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PARTISAN REVIEW
read that Jews had done? Mom couldn't answer the question. She did
remark, though, that in the South, when Negroes were being lynched,
the other Negroes didn't put up much of a fight. I still couldn't see,
though, how people, knowing that they were going to be killed,
wouldn't fight for their lives. Only when Izzy told me about the
Warsaw Ghetto did I begin to understand.
Before the exodus to Weequahic, the Jewish holidays were exciting
times in our neighborhood. Everyone acted as if a storm were coming
and he had to stock up before it arrived. As the deadline approached,
things became even more hectic. "Georgie," Mr. Gold, the grocer,
would yell, "Georgie, tell your mother to hurry and get her shopping
done because I'll be closing before sundown." Mr. Gold closed earlier
than the other shopkeepers because he had already moved to Weequahic.
Mr. Gold was originally from New York, and he thought himself above
the Newark Jews, whom he treated like yokels. His wife, who was my
first-grade teacher, had inherited the store from her father, and he had
condescended to run it. He rarely spoke to the other merchants. As
Willie, the vegetable store owner, told me, "Gold thinks he's better
than I am."
This feeling extended to us, as well. Mr. Gold's son turned up in a
summer school lecture class I attended; he told me his father mentioned
the Curetons with affection, but the nearest Mr. Gold could come to
this was to tell me that he understood I could get along pretty well
with Macbeth, which his son could not. He couln't bring himself to say
that I must be a pretty smart young fellow; that just wasn't in his
makeup.
The Jewish religion fascinated us. During the holidays, we would
peer into the synagogue, watch the men and boys with their little round
hats, and listen to the strange - to us - chanting. If we were chased
away, we'd run upstairs to the back porch and watch from there. I
al–
ways searched for Mikey among the sea of little black hats; he would be
sending signals to his friend Bernie, telling him to meet him after sun–
down.
If we were curious about the Jewish religion, the Jews had every
right to be just as curious about ours. If their chanting seemed strange to
us, how did they feel about the vociferous "amens" they heard from our
churches? The laugh of the neighborhood was the church above the
liquor store. Every Monday, Jack, the store's owner, would find half his
stock broken on the floor because of all the jumping that went on in
the church Sunday night. It got so bad that Jack started packing up
all
the liquor on the shelves every Saturday night. Mom teased him about
this. ''Jack,'' she said one day, "I wonder if they're not adding a little
extra shouting and leaping just to destroy the devil that's under them."
