by Avery Corman
In 1945, after Joseph Vitolo Jr. said he saw the Virgin Mary in a vacant lot a few subway stops north of where we lived, people began to hold a vigil for the Virgin Mary’s return there. The devout, along with the ill seeking to be cured, came to pray and to be touched by the boy. Candles were lit, flowers were placed. Eighteen days after he first made his claim, the crowd coming to the site reached the estimated 30,000. For Jewish children of my age — I was nearly ten, about the same age as the boy — the situation was beyond our capacity to understand.
The boy did not have the vision again. A small shrine was erected facing the Grand Concourse after the crowds dissipated. The shrine was still in view when I traveled home on the bus from high school. It is there still.
The Catholic children who did not attend parochial school might have resented the fact that they had to go to school on days we were excused for a medley of Jewish holidays. I didn’t even know what some of those holidays were for. What was Shemini Atzeret? And yet we were usually given two days off from school, the second day for the supposedly more religious among us. “Is it allowed?” was my standard question of my mother concerning these Jewish holidays. “Is it allowed to go to the movies?” “Is it allowed to play ball?” “Is it allowed if I play ball, but I don’t run?” The rules for me became — no ball playing or movies on the High Holidays, but it was all right on the other Jewish holidays since we didn’t celebrate them and my mother and my uncle went to work on those days and I figured my mother probably didn’t know what they were either.
Although we didn’t go to services, my mother sometimes slipped in for a memorial service on Yom Kippur. We did stroll along the Grand Concourse with the other Jews on the High Holidays. And we usually had a holiday meal to begin the important holidays. For Passover, we had matzo on the table and appropriate Jewish dishes, but it wasn’t a seder, we didn’t have a Haggadah. I had to dress “nice,” for the High Holidays. By the second day of Rosh Hashanah, still excused from school, I was playing ball while dressed “nice.”
For the Jewish children of my generation, our parents might have been able to speak Yiddish, and more likely their parents, but by our time, the language did not reach us, Yiddish overwhelmed by assimilation. The Yiddish language Daily Forward was sold at the candy store downstairs, tucked in a rack with other foreign language papers. Only a few copies of The Forward were ordered by the candy store each day. None of my neighborhood friends who were Jewish spoke or understood Yiddish and I did not. My aunt and uncle did not know Yiddish and never signed a Yiddish word. My mother, whose parents were Yiddish-speaking, said that she might have been able to follow a conversation in Yiddish and perhaps speak a little. She would not have had a reason to do so.
A teacher in 4th grade asked us if a second language was spoken in the house and barely any hands went up. In a sense, with sign language we spoke a second language in my house. I did not volunteer that information.
For Jewish children, Catholicism was mysterious. With what little we knew of the Catholic faith, and we knew very little — our guides were Catholic children our age, hardly divinity experts — we could not track the ideas and the miracles behind the religion, lacking the belief or the knowledge.
This passed for a theological discussion on a street corner: A Catholic boy says that Catholics have a real religion and the Jews don’t because the Messiah came to the Catholics and the Jews are still waiting for the Messiah. We have no rejoinder, not knowing how to answer. What is a Messiah and are we still waiting? The Catholic children were given the answers, we didn’t have any.
“I have to go to Hebrew,” were the words we spoke as we withdrew from a street game or left our friends hanging around. You had to go. It was decreed as part of your upbringing. A few days a week from when we were about ten years old until our bar mitzvahs at thirteen, with occasional Sunday School sessions, we went to “Hebrew.”
My Hebrew School was part of the Concourse Center of Israel synagogue, a half block from the apartment. Bronx synagogues ranged from small buildings, which were converted private houses, to larger, more elegant synagogues built from the ground up, like Temple Adath Israel on the Grand Concourse where the Metropolitan Opera tenor Richard Tucker once had been the cantor.
The Concourse Center of Israel was one of the larger Bronx synagogues with substantial seating and a balcony. Identifying itself as a Conservative synagogue in the 1940s, the synagogue took a position that would have been considered Orthodox in later years — women and men were required to sit separately. I wouldn’t have been aware of it. I never went into the synagogue. It wasn’t a requirement for Hebrew school students to attend services and so I didn’t go.
In Hebrew School we were not taught Hebrew as a language as we were to be taught French or Spanish in regular school. We were only taught to say Hebrew words. Pronunciation of the words was drilled into us. We read aloud. We wrote Hebrew letters and words in notebooks. That passed for Hebrew instruction because the principal intention was for us to stand up on the day of our bar mitzvahs and chant properly.
Our Hebrew School teachers, humorless, pinched men, older than our regular school teachers, suggested that God was looking down on us and observing our dedication to the task at hand, if you could believe that and I didn’t. The instruction was strict, unrelenting, with a likely continuity to the yeshivas of Eastern Europe, except it wasn’t Eastern Europe, it was the Bronx and seemed inappropriately rigid. In my Hebrew School we were moved around in the classrooms. If you answered incorrectly you were moved back and could move all the way to the last row, last seat in the room. If you answered correctly you moved up. Classes were held in a floor below the synagogue, sliding doors defining the separate classrooms. No girls. The concept of bat mitzvahs didn’t exist in the neighborhood. If I close my eyes and think back on those classes in Hebrew School, I am tense, restless, and just getting over the chicken pox.
In Sunday School we were told tales from the Old Testament, the story of the Jews presented in dry reportage as if true. “Do you know what the word, history, means?” my teacher said. “His story.” I found it all hard to believe and that was a crucial difference between me and the Catholic kids I knew. They seemed certain in their belief. They seemed to really believe the biblical stories they were taught.
The largest issue between Jewish and Catholic youngsters was that we were told by our Catholic friends that the Jews killed Christ. The idea was passed on by the nuns who taught in the parochial schools of the 1940s, naive themselves in that era of backward thinking. It was understood by the Catholic kids that in biblical times our people did it. We killed Christ. The undercurrent from that thought never went away. In anything resembling a discussion of religion with our Catholic friends we were always off balance, lacking the information for refutation. We felt we were viewed negatively for this historic and monumental crime. In adult life I appeared on a television panel discussion with a priest from the Bronx of my childhood who said regretfully that the nuns were teaching in Catholic schools then that the Jews killed Christ.
We Jewish and Catholic children from the neighborhood when we were older and better informed might have discussed intelligently the known history of the life and death of Jesus and resolved the issue between us, but we were no longer there. We had scattered.
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BARBER SHOPS
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The barber shop was a reflection of the neighborhood as small town, our link with a Norman Rockwell image of American life. In the barber shops on a Saturday men would sometimes wait for up to an hour reading newspapers and magazines and chatting — politics, sports, complaints. They were in a man’s domain, copies of Police Gazette strewn about.
For a child, being taken there by a grownup was not good. Being old enough to go by yourself, having been given the right amount of money for a haircut and tip, was also not good. The wait was excruciating. The talk in the barber shop had nothing to do with you and you could not possibly have an opinion the men
or the barbers would listen to, even on something you knew about like sports.
When you were little you had to endure the embarrassment of being propped up on a booster board so the barber could get at you without straining his back. When you were older the barber cut your hair short for the summer, making this decision without your having a say in the matter. Eventually, you were old enough to have opinions about the way you wanted your hair cut and you asked for pomade and fussed about how your pompadour looked.
Like the shoe repair stores, barber shops were exclusively run by Italian-Americans. On a Saturday afternoon in the shoe repair stores and barber shops and through an open window here and there, the Texaco-sponsored radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera House would follow you through the neighborhood.
A barber shop war broke out in our neighborhood. The barber shop I went to was located on the east side of the Grand Concourse between Field Place and 184th Street. My uncle went there and, therefore, so did I. The decor was basic, a narrow space with white walls and traditional barber shop furnishings. A contributing factor to the particularly long waits in this barber shop was that the barbers were older men and old-fashioned craftsmen, each scissor snip made deliberately, painstakingly, which translated into a haircut rendered very slowly.
In the early 1950s, a competing barber shop opened directly across the street on the west side of the Grand Concourse, nothing old-fashioned about it, black and white furnishings, slick floors, modern, and they used clippers extensively, and they got you out fast. The new barber shop was in the next building from mine. When I passed the shop I could gauge how long a wait I might have and I could duck in if they weren’t busy, knowing I wouldn’t be there for an interminable length of time as with the old barbers.
I switched over to the new barber shop. Many people did. Rumors circulated that the old barbers would go out of business. I wish I could say that craftsmanship won out, that the men in the neighborhood rebelled against fast and modern in favor of the deliberate, old ways. But the new barber shop caught on and was successful. The old barbers did manage to stay in business. Sufficient numbers of men appreciated them and were loyal.
As a teenager my hair was thick and wavy and couldn’t get too long or the sides would curl up like the points of an elf’s shoes. I failed to appreciate the care the old barbers took in dealing with me and making me look presentable. The new barber shop dealt with my hair by keeping it short on the sides, clipping away, rather like putting a bowl on my head. My pomade-reinforced pompadour on top served as a general distraction from the overall look.
I went to the new barber shop until I started college downtown and then had my hair cut in Manhattan. I never reached the age in the neighborhood where I was one of those men waiting, chatting, small-town style, in that old-fashioned barber shop. What I know now is the ritual of waiting was important to the men. And I know now those two old barbers were great.
* * *
GROCERIES, DELIS, BAKERIES, APPETIZING STORES
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Several “Mom and Pop” grocery stores were located within walking distance of our apartment. These small stores were sometimes actually run by a husband and wife, justifying the “Mom and Pop” designation. Loyalty to your grocery was important. If you happened to buy something in one grocery store where they had an item your regular grocery didn’t carry and you went into your regular store directly from there, you hid the bag so they wouldn’t know.
The delis usually had a few tables for dining. Seldom did I or any of my friends sit and eat in our neighborhood deli. We ate grilled hot dogs, primarily, which you ate standing. Or I bought scrap pieces of deli for my dog and tossed them to him on the sidewalk, so it could be said Paddy also ate standing.
Sending us to the bakery for a rye bread was a dubious proposition for any adult who ordered up the bread. For most bakeries the goods were baked there, not shipped in. The bread was fresh, often recently out of the oven and it was the rare bread that arrived home via a child without one end or sometimes both ends of the loaf eaten.
The neighborhood appetizing store with its smoked fish and pickles — the store smelled of pickles — was a place my aunt particularly liked. We had smoked sturgeon and baked salmon routinely in the apartment the way other people had American cheese sliced and purchased by weight from the grocery.
This made for a rather bizarre experience for a child. My classmates were going to school with sandwiches for lunch — peanut butter and jelly, baloney, like that. My aunt made sandwiches for me to take that she would have made for herself. I was going to elementary school with smoked sturgeon sandwiches. Nobody traded with me.
* * *
ICE CREAM PARLORS
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The most famous ice cream parlors in the Bronx were J. S. Krum’s on the Grand Concourse near the Loew’s Paradise, Addie Vallins near Yankee Stadium on 161st Street, and Jahn’s near the intersection of Kingsbridge Road and Fordham Road.
Jahn’s was a chain with locations predominantly in Queens and Long Island and was a late arrival at its Fordham area site. The place was known for its specialties like “The Kitchen Sink,” a mélange meant to be shared by several people, but with its pretend Gay Nineties image, Jahn’s was not popular among my family and friends. We preferred the traditional atmosphere of Krum’s, and when we were near Yankee Stadium, Addie Vallins.
Krum’s featured several outdoor signs announcing “Krum’s Kitchen Fresh Kandies.” The extensive candy counters with loose candy were a main feature of Krum’s, “Over 300 varieties to choose from.” With its extensive candy offerings, its large size, and its white-uniformed personnel, Krum’s separated itself from the other ice cream parlors.
Various movie theaters were in the vicinity, making Krum’s a popular after-movie venue. Because of the prestige of Krum’s it was socially acceptable for adults and for young people on dates to go there even though you would sit at a counter and even stand behind people being served, waiting for seats to become vacant.
Krum’s was where I had my first banana split, a slice of banana on either side of the dish framing a scoop of chocolate ice cream, a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and a scoop of strawberry ice cream, smothered with chocolate syrup, topped with whipped cream and a cherry. If I ate one today, I would feel guilty for days.
Of the 300 varieties of loose candy to choose from, my favorite was the chocolate covered orange peel. I would eat copious amounts of it, stopping only when I had pretty much reached the point of nausea.
* * *
THE TRUTH ABOUT MY FATHER
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“If your father is dead, you have to be bar mitzvah-ed at twelve and not thirteen because you have to become a man earlier in the Jewish religion.” That was what I told my mother, an interesting piece of apocryphal information. I was then approaching twelve, which would have made my bar mitzvah imminent. I was working a strategy to unearth the truth about my father.
No family photographs existed of my father, alone or with my mother, or my sister, or with me. He was never discussed. No reference was made about him to fix moments of our life in time. I had been told he was dead. First, he supposedly died in the war in the Canadian Army. We had Canadian relatives, a cousin of mine was in the Canadian Army, and I must have asked where my father was and when my mother told me my father died, I must have followed up by asking if he died in the war in the Canadian Army and my mother, overwhelmed by her situation, probably said he did.
As I got a little older, my mother either changed or lost track of the story line and my father had died in a car crash. As an adult when I returned to P.S. 33 to address the children at an assembly, I was given as a gift a copy of my elementary school record which began in September 1941 when my mother enrolled me in 1st grade. Next to my father’s name it said, “Deceased.” So I wasn’t the only one she was telling tales to.
My father was like someone who had never lived. This might not have been the case had I been able to confront my mother
and ask what was the truth, or confront my older sister. I was complicit with the silence. Until I wasn’t. Scheming, I made up a story for my aunt, my pal in playing cards after school, and I said some boys teased me about not having a father. Completely untrue. “Do you want to know where your father is?” she asked me, signing. I nodded that I would. “California,” she said. She was often puckish and was so as she told me this, letting me in on something between us. “Don’t tell anybody I told you.” “I promise,” I said.
California. The shifting stories about how my father died now made sense. The stories shifted because they weren’t true. I couldn’t break faith with my aunt and implicate her. And that was when I came up with my idea of flushing out the truth by rewriting the bar mitzvah requirements and confronting my mother with the complications therein.
She did not respond immediately. A few days later, I was told to come into the living room and my mother and sister sat across from me, both with grave expressions. My mother began elsewhere, telling me about my cousin’s boyfriend. My cousin, Renee, with whom we lived, was about eighteen at the time and going with a young man who believed, because that was what he had been told, that his mother was dead. He had just found out his mother was not dead, she was alive and in a mental institution. The young man was deeply upset and my mother said she had decided she didn’t want me to be similarly upset some time in the future to discover what I had been told about my father wasn’t true. My father was alive. My father and mother were divorced. He had abandoned his family before my fifth birthday and when my sister was almost twelve. He had run out on us, deserted us, my mother said. He had made no attempt to be in touch with us or send money and he had left us to move in with relatives. He hadn’t sent letters or birthday cards to his children. He had no interest in us. “I told you he was dead because he’s as good as dead,” my mother said. He once was a salesman for a paper company, she told me, but he couldn’t hold on to the job. My mother’s uncle set him up in a shoe store, but he couldn’t run it properly and the business went under. She said he was a bad man. He gambled. He had debts. My mother had been paying off some of his debts to a collection agency, a few dollars a month. The collection agency representative agreed to that because he said it was taking milk from babies. She was still paying every month. If my father cared about me or my sister we would have heard from him and we had not.