One
In 1932, a polio epidemic swept through Philadelphia, with 728 reported cases that resulted in eighty-four deaths. The virus found its way inside me, and my older brother, Blackie, caught it soon after. We were hospitalized for weeks in an infectious disease ward, and despite rules that strictly forbade parental presence, our mother stayed with us every single night. I’m not sure how she convinced the nurses to let her, but I know she was there.
I was three years old, and this is my earliest memory. Stuck behind the metal bars of an industrial crib, acutely aware of the fear in the air, with my mother’s constant fretting and doctors hurrying by our ward’s open door, grim looks on their faces.
None of this bothered me one bit.
I turned the parade of doctors into a game. I’d stand in my bed, steadied by the rails, and wave at each white coat in an attempt to see how many I could get to wave back. My track record was strong.
* * *
My mother’s name was Celia, but everyone called her Cele, pronounced like the animal. She slept on a small cot by our hospital beds, and our father would relieve her every other day so she could return home to freshen up. She’d be back within a matter of hours.
This level of devotion to her children continued throughout her life. She refused to speak much about her past, but as I grew older, I gathered bits and pieces of it together through stories told by my aunts and learned that she’d accepted the responsibility of ensuring the future of her entire family at a very a young age.
Born in Korostyshiv, a Jewish slum roughly seventy miles west of Kiev, she immigrated alone to Philadelphia in 1907, when she was just thirteen. Her older brother had already left for America several years earlier to try to establish a new life, but he hadn’t succeeded in building a foundation that could support the rest of the family.
Cele was considered the smartest and most beautiful of her four sisters, and my grandparents decided she had the best chance of finding a husband in America. The financial stability of a good marriage would pave the way for the rest of the family to join her and leave poverty behind—a heavy responsibility for anyone, much more so for a girl barely a teenager.
My grandfather took her to Lisbon and booked passage on a ship in the lowest class. She made herself useful among the other Jews journeying to America by caring for their young children, but she began to worry after some of the passengers learned just how young she was.
“They’ll turn you away,” she was told. “You have to be sixteen to get into the country alone unless there’s a special circumstance, like your whole family has been killed.”
When the boat arrived and Cele exited the plank, she spotted her older brother through the crowd, waiting from behind a large gate, jumping and waving.
“Welcome! Welcome!” he shouted. “How is the family?”
“Dead!” she yelled as loud as she could, making sure everyone could hear. “They’re all dead!”
By the time she made it through processing and got to the other side of the gate, her brother was weeping inconsolably, and he grabbed Cele, hugging her tightly.
“Everyone’s fine,” she whispered. “But keep it up.”
* * *
Cele didn’t find a husband right away, but she and her brother got settled enough with new jobs and the rental of a small one-bedroom flat that they were able to send for the rest of their sisters and my grandmother. The six of them lived squished into an apartment in South Philadelphia, an area deeply concentrated with other Jewish immigrants. My mother and aunts found part-time jobs while attending an all-girls high school and wore whatever hand-me-down clothes they could scrounge from charities, including boys’ coats in the winter.
Teased relentlessly in the streets, taunted by calls of “greenies,” a catchall slur for anyone new to the county, they kept their heads down and worked hard, and each graduated and found jobs as secretaries or in childcare.
Cele eventually met and fell in love with a man named Jack Schlain, who had a younger brother who was sweet on Cele’s youngest sister, my aunt Naomi. The two brothers married the two sisters, and our already large family quickly began to multiply and expand, as my other aunts married as well and everyone began having children.
In my immediate family, my sister, Delphina (she was quickly nicknamed Dolly), eleven years my senior, came first. She was feminine from the start, known for her beauty and love of fashion. Social and outgoing, she always had a close circle of girlfriends.
Dolly was followed by my beloved brother and sometimes tormenter, Edmond, who we all called Blackie due to his inky hair and dark eyes that sparkled like onyx. That trickster gleam perfectly matched his personality: independent, outspoken, and utterly charming. Four years later, I came along.
I was an accident. Later in life, I used this phrase while talking to a psychiatrist, who was quick to point out that even if I were, I must have been a welcome one because it meant my parents were still making love after being together for so long. I thought this was a very good point—and an important lesson. If they hadn’t kept things hot, I might never have existed.
* * *
Blackie and I were both released from the polio ward unscathed, with no lasting effects except for the massive hospital bills that hit my family. My father had to borrow a lot of money from some cousins, and to help pay off the debt, he began working for them selling wholesale stationery and toys to department stores.
We lived on top of a small store that my mother operated on the busy corner of Fifty-first and Baltimore Avenue, close to the trolley tracks. We had a soda and ice cream counter and loads of candy, and we were the only members of our entire extended family with a telephone. My sister and brother and I were constantly running from house to house to deliver messages or fetch someone who had a call. A bell over the front door rang out anytime someone entered, and if it was only a family member there to use the phone, he or she would shout “Never mind!” to let Cele know that a paying customer hadn’t walked in.
Between having a father with constant access to the latest toys before they hit the shelves and a mother who ran a sweets shop, I was in child heaven. The store was my playground. A boy from my kindergarten class visited one day with his mother, and he scrambled up on a stool and insisted I be the one to pour his drink from behind the counter. I had to use a stepstool to reach the syrup pumps. My cousins would come by and invent their own soda flavors, like cherry-vanilla root beer.
Dolly and Blackie were both responsible for watching over me, but Blackie more so when it came to keeping me entertained because we were closer in age. I have him to thank for my love of movies, since his method of childcare was to drag me along with him to either of our two neighborhood theaters.
They were close to our house: three blocks away was the Sherwood, with a large screen housed inside a gothic building. A few blocks beyond that was the Ambassador Theatre, which had an enormous light-up marquee and could seat up to one thousand people. When I began accompanying him to the movies while I was in first grade, he was mortified at the thought of anyone seeing him walk down the street alone with a little girl. Many of our neighbors weren’t particularly fond of Jews; he had a hard enough time getting anywhere on his own without being teased for being a sissy babysitter. He’d force me to run ahead of him so no one would suspect we were together. Just before I’d reach each curb and the stream of oncoming traffic, he’d shout “Heel!”
Initially, I loved the game and would pretend I was his puppy. It didn’t take long, though, for me to realize he was literally treating me like a dog, so I put a firm end to it and instead walked three steps behind him to keep him happy.
Weekend matinees were double features with cartoons, a serial, and newsreels. Blackie loved the twenty-minute adventures of The Lost Jungle and Flash Gordon. I was mesmerized by Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies like The Goddess of Spring, the story of beautiful, floppy-armed Persephone, who’s kidnapped by Hades to be his bride and dragged to his underworld lair, causing ice to spread across the land. She’s only allowed to return to the world above if she agrees to spend half the year back in hell with him for eternity.
It was the feature-length musicals that imprinted on me the deepest and kicked off a lifelong love of musicals and theater. I was so enthralled with Shirley Temple in films like Poor Little Rich Girl and Captain January that I thought nothing of bringing my harmonica to the theater and playing along with her songs. It never occurred to me that others might not want to hear it, and after several evictions from the Ambassador, I was banned for a week. Blackie worked around this by making me kneel down and shuffle through the door ahead of him, below the sight line of the woman in the windowed box office.
I earned a tiny allowance from helping out around the store and spent it all on going to the movies. If I ran out of coins, I’d swipe pennies off the stacks of newspapers that lined the little stands around our neighborhood, wrap them in silver foil from inside my father’s cigarette boxes, and try to pass the counterfeits off as dimes. My con never worked, and an exasperated Blackie would avoid eye contact with the fed-up ticket taker as he paid my way in.
Because I was constantly surrounded by so many treats, it was lost on me that our family was barely scraping by. A seemingly never-ending stream of dolls from my father’s work and unlimited sweets from the store made effective blinders. Little clues escaped me, like having to watch over the cash register one Thanksgiving with Dolly, waiting until it filled up with enough money so that we could run down the street to buy a pot that our mother needed to finish cooking the holiday dinner.
We lost the store the summer before I was supposed to enter the fourth grade. Taxes were owed that were too steep to cover, and the business was sold, along with the building it was housed in—our home.
Despite the fact that we were nonpracticing Jews, it was extremely important to Cele that we move to a solidly upper-middle-class Jewish enclave on the west side of town. Essentially, Cele wanted us to live somewhere Dolly and I could find good husbands. Marriage was crucial to her. Just like she had been taught, she thought it was the only chance my sister and I had for future economic security. Being Jewish, however, had everything to do with the culture around family, not God or the Torah. Cele knew Yiddish but didn’t speak it very often—mostly with her mother-in-law and sometimes with her sister if they were talking about her mother-in-law in the presence of others. She also liked to place her hands on family members’ cheeks and say shayna punim—“beautiful face.”
In the right company, Cele would loudly proclaim that religion was nothing but a bunch of hocus-pocus and told all of us children that if anyone ever asked our religion, we should reply “Atheist.”
Deciding where to move resulted in the one and only fight I ever heard my parents have. (Jack had a temper and often yelled at us kids, but he was never allowed to hit any of us—Cele forbade it.) I’d never heard the two of them raise their voices at each other, and Blackie and I were terrified; we huddled in the living room as Cele and Jack screamed in the kitchen. Jack didn’t want to spend too much on rent, but Cele insisted on a better neighborhood. Cele won, and I don’t know how they managed to do it—I suspect my father borrowed more money from his cousins—but we ended up in a very nice rental house on Sixty-second and Washington Avenue, in the exact area my mother wanted. Not long after, we moved four blocks north to an even better place, on Sixty-second and Christian Street.
Our new neighborhood was made up of block after block of tree-lined streets with three-story, two-family homes, each side a mirror image of the other. The structures all had slight architectural differences, a bay window here or enclosed front porch there, to keep the area from looking dull and too uniform. It was much quieter without the constant din of traffic and the trolley shuttling back and forth, but the sounds of children playing in the street made up for it. I was shy around others my age and preferred to spend my time with Blackie. He still took me to the movies; we rode our bikes together back to the theaters in our old neighborhood.
While we were first getting settled, everyone pitched in to help make money. Dolly and Blackie each had jobs, and my mother found all sorts of little ways to make ends meet while figuring out her next career move. My favorite, and the one I was old enough to help with, came during springtime. Since my mother hadn’t been able to get enough people to come to the candy store to support it, she decided to bring candy to the people. Every Easter, she’d make chocolate eggs with a hinged mold that could produce eight at a time. These weren’t feather-light little Cadbury eggs—each one was solid and about the size of my two fists pressed together. We’d pipe bright pink and yellow icing onto the surfaces once they cooled and hardened, decorating them with flowers and vines, and then we’d drive to the predominantly Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods and sell them door-to-door. Our eggs were a hit, and we began receiving custom orders—lists of names to add in swirly, candy cursive writing. Eventually, a few stores began to place wholesale orders as well.
I loved the time spent with Cele preparing these confections, the smell of chocolate wafting through the kitchen, and dabbing my pinkie onto the end of the piping bag for a tiny sugar rush.
I could do no wrong in my mother’s eyes—none of her children could. I know now that I was spoiled, but it wasn’t the material sort of spoiled. The gifts I was showered with and held on to were self-esteem and a belief that I could do anything. I think it could have gone disastrously wrong if I hadn’t also been book smart in a way that backed up Cele’s constant praise. There’s nothing worse than a know-it-all that doesn’t really know a thing. She also kept us in place with gentle teasing—anytime we drove by the zoo, she’d yell “Duck!” so the zookeepers wouldn’t come after us and lock us in with the rest of the monkeys.
We were in a new school district, and when I’d first enrolled, the administration discovered that I was far more advanced in reading and math than the other children, so I skipped the fourth grade. On the one hand, it made me feel special, but on the other, it meant I was a year younger then everyone in my new classroom, which didn’t do much to encourage socializing.
My only real friend was my cousin Sonya, whose nickname was Sunnie. She was only fourteen months younger than I was, but everyone referred to her as Sunnie Baby, because she was extremely asthmatic and therefore raised to be rather timid, discouraged from doing anything too exciting that might trigger an attack.
Every summer, Sunnie’s parents rented a small one-bedroom apartment in nearby Atlantic City. Say what you will about the place now, but in the 1930s, it was the East Coast vacation destination and well earned its self-appointed nickname of “the World’s Playground.” I’d go on to discover its hedonism as I grew older, but as a child, it was all innocence and magic. Cousins, aunts, and uncles would come and go from the apartment, and the kids would crash on the floor and take turns sleeping in the bathtub.
Sunnie and I built our share of sandcastles on the beach, and when the sun grew too hot, we’d stake out a cool, shady spot under the boardwalk and spy on the never-ending parade of feet crossing the slats above us, popcorn and saltwater taffy wrappers raining down like parade confetti. At night, we’d stay outside on our own until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., our skin lit up by the flashing lights of marquees and billboards. We’d watch enviously as teenagers and adults emerged from fancy hotels in evening wear, out for a night of dinner and dancing at any number of jazz clubs.
My parents and siblings didn’t join me on these extended summer trips with Sunnie; they were too busy working to pay the rent on our new home. Little by little, my father began making a name selling stationery. At the time, every department store had a stationery department on the ground floor along with the perfume counter, so there was a constant market. Luckily for me, he also maintained his contacts with toy wholesalers and often brought home board games and dolls that had yet to be released.
All of this childhood bliss initially made it easy to block out the start of World War II, after I turned ten. I remember picking up on bits and pieces from newspaper headlines and hushed conversations between my parents and siblings, but it was really nothing more than a sense that something bad was happening to other people somewhere far away.
Copyright © 2019 by The Judith M