580
PARTISAN IliVLEW
Virtue and vice are sanitized and made acceptable, while the suffering, we
tell ourselves, holds us together. But the reality of life in this city suggests
different agendas. The fate of blacks and Jews is no longer tied together,
nor does there any longer exist a political symbiosis between the groups.
But each side continues to have expectations of the other. "If blacks be–
haved like Jews," another of those aging union men tells me in the
street, finger fronting me like a mugger's pistol, "they would be a lot
better off." We are forever instructing the other's
them.
And if the other
refuses to listen, we assume disaster - for
them
and for us.
A few months ago, I sent an essay about my love affair with the
American South to an editor who, like me, is a Jew from the Bronx.
Accepting the essay, the editor wondered why it contained nothing
about blacks. Didn't
r
realize blacks were Southerners, too? The ques–
tion caught me off guard. I had simply never thought of blacks as
Southerners.
I knew, of course, that the culture blacks carried to New York was
rooted in the South, just as I knew that the Eastern European Yiddish
shtetl
had provided the rhythms to which I and my friends danced into
adu lthood . But cultural lineage didn't make us Eastern Europeans any
more than cultural lineage makes blacks Southerners. New York condi–
tions its offspring to take what they are given, however raw and angry
and filled with grievance what they are given makes them. Then it
teaches them to thrust their idea of self into what they have taken. New
Yorkers are forever choosing up sides on issues. "Getting even," we
called it as children. Is today's city merely a showcase for blacks and Jews
to get even with each other? Is the meaning of suffering
to
be reduced
to what is or is not considered politically correct at a particular mo–
ment?
The blacks I knew were N ew Yorkers, not Southerners. Like me,
they wanted different fates. Memories of race matters root to memories
of physical resurrection. Between September 1946 and May 1950, I was
taken twice each week in a station wagon into the heart of Harlcm, for
physical therapy at the Joint Disease Hospital on Madison Avenue and
123rd Street. The driver of that wagon, Mr. Cooper, was a black man
in his mid-fifties, who smoked cigars and drove cautiously.
Every Monday and Wednesday morning, the leftist pietics of my
adolescence were tested by Mr. Cooper's anger toward his fellow blacks.
"Damn loafers!" he would testily mutter, eyes splaying a group of boys
and young men hanging out on a street corner. Like a hooked trout
webbed in the terror of my cripplcdness - a fat adolescent with useless
