What I Saw at the Fair: An Autobiography

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What I Saw at the Fair

An Autobiography

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Honey was not the name on my birth certificate, though I was called that. Nor did it have anything to do with my long blond hair. (My mother's hair, of course, had once been blonder. Aggravation from me had made her go gray.) My hair wasn't golden anyhow, but kind of silvery, as if it belonged to a little old lady, which was sort of what I looked like at six, dubious expression, dark circles under my eyes and all. But Honey was how the goyim in Hell's Kitchen, where we lived, interpreted my Yiddish name, which was actually Chana, and familiarly Chanie. Goyim had no gift for the guttural. At home I was also often Channele, a diminutive. In school, which I had just started, I became Anna, another person altogether.

This was already a big complication—these days it might even be a prelude to schizophrenia. However, multiple personalities weren't in fashion yet, so nobody gave it a thought. And anyway, all our lives were split in two. We were all different people with different brand names: one for the outside American world, the other for domestic consumption. To start at the top, my father, Rabbi Bernard Birstein, was Beril, but only to relatives and to other rabbis. My big brother, Samuel Joseph, was Yossie at home. Then came my sister Sarah aka Sookie, and, by a kind of dreary bad luck that plagued her whole life, Malke Leah wound up saddled with Mildred. Somehow my mother remained Clara in any language, and Julia, the child of her heart, remained Julia. I think they had no patience with complex personalities.

We had recently moved from a railroad flat on Forty-seventh Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, where my father's synagogue and my dreaded elementary school were located side by side, to Fifty-first Street, also between Eighth and Ninth, which wasn't much of a step up, though this larger apartment had a bathtub in the bathroom instead of in the kitchen and also a telephone. The turmoil inside was pretty much the same. Cooking, crying, laughing, fighting. Food at all times but you had to wait hours after you ate meat to eat dairy. How we all slept would have made a sardine packager proud. Sarah and Julia and I spent the night in a tiny bedroom with two single beds jammed together, the three of us head to toe. Mildred slept on a daybed in the dining room, where all business was conducted when visitors came, whether she was actually asleep or not. Yossie had his own room, tiny though it was, because he was a boy, and Mama and Papa had a small bedroom off the dining room with just enough space for a double bed and a dresser. We must have had closets because we had clothes, Sarah/Sookie especially since Mama said she put her whole salary on her back. But where these closets were I have no idea. In any case, clothes were produced when morning came. And then everybody went off to the outside world. Yossie to study journalism in college as S. Joseph Birstein—he had taken to writing letters to various publications, saying such things as "kudos to Time"—very impressive. But then he was the intellectual in our family, as if being the oldest and only boy weren't enough. Mildred went to her day job as an assistant to a dentist near Madison Square Garden, whose chief clientele for obvious reasons was circus performers, cowboys, and prizefighters, then to Hunter College at night. Julia was off to Washington Irving High School to be the same obedient drone she was at home. Sarah, after first depositing a totally unwilling me at PS 17, continued on to her job at the Film Center on Forty-second Street in one of her natty Sookie outfits, maybe a navy blue fitted reefer coat and a hat to match tilted over one eyebrow. She too, like Millie, went to Hunter at night, but in her case it sounded glamorous. Daddy had left before anybody was up to go to shul, conduct services, and direct his other extremely important affairs. Mama stayed home to start another day which, to hear her tell it, began and ended in bitterness and unappreciated toil.

Outside, a totally other world reigned, the strange world of Christians—with dark bars run by retired prizefighters, unkosher restaurants, movie houses, the local Automat, and inevitably PS 17, a huge stone Gothic fortress that smelled of sour milk for the free lunchers, whose parents were on relief. (An almost unmentionable disgrace.) Inside there were long silent lines of silent children waiting for a bell to ring. A heart stopping change from home, where everybody carried on all the time. But this silence was clearly the American way. Silence at desks, hands clasped in front. No speaking unless spoken to. Having to go to the bathroom was an even worse crime, which was another big difference. At home, bodily functions were frequently alluded to, bowel movements a big topic. (When I was very little, my father, a proud Litvak, would discreetly ask me whether I had been a Litvak or a Galitzianer that day.) There were only a few Jewish children in the school on account of it being in Hell's Kitchen. Everybody else was either Irish or Italian, a basically scary situation. But the Italians, though technically Gentiles, were in the same boat as Jews, linguistically speaking, which made them less of a menace. The Irish, it was plain, were the real Americans. Not only were they Gentiles, they actually spoke English. At home! It was their native tongue. There couldn't be anything more American than that, especially when they were glibly spewing out their catechism.

Making the situation crystal clear was the fact that PS 17 was a Tammany stronghold, The principal was a Miss Bohan, sister of a judge, and the teachers, all normal school graduates, were also political appointees. Such as Miss Riordan, who hated children, always wore black, had double forearms, and took a grim pleasure in teaching grammar. But they were all named Miss, and they all seemed to hate children, Jewish children especially, though some were ecumenical. There was Miss Bartlett, Miss Yeats, Miss Ward. Sometimes a Mrs. snuck in, which made for a somewhat kindlier atmosphere, but introduced other problems, as with Mrs. O'Connor, who smilingly insisted that we put a period after every title, and that the English assemblage of lawmakers be pronounced Parly-a-ment. She also called me to her desk to explain after I had picked bluestocking from a multiple-choice question as a definition of pedant, that a pedant was something you hung around your neck. Metaphorically this may be true, but I didn't know that until later. It didn't matter that technically she was dead wrong. Teachers were always right, except for Mrs. Sinsheimer in connection with the notorious affair of her bloomers, a matter that I will come to later.

Each school day, trudging home the long four blocks for lunch, I toyed with the idea of never going back there. But that would have entailed telling my mother I was sick, and then she would clutch her heart, carry on, and call my father at the shul to come home and take my temperature that way. My mother couldn't read English, and Yiddish only with difficulty, and she expanded this to numbers as well as letters. It was a much luckier day when I got a quarter for lunch at the local Automat, a vegetable plate because I was kosher, featuring mashed potatoes, peas, and Harvard beets—which I considered terribly Ivy League and still do—eaten at a table that said LADIES ONLY. Everything that wasn't vegetables or dairy was out. Food represented other vast differences between them and us, being kosher only part of it. Social workers were always coming by to give us questionnaires about what we had for breakfast. One of the Jewish kids wrote down "skimbles and bumbles," which translated as skinless and boneless sardines. But I gave myself a lovely American breakfast of cereal, milk, toast, and scrambled eggs. This was my first real fictional creation, since my actual breakfast was a bagel and coffee, and I wouldn't have had it any other way. Yossie said this wasn't right, considering my age—he started saying it when I was six—but Mama said I was stubborn and what could she do?

All the seasons at PS 17 were terrible, in fact, all days there were terrible, but Christmas was right up there in terms of terribleness if you were Jewish. "Jesus" and "Christ" were constantly being said in hallowed tones, which was absurd, since it was perfectly clear to us that he wasn't the Messiah. (The virgin birth also gave us all a big laugh. It seemed that goyim would believe anything.) There was fake snow and tinsel, crèches all over the place, and worst of all the singing of Christmas carols in class and in assembly. It wasn't that we weren't allowed to sing them, it was that we weren't allowed to sing all of them. When we came to the C and J words, we three Jewish kids in the class would zipper our mouths shut and give each other meaningful looks. It was the looks more than the not-singing that enraged the Irish teachers and they were always threatening to do something about it, besides making us generally miserable. Actually, after careful consultation with my father, I was allowed to sing Adeste Fideles, first because it was in Latin, a language my father felt every cultivated person should study, including his own children, and also because, really, Dominum could mean anybody.

Sometimes Christmas coincided with Chanukah, which didn't alleviate matters since Chanukah was such a zero holiday we had to go to school through all of it. The few compensations were that Mama, who was handy, made little wax tea sets out of the melted orange menorah candles, and also a little muslin bag on a string, which I wore on my neck when I went around trying to cadge pennies from my relatives. Easter was also a killer. Often it coincided with Passover, but Passover I liked, the first two and the last two days, anyhow, when I wasn't allowed to go to school. Before that I would go down to the Lower East Side on a shopping expedition with Daddy, and Mama too, of course, into tiny dim stores crammed to the rafters with decaying books and tchochkes and presided over by old guys with beards. Some of the things we brought back were wondrous. Carved olive-wood pen holders with a bead through which, if you squinted you could see the Wailing Wall, miniature torahs with shiny rayon covers that could be slipped off so the paper scrolls could be unrolled, usually once too often, kosher Pesach wine from Palestine, not the Manischewitz stuff—but Tokay, Malaga, Muscatel, straight from the Rothschild vineyards, matzohs, matzohs and more matzohs, Pesadiche honey cake, tagelach, mandel brot, and candy—little squares of red, yellow, and green marmalade, and, the real wonder of wonders—a marzipan salami! This salami could have fooled anyone.

Mama naturally carried on to the bitter end about the huge preparations and changing all the dishes, right up to the final search for chometz, little packets of bread crumbs rolled in newspaper which she herself had planted, when I followed around my father with a candle and a little feather. At the seders, Daddy was a vision in his white robe and white yarmulke, pillows propped behind him, and I not only got to ask the Four Questions, because I was the youngest, translating from Hebrew into Yiddish, but always got a prize for finding the afikomen too, Julia's protests notwithstanding. But when we went back outside to everyday life, all of us from S. J. Birstein on down carrying matzohs and hardboiled eggs in a brown paper bag for lunch, the Gentile world impinged again, with a vengeance. By the end of the week, matzohs were crunching away in my stomach. Easter baskets, Easter eggs, fluffy marshmallow stuff were featured in all the store windows. Even an authentic looking marzipan salami, which didn't taste that great anyhow, couldn't compete with the cheapest chocolate bunny in the five-and-ten. I had always hated macaroons, and matzoh and coffee for breakfast wasn't the same as coffee and a bagel. Worst of all, especially by the last day, was the lure of the caramel apples in the window of the Penny Arcade. Put there by Satan, who was a Catholic anyway. The minute the sun went down on that eighth day, I made Sookie take me over to buy one, and it tasted just as good as it looked, though Mama always warned against hoping or, in fact, even trying, so that you wouldn't be disappointed. The worm in this particular apple was that it brought back PS 17 the next day, and yet another struggle to exist in the Christian world.

Besides the holidays, the other big injustice was that after school, the Jewish kids had to go learn Hebrew. But the Catholics lucked out again, this time with their catechism and their confirmations. I didn't envy them their catechism—none of the questions and answers they were always throwing at each other made sense to me. They could have been in Hebrew, which I could read but not understand, except that this thought was sacrilege. But confirmation, here was the rub! In my circles only the boys were bar mitzvahed, and who cared anyhow, they were all so mean and stupid, and my poor father had to listen to them practice in cracked voices so often he finally made a demonstration Haftorah record at the Penny Arcade on Broadway that sold the caramel apples. But confirmations were different. The Catholic girls got to have mock weddings—there were little brides all over the streets. It didn't seem fair. My father was always marrying people and as a matter of course I used to dress up my dolls in veils and such and marry them too. Therefore I was dying for a little girl's bridal outfit of my own. Of course, I was dying for a nun's outfit too, which I didn't mention to anyone except Julia, who told Mama. But where could be the harm in dressing up as a bride? "Channele, do you know who they think they're marrying? Where are the little grooms?" my father asked. It wasn't the point. I didn't want to get married, ever. It was the outfit I was after.

Meanwhile, back in the child-hating hell of PS 17, the boys took shop and the girls took sewing and cooking. We made our own gym bloomers, cooking aprons, and long "day" dresses of flowered dimity—what you were supposed to wear for tea, I think, which in my house was drunk out of a glass, sugar cube held between the teeth. The Italian girls cheated by making their inside seams on a sewing machine at home and hand sewing the outer one. The Italians all had sewing machines at home. But the Irish sewing teacher, on the watch for anybody trying to make life easier, poked around and made them rip it all out. Cooking and Home Economics we studied with a Mrs. Sinsheimer. That the Jewish kids didn't have to eat what they made because it wasn't kosher and the Gentile kids hated us because they did—sometimes our slop too—went without saying. But there was no Halachic law that got us Jewish girls out of the how to do laundry part.

Which finally touches on the notorious affair of Mrs. Sinsheimer's bloomers. I have left this for last because, however obliquely, it introduces my father's real position and power on the street and in the neighborhood. He might have been the rabbi of a very tiny synagogue next door to the huge fortress of PS 17, but he was a force just as great as it. The English name of the synagogue, along with Congregation Ezrath Israel, and also The West Side Hebrew Relief Association, was the "Actors Temple," which my father had appended to the stationery when he first came in 1925 and realized that the shul was just a block away from Broadway. Thanks to his efforts, big "famous celebrities" as we called them, now appeared among us regularly for services. Show biz types like Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, Oscar Levant, sports figures like Hank Danning, the catcher for the New York Giants, Barney Ross, middleweight champion, and two of the Three Stooges, who were Jewish. Almost every week would find one of them in the shul to say Kaddish, though their big joint appearance was on the High Holy Days, when we even got police protection. It was, I must confess, a sweet kind of revenge to pass PS 17 all dressed up in my new yomtov clothes, new shoes killing me, while the hoi polloi, hating us more than ever had to go to school. Then I would march upstairs to the Ladies Balcony where my mother, my three sisters, and I took our seats near Sophie Tucker, who was weeping copiously—a copious person altogether—for what reason I never knew, though my mother was running her a close second. Down below, my father in his long white tallis with the silver brocade collar, and tall white yarmulke, hands upraised, talked to God directly. Except when he glared up at us and slapped a huge tome to get the women to stop talking.

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Excerpted from What I Saw at the Fair by Ann Birstein. Copyright © 2003 Ann Birstein. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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