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C h a p t e r 3 New York, New York, a Wonderful Town? We Set Up Shop Will met us at the train station in Manhattan and took us immediately on the subway (!) to my grandparents’ apartment in the Bronx, where we were to stay until we found our own place. My father, however, was not eager to move out. It was the inevitable signing of a lease that bothered him; it seemed to him both an act of unwelcome bonding with New York and an act of disloyalty to Tennessee. As he saw it, Tennessee had made a good life for him and his family; and with a little Jew–store owner savvy, he had seen to it that we had all been happy there. Although mindful of our status as outsiders, he saw us as unthreatened, and he had often looked up and down First Street and said, “Anybody seen any Cossacks around? No? So let it be.” My father’s distaste for New York stemmed from his arrival there as an immigrant. He had come over as an eighteen-year-old with a head full of expectations and his mazel and his zutz. He had listened with “a heart going so fast like a steam engine,” as he himself described his joy when the people in his shtetl told him that in New York the streets were paved with gold, that he would have a big bed to sleep in, and a fine suit for the big job he was going to get. And when he got to New York? He saw that streets were lined not with gold but with trash, and no big bed for sleeping but an old blanket on the floor in the corner of the apartment rented by a member of his mishpoucha, the extended family, who in this case was a cousin of a cousin-in-law. And his expectations? His expectations had turned literally to dust when his first job was delivering coal, a job which paid fifty cents a day and all the coal dust he could carry home. 30 New York, New York, a Wonderful Town? My father blamed his unrealistic expectations on his shtetl dwellers and their rumors. “All what they told me was nothing but klangs. Did they see? Did they know?” he would ask, to which his own answer was: “Of course not. It was just rumors,” which was similar to his answer about the existence of god. It wasn’t long, he would say, before he knew that New York was as cold and unwelcoming as the office of the Russian authorities in his shtetl. Still, we had to live somewhere in New York, and we found an apartment in one of those big brick apartment buildings typical of the Bronx. The apartment had been advertised for rent with a Depression “concession” as a sweetener, which was two months’ free rent in exchange for a year’s lease. To the extent that my father would allow, I was keeping track of the money my father had when we came out of Union City, what he called “carfare”—“enough to take the subway back and forth looking for something to do,” he would say—and I wondered if it would cover our rent. I was assured when my father swallowed the sweetener, handed the owner some of his “carfare,” and rented us an apartment in the west Bronx. As I discovered later, our apartment was in a section of the Bronx where, in a nice coincidence, Jack and his family had lived in their “apartment with two bathrooms,” which his mother would later tell me about with such pride. And when Jack and I talked about it, we decided that it was possible that he had played stickball in front of my building. And could it have happened that we had walked on the same sidewalk at the same time? Had we looked at each other? If so, had he given me that smile—the one I had seen that first moment in Miami, the one that had made me want to grab him and hold on forever? Our apartment was on the sixth floor in that Bronx building, and we got to it by elevator, and that elevator was the inspiration for the first of many letters I wrote to my best friend Doris in Union City. Even as I knew I would be accused of puttin’ on, I would have even...

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