Confessions of a Refugee Child
I was an observer of two worlds, old and new. Language
intrigued, customs abounded. We colored eggs in soft, stripey pastels and devoured
milk chocolate bunnies along with stinging gobs of deep red horse radish as we did our intricate seder preparations. I rehearsed the four questions in a new, blue Easter bonnet.
My brother received traditional bar-mitzvah training in what
seemed an imposing synagogue in our
south Bronx neighborhood known familiarly as the “KI,” a phonetic abbreviation
in local slang which I believe stood for something like “Kehilath” Israel,
signifying a kind of gathering. It was a large, impressive, somewhat
old and architecturally interesting building with an ornately carved façade. There
was a swirling though dimly lit gallery upstairs for the women and girls and a
larger, lighter space downstairs near the ark for the men and boys; and it was here that a serious mess of dahvening took place -especially during the holidays-
alternating with simpler schmoozing among the securely
tallised. On Yom Kippur we’d hear the occasional wail of an ambulance coming to
retrieve one of the elderly, wizened, frail little die hard fasters who refused
not to pass out.
But I was a girl and relegated to the upper, circular
chamber, which at times could be a bit lonely even on the high holidays when it
was a tad livelier. The women wore tight heels and stiff skirts and black lacey
things that seemed to bristle when they chatted- a bit formally- as they half watched the men. Many of the families were of refugee origin and se habla
Yiddish just about everywhere, alternating with a growing contingent of Espanol
speakers. Up the corner from the shul stood a Baptist church frequented by local
African Americans then called Negroes. The church, a brown clapboard affair redolent
of the 19th century, rocked the sidewalk with seismic jolts on
gospel Sundays. As I’ve mentioned
elsewhere, Grovers Corners it was not, though the
1940 film adaptation of Wilder’s classic idyll with William Holden did keep us
going for a while when it finally made it to 1950’s TV; we watched it on the
twelve inch and I was mesmerized. The notion of a town that was ours, where everyone lived in their own
little houses and spoke flawless, friendly English of the polite, provincial
sort, and where you fell in love with the boy next door. . . .
Bat mitzvahs were not very common for girls at the time, and
so I was educated instead at the David Pinsky Folkshul, which I attended four
afternoons a week. It was named after the esteemed,
Yiddish writer, playwright and poet, sometimes spelled Pinski, and associated
with the then progressive labor Zionist movement. The followers of this philosophy
were instrumental in founding the state of Israel and their ideological heirs now mainly form of the two-state, peace movement.
The classes were co-ed, there was no school on Fridays in deference to Shabbat, but during the four other days our cultural study was neatly divided: Yiddish lit on Mondays, a
favorite; Modern Hebrew on Tuesdays, a
time of rebellion as I disliked the too compact letters and hard sounds, so
unlike the melodic Yiddish; Jewish History on Wednesdays with its stories of prophets
and kings; scriptures in the ancient tongue on Thursdays, a kind of anomaly and
everyone’s least happy moment- really,
quite impossible, because we never got past the first few words of Genesis as the
deep symbolism and archaic meanings inherent in each of the mystical letters to
say nothing of the attendant commentary were so unbelievably dense and
incomprehensible. Someone must have insisted on including the biblical verse in
a mainly secular program as a kind of nod to tradition.
However Genesis Thursdays did turn into a sort of rebirth or salvation as it happened, we struggling interpreters
being saved from this most challenging literary hurdle by Mrs. Hirschberg, a
survivor herself with the telling, ominous blue tattoo on her arm. In fact Mrs.
Hirschberg took downright pity on us and often spent this fourth day of
linguistic agony singing the praises of Zion instead of deciphering text; she
was fond of recounting the social and political aspirations that poured forth
from the newly formed land of milk and honey, assuring us that we would always
have a home in Zion. She sent us out into those mean streets on wintry
afternoons with the small, square cards that had those neat rows of slots for
quarter donations to ensure the planting of trees in an arid homeland, and we heeded
the call; knocking on strange doors, catching unsuspecting relatives in their
moment of weakness and putting them on the spot.
Mondays and Wednesdays clearly were my favorites among this
carefully planned weekly schedule of storefront scholarship as Yiddish was
front and center then- and it was here that my love of literature was honed to
the level of obsession as we read through the great Yiddish poets and storytellers
in the original- most of us being able to zip through Sholem Aleichem almost
with the ease of gobbling up a Grimm’s fairly tale. The classes were conducted
in Yiddish, most of the children, my classmates, being of immigrant/refugee
parents and subsequently more or less cozy in the idiom; but with each other we
conversed in English because of the dread inherent in being tagged “mockies” or
“green horns,” just wanting to be cool and American. The melting pot in
truth was a rough peasant stew continually in need of tasting, refining, but we were determined to become part of the mix, non totally “white” as we occasionally were seen
notwithstanding- even by other, more assimilated Jews.
We were such a feisty, hearty and ragtag bunch, smart and
mischievous, confused and rebellious little partisans often still fighting the
battles of WWII at home while learning to assimilate and out-Amerikanize even
the native born with their strange, non-European customs, flat accents, pink bubble
gum, weirdly odd though oddly appealing Disney characters and a profusion of tattered
superhero comic books. It seemed to us as
if it was the Americans who were the strange strangers in whose land we had landed; through
the vagaries of political fate, chance and luck we had been born to continue
the story of a people while learning to eat cheeseburgers and bacon. In the end
we were able to proudly spout curses in two or more languages, depending how
many were spoken at home.
My father, a fierce labor Zionist Eisenhower republican- not
as unusual a combo as now it sounds- when
he began to get the alarming gist of what indeed might ensue with the raising a
girl child in America, was convinced I should attend a yeshiva, but my mother
wouldn’t hear of it. I remember the arguments. Her slightly pagan Hungarian
background left her contemptuous toward the ultra religious folk, whom she snidely
referred to as “Yekkes,” which Wikipedia now tells me is “a Jew of German
speaking origin,” so I don’t quite get the connection, though obviously this term became synonymous with orthodoxy, sanctimony, hypocrisy and all she hated about religion; the notion of “Modern Orthodoxy” was not even a blip on the
horizon yet.
In any event, the main thing was not even that, the hatred
of Yekkes and anything smacking of fundamentalism or religious pretension- it
was simply that my mother did not wish to pay for a private education- we were poor
by middle class standards, leading to the wearing of my own working class
pedigree with pride later on when it became more fashionable. In the end of
course I went to public school and eventually did wind up marrying a goy, which
was ironic since my mother hated and mistrusted goyim even more than Yekkes,
though who knows if this would not have happened anyway- it’s so hard to
predict things.
In retrospect, we were not so very different from any of the others
who grappled with old and new ways of speaking. The majority of the population
is/was/ were, always would be immigrants, reluctant, desperate or grateful upon
arrival, no matter how recent or far back, non-native speakers.
Conversation once comprised the social medium, screens were
smaller and fewer, there was no google translate, and gestures assumed
significance. I still have trouble though with my connectors- the prepositions-
and can’t always swear to the consistent and proper use of the tenses as they
relate to time.
