Fierce Attachments: A Memoir Read Free

your fears at all.”
    The third time she told the story I was nearly forty. We were walking up Eighth Avenue, and as we neared Forty-second Street I said to her, “Ma, did it ever occur to you to ask yourself why you remained silent when Sol made his move?” She looked quickly at me. But this time she was wise to me. “What are you getting at?” she asked angrily. “Are you trying to say I liked it? Is that what you’re getting at?” I laughed nervously, gleefully. “No, Ma, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying it’s odd that you didn’t make a sound.” Again, she repeated that she had been very frightened. “Come off it,” I said sharply. “You are disgusting!” she raged at me in the middle of the street. “My brilliant daughter. I should send you to college for another two degrees you’re so brilliant. I wanted my uncle to rape me, is that it? A new thought!” We didn’t speak for a month after that walk.
     
     
     
     
    The Bronx was a patchwork of invaded ethnic territories: four or five square blocks dominated by Irish or Italians or Jews, but each section with its quota of Irish living in a Jewish block or Jews in an Italian block. Much has been
made of this change rung on the New York neighborhood register, but those who grew up running the Irish or Italian gauntlet, or being frozen out by Jewish neighbors, are not nearly so marked by their extra portion of outsidedness as they are leveled by the shared street life. Our family had lived for a year in an Italian neighborhood. My brother and I had been the only Jewish children in the school, and we had indeed been miserable. That’s all: miserable. When we moved back into a Jewish neighborhood, my brother was relieved at no longer having to worry that he’d be beaten up every afternoon by kids who called him the Jewish genius, but the outline and substance of his life were not fundamentally altered. The larger truth is that the “otherness” of the Italians or the Irish or the Jews among us lent spice and interest, a sense of definition, an exciting edge to things that was openly feared but secretly welcomed.
    Our building was all Jewish except for one Irish family on the first floor, one Russian family on the third floor, and a Polish superintendent. The Russians were tall and silent: they came and went in the building in a manner that seemed mysterious. The Irish were all thin and blond: blue eyes, narrow lips, closed faces. They, too, were a shadowy presence among us. The super and his wife were also quiet. They never spoke first to anyone. That’s the main thing, I guess, about being a few among the many: it silences you.
    My mother might have been silenced, too, had she remained living among the Italians, might have snatched her children up in wordless anxiety when a neighbor befriended one of us, just as Mrs. Cassidy did whenever a
woman in our building smoothed the hair of one of the “Irish blondies.” But my mother was not one among the many. Here, in this all-Jewish building, she was in her element, had enough room between the skin of social presence and the flesh of an unknowing center in which to move around, express herself freely, be warm and sarcastic, hysterical and generous, ironic and judgmental, and, occasionally, what she thought of as affectionate: that rough, bullying style she assumed when overcome with the tenderness she most feared.
    My mother was distinguished in the building by her unaccented English and the certainty of her manner. Although our apartment door was always closed (a distinction was made between those educated enough to value the privacy of a closed door and those so peasant-like the door was always half open), the neighbors felt free to knock at any time: borrow small kitchen necessities, share a piece of building gossip, even ask my mother to act as arbiter in an occasional quarrel. Her manner at such times was that of a superior person embarrassed by the childlike behavior of her inferiors.