There are decent public schools in Queens, but we are scared of blacks. If you put together two Soviet immigrants in Queens or Brooklyn circa 1979, the subject of shvartzes or “the Spanish with their transistor radios” would come up by the third sentence, after the topic of asthma inhalers for little Igor or Misha is exhausted. But listen carefully to those conversations. There’s hatred and fear, sure, but just a little down the line, laughter and relief. The happy recognition that, as unemployed and clueless as we are, there is a reservoir of disgust in our new homeland for someone other than ourselves. We are refugees and even Jews, which in the Soviet Union never won you any favors, but we are also something that we never really had the chance to appreciate back home. We are white.
Over in the leafier parts of Kew Gardens and Forest Hills, the tribal hatred of blacks and Hispanics stands out partly because there aren’t really any blacks or Hispanics. My mother’s one encounter with “criminality” on Union Turnpike: A big white cracker in a convertible pulls up to her, takes out his penis, and shouts, “Hey, baby, I have a big one!”
Still, everyone knows what to do when you encounter a dark-skinned person: You run.
Because they want to rape us so very badly, us in our jackets made of real Polish leather. And “the Spanish with their transistor radios,” you know what else they have, other than the transistor radios? Switchblades. So if they see a seven-year-old Russian boy walking down the street with his asthma inhaler, they’ll come over and cut him to death. Prosto tak. Just like that. The lesson being you should never let your seven-year-old boy out alone. (In fact, until I turn thirteen, my grandmother will not allow me to walk down a quiet street in peaceful Forest Hills without holding her hand. Eyes darting one hundred meters in every direction, she is ready to cover my body with hers lest one of those animals with the switchblades comes near.)
Oh, and if you save up enough money for a Zenith television set with a Space Command remote control, a strong black will surely come by, hoist it onto his shoulder, and run down the street with it. And then a Spanish will run down the street after the black with his transistor radio for accompaniment, playing his cucaracha music. One of them will slip the Space Command into his pocket, too, and then you’ll really have nothing.
And so, the safety of our own kind.
And so, the Solomon Schechter School of Queens.
Or Solomonka, as we Russians like to call it.
Only they’ll be beating the shit out of me in Solomonka, too.
I can’t speak English too good, so I’m demoted by a grade. Instead of starting in second, I am sent to the first. In every grade through senior year of college I will be surrounded by boys and girls one year younger than I am. The smarter kids will be two years younger. In the annual class photo I will find myself handed down from the top row with the tallest kids to the bottom row, because even as I grow older I somehow grow relatively smaller.
How can I be so stupid (and so short)? Aren’t I the kid who knows the difference between The Allegory of Day and The Allegory of Night in the Medici Chapel? Aren’t I the author of Lenin and His Magical Goose, a masterwork of socialist realist literature, written before I learned to properly make kaka atop a toilet bowl? Don’t I know the capitals of most countries except for Chad? But here, at age seven, begins my decline. First through the wonders of Hebrew school, then through the tube of American television and popular culture, then down (or should I say up?) the three-foot bong of Oberlin College, the sharpness of my little boy’s intelligence will diminish step by step, school by school. The reflexive sense of wonder, of crying over a medal of the Madonna del Granduca and not knowing why, will be mostly replaced by survival and knowing perfectly well why. And survival will mean replacing the love of the beautiful with the love of what is funny, humor being the last resort of the besieged Jew, especially when he is placed among his own kind.
SSSQ, I write, worriedly, on the upper-right corner of every notebook for the next eight years. The Solomon Schechter School of Queens. The shorthand is imprinted on my mind, SSSQ. The S’s are as drunk as Step-grandfather Ilya, and they’re falling all over one another; the Q is an O stabbed between the legs at an angle. Often I forget the Q entirely, leaving just the quasi-fascistic SSS. Please work on your penmanship, every teacher will dutifully write. Pen I know because it is my main toy. Man is someone like my father, strong enough to lift a used American air conditioner he has just bought for one hundred dollars. Ship is like the cruiser Aurora docked in Leningrad, the one that fired the fateful shot that started the October Revolution. But pen-man-ship?
SSSQ is my world. The hallways, the staircases, the rooms, are small, but so are we. Four hundred kids, grades kindergarten through eight, marching in two lines, boys and girls, height order. There’s one Hebrew teacher, Mrs. R, middle aged, in large owlish glasses, who likes to make us laugh as she leads us, sticking two hands in front of her nose, making a little flute, and singing, “Troo-loo-loo-loo-loo.” Other than dispensing mirth to scared children, her task is making sure that every boy is wearing his yarmulke. The first, and nearly last, words of Hebrew I learn: Eifo ha-kipah shelcha? (Where is your yarmulke?) That’s the sweet part of the day, being taken to class by Mrs. R. But in class with Mrs. A — Q and S — Z, not so much. Because I don’t know what I’m doing. With my missing scissors and my missing glue and my missing crayons and my missing yarmulke and my missing shirt, the one with the insignia of a guy on a horse swinging a mallet, a polo shirt, I learn much too late, I am also missing. In fact, often I am in the wrong room, and everyone cracks up over that, and I, in my untied shoes, stand up and look around, mouth open, as Mrs. A through Q or Mrs. S through Z goes out to get Mrs. R. And Mrs. R with her light Israeli accent will stand with me out in the hall and ask me, “Nu? What happened?” “I—,” I say. But that’s about all I know: “I.” So she’ll bend down to tie my shoelaces while we both think it over. And then she’ll take me to the right room, and the familiar faces of my classmates will fill up with a new bout of laughter, and the new Mrs. A to Z (but not R) will shout the word that is the official anthem of Solomon Schechter: Sheket! In English, “quiet.” Or, more plaintively, Sheket bevakasha! “Please be quiet.” And everything will fall into its usual state of entropy, students who can’t be quiet, and teacher who can’t teach, as Hebrew, the second language I don’t know, the one that doesn’t even appear on boxes of Honeycomb, bonks me on the head, coconut style. And I sit there, wheezing myself into an asthma attack that won’t come until the weekend, wondering what possibly can happen to me next, as my shoes magically untie themselves, and then it’s recess time, and Mrs. R takes us outside with her sweet troo-loo-loo past hallways with maps of Israel drawn years before the one my parents call “that farkakte Carter” and his Camp David Accords gave the Sinai Peninsula away to the Egyptians, and the walls filled with children’s thank-you notes in bright Magic Marker, thank-you notes to the one who watches over us, the one whose name can’t even be written out fully, he’s so special, the one they call G-d or, sometimes, just to add to the confusion, Adonai. As in Sh’ma Yisroel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.