My Old Neighborhood Remembered

by Avery Corman

  Some of this, revealed in another conversation a few years later, turned out not to be strictly true. My father did leave New York, trailing debts behind. But he did call my mother from somewhere in the South some days afterward and asked her to meet him and bring the children. Making a stand, my mother refused to do so. So it was not exactly abandonment. Thorough editing in this first revelation was not being done by mother, who was going for, what became known in our school studies, as The Main Theme.

  And then my mother added an additional piece of information about my father that was to have a lingering effect on my sense of self and my feelings about my background. She told me he had held up a candy store and was caught. My mother said she received a call to come down to a police station and at the station was a husband and wife who owned the candy store and my father was there. My mother said she got on her knees, crying, begging the couple not to press charges, that she had young children at home and couldn’t have their father in jail and they took pity on her and my father was released. So many questions arose about that incident, including the desperate state of mind he must have been in if the story were true, but the questions didn’t occur to me until I was older. What I came away with was that I had a father who was a bad man who didn’t love his children or he wouldn’t have run off, and didn’t even send us birthday cards, so bad a man that he held up a candy store. My mother concluded by saying that when she went out to work it wouldn’t have looked good if she had said her husband had left her, so she told people her husband was dead. And that was what I was to say if anybody asked. He was dead. That was all anyone had to know.

  You side with the parent who stays and such was my loyalty that for a few years I did maintain my father was dead. That broke open when I was about seventeen and my first real girlfriend asked me what was the saddest thing that ever happened to me. I told her when I had to bring my dog, Paddy, to the vet to be put down, and she looked at me oddly, and I knew somehow she was aware that my parents were divorced and knew I was lying, that it may have been common knowledge in the neighborhood, or she didn’t know at all and just thought I was simply a total jerk for not saying the saddest thing was when my father died, which I couldn’t say because he hadn’t. I went home and told my mother I had lied for her that night, but was never going to lie for her again.

  When my mother told me about my father she said she had learned you weren’t bar mitzvah-ed at twelve, as I claimed. It was thirteen, regardless. So we were back to normal on that particular front.

  Periodically, music teachers who made the rounds of Hebrew schools would come to teach us songs to commemorate holidays, songs like I Have a Little Dreidel and Rock of Ages. The music teacher at the Concourse Center of Israel was one of these roving music teachers. He was younger than our teachers, possibly in his thirties. We liked the singing, a break from the tedium. One afternoon when we were finished, he asked me to stay. He took me upstairs to the synagogue portion of the building to an alcove where there was a piano. He played a note and asked me to reproduce the note by humming it. I did and he repeated the procedure with several notes on the piano as I hummed accordingly. Then he said he wanted to see if I could sing in Hebrew and he played something I had never heard before and sang the accompanying Hebrew words. He played and sang a few times, then asked me to sing it with him and I did, as he corrected me. After a few minutes of this he told me I had a very good voice and I could reproduce notes I heard on the piano and he wanted me to be in a professional choir of his, that it was older men and some boys and they sang at weddings and bar mitzvahs and wore robes and it was a very special thing to do and if I did it I would also be paid. I was to speak with my parents at home. He would be back and we would discuss it further.

  All that about my father. And now this. Everything was too complicated. And I hated Hebrew School. I wanted no part of singing in a choir. I took the siddur, the prayer book our Hebrew School teacher said was holy and I took my other Hebrew School books and I threw everything down the incinerator.

  Then I started playing hooky from Hebrew School. Nobody played hooky from Hebrew School. It would be a sin. But then you had to believe in something about it to believe it was a sin and I didn’t believe in anything about it, not God, not the biblical stories. I played basketball when I was supposed to be in Hebrew School, I took walks, I passed the time. My mother was working, she didn’t know my whereabouts. My aunt couldn’t tell I was not going to Hebrew School. I often went there without coming home first. I can’t imagine what I was thinking with my fevered little brain, how long I thought I could get away with it before I was caught, what the outcome could be.

  After three weeks or so, somebody called the apartment from the Hebrew School office and asked what was going on, that I hadn’t been attending classes. My mother, furious, summoned me for an explanation. I said I didn’t want to go to Hebrew School anymore. Every Jewish boy in the Bronx went to Hebrew School and was bar mitzvah-ed. I was confronting her with a cultural impossibility. Given the recent revelation about my father and the rebellious child before her, she made a choice. She said I didn’t have to go, at least not immediately, but further down the road as it came closer to the assigned date for my bar mitzvah I would have to go back and finish up. They had told her at the school that I was a good student, which meant I would be able to return with enough time remaining to learn what I needed to learn for my bar mitzvah. I made the deal.

  I didn’t attend Hebrew School for the next six months or so and then as the time came closer to my bar mitzvah date, scheduled for December 1948, I returned — with one slight problem. In the time I was away, and as part of my rebellion, I could no longer identify the letters in Hebrew. I had forgotten everything. I wasn’t pretending. It was all a blank to me.

  My mother must have engaged in some behind the scenes discussions because I was told the son of my Hebrew School teacher, a young man who sometimes tutored Hebrew, would tutor me in what I needed to know so that I could chant properly on the day of my bar mitzvah. I relearned enough to manage the words and the chanting.

  Another boy was bar mitzvah-ed along with me. In front of the congregation the rabbi took a few moments to acknowledge the other boy. The teachers spoke to us in Hebrew School about “going on,” continuing Hebrew studies after the bar mitzvah. This other boy, who had reprimanded me for opening a telegram given to me during the service, saying, “You don’t tear paper in the synagogue!” he was “going on,” the rabbi proudly announced. I was not.

  A small reception after the service was held in the basement of the synagogue where the Hebrew School classes met. I gave a short speech for the guests consisting of family members, among them a couple of uncles I barely knew — my mother’s brothers who did not have a presence in my life — and some of my mother’s business associates. My sister, who through my entire life was a supporter of mine, wrote the speech for me. As for the service in the synagogue, I did it. I performed what I needed to chant. I got through it.

  I did not set foot in a synagogue for another twenty-three years. Rabbi Gunter Hirschberg of Temple Rodeph Sholom on the upper west side of Manhattan invited me to attend a Friday night service to hear a sermon he was delivering on the subject of my novel, Oh, God! and I attended. Inevitably, I thought back to my last time in a synagogue, to my bar mitzvah day, when I was like an ailing child prince propped up to wave at the populace.

  * * *

  TELEVISION

  * * *

  The crowd gathered in front of the store window and I considered myself lucky to squeeze into a space with a clear view of the screen for the Joe Louis-Jersey Joe Walcott heavyweight championship fight from Yankee Stadium in June 1948. Television had arrived in the Bronx, not yet in our apartment or in the apartments of the people I knew, on view through the windows of the television sales and repair shops beginning to appear throughout the Bronx. The store owners closed their doors at night, left a television set turned on in the window and let the set play and do the bus
iness of selling the idea of television. Not much selling was required. Within a couple of years or so of that fight everyone I knew, including my family, owned a television set.

  Previously, for home entertainment we had phonograph records, 78s my sister and cousin brought home like Tony Pastor’s One Meat Ball, said meat ball which you “gets no bread with,” and albums like Ballad for Americans, sung by Paul Robeson. And we had beloved radio — the war news, the sports events, the comedy shows, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Bob Hope, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy — a ventriloquist on the radio — our programs, Tennessee Jed, The Lone Ranger, the dramas, Lights Out and Escape. But with television suddenly we had riveting visual images and the television sets were headed right for our living rooms.

  Television went into our living rooms because that is where our console radios had been and television was so extraordinary, placement in a living room where we could gather around was demanded. Some people were concerned about how a television set was to be integrated into the living room decor. The standard look of the furnishings in the Bronx apartments I knew relied heavily on mahogany pieces for status. Consequently, many of the early television sets in the Bronx were in the talking furniture category, inserted in cabinetry which was often made of mahogany with cabinet doors that closed on the screen so when the set was not turned on it looked like a piece of living room furniture. Sort of.

  A store near our apartment specialized in this kind of disguised television set and that was the kind we ended up with, cabinetry containing an off-brand television set that went on to live a sickly life requiring constant repairs within its fancy trappings.

  A new social arrangement came out of these early days of television ownership, the visiting of friends or relatives who owned a set. My brother-in-law’s cousins owned one of the first television sets and this was an event, going over to their apartment and I went one evening with my sister, brother-inlaw, and my mother. It was important enough for my mother to wear a new black dress, something I especially remember because one of the cousins present, my mother’s age, was wearing the identical black dress causing embarrassment for them both. Significant about the incident was that the evening, gathering in someone’s apartment to watch television, was considered dress-up by the women.

  The first friend of mine to own a television set was my classmate from junior high school, Ben Miller. A relative of his built a television set for Ben’s family from an electronics kit. Heady stuff to someone like me who had been inept in making model airplanes. In an exclusive boys’ clubhouse activity, Ben would invite friends to watch Milton Berle.

  When we owned our own television set I was so thrilled I watched anything, even Jon Gnagy demonstrating how to draw pictures I wouldn’t dream of emulating and didn’t try.

  Since each television set required a separate roof antenna, competition became intense for rooftop space to accommodate the antennas which altered the skyline. Antenna wires flopped over the roofline into the various apartments. We pointed out our antennas to our friends as though we owned real estate.

  The reception in the Bronx was shaky, nobody in our area was able to get a clear image of the Dumont Television Network, which came in with a shadowy ghost. And the sets were shoddy, tubes were constantly burning out. Men who had been fix-it guys with radio repair shops were now television repair experts, nearly as important as doctors who made house calls.

  In deciding whether to see a movie without subtitles, my aunt and uncle would ask, “Is there a lot of talking?” If not a lot of talking, they would go to a movie theater to see the movie. Accordingly, they watched television with the rest of us when there was not a lot of talking, as with variety shows.

  The Brooklyn Dodgers were the best team to watch on television. They featured more advanced television coverage than the Yankees and the Giants. The Dodgers had their Zoomar close-up cameras installed in the dugouts at Ebbets Field — Don Newcombe, focused and perspiring, staring in from the mound. Yankee fans watched Dodgers games just for the coverage.

  One day we found ourselves looking wide-eyed at television through store windows and in a dramatically short period of time television was part of our lives. As the industry figured out the medium, the programming was scattered, ranging from the live dramas, Studio One and Kraft Television Theater to roller derby and wrestling. Teenagers caught up in the magic, we passed along the hearsay that the wrestler, Antonino Rocca, was so fierce that in Argentina he killed a man in the ring, which we believed just as we believed Antonino Rocca’s wrestling matches were on the level.

  * * *

  SCHOOLYARD BASKETBALL

  * * *

  Schoolyard basketball was played continuously, on scorching summer days and on courts cleared of snow, played by day and by night with the light of lampposts, played by dirty ballplayers who could never foul out because nobody kept track of fouls, and crybabies who would cry foul if you grazed their shirts, played between stellar ballplayers and hapless ballplayers, between goody-two-shoes students and academic ne-er do-wells. Democracy in action.

  Every neighborhood had its schoolyard basketball stand-outs, some who went on to play for high school and college teams and sometimes returned to play in the schoolyards where it all began for them.

  If anybody bothered to calculate, many of us probably spent more time playing schoolyard basketball than any other activity, apart from physically sitting in a classroom.

  The world contained in a schoolyard basketball court was compressed, intense, something the boys did that the girls did not. You never saw girls playing schoolyard basketball. The basic form was the three-man game. Every once in a while a full-court game was played. Winners stayed on, losers got off. If you lost, it wasn’t a crushing defeat. You might have to wait your turn to play again. If you won, you won court time, like with a pinball machine.

  Which neighborhood had the best basketball players was impossible to determine. Good ballplayers came out of every neighborhood and some went on to have well-regarded basketball careers. Where I lived we had the advantage of the small-scale court in the Bronx High School of Science schoolyard to learn our skills before moving up to the Creston Junior High schoolyard. Madison Square Garden was referred to in the sports pages as “the Mecca of college basketball.” The Mecca of schoolyard basketball in our part of the Bronx was the schoolyard at Creston. With the active intramural basketball program at the school, you were caught up in the basketball-mindedness of the place. You played on the Creston schoolyard court whenever you could and when you went on to high school you still played there.

  In my time important ballplayers could be seen on the court at Creston, Dolph Schayes, who starred for DeWitt Clinton High School, N.Y.U., and the Syracuse Nationals of the NBA and who would be named to the NBA Hall of Fame, Jack Molinas, who led Columbia to an Ivy League championship and who was a story unto himself, Arnie Stein, who played with Dayton University in the NIT Tournament, Bobby Santini, who played for Iona College, Ed Roman from the C.C.N.Y. double championship team, Dick Kor of N.Y.U., Danny Lyons of Fordham University. When any of these players were on the court, a crowd formed on the sidelines and behind the schoolyard fence, neighborhood people watching neighborhood people who were, unquestionably in our minds, stars.

  * * *

  JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

  * * *

  We moved on from Mrs. S_____ in 5th grade to Mr. Katz in 6th grade, a man who comported himself with personal dignity and who was courteous to us. We were taught, we paid attention, the school year passed without drama. We were headed for junior high school and the great divide, boys to Creston Junior High School, girls to Elizabeth Barrett Browning Junior High School.

  They assigned me to the “SPs” for junior high school. For years in the New York City public schools some students were designated for classes called, variously, the “Rs” and the “RAs.” These supposedly more capable students went through an accelerated course of study in junior high school and skipped a grade. When it was o
ur turn to enter junior high, the nomenclature had been changed and the rapid advance classes were to be called “special progress classes,” “SPs.” Why some students were selected rather than others, what the standards were, never was explained to us. Tracking children at twelve or thirteen had to be hit or miss. Whatever the selection process, it could not assess students with skills not easily observed, or students who developed late, or those going through a difficult time for any number of external reasons. Surely an enormous number of students over the years who were not identified for the minor distinction of skipping a grade in junior high school went on to live meritorious lives.

  I don’t know on what basis I was assigned. Maybe I had good reading skills — from an early start reading titles of foreign movies at the Ascot perhaps? But in junior high the first serious signs of deficiencies on my part in math began to show up and they followed me right through junior high and high school like the rain cloud over the head of Joe Btfsplk in the Li’l Abner comic strip.