My father’s death devastated me. I was now the man of the family—something I recall comprehending even at that young age. I felt responsible for my mother and my little brother and sister. How could that be? My father, as a man and a breadwinner, was the indisputable head of the family. But now we were down to four, and I was the oldest male.
I also remember experiencing an uncomfortable sense of freedom. Yes, there was a wretched feeling of loss that has stayed vividly in my memory, but blessedly, there was also a counterbalance—an unfocused, frightening epiphany that I no longer had the same limits and restraints. Perhaps this was nothing more than my own way of surviving the trauma of my father’s sudden death, but I recall that strange, joyless thrill to this day.
My mother’s survival challenges were far more direct. Dad’s death left her with a total of $54 to support herself, me, Joel, and Ruthie, our six-month-old sister. In desperation, she approached the Jewish Federation for assistance and was told that it would be forthcoming—but only if she agreed to place her children in three separate orphanages. The notion not only revolted her but kindled her resolve never to permit any institution or individual to compromise the integrity of her family. To support us, she took a sales position at Sattler’s department store and then at the Broadway Market, both in Buffalo.
Sarah, my mother, was a quiet person, but she loved to dance. She liked coffee more than tea. She went on vacation with my father to Florida once. They sat by the pool, held hands for a moment, found the light too bright, and left. They went out to dinner. She thought about her girlfriends. She thought about her children, the neighborhood, wanting us to be safe.
Mother would hold my hand as we crossed the railroad tracks, and she would hold me back as the Erie-Lackawanna train roared past. She held my hand when we went to synagogue. She held my hand whenever we crossed the street, went on trips to see Niagara Falls, went to an apple orchard, went to Crystal Beach. Her hand had seen hard labor—a layer of tough skin covered the softer skin, mostly from her later work assembling airplane parts at the factory.
In the 1940s, until well through elementary school, we lived in a kind of shtetl, a bleak place on the East Side, in Buffalo’s poorest section. In the early years of our childhood, following our father’s death, my mother had had to shuffle us from place to place. We understood the tenuous nature of our existence. “Don’t disturb the landlord” was the evening credo. By day it was the similar “Be seen, not heard.” We finally rented a house, at 163 Butler Avenue on the East Side, but I continued to carry a generalized anxiety over our uncertain living situation, which somehow turned into a specific dread of blindness and cancer. The first poem I wrote spoke of the horror of each.
I remember standing hand in hand with my mother at the local ritual slaughterhouse while she ordered a kosher chicken, our Friday-night dinner staple. The shochet would chop its head off right in front of us. The blood squirting from its neck would run down a trough, and the chicken’s head would lie on the side like nothing at all, staring up at you as if to say, “Can this be? Is this possible?” One time, the sight was more than I could take. Before I could be sick, my mother dragged me out into the fresh air, where I promptly stumbled over a blind beggar. He was sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk. He was lanky, hunched over in soiled and torn clothes, wearing oversized and disintegrating shoes, and holding a metal cup. His unfocused eyes were milky with small black spots, his teeth misshapen and decayed. Anyway, that is how I recall him, and from that moment to today that is the form in which he has been a regular visitor in my dreams.
The park near our home was dangerous. Thugs lurked there even in the daytime, and they often beat us up just for the fun of it. For amusement, we would go behind our house to play—to call the miserably small area a backyard would be misleading. My great-uncle Abraham, who owned the house, worked back there, stripping metal from bedposts over an anvil. All day long, that old white-haired man would hunch over the anvil, clanking away. His weary horse stood in its tiny stable in the rear, likely grateful for the break from hauling my uncle’s heavy junk cart. Joel and I had to be careful not to get in Uncle Abraham’s way.
You could hear every conversation in the upper rooms of all the homes in the neighborhood—conversations that were not always enjoyable to be privy to.
Mostly, though, our neighbors were guarded in their speech, for many of them had fled a holocaust. Although I was young then and did not know what lay behind, around, and under that silence, I sensed a bit of it. All in all, it was as if we were living in the Dark Ages. My brother and I would play football or baseball in the middle of the street until early evening. It was hot and muggy, and we loved it.
You could hear the bugs whirring up near the streetlamps. The old neighborhood women would be in their housedresses, watching us from their porches. Will Ludwig, an old blind man, would stand and “watch,” too. No one knew what he did or where he came from. He just stood there in his white T-shirt and gray slacks hiked up on his hips. He was creepy but benign, like a friendly ghost.
