indicates that this is the best suit for me, fast-drying and won't chafe. What's your favorite color? Uncle Nate asks- maybe you want it in your school color, huh? I turn scarlet, though that is not my answer. I don't want that kind of suit any more, and oh, I can smell humiliation in the wind, hear it rumbling in the distance-any minute now it is going to crash upon my prepubescent head. Why not? my father asks. Didn't you hear your uncle, this is the best- I want one with a jockstrap in it! Yes, sir, this just breaks my mother up. For your little thing? she asks, with an amused smile.
Yes, Mother, imagine: for my little thing.
The potent man in the family-successful in business, tyrannical at home-was my father's oldest brother, Hymie, the only one of my aunts and uncles to have been born on the other side and to talk with an accent. Uncle Hymie was in the soda-vater business, bottler and distributor of a sweet carbonated drink called Squeeze, the vin ordinaire of our dinner table. With his neurasthenic wife Clara, his son Harold, and his daughter Marcia, my uncle lived in a densely Jewish section of Newark, on the second floor of a two-family house that he owned, and into whose bottom floor we moved in 1941 , when my father transferred to the Essex County office of Boston Northeastern.
We moved from Jersey City because of the anti-Semitism. Just before the war, when the Bund was feeling its oats, the Nazis used to hold their picnics in a beer garden only blocks from our house. When we drove by in the car on Sundays, my father would curse them, loud enough for me to hear, not quite loud enough for them to hear. Then one night a swastika was painted on the front of our building. Then a swastika was found carved into the desk of one of the Jewish children in Hannah's class. And Hannah herself was chased home from school one afternoon by a gang of boys, who it was assumed were anti-Semites on a rampage. My parents were beside themselves. But when Uncle Hymie heard the stories, he had to laugh: This surprises you? Living surrounded on four sides by goyim, and this surprises you? The only place for a Jew to live is among Jews, especially, he said with an emphasis whose significance did not entirely escape me, especially when children are growing up with people from the other sex. Uncle Hymie liked to lord it over my father, and took a certain pleasure in pointing out that in Jersey City only the building we lived in was exclusively Jewish, whereas in Newark, where he still lived, that was the case with the entire Weequahic neighborhood. In my cousin Marcias graduating class from Weequahic High, out of the two hundred and fifty students, there were only eleven goyim and one colored. Go beat that, said Uncle Hymie . . . So my father, after much deliberation, put in for a transfer back to his native village, and although his immediate boss was reluctant to lose such a dedicated worker (and naturally shelved the request), my mother eventually made a long-distance phone call on her own, to the Home Office up in Boston, and following a mix-up that I don't even want to begin to go into, the request was granted: in 1941 we moved to Newark.
Harold, my cousin, was short and bullish in build-like all the men in our family, except me-and bore a strong resemblance to the actor John Garfield. My mother adored him and was always making him blush (a talent the lady possesses) by saying in his presence, If a girl had Heshele's dark lashes, believe me, she'd be in Hollywood with a million-dollar contract. In a corner of the cellar, across from where Uncle Hymie had cases of Squeeze piled to the ceiling, Heshie kept a set of York weights with which he worked out every afternoon before the opening of the track season. He was one of the stars of the team, and held a city record in the javelin throw; his events were discus, shot, and javelin, though once
Yes, Mother, imagine: for my little thing.
The potent man in the family-successful in business, tyrannical at home-was my father's oldest brother, Hymie, the only one of my aunts and uncles to have been born on the other side and to talk with an accent. Uncle Hymie was in the soda-vater business, bottler and distributor of a sweet carbonated drink called Squeeze, the vin ordinaire of our dinner table. With his neurasthenic wife Clara, his son Harold, and his daughter Marcia, my uncle lived in a densely Jewish section of Newark, on the second floor of a two-family house that he owned, and into whose bottom floor we moved in 1941 , when my father transferred to the Essex County office of Boston Northeastern.
We moved from Jersey City because of the anti-Semitism. Just before the war, when the Bund was feeling its oats, the Nazis used to hold their picnics in a beer garden only blocks from our house. When we drove by in the car on Sundays, my father would curse them, loud enough for me to hear, not quite loud enough for them to hear. Then one night a swastika was painted on the front of our building. Then a swastika was found carved into the desk of one of the Jewish children in Hannah's class. And Hannah herself was chased home from school one afternoon by a gang of boys, who it was assumed were anti-Semites on a rampage. My parents were beside themselves. But when Uncle Hymie heard the stories, he had to laugh: This surprises you? Living surrounded on four sides by goyim, and this surprises you? The only place for a Jew to live is among Jews, especially, he said with an emphasis whose significance did not entirely escape me, especially when children are growing up with people from the other sex. Uncle Hymie liked to lord it over my father, and took a certain pleasure in pointing out that in Jersey City only the building we lived in was exclusively Jewish, whereas in Newark, where he still lived, that was the case with the entire Weequahic neighborhood. In my cousin Marcias graduating class from Weequahic High, out of the two hundred and fifty students, there were only eleven goyim and one colored. Go beat that, said Uncle Hymie . . . So my father, after much deliberation, put in for a transfer back to his native village, and although his immediate boss was reluctant to lose such a dedicated worker (and naturally shelved the request), my mother eventually made a long-distance phone call on her own, to the Home Office up in Boston, and following a mix-up that I don't even want to begin to go into, the request was granted: in 1941 we moved to Newark.
Harold, my cousin, was short and bullish in build-like all the men in our family, except me-and bore a strong resemblance to the actor John Garfield. My mother adored him and was always making him blush (a talent the lady possesses) by saying in his presence, If a girl had Heshele's dark lashes, believe me, she'd be in Hollywood with a million-dollar contract. In a corner of the cellar, across from where Uncle Hymie had cases of Squeeze piled to the ceiling, Heshie kept a set of York weights with which he worked out every afternoon before the opening of the track season. He was one of the stars of the team, and held a city record in the javelin throw; his events were discus, shot, and javelin, though once
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