An hour after the new arrivals had installed themselves in the apartment — it was to be Ira’s earliest, earliest recollection of his uncle Max — the young immigrant invited his boy-nephew to guide him to the pushcart mart under the railroad overpass on Park Avenue. There, he asked Ira to inquire as to the price of two small carrots. They cost one cent. Max produced the copper, and Ira made the purchase. How neatly, how deftly Max scraped the carrots clean with his penknife — and then proffered his nephew the smaller of the two roots:
“But it’s raw!” Ira drew back. “Nobody eats a raw carrot, Uncle.”
“Ess, ess,” Max urged (in Yiddish). “Taste. It’s sweet.” And to Ira’s surprise, so it was: sweet and crunchy. The memory, the fading composite of the vaguely smiling Max, the produce on the pushcarts, the penknife peeling a carrot, the warmth of summer, and the contrast between the shadow under the huge steel canopy of the railroad trestle and the bright sunlight on the sidewalk, would condense for Ira into the first inference he was ever conscious of as inference: From that summery composite, he could deduce the kind of life that was lived by Mom and her family, by Zaida, Baba and the rest in the lethargic, Galitzianer hamlet named Veljish. The moist, orangy, peeled carrot at the core of recollection substantiated all that Mom had told him: about the meagerness of rations, about the larder kept under lock and key, about Zaida’s autocratic sway, his precedence in being served, in being served the choicest — and to satiety. As to his progeny, “The child who is given good bread and butter ought not look for more.” That was Zaida’s maxim.
III
And now would follow one of those episodes, the first of many Ira was ashamed of, that seemed to indicate the beginning of attrition of his identity, an episode that Ira always connected with his removal from the East Side to Harlem.
Shake your head in reproach, my friend; let your fingertips join in a cage, and ponder: You brought home for the first time in your public school career a report card marked C C C, unsatisfactory in deportment, in effort and in proficiency. It was so disgraceful a report card, you tried to inveigle Mom into signing it without Pop’s seeing it, but she refused. .
Harry, Ira’s youngest uncle, was sixteen years old. Still regarded as a child by Baba — and his earnings not required toward the support of the prosperous household, to which five wage earners contributed, for Max too had found work — Baba was eager to have her youngest son enrolled in an American public school, and given the advantages of an American education — like those enjoyed by her oldest grandchild. Moreover, enrolled in the same school as Ira, the uncle could learn the routines and protocols of classroom attendance from his nephew.
Unfortunately for Harry, and for Ira too, by the time school opened in September, Mom and Pop had decided to move from 114th Street, east of Park Avenue, to 119th Street, east of Park Avenue. A difference of five blocks, yet the move was a fateful one. Not only were they relocating to a much less desirable b’tveen, a goyisher b’tveen instead of a Jewish b’tveen; but the school nearest Ira’s house was an elementary schooclass="underline" P.S. 103 on the corner of 119th Street and Madison Avenue. It accepted children up to the sixth grade only, which meant that the oldest children in P.S. 103 averaged about twelve years of age — while Harry was already sixteen!
Why did this unfortunate situation come to pass? Because Mom had become unhappy with their first choice of rooms in Harlem. Not only were they small and sweltering. That could be endured. After all, the rooms did have hot running water, and would have steam heat in the winter, like Mamie’s and Baba’s. No, Mom had become unhappy because the rooms were “in the back.” The view out of the windows was lifeless and unchanging; the same backyards met the eye day after day. It reminded her too much of her old home in Veljish: dormant. Inanimate. She became despondent. She craved a window to lean out of and contemplate the changing scene below. She craved a dwelling with windows “in the front.” Such had been their home on 9th Street. All the windows looked out on the front: On one side, Avenue D, full of movement of old and young, of people waiting on corners for horse-drawn trolley cars. Why, Woodrow Wilson himself had appeared on Avenue D doffing his stovepipe hat to the public on either hand. Only four flights down, you could see the light glint on his zvicker, the pince-nez eyeglasses the presidential candidate wore. You could see 9th Street out of the other windows. You could see the East River. Ah, a wonderful thing was a five-room flat on the corner. “I lacked only one thing,” said Mom. “What nonsense: lyupka.”
But front-room dwellings in Jewish Harlem were exorbitant — by Pop’s standards. Everything Jewish was dear, dear because Jewish and dear in dollars and cents. Outside of Jewish Harlem, however, rents dropped sharply, especially rents for cold-water flats. And Pop, intent on saving every nickel for his project as milkman-entrepreneur, decided to sacrifice a Jewish milieu for a cheaper rent. So outside of Jewish Harlem they moved: to a four-room cold-water flat, a flight up, “in the front.” Their new residence was the five-story, dingy, gray and brown brick tenement that occupied the lot at 108 East 119th Street.
It was here, even if they had to give up certain amenities — hot running water, electricity, steam heat, private bathroom — it was here that their needs most nearly dovetailed: Mom had a window on the street to lean out of, Pop had to pay only $12 per month for rent. And miraculously, a block away on Lexington Avenue, there was a stable where he could put up his newly purchased old horse and milk-wagon. What a convenience, what an auspicious omen! What if their new home was on the borderline between Jewish and goyish Harlem? Jews would be sure to move there in the not-too-distant future. What if they had to use gas light for illumination, and not electricity? They were used to that on the East Side. What if the bathroom-toilet was not in the house, not intramural, but in the hall, and the bathtub looked like an immense green-painted tin trough set in a wooden coffin of matched boards, and the paint came off and stuck to your bottom in hot water? They had no hot running water anyway, and bathed in warm water from the kettle rarely. Rent was only $12 per month; that was the important thing. Mom had immediate access to a window on the street, Pop a convenient stable for his horse and milk-wagon.
But for all the satisfied needs and auspicious omens, only misfortune ensued. For Ira, misfortune was long lasting. It altered his entire life for the worse. For Harry it was short-term — painful, but brief. Had Baba not been so persuaded by her acculturated American son, Saul — with Pop to confirm him — that Harry would fare best under Ira’s guidance, and instead of enrolling her youngest living offspring in P.S. 103, enrolled him in the large and conveniently located school on 116th Street west of Fifth Avenue, P.S. 86, a combined elementary and grammar school that went all the way to the eighth grade, the lanky stripling Harry might have passed relatively unnoticed among the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds attending the school. And of much greater importance: He would have been in a school that was largely Jewish in composition, and at the very least, tolerant of the new immigrant. In P.S. 103 he became at once, from the moment of his appearance, the object of derision, of Irish derision (and what derision had a sharper edge?). He became the object of taunts and Jew-baiting: target of spitballs, rubberbands, blackboard erasers and pieces of chalk. That was inside the school. Outside the school, the target of bolts of horse manure and stones, and later on, in cold weather, of ice-filled or gravel-filled snowballs. Over and over again, in full view of his cringing, craven nephew (whose final recourse was to disown his kin, slink into a bystander role, even appear to participate in the hounding), his uncle would stand at bay attempting to drive off a swarm of maddening Irish gamins.