Sidney’s Brooklyn (1941-1960)

Sidney Gross (1941–2016)

The western omelet at Childs restaurant was my first and most traumatic experience with non-kosher food. That happened against my will, although my ultimate conversion was accomplished voluntarily. It came about through a transitional door which I cannot totally understand—eating Chinese food, or as we who should have been more sensitive to ethnic slurs used to say “eating Chinks.” As most people are aware, every genuine Jewish neighborhood contains a Chinese restaurant. My part of Bay Parkway had several, the longest lived of which went by the name of Taeng Fong.

All the while that my father was alive, we were never allowed to eat in a Chinese restaurant. Indeed, my father was terribly upset when Taeng Fong opened in a storefront formerly occupied by a tire store. But after he died, when I was fifteen, my mother allowed me to join my friends who used to eat lunch at Taeng Fong before the Saturday matinee. In those days, you could get an entire lunch served up for fifty cents if you ordered right. This included soup, all the fried noodles you could eat, egg rolls, chow mein, tea, and fortune cookies. It was a welcome change of pace from the kosher delicatessen, but like all Chinese food, it left you famished and roaring for a substantial dinner by the time the movie let out at five.

Since I was a relative newcomer, my initiation into the world of Oriental cuisine was conducted by my cousin Irving. Irving was a year older than I and ever so much wiser in the ways of the world. I took to chow mein immediately since I have always been crazy about cooked onions. Weaning myself from the prohibitions about non-kosher food was another story. For the first couple of times, it was like wading into a cold surf. I ordered only the vegetable chow mein amid funny glances from the waiter. I reasoned that since vegetables are pareve (they go with meat or dairy) no harm was being done to my insides. Somehow, of course, I neglected to consider the fact that the kitchen wasn’t kosher. Eventually I made the transition to chicken chow mein and then beef. The final step was shrimp. There were kosher and non-kosher chickens and cows, but there was no such thing as kosher shrimp. To eat shrimp was to make a definite break with tradition, which I didn’t make until I was nearly sixteen.

At long last my mother herself was won over to Chinese food.  Once a month or so, she would take my brother and me to Taeng Fong for dinner. These meals were more elaborate than the Saturday afternoon variety and involved the use of finger bowls, which I saw as the height of elegance.

As the restaurant prospered, it instituted a carryout service. You could call ahead and would find your food waiting by the cash register when you arrived. We only lived a block from Taeng Fong’s. If I hurried and if the traffic light on Sixty-fifth street was with me, I could get the food back to our apartment while it was still hot. This meant that we didn’t have to compromise ourselves by heating it in our kosher pots. The dishes? My mother solved that one neatly enough with paper plates and plastic forks. As soon as we finished eating, the offending plates, utensils, and containers were carried down the hall to the incinerator room and burned. The window was opened to air out the dining alcove, and who would have guessed what we had done?

Once Chinese food had gotten its metaphorical foot through the door of our apartment, all sorts of other “catastrophes” followed: pizza, veal parmigiana, real (not kosher) bacon, and many other forbidden delights. To the end, though, we never mixed meat and milk in the same meal.  Traditions fell with a vestige of carryover from the stricter past. Looking back now at how we stopped being kosher, it must have been a major upheaval in my existence. It’s something of a lukewarm comfort to realize that life and values were as volatile back then as they are today.

How We Stopped Being Kosher, Part 1

Sidney’s Brooklyn (1941-1960)

Above: Sidney in his “Gene Autry phase”

Sidney Gross (1941–2016)

In my youth, life had a certain rhythm like the clackity clack of a subway train—the same schools, the same small stores, the same apartment. Now, customs and institutions that should by right be taken for granted are subjected to continual change: professions become obsolete; shopping malls are built in residential areas; streets are widened into highways; currency becomes inflated.

The food we ate was one of life’s constants and surely a very intimate one.  Every day we had eggs for breakfast, some form of broiled meat for lunch, and “dairy” for dinner. Along with the food, since our house was kosher, were our two sets of dishes, glasses, and utensils. They were milchig and fleischig, for dairy and meat. They could never be confused because each had its own distinctive pattern. Furthermore, they were stowed in separate cabinets so they could never even touch. Our meat came from the kosher butcher across the street, the fruit from the fruit man on Sixty-fifth Street, and everything else came from what in those days passed for a supermarket. Kosher food was one of the stronger ties that bound me to Judaism and New York. When my eldest cousin got married and moved to suburban New Jersey, our whole family scoffed.  “What’s he moving out there for?  Why, he’ll have to drive clear back to Brooklyn to buy kosher meat.” And that’s just what he did until the kosher butchers themselves went out to Jersey.

Because the laws of kashruth were an intimate part of my life, my first transgression was very painful and absolutely involuntary. It occurred when I was perhaps ten, right before the start of the new school year. I was always one of those kids who couldn’t wait to get back into the classroom come fall. Summer vacations bored me stiff, because there was never any meaningful work to do.

It was a family tradition for my mother to take me shopping for new clothes every year just before school started. Besides wall-to-wall shops in its neighborhoods, New York had absolutely marvelous shopping districts in downtown Brooklyn and throughout Manhattan. One of these meccas in the city was the area around Union Square. Before I was born, I’m told, Union Square was the retail center of Manhattan. As the bigger stores moved uptown to Herald Square, only those of a certain, shall I say, schlocky character remained behind. On that fateful day, we were bound for one such place—Klein’s. My fascination with Klein’s extends no further than its unique sign, which I passed every day in the years that I attended Stuyvesant High School.  “S. Klein on the Square” it read. And below these words was a gigantic carpenter’s square, which was illuminated at night.

But this story is about food, not about Klein’s. If you got out of the labyrinthine fourteenth street station at the Klein’s exit, you emerged in front of Childs, one of a famous chain of restaurants. Childs was an ordinary restaurant–it was not kosher–but this was where my mother decided to eat on this special occasion. Neither of us felt any qualms about going there.  It was as if the dietary laws only applied to inanimate objects like our house or our dishes, but not to our persons. We saw nothing wrong with a place like Childs, although I know that in our kosher days we never went as far as eating in a non-Jewish ethnic restaurant. If it was Italian or German, it was out, but if it was American fare, that was all right. I won’t attempt to justify this curious logic; that was the way we lived.

Once seated in the restaurant, my mother said to go ahead and order anything I wanted as a good start to the school year. Even when given carte blanche, my tastes have always been modest. I’ve always had a penchant for eggs and was fascinated by the varieties listed in the omelet section of the menu. Perhaps it was because I was in a Gene Autry phase, but for whatever the reason, I settled on something called a western omelet. Coming as it did with salad and bread and costing fifty-five cents, it just had to be something special!

When it was brought to the table after what seemed an eternity of waiting, I literally blanched. It was obvious on visual inspection that my western omelet contained HAM. Ham was for me the epitome of traif (non-kosher food). You could eat anything else and still consider yourself a kosher Jew—but not ham. My thoughts turned to pink pigs wallowing in the mud (I’d never actually seen a live pig), to their ugly snouts and small sly eyes. The pig was unclean and no doubt smelly. I grew quite nauseous.

I told my mother I didn’t want to eat the omelet. This must have been a first for me, since I was overweight as a kid and ate at the drop of a hat. On her side, Esther was undoubtedly embarrassed both for her lack of knowledge of western omelets and at the thought of having to send food back to the kitchen. She insisted that I eat it.

The story of Hannah in the Old Testament flashed before my mind. Hannah and her children died rather than eat traif. Had Judaism sunk this low in the twentieth century that people would eat ham without a whimper? I screamed and cried. I made a scene of the kind that kids are always making in restaurants.  My mother was firm, and I ate the omelet. It sticks in my craw to this day. And I never went back to Childs again.

How We Stopped Being Kosher, Part 2

Sidney’s Brooklyn (1941-1960)

Sidney Gross (1941-2016)

Above: Celebrating the Holidays (Sue’s old doll-house furniture)

It’s inevitable that some of the Jewish and Christian holidays should meld, such as Hanukkah and Christmas. Both fall in December, and each involves some form of gift giving. My own memories of Hanukkah revolve not so much around the traditional potato latkes or the brass menorah flickering in its place of honor atop the TV console, but rather at an incident which occurred at the Hebrew school.

Our Hebrew had a faculty of three. Rabbi Eisenman and his wife taught classes in both the 3:30 and 5 PM sessions, and a Mr. Finkelstein also taught in the early session. The rabbi’s wife taught the raw beginners, Mr. Finkelstein the intermediates, and the rabbi the advanced. Beyond this, if you survived, was Mrs. Eisenman’s five o’clock, and finally, the rabbi’s. Each of these grades encompassed a full academic year.

In Mrs. Eisenman’s early class, you learned how to read and write Hebrew, as well as some useful colloquialisms such as “May I take the book from the table.”  You were also assigned a Hebrew name. Mine was Schol, a transliteration of my Jewish name, Scholem Abba. In Mr. Finkelstein’s class we did a lot of praying.  We each had to buy a large blue siddur or prayer book, which served as the text for the class.  We chanted the prayers, without translation into English, so often that by the end of the year we knew practically all of them by heart.  In the rabbi’s 3:30 class, we began to read the Chumash, the books of the Pentateuch, in Hebrew.  The two five o’clock classes continued this theme, adding some topics in advanced Hebrew grammar, as well as a generous admixture of cultural information about Israel.

By age eleven, I had made it through the ranks to Zipporah (affectionately and behind her back known as Zippy) Eisenman’s five o’clock class. Hanukkah was about a week away, and Zippy was putting us through our paces with the traditional prayers over the candles and some of the more festive songs, such as:

I had a little dreidel
I made it out of clay
And when I spun the dreidel
The sides began to sway.

Oh dreidel, dreidel, dreidel
I made it out of clay…

All of us boys in the class really got into the spirit of Hanukkah. We anticipated the gifts of Hanukkah gelt, and we looked forward to the last day of Hebrew before the holiday, when we got to spin the dreidels for prizes of nuts and raisins. The song came to an end, and we were looking at one another in a self-satisfied manner, when we became aware of a sharp, rhythmic sound. It was Zippy tapping on her desk with the long dowel rod which she used for a blackboard pointer. “I want you to listen to me. Quiet,” she ordered.

We all settled down at once. Discipline was not a real problem in Zippy’s classes. She was bigger than we were, and the combination of her kinky hair pulled severely back and her harsh foreign accent were always enough to intimidate us.

“I want to tell you about something that happened to me last Hanukkah.” Zippy’s face lost all its color as she clenched her fist around the pointer. Hushed silence fell over the class. “There was (she emphasized the word “was”) a student who used to go to this Hebrew school. I won’t mention his name. Last year I went to his home to talk to his parents. Do you know what they had, right there in the home? A Christmas tree!”

We sat absolutely still. No whispers, no snickers. This was serious. “Can you imagine,” she continued, “a Christmas tree in a Jewish home? I was so mad that I turned around and walked out the door.”

I’ve forgotten how the lecture ended–no doubt with an exhortation to keep the faith. If any of us were thinking about nagging our parents into putting up a Christmas tree alongside the Menorah, I’m sure we were dissuaded by the thought of Zippy walking into our living room unannounced and discovering our treachery.

Sidney’s Brooklyn (1941-1960)

Above: Sidney and his dad on the morning of Sidney’s bar mitzvah, 1954

Sidney Gross (1941–2016)

From Sue: The so called “kosher food section” in a far suburban Chicago supermarket generally consists of little more than boxes of matzoh and jars of gefilte fish. I once asked Sidney if I should buy him some gefilte fish. I was met with a resounding “NO!” The following conversation ensued.

Sidney:  I can remember going out on a date with my girlfriend who lived in the Bronx, and we were supposed to go to her house to eat, and her mother served us gefilte fish.

Sue:  So?

Sidney:  She served us the kind with the heads and the tails!

Sue:  Oh!  Is that why you don’t eat it?

Sidney: That’s right.  Because up till that time in my life all the gefilte fish I’d ever eaten came out of a glass bottle, and it was a rather innocuous white ball, and that was all right. But when I got to this girl’s house–it was Passover–what they served was gefilte fish with the heads… STUFFED!

Sue: [Laughing] You mean with the eyes staring out at you?

Sidney:  Yeah, yeah…

Sue:  Did that upset you?

Sidney:  Yeah, I lost my taste for gefilte fish.

Sue:  But it must have tasted better than gefilte fish out of a jar, didn’t it?

Sidney:  I’m sure it did.

Sue: [Laughing] Is that when you broke up with the girl, after you ate the gefilte fish?

[Silence]

Sue:   Well?

Sidney:  After that I was convinced that the reason people ate horseradish with gefilte fish was to hide the taste.

From Sue: Among the many recipes that came my way from Brooklyn in my first years of marriage to Sidney was his mother’s recipe for pitcha [jellied calf’s foot]. My mother-in-law told me this was one of Sidney’s dad’s favorite foods. To say that I looked at this recipe dubiously is to put it mildly. Finally, I showed it to Sidney.  His response: “NO!!!”  Sidney proclaimed he would walk out on me if I cooked pitcha. He said just the mention of it made him remember the way the apartment stank when his mother cooked this dish, and as far as he was concerned pitcha looked awful and tasted even worse than it smelled.  As a kid, he could never fathom why his father liked it so much.  So much for the generation gap in food tastes.

Sidney’s Brooklyn (1941-1960)

So, I’ve never made nor tasted pitcha. But I thought I’d honor tradition and post Esther’s recipe…  I have no way of knowing.  It might be delicious…  (for the recipe, turn the page…)

Pages: 1 2

Above: Admiring the prize chickens at the county fair, 2012

Sidney Gross (1941–2016)

I imagine that every Jewish family had an analog to me in one of their children, someone whose role in life was to run errands. “Sidney, I want you to go to the fruit store and pick up an eighth of a watermelon, and while you’re on 65th Street, stop at Mottel’s and get six bialys…”  Indeed, I was so identified with being sent to the store that when I visited Grandmother Bertha, senile and dying in a hospital room following a stroke, she began to reel off a shopping list when she saw me.

As a very young boy, I could be sent to the store but was not to be trusted with money. The storekeepers all knew me, so I could walk in with my list and follow my mother’s instructions to “charge it.” At the grocery store, the accounts were carried in a school composition book kept next to the cheese slicer. The grocer would mark the price of each item on the side of the paper bag before packing and then transfer the sum to his ledger. When my mother stopped in to settle up, he would ferret out our account from the scores of entries and figure the total bill. There were no cash register tapes, no computerized accounts. Back then people simply knew and trusted one another. I suppose the reason for this was the stability of our neighborhood.

Our family lived in the same two-bedroom flat for over eighteen years. Today people like us would be a landlord’s dream. However, then we were not the exception but the rule. All of the side streets in Bensonhurst had six-story apartment houses fronting on Bay Parkway, and you hardly ever saw a moving van in front of any of them. People left a building when they married or died, and in either case they didn’t carry many material possessions with them.

Our next-door neighbors for those eighteen years were the Granicks. By my standards, they were old people. She had gray hair, and they both spoke halting English with a strong Central European accent. In reality, they couldn’t have been all that old, since Mr. Granick had not yet retired when he died. His widow stayed on afterward in their tiny, one-bedroom apartment, living on who knows what source of income. According to my mother, Mrs. Granick was frail, and that is why Esther had taken it upon herself to volunteer my services to buy Mrs. Granick a chicken at the poultry market each and every Friday morning.

There were two live-poultry markets on 65th Street, on the block between Bay Parkway and 23rd Avenue. We patronized Saffron’s because my parents had known the brothers when they all lived on the Lower East Side. The chickens were brought in from New Jersey on big flat-bed trucks. Often I would be walking on 65th Street when a truck lined with shallow wooden cages would pull up. The sound and smell of that truck was as close as I got to the country as a youngster. Saffron’s occupied the northern half of a long, narrow store, the other half of which was a fish market. Both sides had huge, chrome-plated counters open to customers along their entire length. The only difference was that the fish reposed on a bed of chipped ice, while the chickens, a mass of gray feathers and yellow feet, were strewn directly on the counter top.

Most of the Friday morning crowd of customers knew their chickens and pawed the carcasses as if they were in May’s basement. I, on the other hand, was not only shorter than these women, but I was so naïve that I didn’t know the difference between a hen and a rooster. Therefore, instead of approaching the counter directly, I had to seek out one of the Saffron brothers and repeat verbatim Mrs. Granick’s instructions: “Please, I want a small hen for stewing, cut up. Not too much fat, please!” These words, like a prayer to the Almighty, gave me absolution for any of the shortcomings in the chicken I brought back.

Once a feathered specimen had been selected, it was weighed, charged to our account, and then carried to the back of the shop to be dressed. The chicken flicking department had its own area in the back. It was surrounded by walls on three sides with a Dutch door on the remaining side at right angles to the selling floor. From going to Saffron’s every Friday, I got to know the chicken flicker quite well. I never knew his name, but I remember his face, his voice, and his besmeared smock as if it were yesterday.

The first thing the butcher did was to strip the feathers. Rotating the bird against the exposed blades of a noisy plucking machine, he did the job in a trice. Then, with a cigarette dangling from his lips, he gingerly turned the carcass over a gas jet which burned in Saffron’s back room like an eternal flame. This took care of the pin feathers. Now the chicken was carried across the cubicle to a stained wooden butcher block next to the Dutch door. Here it was eviscerated and quartered. The flicker had a battery of knives and cleavers, each of which he used deftly in turn. Although I’ve never dressed a chicken, I’ve watched it done so many times that I feel I could do it in a crisis. I memorized the order in which the flicker used his knives, and when he resorted to his hands to crack the chicken apart. I learned to expect the characteristic sounds made by rent flesh and bone. I knew which of the viscera were to be torn out and discarded and which saved. I knew the viscera not by name but by color and location in the carcass.

One day the flicker did something for me which I’ve never forgotten. After dressing the chicken, he reached under the block and came up with a handful of shimmering orange globes the size of large marbles. Eggs! Yes, in those days you could still buy a stewing hen and find within her a clutch of unlaid eggs, yolks without the white or shells. Boiled, these are one of life’s treats. The flicker had hoarded these eggs from the chickens he processed, unbeknownst to the squeamish lady customers who waited up front. And now he made them my material reward for running Mrs. Granick’s errand. “These are for you,” he said with emphasis, wrapping the eggs separately from the chicken. “Don’t give them to the old woman!” As usual, when I got home, my mother and Mrs. Granick praised me for being “so good.” But it was the flicker who had communicated with me on a level I could appreciate.

There are still live-poultry markets in Brooklyn. This  2011 article from the New York Daily News has photographs which graphically back up Sidney’s account.

Sidney’s Brooklyn (1941-1960)

It should be noted that Sidney, in later life, became a confirmed vegetarian! He always maintained that his vegetarian propensities resulted from his revulsion at the sights, sounds, and smells of the Brooklyn live-poultry markets.

Thinking about chickens and vegetarianism, it occurred to me that I should add a “whole grain” recipe to this blog post, so I’m doing just that. Turn to page 2 for Kasha and Bow Knots (Varnishkas).

Pages: 1 2

Above:  My cake had a frosted siddur!

Sidney Gross (1941-2016)

Bar Mitzvah parties in the fifties were just like sweet sixteens or weddings, with everybody trying to outdo everybody else. My parents were no doubt trying to keep up with the Katzes , and on my own level I too wanted to show my personal friends that I could do them one better. If Harold had his party in the basement of his home, mine was in the banquet hall. If Harvey’s cake had two tiers, mine would have a frosted siddur.

Most of the invitations were done on flat offset, but mine were engraved. You could run your fingers over the text and feel the lettering. Not that we were people who simply threw money away lavishly on things of this sort. In this instance, my father made a special trip to the Lower East Side where he was able to make a good deal with a printer he had known from his own youth. Along with the invitations went the small reply cards, each tucked into a tiny hand addressed envelope which was franked with a three cent stamp. For weeks before my Bar Mitzvah, the first thing I’d ask my mother when I came home from school for lunch was how many of the reply cards had come back that day. If somebody declined to attend, I felt a deep sense of hurt, even if I didn’t know who the person was.

My criterion for inviting personal friends to my party was quite simple: had I been or was I going to be invited to theirs.  Needless to say, on this criterion, girls were automatically excluded. My parents’ criteria must have been a lot more complicated than mine. In fact their reasoning was so complex that I don’t understand it to this day. I still have a copy of the guest list and there are names on it that I’ve never heard before or since—second cousins, friends of friends, old-time business associates.

There is an old joke about Bar Mitzvah presents, stale even in my time, which was a parody of the saying “Today I am a man.” It went “Today I am a fountain pen.” Evidently the fountain pen was the gift of preference to an earlier generation, and the new man must have gone into the world armed with several dozen. By the time I was thirteen, cash was really the only acceptable gift.  Even in 1954, inflation must have been a problem. I can remember Advertising Council posters on the subway train which pictured a snake being held to the ground with a forked stick and the caption FIGHT INFLATION. No, it had to be money for an event like this. In my time, ten dollars was the average gift.  Twenty-five was what you got from a relative or close friend of the family. Parents might give fifty, or even a hundred, but one hundred dollars (good today for a few fill-ups of gas) was the absolute top.

The night before the actual ceremony, my father was more concerned with briefing me on the strategy of how to collect my gifts than he was with the actual synagogue service. Once the party was underway, I was to go around to each table and ask if everything was all right. I was then to kiss each lady on the cheek and shake hands with the gentlemen. At this point, each man would be expected to produce a small white envelope with the name “Sidney” or “Master Sidney Gross” written on it. This was the payoff. I was to thank each person and put the envelope into my inner breast pocket. My suit, as a matter of fact, was tailored with two inside pockets for just this purpose. When both pockets were filled, I was to rendezvous with my father behind the hat check counter. He would relieve me of the envelopes and sequester them for safe keeping. Under no circumstances was I to drop or lose an envelope!

When we finally got home that evening after the Bar Mitzvah party, all of us—two boys and two parents—repaired to the kitchen table where each envelope was opened and the contents and giver discussed. Nobody looked at the greeting cards. I know for a fact that many parents appropriated the take to cover the cost of the party. With all due respect to my parents, they didn’t do this.

Although I don’t know how much I actually received, a substantial amount was invested for me in what was then a newfangled idea, a growth-oriented mutual fund.  It was a smart move during the fifties. The stock market was bullish and the sky seemed the limit.  I left the money in the fund and let it accrue interest until 1968. That year, my wife and I studied the quarterly report and noticed that the share value had been declining for some time. We pulled the money out and used it as the down payment on our first house. There it was, fourteen years later, the past suddenly impinging on the present. And without the money, without the Bar Mitzvah, I would not be sitting as my desk in my comfortable suburban home writing this now.

Above, the corner of 64th Street and Bay Parkway, Brooklyn
Image courtesy of Google Maps,  Image Capture June 2016, copyright Google

A note on the Google image capture, from Sue:  This is a contemporary picture of the corner in Brooklyn, and of the apartment building where Sidney grew up. What is now Ortobello’s Restaurant on the corner, was, back in the early 1940’s, Sidney’s dad’s pharmacy. 6401 Bay Parkway was then  “Samuel Gross, Pharmaceutical Chemist.” There was a soda fountain in the drugstore, however, so I guess you could say there has been some continuity to the location… From the reviews on Yelp, Ortobello’s sounds like a great place to eat!

64th Street and Bay Parkway
Sidney Gross (1941-2016)

Esther holding Sidney, grandmother Mollie with Ephraim; Grandmother Bertha, sitting in front of Sam’s drugstore, corner 64th and Bay Parkway, early 1940’s

If the taste and texture of a madeleine could evoke the past for Marcel Proust, the odor of a hot potato knish can do the same for me. You may laugh at the crudity of the comparison, the difference between a delicate cake and a wad of pureed potato and onion encased in a shell of rubbery dough. Yet, there’s no denying that the tastes and smells of certain Jewish foods instantly recall to me a world now gone.  Come upon suddenly, they are better than any snapshot of bygone times. They recapture the past in a moment of sensible ecstasy.

Here I am, then, contemplating a knish. And it recalls for me the essence of my youth and of the Brooklyn I knew in the 1940’s and 50’s.  My childhood seemed so solid, so constant at the time.

Samuel Gross, Pharmaceutical Chemist

Now everything has changed. But let me be frank. I couldn’t go back to that world again, even if it were there to go back to.  Brooklyn is different now and so am I. Yet I would enjoy the luxury of summing up a few aspects of my past—on my own terms.

What was Brooklyn like in those days?

Even then it was big, a crowded place where parking spaces were scarce (even though nobody in our circle had a car) and there were traffic lights on every corner.  Today I live in a town of 13,000 in Illinois.  When we add another traffic light on the main street, people cluck their tongues and say we’re growing too fast.  My own opinion on the matter is that no matter how rapidly it grows, this town will never be Brooklyn.

Yes, Brooklyn was big. But when I think about it, my Brooklyn was really just the block on which I lived.  The latitude and longitude of my existence was Bay Parkway and 64th Street, with forays into the surrounding area. Effectively, my world stretched as far as 60th Street, where P.S. 226 was located, and 18th Ave., where there was a public library.  65th Street was the local shopping area, and many of the stores I will mention in these stories were once on that street.  The outermost extremities of my world were Coney Island and Fulton Street (downtown Brooklyn).  These were reached, at the cost of a nickel each way, by the Sea Beach Express. I realize now, as I reflect on it, that insularity was the name of the game, even in cosmopolitan New York.

Were my early years typical?  I have the strong intuition that there were lots of kids brought up the same way I was. I remember the five-hour days in school, punctuated by hot lunch at home.  My brother Ephraim and I were lucky, our mother Esther told us.  We were for sure the only kids in the school who got meat for lunch, every day no less.  I must have been an early guinea pig for the high protein diet—two eggs sunny side up (“bulls eyes”), two rolls and butter, and coffee for breakfast, and either steak or hamburger for lunch.  School was followed by “Hebrew” two hours a day, four days a week.  I got as far as being able to translate the Book of Genesis from Hebrew into English.

Friday nights I was supposed to go to services, although nobody pushed me because they didn’t like me having to walk the two blocks between home and synagogue in the dark.  This meant that for the most part I could celebrate the advent of the weekend like a normal kid by listening to the Lone Ranger on the radio. Saturday mornings were another story.  I had to go to services.  What sticks in my mind after all these years are two things, neither of them having much to do with religion: 1) how hot the synagogue usually was on Saturdays, and 2) the sponge cake and wine which were always served at the end of the ceremony.  My parents saw no contradiction in forcing me to go to the synagogue in the morning and allowing me to go to the movies in the afternoon.  Lunch on Saturday was always eaten out at the kosher delicatessen on 65th Street.

Imagine if you will a group of noisy, overweight ten-year-old boys converging en masse on the delicatessen. If I were the owner, I would have groaned, but then again, we were steady customers.  Left to my own devices, out of the watchful dietary eye of my mother, I always ordered side dishes rather than a main dish at the restaurant—never a sandwich, always plates of vegetarian baked beans, kishke, coleslaw, potato salad, a cup of tea to wash it down, and a bottle of celery tonic to wash it down further. A balanced meal was out of the question, and in some ways it’s a wonder that I didn’t contract some exotic nutritional disease. The entire meal was consumed in fifteen minutes or less, and then the group of us was off to the movies.

Our movie house, the Marboro, was cavernous with a real stage and a balcony, to which we would always sneak. Even then the plush seats and carpet were in a state of decay. In those days, twenty cents got you a double feature, five cartoons, a newsreel, and coming attractions. During the holiday season the admission price went up a nickel, but they added more cartoons and a two-reel comedy to the bill.  The only thing I can remember about the theater manager was that he had gray hair and always looked harassed. No doubt he is now enjoying a well-deserved eternal rest.  As a kid I thought the movies were just great, and it’s only now in reminiscence that I realize they provided a wonderful child care service for all the parents in my old neighborhood.

Sunday was meant to be festive, but it was always spoiled for me by the thought of school the next day. We all slept late on Sundays, which meant that everyone was perambulating by eight instead of six. The day began with a walk to the bakery around the corner. Usually my mother bought rolls at the grocery store each morning before the rest of us were awake. But on Sunday it was the bakery for us. The bakery was a source of exoticisms such as salt sticks and onion pletzels. At the time we bought for the four of us a dozen assorted Danish and crullers. From the bakery we stopped at the appetizing store for lox, baked salmon, cream cheese, and a pint of sweet cream. Here were all the fixings for Sunday breakfast. The final stop before returning to the apartment was at the candy store—not for more food but for the Sunday editions of The Times and the Mirror.

When I was very young, my mother made the rounds on Sunday mornings, but as soon as I got smart enough to read a shopping list and make change, the job was delegated to me.  I didn’t mind it.  Breakfast led invariably to a light lunch, and lunch was followed by a trip to visit my father’s mother.  My grandmother Mollie Gross, as well as numerous uncles and aunts, still lived on the Lower East Side, and no doubt it was our duty to make the pilgrimage each Sunday. These visits were always a drag for me—my cousins were all girls.

The only part I really enjoyed was the ride to Manhattan on the Sea Beach, especially the part where we came out of the tunnel and surfaced on the Manhattan Bridge. On the way into the city I could enjoy the cars racing the train along the cobblestone span. I looked at the murky river fifty feet below and speculated about what would happen if the train fell into the drink. At night the view from the train was a panoply of neon lights. A huge billboard for Dutch Boy paint is burned in my memory as well as an advertisement for a freight company which showed a side view of a semi with a neon tire.

Brooklyn was many things in the 40’s and 50’s. It was the citified games of stick ball, Johnny ride a pony, and king. It was summer days at Washington Baths in Coney Island, returning home sandy and red as a lobster, with an iridescent chalk mark (used for identification) on the right shoulder. Brooklyn was also the yentas who lined the sidewalk on their folding chairs and made a ten-year-old feel like he was running the gauntlet every time he went out to play or to run an errand. It was my father Samuel coming home from the drugstore, the exotic smells of medicines still clinging to his hands and clothing. It was my mother talking incessantly on the telephone to her Eastern Star cronies. How she connived and politicked; and then once a month she magically transformed herself in a white dress and went to her chapter meeting.  It was my grandmother Bertha’s cooking…

My mother’s mother, Bertha Pantzer lived in a small apartment across the street from ours.  In fact, the windows faced each other across 64th Street.  Since in those days, local calls in New York City were billed as message units, one ring on the telephone meant both parties were to come to the window and transact their business by shouting at one another across the street.  We had nothing to hide!  My grandfather, Samuel Pantzer had been a kosher butcher.  When his daughters married and moved to Brooklyn, he and Bertha followed and opened a store on Bay Parkway.  After his death, a year or so after I was born, my grandmother ran the shop alone for a while and then retired, or so she thought. Her second career started late in her life. She lived to survive both her sons-in-law and it fell on her shoulders to bring up two sets of grandchildren, four boys, while her two daughters held down full-time jobs. Many memories of my childhood are of my grandmother Bertha in her kitchen.

Sidney’s Brooklyn (1941-1960)

Above: The Automat on East 14th St., in Manhattan

Sidney Gross (1941-2016)

Fast food is not an invention of McDonald’s.  Before McDonald’s, there was the Automat.  Once so widespread in New York, the Automat is now extinct, but in the 1950’s it was synonymous with wholesome food and atmosphere.  For as long as the Automat existed, I was compulsive about going there.  When I moved away from New York, it was one of the magnets which drew me back for visits.  Even when I lived in Brooklyn, I would stop in at any branch Automat that I passed, if only to turn the crank in the coffee area and watch the steaming beverage pour from the lion’s head spigot.

My favorite Automat was the branch on East Fourteenth Street in Manhattan.  Twice a day I passed its gleaming windows on my way to and from Stuyvesant High School.  In those days, when a high school became overcrowded, as Stuyvesant certainly was, the Board of Education did not erect an expensive new building to house the overflow; instead they put the students on split session.  The first two years I attended what was known as the “P.M. Session,” which ran from 12:30 to 5 p.m.  Late classes were just a continuation of my earlier existence when I had to attend Hebrew school after P.S. 226 let out at three.  Of course, I was always famished at the end of the day and I still faced, in the rush hour no less, a one hour ride back to Brooklyn.  The Automat lay between the school and the subway station, so it was natural to stop there and fortify body and soul before boarding the Sea Beach Express.

What did I eat there?  Well, since dinner would be waiting for me in Brooklyn, I had to content myself with a light and thrifty snack.  This was usually a cup of tea and a small green ceramic pot of Horn & Hardart baked beans.  The beans were so much different than the ones we had at home, which were simply Heinz vegetarian fresh from the can.  These were dark brown.  They weren’t watery, and they contained bacon, spices, and onions in an absolutely heavenly combination.  To this day I maintain that the Horn & Hardart recipe for baked beans is worth all the gold in Fort Knox.

Every Automat was built on a grand scale, a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach.  The front windows went up a good story and a half, and you entered via a revolving glass door so that the visual line of the windows was not broken.  The dining room was immense, filled with small tables which would hold four uncomfortably on straight-backed chairs.  A small group of tables was roped off from the rest by a red plush cord.  On a brass stanchion was a plain but neat sign which read simply “Ladies.”  Each of the tables in the reserved area held a clear bud vase which contained a single daisy.  A nice touch, I always thought.

The floor and walls of the dining room were faced with reddish beige marble.  These were the days when New Yorkers made much of the Moscow subway station.  If you were visiting Russia, this was supposedly a “must see.”  In my own mind, I identified the Horn & Hardart with what the Moscow subway station must be like.  Well above the hubbub of the ground floor was an ample balcony meant to accommodate the overflow crowds which must have been common in the Automat’s heyday.

Smack in the middle of the main floor was what had to be the eighth wonder of the modern world—the Automat change booth.  Everything in the Automat was calculated on the use of nickels.  If you did not have nickels to buy food, you went to the change booth.  The change maker on Fourteenth Street really knew her business.  No matter what coin or bill you presented her with, she reached into her drawer and threw a fist full of nickels onto the counter which separated her from the rest of the world.  She never seemed to count them—or make a mistake.  Ingrained in my memory of the Automat is the sound of those nickels crashing against the marble change counter.

To the left of the change booth was the Automat itself, a solid wall of shiny glass doors graced with porcelain knobs on brass stems.  It looked like nothing so much as a theater marquee as it glittered in the light streaming from a battery of incandescent bulbs overhead.  Like soldiers, the doors were aligned in vertical file.  Each was clearly labeled: creamed spinach, baked beans, lemon pie, chicken sandwich.  The joy of all this was that you could peek through the glass and see your selection already before you on its own plate.  All that needed to be done was to insert the appropriate number of nickels (in my day the top was five), twist the porcelain knob, and presto, the door would fly open and you would reach in and grab your food.  One of my childhood fantasies was to discover a door with a broken knob which would pop open without the aid of nickels.  I never found it, but the lure kept drawing me back.

So, there was our fast food of the fifties.  Contrasted with McDonald’s and Burger King, the Automat system must have been like hunting through a file drawer as compared to a computerized retrieval system. Yet I can’t help but feel that having it my way would entail the buffalo nickel and the shiny glass door.

Sidney’s Brooklyn (1941-1960)