266
DAVID BRONSEN
holiday rituals. Those were the years when the huge influx of Eastern
Jewish immigration was building the area up. The East Side was help–
ful, communicative and highly interrelated - in short, a community.
It was a place with the promise of opportunities and new horizons,
where one could make a new start in life. And the Jew in those yean
was optimistic and dynamic, full of the feeling that nothing was holding
him back.
We lived in Ninth Street till I was eight years old, and then in the
summer of 1914 we moved to Harlem. My mother's parents, along with
several uncles and aunts, were brought over just before the outbreak of
the First World War and settled by my maternal uncle in a steam–
heated, hot-water apartment in Harlem. My mother wanted to be near
her parents, which accounted for our moving there too. The move
turned out to be crucial for me.
We settled at 108 East 1l9th Street, near the trestle of the New
York·New Haven Railroad. This part of the neighborhood, squeezed
in between Little Italy to the east and the more prosperous and pre–
dominately Jewish area to the west, was considered the poorer part of
Harlem. It was a mixture of Irish, Italians and Jews, and a rough
mix–
ture. I was taken from a neighborhood that had been home for me and
put in a highly hostile environment. That produced a shock from which
I have perhaps never recovered. Until then I had had a natural love
of activity and enjoyed the companionship of other children. I had
been a good student in school as well as in
cheder.
After the move to
Harlem all that changed and I took to avoiding outside contact by
staying in the house and near Mama as much as possible, so that I
grew
fat with the lack of activity. In fact, that is what the children used
to
call me - "fatty." For weeks I cried and had tantrums, begging to
be
taken back to Ninth Street. But no one paid any attention to me, nor
was there any concern when I received C's for the first time on my
report card. I got into fights at the new school for a while, but I soon
learned to avoid any provocation. I retreated into myself and stayed
out of people's way. Serious psychological damage had been brought
about by this uprooting of a naturally conservative child, and it ex–
pressed itself after a while in my rejection of Jewish faith and customs,
which until then had been a part of me. I felt no anguish over this at
the time - I was throwing it all to the winds. My mother, who
WlU
the only source of security, did not understand what was going on,
although I suppose her example was also influencing my behavior. She
herself was reacting against the fanatical orthodoxy of her father, which
had oppressed her as a child and a young woman.
If
her faith had not
been tongue in cheek I might have been insulated against the influ-
