I have written a great deal over the years about both the Bronx and my growing up there. But I feel the need to write once more about those memories, hopefully, with fresh, more seeing eyes. The first memory I can recall was listening—could I really have been listening at two?—with my father to a radio in a wooden cabinet in my grandparents’ apartment in December 1941 when the Giants pro football game was interrupted by an announcement of the invasion at Pearl Harbor. I have less dramatic memories of those early years, like being pushed by my sturdy mother in a stroller, in all kinds of weather, across the neighborhood park—Crotona—to my grandparents’ apartment. I was conscious of the park’s mixture of patches of fenced in green, trees, and rocks, where squirrels and sparrows abounded, and of the asphalt path on which my mother pushed the stroller. As I got older, I played football and softball in that same park; it was a functional place, devoid of beauty, but it served the limited desires and perspective of my childhood and adolescence.
There is much more that I can remember—for it all remains vivid, despite it being rarely adventurous or turbulent. I have memories of food shopping with my mother, who loved walking and looking for bargains. There were three main places we shopped: working-class Bathgate Avenue and Jennings Street, which had many small shops, peddlers, and open-air stalls, and the lower-middle-class Tremont Avenue, with its larger supermarkets (Deitch’s was the main one), toy stores, bakeries, and dress shops. I took pleasure in the food shopping; I liked the atmosphere of the teeming streets, the food open to touching and smelling, and the cries of the peddlers and shopkeepers promoting their wares. It moved me later in life to head towards more bountiful open-air markets to shop whenever we were in Europe.
My pre-adolescent years exist mainly as memories of the neighborhood—its sights, sounds, and institutions—rather than recalling more internal states and feelings. I am sure I had a great many of the latter, but there are only a few that I can resurrect. The most intense one was the feeling of alienation I felt from the yeshiva I was sent to in the second grade. My parents weren’t religious, but they were deeply traditional, and they thought the school would help keep me in the fold and adhere to tradition. It ultimately had the opposite effect. I began to find the yeshiva airless, rigid, and punitive. In addition, without articulating my antipathy, I never found religion taking hold. Its rituals and prayers not once having meaning for me.
Also, attending yeshiva cut me off from neighborhood boys and girls. I had amiable relationships with some of the yeshiva students, but their religiosity stopped me from establishing real friendships with them. That left me with older boys in my building and others nearby. We sometimes played ball together, but I was just a mascot and hanger-on, who had no real relationships with any of them. So, entering public school brought me friendships, girls to hang around with at night on stoops and sitting on cars, and even a newly formed social and athletic club to join. I can’t say it was all idyllic (some of the friendships had a sadistic strain), but it felt like an embrace of life, in contrast to the yeshiva’s constricted atmosphere.
Public school also meant becoming less connected to family and home, and more so to friends and the street. As I headed for high school, I made new neighborhood friends and the beginnings of a more complex inner life began to take shape.
