But there was this one thing. It kept coming up.
Once I went over to Freddie’s house down the block, the C. house. His two or three older brothers seemed surprised to see me.
Hambone, what are you doing here?
They stood around in the living room, ostentatiously discussing politics. Hitler, he was bad. But he had some good ideas. A look at me to gauge my reaction. These were fifteen-, seventeen-, and twenty-year-olds talking in front of a nine-year-old. I think one of their parents told them to stop, but I might be making that part up. I do recall unmistakably their banter, their laughter, and how it went on long enough to make me uncomfortable. I knew full well what Hitler had done. It had happened only twenty years earlier.
My mother could sense the anti-Semitism in the air of our neighborhood, and she hated it. She’d grown up in Toronto when Toronto was the polar opposite of what it is today. When she was a girl, there’d been a riot, Gentiles versus Jews, at the Christie Pits playing fields over the display of a swastika flag. At the beaches on the other side of town, some swim clubs flew swastikas to keep the Jews out. NO JEWS NEED APPLY signs at job sites were common. All that institutionalized anti-Semitism when she was growing up, and then the Nuremberg Laws and World War II and the camps. She had reason to suspect Jew-hatred everywhere she looked, but I scoffed—I thought what she experienced had gotten to her and made her obsessive. Many years later, we were watching TV together, and we saw a universally respected statesman disembark from a plane for a peacekeeping mission at some international trouble spot.
“Look at that anti-Semite,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” I said dismissively. “That’s the secretary general of the UN.”
It was Kurt Waldheim. Later we learned he’d been an SS officer during the war. My mother was right; the old world was full of them.
She’d claim that things in our neighborhood got worse around Easter. I never noticed, but I do remember the only time in my childhood that I heard the phrase “You killed Christ.” It came from one of James’s older brothers on a spring day. I didn’t understand. What?
You killed Christ. Well, not you, but your people.
I was completely baffled. I didn’t know the story. I asked my mother.
“This is what they teach them in their churches,” she said. She named the church down the block. “They teach this every Easter, and people like the C.’s and the M.’s come out and act worse than they usually do.”
I asked my father, too, but he just shrugged it off. He’d grown up in a place where all the ethnicities blended without incident, and he simply didn’t care. He was an architect and an FDR Democrat through and through, and he never had a bad word to say about any group. (The last job he did was to convert an old East Side church building into a mosque, and that was after 9/11. He was friendly with the imam. I thought the whole thing was pretty remarkable. I wanted to write an article about it for a Buffalo magazine, and after much hemming and hawing the magazine editor got back to me. “Well, it’s like this,” the guy said. “A lot of people we talked to don’t think what your father did is necessarily a good thing.” Jerk.)
If you weren’t around in the 1960s, you may not truly understand how pervasive this stuff was. People then didn’t veil their prejudices—they were all out in the open, and nothing to be particularly embarrassed about. This was a time of ubiquitous Polack jokes, or, as sanitized on TV by famous comedians, “Polish jokes.” No Asian immigration was allowed, so there simply were no Asians around, but there was plenty of talk about the Japs in World War II. And the N-word wasn’t something you heard on TV, but it was pretty common in casual conversation. One of the older M. brothers spoke of a kid he knew who was a great football player. “He’s a n—, but I tell you, I respect him,” he said.
We grunted gravely in agreement, acknowledging how sincere and important an assertion this was. I tried saying the word a couple of times, but even back then it sounded foul; now I can’t even type it, and you’d be mortified to see it in print. I can’t remember the kid’s name, but he came over once and played football with us. He was the only black kid who set foot in our neighborhood in the thirteen years I lived there.
One day when I was eleven or twelve, I went out our front door and heard a tremendous amount of yelling from the C. house. It seemed to be directed across the street, where a family of Hasidic Jews, although I didn’t know the term at the time, were moving in. They looked exotic. We and all the other Jews we knew were totally secular and assimilated—no yarmulkes, no outward sign of Jewishness. But these guys in their black suits and black hats, they stood out. Still, I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
I walked over to the C.’s porch. The older C. and M. brothers were there, huddling behind the railings, yelling, “Get out! Get out!” They’d spring up and throw small stones at the Hasids hauling chairs and couches into their new house, then duck down again behind the cover of the railing. I can’t remember if James or Freddie was there. Maybe I don’t want to. But I do remember, quite vividly, asking, “What are you doing? Why are you doing this?” One of the older brothers answered.
Look at them. We don’t want them living here.
He seemed to forget that I was one of them, too.
