An Orphan in New York City: Lif E with a Thousand Brothers and Sisters

By Seymour Siegel and Laura Edwards

An Orphan in New York City is about survival. During the Great Depression families who suffered loss of income, loss of health, and loss of life sought frantically for ways to survive. Social Security, Housing and Urban Development, Public Assistance, and Public Health programs available today were limited or non-existent back then. All extended family members helped out as much as they could. When this was not enough, the only choice was to break up the family. Benevolent Jews had established orphanages to care for children left homeless or in poverty. The largest of these orphanages was the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, better known as the HOA or The Home, located between 136th to 138th Streets on Amsterdam Avenue across from the Lewisohn Stadium of the City College of New York City. From 1929 to 1939 the HOA housed more than one thousand boys and girls at a time.

The Hebrew Orphan Asylum was referred to as a city within a city as it was basically self-contained. Not only where there the essentials of residential life-- dormitories, a kitchen, a dining room, an infirmary, a dental clinic, and a laundry--but also a public school 192, a synagogue, and a religious school. Then too there were a bakery, a shoe shop, a tailor shop, a barber shop, a clothing store, a candy store, a woodworking room, a sewing room, a photography studio and darkroom, a boys scout room, a band room, a choir room, athletic fields and playgrounds. There was a Reception House, the Main Building, the Warner Brothers Gymnasium (state of the art at that time), and buildings for boilers for heating. It had its own transportation system and a fire engine. There were military bands and drill squads, fraternities and sororities, as well as baseball, basketball, and football teams that competed with other orphanages and the junior varsity at City College.

Orphans, half orphans, and children from broken families began their shared institutional lives at the Reception House where they were isolated for two weeks to assure they did not bring any contagious disease or illness into the institution. The author was one of those with a family destroyed by alcoholism and poverty who had to leave his family at the age of nine and begin an orphan's life. He writes: "Having seen, from my top-floor perch in the Reception House, children who were playing on the huge field below, and having listened to the marching band and watched the military drills, I was looking forward to moving to the Main Building. But when I finally got there I felt lost in the labyrinth of hallways and doorways, and among the masses of children who were coming and going. Outside, in the courtyard, were more than 100 children talking, shouting and playing together. One of my first memories there is of hearing a short rotund man suddenly shout above that babble of voices: "All Steeeeeeeeeel!" All Still. What that meant only became clear when, as I watched, most of the children froze in their places and stopped talking. One child did not freeze. The man with the powerful voice strode over to him and slapped him so hard across the face that the child fell down.In the years that I would be in the orphanage, that and similar examples made me obey the "All Still!" and always appear to be following commands, rules, and regulations, even when I wasn't obeying. What I witnessed there, day after day, also reinforced my hopeless and helpless feeling that there were immense forces beyond my control: my father's rage, my separation, my placement in an institutional environment, and the subsequent abuse in that environment. I wept within myself, and there was no adult at the institution to comfort me, not the first day nor the last."

For his own healing, Dr. Siegel has written a book about his decade during the depression years in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 14, 2000
• ISBN: 9781462828821

Seymour Siegel

Dr. Seymour Siegel is a licensed Clinical Social Worker and Marriage and Family Therapist. He has received diplomate status in clinical social work, professional psychotherapy, and clinical hypnotherapy. His forty-year career includes twenty years as Executive Director of Jewish and Family Services in Southern New Jersey, co-founding a transitional residency service for individuals with mental illness, and serving on the NJ Board of Marriage Counselor Examiners. He has taught at Rutgers and made presentations to varied groups at varied times. He has appeared on radio and television talk shows and initiated and facilitated a men's group on "The Wounding and Healing of Men." For his own healing, Dr. Siegel has written a book about his decade during the depression years in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York City. Dr. Siegel is father of five children, a racquetball competitor, and enjoys theater, classical music, and all forms of exercise.

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AN ORPHAN INNEW YORK CITY

Life With A Thousand Brothers & Sisters

Seymour Siegel, D.S.W.WITHLaura Edwards, Ph.D.

Copyright © by Seymour Siegel, D.S.W. with Laura Edwards,Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation 1-888-7-XLIBRIS www.Xlibris.com [e-mail]

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

CHAPTER 1: SEPARATION

CHAPTER 2: THE HEBREW ORPHAN ASYLUM

CHAPTER 3: OUR JEWISH HERITAGE

CHAPTER 4: LIFE IN THE ORPHANAGE

CHAPTER 5: 1929

CHAPTER 6: 1930

CHAPTER 7: 1931

CHAPTER 9: 1933

CHAPTER 10: 1934

CHAPTER 11: 1935

CHAPTER 12: 1936

CHAPTER 13: 1937

CHAPTER 14: 1938

CHAPTER 15: 1939

CHAPTER 16: 1940—1941

CHAPTER 17: CONCLUSION

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

This book is dedicated to the many people who saw qualities in methat I didn’t recognize in myself. They provided timely encouragement and guidance so that I achieved beyond the wildest imaginations of my youth.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An Orphan in New York City has had a long gestation period filled with the pains of reliving the orphanage experience. When the pain became too great, I abandoned it. Then I’d start again. The completion of the first and second versions of the book came about with the help of my partner in life, Dr. Laura A. Edwards. She saw the great merit of my work and encouraged me to finish it. She volunteered to help with editing, researching, rewriting, and locating a professional writer to assist in changing summaries of a series of verbatim tape recorded interviews. In accepting her help I was making a commitment to finish it, though there were times when I regretted the commitment. She was consistent in her support and constancy to completion right down to locating potential publishers. I will always be indebted to her because of her generous, loving, and caring nature. I also appreciated the professional editing of Robert P. Bomboy. Together we reshaped the material into a more readable and more entertaining manuscript.

Alumni of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum (HOA) contributed details for the book. More than forty participated in taped interviews from 1976 to 1991 and gave me permission to use their stories. Nineteen are included in Appendix A. Participants in the taped interviews included Morris Albala, Shirley Baron, Edna Bergstein, Hilda Berman, Milton Braff, George Brooks, Hank Brooks, Edith Clark, Reba Cohen, Lou Delin, Irene (Brown) Cooper, Jack Cooper, Natalie (Weinberg) Finver, Milton Freidman, Dan Fruchter, Ralph Henry, Al Hulon, Ceil Kaminsky, Maxwell Katz, Hank Kaplan, Ted Kaplan, Harry Kramerman, Sylvia Lang, Raymond Lang, Hannah Bock Lee, Roz Olchak Levy, Walter Lipschitz (Lewis now), Miriam Lifson, Bernard Marks, Lou

Nemeth, Estelle (Silverman) Nemeth, Norman Rales, Hy Raskin, Bernard Rosenfeld, Joe Ross, David Shorr, Nathan Schwartz, Harry Siegel, Pearl (Turner) Siegel, Mildred Stember (Siegel), Sam Slavin, Gertrude Sommer, and Joe Weinberg. Alumni, too many to mention, at annual gatherings in Florida, California, and New York also provided additional stories of life in the HOA.

Hy Bogen was invaluable in the production of the book. His book, The Luckiest Orphan, provided the history of the orphanage and he checked facts as needed. As editor of The Rising Bell, a monthly alumni publication, he gave permission to incorporate material as needed, especially stories by Grace Candles Presser that offered the feminine perspective on life in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum (HOA). Maurice Bernstein, former Superintendent of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum and an alumni himself, provided an administrator’s perspective for this book. He graciously shared his own unpublished manuscript and granted permission to use excerpts. Since memory is a weak reed upon which to lean, especially after 40 years, I am also indebted to Ralph Henry and Daniel Fruchter who had a more accurate recall of selected events and helped confirm, clarify, challenge, or modify information on personnel, programs, and special events at the orphanage. I thank them for being ever ready to answer my frequent calls often made at inconvenient times. In addition, alumni returning camp reunions also enhanced the material in the book. Max Glassman, thanks for the photos, the Rising Bell editions I was missing, and the continued friendship that also added to this book.

FOREWORD

Pain. Pain that could rise up in an instant as a memory or a scene from the past flashed before me, 20, 40, 60 years later, a shattered lifetime after the injury, so that the original tears would well up again. It was pain that had sprung from my childhood, pain that had followed me all the days of my life. Pain of loss. Pain of separation. Pain of loneliness. Pain of wanting love and of being unloved. That pain is at the heart of this book.

I grew up in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, a philanthropic refuge that, until 1941, occupied four square blocks, between 136th and 138th Streets in New York City. This story of my life there, and of other lives, began on the eve of the Great Depression, that wrenching cataclysm that tore so many families apart. Our stories began in poverty, in the world of immigrants, the world of work, the world of despair. They began in the city where I, and most of the other children were born, where we scurried for shards of ecstasy beneath the iceman’s wagon and paid for our nickel’s worth of yesterdays.

My desire, my need, to write this book goes back to a gathering of men, five of us who had known each other in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum a half century earlier. We would meet once a year in some warm place that wouldn’t remind us of the frigid orphanage winter, and, at that time, we would reminisce nostalgically about our lives. As I sat and listened, the others told story after story, time and again, and relished each re-telling with even more delight. My old friends regaled each other with the positive virtues of our orphanage experience: It had made their adjustment to military life easier. It had made them independent and strong,

self-sufficient and tough. Because of it, they had braved the hard knocks of life and taken them in stride.

Yet, as I sat listening, I marveled at how different our memories were. I too remembered the three meals a day, the clothing, the schooling, the sports, and the exposure to cultural, professional, and athletic events that the Hebrew Orphan Asylum had given us—it was all true. But, unlike the other men around the table, I also remembered much that was dehumanizing, mean, cruel, unfeeling, and unjust. I agreed with them that I had never eaten better cheesecake than the cheesecake we ate on Friday nights at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. But I also remembered hours during which they, and I were forced to stand at attention, our arms outstretched until they became painfully rigid and achingly numb. I remembered being slapped and beaten, as they had been. One of the men remembered only love. I remembered nights when a nine-year-old cringed in his bed, praying that he wouldn’t be hurt again: I remembered indignities to my person, episodes of stark hopelessness, years of futility, and periods of depressing isolation. My fears and injuries, my pain, had not come because of separation from my parents but because of direct maltreatment by some of the orphanage staff, and the institution’s lack of professionally trained counselors. My friends seemed to be denying a significant part of our common experience, the painful part.

As I thought more about their denial, I recalled that, for fifteen years, I too had idealized my experiences at the orphanage when I spoke about it to others. I had even projected a self-image of personal strength and stability; I seemed well adjusted, imperturbable, and easygoing as I idealized my years at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. But I had paid a price for projecting that false image of myself. By covering up and internalizing the negative feelings I didn’t understand, I also walled up the positive feelings in the rest of my life. In fact, it took me many years to learn to distinguish between the two and to become a more real and feeling person, who could take the risk that negative but true expressions might destroy me or someone else. Over the years, as I had grown, I had been able to rediscover the missing dimension to my personality that has enriched me and deepened the quality of my relationships with others.

In the years after I left the Hebrew Orphan Asylum I had become a clinical social worker and had taught at local colleges. It was only through the professional training that entailed, and through personal therapy, that the hidden pain of my childhood years had made its way to the surface. Perhaps my friends around the table had pain that they were denying too, and perhaps they might reveal that pain in one-to-one professional interviews with me. If their stories were poignant, full of pathos, and powerfully emotional, I, perhaps better than anyone else, could understand and sympathize with them.

So it was that, beginning almost a quarter-century ago and continuing until this year, I interviewed and tape-recorded the life stories of more than forty other men and women nationwide as they talked about their experiences before, during, and after their years in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. None prohibited me from using names and personal stories. To avoid unnecessary repetition, I have printed here the stories that most fully capture the positive and negative recollections of life in the orphanage and the circumstances that separated us from our parents. All of our experiences, of course, overlapped at the center, that most of us called the Home. Sometimes we referred to it as the H. 0. A. or the Academy; rarely, as children, did we use its formal name, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. Some of us were ashamed at the sound of the word orphan. Some of us had a secret, so bitter, we could hardly say it: we were not orphans; we had been put away, unloved and unwanted.

As an experienced and professionally trained interviewer, I was sensitive to nuances of feeling. I knew when to tread lightly and when to move full-speed-ahead. In my explorations and probing, I knew when to respect and protect the person’s dignity and pride and when, ethically, to delve into the lodestone of his or her feelings and memories. I knew when and how to get past denial. In fact, many of those I interviewed commented on how good it was to talk, for the first time, about the hurt they felt. In that way they benefited from our conversations. Before interviewing each man or woman, I discussed the risks with them: for anyone, it is a real risk to open up long forgotten and denied memories that are painful and repressed. I offered everyone whom I interviewed the right to maintain confidentiality by using fictitious names, if they preferred, and the right to omit any parts of their stories that they did not want published. In practically every instance, the child-grown-to-adulthood gave complete carte blanche to write everything they said. It was rare when I was told to stop the tape recorder for a particular segment and then to continue the interview.

Three books and one unpublished manuscript about the Hebrew Orphan Asylum came to my attention during my interviews for this story. Two books, The Luckiest Orphans and These Are Our Children: Jewish Orphanages in the United States, 1880-1925 provide a history of the institution. In the third book, alumnus Eddie White devoted one chapter to his life at the orphanage, before writing about his years as an entertainer, screenwriter and Broadway producer. Maurice Bernstein, who not only grew up in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum but also served as its assistant director while I was there, shared his unpublished manuscript titled All Still with me after I had completed my interviews. In addition the alumni newsletters, Hebrew Orphan Asylum Association’s Rising Bell, provided additional perspectives on institutional life. I am grateful for all these sources, and I have quoted from them from time to time.

When I retrace the steps of my professional and personal development and identify the avenues of my growth, the projects I have chosen to work on have been ones that have taught me to be more expressive of my emotions. When I began it, I thought this book would be a new and satisfying vehicle for my discoveries. Its useful byproduct would be that, in writing, I would be casting out what remained of my emotional pain; with its exorcism would come a more neutral and matter-of-fact way for me to describe and explain my experience. I was past retirement, the age when most men have confronted their devils, brought together all the threads of their lives, and achieved their peace. When I had finished the book, I thought, I would no longer choke up, tears flowing and barely able to swallow, my composure lost in embarrassment. Having set my seal on the final page, I would breathe more easily talking about myself—who I was, and what my life had meant.

In fact, as I wrote this book—which turned out to be part history, part biography—I found that the pain of the others who had been children with me triggered memories of my own, the ones that I had buried most deeply. To write this book I had to re-experience my pain, dig it up again, and re-live it in the dark. The pain was so intense that I put the writing off, and sometimes, it was years before I could find my way back to it. Even now, when I have finished, I find the tears flowing as I think back on my early life or read what the others have said. I have looked at my own life here only to describe the separations—the losses and the gains—that thousands of New York children experienced in our Hebrew Orphan Asylum. We are children no longer, but old now. Many of us are gone. This book is a memorial to them.

CHAPTER 1: SEPARATION

We begin life as optimists and end as cynics. I thought once, long ago, that I could change the world.

People sing about autumn in New York, but, for me, spring was always the best time. Especially May, when winter was over and the bitter wind no longer howled across the canyon of 121st Street. Even as a small child, I longed for the beech trees down the curbs to begin making their buds, and I waited, week after week, for the buds to sprout and turn green and for the Italian men in their shirtsleeves and moustaches to open their stores each morning and to roll down their faded blue and yellow awnings. Then the small leaves would open, and the sun, rising out of the East River and shining on the front of our apartment building, would turn the new leaves a transparent green—or, sometimes, when the breezes of a warm May morning stirred them, they would shimmer like a shower of golden coins.

I was born in 1920, when Al Smith was a power in New York, when it was still a melting pot for the millions who came from Europe, as my parents did, hoping for a better life. My parents were Jews who had fled the pogroms of Russia and Poland. My mother, whom I adored, sometimes talked about her father, and I would listen, wide-eyed, to her stories, often sitting by the kitchen table as she worked around me. She was one of ten children, and she remembered the bad times in her homeland when the Russian Cossacks took over the town and stories of their looting, raping, and murdering Jews began to spread like tongues of flame leaping from house to house.

It was from her stories that I first understood the meaning of anti-Semitism and random violence. Her father was a learned man,

a scribe, who prepared official documents for people who couldn’t read or write. But her mother’s family was in the retail trade and, for generations, had operated a general store on the muddy streets of the shtetl or Jewish ghetto in Tzoyzmir, Poland, the town gentiles called Sandomierz. I remember my mother saying that they sold bags of seeds and other foodstuffs and that she and her sisters and brothers worked in the store. My mother, one of her brothers, and three sisters, all immigrated to this country. They fled in the years just before World War I, when the barbarous Cossacks occupied the town and there seemed no end to the growing anti-Semitism. What became of those who stayed in Poland I don’t know. The Institute of the World Jewish Congress reports there are only 8,000 Jews alive in Poland today.¹

My father was a house painter who painted interior walls and didn’t have steady work. I remember that several colors of paint often stained his hands, and that he had black hair, a moustache, a prominent nose, and a hairline high up on his forehead. He had dark eyes and thick black eyebrows. I looked up to him—he stood an inch or two under six feet tall—and I loved him when I was very young. I was his favorite until my younger brother, Harry, came along. My father was a private man who kept to himself, but occasionally he would take me with him, and we would walk around the block, stopping here and there to look at the store windows, and occasionally he might treat me to candy. In the winter I was thrilled when, laughing and glancing back at me, he pulled me on my sled along the snow-covered sidewalks. He smoked Camel cigarettes, and, as a small child I remember sitting on his lap, fascinated, as he took a puff and blew smoke rings above my head. I sat there in amazement, wondering how he could make those circles in the air.

His sister, Yetta, lived with us briefly when she first came to America. She had a profound influence over my father, as the only other member of his family in this country. Although she later developed a thick rash of brown freckles on her face, she was, nonetheless, an attractive woman, of medium height. She had light blue eyes, a nose well proportioned to her face, and a disarming smile. Her figure was beginning to expand, but she dressed neatly and fashionably. She was a good cook who enjoyed making traditional Jewish dishes but also experimenting with new menus. Aunt Yetta was not married at the time, and she often spent the night with our family. She doted on us and, frequently, brought us gifts. She seemed to favor me as a child, and I remember liking her. Aunt Yetta stayed with us from time to time, when she seemed to need a place to live, and she was the source of on going friction with my mother and my mother’s sisters. Looking back, I know now that she was a very controlling and manipulative woman and quite clever in accomplishing whatever she set out to do. Playing in our apartment, I’d hear her say nasty things about my mother’s relatives and paint a picture of my father as a good man. It was only the relatives who spread vicious words about his treatment of my mother, she said, as she played down my father’s behavior toward my mother. Aunt Yetta was argumentative, vituperative, and conniving in her relationships. I still remember, for example, that when she dealt with street vendors and shop owners, she would lie to get the best price.

I was the eldest of three children. My sister, Sally—who wore her hair straight and parted to one side, with her hairline ending around the ear or sometimes in bangs—was two years younger than I. I remember that she was always in dark dresses whose hemlines fell above her knees, and in shiny black flat shoes that buckled around her ankle while showing the sock above and below the buckle strap. As Orthodox Jews, my parents had not used birth control. In that time, pregnancies were not planned, and not necessarily sought. Sally, born on November 11, 1921, had a prominent nose and eyes of amber green that glowed when light struck them. My mother treated Sally lovingly, and Sally’s face was radiant when she was happy. My father was not as demonstrative toward Sally; sometimes he treated her badly, and I resented that. At those times, Sally’s face was solemn and sober. She was a good-natured person and easy to get along with. But, as she grew older, she would become more obviously fearful of trying new avenues, outwardly satisfied, always, with things as they were. She would be the obliging one when the girls got together in a group. She never made a fuss, never wanting her own way or saying, Here’s what I think we should do. With one other person, she might suggest things to do or places to go, but never in a group. Sure, that restaurant is fine, she would say.

My brother, Harry was born on August 31, 1925. He was the last of my mother’s children, five years younger than I. He was a beautiful, chubby child. When he smiled, a cute dimple appeared in his right cheek, as if by magic. Later, as a toddler, he wore shiny black high-topped shoes and had big ears, as most small children do. I remember my mother combed his black hair forward into bangs, and that gave him a slightly inquisitive and wondering look. When he was born, Yetta devoted herself completely to Heschel (Harry’s Yiddish name), and I could feel the loss of her affection for me. As the months passed, I could feel my father devoting more attention to Harry, as an infant and as a young child. My mother, on the other hand, loved all of us.

For a while we had lived farther downtown, but when I was five years old, we moved to the brick tenement on 121st Street, between Second and Third avenues, in Harlem. Ours was a three-room ground floor apartment, and, for the first time, we had a private bathroom. It wasn’t pretentious, but our family had a bathtub, a toilet and a white ceramic washbowl with shiny hot and cold faucets. Instead of toilet tissue, though, I confess that we used newspaper and scraps of other paper, because we were poor.

The hall door opened into our kitchen, and outside, its windows were gray window boxes that held flowers in the summertime and kept our food cold in the winter. There was a small sink that had a black spot around the drain where the thin white porcelain had worn away, and we had two deep laundry tubs where my mother scrubbed our clothes on a washboard until her hands were red. Roaches and rats infested the building. I, often, watched my mother bait traps with bits of food to lure a rat inside. They were wire cages with doors that shut quickly, preventing the rat from scurrying out. When we caught one, I would watch, fascinated, as my mother put the cage with the rat into a laundry tub and turned on scalding water. The rat would writhe back and forth, back and forth, until it died. Then we had to take the rat out of the cage, roll it in a newspaper, and dump it into the trash.

That was the wonderland into which I was born. Our kitchen table had a white porcelain surface and wobbly legs. Ancient plaid-patterned linoleum, yellowed and frayed, covered the floor, laid down who knows when, by who knows what previous tenant. My mother scrubbed it on her knees, with yellow soap and water, and dried it with a mop to make it bright and cheerful. Then, to preserve the result of her hard work, she would lay down sheets of newspaper, though they lasted only a few days before we were once again walking on the bare linoleum. We had an icebox to keep our food cool during the summer months, and I remember the old horse-drawn ice wagon that rolled to a stop in front of our building every day. The ice wagon was black and had a white roof. We children would wait for it and gather around the tired gray horse to pet its flowing mane. The iceman had big hairy shoulders that glistened with his sweat, and he swore almost continuously. As the small boys on the street gathered around, he would set the hand brake, climb down from the wagon seat, and peel back the thick wet rug that kept the 200-pound blocks of ice from melting. He wore a long brown rubber apron that tied at his waist with leather thongs that extended to his calves. The apron kept him dry as he carved the ice into 10-cent pieces. Using a pair of heavy steel tongs, he would wrench one of the steaming blocks to the tailgate of the wagon. Then, as we watched, he would begin chopping away at it with a wooden-handled ice pick, deftly and quickly cutting it into a 25-pound block that would cost my mother a dime. Finally, he would pick up a worn piece of canvas, fold it into a padded square on his bare shoulder, heave the block of ice onto it, and carry the ice up the five stone steps to our apartment building. Then all of the boys, and a few girls who had gathered around, would scramble under the wagon and on the street to scoop up the ice chips he had sent flying. On those warm May mornings, and all through the summer, it was ecstasy to feel the cool ice melt in our mouths.

Next to the kitchen, our parlor was furnished with a worn cloth brocade sofa and a matching overstuffed chair. The lamps on the parlor walls had been gaslights whose round glass bowls had been rewired for electricity; there was an overhead ceiling light and one floor lamp. My mother was a good woman and took pride in keeping the apartment organized and clean. To try to give it a warm, homelike quality, she sewed and hung curtains over the windows. There were several tables, and two small paintings hung limply from our parlor wall, depicting life in the Old Country. One was an eight-by-ten-inch watercolor depicting the countryside outside Warsaw. The other was an oil painting of stores on a busy Warsaw street. Our family’s most precious possessions stood on a four-foot wall shelf. They were statuettes of rabbis, Yiddish language books, a Sabbath candle, a Chanukah menorah and dreidl, and a Purim grogger (noise maker). We observed the Sabbath each week by lighting candles and eating chicken soup, gefilte fish, Challah bread, and vegetables that were mostly boiled potatoes and carrots. Gefilte fish was a staple of our Friday evening Sabbath meals and candle-lighting rituals. My mother would buy the shiny carp or pike, live and in wooden pails of water, at the fish market down the block. We kept them alive in a bathtub full of water, until Friday, when my mother would kill them, one at a time, and prepare them for dinner. To make gefilte fish, my mother would take the dead carp, and, using a fish board and a long knife, she would cut off their heads and tails. Then she scaled them with a smaller knife, quartered them, and dropped them into a pot of boiling water. When the flesh was soft and tender she would place them in a round wooden bowl and add chopped onions, celery, carrots, and seasoning. Then she would mix in an egg to help bind it, added a pinch of sugar, and mash it all together. It would go into our icebox for several hours before she would dish it up with strong-smelling red horseradish that she had to grate before serving. I enjoyed watching her and, as I grew older, helping to mash the fish. I confess that I liked squashing the fish under the masher.

For the Sabbath and for the Jewish holidays, we needed wine, but we didn’t buy it. My father made it by taking bushels of purple seedless grapes to a wooden tub in the basement. Our whole family helped him. After washing our feet, laughing and having the most wonderful time imaginable, we took turns trampling and mashing the grapes into a puree that my father would strain and store in large ceramic jars so that it could ferment into wine. We had wine enough for ritual observances all year long.

I had a child’s curiosity about the whole process of making wine at home. Why is it important to make our own wine? I remember asking my father before one of our winemaking rituals.

He was a suspicious, often morose, man. I can’t be sure the wine is kosher at the liquor store, he said, and it saves us a lot of money to do it ourselves. I can’t afford to be buying wine every week for the Kiddish ceremony and the lighting of our Friday night candles.

Why can’t we use fruit juice and not go to the trouble of stomping the grapes? I continued in my high, piping voice.

It’s a tradition for Jewish people to use wine for religious occasions.

Why is it a tradition? When did it start to be a tradition? I asked him.

He paused, wrinkled his forehead, pursed his lips, and put his hand up to his forehead in perplexed thought that, I feared, might turn to anger. Then he relaxed his face and changed the subject to the steps we would take to prepare the grapes for fermentation.

I remember that conversation, because it was my first clue to how far to go with my questioning. I stopped pressing my father about Jewish history and kept to questions about the traditional observances that he practiced. He was readily able to answer my questions about Passover.

What are we passing over? I asked.

Many years ago, in the land of Egypt, my father began the traditional Haggadah (that is, the story of Passover), a Pharaoh made Jews work for him and beat them if they didn’t work as hard as he wished. Moses and his brother, Aaron, came to Pharaoh and said, ‘God says, let my people go.’ Pharaoh didn’t. And so, God didn’t like that and sent a series of bad things to happen to Pharaoh. Still Pharaoh didn’t let them go. Finally, God warned the Jews to mark their doors with blood from an animal on a particular night. The angel of death would pass over the homes of the Jews and go only to the homes of the Egyptians to slay the firstborn sons.

Oh, I’m a first-born son, I said, alarmed. I looked up at him. Would you have killed an animal to have blood to put on our door so I wouldn’t have been killed?

Yes. I’ll tell you more of the story in a month at our family Haggadah service.

At the end of the evening of winemaking, I asked:

Why is it that only grown-up people can drink wine often, but not me and Sally and Harry, except on Friday nights and then only a sip or too?

My bigger body can tolerate the effects of wine better than your small body can, my father said.

As I grew older, I came to understand how much his behavior belied his words; in fact, he could not tolerate the wine and whiskey he often drank. In those days, alcoholism among Jewish men was practically unknown. Because of its disgrace and opprobrium, Jews severely frowned upon it.

For our Sabbath dessert we often ate compote of cooked apples, apricots, prunes and raisins. My family was Orthodox. My parents observed the commandment that the Sabbath was a day of rest when no believer should perform work. Even turning on the electric lights on the Sabbath evening or lighting the gas range to cook was considered work. So my parents, like other observant Jewish families, would hire a shabbos goy, a Saturday gentile, whom they would pay in advance to come in on Friday evening to light the gas range for cooking food that my mother had prepared and had placed in the pot earlier that day. My mother kept a Kosher house, which meant that she had to separate her dishes for meat and dairy in her cupboard and in the sink, as well as the utensils in her kitchen drawers. As good Jews, we never mixed our meat and dairy dishes together at the same meal; that is, we ate either a meat meal or a dairy meal, though we drank red or white borscht. By observing Purim in the early spring we recalled the ancient victory of the Jews over the Greeks and the perfidy of Haman, who had sought to exterminate our ancestors. We recited the story of how Haman was defeated. Like Jews everywhere, we celebrated with noisemakers and hamantashen cake, and by giving gifts, playing Purim games, spinning a dreidl, and singing Purim songs. We observed Jewish ritual throughout the year for Passover, Shavouth, Tisha B’Av, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the Fall, Succoth, Shemini Atzeret, Simchas Torah, and Chanukah, which I loved, in December.

My brother Harry, at that time, was too young to spin the dreidl, which is a four-sided cylindrical figure that can be spun like a top, but my sister and I would spend hours spinning the dreidl in a corner of our living room. Dreidl is a Yiddish word derived from the German drehen, which means, to turn. The dreidl has a different Hebrew letter on each of its four sides. The letters are Nun, Gimmel, Hay, and Shin, which make the acronym Nes Gadol Haya Sham—A Great Miracle Happened There [in Israel]. In the dreidl game, the players bet on what letter will show when the dreidl stops spinning. If it stops on the Nun, no one wins; on the Gimmel, the spinner takes the pot; on the Hay, half the pot; on the Shin, the spinner must put something into the pot. Sally and I played it over and over, laughing or crying out in dismay as we took our turns spinning the dreidl.

It was my mother who taught me about Chanukah, which, in America, is the fourth most widely, observed Jewish holiday—after Passover, Yom Kippur, and Rosh Hashanah. In the Jewish lunar calendar, the Chanukah holiday begins on the twenty-fifth of Kislev, which can occur anytime between late November and late December. During Chanukah I remember my mother standing at the stove frying tasty and fragrant latkes, pancakes made of potatoes and onions. She fried them in oil, because the Chanukah miracle concerned oil. The Talmud says that when the Syrian-Greeks captured the Great Temple in Jerusalem, they desecrated all the jugs of oil that the High Priest had prepared for lighting the temple menorah (candelabra). When the Jews regained the holy place, they could find only one small-undefiled jug still bearing the unbroken seal of the High Priest. But they wept because that cruse contained only enough oil to light the menorah for one day, and it would take eight days to prepare the oil that the temple ritual required. Nevertheless, the High Priest lighted the menorah. Then a miracle happened: The flame burned on and on, for eight days and nights. To commemorate the revolt against the attempt to destroy Judaism and the miracle of the light, the Jews decided, each year at that time, to observe a holiday and kindle a new light each day for eight days. From that observance, Chanukah became known as the Festival of Lights.

On the first night in our home, we lighted one candle, on the second, two candles, and so on, until the last night, when eight candles would be lighted. The candles stood in our menorah, a candelabrum that had eight level openings, and a ninth, more elevated opening known as a Shamash. We would light the Shamash candle first and use it, each night after that, to light the others. My mother told me Jewish law dictated that we place the candles near a window, so that people passing by could see them from the street. We had to publicize the miracle, she said, and I know now that the sole function of the Chanukah candles is to do that. We must not use them for any other purpose; we cannot, for example, read by the Chanukah lights. During the time the candles are burning, it is also customary for women to relax and not work. Because Western Jews live in a predominantly Christian society, and because of Chanukah’s proximity to Christmas, many parents today have converted it into a Jewish form of the major Christian holiday; but at that time, in our home, we didn’t give or get gifts on Chanukah, except sometimes for Chanukah money. That was part of an eastern European tradition in which, on the fifth night of Chanukah, families gathered for a special family night during which children were given Chanukah money. I do remember being given a dollar at home during Chanukah.

As a small child, I enjoyed many things. A family upstairs had a crystal set, an early radio, with its wire antenna stuck in a window frame. They let me take a turn listening to the earphone to hear Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Fred Allen, and Jack Benny. There also were big bands and orchestras on the airwaves, and I was fascinated to hear the scratchy music of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, and Tommy Dorsey.

More than two dozen other families lived in our building, many of them speaking only Yiddish, and relations among them were good, by and large, even in the sweltering summer heat in a time before the arrival of air conditioning. As a child, though, there were things in the building that terrified me. It frightened me, from time to time, to see burly, rude men removing furniture and household goods from one or another of the apartments and stacking it on the sidewalk out front. These were evictions, amid tears and loud wailings of misfortune, as the landlord dispossessed families because they couldn’t pay their rent. Everything they had in the world went on the curb, ultimately to be put into horse-drawn carts and taken away by second-hand furniture dealers, who would sell their furniture and household goods for the landlord.

When I first saw an eviction, I asked my mother innocently: "Why are men taking the sofa and chairs out of the apartment over there and putting them in the street?

They were not able to pay their rent, my mother replied.

I was afraid. Could that happen to us? I asked her.

Noooo, my mother said, drawing out the word as if she wasn’t quite sure.

I picked up her hesitation, and my anxieties rose, especially thinking about the quarreling in our house. Looking back now I can imagine my father’s worries: he was an unskilled, foreign laborer. His work was seasonal. His income was sporadic. I can imagine the insecurity he felt, knowing that he had three children to raise and a wife to support. He began spending more and more of his time in saloons.

Would anyone take our things away? I asked him later.

I’ll never let that happen, he said, I’ll beat them up first.

Wouldn’t they call the police and put you in jail? I ventured.

Not at all.

As evictions became more common, I became more aware of others and their plight. That awareness, in time, would grow into a keen social consciousness and questions in my mind about the role of the government, neighbors, the synagogue, and the victim in eliminating or preventing such tragedies. But at that time, in our neighborhood, there was no psychological sophistication. My parents were too busy trying to survive from day to day, too busy to heed my growing anxieties and fears of potential loss. Little did I know how close we were to the reality of our family’s dissolution. They were worried, perhaps terrified. When they tried to reassure me, I knew they were lying.

I had many bad dreams and haunting fears. I have a terrifying memory, almost seventy years after the morning it happened, of a day when dishes in the cupboard, pots on the stove, even the white plastered walls of our apartment suddenly began to shake and rattle. The shaking stopped after a few seconds, but I saw my mother and father, their eyes wide, glance around in bewilderment and confusion, terrified. We ran out into the hallway, where our neighbors, also afraid, were calling out to one another in Yiddish, What was it? Are you all right? To this day I don’t know what it was that shook us so.

I was also terrified of death. My first experience of death had to do with a family named Freedman on the second floor. I played in the street with their two little boys, Joseph and Mark. Their father was an ironworker, a big strong man. One day in the hall I saw a man I didn’t know rush upstairs, and then I suddenly heard loud wailing and crying from the Freedman apartment. Neighbors from down the hall rushed out, and, as I listened, I heard them say that Mr. Freedman had been killed in an accident at work when a heavy piece of iron had fallen on him. My family was shaken by the sudden death of this man we knew, and there was a great sadness in the building for many days.

From my orthodox religious training I believed, then, that when a person died, depending on the kind of moral and religious life he had led, he would go either to heaven or to hell. I wondered what kind of life Mr. Freedman had led. I asked my parents: Was Mr. Freedman a good man or a bad man?

My mother said, He was a hard worker, a good father, and a good neighbor.

I surmised that he would go to heaven.

If he was a good man, then why did he have to die and leave his family? Couldn’t God have saved him?

My parents looked at one another and shrugged their shoulders. Then my father replied, God only knows. He’ll have a better life in heaven.

I began wondering to myself what it was like to be dead. Will my body go to heaven? I wondered. How does Mr. Freedman get to heaven if they bury him in the earth? I knew intuitively not to ask my parents, because they probably didn’t know either.

After a while I saw several unfamiliar men climb the stairs and go to the Freedman’s door. Who are those men going into the Freedman’s apartment? I asked my mother.

They’re members of the Chevra Kadisha, Holy Society, that prepares the body for burial, she told me

What do they do to the body?

First, they wash Mr. Freedman’s body carefully with soap and water, and, then, they dry it with a clean cloth. Then they cover him with a special wrapping cloth used for burials; it’s called a shroud.

Mr. Freedman’s funeral was held within 24 hours of his death, in accordance with the Jewish tradition. Although we didn’t attend the funeral, my father and mother took me to the Freedman’s apartment three days later. Mrs. Freedman and her family were sitting Shiva for seven days. My father had instructed me, before we left our apartment, that I could go only if I were very, very quiet and said nothing to Mrs. Freedman unless she spoke to me. As we entered the apartment, I saw a lighted candle; my father later explained that the candle would aid Mr. Freedman’s soul on its journey to heaven. Staying so quiet was hard to do, but I did it. Even my father was quiet until Mrs. Freedman spoke to him and thanked him for coming. Soon after we got there, ten Jews, all men from the synagogue (a minyan my mother explained later), helped with the service. One man led the chanting and reciting of the Kaddish prayer for Mr. Freedman. I remember the small room was so full that it was hard, after the service, getting to the long table of food. When we returned to our apartment, I was full of food and questions.

Why was there black cloth over the mirrors?

To prevent Mr. Freedman’s soul from being seen in the mirror, because his ghost might snatch the soul away, my mother told me. As an adult I learned other reasons: mourners would not want to see themselves in a grieving state; Jews were not to pray in front of a mirror.

Who brought all of that food?

My mother smiled. Neighbors who wanted to make sure the mourners ate after the service.

"What’s a mourner?

A mourner is someone whose loved one has died.

Where did they take Mr. Freedman after he died and was wrapped in that special cloth?

They took him to a special place where people who have died can rest before going up to heaven or to hell.

How does Mr. Freedman get to heaven?

God comes and gets him.

Will I go to heaven if I die? I asked hopefully.

If you obey the commandments of God.

Now that I had seen death, I was shocked. All 613 of them?

I asked my mother, thinking of what I had learned in our storefront Hebrew School, that there were 613 commandments in the Torah alone and thousands more in the Talmud and the Jewish legal codes.

My mother could not reply.

I didn’t learn until much later about the kri’a, a tear made in the mourner’s garment, opposite the heart. Ultimately, when I was older, someone explained to me that the tearing of the garment represents the tearing away of the loved one from our hearts.

The social closeness I’m describing, of course, happened in the New York of another time. Life insurance salesmen in worn suits came to our door each week to collect fifteen-cent payments. Bearded orthodox functionaries in their black felt hats and black gabardine suits were always soliciting door-to-door, collecting for philanthropic charities. Peddlers in ragged brown trousers and collarless shirts sweated and mopped their brows as they pushed their heavy carts of hot sweet potatoes, fresh fruits, or vegetables up and down the streets. Blue-tailed flies buzzed over the packages of garbage that my mother and other housewives had wrapped in newspapers and left at the curb for the sanitation workers to pick up, or around the light-brown piles of fresh manure left behind by the milkman’s horse.

Farther down the block, we trooped into the storefront Hebrew school three times a week. There were ten boys my age in the small room, and we learned the Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew words, and the important prayers. Rabbi Solowitz made us memorize one line of Torah every day, but, because it was rote learning, I didn’t understand what the words meant. Rabbi Solowitz punished us severely if we misbehaved, striking the backs of our hands, scolding us loudly, and, what we feared most, threatening to send a message home: Shimon, I will tell your father what a bad boy you have been today!

Our neighborhood synagogue