GEORGE
CURETON
My
Ghetto:
A
Backward Glance
They call it a ghetto now, myoId neighborhood in Newark. Ironically,
it acquired that name only after the predominantly Jewish population
moved out shortly after World War II. But when I was growing up, it
was still a mostly Jewish community. My mother, like many of the
Negro women, worked as a domestic in a Jewish home. I, like many of
my black classmates, wore hand-me-downs from a well-to-do Jewish
family.
Things were changing, though. When the war ended, many of my
Jewish neighbors moved to the other side of Newark, to the Weequahic
section, the part of town that Philip Roth writes about in
Portnoy 's
Complaint.
And my part of town became known as a ghetto.
I remember asking Mrs. Goldberg, my fifth-grade teacher, what the
word "ghetto" meant. She gave me that enthusiastic look that told me I
was in for a long drawn-out response. "Wait and see me after school,"
she replied, "and I'll tell you all about the word." Oh no, I thought,
whatever the word means it must be something bad. I wasn't ready for
that. I tried to get her to postpone her definition, but she was eagerly
insistent: "No, you wait after school." None of my pleading had the
slightest effect; I was to wait after school and see her. And all becau,se of
some mysterious word that white folks used to characterize my section
of town. (If they needed a word with sociological implications, why
didn't they ask us? We could have given them a more colorful term than
"ghetto" to identify where the black folks lived. I can understand how
the people in Toni Morrison's
Song oj Solomon
felt when they were
denied the name of Doctor Street.)
So I stayed after school. Mrs. Goldberg began her definition at 3:20.
She was still going at 4:00, when the janitor informed her that he had
to clean her room, a signal for her to leave. But before she did so, she
had me look up "ghetto" in my school dictionary. And it wasn't there.
Nor did most of what Mrs. Goldberg told me mean very much to me.
(After all its psychological and sociological ramifications had been ex–
plained, I came away with just one thought: How easy it was to rhyme
the word with'Moe, Joe and Steptoe, nicknames of some of my friends
and classmates.)
But the ghetto was on its way. As the Jewish families moved away,
