Glasses

Part 1: 1917—My Father Gets Beaten Up

One day soon after the State of Israel won its War of Independence, my father with tears in his eyes and a choke in his throat, said to me, “Sit down here with me, please.  It is time to tell you something you are old enough to know.”  At nine years old, I felt very proud to be so old and ready to learn something that made my father proud and sad at the same time. 

            “Do you know why I wear spectacles?” he asked. 

            What a question?  Never did it ever my mind from the beginning of time that he might not wear glasses, nor more so than that he had a moustach or was my father.  These were self-evident facts of life. 

            So, when I shook my head, he started to tell me a story about when he was a boy, “just a little younger than you are now,” a date I can now place probably in 1917 or 1918, since he was born in 1910.  Those dates would have been meaningless to me then because, on the one hand, parents are eternal and ageless, and, on the other, because my grasp of history was only starting to form and for me, for example, “The War” meant the one that was going on when I first became conscious of anything, that had taken my father away to be a soldier, and that was why we no longer relatives in Europe. 

            “I was on my way home from school,” he explained. 

            Anticipating my question, he went on, “It was P.S. 160, not the one you go to, because we lived on Mina Street, where Grandma and Grandpa still live.”

            He hesitated, and then assumed his most articulatory voice my sister and I loved so much, although I could still feel his throat choking up as he tried to speak.

            “About five Italian boys from the parochial school ran after me.  They surrounded me.  They called me a Dirty Kike and a Christ Killer.  They pushed me down.  One of them punched me in the stomach.  One of them kicked me in the back.  One of them sat on my chest and started to run dirt from the street into my eyes.  The two others laughed and then punched me.  When they ran away I couldn’t see.  I was crying and that helped to wash out my eyes.  But it hurt and when I ran home, Grandma picked me up and ran with me to the doctor.  She was screaming the whole time about a pogrom and about anti-Semites.  I was very frightened.”

            My father stopped to catch his breath.  He had sounded just like me, and that was scary.  In fact, it could almost be that right now I have to use the words I always give myself as a child in order to sound like him when he was a child.  Thus what had happened to him just after the Great War would be happening to me right now after the Second World War.  Time had suddenly appeared as history and then collapsed as myth.

            He hugged me tightly, something very unusual for him to do.  He kissed the top of my head, which was the right way, not like those relatives who smooch all over your face.  Sixty years later, long after he disappeared, I understand all the more painfully what he was trying to say to me.  This is another sudden appearance of history as relativity and the accrual of understanding and then at the very same time the collapse of differences and the emergence of myth.

            “This is a true story,” he said.  “It really happened to me, your own father.  A few blocks from here, right here in Boro Park.  It happened to me and it changed my life.  The tough goyish boys rubbed sand into my eyes and that’s why I have to wear glasses.  Do you see?”

            Unlike the story Sigmund Freud tells about his father who was walking with him in the street when some anti-Semites stopped him, pushed his hat off and laughed at him, I was not ashamed of my father.  I didn’t think he should have tried to fight back.  Already I knew about the gangs that lived down near Mina Street and went to the parochial school.  But I had never thought it was more than a pain to me.  So it was a big shock to me in so many ways, that I was frightened for many days, that I thought those same boys—it didn’t matter that they would be grown men like my father, even older than he—would come after me, too, rub sand in my eyes, make me wear glasses and change my whole life.  We were strong in other ways, my father and me. 

Then in this same moment of intellectual intimacy my father said something else.  This was really the point of his story, though he probably didn’t know it.  I certainly didn’t.  It was about Israel and its war against the Arabs who attacked her on the very day she was born as a state. 

My father gave me a hug and he said, “You have to be strong.” 

Then he looked at me and I could see the tears in his eyes:  “We are strong now.  We are independent.” 

I was not quite sure what he meant, so he added, “Now Israel can fight back for us.” 

It seemed that he meant soldiers would come over on a boat to Brooklyn to protect me. 

But he said instead—because I think he anticipated what I was thinking then: “We have to protect Israel so it can be a homeland for all of us, for all the Jews who can’t fight back.” 

Deep inside me I felt even more afraid then because it wasn’t just my father or myself who had to fight with the tough kids on the street who didn’t like us.  We had to learn to fight back too.  This was something much later I think that Freud would have understood too and he wouldn’t have been so ashamed of his father.    

Though, they now say, it was not an event little Siggy observed with his own eyes.  The hat incident was years before the son was born.  What he believed was myth, what really happened is history.  Thinking of it that way puts a whole new color on the episode of the hat being knocked off the senior Freud’s head and of the sand being rubbed in my father’s eyes.  Similarly, when I sit down and ponder without any distraction, it is clear that Franz Kafka was not writing about his own father when he made a story about the son jumping into the river or another young man turning into an ugly insect.  You have to be very careful when you imagine yourself in your father’s place at a time of great vulnerability and pain.  Everything depends on the lenses you look through.

Part 2:  1962—I Meet Three Italians

Of those five Italian boys who attacked my father, three survived into the time when I was alive, the two others died, one of an illness during the Depression and the other during fighting in World War II.   By chance, I came to know about the three remaining attackers of my father.  This is how I came to know them and how it changed my life.  It was late spring, and as usual I came back to New York from the college upstate where I was doing my Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature. 

            For the first time in years, since a graduate scholarship was given to me, I didn’t have to go to work but could spend my time reading and writing, and giving attention to what remained of my family.  My father was not well at all, had retired, and spent most of his time sitting on the back porch looking out at the garden he once tended carefully.  My mother had passed away almost ten years before.  I was the only son.  There was not much to say to my father, yet he liked me to be around the house and occasionally sit outside with him and sip cold lemonade.

            When I started meeting with those Italians there seemed no connection between them and my father, let alone any idea that they had been in the gang that taunted my father with charges that he was a dirty kike, a Christ killer, and a sissy momma’s boy.  Even when I occasionally spoke about the visits I started making with these three and repeated some of our conversations, my father didn’t seem to pay any attention.  He sat and sipped his lemonade.

            Antonio, the first of the men I encountered, ran a small fish shop in a part of Brooklyn I normally did not frequent, way past Church Avenue, but chanced to visit when I was in my mid-twenties, as there was a bookseller on the same street and I was addicted even then to old books, so long as they were cheap.  Someone recommended I go, so off I went partly by subway, partly by bus.  At first, I could see no book shop.  I walked up and down the street, checking the name and address written by my friend.  Then, on an off chance, I went into the fish monger’s. 

            “Excuse me,” I said, and then asked about the book dealer supposedly nearby.

            “Aha,” the man behind the counter answered, “it’s a bit tricky that, but you have to go down two stores, turn into an alley, and its on the right, up a flight of stairs.”  He was about the same age as my father, but looked older and more worn out.  He too wore glasses.

            I thanked the fish monger and was leaving his premises when he said, “You looking for rare books?”

            “Yes.  Maybe not so rare, but there are titles I just can’t find anywhere else in the City.  Strange.”

            He started talking about books and book shops, authors and titles he liked.  It was fascinating because in my prejudices I found it unusual for an Italian shopkeeper to know so much about the book trade.  The books he liked most were nineteenth-century French and Italian novelists I had never heard of, and some philosophers, the only that sounded familiar was Vico.  After a few minutes of chattering, he said, “I’ll take you up there, if you like.”

            The used bookshop was rather tiny, shelves all around and dividing up the space, so that one could hardly walk around in it.  On a high stool near the back, a man sat reading a large volume. 

            As we walked in, he greeted us both.  “Hey, Tony, you bring me another customer, eh?  How you both gonna fit in here?”

            Antonio laughed.  “I will suck in a lot of this knowledge and make more room.”

            “That’s a good one, Tony.  That’s a good joke.  I remember that for later.”

            He turned to me then and said, “You want some knowledge, too, Mister? But for you I have to charge the money.”

            I laughed politely and told him the kind of books I was looking for.

            “Hmmm, hmmm,” he said.  “Let me think a minute, please.”

            Antonio spoke up.  “Angelo, I think I know where those titles are.  Let me show this young feller where they are.”

            “What? You run my shop now, you stinky old fisherman, you?”

            They both laughed and pushed me together down to a small alcove near a narrow staircase I hadn’t noticed until then. 

            “It’s upstairs, you remember, Angie.  I haven’t been up there for a while.  Maybe something I want there, too.”

            The two men pushed me up the steps and into a much larger but darker room, filled with boxes and shelves, out of which very old and dusty books were spilling.  They were having a lot of fun, I could tell, joking with each other and prodding me on, mentioning the authors I was looking for. 

            Antonio would pick up a book, blow off its dust, read out the title, “This what you want?”  He handed it to me.  “I read it a long time ago but I didn’t like it.”

            Angelo would find another, wipe it clean with his sleeve, and say, “This a much better book.  But, hey, why not you take both?  I make a bargain for you.”

            I bought the two books with the charge probably low for what they were but at the limit of my budget, since I was still a student then at home for the summer holidays.  I figured it was worth it, all this entertainment coming along with the purchase.

            “Now I better go back and sell some fish, or my wife’s going to kill me,” said Antonio.

            “Me too.  Maybe another customer come in downstairs.  Funny, hey?  Two customers a day, that would be a miracle, don’t you think?” said Angelo.

            As I left, we all shook hands, and both of these middle-aged men invited me to come back soon.

            Two weeks later, this is exactly what I did.  Though I knew now where the bookshop was, I thought it a good idea to first look in on the fish monger.  There were three women haggling over some carp, so I waited until they were done.  Antonio already saw me and waved while he scooped up some live fish from the large marble tank that formed a part of his counter, put them on the surface, and then, one by one, as they flapped about, he wacked them on the head with the side of his big knife.  He proceeded to slice off their heads and tails, slid the blade through their stomachs, and laid them out and filleted the three carcases. 

            “Now, my friend,” he said, turning to me, and whipping his knife on his large white apron, “you want some fish or books today?”

            “Books,” I said, “but maybe you and Angelo can let me take you out for a cup of coffee, and we can talk, if you don’t mind.”

            “Sure, you go up there first.  I have to clean up a little here.  I come later. “  He put out his hand and touched my shoulder across the counter where the fish had recently been slaughtered.  “Don’t get all the books, please.  Leave a little for me, ok?”  He laughed.

            I had been talking with Angelo for about fifteen minutes when Antonio climbed up the stairs and joined in our conversation. 

            “Hey, Tony,” said Angelo, “this kid, he’s real smart.  I tell him about some of our Italian writers, and right away he wants to buy them, so he can talk more to us about the Old Country.”

            The two of them rattled off names of authors and books, laughing and joking. 

            Through the rest of the summer, I went back every week or two, talked with these two older men, both about the age of my father, bought a few books, and came to know them more and more. 

            Near the end of August, after I announced that it would be soon time for me to return to college upstate, Antonio said, somewhat more seriously than usual, “Look, if we go down to Dominic’s and have something to drink and a piece of nice Neopolitan pastry, I want to ask this kid a question, and you can help me, too.”

            “Remember, it’s my treat,” I put in.

            “OK, OK,” Angelo said, “but if you do that, then I have to bring you to meet my wife the next time you come.  You have a big spaghetti with us. You, too, Tony.  We make a whole dinner party.”

            Dominic’s cafe was called Syracusa.  It was small like all the shops around there, and inside there were perhaps six tables, each with red and white checked tablecloths. Around each table were four iron-wire chairs.   On the walls were cheap paintings of Mount Vesuvius, Palermo Bay, and some churches I didn’t recognize. There was also a small photograph of the current pope on the wall behind the cash register desk.  The room seemed dark as we came in out of the glare of the late afternoon sun, but soon my eyes grew accustomed to the shade and I looked around.  We were the only customers in the cafe. 

            Dominic came over to take our orders.  He was in his late fifties, as were Antonio and Angelo.

            “Well, signori, “what’s it going to be today?”

            Angelo ordered for all of us.  “Three cappacino, a plate of you best pastry, and a few bottles of nice mineral water.” 

            “What’s a matter, Angie, you forget you manners already?  You no gonna introduce me to you young friend here, and you no gonna invite me to sit with you today?  What do you see around you, a whole crowd of customers?”

            Very soon, Dominic sat with us, and his wife, as I was told, brought over the espresso and the pastries.  They were made of marzipan and smothered in cream.  Everyone took a bite and then a little sip of the thick black liquid, sat back satisfied, and waited.

            Then Antonio looked at me.  His ruddy face seemed all shiny in the glow of the afternoon sun. 

            “This is what I want to say, kid.  You listen too, Angie.  This is something serious I am thinking about a long time.”

            I nodded in agreement to show I considered this an important moment to discuss such things, and Angelo smiled, though he looked somewhat puzzled by this appeal to seriousness.

            Dominic said, “You want me I should leave, if you talk all serious with this young man?”

            “No, you stay, please, Nico.  This involves all of us.”

            Now everyone looked expectedly at Antonio., me included.

            “Well, kid,” he said, putting his hand on my arm, “all of us here, Angie and Nico and myself, we been good friends from the time we go to grade school together.  We always played around the same neighborhood, not here, but over the other end of Brooklyn, in what they call Boro Park.  Down at the end of Thirteenth Avenue, near where the two el lines meet, near the markets.  Anyway, we always played around, not always such nice games, but we was young then.  We get older, you see, and there were the hard times during the Depression.  One of the old group, he died then.  Another one during the War.  But we three, well, we grow up together, get married, have children, and we become serious.”

            As he talked, the two others nodded their heads.

            “Tony’s right,” said Angie.  “We were pretty crazy kids back then, but life, she change the way you look at the world.  But they was hard times, very hard.  I wanted to go to college to learn about history and art, the things my own poppa always tell me about in the Old Country.  Italy is full of history and art, he always told me.  So I want to learn, but how could I do that during the Depression, or later in the War.  But I always read the books.  After I retire early from the grocery business of my farther because my lungs are not so good, I decide to make a book shop.  I go all around to the dealers in the City, down by the Village, and I buy some boxes of books.  I get my father’s apartment after he dies and I make the shop there, like you see, a upstairs and down.  Ina few years, old people bring me their books because their kids, they don’t like to read, and the old guy he can’t bring himself to throw away these books he got from his own father.  Soon I have hundreds and thousands of books, like you see.  Not many people come in, but that’s ok, I sit and read myself, and I can live off my pension and my wife who still works in a hospital to be a nurse.”

            Then Dominic said, “He’s say what is true, this Angie, and also Tony.  We were wild boys in the old days.  That was way back, you got to understand, kid, back at the time of the Great War and when we were in grade school at St Mary’s.  It was crazy times, and we were crazy kids.  Sometimes, though, we did the bad stuff, too.  Once we steal the apples from the big market and almost get caught.  Another time, we throw pieces of coal at a car that drives past and we break his windows.  We sure had to run fast out of there.  Another time, we beat up some sissy Jew boy from around there.  But we didn’t do big harm.  Not us.  Bad stuff, wild things, but we never really hurt nobody.  And like Angie says, in the Depression and afterwards, we had to grow up because we have responsibilities.  You marry and have kids, you can’t be wild no more. ”

            Antonio sipped his coffee from the demitasse cup and ate little morsels of his cloyingly sweet pastry.  He nodded his head as the other two talked.  He would pat my arm occasionally and say, “Yes, you listen.  This is very important what they say.”

            After the others became silent and sipped their espresso, Antonio straightened up.

            “Now I tell you why I am serious today.  I start to think when this young fellow comes to see me a few months ago, this is a smart young man, a real thinker, and he goes to college and he knows a lot of things.  So I say to myself, Tony, you ain’t never gonna do what you dream about for so many years, to write the book about your friends and the wild time way back when you were all crazy kids, good things and bad.  But the world is very different now.  Somebody has to write down our stories because our own kids they don’t know nothing about it.  They never want to listen to what we say.  Our wives, too, they say we are still crazy.  Bunch of stupid old men, that’s what. And—“ he started to speak further, but stopped himself, sipped his espresso and then went on.  “I am stupid too, you know?  I wanted to be a doctor once, but, well, my father had the fish shop and the nuns drove me crazy in school so I didn’t get the good marks.  As soon as I was old enough, my father made me quit at St Mary’s, too expensive, he said, and he took me into the fish business.  Instead of a doctor I cut up fish.  Pretty funny, no?”

            The others nodded in agreement.  Then Antonio continued.

            “So I didn’t go to college like you, kid.  But I write down at night little notes, so maybe someday one of my boys he be smart like you, he go to school to be educated, and then he write down my story proper.  But you know what, my boys have no interest.  They go to school alright, one boy even a doctor now, the other an accountant, and they move away to the City and maybe come back to see the old man once a year.  They like to talk to their momma on the telephone and don’t say nothing to me, their papa.  So who gonna write my story, you tell me?”

            “Me too,” said Angelo.  “I don’t make the notes down in a book, like Tony, but I keep them up here,” and he tapped his head with his fingers.  “It’s all there as much as I can remember.  Those crazy things we used to do when we was kids, and also how it was to live in the old neighborhood, in the Depression, in the War, all those stories, right up here,” and he tapped his head again.

            Dominic listened to their words intently. 

            “I don’t think about those things so much, like these two guys, but I tell you what, when I listen to them talk, I start to remember too, only what I remember is not exactly like what they say.  So if you write down a book for us, you better have me there, and I make sure you don’t put down no lies, ok?”

            “Hold on,” I said, “I am very flattered that you ask for my help, but I have to go back to Colgate and finish my degree.  I will help if I can, but probably not this year.  It would have to be next summer.”

Part 3: 1964—The Book of their Lives

It took more than the next summer to sit down with all three of these Italian gentlemen and listen to their stories, sometimes one at a time, sometimes two, and sometimes all three; and many sessions where we all went back over the drafts that I presented them with.  But by the autumn of 1964 the manuscript was in a state where Antonio, Angelo and Dominic, or as I was then calling them, Tony, Angie and Nico, were agreed it was good enough to be published.  Perhaps “publish” is too glamorous a word for what we planned: a photocopy the pages of the clean typed version we paid a local high school student to prepare and then have fifteen or twenty copies tape-bound to distribute to the closest relatives, along with a small collection of black and white photographs.  The text, along with the pictures, runs to just over fifty pages, but I am going to give you here a couple of those passages that seem most relevant to the original story my father told me of why he wore glasses.

All of us grew up around Church Avenue and went to the same parochial school, Our Lady of Perpetual Virginity.  Our families were working class, we lived in small two-story brick row houses with handkerchief gardens in front and back, and played together in the streets.  In those days, during and after the Great War, there were still many vacant lots, unpaved streets, and horse-driven carts making deliveries around the neighborhood.  They were tough times and tough streets, so we were tough little kids.  We learned to fight in our homes, fighting the hierarchy of ages among all our many brothers and sisters, and then learned to fight in the streets, with the main rule in all our games being that the strongest player always won.  In school, the nuns were tougher than the occasional priest who visited us, and the kind of religion they taught us was a very literal Church Militant.  It was our job, as good Catholics, to fight for the true faith, and especially against the Christ-killing Kikes who lives nearby.

The two roughest members of our group are those who are no longer with us today.  If they had survived, perhaps they would have mellowed like the three of us who remain. More likely, we suspect, they would have gone a very different way than we did.  We suspect that at least one of them would have worked for the Casa Nostra, or at least they would have been petty thieves.  Matteo, who died of strep fever in the 1930s, was already in trouble with the law.  Sylvio was killed in action in the Second World War, falling on Anzio beachhead; his family now worship him as a heroic saint—we have heard alternative stories, that either he was shot by his fellow soldiers because he was always a trouble-maker and a thief, or that he had sneaked off and died dead drunk in a whore-house in town that was hit by stray artillery fire.  Either way, with both those guys out of the way, we three were safe to take on more responsible careers after the War.  However, while not wanting to wriggle out of our parts played when we were louts in the late teens of this century, we can honestly say that the worst behavior in our gang was due to Matteo and Sylvio.

Part 4: 2013—Epilogue

That’s it.  All of them are gone now.  In fact, they probably disappeared long before I tried to strain my memory to find what might have happened to these people I had only guessed at, gave them names, backgrounds, and memories of their own.  For that reason, to anyone seeking true history of those times and those boys grown up to manhood, there is nothing real about any of it.  

Everything began with a few words recalled from a conversation with my father that may not even have taken place.  All that is real has been my effort to make sense of the little anecdote passed on to me close to seventy years ago and about an event that occurred nearly a century ago. 

Everything passes through the lens of imagination, nostalgia and literary conventions.  When this story is forgotten, true or not, there will be no one to care about why my father wore glasses—or even know who he was.  Sic transit gloria mundi.