My father laughed and handed me the copy of The Day. I bent over the first column (fortunately, I knew the words went from right to left in Yiddish—and in Hebrew, too) and began to read. It wasn't at all difficult because once I pronounced some of the letters in my mind, I would recognize the word, since I could speak Yiddish fluently.
My father was once again astonished (I really don't know why; by now, he should have expected it) and sent me to Hebrew school. For about half a year, I attended Hebrew school on certain days of the week (every day of the week, except Friday and Saturday, in fact) after ordinary school was done.
I learned to read Hebrew with the help of the diacritical marks. Hebrew books intended for accomplished readers didn't have them, 7 but I never got to the point of being an accomplished reader.
I learned a considerable Hebrew vocabulary and some of its grammar. I even remember memorizing and reciting a speech in Hebrew at some ceremony to which parents were invited. Someone had to stay in the store, but my mother came, and sat there, beaming, while I pronounced the ancient syllables.
But it all came to an early end when we moved—synagogue, Hebrew school, and all.
I wasn't sorry, for I wasn't terribly interested in Hebrew school, and it was always a chore to remember to wear a hat. I still know a very little bit of Hebrew, however, and I can still read it with the diacritical marks, even though I can't really understand it.
That was the beginning and the end of any religious training I have ever received.
7 In English, for instance, the experienced reader would at once recognize and read FRSCR ND SVN YRS G as "Four score and seven years ago."
Essex Street
By the end of 1928, we had lived on Miller Avenue for three years and we had owned our candy store for a little over two years. That was enough.
My father, on a number of occasions, would find that a candy store had grown dull, or perhaps he thought he might locate a more profitable one. He would therefore employ an agent who specialized in such things. The agent would suggest places and my father would then visit those stores, study their books, stay a day to observe how the business went, and so on.
Sometimes he would take me, and that I would always find terrifying. I never wanted to leave the old place. New stores always looked dangerous to me; new neighborhoods unnatural and ominous; new people monstrous. To this day, this remains true for me. I don't like to travel; I like to stay put; I have very little sense of adventure. 1
Finally, my father found a likely prospect, and in December 1928 we left the old apartment and store and moved half a mile eastward to the corner of Essex Street and New Lots Avenue. The exact address was 651 Essex Street. It was still East New York. It was still a Jewish neighborhood.
The store was indeed a better store. It was larger and the clientele were apparently better off. One thing I had never seen before was a slot machine. People would throw nickels into it, pull the lever, and I would watch with fascination as the three wheels whirled. I never had any impulse to try it myself, though. The whirling wasn't worth a nickel to me and I could clearly see that the wins did not balance the losses, except for the slot-machine owner (who paid us a small percentage for keeping it there).
Sometimes the intricate mechanism would go wrong and a repairman would come and take the thing apart. I would watch and marvel at the many parts and would be overcome by an earnest desire to take
1 This tendency may be helped along by the fact that I find so much change and adventure inside my head that I don't feel the necessity of going through the trouble of dragging my physical body over the obstacles and through the underbrush.
apart, carefully and delicately, the entire machine. It was then my notion to line the parts up in order of decreasing size. I knew, however, that I had no desire whatever to put them together again thereafter.
My attraction to mechanical objects was purely destructive, never constructive, and I realized it. In my whole life, therefore, I never fooled myself into thinking I wanted to be an engineer or an auto mechanic or anything of the sort.
In the new store, we lived upstairs and not around the corner. There was a staircase in the back of the store that led directly up to our living quarters.
There were numerous advantages to this. The store and the apartment were all there was to the building so that we rented the entire structure and we did not have other people sharing it with us. There was no one for us to annoy and no one to annoy us. It was very simple to go up and down the stairs, so we saved on commuting time, so to speak, and my father did not have to go through a stretch of the outdoors in bad weather just to eat or take his nap.
On the other hand, it was a small apartment, and we were back to three rooms. Worse than that, far worse, we were just above the store, so that if my sister and I had the slightest discussion, there'd come a banging on the radiator pipes, or a yell up the stairs, or, worst of all, the sudden, physical presence of my mother.
Her complaint was always that the customers were astonished and perturbed; that they looked up at the ceiling saying, "What is that?" as though an earthquake were taking place instead of a discussion. The impression we received was that all the customers came from homes where the utmost decorum prevailed at all times and that for them to hear voices raised in discussion shocked their sensibilities to such an extent that they would certainly never return. They might even report the matter to the police.
My mother, always short-tempered, would sometimes explain her views by hitting us on such parts of our bodies as she could reach, thus invariably giving rise to outcries far worse than those she was correcting.
In a cabinet in the kitchen, she kept a length of clothes rope that was specially hardened and sharpened for the purpose of beating recalcitrant mules and little children, and when she was very angry, she would light into us with that. It was much worse than spanking. In a spanking, the pressure is spread over the palm of a hand. When that
rope curls around you, however, with all the pressure concentrated into a narrow region and with the extra speed induced by the leverage effect of its being farther from the pivot, it really smarts. It takes a long time to rub the pain away.
In later years, when my mother would look back on my childhood and marvel at what a good boy I had always been, I would say, "What kind of good boy could I have been, Mamma? You were always hitting me with ropes."
"With ropes?" she would say, stupefied.
"Sure," I said, "you had a rope that you kept in the closet and when you got really mad at me you would whip me with the rope. How could I have been a good boy if you had to hit me with ropes?"
And she would say, "Never. I never hit you with ropes." I think she even believed it.
The fact is she struck me even when I grew to tower over her four feet, ten inches. She would order me to sit down and then she would attack me like an enraged lioness. By that time, however, I was large enough and she had grown old enough for it to have become easy for me to fend her off with my elbow and she would end up wincing and complaining that I was an unnatural son who was hurting her.
I said, reasonably, "It's because I'm getting too big to hit, Mamma." So she stopped. I must have been about fifteen by that time.
3
When we moved into that apartment, by the way, the old owners had not yet completely removed their possessions and, for just a few days, there was an overlap. One of the things they had left behind was a typewriter, and I believe it was the first typewriter I had ever seen.
It is really astonishing, as I look back upon it, to recall my reaction. I scarcely knew what a typewriter was. If I did know, there could be no reason why I should want to use one—and yet I felt the strangest yearning toward it. I would stare at it and touch the keys and carefully depress one and watch the letter move up.
Somehow I had the dim hope that it might be left behind and that it might become ours by default and that I could then use it. What purpose it could possibly serve, I didn't know, but I wanted to use it.
If I were a believer in psionic power (which I am not), I would think that the force of my ultimate fascination with typewriters and my
endless use of them in years to come had somehow sent a message backward in time to my nearly-nine-year-old self.
4
At the time we moved I was in 5A. After we moved I could no longer go to PS 182, where I had gone for nearly four years. We were out of the neighborhood and there was no busing. The new neighborhood school was PS 202, which was a newer, cleaner, and better school—but it meant I was totally uprooted.
There's something I remember that I can't swear belongs to this particular move, but it may have. As I recall, I got into an argument with another young man of my own age in the playground, as we were lining up to be led into our classes.
He maintained that 202 was much better than 182, and I denied it, naturally. He said that the smartest boy in 5A in his class was smarter than the smartest boy in 5A in 182; and I said he was full of something-or-other-that-I-wasn't-allowed-to-say-at-home, because I was the smartest boy in 5A in 182, and I was certainly smarter than the smartest boy in 5A in 202.
It was a terrible boast to make, for it might well have ruined my stay at the school if I had turned out to be engaged in unfounded boasting. And how could I know? After all, could I be certain that the brightest boy in class in this new school might not be a prodigy who would far outshine me?
I was indeed to meet such superprodigies in time, but fortunately for myself, this wasn't to be one of those times. I moved smoothly into position as brightest boy in the class and there was no real argument about it.
5
I was being put to work more and more in the store. I had always done what I could from the beginning. I had watched the newsstand to pick up the pennies left there and to make sure no one took a paper without paying. (If even a seven-year-old calls out, "That's two cents, mister"—which is what the morning papers cost those days—it takes a hardened criminal to walk away without paying.)
In the new store, however, I was being placed behind the counter to dole out penny candy, or to sell a pack of cigarettes or a cigar or a newspaper. I would deliver papers on occasion (we didn't have a regular delivery). I became the one to run and call people to the phone,
which meant I sometimes got a nickel as a tip. (Tips, though, I turned over to my father. It was understood, after all, that I had no use for a nickel, since I was supplied with all my necessities free of charge.)
About the only thing I didn't do was to fool around with the ice cream, or make malteds. (I did make ordinary sodas.) Somehow I never learned how to dish out ice cream, make sundaes, ice-cream sodas, or malteds in all my years in the candy store. I can't believe it was because I was too stupid to learn how, so I can only suppose it was because it was the one task in the candy store I was determined not to do, and you can't learn to do what you're determined not to do.
My father let me get away with it.
Still, the increasing duties managed to break off my relations with my peer group. In the first place, I couldn't very well keep friends if I had to say constantly, "I have to go watch the store."
Second, there was a vast social gulf raised between myself and the rest. If one of them came in for a piece of candy for a penny, and could stand at the counter, taking his ease, and deciding slowly, while I had to wait patiently for him to make up his mind and then give him whatever he asked for on demand, it made me his distinct social inferior— and I felt it.
The reason why I was suddenly put to increasingly onerous duties in the candy store was not merely the result of my growing older (I was a big boy of nine by now), nor was it any weakness in my father.
He turned thirty-two at just about the time we bought the Essex Street candy store, and had worked hard all his life, as had all his family, and he had the work-hard ethic. I remember his chopping his own ice in that candy store to put into the ice-cream storage container (we did not yet have an electric freezer for it) and then adding rock salt to bring the freezing temperature to the required point where ice cream would remain hard. He would have to mix the chopped ice and the rock salt by thorough pounding with the thick end of a baseball bat. I remember him wrestling carbon-dioxide cylinders into and out of the basement so that the carbonated spouts of the soda fountain would work.
No, there was nothing wrong with him. The trouble was with my mother. Sometime in midfall of 1928, during our last months at Miller Avenue, she became pregnant.
It was not a planned pregnancy. It was an accident, and if it had occurred a half-century later I have a strong suspicion an abortion would have been performed, if only because a baby and a candy store were an incredible combination. As it was, abortions were unthinkable, and there was nothing to do but go through with it—which is a good
thing, for everyone was, and has always been, pleased with the result, including, particularly, myself. 2
This meant that through the first half of 1929, my mother was becoming steadily less capable of putting in her usual sixteen-hour day of unremitting toil, and I had to substitute. Furthermore, my father had to look forward to my mother's being inevitably wrapped up with the demands of an infant for some time after birth, so I had to know my way around the store sufficiently to be able to take over as second in command.
That was the beginning. For a period of many years thereafter, I was tied to the candy store. Since I also had to go to school (and do well, for my father had no intention of allowing me to use my home duties as an excuse for falling short), it meant that many years were to pass for me with little or no leisure.
I might have rebelled inwardly at this and, once I escaped, I might have made up my mind never to live so again—taken to sleeping late, learning how to loaf, and so on.
However, I either started working too young or found too much compensation in work, for I was imprinted for life. When the time came that I could have all the leisure I wanted—I found I did not want it. In fact, I could not take it even when others insisted. I am forever and always in the candy store, and the work must be done.
I even know the precise reason for it.
My father, who was forever bustling about the store, hauling cases of soda bottles or bundles of newspapers, would occasionally find me sitting down, lost in a book, and would immediately inform me that I was lazy and that lazy people would come to a bad end. He would then find some chore for me to do in order to preserve me from disaster.
I always defended myself against the imputation of indolence. I never disobeyed my father, but my respect for him was not carried to the point of accepting libelous remarks in silence.
And I still defend myself. I kept trying to disprove my laziness for so long that I forgot that leisure was not necessarily laziness. Whatever within me was needed to relearn that fact has atrophied past saving.
So I still work seven days a week and ten hours a day, when I can, as though I were still in the candy store. When circumstances force me to stop for a while, I get uneasy as though I hear a voice within me saying, "Who's watching the store?"
2 When I stated the pregnancy to have been accidental in Before the Golden Age, my brother (the result of that pregnancy) asked me, in a rather challenging manner, what made me think so. I said, "Mamma told me," and you never heard anything so unanswerable in your life.
Of course, it is writing at which I now work, but the memory of my father is with me constantly and it is that, more than anything else, that has made me so prolific. I am still trying to dodge the imputation of laziness.
It's also there that we may find the reason, more than any other, that makes me insist on doing all my work solo, and never employing a typist, a secretary, a researcher, or anything else. The candy store was a family operation and we had no helpers—so I allow myself no helpers now.
But never mind that. In the spring and summer of 1929, I had no way of knowing what the candy store was to do to me. All I knew was that my mother was getting fat and tired and that I
couldn't play with the kids at all. About the only thing left for me to do that could be called playing was, when things were slow in the store, to bounce a ball against the wall (but not when my father was napping), provided I kept an eye on the doorway and came into the store if more than two people entered.
This forced me the more firmly into the world of books, and I became an assiduous librarygoer.
I read omnivorously and without guidance. I would stumble on books about Greek myths and fell in love with that world. When I discovered William Cullen Bryant's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey I took them out of the library over and over. Unaware that they were classics I was supposed to read and should therefore avoid, I enjoyed them and read and reread them, often beginning again as soon as I had finished, until I had almost memorized them. (I was so ignorant that it was years before I discovered that Achilles was not pronounced ATCH-illz.)
I read Dumas and Dickens and Louisa May Alcott and, indeed, almost the entire gamut of nineteenth-century fiction. Because so much of it was by British authors, I became a spiritual Englishman and a conscious Anglophile.
I read E. Nesbit's books and Howard Pyle's and George Mac-Donald's. I even read Eugene Sue, which carries the Romantic Era to the extreme edge of endurability and had me constantly in tears. But then I was crying all the time in those days. I wept over Beth in Little Women, over Raoul, Athos, and Porthos in The Man in the Iron Mask, over Smike in Nicholas Nickleby, and eventually learned, in my frequent rereadings, which chapters to skip.
I had to read nonfiction too, because at least one of the two books I was allowed had to be nonfiction, and I would read anything rather than nothing. I found, by experimentation, that history and science fascinated me, so I picked out every book I could get on those subjects.
And, because I had (and still have) a retentive memory and instant recall, everything I read remained with me and was at my service and made schoolwork all the easier. It was to be many, many years before I learned anything in school that I did not already know. 3
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 11