Category: Autobiography

This is chapter four of my ongoing autobiography project, all about my early school years. Check back in each Friday for more installments from my life’s work! 

When you are 5½-years-old, how do you know what suffering is? Looking back, if not actual suffering, my days in Williamsburg were at least lacking in joy. As such, I had few memories of those early years when school became the centerpiece of my outer world and, for the most part, the memories I do have are shaded grey, if not darker.

My first school experience, P.S. 16, was a four-block walk from my family’s third floor walk-up apartment in an aged brick building situated on the busily traveled Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. My sister, Bernice, four years my elder, also attended P.S. 16. Every morning, hand in hand, she would mother me safely to school. Before entering the building, students lined up according to their class in the paved-over grim schoolyard. I don’t have many memories from that time, but somehow the memory of that schoolyard stuck. I suspect it was because the physical and emotional boundary of family ended (with my sister letting go of my hand) and the alien outer-world began.

A surprisingly similar dislocation occurred when I was 25. My wife of three years and I left New York City headed for Chicago, where I was to begin my internal medicine internship at Michael Reiss Hospital. As the bus left the Port Authority terminal on 8^th Avenue in Manhattan, it faced west into a deepening reddish sunset before descending into the Lincoln Tunnel on its way to New Jersey. I was suddenly beset with melancholia in that moment, a great sense of loneliness. I am leaving my mother, I couldn’t stop thinking. I sobbed profusely, uncontrollably. Perplexed, as well she should have been, my wife requested a reason. “Why are you crying, what’s wrong?!” I was too ashamed to answer her. I said nothing.

The schoolyard was like that for me. Burned into my psyche, a great emotional brand that I’ve never been able to forget. But try as I might I am unable to conjure up any further images from the two years I attended P S. 16, for 1^st and 2^nd grade. Was it simply that nothing of note was happening? I don’t feel that I am repressing traumatic events, but rather that there just were no events worth remembering!

At the same time, my summer sojourns at Lake Hopatcong left multitudes of joyous impressions in my memory bank. I am beginning to realize that I only hold onto memories if they are truly happy or truly traumatic.

I do remember that my school day did not end after being discharged from P.S. 16. Following my public school classes, I attended Hebrew school, or Heder, five days a week. The Heder was also within walking distance from my home. In fact, the area of Williamsburg I lived in was a hotbed of Jewish ghetto activity. All forms of institutions of Jewish learning and prayer were within walking distance. It remains mostly the same today along Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn.

I distinctly remember the Heder’s classroom. It was located in one of those half-sunken basements. Windows lined what was designated the rear of the room. Through them could be seen the lower half of the torsos of passersby as they meandered up and down the street outside the Heder. Creatures such as dogs, cats and even rats were at eye level, in full view.

The Heder, which consisted of just the one room, was filled with three rows of ten wooden chairs, each with attached arms that served as desks. Purposefully, the chairs faced away from the windowed “rear” wall to avoid distractions and towards the room’s front wall, which was covered with a blackboard almost in its entirety. I remember the Heder’s youngish male teacher pacing back and forth in front of that giant blackboard. His duty was to teach us to speak Hebrew, the language of the newly-to-be-established State of Israel. A few words stuck but, once again, my school experience was a dud.

Yeshiva Torah Vodaath

It was one dreary afternoon when my parents dragged me, without warning, kicking and screaming, to enroll in Yeshiva Torah Vodaath. That was when, as a third grader, I finally started to have vivid school memories. Bad ones. Who convinced my loving parents to enroll me in the devil’s pit? I would sincerely like to know. No doubt it would be too late to rebuke them for the calamity they caused me, however limited in duration the experience was, because the guilty parties are dead after all these years. Neither my mother nor father earned a high school diploma. Neither were they self-taught scholars. They were ignorant as to the ways of education and how to assess schooling. A strict Jewish education, mated with public school curriculum, the Yeshiva Model played well to my parents’ guilt, and their need to provide their male child with a better Jewish-oriented education than they’d had. It is somewhat of a paradox that non-practicing Jews would seek out for their son a parochial Jewish education. Well, there’s one correction that needs to be made. My mother did practice a modified form of Kosher. We used two sets of dishes, pots, pans, and silverware in the home: one set for meat (fleishik) and one for milk (milkhik), so that never the twain shall meet. However, Kosher law was suspended when we went out to eat at a local Chinese restaurant. In order not to “offend” our hosts, we ate, with gusto, fried pork ribs.

I was lost at sea in the Yeshiva and felt helpless to express this feeling to anyone at the school or to my parents. My math class was tackling long division and having come into class in the middle of the school year, from a hapless public school, I had no idea what long division was about. Day after day, I sat in class bewildered, uncomprehending and silent, feeling oh so lost.

Worse yet was Hebrew class. How vivid was my memory of the teacher, a man in his fifties or sixties with puffy, reddish cheeks and bulging, incriminating eyes that were magnified by Coke bottle-thick eyeglass lenses. His thickly accented, barely understandable voice was laced with anger. Miss a translation of a Hebrew word and he would shout, “Dumm kopf!” Miss two words and he would command, “Put out your hand,” in order for him to deliver a ruler whack across the knuckles. I had learned little Hebrew at the Heder and was incapable of keeping up with my Yeshiva Hebrew class. Day after day I lived in terror of my teacher, my tormentor, suffering frequent painful knuckle blows and feeling hopeless. My parents remained distant, unable to comprehend what was happening to me. They didn’t ask and I didn’t know how to tell.

What I did learn at Yeshiva Torah Vodaath was to gamble and steal. On our lunch break, the students organized a marble game that included betting. One student positioned himself in the gutter, his back against the curb (traffic was blocked off on our street during school hours), legs spread, facing the other side of the street. He would place a marble between his legs. From across the street, a second student would launch marbles aimed at his. All misses were kept by the gutter student, but a hit would pay off in either marbles or money. The local candy store sold marbles for ten cents a dozen. A hit usually paid ten cents, so one hit in twelve shots and the shooter broke even. Some shooters got either very good or very lucky, and some students ended up paying off large sums of money, enough to wipe out their lunch change. In time, this led to a crack down on Yeshiva gambling, which included dire threats or expulsion, mothers being called and, worst of all, a total lockdown of Yeshiva gambling—the highlight of most students’ days.

As for theft, the plot went like this: the local vendor of potato knishes would roll his wagon—a two-wheeled push-cart with a heated container mounted on it—onto the Yeshiva block at lunch time. Knishes were a fried dough skin loaded with spicy baked potato and salted on the outside. Delicious. The fastest student would pretend to buy a knish, but once he had it in hand, he would run off without paying. The over-challenged, heavy-set vendor would then give chase, huffing and puffing, between shouts of “thief, thief!” Like vultures, the rest of us descended upon the unguarded knish wagon. I think I stole a knish once, but mostly I remember feeling sorry for the knish seller. Somehow none of us got in trouble for our prank. We should have.

On my way home from Yeshiva I would make sure to take a route that went past my maternal grandparents’ candy store on the corner of Division avenue and Roebling. “Come, sit down, Schmul,” Grandma Rose would say, hugging me gently and pointing to the high top chairs that adorned the store’s soda fountain. Schmul was my Hebrew name. Grandpa Joe (or J.B.), with his Bhudda-like belly and silent mannerisms, would load up my chocolate éclair. They had a large, slow-moving orange feline named Rusty who guarded the store. When the mood struck him, he’d jump on my lap and purr for caresses. “What did you learn today?” J.B. would inquire daily, not expecting any particular answer. Since I hadn’t learned much and he expected little in the way of an answer, I didn’t need to suffer a lie. “Oh, we played punch ball at lunch break and I got a single,” I’d say. Or, “The Rabbi said we should take a Pushkah home [a Jewish charity box with a slot to deposit coins] and go about our block asking for donations to help the Yeshiva.” Grandma Rose, slender, with sharp attractive features, was the straight woman, strong and contained. J.B. was the whimsical one, uncritical and divine—like the Buddha he so physically resembled. Their candy store was heaven on earth for me, a love sanctuary with eclairs.

Somewhere in my reflective years, around age 60, I finally got around to reading the text included in my Great Uncle Lionel Reiss’ book, A World at Twilight. The book was Lionel’s vehicle to present his paintings and sketches of Eastern European Jewry before the Holocaust. The text was written by Milton Hindus and contained a chapter entitled, “The Heder,” from which I quote, “At the Heder, the elementary Hebrew school of the Eastern European Jews before the Holocaust, studies began very early (age 3 or 4). The discipline was rigorous and punitive, and the hours spent were inordinately long (nine, ten, or more). The poverty of the Melamedim (elementary teachers), the condition of their homes, in which they had to carry out their instructions under the scrutiny of their wives, and the lack of esteem in which they were held— all contributed to the development of the worst sides of their character.”

It was then I understood the roots of the misery I endured at my Heder and later at the Yeshiva. It is incongruous to me that the “people of the book,” a religion steeped in knowledge and wisdom, could be so poorly treated by their own elementary educational institutions.

I was saved from the Yeshiva by my father’s success in business. We moved to Flushing, Queens, into an attached house—now called a townhouse—with a postage stamp-sized backyard. The street in front of our house, 175^th Street, saw only local traffic. A stickball game could be played safely on 175^th Street—except for the loss of pink, high-bouncing Spaulding balls hit onto rooftops.

The local public school was two blocks from our house. It was fourth grade time for me. I went from being the loser of the Yeshiva bunch to a minor star. My new public school was my speed and there were girls—which the Yeshiva did not have—and no Gestapo teachers.

I attended Hebrew lessons on a one-on-one basis, three times a week, with a gentle, somewhat dried up, lean old man. He taught me how to translate English words into Hebrew, read portions from the original testament (old to me is derogatory) and tried to explain their meaning. Later, as I approached thirteen, or manhood in Judaism, he instructed me in my HAF Torah, the part of the Torah that I was to read at my Bar Mitzvah. The day of my Bar Mitzvah was the day my formal Hebrew training ended.

By the eighth grade, I had “dated” a few neighborhood girls but was decidedly shy and, at the same time, desirous. At most, I managed a few sterile kisses. Like the rest of the boys, I appreciated viewing Debra Waxman’s bigger-than-believable breasts outlined by the tight sweaters she wore. I also was popular enough to be elected to the ceremonial office of school treasurer. My father helped my campaign for office by having a faked front page of a newspaper printed with a headline that read, “Zuckerman Wins Election” in 3½ inch high bold lettering.

Did I have friends in public school? Yes and no. I didn’t seem attached to anyone, to any group, or to any socializing activity like The Boy Scouts or a school team. Was I a loner then? Well, not exactly. I had associates I hung with who lived on my block: Larry Gotkin and Norman Learner. Both ended up becoming doctors, like me. Norman eventually went to an accelerated class where he was able to do high school in three years. I’ll never understand how he did that. I used to study geometry with him and was endlessly impressed with his lack of insight into what to me was obvious. But Norman was a grind, doggedly working to understand what was in front of him. He saw a challenge and applied himself to it, regardless of talent or competence.

My real best friend, Jeffrey Mackler, was my opposite. Self-confident with the girls and socially extroverted, he plucked at the guitar, played tennis, and beat me regularly at chess, a game he learned from his outgoing Jewish communist “intellectual” furrier father (my father was a dressmaker, was little read, didn’t play chess or any sports, and didn’t like Communists like his brother-in-law, my mother’s sister’s husband, Morris, the sweater manufacturer). I followed, Jeffrey led. We split when we went to different high schools. He went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, became a teacher and a social leader in the San Francisco Bay area, a leader in an organization described as Trotskyite in leaning, and an environmentalist. We met once at Antioch and never since have been in contact. For many years, I adored both Jeffrey’s father and Morris, while wishing my father had been like them. That ain’t the way it ended up. My father, Max, was honorable, silent, strong, and 100% loyal to family. Bedrock, but you would never hear it from him. He loved, he cried. He was, up to his eyeballs, a human being to all and a joker up to his dying words.

Throughout my public school years, I clung to my ambition to become a doctor. At some point during my eighth grade in public school, I discovered Stuyvesant High School and its reputation for excellence in science and math, the two prerequisite courses for admission to premed college programs. Stuyvesant was a public school, one of a few New York City Schools designated as a Specialty High School. Others included Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Tech and Music and Art. Stuyvesant was unfortunately, at the time, an all-boys school.

All New York City’s specialty schools were meant for the academic crème de la crème. Entry to Stuyvesant was by far the most egalitarian of qualifications. You needed to be human, male, have completed the eighth grade, be an official resident of New York City, and to have scored high enough on the three-hour entrance exam. I remember taking the exam in a room that was hot and stifling, unsure of my future. But then I got my letter. And I was jubilant to have received my acceptance.

Here’s the third installment of my ongoing autobiography project, where I post chapters from my life’s story every Friday.

Fishing and swimming—those were my summer joys at Lake Hopatcong. Swimming required only a bathing suit. Fishing, some basic gear. A line, bobber, hook and, of course, the bait.

On those long-ago summer days when I was four or five, sunfish were my specialty game. The flat, bony swimmers are carnivores. They require live animal bait that, after being pierced by the hook in a non-fatal way, twist and turn in their agony to escape, providing irresistible allure.

For me, young and eager to catch any fish I could, bait animals came down to two species: grasshoppers and worms. There were two types of grasshoppers that were local, plentiful, and catchable by a hunter killer such as me. Camouflaged green ones that hopped from one blade of greenery to another, and those that were dull brownish in color and had adapted the means to fly. The brownish ones hung out on brownish dirt patches where their excellent camouflage thwarted detection. When fearing their camouflage had failed, those brown hoppers propelled themselves into the air with a snapping sound. Then they spread their wings—that for no seemingly good reason were colored black and yellow. Off they flew, erratically darting this way and that. Chasing them down was dizzying. Those fliers were the hardest to catch, as there was hardly any way to sneak up on them. With sharp eyes, quick hands, and a cat’s hunting fervor, I learned to track down the flying grasshoppers where they landed and pounce without squashing them, thus rendering them useful as bait. Struggle as they might, I would single-handedly pierce the insect’s exoskeleton with the sharp hook—just past their head in the thorax area—and soon I was ready to fish with a wiggling bait.

Hunting worms was a much greater challenge than hunting grasshoppers, especially the brand of worms that I targeted, the mighty nightcrawler (lumbricus terrestris). Nightcrawlers only rise to the surface of the earth after the noxious sun has set. Their purpose in doing so? Sex! The worms are hermaphrodites and so, to them, sex is a double-edged pleasure. Once out of their holes and slithering about in the evening grass, they seek out one another and, when successful, they match their male to female and female to male sex organs head to tail, tail to head, and proceed to copulate. Double the pleasure. I wasn’t allowed out late at night and so was never able to take advantage of nature’s zest for procreation in order to capture nightcrawlers during their nocturnal debaucheries.

Instead, a fellow Briefite, two years my elder, unveiled to me the secret method used to coax nightcrawlers to come to the surface during the rule of the sun.

Step 1: concoct a caustic brew to be poured down the nightcrawler’s hole. This brew would make the worm seek relief by rapidly coming to the surface, whether it was day or night. To make the offensive liquid, I would covertly borrow the tin of Coleman’s Dry English Mustard from my mother’s pantry. I then mixed the powder with water in an empty quart milk container with its most utilitarian spout. The brew was ready when it took on a bright yellow color and tangy smell.

Step 2: the art of locating the nightcrawlers’ home and preparing it for the delivery of the liquid mustard preparation. To find the holes, we crawled on all fours in the thick grass, searching with our hands for the mounds of worm poop that covered the creature’s hole. The trick was to uncover the hole without letting any poop fall in it, clogging it up. The worm poop was then used to carefully build a funnel around the hole, making sure none of the poop clogged it, to direct the liquid. Down the yellow liquid heat would rush, and in twenty anticipatory seconds, the stillness would explode. Out of the mouth of the hole came this large, pinkish-brown, fleshy, pointed, herded, faceless thing, writhing with mustard burn. When the inflamed beast was halfway out of his tunnel, he would hesitate, offended by the sunlight.

This was the most crucial moment of the hunt, for it required all the discipline a four-year-old could muster. When to strike! Too early and the nightcrawler would seize up so that half his body would be stuck in the tunnel—a hard pull would tear him apart. So my friend taught me to have patience, to wait. Patience paid off, because inevitably the nightcrawler’s pain overcame his distaste for sunlight and he’d slither out of his hole and become easy pickings. Sometimes, the nightcrawler would get stuck, half in and half out, so it took a keen eye to judge when he relaxed his powerful muscles. Then with a quick grasp at his protruding half, before he could tense up again, he could be plucked whole and put into the can of water used to wash off the offending mustard, and then into the dirt holding pen, ready to be sold for bait.

My sister, Bernice, four years older than me, handled the bookkeeping. We sold a dozen nightcrawlers for $.10 and by summer’s end, our tin can bank was full of dimes to the tune of $9.00.

Every now and then, I think back to my nightcrawler hunting days and how exciting it was. Do I have nightmares where giant nightcrawlers are threatening to avenge the mayhem and murder my sister and I perpetrated against their brethren? No! But, as of recently, I began to think of nightcrawlers, those faceless creatures, as having feelings, a soul, especially now that I have come to contemplate my own demise. Even without Darwin, it is now intuitively obvious that all living creatures are my brethren.

Please enjoy the second installment of my ongoing autobiography project, where I post chapters from my life’s story every Friday. 

From ages 4½ to 11½, summers were heaven. For two delicious months, my family and I escaped our tenement confinement in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by heading to Brief’s Bungalow Colony on the western shore of Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey’s largest lake. Uncle Philly, who was married to Aunt Lena, my father’s younger sister, was a fish monger. He sold to rural New York and New Jersey hotels, which were kept hopping with Jewish vacationers escaping the summer swelter of the city. Philly had discovered Lake Hopatcong on one of his Pisces peddling sojourns and couldn’t wait to tell my father about it.

“Max, you won’t believe it!” he told my father. “I found Gan Eden [Garden of Eden in Hebrew], minus that grumpy, self-righteous landlord, just a couple of hours from here. What are you going to do this summer to get Helen and the kids out of Brooklyn’s schvitz bath and bad tempers? I’ll tell you what! You send them up to Brief’s Bungalow Colony on Lake Hopatcong for two months! Cheap, $400 for the summer. And you? You can visit them on the weekends!”

Philly’s enthusiasm successfully persuaded my father, although I will never be sure if it was because Dad thought it was truly a great deal or because he couldn’t wait to get rid of Philly. Philly traveled with a miasma about him from the fish he sold—mostly of the northern Atlantic variety—that he purchased wholesale at the Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan at three o’clock in the morning. Lake Hopatcong’s fish did not smell like that, nor did they reek of alcohol like Philly did. How memorably embarrassing was his commandeering the emcee’s microphone to blurt out his own version of Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn, or To Me You’re Beautiful, at one relative or another’s Bar Mitzvah or wedding. Like most Jewish families, ours were righteous teetotalers. Only ceremonial Manischewitz and Schnapps were sanctified. Whiskey, Philly’s favorite, was not. It was not unusual to hear one relative or another say, “Who invited that Shmegegee [buffoon]?” or “Why doesn’t Lena divorce that Shikker [drunkard]?” or “Look, nobody has the Chutzpah to take the microphone away from that pisher.” But that was just Uncle Philly.

My mother’s family were all experienced swimmers. Her father, Grandpa Joe, a candy store owner, loved the ocean, and as soon as his children could walk, he taught the three of them to swim in the waves at Rockaway’s public beaches.

When my mother’s brother, my Uncle Myer, heard of Lake Hopatcong, he joined the summer exodus with his wife, Ester, and his three children. This was great for us, because Uncle Myer owned a hand-me-down woody station wagon. It was a gift from his Uncle Lionel, the artist, who, amongst other things, created the MGM Lion! Into the woody would go our suitcases, fishing lines, towels and bedding, and then we would set off for summer heaven. Even the trip to the lake was itself an adventure, because the woody was old and cranky and would overheat at the hint of any grade over five degrees. Lake Hopatcong was 60 miles away on winding, hilly roads from Brooklyn. We would all be on alert for steam rushing out from under woody’s hood, the signal for the caravan to circle. Myer stocked woody’s running-boards with five gallon water tanks, strapped down securely and ready for action. After guzzling a couple of gallons of water, the old timer settled down and the caravan would round us kids up and move on. We’d replicate this ritual four or five times on the way to Lake Hopatcong.

Brief’s Bungalow Colony sat on the western shore of the lake. The area had a foreboding name—the River Styx—and it included a two lane, narrow bridge. Our bungalow had three bedrooms and an all-purpose kitchen, living room, and dining area. The bungalow’s screen doors and windows invited summer breezes to pass unhindered through the bungalow, blurring the lines between outdoors and in.

There, at Brief’s, we escaped the squalor of Brooklyn with its locked doors and windows used to keep out winter and thieves, and the relentless noise and traffic pollution of Bedford Avenue, a major thoroughfare that was right outside our door.

Brief’s Bungalow Colony owned 50 feet of lakeshore. Its dock extended far into the lake before making a sharp turn to the left. Doing so, it created a rectangular “pool,” or safe area. It was here that my mother taught me, an already accomplished swimmer at age 4½, how to float. I remember floating effortlessly on top of Lake Hopatcong’s gentle waters, arms and legs outstretched, relaxed, completely enchanted by the billowing clouds that moved lazily across the blue sky above.

I never did, as a youth, fathom the length and depth of Lake Hopatcong. From Brief’s dock, I could see the white plumes of speed-boats in the distance as they crisscrossed the main body of the lake. It was probably smaller than I imagined then, but in my mind it stretched on forever, blue waves and endless water.

It wasn’t just the water. My whole Hopatcong world seemed vast, though it mostly consisted of our bungalow, the grassy commons of the larger colony where I hunted night crawlers, and the long dock where I caught upwards of 400 sunfish every summer. I spent a good deal of time diving under the water, trying to become like those very fish I spent so much time catching, beheading, gutting, scaling, frying (though my mother did that part), and eating.

I remember lying on my belly, fishing on the dock with a drop line, hook and worm dangling in the clear lake water, watching the brightly speckled orange-bellied sunfish dart about my hook, just two feet from my nose. Those sunfish never failed me.

When I was fifty, I revisited Lake Hopatcong and tried to locate Brief’s Bungalow Colony. I drove back and forth about four or five times, unable to figure out where Brief’s was. It finally dawned on me that I was looking for Brief’s with my child’s eye. The actual area, sans bungalows, was so small compared to my memory of it that I had passed by it time and time again without recognizing what it was.

This is the first real installment of my ongoing autobiography project, where I post chapters from my life’s story every Friday. Enjoy!

On a bright day, when sunrays danced on water so pure that every grain of sand glimmered on the sea bottom, I was launched into conscious life. I was two and a half at the time. My mother held my hand as she led me gently up to my waist in the briny water. She cuddled me under my belly and laid me facedown in the warm sea. I instantly panicked, arching my back to get my face out of the water. Then she did it again, speaking to me calmly. I couldn’t breathe, the water rushing into my nose and mouth. She urged me to kick, to splash with my arms and, assuming that there was purpose to her dunking me, I frantically obeyed. Two, three, four times she patiently lowered my face into the water. Each time I came up sputtering and coughing from the salt that stung my eyes and lodged in the back of my throat. Finally, my tears, my protest, convinced her that I’d had enough that day.

“Take my hand little one,” she said and led me up onto the warm, sandy beach. We were at Long Beach in New York, the summer of 1943. It was the only time we ever vacationed there, but I remember my swimming lesson vividly. Everything was new, and my senses were glutted with that newness. The feel of sand under my feet, the taste and smell of the salt water. I can still feel those waves on my body. Eventually, I got the hang of having my face in the water and, from that point on, the umbilical cord was severed. I was my own boy!

After swimming, I remember lying on the beach with my mom. A large propeller-driven airplane zoomed overhead, menacingly low, flying over the water. I jumped at the time, startled by the noise and how close it seemed to crashing into the waves. Now, I assume it was a military plane taking off for war from nearby Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. WWII had been declared two years before I was born.

It was a time of chaos, when my country was fighting to save itself and the rest of the world from the evils of despotism, fascism, communism and anti-Semitism. A great struggle for good-over-evil was taking place, one that would dramatically impact my life.

My parents were both first generation Americans, the children of Polish Jews who had emigrated to New York City in 1913—just before immigration from Eastern Europe was shut down. Both had grown up in the stifling, overcrowded tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

My mother’s family, while as poor as many of the immigrants who passed through Ellis Island—those who inspired Emma Lazarus to write the sonnet, “The New Colossus”—were of artistic and intellectually rich stock. My father’s family, in contrast, were street-smart, working class shtetl Jews. Their grit and humor transformed Manhattan’s garment district from predominantly uniform manufacturing to women’s wear and eventually to Haute Couture.

Not long after the summer of 1943, I first encountered the man who would be one of the great influences in my life. Dr. Gabriel Kirschenbaum practiced general medicine out of a three-story brownstone across the street from us on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. That day, he had crossed the avenue and climbed the stairs up to our third story walk-up apartment to extract the whole pistachio nut that I had, personally and intentionally, lodged up one of my nostrils. Even though he was a bear of a man with a gruff roar, Dr. Kirschenbaum was surprisingly un-scary. I stood in my crib, unrepentant as he approached, arm-in-arm with my short, round, loquacious mother. She beamed up at him, and he affectionately scowled at her and then nudged me under my chin. My mother then began her trademark barrage aimed at educating Dr. Kirschenbaum on the finer nuances of nostril nut removal. He finally turned to her with glaring eyes and declared, “Shut up, Helen,” and by G-d, she did. She closed her mouth, still looking way up at Kirschenbaum with those adoring eyes. I don’t remember the extraction, but I do remember the power he had in that moment—to help me, and to make my mother stop her verbal stream.

Seven decades later, with all the retrospect wisdom that comes along with stiff muscles, aching joints, and decreased libido, I offered up a heartfelt thank to you Kirschenbaum. He impregnated this infant’s mind with the goal of a tireless and selfless effort to be of help to others, and therefore to be loved. Kirschenbaum: the father of my dreams.