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| 27 CHAPTER THREE From Far Rockaway to Montgomery T here were still considerably more oaks and elms dotting and shading the stubborn concrete when Stanley Levison was preparing to graduate Far Rockaway High School in Queens, New York, in 1930 than there are today. The huge building on Bay and Twenty-Fifth Street spread imperially between Oceancrest Boulevard and Hartman Lane, bearing its own massive gridiron and track behind the central stone citadel and physical plant. It was cramped for parking space and had sprouted in the middle of a classically patterned, considerably Jewish neighborhood of homogenous middle-class homes with bleak stoops and miniature grass plots. Stanley David Levison was born in that neighborhood on May 2, 1912, to Esther and Harry Levison. The house was austere in tone and structure; young Stan shared a sparse bedroom overlooking the gritty street with his identical twin, Roy. Harry worked as an accountant for Unique Specialties Corporation, 28| CHAPTER THREE a tool-and-die firm located in Brooklyn. Esther did some real-estate management work but was primarily a housewife, dedicated to her boys, focused on their nutrition, health, and making sure their clothes and underwear were laundered and fresh. The boys would look out at her in the tiny backyard, applying clothespins to their washed shirts and shorts, occasionally taking a long breath of air while bending against the cramped weariness of her existence. Esther and Harry seldom frolicked at the beaches. Stanley thought his mother’s face was devoid of joy, but he felt her warm allegiance. “I want to do something to lift people out of the sameness of life a lot of us are stuck in,” he said to the principal of Far Rockaway High School, Dr. Sanford J. Ellsworth. They were walking together down one of the highceilinged hallways—the roundish-looking upperclassman in 1929 and the silver-haired administrator in his slate-colored double-breasted suit laced with herringbone fabric and topped off by peaked lapels. Ellsworth liked Levison and thought the rather plain, nonmuscular bookkeeper’s son would amount to something. The principal did not know Stanley’s twin brother Roy as well and felt more of an affinity to the bespectacled Stanley at any rate. Ellsworth detected Stanley’s tendency toward asthma, and although he was a rather stiff, formal, scientific man, he was compassionate toward and about his pupils. Stanley had made mention once or twice of his admiration for Ellsworth’s promotion of equal educational standards for young women, and it flattered and pleased the old mathematician. “Use your head, Stanley. You are a thinker. But don’t get radical ideas and try to turn the whole civilization upside down. There are a lot of people out of work and we have to find a way to rebuild the country and not getting people to just fester.”1 But Stanley did have radical ideas, and they were very much in his head. He and Roy, who were raised as secular Jews exactly at the time when the nation was reeling into the Great Depression, trafficked in the left-wing, proSoviet Yiddish newspapers much more than in Hebrew prayer books. Stanley’s circumstance of being Jewish translated into an early sense of solidarity with the working class, with revulsion at the reality of the sprouting, destitute FROM FAR ROCKAWAY TO MONTGOMERY| 29 “Hoovervilles” of the United States, and at the growing breadlines he saw along Central Avenue and Seneca Street. He noticed his algebra teacher, Abram Bader, reading the leftist weekly Voch—among a slew of dissident, Yiddish publications of the era. Though such newspapers editorialized on matters of culture, education, and literature, they were stamped with an unmistakable fealty to communism, or at least internationalleftistprinciples.Stanley,stillyoungandimpressionable,became fascinated with the unapologetic avowal of working-class values that was published in Voch: We consider the October Revolution [of the Soviet Union] to be the greatest event of recent generations. By transferring power to the workers, the Revolution simultaneously liberated national minorities, ensured their independence and undertook to help develop their cultures. We stand with the Soviet Union in its overall socialist development and in the economic and cultural reconstruction of Jewish life that the Soviet Union has undertaken.2 What Ellsworth, himself far-removed from such Bolshevism and a staunch patriot, did know was that that Stanley lived in the world of ideas and that he was motivated by social doctrines. The principal was a Presbyterian and supervised...

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