Just Kids From the Bronx (21 page)

In our extended family, there were a lot of Sarahs, there were a lot of Roses, there were a lot of Helens, and there were a lot of Sylvias. My mother had two first cousins. One Sarah was Fat Sarah and the other Sarah was Dumb Sarah. I just thought those were their names: Fat Sarah and Dumb Sarah. Dumb Sarah was the most likable person in the world. She would do anything that you asked her to do, but reasoning was not part of it. She was always amenable. The other Sarah, on the other hand, she was the one you had to be careful about how much cheesecake you laid out when she came over for coffee and cake.

In 1948 my grandfather’s first cousins, who managed to survive the Holocaust, were sponsored by him and came over. And to us, these people were forever known as “the Greeners,” because the slang Yiddish term for newcomers was “greenhorns.” I thought that was their name because they were never called anything else. The Greeners are coming for dinner tonight was what they said.

There was predictability to life that gave me, as a child, a tremendous sense of security. As the family grew, my grandmother couldn’t prepare the Friday night dinner for everyone, so wherever you lived—our whole family lived in the Bronx, and for years we all lived in the same building and neighborhood—you went to my grandmother’s for dessert and coffee. That was predictable. Our Friday night ritual.

The men played pinochle in the dinette, and the women were generally in the living room chatting. The kids were in the back bedroom doing whatever we did—mostly watching TV. My grandmother had a TV early on because she liked to watch
The Loretta Young Show
.

My grandmother would make an announcement that it was time for coffee and dessert, which meant that she moved the cut-glass fruit bowl from the kitchen into the dinette and put it down on the table, no matter at what stage the card game was. My grandfather was always pissed off because it was invariably in the middle of a game. And she would say to him, “Sha. Be quiet. Enough.”

My grandmother also had this habit, which, by the way, to the day my mother died, she also had. She used to keep playing cards in the pocket of her housecoat or apron. Then she picked up crumbs or dust from the floor with the two playing cards, using them like a dustpan and a small dust broom. If my grandmother was sweeping the floor of the kitchen on Friday night, and if the men were playing cards and she didn’t have cards handy, she’d go right over to the table and take two cards off the table—without asking, of course. My grandfather would say, “What are you doing? The woman’s an idiot,” and she would look at him with complete disdain and say, “What are you complaining about? You got a tableful!” Then—“The man’s a meshuggener.” A crazy one. Those last words were not said to him but to the broad air.

My grandfather had a view of America that was also part of the Friday night gatherings. We were to hear the world according to Grandpa. He was very clearly seen as the patriarch. That stability in the family was very important to me. There was a real sense that this was the family hearth. Even though it wasn’t a big sprawling home or the farmhouse, it was the Bronx version of that.

When the Russians launched Sputnik my grandfather went crazy. “What’s the matter with the Americans? Couldn’t they see that the Russians were going to concentrate on this?” His notion was that Americans could be self-congratulatory and lazy. “This country has to wake up.” The reason he had such a profound influence on my life is that he would always say, “The future is science.” We have to beat the Russians. We have to be the technological leaders. We can’t sit on our laurels of having won World War Two.

Quite frankly, if I were to be true to my real passion, I would’ve been a history teacher. But for my generation, and I’ve heard this from a lot of my friends, there was this pressure to go into a scientific career. That was the future of America, and we couldn’t risk falling behind. It was patriotism linked with the sense that European Jews had made a huge impact on science in Europe and it was now our responsibility here. My grandfather was the one who taught me how many German and Russian Jewish scientists were involved with the Manhattan Project and theoretical physics. It all made a big impression on me.

I went to a Bronx school, yet I got the best secondary education I could possibly have gotten in the whole country. When I graduated from Bronx High School of Science, there were twenty-one of us in my graduating class who got into MIT. We were the largest single contingent from any high school in the United States going to one of the foremost universities in the country.

DAVA SOBEL

Science writer, author, educator

(1947– )

Usually when people hear my name, they think that my parents wanted a boy, but that wasn’t so. My parents already had two boys and they wanted a girl. My father, who was a doctor, mostly an obstetrician, enjoyed making up baby names. That’s how I got mine. He delivered a baby the day Alaska became a state and he tried to convince the poor woman to name her baby Ala.

Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I was slightly more privileged than others in the neighborhood. My parents were better educated than most, and compared to the people next door, for instance, we had the larger house. We also owned a boat. My mother was a chemist, in addition to my father being a doctor. My parents had met in chemistry lab at NYU. But I know that I certainly didn’t feel privileged, because at one time I wanted to buy something or other for myself and didn’t want to ask my parents to buy it for me. I saw an offer for a kit of greeting cards in a magazine, which you could sell door to door to make money, so I sent away for it. When it came, my mother was horrified. She had to explain that I could not go door to door to our neighbors, who would be offended by my asking them to buy something from me. That was a revelation. I had no idea that it wasn’t the right thing to do, probably because my parents were not at all pretentious.

My father worked at Harlem Hospital and we had a variety of people who came to our house. Everyone was welcome. He also had many patients who couldn’t afford to pay and he treated them for free. They cooked for him. They knitted sweaters. They did what they could to pay him something for his services.

My parents had this forty-foot sailboat, which also had an internal motor. We kept it on City Island, and in the summertime when it was hot my mother and I would just stay out there and sleep on the boat. The sky was always there. My mother became very interested in astronomy and the constellations when my father became interested in sailing. She then went to night school to become a celestial navigator. My mother had a sextant and had even bought herself a little toy planetarium projector—a box that projects constellations on the ceiling of the room. It was probably a study aid for her to learn the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. So that’s what I grew up with. If I have a love of learning, it was because my parents were always interested in learning. I was a studious girl. An obedient girl. I wanted to live up to my parents’ and teachers’ expectations. Early on in school, we were tracked for special interests. By third grade I was in science class. I found a report card in my mother’s old filing cabinet. There were long boxes in which to make comments. My third-grade teacher wrote that I was interested in knowing about life on other planets. How prophetic!

The Botanical Garden was a short walk from our house. My mother loved it. That made it more meaningful to me, as a kid, than they perhaps might otherwise have been. She was an enthusiastic gardener and visited often. She even had a vegetable garden on our roof, planted in five-pound buckets from the Burger King on White Plains Road. At the southern end of the Botanical Garden there’s a waterfall and a building called the Snuff Mill. What a great place that was to go on dates, which usually involved kissing—not truly X-rated but what passed for it in those innocent days.

Although the Botanical Garden was right near us, I loved the area directly across the street from us. There was a huge lawn that was public property. It may have been part of Bronx Park, but it was separated from the park itself. On summer evenings, people would take their chairs out to sit and talk there or play cards. There were beautiful trees and it felt like ours. Once, coming home from high school, I saw a group of men cutting down a giant elm tree during the time of the Dutch elm blight. This particular tree was a monument. It was gigantic. I was so shocked that the tree would have to come down, and I stood there, bereft, when one of the guys said to me, “Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.” That was the Bronx. An unexpected mix.

My mother’s younger sister, my aunt Ruth, had worked in the Roosevelt administration. She was a special assistant to the secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes. She’s still alive, living in Manhattan. She’s 101. Coincidentally, my brothers had gone to Christopher Columbus High School, where my oldest brother was a classmate of Anna Italiano, who later became Anne Bancroft.

In 2001, Bancroft was in a made-for-TV movie called
Haven
, which was based on my aunt Ruth’s true story, which took place during World War Two. In the movie, Anne Bancroft portrays my grandmother. There’s a wonderful scene where Bancroft is horrified that the secretary of the interior is sending her daughter, played by Natasha Richardson, into danger in the middle of the war. That danger referred to my aunt Ruth’s assignment from Ickes that changed her life. During World War Two she was sent to bring back a thousand refugees. Most of them were Jews and many of them had been in concentration camps. They were gathered in Naples, some of them still in their striped prison clothes, and put on a ship with a thousand wounded American soldiers and Ruth. They were even attacked during the crossing.

My aunt Ruth spoke German and Yiddish and took down the stories of the refugees. At the time, it was very difficult for refugees to get visas to enter the United States. Her story came out because the newspapers wrote about how the State Department was pretending that the denial of visas was not going on. It was a scandal. Aunt Ruth has written and talked about her amazing life a lot. She’s been a real role model for me because she was both a writer and a woman with children.

The Bronx was such a good place to grow up in because the boundaries were so fluid. The neighborhoods were mixed and so were the schools. People from many different countries lived there, people of different socioeconomic levels. However, at that time, I personally knew few Hispanics and African Americans. In fact, at Bronx High School of Science, out of a class of 860-something there were only eight black students. That made me very aware of social injustice. One summer I picketed the White Castle on Boston Road. I was thirteen or fourteen and had come under the influence of a boy, Peter, who was slightly older than I was and who came from a politically aware family. I think he was reading Marx by the time he was in junior high school. He told me about this protest at the White Castle. I thought protesting was a really fine thing to do, and so I joined in.

When I mentioned this to my father, he said, “What?” and said I was not to go there again because picketers had actually been shot at. However, when my aunt Ruth went to Washington for the March on Washington in 1963, she took me with her. On the plane we sat behind Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. I was sixteen years old so the whole experience was exciting. When we got to D.C. my aunt had to write a story or something, so I wound up on the Mall walking by myself and listening to the Martin Luther King “I Have a Dream” speech. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I think I must have known how historic it was. I had never seen so many people in one place before. And the spirit of it! I was there from another state walking alone, but everybody there was united in purpose. I remember that feeling, and I’m so grateful that I could be there to be part of it.

ROBERT F. X. SILLERMAN

Businessman, media entrepreneur

(1948– )

My father’s fortunes went up and down, so my childhood was full of highs and lows, mostly measured by where we lived. My earliest memory is of a lower-class apartment building on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. My father had lost whatever money he had at the time, so we had moved there from Manhattan. We were grandparents, parents, my brother and I—six of us, in that small space. I’m sure there were distinctive sounds and noises, but I don’t remember them. However, I clearly remember the sulfur smell from the match you had to light for the stove.