City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, 3-volume box set

2 Friends or Ideologues

39 Born in 1928, Adolph Schayes grew up on Davidson Avenue and 183rd Street, off Fordham Road and near Jerome Avenue in the West Bronx. For “Dolph,” the son of Romanian immigrant parents, his neighborhood turf was the local asphalt-covered playgrounds. There he honed basketball skills that brought him honors at Mosholu Parkway’s DeWitt Clinton High School and earned him a scholarship to New York University. He stayed at home because NYU’s uptown campus was merely a short bus ride away at University Heights. After graduation, he capitalized on his athletic prowess in the early postwar years, becoming one of the great early stars of the National Basketball Association. Decades later, Schayes recalled, “As a kid I thought everyone was Jewish.” He had good reason to feel that way. Though in 1930 and 1940 Jews constituted approximately 45 percent of the “Fordham” section of the borough , “sharing” the neighborhood with the Irish, everywhere Schayes turned he saw Jews and Jewishness around him.1 As a child, Schayes accompanied his mother to the Jewish-owned “little stores” in the neighborhood. They went to Kasowitz’s fruit store, Israel’s meat market, and Efron’s bakery, with a stop at Zelesnik’s candy store. As he got older, his peer group the “Trylons,” an informal neighborhood street club named for the 1939 World’s Fair centerpiece, consisted almost entirely of Jews, “with a token Irish” (youngster). They proudly walked through their streets wearing their dark-blue jackets with the club’s name lettered in orange on the back. When they were not playing kick-the-can or stickball, these fellows simply hung out together, “meeting and talking.” Though an intrusive beat policeman might on occasion suggest with his nightstick under his arm that they C H A P T E R 2 Friends or Ideologues 40 ■ j e w s i n g o t h a m move off the corner, they were not a crowd of hoodlums in the making. They found their competitive edge in sports, not control of the streets. Dolph graduated into a successor club as a teenager, another all-Jewish contingent called the “Amerks,” that played more organized games against other Jewish teams and opponents from other ethnic groups. Schayes, who grew to be six foot eight and an outstanding athlete, recalled that the most challenging matches pitted them against Catholic teams at the St. Francis Xavier tournament . There he and his compatriots “suffered slings and arrows . . . [and] things thrown” at them by hostile crowds. But with Schayes leading the attack with his deadly set shot and hook shot, “the Jews always won.” Dolph Schayes also felt at home in his neighborhood public schools, with their large Jewish student bodies and many Jewish teachers. When in 1934 he entered PS 91, located on Aqueduct Avenue, only four blocks from his parents’ apartment, most of the pupils had foreign-born parents, with those from eastern Europe, like his own, constituting the overwhelming majority. By contrast, there were but forty youngsters in the school from Irish and Italian immigrant families. Most of the Catholic boys and girls went to local parochial schools. Schayes found a similar ethnic student body at Creston Junior High School, PS 79, and one block east of the Grand Concourse. There, of the 1,087 children of the foreign-born enrolled, 666 (60 percent) came from Russian, Polish, and Romanian backgrounds. Only 67 Irish and Italian kids were in the halls and classrooms, a minuscule 5 percent of the students. In high school, Dolph found it easy “to hang out with Jewish guys,” since there were over 1,500 students from eastern European immigrant homes at Clinton, four times as many as those of Irish and Italian extraction.2 The third dimension of Schayes’s Jewishness, beyond the streets and schools, was his extended family. Aunts and uncles met once a month at his parents’ home, or his folks trekked to visit the clan in Brooklyn. The elders played cards, enjoyed his mother’s Romanian delicacies, and spoke of their affection for the “liberal” New Deal policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. None of Schayes’s Jewish connections, however, derived from formal Jewish organizational life. He knew, as a youth, of the existence of the “large” Concourse Center of Israel and of other “store-front synagogues” in his neighborhood where some kids received religious training. But neither he nor his club friends ever set foot in these sanctuaries and schools. He...