Read an Excerpt
White Boy
A Memoir
By Mark D. Naison
Temple University Press
Copyright © 2002 Temple University.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1566399424
Chapter One
Crown Heights in the 1950s
Born in 1946, I grew up in a red brick apartment building at the intersection of Lefferts and Kingston Avenues in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Today Crown Heights is a national symbol of black-Jewish tensions, with Afro-Caribbeans and Hasidic Jews living in uneasy proximity. In the 1950s, it was a peaceful neighborhood populated largely by second- and third-generation Jews and Italians, with a sprinkling of Irish and African-American families. The absence of racial and religious conflict was not accidental. Cherishing the opportunity to retreat into private life after years of war and economic hardship, Crown Heights residents seemed determined to shield their children from the weight of history. Anxious to have their children grow up American in a society opening its doors to minorities, my parents' generation worked hard to hide the scars that had been inflicted by the Depression, the Holocaust, and the terrors of the Jim Crow South. Through a communal code of silence upheld by religious leaders and the mass media, the people of Crown Heights tried to erase tragedy from their daily experience and give their children a feeling that the world was fundamentally benign, a place of adventure and opportunity where no accomplishments were out of reach.
Nevertheless, the social geography of Crown Heights was influenced by immigrant traditions and ethnic differences. Most of the Jews in the area lived in six-story elevator apartment buildings put up in the 1920s; there were four at the intersection of Lefferts and Kingston, one on each corner, and ten more within a three-block radius. Most of the Italians lived in a five-block-square area of wooden and brick one-family homes that everybody called "Pigtown." Located one block south and west of my corner, Pigtown had its own Italian-language parish, which ran annual street festivals, and back yards that contained vegetable gardens and chicken coops. Directly to the south of my apartment house there were rows of three-story walkups in which Italians and Jews lived together.
Other nearby neighborhood landmarks included PS 91, a huge, red brick public school with a concrete schoolyard that contained several basketball courts, and a vest-pocket park with a playground, handball courts, a full court basketball area, and a large softball and football field. Six blocks to the south was Kings County Hospital, the largest concentration of hospital buildings in New York City. Six blocks to the west stood Ebbets Field, the fabled home of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Neighborhood life was highly ritualized, giving Crown Heights a village-like atmosphere. On weekdays men went off to work, some by car, some by subway, while women walked their children to school conversed with one another from apartment windows, and dried their laundry on clotheslines that hung from or between apartments or stood in backyards. On weekends the men sat in folding chairs on street corners or stood outside the candy stores talking with the local bookie, while the women sat on benches by the park, the grandmothers in one section, the women with baby carriages in another. There were still street peddlers, a roving knife sharpener, a rag picker in a horse-drawn wagon who yelled "any old clothes," and numerous vacant lots, where children could chase one another, play ball, and even roast potatoes and marshmallows over a fire. Several small stores within a block of our apartment met most family needs. We had a grocery store, a dry cleaner, two candy stores, a hair salon called "Blonds and Dolls," and a Jewish delicatessen that sold pickles, nuts, smoked fish, and a middle-eastern delicacy called halvah.
Although the neighborhood contained a sizable number of elderly people who spoke only Yiddish or Italian, the largest group in the community were American-born married couples who were educated through high school and spoke English at home and at work. Crown Heights in the fifties was filled with young children, most of whom had been born during World War II or immediately after. Most of the men and women in these families had been poor during the Depression and cherished the modest prosperity they were experiencing. Although no one had more than two bedrooms, this seemed spacious, if not luxurious, to people who had been doubling up with relatives for most of their adult lives. Cars and television sets, once rare in this neighborhood, but virtually universal possessions by the mid fifties, had become important features of family life. People gathered in groups on weekday evenings to watch their favorite shows and took excursions throughout the city on weekends to visit their relatives.
Despite new technologies, the vitality of street life remained the neighborhood's defining characteristic. While adults sat or stood in groups to gossip, gamble, or talk politics, kids used every available piece of space for games and contests. The lives of children, like those of adults, were rigidly divided by gender. Boys played cowboys and Indians in the alleys, used sidewalks for boxball and box baseball, and played stickball, football, and punchball in the street. Meanwhile girls played with dolls in their apartments and jumped rope and played hopscotch on sidewalks under the watchful eye of their mothers. If you were a boy, every nook and cranny of the neighborhood was a zone of adventure and competition, a place where kids fought, tested each other, and made friends and enemies; but girls were prohibited from activities that involved physical aggressiveness or the risk of getting dirty. In all my years in Crown Heights, I never saw a girl play basketball or stickball, throw a football or hit a baseball, roast potatoes in a vacant lot, or join in games of ring-a-levio and johnny on a pony.
Racial boundaries in Crown Heights, at least on the surface, were far less obvious. In the 1950s, only a sprinkling of black families lived in the fifteen blocks between Eastern Parkway and Kings County Hospital, and most of them seemed solidly working class. None of my neighbors appeared to fear the black people in our midst or worry about their children's behavior. The poor and troubled families in the neighborhood, the ones everyone kept away from or felt sorry for, were all white. Whereas Crown Heights today is a community where black-Jewish divisions permeate every aspect of life, from schooling to shopping to patterns of sociability, in the early fifties, working-class and lower-middleclass Jews seemed to express little overt hostility toward the neighborhood's small black population. The Jews whom I grew up among were secular, politically liberal, and—at least until large numbers of blacks started entering their neighborhood in the early 1960s—reluctant to express racial hostility in front of their children. In my childhood, I never heard a neighbor or a member of my family use the word "nigger." Feelings about blacks, whether positive or negative, were masked behind the very ambiguous term schvartze (Yiddish for black), which could be either a term of description or a racial epithet. As a child, I found it difficult to know which meaning was being employed because adults invariably reverted to Yiddish when talking about African-Americans. Their racial prejudices, whether subliminal or explicit, were not something proudly passed on from parents to children. Adults seemed embarrassed, even ashamed to talk about racial issues.
The children in my neighborhood were even less prone to make race a public issue. There were two black kids in the pack of thirty-odd boys I hung out with, Franny and Franklin, and they were included in every one of our activities, from running in the alleys to playing handball and basketball and football. I never heard anybody insult them with a racial slur or exclude them from an activity because of their racial background. The biggest division in our neighborhood was between Italians and Jews, and even this was not marked with great hostility. Jewish kids from "Lequerville" (the term we used to describe our section of Crown Heights) played with Italian kids from "Pigtown" as much as we fought with them.
The neighborhood also had little, if any, violent crime. Until I was ten or eleven years old, the only policemen I saw were traffic cops. Organized crime was a muted presence—my friend Barry's father was the local bookie—but there were almost no burglaries, muggings, car thefts, or assaults, much less rapes or murders. Because Crown Heights was filled with extended families and people (mostly women) who were not in the paid labor force, there was no need for volunteer security patrols or a heavy police presence. These informal block watchers made the neighborhood safe and secure at all times of the day and night, a feature that my parents, who had grown up in much poorer and more dangerous areas, appreciated greatly.
In the mid-1950s Crown Heights had few very poor people and only a handful of rich ones, making for a rough equality that undoubtedly fostered social harmony. However, there was one striking social disparity—the widespread employment of African-American and Afro-Caribbean women as domestic workers. Almost every Jewish family in our neighborhood, even those where wives were not employed, had African-American women come in to clean their apartments or help care for children. Jewish women referred to these workers as their "girls," even though the women they employed were often older than they were. Every morning they arrived in a group on the Kingston Avenue bus from Bedford-Stuyvesant, and they left by the same route early in the evening. Their educational and cultural attainments varied greatly, as did those of the people who employed them. The woman my mother employed, "Adler," had no trace of servility or deference. A well-spoken woman with a light-brown complexion and straight hair, Adler carried herself more like a schoolteacher than a maid, and she sat down with my mother for coffee like a family friend. My mother, an ardent trade unionist who had worked at numerous blue-collar and clerical jobs before becoming a teacher, insisted that I treat Adler with politeness and respect. But Adler's presence raised disturbing questions. Why was someone so capable and intelligent cleaning our house? Why wasn't she doing what my mother was doing? Racial barriers in New York, which kept African-Americans from getting jobs as secretaries, sales clerks, and bank tellers, had created a pool of black women workers with few alternatives to domestic labor. By drawing upon this labor force, lower-middle-class Jewish families simultaneously improved their own standard of living and acquired a morally damaging complicity with racial discrimination.
Childhood Idiosyncrasies
The racial issues in my neighborhood, overt and covert, had little impact on my early childhood. The biggest problem I faced was a dissonance between the values of my parents and those of most other families in my neighborhood. My parents were schoolteachers, Jewish intellectuals who revered education and wanted me to become a professor or scientist. They took me to zoos and museums and concerts, gave me piano lessons, provided me with electric trains, chemistry sets, and books on dinosaurs, animals, and outer space. For their own enjoyment, they stocked our apartment with books, records, and musical instruments, and filled our walls with inexpensive reproductions of paintings they saw in museums. My parents regarded themselves as members of an intellectual elite whose job was to bring culture and civilization to unappreciative New York public school students. My achievements were to provide proof that their talents had not gone to waste.
This way of life made us very different from most of the Jews in our Crown Heights neighborhood. Most of our neighbors were tough, earthy people who were more influenced by American popular culture than by Jewish intellectual and cultural traditions. Although their occupations varied—they were skilled factory workers, small businesses owners, taxi drivers, clerical workers—they had the cynical air of people who had to fight their way out of poverty by means both fair and foul. They spent much more time watching television than reading, and were more inclined to go to the racetrack than a museum. Gambling and card playing were omnipresent. Women played mah-jongg and canasta, while the men played pinochle, casino, and gin rummy and bet on ball games and the horses. Little attention was given to religion. Most people went to synagogue only on the high holy days, and they sent their kids to Hebrew school so they could go through the ritual of a bar mitzvah, not so they could become religious Jews. Childrearing was approached rather casually. Children were expected to do well in school but also to be well-rounded individuals who could dance, play cards, compete in sports, and, if they were girls, dress up and look pretty. People were judged by their physical appearance, the clothes they wore, the cars they drove, and the food they served at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and family parties.
Eating seemed to be the neighborhood's favorite pastime, the activity where social ties were cemented and the burdens of any painful history could be set aside. Wherever they went, children my age were deluged with food: homemade potato latkes and matzoh ball soup prepared by grandparents; chow mein and egg foo yong ordered at Chinese restaurants; deli sandwiches of roast beef, corned beef, tongue, and chopped liver; Sunday breakfasts combining bagels, cream cheese, and platters of smoked fish with onion and salami omelets. Among the secular Jews of Crown Heights, the size and health of their children was more important than their aptitude for learning or their knowledge of Jewish tradition. Most of the children and adolescents in the neighborhood were big and strong, reaching their parents' height and weight by the time they were twelve or thirteen years old, and they possessed a physical self-confidence rarely seen in the shtetels of Eastern Europe or the crowded immigrant slums in which their grandparents had once lived.
Unfortunately for me, my parents were determined to uphold the tradition of Jewish intellectualism in this earthy, materialistic community no matter how much it isolated us. Although their combined income as schoolteachers was no more than that of our neighbors, they regarded themselves as intellectual royalty in a world of philistines, and they decided to use me, their only child, as the vehicle to display their superiority. I was taught to read by the time I was three, forced to perform at piano recitals and enter science fairs, and paraded in front of neighbors and relatives to show off my knowledge of science, politics, and current events. While exposure to books and museums awakened my intellectual curiosity, being shown off as the product of exemplary childrearing exposed me to incessant teasing and considerable hostility. My peers mocked me for having early curfews, for having to go to lessons and recitals, for getting high scores on standardized tests, and for being praised by teachers for winning science fairs and spelling bees.
Two things saved me from complete social ostracism. First, my parents both worked full-time and lacked the time and energy to supervise my weekday afternoons and weekend mornings. During those times, I could run relatively unsupervised with the pack of neighborhood boys. Second, I was strong and reasonably athletic, and I had been given valuable fighting skills by my father, who had been victimized as a child on the streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn's toughest and poorest Jewish neighborhood. Only five feet, four and a half inches tall, with a receding hairline, glasses, and shoulders slightly hunched from adolescent rickets, my father taught me three wrestling holds—a hammerlock, a headlock, and a full nelson—and he bought me my first pair of boxing gloves when I was three. He also stocked the house with sports equipment and played catch with me whenever he could, even though he was horribly uncoordinated. By the time I was eight, I had become competent in most ball sports and could use my wrestling holds to fling tormenters to the ground and sit on them until they "gave up."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from White Boy by Mark D. Naison. Copyright © 2002 by Temple University. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
