840
PARTISAN REVIEW
them off. It was nine years before my mother saw her father again, a
complete stranger who frightened her at the pier behind his full
beard when he offered her a banana, a thing she had never seen .
The big city must have been terrifying too , but in the crowded
ghetto, this new Pale of Sehlement, the people and the language
were soothingly familiar . Wildly different strands were braided
together to create the amazing immigrant culture of the Lower East
Side- part Europe and part American hurly-burly, part piety- with
twenty tiny synagogues to a block- and part socialist ideology, part
theaters and cafeterias and part sweatshop labor. Supposedly this
culture was long past its glory days when I was growing up there in
the 1940s, but when I read books like
The Downtownjews
and
World
of Our Fathers
there was much I recognized that had lingered on from
forty years before .
What persisted for me especially was the religion . Unlike nearly
everyone else on our block, who perhaps bought kosher meat and
went to say
Yizkor
three or four times a year, and unlike the families
that appear in most Jewish-American novels or memoirs, my parents
were orthodox . That is to say , religion was less a "faith" than a way
of life, a set of rules that colored everything they thought and did.
For true believers more strict than my parents , it told them when to
eat and when to wash , when to pray and when to make love. If their
temperaments were more drawn to the forbidding side, it told them
above all what
not
to do. Even in the
shtetl
this system needed to be
defended against encroaching influences of modern life. To fortify
me against America, but also to separate me from the street-kids
who would never go anywhere , my parents sent me to a yeshiva, a
Jewish day school, where I would be immersed in tradition, among
Jews who would never assimilate, never yield.
When we moved to Queens at the end of the forties my parents'
orthodoxy abated but their feeling for it did not. In a gentile neigh–
borhood surrounded by temptation, I needed learning as a shield , a
talisman , a life-line to the luminous past. Somehow it seemed a fore–
gone conclusion that I would continue at the yeshiva, despite the
long trip back and forth. So instead of walking a block to school as I
had for years, I found myself, as a fifth-grader, taking a bus and
three trains, leaving at 7:30 in the morning and getting back twelve
hours later. Though I had no day left I don't recall I was ever fazed
by these Dickensian hours or the endless ride from one corner of the
city to another, which was exhilarating at first, then simply routine .
Returning home on the very first day, instead of meeting my father
