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CHAPTER 1
After three days and nights of labor my mother gave birth to me at the Israel Zion Hospital in Boro Park, Brooklyn. I'm spelling it "b-o-r-o" instead of "borough" because that's closer to the Hebrew word borei in the prayer Borei Pri Ha'etz (creator of the fruit of the tree) and the members of my family would never take a bite out of an apple without mumbling that prayer first.
The Israel Zion Hospital was later renamed Maimonides Hospital, which is a good thing because its former name laid a message on my subconscious while I was trying to get out in 1931. Israel! Zion! I hadn't even been born yet, enough already. My two sisters were born in this same hospital five and eleven years later, but they never mentioned what they thought of coming into the world with the ideas of Israel and Zion looming, and they glided out without the long struggle my poor mother endured to have me.
From the hospital, I, the firstborn — if the oldest happens to be a girl, she's never referred to as the "firstborn," but never mind — was brought from Israel Zion on Forty-Ninth Street and Tenth Avenue to our house on Forty-Seventh Street between Twelfth and Thirteenth Avenues, which remained my home until I got married.
Judging by its name you'd think Boro Park was the Central Park of Brooklyn. However, you won't find a semblance of a park in the whole neighborhood. There was just one tree on our block. A man named Mr. Behrman convinced the city to plant it in front of his house next door. We never saw him, but my mother would sing his praises each spring when she looked out the window of our enclosed porch to see the tree's first light green foliage. The last time I was in Boro Park, it was still flourishing, a memorial to a man I never met.
Since Boro Park had very few trees, and Prospect Park was almost near "The City," as we called Manhattan, on Sunday mornings Daddy used to take me all the way to Ditmas Avenue near the Belt Parkway so I could soar on the swings that overlooked a bunch of trees in the distance. Younger children had to stay put in Boro Park and make do with rocking on the mechanical horses lining Thirteenth Avenue that galloped as soon as a quarter was put in a slot. Once the children turned five years old, learning the Aleph Beit (the Hebrew ABCs) was deemed playtime enough. At the age of ten, tag at recess in the yeshiva was exercise enough. In adolescence, the walk to shul, in all one's finery, was enough.
Having trees in our neighborhood was not important, but donating trees to Israel? That was pounded into our heads. Every girl in my class had a blue and white pushka (a tin box for collecting charity donations) to collect money for trees in Israel. Trees were planted to honor a person who had died. Sometimes I was honored even though I was not dead: my aunts and uncles occasionally gave me a "meaningful" birthday present, a certificate that read, "Happy Birthday! A tree has been planted in your honor in Israel." And then I had to write a flowery thank you note befitting such an uplifting gift.
NATURALLY, my father, Anshel, had hoped for a boy each time my mother gave birth. Who could blame him? Daddy was well prepared as to what to expect from daughters, thanks to the Talmud's forewarning:
A daughter is a deceptive treasure to her father because of anxiety on her account: he cannot sleep at night when she is young, lest she be seduced; when she reaches puberty, lest she play the harlot; after she is grown, lest she fail to marry; after she is wed, lest she have no children; when she is old, lest she practice witchcraft.
Yet after my auspicious nine-pound arrival as the first of the Greenfield girls, I was wheeled in a baby carriage with sterling silver blanket clamps, dressed in little ruffled pinafores, and shown off in the Young Israel shul every Shabbos. My smiley, moon-shaped face earned me the nickname "Bupsie." There's a photo of me at four years old in which I'm curtseying in my "Shirley Temple dress," a polka-dot frock. In those days, modern Orthodox girls were mad for Shirley Temple dolls. Chesty Barbie with boyfriend Ken, had she been conceived in my time, would never have been the choice for any Boro Park girl. Of course, Chassidic girls were responsible for mothering their real life siblings every day, so they actually had no need to play with dolls of any kind.
THE HOUSE WE RENTED for eighty years was on the same block where the annual Simchat Torah (Joy of Torah) holiday dancing took place. Our street, Forty-Seventh Street, was the Times Square of Boro Park. The police barriers that were erected during the holiday to block traffic from entering the street were completely unnecessary because the streets were automatically emptied of cars on Shabbos and Jewish holidays. After all, the entire neighborhood was Orthodox.
My mother, Etta, had an easy comradeship with every storekeeper in the neighborhood. From an early age, she had been known as Itte, de'gitte — Etta, the good one. Whenever I was in a stalemate with my pesty younger sister or sulking about one thing or another, Mother would say, "You be the good one." But ask anyone who knew my mother: Who could be as good as Itte, de'gitte?
"The main thing, you should be with nice people," she always said.
"Mom," I told her in 1971, "I am in the Whitney Museum. It's a show called Lyrical Abstraction."
"The main thing, you should be with nice people."
The nice haimeshe storekeepers sent their nice Jewish daughters to Shulamith School for Girls on Forty-Ninth Street. Shulamith was named for the comely princess in King Solomon's Song of Songs. They sent their nice Jewish boys to Eitz Chayim Yeshiva, named for the Tree of Life, which was around the corner on Thirteenth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. The Young Israel shul was down the block on Fiftieth, and the tiny, homey shul called a shteibel, where Baba, my grandmother, would pray, was on Fifty-Second Street. The fish store was on Fiftieth Street, the bakery where I was sent to pick out "wellbaked" challahs and Bilkelach (small challahs) was on Fifty-First Street. Mother used to tell us that on the passenger boat to America, she, her brother Morris, and her sister Molly were given raw dough instead of rolls. "It was not Jewish bread." Until her death at almost 101, she asked for only "well baked" rolls and challahs and considered white bread to be gentile.
Sometimes I accompanied my mother on her expeditions to buy fish for gefilte fish. The fish eyes stared at me, and the smell made me dash outside to wait for my mother until she'd emerge looking immensely satisfied with her accomplishment. Then we'd go down the block to the hardware store to buy aluminum containers so that guests who came to the house could take food home with them. "Make a bracha (blessing) in my house" Mother would plead, asking visitors to taste some mouth-watering treat while she sneakily filled containers with more delicacies for them to take with them. "Here, have another shtikel, just a little piece."
My friends, my relatives, my school, my shul, my doctor, my dentist, and the Indian Walk shoe store where my flat feet were routinely examined and fitted with orthopedics — all were located between Forty-Fifth Street and Fifty-Fifth Street. My best friend, Hindy, lived on Forty-Eighth Street; my second best friend, Hadassah, lived around the corner from us on Forty-Sixth Street with her uncommunicative rabbi father and her very old grandmother who pronounced each word slowly and carefully. Mother's oldest brother, Uncle Morris, otherwise known as Moishe Mendel, and his wife, Aunt Molly, lived on Forty-Ninth Street, and Daddy's brother Ben and his wife, Sarah, were diagonally across the street from them. (And when Aunt Sarah died, Baba imported a young bride from Europe to be Uncle Ben's second wife and care for his seven motherless children. So we got a new aunt, and after a few years, three new cousins). Our other cousins, Mutzi, Miriam, and Shaulie were on Forty-Sixth Street. Cousin Shloimie, another Shaulie, and Yankel were on Forty-Eighth Street; Aunt Yetta and Uncle Nuchum on Fifty-Second Street. Aunt Helen and fat Uncle Abie were on Forty-Sixth Street, and Aunt Tybee, who was not a real aunt but the best friend of my mother, and Uncle Abe, who was not a real uncle but the best friend of my father — lived on Fiftieth Street. Aunt Tybee and Uncle Abe had three sons who, according to the parents' plan, were supposed to marry us three Greenfield girls. The oldest boy was a crybaby, so luckily this idea was eventually dropped.
Even my Sunday elocution teacher — the exquisitely beautiful Miss Lewis, whom mother found from out of nowhere, and who made me weak in the knees with her otherworldly, powdery complexion and pastel aqua eyes — lived on ordinary Forty-Ninth Street on the ordinary second floor of an ordinary house. None of the other girls' mothers thought of giving their daughters elocution lessons, and I have no idea where Mother got the idea or how she met Miss Lewis. I can still recite a poem Miss Lewis taught me, about an old woman led across the street by a young boy. It is a long, maudlin ballad that ends:
Somebody's mother bowed low her head In her home that night,
And the prayer she said was,
"God, be kind to that noble boy,
He is somebody's son, and pride and joy."
Faint were her words and wan and weak,
But the Father hears when his children speak.
Angels caught the faltering word,
And somebody's mother's prayer was heard.
I never recited this Hallmark poem in public. I was already developing an aesthetic during my preadolescence and I knew the poem was pure schmaltz. Plus, it didn't quite sound like Jewish schmaltz. The author was unknown, but I intuited a bit of Boy Scout Christianity in it. Yet mother loved to have me recite this poem to her, and she always got tears in her eyes at the mere mention of prayers, frail elders, offspring who bring naches (pride) and the notion that the Father hears. It could have been Holocaust Memorial Day the way her eyes filled up. The imagery was Jewish enough for Mother, so I never mentioned my suspicion that the poem was Christian — and worse, that the divine Miss Lewis with her blond halo and perfumed aroma might be Christian too.
It certainly was rare to see a Christian in the neighborhood, or even a secular Jew, which amounted to the same thing in Boro Park.
I could always spot the difference between Orthodox and secular Jews. I call this talent "J-dar." With the ultra-Orthodox it's obvious because of their in-your-face getups. But in a glance I can tell whether someone who is dressed normally is a shul-going Jew or a wash-the-car-on-shabbos Jew. If the person is shul going, I can tell you if the shul is modern Orthodox, Conservadox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist or Post-Denominational. I can even intuit a convert or a baal tshuva, that is, one who returns from a secular background. Not to boast, but I can tell whether a person is ardent or indifferent or agnostic or just plain hostile about being Jewish — or a crazed mixture of all. In fact, I can tell whether someone is connected or disconnected to Israel, and I can calculate their degree of heated passion or cold indifference as if I had a thermometer.
The modern-Orthodox Jews are very content. Their contentment borders on smugness. They are known as the FFB — frum (religious) from birth. They have a sense of entitlement. The baal tshuva are abbreviated as BT. They try to be more frum than the FFBs, which causes the FFBs to marvel patronizingly at such a phenomenon. And get this: there's a new "sexy" Judaism. The twenty-something girls think being Jewish is hot stuff; I blink when I read slogans like "Juicy Jewess" on their T-shirts. Their serious parents read Tikkun but the kids subscribe to Heeb magazine.
Still, when I look in the mirror, I cannot for the life of me surmise my own category. It took my rabbi professor nephew, Adam Ferziger, whose research at Bar Ilan University in Israel is on the subject of assimilation, to tell me that I am "post-Orthodox." It's close enough. And I can sniff out other post-Orthodox types: they have my same angst. They see-saw between blown up pride and burning shame. They love to tell inside jokes and use "in" expressions that only those born to "the life" can detect. They barely cover up a perverse disdain for the polite Conservative and Reform Jews who pray in English, who don't "know" as much, and who seem overly respectful to their rabbis and terribly good-humored about the psychopathic character of the Torah G–d. And the post-Orthodox feel a disguised superiority to the FFBs who struggle to be "in" the way the post-Orthodox struggle to be "out." The post-Orthodox are as intense about leaving Orthodoxy as deceived, disenchanted, divorcing spouses are about leaving their marriages. When the post-Orthodox manage to move out of Boro Park, they don't return, but Boro Park is always in them.
MY MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER'S name was Hinda Stern Scheinberg. Her deep-set eyes with their penetrating expression conveyed a pioneer's independence. She had a long chin that she would thrust forward. Her maiden name, Stern, befitted her. Still wearing her shaitel, wig, Hinda came through Ellis Island soon after Emma Lazarus, the author of the words on the Statue of Liberty, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Hinda came to gigantic America from the tiny village of Shwenzany, Poland. There she had chopped ice to make her own mikveh, a ritual bath, even in the dead of winter right there in the back of the inn. No tiled spa and hair dryer in that mikveh! Henoch, her husband, had come from the city of Babov. A renowned scholar, he was plucked from that city's yeshiva to be a groom for Hinda, who saw Henoch only once before marrying him. They went on to have five children. Henoch and their second son, Izzie, took a boat to America and worked until they had the money to send for Baba Hinda and Laibish, the baby. Hinda took the next boat with Laibish, but she had to leave three children behind. Her eldest, twelve-year-old Moishe Mendel, that is Morris, took care of eight-year-old Molly and three-year-old Etta until two and a half tickets could be sent for their trip to America.
Finally the time came for Morris, Molly, and Etta to make the crossing to America. Mother dramatically recounted the moment when one day in the midst of their five-week journey Moishe Mendel noticed that his baby sister Etta was lost. The poor boy was distraught. What if she fell overboard? After frantically searching, he found her fast asleep in a corner of the captain's cabin, where no steerage passenger had gone before. This story has been told and retold to Etta's children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.
The children reunited with their parents in America and the family moved to an apartment above a store on the corner of South Third Street and Marcy Avenue in Williamsburg. The next move was to an apartment behind another store at 11 Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side. Zaida Henoch made garters for the older children to sell on the street in front of the house; the younger children finished off the garters. "Laibish fastened the raw edge of the elastic into the metal clip, banging it in with a hammer," my mother told me admiringly. Her job was to put the elastic through the metal slides. "The work time was like our play time," she said ruefully.
The store on the ground floor was set back from the crowded sidewalk so there was also room to bring some shmatas, rags, to sell outside. Across the teeming street was the magnificent Eldridge Street Synagogue. Who could care about the squalor of sleeping three in a bed when you woke up to look out onto such grandeur?
Next they moved to 75 Eldridge Street, to the fifth floor of a tenement building that had a tub in the middle of the kitchen and a toilet down the hall. There were four tenants on each floor, two in front and two in back, all sharing one toilet. They would sleep out on the fire escape on hot summer nights.
"And we were happy," Mother said. "We never felt poor."
In winter, they carried heavy coal in two pails from the basement bin. In summer, they would sometimes get up very early to travel to Coney Island because there was a special rate of ten cents for lockers and just a nickel a train ride before 8 a.m. My mother held back tears when she told the story of the one time that Hinda played ball with her on the beach of Coney Island, "She looked young at that moment. She was smiling. She always worked so hard, she was always so weary, but at that moment on the beach, she looked young."
Mom, tell me more about Hinda, even if I've heard it a hundred times before. Tell me again how her honesty shone because she was a tsadeikista (righteous woman). Tell me how her no-nonsense attitude ruled. Hinda, who I'm named after!
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Helène Aylon.
Excerpted by permission of Feminist Press.
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