4.2.12 WC: 191694
Part I: From Brooklyn to Cambridge (with stops in New Haven and Washington)
Chapter 1: Born and religiously educated in Brooklyn
The doctor told my pregnant and anxious mother that she would give birth “first in September.” So when I was born on September 1, 1938, my mother thought the doctor was a genius. I was the first person in the history of my family to be born in a hospital. My maternal grandfather, an immigrant from Poland, wanted me to be born at home, because in Poland, there were rumors that Jewish babies were switched with Polish babies. To prevent this from happening to his grandchild, he stood guard over me at the baby room. Nevertheless, when I started to misbehave early in my life, he was convinced that the switch had taken place, despite me being—in my paternal grandmother’s words—“the spittin’ image” of my father. (I was well into my adult life before I realized that I was much more like my mother in ways other than physical resemblance.)
I was born in the Williamsberg neighborhood of Brooklyn, where both of my parents had lived most of their lives, having moved as youngsters from the lower East Side of Manhattan where they were born to Orthodox Jewish parents who had emigrated from Poland at the end of the 19" and beginning of the 20" Century. When my mother was pregnant with my brother Nathan, who is three and a half years younger than me, we moved to the Boro Park neighborhood of Brooklyn where I grew up and where my parents remained until their deaths.
Boro Park is unique among American Jewish neighborhoods in that it has always been Jewish. Unlike the neighborhoods of Manhattan—such as the Lower East side and Harlem, which have had changing ethnic populations—Boro Park has always been, and remains, dominantly Jewish. The first occupants of the small tract houses built near the beginning of the twentieth century of the site of rural farms were Jewish immigrants seeking to escape from the crowded ghettos of Manhattan and later Williamsberg. The current occupants of the modern multi-dwelling units are Chasidic Jews who have moved from Crown Heights and Williamsberg seeking to recreate the shtetles of Eastern Europe.
When I lived in Boro Park during the 1940s and 1950s, it was a modern Orthodox community of second generation Jews whose grandparents had emigrated mostly from Poland and Russia during the late 19" and early 20" centuries. Following the end of World War II, some displaced persons who had survived the Holocaust moved into the neighborhood.
My parents reached adulthood in Williamsberg during the peek of the Great Depression. My mother Claire had been a very good student at Eastern District High School and at the age of 16 enrolled at City College in the fall of 1929—the first in the history of her family to attend college. She was forced to leave before the end of the first semester by her father’s deteriorating economic situation. She went to work as a bookkeeper, earning $12 a week.
My father, who was not a good student, attended a Yeshiva high school in Williamsberg. It was called Torah V’Daas—ttranslated as Bible and Knowledge. He began to work during high school and never attended college.
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