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  • 标题:Being them: a New York City childhood.
  • 作者:Kessler, Julia Braun
  • 期刊名称:Midstream
  • 印刷版ISSN:0026-332X
  • 出版年度:2004
  • 期号:September
  • 语种:English
  • 出版社:Theodor Herzl Foundation
  • 摘要:Quick and convenient such captions may be, yet one cannot help asking, how valuable or, accurate. I, for one, growing up a Jew in a post-depression, World War II America am not remotely comfortable with such designations for our bunch. Looking at the past, I find myself hardly fitting into the categories. But, if somebody ever asked me for a sharper image of our lot, I could've dubbed us, "the sha-shtillers of those times."
  • 关键词:Jews

Being them: a New York City childhood.


Kessler, Julia Braun


It seems, in these times, that every decade needs pocket definition. The twenties roar at us still, the thirties breadlines form for us, Rosie the Riveter barks out from under her snood during the forties, the suburban fifties continue in ferocity to consume their cunning domestic devices, while those sixties hipsters stand before us, stripping for love. One could go on down the decades until we reach our puzzling cell-phone carriers, the GenX specimens--kids today, who poke us in the nose with their own detachment!

Quick and convenient such captions may be, yet one cannot help asking, how valuable or, accurate. I, for one, growing up a Jew in a post-depression, World War II America am not remotely comfortable with such designations for our bunch. Looking at the past, I find myself hardly fitting into the categories. But, if somebody ever asked me for a sharper image of our lot, I could've dubbed us, "the sha-shtillers of those times."

Certainly, where and when I grew up, I was encouraged to be one of "them!" American, that is, from my high heels right up to my pageboy coif. Not that it was said in so many words, but even so, it was the message that I heard. And, it was there for us all. Just stay inconspicuous and you'll slip smoothly into the mainstream, you'll see! Don't stand out. Dress like them, talk like them, move like them, dance like them, cheer like them, think like them, but over all else, look like them!

But then, what did I know? At least, till I got older, out of the city to a college in the Midwest, and into the goyish world at large!

I grew up in that pastoral Bronx of New York City of the 30s and 40s, with its safe streets, its parks, and broad avenues. There, was being Jewish a problem? How so? Never heard of it! If any such madness as that dominated the rest of the world, I was blithely unaware of it. Or, even if there was a hint of such discrimination, word of it came merely from our parents; and in my judgment, they were petrified by everything in their new land, lamenting developments, finding daily worries in each event. So it seemed, at least, to this simpleton then.

To my mind, the whole canvas, the world of my own New York City consisted wholly of the familiar, the accessible, the possible. As far as I thought of it--and I did not--what was not Jewish? Clearly, in the Bronx of those "upwardly mobile" days, we were in the majority. Most of the kids in my school, P.S. 70, just off the Grand Concourse, were, just like me, children of immigrant parentage and of families who had poured out of Central and Eastern Europe within the late years.

My own family were Hungarian speakers. Around us, we had every variety to choose from: Greek neighbors, Poles and Slovaks, some Romanians, Czechs, and tons of Galitsianers and Litvaks. Standing with our mothers in the appetizing store, in the grocery, of in the fruit market, we heard all those languages. But what we really listened to were kids translating for their fussy parents so the Italian fruit man of the Irishman at the hardware counter could get a clue to what was demanded of what would serve them in that moment.

We heard plenty of Yiddish in the streets in those years, a language that soon took a dominant place not only in the Bronx, but in all the boroughs of New York. My own parents, however, knew only their own tongue, adding to it a little rote Hebrew on Rosh Hashanah. Their Magyar was an exotic speech, an alien, uncooperative Asiatic derivative relating to nothing else in Europe. So they found themselves wholly at a loss in their new setting. In fact, in those early years, they took greater pains to learn Yiddish than English itself!

Having left behind most of their large families at the age of nineteen to come as honeymooners on a visit to the New World, with no intention of returning home, and little hope of more than a letter from their dear ones every half-year, they determined to make their way towards a future here. There was little choice. But to do that, they must join those other alien Jews around them, and be like them. To my parents, Yiddish was to become their entry, their lingua franca, both means and bond.

Of course, at first, they had resisted all change--who wouldn't? I can remember my braggart papa's insistence that Magyar was "known all over the world." He'd bet anybody that he needed no English at all to get in anywhere in the city. All it took was Hungarian patter and his own charm. And for years, he boasted that anybody who didn't know that didn't know much. Later on, when everybody around him was already managing, fluent or even literate enough to be reading The Daily News or The New York Post, he insisted on his Magyar Nemset, New York's Hungarian, and pro-fascist, press. He'd curse it, but never mind, he'd end up reading it all the same. At least the ugly sheet was in Hungarian!

Then, there was my svelte, young, unmarried aunt Ilona--her name changed on arrival to Elaine as the more pronounceable and American--who lived with us for years. How she treasured a little embroidered doily she had brought with her from Europe. Into it was sewn two maps of Hungary in red, white, and green, the colors of its flag. One was a big blob, a pre-World War I sketch. Inside its outline was the remains of a nation shrunken to sheer nothingness after the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian empire. She would wave it at us, often reciting the bold caption sewn below the maps, "Lehet es eej? Neto, nem, soha!" (Can this be possible? No, no, never!) And to please her, we children would stomp around the apartment, shouting the slogan again and again.

Yes, they hung on to their old-world ways as long as they could; had their attachments; their ties; their nostalgic passion for their homeland; their unique, glorious poetic language so mysterious in origin; they had only happy recollections of their childhood in their native land. "Franz Joseph," they insisted to us, "after all, had been so good for the Jews!"

Every year in the spring, they would haul us to the "picnics" at their Magyar benevolent societies, so that they could dance and sing and teach us to prance with them to the violinists playing schmalzy czardases and gypsy tunes. In summertime, when everyone else in the neighborhood rushed up to then fashionable Sullivan County, to Livingston Manor, Swan Lake, or Ferndale, we instead had to go to "our own side" of the Catskills, a Magyar enclave miles off on the unknown side of the mountain, some remote places called Accord or Fleischmanns, where their language was to be heard from adults and kids alike.

Yet, there my young, lonely parents remained still, and when you get down to it, isolated in a distant world. But for the few relatives who had come over with them, or those with whom they met on occasional weekends to exchange a word or two in Magyar, there was nothing. So it wasn't long before even my father had to concede. No matter what he preferred or pretended, there was no other way. At least, by learning some Yiddish (and my parents' Yiddish was, they were constantly reminded, truly wretched!), they could hope to make friends with their neighbors, and even schmooze a little with the milling Bronx folks on the summer evenings downstairs in the hot streets or on the stoops.

How were we to know that any of this was different from the experiences of others growing up in America? Or that children anywhere around us weren't living the life we did? Wasn't the whole country just like New York, made up of people like our own, newly arrived? All of them working like dogs, with little expectation for themselves, but with great hopes for their children? People who went forward, fearless, sure of their luck and a chance at a good life? (Little did they know then how right they were.)

At school, I heard the roll call and never once recognized that the names were peculiar. A Gregory Berkowitz, a Byron Ashkenazi, or a Cynthia Altschuler sounded as ordinary as any John Brown, Frank Smith, or Mary Jones to me. Who knew those were Jewish names? The flirt time I ever noticed any difference in such sounds was far too late. I was already a student at the University of Chicago.

No, growing up there in the Bronx, there was no Jewish problem. I couldn't have found it if I'd gone looking. We were natives to the land of opportunity, that same America boasting with Emma Lazarus that it welcomed the tired and battered masses to its shores. Before me was nothing but advantage, open doors, opportunity knocking. I rejoiced in my choice of parents: that they had come here to make me American-born, a someone who spoke the King's English unaccented--of at least some bowdlerized New Yorkese version of that--was a blessing in itself.

Already, numbers of us, for example, had shown a facility at school. Natural-born students, it seemed, and this, in several cases, to the dismay of eager parents, whose immediate needs demanded another wage earner as soon as possible--anything--a secretary, or a garment hand. But confident upstarts that we were, we turned rapidly away from such demeaning ways of life. Not for the likes of us! We had dreams of our oval dreams for the future and a thoughtful, elegant life. American dreams they were, always before us, ever achievable.

Even in those early encounters, we found that we could talk endlessly about our pleasures: movies especially, but then came books, and art too, and we could argue about politics, or we could quote the philosophers. We coveted the best society, we experimented as only free minds can, and sampled everything about us, with little or no concern for what might menace us later. We sought and tried out various encounters downtown--meetings, art shows, performances--all that was new and undefined. There was everything from the Ethical Culture Society, to Peggy Guggenheim's new Kandinsky-filled storefront galleries, to the avant-garde lectures from incoming refugee artists and intellectuals at the New School for Social Research, or for the politically inclined, there were the enticements of the Yipsels, a youth offshoot of the Socialist party. Kids just like us, all eager and bright, appeared at such displays from all over the city.

A mere subway ride away, every such venture was then quite sale for the trying. Despite the realities, the chaos already in play in Europe, a preposterous security engulfed us, so that nothing stood in our way. As specimens of this new generation, whose parents had not only managed to make their way to a New World but further still survived through the meager times of the Great Depression, it figured: what we saw was only possibility and promise before us.

So our '30s and '40s, at least until the war began here in December of 1941, remained a carefree time growing up in New York City. And being them, becoming them--seemed little trouble altogether. We were the joiners in this blessed society. The American sky was still the limit!

It was just about then that in my own family, our great step-up came along. We got ourselves out of apartment living altogether. We moved. Not only further uptown, but upscale! My Dad, who was already working his way towards a sure death by age fifty-two, was a wild success in angling this escalation, and with the help of a shyster lawyer for a partner, he managed to secure the rights to buy some land.

Land! Good Lord, what was that? We were off to the top of the Bronx, and to the top of the world for all we knew. We soon transported ourselves to the edge of then tony Van Cortlandt Park, where all was country still. Not only had my father managed to buy the tiny lot bordering the great park, but he and his lawyer pal proceeded right away to build their monster structures on it.

Two oversized houses soon appeared on the small patch they acquired. Even so, they were in a style we were not accustomed to. In that spanking new house we now owned--just the sort of place realtors have since come to designate as "a home'--we were quite suddenly living the American dream itself.

Not only had my mother acquired her wall-to-wall carpeting, her two bathrooms with their alternating baby blue and pink bathtubs or their blue and pink files, but outside, in her private garden, she strolled among climbing roses, lilacs in springtime, and soon enough, to win the war with, her very own Victory Garden. Singlehandedly, she could provide the whole mishpocha with her vegetables.

How proud she looked as she walked through it in her straw hat to gather her flowers, her baskets of produce--so elegant, she could have been Spring Byington in the movies. For us to watch such offerings of zucchini or tomatoes to the neighbors was exhilaration itself.

Back then, in the mid-'40s, going to the end of the Broadway elevated line into the upper Bronx was still like going into Westchester County. All around us it was green, fresh, and open. True enough, not far away, there already stood a group of apartment houses known as "the Amalgamated," a clothing workers' union-built, high-rise complex providing good apartment living for its members. Yet, if you merely turned away from these and went on only a little farther west, the two new private houses still stood amid the empty, uninhabited, thick foliage fronting the edges of the historic acreage of Van Cortlandt Park.

Snake Hill, as our high perch was then called, was a place of overgrown trees, forests to get lost in, even a haunted house complete with a crazy old lady to scare us away when we ventured too far into the thickets.

All the more reason now for dedication to being them! So that process went into full swing in our family even amid the raised eyebrows of our skeptical parents! My own mother's sardonic remarks turned mostly to comments like, "Here comes Miss America!" when she spied some garish new outfit or heard of still another excursion and expenditure in New York City's fashionable downtown. And, that was only when she was being civil!

First came our attentions to speech patterns. Most of us knew, right off, that expressions could give us away. They had to be looked to, scrutinized, cleansed. Naturally, we simply echoed what we heard in the rhythms, the sing-songisms of our parents and their friends. If we were to be real Americans, every turn of phrase needed pruning. Just listening to the gum chewers on the subway in those times was to know who would and who wouldn't become somebody of consequence.

So we worked hard at the rectifying, anglifying, waspifying. Despite that, our teachers often caught us in Yiddishisms, or in my own case, translations of cunning phrases from my mother's Magyar arsenal. None of these worked when replayed at school.

Next, there was the clothing. We needed to rethink it into a very different breed of dress from what we saw daily on the Bronx streets. What was worn on the Grand Concourse of a Saturday afternoon when the family went out for corned beef sandwiches, or, even those grander outfits assembled for the synagogue at holiday season, were not in the least appropriate to such a purpose. Our choices now must conform to American standards. Our parents' quaint European notions about property in dress could easily betray us there.

But with, or without parental blessing, we quickly joined contemporaries, "fitting" into our native land as the bobby-soxers, the saddle shoers, and loafer swingers in our plaid skirts and cashmere sweaters. You might say it became our own uniform (and uniforms were very popular indeed in those years).

Along with these costumes came new roles from them. In the Amalgamated Club Room, we came alive as "jitterbugs," to bring a new intensity to dance. Nothing could substitute for those frenzied pre-puberty weekends. So we lindied and shagged with the rest, sometimes even to exhaustion.

And for me, it was mostly during the blackouts of the early and mid-'40s that such pursuits became vivid. In our flaring skirts, lush sweater sets, and penny loafers polished to special brown-red tones, we had become the prime examples of all we admired. The lean strangers pictured in the magazines, in the newspapers, they were us. Our state, newly designated: teenage, a whole new phenomenon, and one as yet uniquely American.

Soon enough, it was not only weekends that we danced, but nightly. School would hardly let out, and we were swinging to Benny Goodman's clarinet, or to the music of Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller. You could find us there anywhere from four or five in the afternoon and right on till quite late at night. And always, in the middle of the blackouts, our illumination came from candles alone.

How romantic all that seemed. For years, I had watched my sisters in their flirtations with boys, their jousting, their shenanigans, but here was my turn. Ah, those great tunes that kept me mooning and swaying--the My Reveries, Deep Purples, Amapolas or, Frenesees, the "Why don't you do right," or "People Will Say We're in Love."

I could belt out every lyric to perfection, had memorized them each time they were played on the radio. Or, better yet, when the old wind-up record player in the club-room was working, I could bring favorites there to play over and over. How funny to think that even today, when some nostalgia jockey does a sentimental retake on the music of that era, I can repeat such performances complete with each nuance.

In those salad days, the miraculous thing about singing and dancing was how it could answer to all our needs. It kept us jumping and spinning. It was our treadmill, our light-weights, our whole gym. Who can tell how that worked? On our growing pains, maybe? But dancing served. That frenzy was our particular take on "sex."

In those unreal times, such intimacy as we see pouring out daily, the sexual act depicted on screen, was inconceivable. Still very much a whispered about pursuit, the act was not real to most of us. For adolescent girls at least, the truth was we knew very little of it, and even if we had a sense of the act itself, it was at second hand.

I suppose some notice of it must have been taken in connection with the birth of a younger sister or brother. Plenty of us had had that misfortune, and remained horrified at the thought that our own parents--our own parents--cohabiting in animal fashion to make such a product. Younger sisters and brothers that now hung on, threatened our freedom, stole our importance. Distaste was the best we could come up with regarding the whole of it.

Meanwhile in the process, mainstream, most of us became. Our generation remained devout in this quest. Such ambition prevailed in the grand scheme of American success well into the '50s. Any looking back, assures us of this persistence--the now aged doctors, lawyers, professors, or the business tycoons still on parade in expensive suits any morning in lower Manhattan.

Ah, but the price! Consider how such transformations threatened loyalties to family, to origins, to ancient connections or traditional ways. Yet, oddly enough, this seemed little loss to us then. We saw only smart procedures, new customs, America before us. Progress, that is. And on that very path, we hooted our fearful parents aside, together with all their old-world terrors.

Even now, the simplicity of those times, the very arrogance of our views strikes at the heart. This picture of us in a fever to join the natives in this best of all possible worlds, this moon-June nation, is staggering.

Of course, heavy revelations from Europe would soon enough intrude to set us straight. Such disclosures upon the nature of evil came upon us with a force to last us all of our adult lives. There was no denying what we saw and what we heard.

And for many even today, their wary parents--living or dead--still shake their fingers at us in stark reminder: Remakes notwithstanding, whether here, there in Europe, or anywhere else before and since, you are who you are. As my Mom might well have capped it in her own horrid Yiddish, "and gornisht vet helfen!"

JULIA BRAUN KESSLER is a journalist who has written and published on artists and the arts in many national magazines over the years, among them Seventeen, Family Circle, Travel and Leisure, Human Behavior, and Geo. Most current, under the pseudonym, Julia Barrett, she is the author of three novela, Presumption, The Third Sister, and Jane Austen's Charlotte.
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