during a meet at School Stadium, he was put in by the coach to run the low hurdles, as a substitute for a sick teammate, and in a spill at the last jump, fell and broke his wrist. My Aunt Clara at that time-or was it all the time?-was going through one of her nervous seizures -in comparison to Aunt Clara, my own vivid momma is a Gary Cooper -and when Heshie came home at the end of the day with his arm in a cast, she dropped in a faint to the ktchen floor. Heshie's cast was later referred to as the straw that broke the camel's back, whatever that meant.
To me, Heshie was everything-that is, for the little time I knew him. I used to dream that I too would someday be a member of the track team and wear scant white shorts with a slit cut up either side to accommodate the taut and bulging muscles of my thighs.
Just before he was drafted into the Army in 1943? Heshie decided to become engaged to a girl named Alice Dembosky, the head drum majorette of the high school band. It was Alice's genius to be able to twirl not just one but two silver batons simultaneously-to pass them over her shoulders, glide them snakily between her legs, and then toss them fifteen and twenty feet into the air, catching one, then the other, behind her back. Only rarely did she drop a baton to the turf, and then she had a habit of shaking her head petulantly and crying out in a little voice, Oh, Alice! that only could have made Heshie love her the more; it surely had that effect upon me. Oh-Alice, with that long blond hair leaping up her back and about her face! cavorting with such exuberance half the length of the playing field! Oh-Alice, in her tiny white skirt with the white satin bloomers, and the white boots that come midway up the muscle of her lean, strong calves! Oh Jesus, Legs Dembosky, in all her dumb, blond goyische beauty! Another icon!
That Alice was so blatantly a shikse caused no end of grief in Heshies household, and even in my own; as for the community at large, I believe there was actually a kind of civic pride taken in the fact that a gentile could have assumed a position of such high visibility in our high school, whose faculty and student body were about ninety-five percent Jewish. On the other hand, when Alice performed what the loudspeaker described as her “piece de resistance”- twirling a baton that had been wrapped at either end in oil-soaked rags and then set afire-despite all the solemn applause delivered by the Weequahic fans in tribute to the girl's daring and concentration, despite the grave boom boom boom of our bass drum and the gasps and shrieks that went up when she seemed about to set ablaze her two adorable breasts-despite this genuine display of admiration and concern, I think there was still a certain comic detachment experienced on our side of the field, grounded in the belief that this was precisely the kind of talent that only a goy would think to develop in the first place.
Which was more or less the prevailing attitude toward athletics in general, and football in particular, among the parents in the neighborhood: it was for the goyim. Let them knock their heads together for glory, for victory in a ball game! As my Aunt Clara put it, in that taut, violin-string voice of hers, “Heshie! Please! I do not need goyische naches! Didn't need, didn't want such ridiculous pleasures and satisfactions as made the gentiles happy . . . At football our Jewish high school was notoriously hopeless (though the band, may I say, was always winning prizes and commendations ); our pathetic record was of course a disappointment to the young, no matter what the parents might feel, and yet even as a child one was able to understand that for us to lose at football was not exactly the ultimate catastrophe. Here, in fact, was a cheer that my cousin and his buddies used to send up from the stands at the end of a game in which Weequahic had once again met with seeming disaster. I used to chant it with them.
Ikey, Mikey,
To me, Heshie was everything-that is, for the little time I knew him. I used to dream that I too would someday be a member of the track team and wear scant white shorts with a slit cut up either side to accommodate the taut and bulging muscles of my thighs.
Just before he was drafted into the Army in 1943? Heshie decided to become engaged to a girl named Alice Dembosky, the head drum majorette of the high school band. It was Alice's genius to be able to twirl not just one but two silver batons simultaneously-to pass them over her shoulders, glide them snakily between her legs, and then toss them fifteen and twenty feet into the air, catching one, then the other, behind her back. Only rarely did she drop a baton to the turf, and then she had a habit of shaking her head petulantly and crying out in a little voice, Oh, Alice! that only could have made Heshie love her the more; it surely had that effect upon me. Oh-Alice, with that long blond hair leaping up her back and about her face! cavorting with such exuberance half the length of the playing field! Oh-Alice, in her tiny white skirt with the white satin bloomers, and the white boots that come midway up the muscle of her lean, strong calves! Oh Jesus, Legs Dembosky, in all her dumb, blond goyische beauty! Another icon!
That Alice was so blatantly a shikse caused no end of grief in Heshies household, and even in my own; as for the community at large, I believe there was actually a kind of civic pride taken in the fact that a gentile could have assumed a position of such high visibility in our high school, whose faculty and student body were about ninety-five percent Jewish. On the other hand, when Alice performed what the loudspeaker described as her “piece de resistance”- twirling a baton that had been wrapped at either end in oil-soaked rags and then set afire-despite all the solemn applause delivered by the Weequahic fans in tribute to the girl's daring and concentration, despite the grave boom boom boom of our bass drum and the gasps and shrieks that went up when she seemed about to set ablaze her two adorable breasts-despite this genuine display of admiration and concern, I think there was still a certain comic detachment experienced on our side of the field, grounded in the belief that this was precisely the kind of talent that only a goy would think to develop in the first place.
Which was more or less the prevailing attitude toward athletics in general, and football in particular, among the parents in the neighborhood: it was for the goyim. Let them knock their heads together for glory, for victory in a ball game! As my Aunt Clara put it, in that taut, violin-string voice of hers, “Heshie! Please! I do not need goyische naches! Didn't need, didn't want such ridiculous pleasures and satisfactions as made the gentiles happy . . . At football our Jewish high school was notoriously hopeless (though the band, may I say, was always winning prizes and commendations ); our pathetic record was of course a disappointment to the young, no matter what the parents might feel, and yet even as a child one was able to understand that for us to lose at football was not exactly the ultimate catastrophe. Here, in fact, was a cheer that my cousin and his buddies used to send up from the stands at the end of a game in which Weequahic had once again met with seeming disaster. I used to chant it with them.
Ikey, Mikey,
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