GEORGE CURETON
145
it." Mom replied cautiously. She still worked for Mrs. Cohen and didn't
want to risk offending her. ''I'm sorry," she said. "Mr. Brausten, where
you got it, is dead, and the shop is now a storefront church." She didn't
add that she had never liked the color of the old linoleum and was
ove~oyed
finally to have a color she wanted.
By 1947, the entire neighborhood had become black, except for a
few families, and most of their children took the bus every morning to
schools in the Weequahic section. But not all the Jewish kids left our
school. One who stayed behind was Morris. He told us he didn't transfer
across town because he was a "schlemiel."
I wonder if perhaps that was also the reason why Doris and her sister
handn't transferred. Doris's mother dressed like a character from "Fiddler
on the Roof," and she spoke a confusing kind of English. She didn't let
her two girls out of her sight except to go to school. How Doris man–
aged to get pregnant was a mystery, but she did manage it; the father
was an unnamed black dude in the neighborhood. When the baby was
born, nobody was allowed to see it; it was always wrapped from head
to toe and tightly clutched in its grandmother's arms. We knew it was a
boy, however, because whenever Doris and her sister got into one of
their heated arguments about the baby - and this happened almost every
day - it was a boy's name that they tossed about.
He wasn't the only black with Jewish overtones. Our family not
only inherited Mrs. Cohen's apartment and her furniture, we also inher–
ited a Jewish mother. My mother had worked for Mrs. Cohen so long
that she had become a complete replica of her. She used Mrs. Cohen's
Yiddish idioms to describe our behavior, and she pushed education at us
as if it were a mission. I spent my early years being compared to Mikey,
and was constantly harassed by my mother to be a doctor. One of
Mom's greatest thrills came when I got my bachelor's degree and she
could inform Mrs. Cohen that her boy Georgie had "graduated college"
and would be teaching in Newark. Her ego was further inflated when I
was chosen as New Jersey's Teacher of the Year. Showing
Look
maga–
zine to Mrs. Cohen and pointing out my picture was one of the great
highlights in her life.
So much of the Jewish culture was brought into our home that
when everyone was talking about the Holocaust, Mom would retell the
stories she had heard in the Jewish homes to my aunt, and we children
would have nightmares. Izzy the fisherman, who had arrived from
Poland, also told me gruesome stories. I had to know more; I think I
read every book published on the concentration camps. I got involved
personally. How would I have reacted under those conditions? Would
black folks have gone to concentration camps without resisting, as I had
