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2 Brooklyn Boyhood, 1941–1958 I entered the picture on the evening of May 5, 1941. Born in Brooklyn’s Israel Zion Hospital, I was my parents’ first child. In line with Jewish tradition, I was named after a deceased grandparent—in this case, my father’s mother, Leah. Had I been a girl, that’s probably the name I would have received. But, as a boy, I was named Lawrence and invariably called Larry. Initially, we resided in an apartment located at 2016 Avenue N, in central Brooklyn. But that July, probably for economic reasons—and perhaps also to give my mother a hand with childcare —we moved into the large house owned by my grandfather, Joseph Wittner, in Long Beach, New York. Here, among assorted members of the Wittner family , we resided until September 1942, when we moved into our own three-room apartment, located at 570 Westminster Road, in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Rented for a fairly modest sum, that one-bedroom apartment became our home for the next thirteen years. During the 1940s and 1950s, Brooklyn—New York City’s largest borough— had a population of about 2 million people. Most of them were blue collar, lower middle class, and middle class, usually of European origin. Many, in fact, were European immigrants or their children and predominantly Catholic or Jewish. Although left-wing—and particularly Communist—institutions collapsed after the late 1940s, as the Cold War progressed, New York City remained a bastion of liberal Democratic politics. In my region of Brooklyn, the tiny Liberal Party (which usually endorsed Democrats) regularly outpolled the Republicans. The city’s public schools, public colleges, public radio station, public libraries, public parks, museums, powerful unions, and inexpensive mass transit system eased the difficulties of urban life and provided hardworking residents with opportunities to advance their economic and social status. Brooklyn was less urban and far less glamorous than the borough of Manhattan, which housed some of the 14 Brooklyn Boyhood, 1941–1958 city’s richest (and poorest) people. Indeed, Brooklyn served as a bedroom community for many people who worked in Manhattan. Nevertheless, its crowded, bustling streets contained a very substantial number of small stores and other business enterprises. Flatbush, at that time, had a lower middle-class to middle-class flavor. Like much of Brooklyn, the overwhelming majority of its residents were Jews and Catholics, with the latter predominantly of Italian or Irish background. Nearly everyone was white. Certainly that was true of the residents of the fairly large, aging red brick apartment complex in which we lived. Our apartment was located on the second floor of a six-story apartment house, where people of relatively modest means resided. This building was connected by hallways and basements to two others exactly like it that were under the same management and contained the same sort of constituency. Although there were some private houses on our block and across the street, on Westminster Road, a substantial portion of the people in the neighborhood lived in apartment houses much like these that were scattered about the area. On one side of our block, Newkirk Avenue, which fronted on Public School 217, there were small, unpretentious shops, including a candy store and a drug store. The grocery store was run by two Jewish grocers happy to slice a pound of cheese or fish out a garlicdrenched pickle from a barrel for their customers. Occasionally, a peddler came through the neighborhood with his horse and wagon, seeking to stir up sales of used clothing by crying out: “I cash clothes! I cash clothes!” During my first few years, I seem to have been quite content, basking in lots of attention. My mother, who with my birth began her career as a housewife, breastfed me, although not without some difficulty. According to what I have been told, I would occasionally bite her in the process, leading her to wear a special device to protect her nipples from her overly assertive baby. Apparently, though, it denied me neither nourishment nor satisfaction, for I grew into a chubby, inquisitive, blond-haired toddler, doted on by parents and relatives. Both my head and my skin were very light—so much so that mosquitoes would move unerringly toward my head, apparently unable to distinguish between my hair and my scalp. Although my father continued his underpaid legal work on a full-time basis—in his own law practice (first established in 1940), for a law firm, and as a full-time...

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