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4.2.12
WC: 191694

rear there was a tiny back porch, a yard and a garage. Since we had no car, we rented the garage to another cousin who used it to store the toys he sold wholesale.

We were not poor. We always had food. But we couldn’t afford any luxuries, such as restaurants. We passed down clothing from generation to generation and ate a lot of “leftovers”. (Remember the comedian who said “we always ate leftovers—nobody has ever found the “original” meal.) My mother has always said we were “comfortable.” (The same comedian told about the Jewish man who was hit by a car, and was laying on the ground; when the ambulance attendant asked him “are you comfortable,” he replied, “I make a living.”)

The center of our home was the stoop in front of the house. We sat on it, played stoop ball on it, jumped from it and slid down the smooth slides on each side of it. It was like a personal playground. On nice days, everyone was outside, especially before the advent of television. We even listened to the radio--Brooklyn Dodger baseball games, the Lone Ranger, "Can You Top This?," "The Shadow," "Captain Midnight," and "The Arthur Godfrey Show"--while sitting on the stoop, with the radio connected to an inside socket by a long, frayed extension cord. We ate lunch on the stoop on days off from school, had our milk and cookies on the stoop when we got back from school, traded jokes, and even did our homework on the stoop. Mostly, we just sat on the stoop and talked among ourselves and to passing neighbors, who knew where to find us. In those days, nobody called ahead—phone calls were expensive. They just dropped by.

In front of the stoop was what we called "the gutter." (Today it is referred to as "the street.") The gutter was part of our playground since cars rarely drove down our street. We played punch ball in the gutter, stickball in the driveway and basketball in front of the garage--shooting at a rim screwed to an old ping pong table that was secured to the roof of the garage by a couple of two by fours.

We had no room to play indoors, so we had to use the areas around the house as our play area. Our house became the magnet for my friends because we had a stoop, a hoop and an area in front of our stoop with few trees to hinder the punched ball. (A ball that hit a tree was called a “hindoo”—probably a corruption of “hinder.”)

The stereotype of the Brooklyn Jewish home during the immediate post WWII era was one filled with great books, classical music, beautiful art prints and intellectual parents forcing knowledge into their upwardly mobile male children aspiring to become doctors, teachers, lawyers and businessmen. (The daughters were also taught to be upwardly mobile by marrying the doctors, etc.)

My home could not have been more different--at least externally. The living room book shelves were filled with inexpensive knickknacks (chachkas). The only books were a faux leather yellow dictionary that my parents got for free by subscribing to "Coronet Magazine." When I was in college, they briefly subscribed to the Reader's Digest Condensed Books. There was, of course, a "Chumash" (Hebrew bible) and half dozen prayer books (siddurs and machsers). I do not recall

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