Each day, it became increasingly evident to me that where I saw
something at once, the others had to have it explained. Furthermore, whereas once I saw something, it was safely inside my head never to be lost again, the others would forget and have to have it explained again.
It never occurred to me to hide the fact. All kids are showoffs as a matter of course. If one child beat another in any game whatever, the natural tendency was to jump up and down and say, "I won! I won! You stink and I won!" Furthermore, children would go about saying, "I can beat you anytime," and "I'm the best marble shooter on the block." If you didn't say things like that, you would probably build up enough internal pressure to damage your inner organs severely. And if you were told that saying it was bad manners, it would make no more sense to you than if it were said in Sanskrit.
In a hundred different ways, involving everything but schoolwork, I had to listen to others boast. I had to get my own back. Since I knew that I was the smartest pupil in the class (and so did every other pupil in it), I said so on those occasions when it seemed appropriate to make the information known. Even when, as the result of skipping, I ended up the youngest pupil in the class by better than two years, I was still the smartest and knew it and made sure they knew it.
It had its difficulties. The larger, older, stupider classmates occasionally found me wearisome and decided that I would probably be a much more likable person if I were kicked into submission now and then. I had a certain amount of applied brightness as well, however. I found that if I picked out the biggest dumb youngster in the class and did his homework for him, he would constitute himself my protector.
Another point that helped save my life was the very fact that I was a disciplinary problem. The fact that I was periodically kicked into submission (in words, anyway) by my teachers somehow lessened the pressures within my classmates. I daresay the other kids decided anyone as sinful and wicked as my teachers held me to be couldn't be all bad, and it made it easier for them to resist the impulse to eradicate me.
The result of all this was that I never learned to develop that lovable quality called "modesty." I continue to be aware of my virtues and to inform others of them if it seems suitable to do so (and it frequently seems to me to be suitable to do so). I lay no claim to virtues I do not possess, however, and perhaps that may be considered a palliative.
Besides, I don't call my lack of modesty "immodesty," as perhaps I ought. I call it "cheerful self-appreciation."
This is not to say, of course, that my passage through grade school was one long scholastic triumph. I managed to trip up badly on one occasion or another. In one case it was not my fault, but I was badly embarrassed just the same. This is the way it happened.
By the time I reached 3A1 (which I entered in February 1927) I had accumulated enough of a lead over my classmates to be skipped once again. This time they put me right into 3B1 and didn't bother testing me out with the slow class.
But now the same thing happened as in the previous skipping. The class was doing something of which I was utterly innocent. They were studying geography, and I knew no geography. Until then, the only map I had ever looked at in detail was a map of New York City, which we had studied in an earlier grade. The five boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Richmond made up, I thought, all of the United States, and I pored over my own fifth of the nation-Brooklyn—with a great deal of pride.
Beyond the five boroughs that made up the United States, I knew, vaguely, that there was another nation called Europe, since that was where my father said we came from—and that was it.
In 1B, at least, when I knew no multiplication, I wasn't called on. In 3B, however, when I knew no geography, the teacher had no hesitation in calling on me. She knew I had just arrived from 3A and she might have spared me the needless humiliation—but, on the other hand, she might have heard rumors about me and decided that it would be good for my soul.
The subject under discussion was the continent of North America, and a young man had just explained (in response to questioning) that Florida (of which I had never heard) was a peninsula (a term with which I was unfamiliar) on the southeastern portion of the United States.
The teacher then called on me and asked me to locate Yucatan, and I drew a complete blank. Since I do not look bright even under the best of circumstances, my expression when I feel stupid is dumb beyond the dreams of Simple Simon. The class, therefore, which did not know me, responded in the usual manner and with the true sympathy one child feels for another who is under the harrow. They laughed very loudly.
When the afternoon was over, I asked the teacher if any of the new books I had been given would tell me where Yucatan was located. She pointed out the largest of them and said it was the geography book. That night, I went over every map in the book in detail, and you can bet I was never caught again on any geographical point.
8
Sometime in 1927, Marcia caught the chicken pox. My parents could not stay with her because they had to stay in the store, and Mar-
cia demanded company. I was elected. It was my duty as a big brother to take care of my little sister. So I did. She was indoors a week and, except when I was at school, so was I.
But you know the result. As soon as she was well and could run out and play, I got the chicken pox. At once I demanded that she now return the compliment and stay with me and keep me amused. Not a chance! She never came near me, and I was in this way introduced to the injustice of the world.
But what the heck, I survived. Nor have I too much to complain about in the matter of health. I am hardly ever disabled through infectious disease. I almost never run a fever. I rarely even catch cold. 3
Nor have I suffered much in the way of physical accident. At about this time, I cut my left thumb (the dorsal surface, I believe doctors would say) when a penknife with which I was playing slipped. I ran home dripping blood, and my mother, placing her thumb tightly over the cut on the thumb, ran me to the nearest drugstore.
We waited for the pharmacist to turn his attention to us. He didn't for quite a while, since selling cough drops is bound to take precedence over a bleeding child, and eventually my mother lifted her thumb carefully to see what the progress of the bleeding was. The bleeding, it turned out, had stopped, so she took me directly home without treatment and bandaged it. There was no problem, but I still have the scar on my left thumb today.
At about this time, too, I briefly made the acquaintance of a remarkable youngster. He was roughly my age, rather smaller than I was, and a little swarthier in complexion. I discovered, somehow, that he had the ability to tell stories that held me enthralled, while he discovered, simultaneously, that I was an audience most willing to be enthralled.
For some months, we sought each other out so that we could play the roles of storyteller and audience. 4 He would rattle on eagerly while we walked to the library and back, or while we just sat on someone's front steps.
For the first time, I realized stories could be invented, and that was a terribly important thing to learn. Until then, I had naturally assumed that stories existed only in books and had probably been there, unchanged, from the beginning of time, and that they were without human creators.
3 I have had my medical problems, however, which will be mentioned in due course but without undue detail. My own feeling is that there is very little of interest in the medical misadventures of someone else, and I don't want to bore you
4 It is hard to believe, as I look back on it, that he was the storyteller and I was the audience, but that's the way it was.
Of the tales my triend told me, I have only the dimmest of recollections. I seem to remember that they involved the adventures of a group of men who were forever facing and overcoming dangerous villains. The leader of the group, an expert in the use of all conceivable weapons, was named Doddo "Weapons" Windrows, and his lieutenant was one Jack Winslow. Another character was a black who spoke in what my friend (and I) conceived to be the w
ay blacks spoke, and a Chinaman who spoke in another variety of ludicrousness. (By now, you see, we had been to the movies often enough to absorb the casual racism of the times. We didn't know there was anything wrong in it— and how hard it is to shake vicious habits learned in childhood.)
Whether my friend actually made up the stories, or retold me material he had read, with adaptations, I didn't know. At the time, I had no doubt whatever that he was inventing it as he went along, and looking back on it now, his enthusiasm seems to me to have been that of creation and not of adaptation.
Both of us were careful never to let anyone overhear us in our enjoyment of the process. My friend once explained that the other kids would laugh at us. I suppose he felt his stories weren't first-rate and that while I seemed to appreciate them, others might not. Like any true artist, he did not care to expose himself needlessly to the possibility of adverse criticism.
As for myself, my chief fear was that my father would become aware of what was going on. I was quite certain that my friend's tales would come under the heading of "cheap literature" and that I would be forcibly rescued from their baneful influence. This I most earnestly did not want to happen, and insofar as I recognized that my friend's stories were akin in spirit to the tales to be found in sensational magazines, my hunger for those magazines sharpened.
Ah well, it didn't last long. The storytelling spree could not have gone on for more than a few months before my friend's family moved away from the neighborhood and, of course, took my friend along. He never returned; he never visited; he never wrote. I never knew where they had moved, and contact was broken forever.
It seems to me now that my storytelling friend could not possibly have gotten such pleasure out of telling stories without having tried to become a writer as he grew older. I know something about that particular compulsion and I am certain he would have tried. And if he had tried, it would seem to me that he must have succeeded.
And yet I remember his name—it was Solomon Frisch—and I am not aware that there is any writer by that name. Can he have used a
pseudonym? Is he dead? I don't know. But wherever you are, thank you, Solly; those stories meant a lot to me.
9
The candy store had not yet become the all-devouring entity it was eventually to become. My father was just past thirty and he was still young enough to carry the load all by himself for a limited period of time. In 1927, and again in 1928, my mother, myself, and Marcia spent two weeks of the summer in the Catskills.
We stayed in a town called Parksville, at a resort owned by a family named Siegel. It was not a fancy resort; it was little more than a farmhouse with some cottages about it.
I hated it.
I didn't like the country. I didn't like the food. I had some passing interest in watching the cows being milked, but I didn't like the way the cows smelled and I didn't like the danger of stepping into cow plop. Nor did I like milk given me to drink fresh from the cow. It was warm and it smelled and tasted funny.
Finally, I was furious because a calf—a little baby cow—was carried off in a truck. (Goodness, I still remember the calf in the open truck, with dabs of cow manure stuck to it here and there, mooing mournfully as it was carried off.) The mother cow bawled for a whole day and when I innocently asked why they didn't give her back its baby, they told me that the calf was to be slaughtered. I was horrified; 5 I counted the hours till I could get back to the sweet and gentle city.
10
The year 1928 had several high points for me, at least one of which concerned me very nearly.
Once a year of school had confirmed, extended, and intensified my ability to read and write far beyond what I had managed to attain on my own, the next step was to teach someone else how to do this. I needed a victim and they were not easy to come by. The other children in the neighborhood were either older than I, so that they knew how to read (in some more or less stumbling fashion) or younger than I, but
5 What a hypocrite I was! And am! Do you think I would give up eating meat because I can't bear the thought of animal slaughter? Do you suppose that I'm not crazy about veal and eat it as often as I can? As long as I don't witness the slaughtering, I'm fine. If it's done without my knowing it, it doesn't bother me— which is the trouble with the whole world.
inaccessible. The only possible subject for immolation at the burning altar of my desperate desire to teach was my sister, Marcia. She was both illiterate and accessible.
So I began to teach her, possibly during her siege of chicken pox, though I can't remember this clearly. Poor Marcia was a most unwilling pupil, but I had no intention of being foiled out of the fun of teaching just because she would rather do something else.
I got a slate and chalk and made up my own letter cards and word cards, which I would shuffle and then have her identify. Under my merciless browbeating and thanks to her own native intelligence, she learned how to read and write before she ever went to school. In fact, she was better at it than I had been, for she had a firm and dedicated teacher, which I had not had.
In September 1928, it was time for her to enter school. My father went to school to register her (he, instead of my mother, because he was planning a coup). I went with him to show him where to go once he got inside the school.
Some teacher was registering the new students who were waiting in line—all of them scared into catalepsy. The greenhorn parents who accompanied them seemed equally scared. When it was Marcia's turn, my father marched her up to the desk and said in what was by now clearly understandable (though heavily accented) English, "I would like to have my little girl enter the second grade."
The teacher looked up in surprise, and adopting the natural tone one of them would take to a greenhorn, said, "Are you crazy, mister? Children enter school in the first grade."
My father was not frightened. He had frequently dealt with Russian officialdom and he took this hectoring attitude as the small change of the profession. He said, "But my little girl can read. Give her something to read."
The teacher laughed scornfully and opened a second-grade reader. "Here," she said, "read this, little girl."
Marcia rattled it off unhesitatingly, and into the second grade she went.
That same month I passed another kind of milestone.
My father came to the United States with every intention of making it his permanent home, and that meant citizenship. He took out his "first papers," a declaration of intent, after he had been in the country for three years, and in September 1928, when he had been in the United States for 5V2 years, he received his "second papers"—the real thing—and became a naturalized citizen at the age of thirty-one. 6
6 My mother did not become a citizen until 1938, ten years later.
On my father's citizenship papers, as on his passport, his two children, both minors, were mentioned. That meant Marcia and I automatically became naturalized citizens on our father's papers. I have thus been an American citizen since I was eight years old.
11
Something that was less important, but more noticeable, to me, was that my father did a little moonlighting. How he managed it, I don't know, considering all he had to do in the store, but he actually had taken up part-time duties as a bookkeeper at the local synagogue.
He had had bookkeeping duties in Petrovichi in his father's business and in his co-operative ventures, which he ran after the revolution. He even kept meticulous and detailed books for the candy store, even though for the income he commanded in those days there was no income tax to make it a necessity.
I suppose he welcomed the opportunity to exercise his expertise in this direction, especially since it gave him the opportunity to indulge in his beloved disputations over the Holy Books and to display his knowledge of the Talmud. After five years of being a virtual illiterate, he could once again shine as a learned scholar.
If he were going to be a secretary at the synagogue, he felt he would have to attend services now and then. He had his regular seat in the sy
nagogue in row J, and he would attend Sabbath services on Friday evenings now and then and take me with him.
He would be there in his hat and prayer shawl but would never sit with me in the seat until the services started. Before that (and he was always early, since the social period before services was the best part) he would be speaking to others somewhere in the aisles or in the back. I was always craning my neck to look for him since I feared he might forget I was there and leave me in the strange place.
It was indeed a strange and fearful place—the balcony where the women sat (for it was an Orthodox synagogue, and the sexes were segregated), the ceremony with which the scrolls of the Torah were brought out and taken from their velvet covers and opened to the appropriate verses, the intonations of the prayers in an incomprehensible language, the wailing of the cantor. I even remember the blowing of the shofar, or ram's horn, on the high holiday period of 1928 and the difficulty the blower had in making it sound.
What fascinated me most was Hebrew, for here again I was illiterate. It was a language written in letters I didn't know, letters that were both more complicated and prettier than the by-now prosaic letters of the Latin alphabet.
My father, of course, read the Jewish newspapers, in particular The Day. (The most important of the Jewish newspapers was The Forward, but my father disapproved of its politics and wouldn't touch it.) The Hebrew block letters had therefore been tantalizing me for some time.
I asked my father if Hebrew had an alphabet the way English had and he showed me the letters in order and told me their names. I asked him how they were sounded. He told me the sounds of the consonants and which letters were used as vowels in Yiddish (Hebrew itself has no vowels, but uses little "diacritical marks" for dullards who need the help). Once he had done that, I said, "Good. Now I can read Yiddish."
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 10
