Choices

Moving to Jackson Heights, Queens in 1949 meant that my father Max Abramowitz was released from his in-laws watchful, Jewishly observant eyes.  Some men take a stand against domestic conventions by drinking too much or staying out late or buying a motorcycle. My father’s rebellion was characteristically modest. He stopped attending synagogue.  Instead, he spent his Saturday mornings at the Jackson Heights Public Library.

He was thirty-three and had lived his first twenty-eight years in a three room, five story walk -up on Eldridge Street with his widowed mother, a sister and a brother.  His bed  was a metal frame and a mattress that folded in half and was stored during the day against a wall in the kitchen.  When he married my mother and they moved into her parents’ six room apartment, he acquired his first stable berth.  

My father was an unassuming man.  Sometimes  playful and funny, in daily life he was mostly dutiful and dogged. Workday mornings he rose at five and departed before six for his business selling paper products – brown bags of all sizes, wrapping paper, tape and twine. He sold to the small retail liquor, dry-cleaning and grocery stores that line the neighborhoods of the five boroughs. “The smallest of the small,” was how he described his customers. Then he would laugh, thinking of himself in that same way – small, modest but prosperous, safe.  He owned the business he worked for, with his mother and brother and sister. Six in the evening was his homegoing hour, Friday afternoon and Saturday his days of rest.

I’m not really sure if the decision not to attend synagogue was one of light defiance or a reluctance to choose.  Maybe it was a little of both. Jackson Heights offered two options.  One was the Young Israel, a modern Orthodox congregation which met in a storefront.  It was a newcomer to the area.  Members were like us, recent emigrants from more crowded Jewish neighborhoods. But they were newcomers who wanted to abide in the traditional.  Here the services resembled the ones downtown, all in Hebrew, with traditional davening where no one announces the page number because everybody knows, and the men sway back and forth as they pray. The congregation was led by a Rabbi plus a group of learned men who stood on a bimah which is a slightly elevated platform in the center of the room. 

In the opposite direction ten blocks west and up a steep hill was the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights, an imposing three-story structure of brick with fake turrets or crenellations on the top.  Established in 1920, the Jewish Center was part of the all-American Conservative movement.  Here men and women sat together, the services were sedate and decorous. No one would rock back and forth in this imposing sanctuary which was as big as a school auditorium. Not that it was forbidden. It just wouldn’t happen.  Prayer alternated between responsive reading in English and some traditional Hebrew liturgy.  The Rabbi spoke down to his congregation from a proscenium stage.

My father didn't go alone to the library on those Saturday mornings. He took me with him. Hand in hand we walked the length of Seventy-Eighth Street to Thirty-Seventh Avenue. Hand in hand we entered through the second door where the children’s librarian, who already knew us, was setting up the low benches for story hour.

The Jackson Heights library was at that time composed of two adjacent storefronts connected by an inner set of folding doors. By the librarian I was deposited, near the  picture book section.  My father passed through to the adult section with its heavy wooden chairs and high oak tables.

At the end of story hour, my father claimed me. We walked home side by side, each clutching treasure  – four books apiece, the library limit.  At that moment we would have agreed with Jorge Luis Borges when he remarked, "I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library." 

Challah, salad and cold chicken awaited us, laid out on the kitchen table. The same meal my mother would have created if we were returning from synagogue. And, it did feel that way, as if we had spent the morning in a hushed house of prayer. 

  

My mother was accustomed to home being a woman’s place on Saturday mornings. That had been the way it was downtown on Shabes– the women stayed home with the children and prepared lunch. They didn’t mind. Prayer was what men did. It was important, absolutely, but tedious. Of course they would never have said that out loud. 

Then, in 1952, my mother was pregnant again and this time she had a boy. And what a boy! Blonde!  Blue-eyed! Chubby – when chubby was desirable. A golden child. But if he had been bald or brunette it would not have mattered, maleness was what mattered.

   

Within a few months we were paid-in-full members of The Jewish Center of Jackson Heights. A choice had been made. I was enrolled in the Hebrew School Sunday mornings and one afternoon during the week.  No more library dates, just my father and me.  My mother needed him at home. Or, if she didn’t, he went to synagogue because now he had a son and had to set a Jewish example.

Oedipally speaking, it must have been a blow for me, though I don’t remember feeling loss.  Except for this ploy: When visitors arrived to coo over my new baby brother I would close the door to his room and say, with as much authority as I could muster,  “The nurse says you can’t come in.”

A son was a momentous responsibility. He might join my father in business (he didn’t), or ask for guidance (sometimes). And so the mild-mannered outlaw days of Max Abramowitz were ended.

 Max and his first granddaughter,  1984

Jackson Heights, Queens: A Foreign Country

Slowly and then suddenly and completely there was prosperity. I’m talking about the late nineteen forties when post-World War II industrial abundance cranked up slowly and then spread wildly and widely in the early nineteen-fifties.  When everybody loved us, the U S of A, the saviors of Europe.  Slowly and then suddenly and completely the quotas on Jews in public school teaching or allowed entrance into Ivy League colleges were erased and it was as if they had never been.  An apology for the Holocaust?  Maybe.  We’re nothing like those Nazis.

But restricted neighborhoods like Jackson Heights, Queens, were still controlled by the private Queensboro Corporation. Restricted meant no Jews, no blacks allowed.  They didn’t think they owed an atonement to anyone. The state courts, after all, had upheld their right to restrict.   But the Queensboro Corporation couldn’t buy all the land.  New construction was everywhere the Queensboro Corporation wasn't,  plowing under farm fields and vacant lots. 

Into one of these newer buildings moved our Aunt Natalie, her two young sons and our Uncle Murray, four rooms on the fourth floor, apartment B40, next to the elevator.  She was done with the Lower East Side, she said. Done with railroad flat walk- ups. Aunt Natalie was the enterprising one, the one who couldn’t be stopped. One year passed as she watched and waited until she heard of an opening on the third floor, A35 to be exact. And, figuratively speaking, because in 1949 there was still a housing shortage, she lay down in front of the door to A35 and would not let anyone pass through until it was secured for my mother and father, my baby sister, Jayne and me.

            

And so we moved, my mother initially excited about being modern and leaving her parents’ home where the four of us had only the front two bedrooms.  

But Queens was so quiet, nobody on the street. Even though that’s what everyone said you moved for – the trees and the quiet.  Early on she sent me to the back garden that belonged to our building, assuming I’d meet some other kids there. Instead, both she and I were yelled at by the superintendent of the complex.  No children allowed alone in the garden. And during the ten years or so that we lived there no one – adult or child – ever sat or stood or in any way used that tree and bush crammed space.

Why did we come to “this god-forsaken Queens”? She asked herself each morning and wept. And every Friday bundled up my baby sister and I to take us forty minutes by E and then D train back to Rivington Street, to those two, now dear, front rooms, where our father met us and we remained until Sunday afternoon, fed and fussed over by Schmulka and Chinke who were delighted to have us back.

My mother didn’t know a down payment was required in order to become a modern family.  Her fee was this early loneliness. She didn’t know she was gifting me with a hunger for the honks and shouts of the narrow, crowded, treeless streets downtown that would stay with me until I made it back there as a young adult, to the Lower East Side, my true home.