The Long Sleep and the Endless Noise
As I was born
in 1940, my earliest memories take shape around experiences of the Second World
War, of the way my mother would watch as young boys who had been drafted would
climb the stairs going up to the elevated train station next to our apartment
and she would cry because she would say that most of them would never come
home, of the way my father left for the Army in early in 1943 and never
returned until the last months of 1946, leaving my mother, who was always ill,
to cope and moving in her with her mother, and with her father who, it seemed
to me, was always dying on the front stoop or on a couch near the window, of
the WACs who marched in the junior high school yard across from Grandma’s house
and who made me believe that most of the soldiers in the world were women, of
the little uniform my Grandpa made for me before he decided to come home and be
sick and then to die, a uniform decorated with all sorts of insignia and medals
which made soldiers and sailors on the avenue salute me when I walked proudly
alongside my mother, of the ration book my Grandmother let me carry for her
when she went into the grocery shop, and of all the times my mother would faint
in the street and I would be taken home by policemen and other strangers.
My paternal
grandfather was a simple man who worked in the fruit and vegetable markets.
My maternal grandfather was a cloth-cutter and a tailor. Life was
hard in the 1920s and 1930s, and their attitudes shaped mine. A strange mixture of classes, attitudes, and
senses of culture. More than that, when
the news of the Holocaust arrived in Yiddish papers and then in the people
walking the streets with numbers tattooed on their forearms, what was said
didn’t match what was felt at home: at home there was anger and rage. Underneath, there was the sense that I would
have to be at once the replacement for everyone lost and the religious belief
they stood for, and the continuation of the rebellion into assimilation,
atheism, and left-wing politics.
Then finally
my father came home from Japan and we lived in a big house where he kept his
dentist’s office. Grandma moved in with
us until she died just after my sister was born in April 1947. Other people also seemed to die all the time
on the street and in houses we went to visit.
Life was filled with death and with women who ran households, who
visited my mother and whispered and cried, while I hid under the kitchen table
and didn’t understand. My father worked
in the front of the house. But it was
hard because other people were successful.
By the time I was to be bar mitzvahed he had his first heart
attack. Meantime my mother continued to
be sick, to faint and to teach piano—which she did until she had a stroke at a
very early age. I can’t remember any
adult ever having a discussion or a conversation with me. They told me what to do, to think, to eat, to
feel and to become when I grew up. But
there were lots of books in the attic, and I read my way through them, books on
working-class people, strikes, psychology, history and dentistry (they had
grizzly pictures of horrible infections and wounds). Though I played stickball and stoopball in
the streets, I spent many hours curled up in a chair in my room, next to the
window, and read and read. It would take
many years before I realized you were supposed to understand what you found in
books, and not just look up strange words in the dictionary, with definitions
that also made no sense. Life in general
made no sense.
But I learned
to play the trumpet and was in the school band and orchestra, and started a
dance band with my friends. I went to
Stuyvesant High School and studies as hard as I could. Mathematics not being my
best subject, I took many courses in musical theory, history and literature,
and French. Nevertheless the long sleep
continued and, though I sometimes got high marks, understanding lagged
behind. Even when I started university,
with English as a major—replacing History because of special help from one
professor, though I don’t recall ever having read a poem before--and doing as
much French and German as possible. Yet
sometime in the second year light began to break through. Maybe it was because my mother had a stroke
shortly before I went back to the little university in September 1960. Maybe it was just that the time had come
(twenty years old may be the right age) to become aware of what literature and culture
meant.
Yet as I was
going through university, at each transitional moment, it was always the last
time--the last time it was required to study two foreign languages, the last
time comprehensive exams took eight hours, the last time such and such a
scholarship was offered, etc. I could see and feel the earth being
transformed around me. When we formed a little dance band in high school,
my friends and I were playing the music of the 30s and the 40s, but we
were swiftly shoved off by groups playing rock'n'roll, with saxophones and
electric guitars, whereas we had trumpets, bass fiddle, piano, and drums--and
we rehearsed music we bought that had been orchestrated for older style
musicians. For me, the new sounds were noise.
But so was
almost everything else almost always mere noise until I entered the last year of
my undergraduate degree and applied for graduate school But that must wait for another day.
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