyone else in 1B2, 5V2 years old to their 6V2. But what did I care about that? What did bother me was that I was lonesome for my nice black teacher. (For some years after I kept hoping I would have another black teacher, but I never did. Never. She was my one and only.)

  I still remember her squeezing into my seat with me and moving her finger along the words as I read: "Dickie Dare went to school. On the way he met a cow. 'How do you do?' said Dickie Dare. 'Moo, moo/ said the cow."

  Dickie Dare went on to meet a sheep, a pig, and a goose, who went "baa, baa," "oink, oink," and "s-s-s," respectively. Why children in the city slums should be told about meeting animals on their way to school is a mystery. School books tend to be at least half a century behind the social facts I guess.

  My black teacher was not there in 1B2 and neither were any of the children I knew. What's more, I had come across addition in 1A1 and got the idea instantly, but in 1B2, the children were subtracting and that was a complete mystery.

  I was very frightened at that, for at that time (and today, too) not understanding upsets me. I managed to get the idea, though. After listening to the different children stumble out the fact that 3—2=1 and 5—3=2, it dawned on me that what they were doing was the reverse of addition, and a great relief flooded over me. I could do that.

  What was worse was that the classes were staggered, and 1B2 was let off for lunch half an hour earlier than 1A1 was. Ordinarily, my mother was waiting there at the school gate to take me home, feed me, and then bring me back to school. (There was no school cafeteria in those days—at least not in PS 182.) Now I came out and, of course, she wasn't there. After all, she had not been told I was to be skipped, and, for that matter, neither had I.

  My first reaction at finding that my mother wasn't there and that I was not to go home in security was, of course, to cry. The crying meant nothing. I was not frightened or unhappy. It was just the appropriate response to being alone, present in the young of the species as an instinct, I suppose.

  I went walking home, wailing, and a man, his heart touched at the sight of a five-year-old boy walking down the street crying, stopped and

  said, "Are you lost, little boy? Where do you live?" (That is the purpose of crying, I suppose, and its survival value; it rouses the protective instinct in adults.)

  I stopped crying at once, looked up at him in indignation, and said, "Of course I'm not lost. I know where I live." (What did he think I was? A little kid?) Having put him in his place, I resumed my wailing and continued to walk down the street.

  I walked into the apartment, and my mother, who had counted on another ten minutes before having to leave for school, stared at me in panic. "Isaac, what are you doing home? How did you get here?"

  I told her. She prepared lunch quickly and got me back to school, but from that day on, she never called for me again. Once it was established that I knew the route and could negotiate it without disaster, that was it for young Isaac. And, of course, once I knew in advance that my mother would not be there, there was no point in crying.

  The next morning, though, I carried through a little plan I had worked out. I returned to 1A1 and took a seat in the back of the room, hoping no one would notice me. Fat chance! The teacher saw me, asked what I was doing there, and paying no attention to my sobbing response that I wanted to stay with her, she put my hand firmly in hers, walked me down the hall, and deposited me in the room in which 1B2 held forth.

  And now I found to my horror that the 1B youngsters were doing something with numbers I couldn't understand at all. To say that 7—3=4 was quite understandable once I gave it a moment's thought is one thing, but -7X3=21 left me completely in the dark. I couldn't imagine what you could possibly do to 7 and 3 that would get you 21.

  What's more, for homework we got a series of multiplication problems, and I went home deeply troubled. I might have asked the teacher to explain after class, but I couldn't very well do that. If I had gotten home five minutes late my mother would already have alerted the police of all five boroughs.

  At home, I tried to explain to my mother that I couldn't do the homework and, of course, I started to cry. My mother was unable to understand exactly what the homework was or why I couldn't do it. My father would, of course, have been able to help me, but he was at work, and my mother thought it would be quicker to get outside help. She therefore called in a neighboring girl, aged twelve (that is, I found out in later years that she had been aged twelve; at the time, I thought she was a grownup).

  The girl began drilling me in 2X1=2; 2X2=4; 2X3=6, and so on. Rather quickly, it began to seem very familiar. I asked her to wait a

  moment and got the five-cent copybook my mother had bought for me when I started iA. On the back of the book were reference tables telling me that there were 12 inches to a foot, 16 ounces to a pound, and so on. There was also a large square array of mysterious numbers that were numbered 1 to 12 down the left and 1 to 12 across the top, with numbers that increased erratically and symmetrically rightward and downward.

  "What is that?" I asked.

  "That," she said, "is the multiplication table."

  "In that case," I said, "I know how to multiply," and I sent her home. Having had nothing better to do, I had memorized the numbers almost as soon as I got the book, and from what she told me, I had seen how the multiplication table worked.

  It took me a bit of thinking, however, before I penetrated the fact that multiplication was repeated addition and could see the sense behind it.

  At the end of the term, it was clear that I didn't belong in the "slow" category, and I was promoted to 2A1, which I entered at the beginning of February 1926.

  The Candy Store

  While I was in the second grade, a great change came over our lives.

  During our first three years in the Un
ited States (where, by second-grade time, I had already spent half my life), my father did as he promised the Immigration Service official he would. He had turned his hand to anything honest that would enable him to support his fam-ily.

  I remember he worked as a knitter in a sweater factory, and I even have a dim memory of being taken there by my mother when she once had to take something to him. The factory was on Stone Avenue, near the edge of Brownsville, which was an even more depressed area than East New York, and I remember being quite uneasy as the bus (or trolley, I don't remember which) passed street after street after street. I had never been taken such a distance in my conscious memory and I was awed at the vast number of streets in the universe.

  (I remember my father telling me of a similar feeling when he first came to New York. He watched elevated trains pass by from some vantage point and he told me that his thought was, "Where do they get the people to fill all those trains?")

  The factory had intricate machines in which there were hundreds of thin metal extensions (if my memory does not play me false) like the keys of a hundred typewriters, all moving in complex combinations as they automatically wove a pattern into the sweater. There were also conical spools from which the wool was taken as the machines worked. I was fascinated and envied my father for being able to watch it all the time.

  While my father worked there, all was well, I suppose, but I think the factory must have gone out of business, from some fugitive remarks that linger in my memory. In any case, my father wasn't a knitter anymore.

  He tried his hand at being a door-to-door salesman of various things. There were definitely sponges among the products he sold, because I remember him telling me about that; and vacuum cleaners, because he had his sample cleaner in the house for a while; and maybe other things.

  My father was not, however, the salesman type. He was entirely too argumentative and did not know how to ingratiate himself. Add to that the fact that his command of the English language was still very weak and you can see that this was not his field.

  I don't recall, though, that we were ever in danger of being thrown out of the apartment for failure to pay rent, or that there was ever any undue shortage of food, so whatever the difficulties, he managed to support us.

  In 1926, though, in search of some sort of security, he put what money he had been able to accumulate into a candy store that existed at 751 Sutter Avenue, between Miller Avenue and Bradford Avenue. It was, in point of fact, just around the corner from our apartment.

  Candy stores were a product of the times. They required no education or skill and could be run by a greenhorn as easily as by a sophisticate. You sold discrete objects like pieces of candy, glasses of soda, newspapers, packs of cigarettes, and so on. You bought all these in quantity for a certain sum of money, and you sold them, one by one, for, in total, a slightly larger sum of money.

  Candy stores were incredibly convenient for a poor neighborhood. You could get small items there, sometimes on credit. You could change money, get stamps, buy one cigarette (for a penny; a pack of twenty cost thirteen cents in those days, and some packs sold for ten cents), and sit and talk with your friends while sipping a soda for half an hour.

  As for the owner, he was his own boss, and he could make a living provided he was willing to open the store at 6:00 a.m. and close it at

  i:00 A.M.

  Naturally, my father couldn't do this all by himself, but he didn't expect to. My mother had spent her time in a similar store in Pe-trovichi much of her life and she took up the task again. She went to sleep earlier than my father did, and he spent the last hours in the store alone, carefully washing all the glassware, going over the transactions of the day and entering them in the books, and getting everything neat and ready for the next day.

  He made up for that late hour by taking a nap every afternoon from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., and that afternoon nap became a fixed constant in the life of the family. We children were not allowed to make noise, and since breathing constituted noise, we were encouraged to stay out of the apartment altogether. In fact, it was my duty to stay in the store, if I weren't at school, in case my mother had errands I could run for her.

  At four o'clock it was my duty to wake my father, a task I performed in the most direct possible way. I would stick my head in the door and shout, "Wake up, Pappa. It's four o'clock." My father would invariably say, "I'm not sleeping," even though I had startled him awake in midsnore, and he would scramble into his clothes.

  Despite her work in the store, my mother had to take care of two small children, too, but she was used to that sort of thing. It meant that she could not learn to be a gourmet cook or develop much in the way of a culinary repertoire, but that would not have occurred to her anyway.

  She did lots of frying because that took little time, and lots of boiling because that took little supervision. We had boiled beef and boiled chicken frequently and I found it delightful, for soup always came with it. When she added potatoes, lima beans, barley, and anything else that wasn't green or orange, I loved it. When she indulged her penchant for putting carrots, peas, or cabbage into it, I loved it a little less.

  Along with the beef (or chicken) and soup, we were served with thick slabs of pumpernickel bread. Under her watchful eye I had to eat a mouthful of bread with every mouthful of meat or chicken, and if I ever (on purpose) finished my bread in advance so I could have some of the meat or chicken in my mouth undiluted, she would slice off another piece of bread for me. I think it was her feeling that a meal without an overflowing supply of bread was so lacking in essential nutrients that it would kill me.

  There were also lots of delicacies, such as chopped liver with hard-boiled eggs and onion, which she made herself. (She would chop the liver in a wooden bowl with a special chopping knife. It was very simple. She would just go chop-chop-chop at a steady five-per-second rhythm for half an hour. When I try it, even now as an adult, my arm falls off after twenty seconds.)

  She did the same thing with white radish in place of the liver. That lingers in my mind even more than chopped liver. The latter is a universal delicacy; the former I've eaten only in my mother's house.

  My mother also made something called "ptchah," which consisted of the meat and gristle from calves' feet with chopped hard-boiled eggs and who knows what else, the whole forming a thick soup that set into a hard jelly when it was cold. It was an acquired taste, and a great deal

  of it had to be forced down my throat before I got to the point where I loved it so much that I objected to anyone else eating any of it. 1

  And, of course, she made that ultimate delicacy, chicken fat ("schmaltz," we called it). She would render big lumps of the fat every time we had boiled chicken, along with chopped onion, and then strain off the onion and the hard, charred bits of skin. The fat itself was wonderful, but the leftover onion and skin were what I was waiting for.

  In between meals, we had bread and butter, or bread and cream cheese, or bread and chicken fat, or occasionally bread and jelly. In addition, we would have salami sandwiches, or, on rare occasions, expensive corned beef sandwiches. Whatever we ate there were those thick slabs of pumpernickel bread, though occasionally we might have rolls or bagels. And, on Saturdays, of course, we had a braided egg-bread called "khalleh," which was to ordinary bread what diamonds are to rhine-stones.

  And there was smoked salmon, sturgeon, whitefish, herring, gefilte fish, dill pickles, and much, much more.

  You don't adopt this dietary, by the way; you must be born into it and introduced into it gradually. Anyone who was not used to the food of the East European Jew and who ate a quantity of it at one time would undoubtedly die of pernicious dyspepsia at once. One helping of stuffed derma (with the intestinal wrapping—you've got to eat that, too) would alone slay its thousands, no doubt.

  Since I was weaned on it, I didn't appreciate the utter indi-gestibility of it. I ate it with delight and in as large a quantity as I could manage. The result is that I can, today, eat anything. I hav
e seen, with my own eyes, people stare at unfamiliar food and pick at it and decide that the taste doesn't agree with some hidden standard they carry in their taste buds. Not me. I am omnivorous.

  Of course, as I think of my childhood diet, I can't help but conclude that it was totally lacking in essential minerals and vitamins, so that despite the fact that I invariably cleaned up everything in sight, I remained bone thin through all my youth.

  I had to eat ravenously, by the way, because my parents always told me about the starving children in Europe and how they would long for the crust of bread I seemed on the point of throwing away—so I would eat it. After all, why should the starving children of Europe get it? Now that I look back on it, I don't understand the force of the argument.

  1 The Russian Tea Room in New York is one of my favorite restaurants and it has something called "studen," which is clearly a cousin of my mother's "ptchah," rather like skim milk is a cousin of heavy cream.

  My mother did not keep a kosher house. We never ate meat and dairy products at the same meal—out of simple habit (because both of my parents were brought up in households that were kosher)—and we never ate pork products for the same reason.

  Just the same, my mother didn't have separate dishes for meat and dairy, and she looked for ways to break away. She introduced bacon into the house to my utter horror. I wasn't horrified, you understand, at its being nonkosher, for I knew nothing about that, but only because it looked so funny. I assumed it was very fatty corned beef, so fatty as to be useless. And when she fried it up, I was repelled by the smell—but only for a while. Faced with it, I first endured, then pitied, then embraced.

  As a matter of fact, despite my father's deep and thorough religious education, he was not religious. In Russia, prior to the revolution, there was an insistent vein of secularism blowing from the West, and many young Jews were trying to rid themselves of the trammels of Orthodoxy and to become "modern." My father was one of these.