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.