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Chapter 6. So Long, Sidewalks of New York; Hello, Moon over Miami
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C h a p t e r 6 So Long, Sidewalks of New York; Hello, Moon over Miami From the moment we arrived in New York, my father had begun plotting an escape. After investing in the taxi repair company, he had almost immediately di-vested, and though the venture didn’t lose him any money, it didn’t make him any either. Was Will, I wondered, now going to be a chauffeur? No, he was going to take a job with an uncle in the construction business and get paid five dollars a week. My father spoke often—sometimes only in mutterings to himself—of how much he missed the courtly air of the South. “I’ll be derned if I can find anything good about New York,” he would say, to nobody’s surprise. “It’s just a bunch of noise and insults.” Nothing was to his liking. He would never get used to New York, he would say, even if he lived longer than his grandfather, who, we had all been told, died at the age of ninety-six. Of course no one could ever be sure of his grandfather’s age because births were seldom recorded, certainly not in Russia on behalf of Jews, but everybody agreed that past ninety and near one hundred was about right. I worried. If we left New York, where would we go? And when we got there, what would my father do for a business? I soon learned that my father wouldn’t answer our questions, that he would just go on with what he was doing, which was studying up on United States geography. To my surprise, I noticed that Florida—not Tennessee—had suddenly begun to shine a light his way. His thought apparently was that he knew all about Tennessee and its opportunities and what he knew was discouraging, so maybe Florida had something up its sleeve? The truth was that my father 54 Sidewalks of New York, Moon over Miami had never gotten Florida out of his mind. Though he knew that the land boom had finally gone bust, he didn’t forget what knowledgeable people had said about Florida—that it was the place of the future, the place to put your money. It was something he liked the sound of. If my father was ready to pull up stakes, my mother had yet to be convinced . Her second imperative—that her daughters marry Jewish boys— had not been fulfilled. Ruth and I were not yet of marriageable age, but Minna was, and my mother’s imperative was kicking up a storm. Minna had gotten a lot of attention from New York Jewish boys and had, like Ruth and me, been asked to “say” things in her southern accent, and the boys had flirted with her. Moreover, having perfected the art in the way of all Union City girls, she had flirted right back. But flirting was not proposing marriage, and proposing marriage was off the table with these boys because proposing marriage meant you could afford a wife and none of them could. And because this was how Minna’s prospects for marriage seemed to be playing out, my mother finally agreed to listen to my father’s plea to leave New York. But only if he listened first to her. My mother didn’t want to go to a town where Jews “stuck out like sore thumbs,” she told my father. “Didn’t I have to teach them,” she asked, “that we didn’t have horns or humps on our backs?” And she might have added, “or Christian babies on our tables?” She agreed that she had eventually been happy in Union City, but “eventually” was her operative word, for she remembered that she had experienced a lot of discouraging moments before happiness had been achieved. “I don’t want to start out like I did then,” she said to my father. “I don’t want to have to teach nobody not to be afraid of us.” To convince my mother that Florida was a Jew-friendly place, my father brought to her attention the fact that Florida’s governor at the time was named Dave Sholtz, and wasn’t “Sholtz” a Jewish name, Rebecca? And, “Rebecca, listen to this: Dave Sholtz is from Brooklyn!” Okay, Governor Sholtz never said he was Jewish and he had been living not in the Jewish mother lode in Miami / Miami Beach but in Daytona Beach, and...