The War Comes to Brooklyn

A Simple Almost True Story from  Boro Park[*]

The obsession with war begins in a time of war and under the fear of imminent attack. A child understands so little but cannot help but feel the powerful passions in the people all around. There may be no real battle looming with the thunder of heavy artillery always off in the distance, or the blinding shock of explosive ordinance lighting up the night skies. A child can interpret the nature of the world from the small details all around, even those which parents or other older relatives are unaware of, or push aside as trivial and with without any significance. There does not have to be jack-booted enemy army of occupation marching with goosesteps to brass bands and punctuating drums right on the main street where you live. It is not necessary for the child to see with his own eyes the corpses of ordinary neighbors tossed into dark green heavy trucks for him to realize the overwhelming danger of life in a season of war.

This was particularly true in the years 1943 to 1945 in Boro Park, Brooklyn, when I was just a very young boy. There was a palpable change in the number and kind of people in the streets: there were fewer young men walking about, and those who were tended more and more to be uniform, the dark brown of the army and the blue and white of the navy. All this in an atmosphere from day to day, month after month, for all those three comprised a shifting mixture of excitement, anticipation, fear, grief, and frustration.

Among the children that I played with-and they were few, as my mother would cling to me, when she was not reading or writing letters--there was, however, though none of us ever actually spoke the words, a sense of loss, of fathers who were no longer home in the evening to play with, or older brothers or uncles or male cousins. The bigger boys, still in grade school, now seemed more distant and wanted play army among themselves, to talk more in whispers, to boast about things we could not follow, we who were younger, and to laugh in a crazy way, with voices always making banging sounds like guns or roaring noises like bombers and bombs falling on houses and schools, or buzzing and hissing sounds that were not funny at all.

While my mother waited each day for a letter-they came in blue envelopes, written on very thin almost see-through paper in the tiny, tight handwriting of my father, so meticulous and careful to use every available inch of space-in the good weather she would sit on the front stoop, looking this way and that for the mailman, though she knew he always walked up from Fort Hamilton Parkway and then down to the el station at the corner of 48th Street; and when he came he would hand her the letter, or two or three, if there had been days when nothing came, and she would run inside, to sit at the kitchen table and read them quickly at first, and then again and again slowly, sometimes aloud to my grandmother, and when she thought there was something about me or that I should here, to me. If there were no letter that day, she would walk back slowly anyway to the kitchen, and then she would take out the blue envelopes of the week before and read the letters inside them again. Though he was writing every day from wherever he was, over there in the war, she would only write her responses once a week. She would spread his letters out on the table, read them again, and then slowly pen her letter on her own very thin pink paper, using a small lady's fountain pen answering his questions, commenting on things he said, telling him about me, reporting the news of her father and mother and the things she had heard about his family, though she really didn't communicate very often with them. Before she finished, she would ask me if there was anything I wanted to say. Near the end of the second year, when I was starting in kindergarten, she would ask me if I had made any pictures in school that I wanted to send. I hardly ever did, because it was hard to remember, but I would pretend that I had something, and then run back to my room and : quickly make some scribbles of spaghetti with a crayon or a pencil and bring it back, and my mother was pack into the envelope with her own writing. I also could never think of anything I wanted to say to my father, although I was always angry about him being gone, and so I would make up something, or recite a rhyme or saying we had been taught by the kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Kretschmer. Sometimes, of course, my mother would not ask me, not because she knew I never had anything to say, but because she had things to say it was better to put into words supposedly from me; and then she would read out what she wrote my father she had heard from his own bright little son, about how much I missed him and wished he would come back safe and sound as soon as possible; or maybe he could find some little present to send to my mommy, like a bit of French perfume or maybe a fine piece of silk. She would write that I was silly and precocious to say that, but wasn't it all very clever and cute? I knew that I l~ would never say such things, not even talk about love, but what could a child really understand of the pretend games that adults if liked to play?

A child cannot put together the many little instances of deceit and malevolence of such terrible times. He does not recognize in his own rage, hidden most of the time, especially during the day, and waits for excuses to cry and scream, and even, if the occasion does not come, to provoke it, so he can roll on the floor. He doesn't think of this as a test of his mother's loyalty or a way of punishing his father for not being at home. He cannot imagine a tantrum upsets everyone in the family, and has no foresight to plan some way of causing his grandfather to become ill and eventually to die.

I was unable to see or understand the lies that are so prevalent in a time of war, and accepted the stories and rationalizations that adults spoke to me, the wave of the hand that said there was nothing wrong, the shrug that meant a gesture or word was of no consequence, even though it seemed to cause such pain, both to utter or enact and to hear or watch. Grown-ups think they can conceal the fears and disappointments they feel in great waves all through the day, and they honestly believe children cannot feel the tensions in the air or guess at the significance of hostile body language. Perhaps they feel justified because so many older children pretend to know more than they actually do and, when they enter into conversations that are beyond them, they say such silly things, even someone like me could see right through them.

I could not have told you what was going on. I had no words and concepts at my disposal. But was I any different than my parents, my grandparents or the neighbors who did not conceive of the enormity of the deceptions in the newspapers and on the radio, the distortion of the truth, anything but the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? They also believed implicitly, not just because they wanted to, whatever "our boys" who were over there" wrote in their letters home, and they took the censor's stamp[ on the envelope as attesting to the veracity of whatever was in the letter, even if, as occasionally happened, a word or two, a whole sentence, was blacked out because inadvertently their son or husband or lover may have let slip the name of a battlefield or a ship or a date that a spy could use. The writer could make mistakes; that they accepted; but not that he could ever deliberately mislead them, no more so than would FDR or Ike. What they heard on the radio was exciting and frightening and confirmed who was good and who was bad. They learned of our defeats and of our high casualties and never questioned that this was further proof that everything else was true, such as famous victories over the Axis Forces in this place or that. The letters from over there were reassuring, as much as telegrams from the War Office were crushing. The impressions were cherished, and stood in the place of our boys who could not be home this Christmas but maybe next time. The folks back home had to ensure that a similarly encouraging impression was created for the men and women in uniform fighting for freedom, and they did their best because it also made them feel useful and good, like collecting rags and scrap metal or buying War Bonds or Victory Bonds. Every little bit helps. I was so young I could have had no idea that great generals, presidents, prime ministers, the boys at the front could also deceive themselves.

A child knows none of this. He knows only that he is out of place and his feelings not up to the moment. I would hear the names of cities or mountains or rivers or islands for a week, become familiar with their sounds, almost be able to pronounce them, and then they would be gone, faded away, gone with the wind. The names of our leaders and of the evil forces of the enemy, these I also became familiar with, as persons not on our street or around the comer, but far away, more than a trip on the subway or the trolley car. From the beach at Coney Island I could see, far out, where Sandy Hook now marks the horizon, was the place called Europe, just as during those few months I went to California with Mommy to see Daddy before he went away I could hear the war on that other Pacific horizon where today Santa Catalina hovers in the distance. What were these words but ominous or soothing noises. A child cannot differentiate between a Jap and a Kraut, does not find a personality inside the name of Hitler or Mussolini. Can he know that Stalin was good and now he is bad and then good again. Who was the Churchill or the Montgomery? Where was El Alamein or Monte Casino?

A child learns to read but does not sit down with the newspaper. He becomes familiar with words that grown-ups use but does not know how to use them. Everyday these words are spoken at home, on the street, over the radio, in school, but they are not children's words, do not fit in children's space, they push the child aside, squash him down, make him angrier and angrier. When we go to the movies to see Walt Disney films, there are pictures and sounds in the newsreel. Ed Herlihy speaks in Movietone News. The News of the World is about war. War has exciting music, different kinds for them and for us, the bad guys and the good guys; there are marching bands and explosions, solemn viola melodies. And it's bombs away, and then hundreds of puffs down below on a city. In Asia and the Pacific, it's ships, convoys, aircraft carriers, submarines. Explosions and music. I want to understand but mix up the coming attractions with the news, confuse the Great War with our own struggle for democracy, and cannot believe there was ever a world without war, a time without explosions and music.

***

I have a very vague feeling that I had a father who was not writing letters on thin blue paper with tiny tight penmanship but really at home but I am not sure and am frightened I am making it all up.

The Italian lady, Mrs Saladino, who lives next door to grandma is Italian. She has three boys at the front and a husband who works in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. She is very proud to be an American. She gives me spaghetti and crusty bread. One day she gets a telegram and the next day she gets a big envelope and she hangs a purple banner with a golden star in her window. She makes me long stringy pasta, she sprinkles olive oil and then grated cheese, but says she is too tired to get the bread. She does not sit on her front porch like everyone else waiting for letters any more that week. Many neighbours pass by, look up at the window, see the banner and the star, some make a cross with their fingers over their hearts, some start to cry. A few people pay their respects. My grandmother goes to the bakery to buy her crusty bread. Then six months later there is another telegram, and the Italian lady falls down in front of her house even before she opens the envelope and the boy on the bicycle runs away. My grandmother runs to help her, and a man on the street also comes to pick her up and take her from the stoop into the living room. My mother is in our kitchen when I come back, and she takes my hand and holds it tight--it hurts—and she says that didn't she suffer enough already? Enough is enough! But you wouldn't know there was a war going on, if you saw the way those crazy bobby-sox girls behaved, and the to do and the tumult when they talked about Frank Sinatra and danced the jitterbug by themselves on the porch in the house on the other side of grandma's. 

“But aren’t they young?  Let them have some fun while they are able,” grandma would try to explain. “You were never young yourself?”

“Young, shmung, a working man can't read a newspaper in peace these days?”

 He would open the Yiddish newspaper, take out his little magnifying glass from a side drawer, and read, carefully sounding out the words.

“Do you think in my day in the Old Country a person had time to go to school and become a genius? But it’s good for the boychik,” who was me, “to get a good education and make a proper man of himself, he shouldn't have to be an old ignoramus like his grandfather.”

Grandma would pat me on the head.

One evening after dinner the telephone rang, not such a common occurrence in those days. My mother told grandpa it was his friend from work. I could see the colour draining out of his face as he listened to the voice at the other end of the line. He didn't say a word and put down the receiver. Grandma came running up to him. She asked what was the matter. At first he shooed her away, but then he whispered that she should read him the Yiddish paper which he was getting ready to look at before. She raised her eyebrows and waved her hands.

“Read, read, I can't,” he said.

She picked up the paper and started to sound out the words, and as she spoke her voice became slower, dropped in tone, and started to shake:

 “Genug! Oy givalt! O givalt! “he said.  

He took the paper out of her hands. 

 “It’s enough already.” 

hen he threw the paper on the floor and reached out his hands towards the ceiling.  

 “What do you want from us?  What kind of a God are you?”

He shrieked, and he yelled out more words I couldn't understand.

My mother came out of the bedroom. She looked shocked as no one ever screamed in this house. I could see her trembling all over when grandma readout the first sentences from the newspaper, and then she fainted, her eyes disappearing behind the whites, and sliding to the floor. Get the boy away from here, grandma said, as she bent down to pat my mother's hands and face. But my grandfather didn't move. He was sitting silently, staring at the newspaper, and then I could see tears in his eyes. I was standing in the corner of the room. I wanted to run up to someone and hit them as hard as possible. However, no one paid any attention to me, so I went into my room to draw pictures of the war with lots of explosions and music.

***

            The next day grandpa stayed home from work. He sat in the window seat and stared out into the street. When I walked up to him, he shooed me away.

Then he said, but not to me, “The whole world is crazy and those people—look at them, look, look—walk  around in the street like nothing is wrong.”

 Grandma brought him cups of tea, which he would sip once or twice, then forget and leave on the floor next to him. My mother sat in her room all day. I didn’t know she was so young then, only twenty-three, a child, too, like me.  She only came out when grandma knocked and said there was a letter just delivered.

I went next door to the Italian lady and she gave me spaghetti and crusty bread because no one remembered to make me lunch. She showed me a picture of her one remaining son, her angel Angelo, and said he was coming home because the War Department thought she had suffered enough. “I show you how much,” and went into another room and then came back. She let me hold the box with the two gold stars. “My American heroes, “she said. Then she said slowly: “American.” and after a few moments  “Heroes.”

When I walked back to grandma's house, where we had been living since my father went into the army, the doctor was standing next to grandpa holding his wrist and looking at his watch.

From then on. grandpa didn't go to work any more, but stayed home everyday, and everyday he sat at the window and soon grandma made him a bed in the window seat where he lay all day long. At night, my grandmother and mother helped him go to his own bed. Sometimes he would pat me on the head.

“A good boychik,” he would say. “You shouldn't know for a long time what a world this is.”

 But I was really very angry that he wouldn't tell me what was going on.  No one ever told me anything. The only person who ever talked to me was the lady next door. She told me that the Army wouldn't send her boy home just yet, and he wanted to fight against that Mussolini, but they were sending him to the Pacific, because they  didn't want Italians to kill Italians.

“They should let us get rid of that bald monkey. You think my family over there wants him? Ptuui. We all love this America.”

Then I asked her if she knew what made grandpa sick after reading the Yiddish newspaper.

"Holy Mary, Queen of  Heaven,” she said, “I don't know what is in those papers. You grandfather, he a good man. I have much respect for your people. I don't understand what those devils over there want to do with them. You a lucky boy to live here in America. America is a good country. Come, I make you some nice spaghetti.  A big bowl.”

***

For a few days in spring, my grandmother helped grandpa walk into the little garden behind her house where he had made a rosary, and he looked at the rose buds starting to show.

“It’s too cold to stay out there,” she said, and they went back to the window seat. In the late afternoon, when the bobby-sox girls started to play their gorgeous Frankie music, grandma went to ask them to please be quiet because the old man-which is what she always called him then, had to be quiet. They turned the radio down.

“Some miracle,” he said, when she came back. “We should also turn off the war so easy and kill that Haman with the fancy little moustache.”

I liked to sit very quietly behind a big plush chair in the living room so I could hear what people were saying. No one paid much attention to me if I were still in this safe little cave, and I hoped I would find out what the war was all about and when my father would be coming home. Grandpa would be lying on the window seat bed, and he would stare out the window, even after it was dark and you could hardly see anything except if someone walked right under the street lamp across the road.

If grandma tried to read something from the Yiddish newspaper for him, he would listen for a few minutes, and then say, “Genug! Do I have to listen to every dirty detail of what they are doing to us?”

“What do you want, then,” she would say, “a story from the old country?”

“Oy givalt, what is this stupid woman talking about? There is a war and we are being—oy, I don't want no stories. Leave me alone.”

My mother, who was at the kitchen table with my father's blue letters spread out, and trying to compose her weekly response would just hum very softly to herself.

“Poppa,” she would ask, after a while, “a glass of tea maybe?”

There would be no reply and she would turn back to the letter she was writing slowly with her lady's fountain pen on her very thin pink paper.

“Send the boy over here,” she would say after a while, and grandma would tell me to go to the table and sit with my mother. “Listen to what I am writing to your father for you. ‘My dear father, I love you and miss you very much. I have fun in school and am a good boy. Your loving son, Normashoo.’ You want to say anything more?” she would ask.

I said nothing.

A few minutes later, as she was folding the pink sheets she had filled with her writing, she asked, “You have a picture you made at school maybe?”

I ran back to my room, tore a page from my little notebook, pulled some crayons from the drawer of my desk and made some quick spaghetti scribbles. “Here, I made these at school just for my daddy.” I didn't tell her they were pictures of soldiers shooting each other.

***

Children become obsessed with war when adults are, and the big difference is that grown-ups try to hide their rage-the anger they feel at the generations before them that let them down and bestowed upon them a world at war; whereas for a young boy in a house where an old man is dying, the war is against the reality of that death and the pretense that nothing is wrong. It was already years since grandma did nothing else but nurse the old man in the window seat bed. My mother did little else but wait for letters, read them, write her responses, and then sit in her room hoping she wouldn't see what was happening in the front room. The doctor. who soon was coming every morning on his way to work and in the evening when it was already dark, said very little to anyone, much less to me, although he occasionally patted me on the head or chucked me under the chin. He would open his mouth to speak, but at most something like, “my my” would come out, and then he would go back into the dark street.

One morning a rabbi visited our house. He was dressed in a black suit, had a black hat, and very black eyes. He sat next to grandpa for a short while, and then called the other grown-ups to the kitchen table. He slowly sipped the glass of tea that grandma made for him. He drummed his fingers on the table. No one spoke for several minutes. Then my grandmother said that it was very nice of him to come, but. “Of course, the old man did not go to shul and spent his whole life fighting against tuchas warmers fromk the Old Country and he couldn't see the point of his starting now.”

 But the rabbi smiled and stroked his beard. “You have to be prepared,” he said. “Even when the worst is happening over there, we have to be prepared and not let this latest Haman win by not being prepared for the worst, God forbid.”

 My mother kept staring down at the table. Grandma whispered that his whole life the old man thought about his family in the Old Country and now when they needed him it was too late. 

“They should have come over when he invited them. He would have sent the money, but they were so stubborn, those old-fashioned people. His father was a fanatic and his mother, Givalt!  They could all be here with us.”

            “But no one could have expected this,” the rabbi said. “It has never been so bad.”

“So where then is your big shot God then?” Grandma asked.

“That's no reason not to be prepared,” he answered, and then he explained what would happen and what they would be expected to do.

“Stop it,” my mother shouted. “It isn't time yet. It's not true,” she said, and then she ran into her bedroom.

“Remember to help him turn against the wall and say the shma, and then you can call me“ the rabbi said, as he got up, put on is heavy black coat, and left the house.

After he left, grandma looked for me, and found me in my usual warm and secret hiding place behind the big plush chair.

“What does he think we are, savages?” she said.

I had no idea what she was talking about. It was all part of the war. Still, it was a good thing I was getting to be a big boy because the grown-ups hardly paid any attention to me any more. I tried to think of the secrets they were always talking about but the more I tried to think hard about such things the more my imagination was drift away about the big blocks I liked to play with at kindergarten or I would all asleep. I am sure that I often fell asleep behind the big plush chair, like a bear in cave hibernating, and yet I never awoke there, always in my bed, always in my pyjamas and neatly tucked up in the blankets.

Nor was school much fun any more. My mother walked me there every morning and after a while I was going back after lunch as well, and she would say it was good for me, although I knew she meant it was good for her and grandma also would say:  “It is good for the boy to be out of the house while the old man just lies there.”

The kindergarten class was on the first floor of the big school on Fort Hamilton Parkway. The bigger boys played with the blocks most of the time, and I was only able to get a brief chance to play with them when the teacher took them apart to make them sing songs. But I thought about the blocks all the time, or dreamt that I was playing with them, and could draw pictures of myself playing with the locks, though no one recognized what the pictures represented. The blocks could be dangerous weapons—tanks, cannons, or airplanes—as well as buildings being bombed or the bombs and people being blown apart. The other children, girls and boys, had lots of fun. They sang songs, they danced, they splashed milk at each other. I was always at war, playing with the blocks or dreaming about the blocks. I could be a soldier like my father and fight the terrible enemies, or I could shoot at him with big cannons, bomb him with long heavy blocks. The teacher had to remind me to drink my milk.

***

A child does not understand the seriousness of war or death. He thinks an old man asleep all day in the window seat by the front of the house is already dead.

***

In class, one day, the teacher sat down next to me and asked me what I was playing. I told her about the old man, who I explained was my grandfather, and that he was dying or probably already dead, but she asked me if I were worried about my father, and I said I wasn't but I started to throw blocks and she made me quieten down or I would have to sit under the piano in the comer because that was naughty to do. Melvin, one of the worst of the bullies, sometimes sat under the piano when he was naughty. The teacher had told us he was upset because of news about his father who was over there but still, she said, we couldn't go around bullying other people, could we, even though it was hard to be quiet during a war?

That day I asked the teacher, when she sat down next to me to help me drink my milk, if I could be a bully because I was worried about my daddy too. She didn't answer immediately, which was strange, and then she said it was not really a very good idea because little soldiers on the home front had to be brave too. Of course, I was rather relieved when she said this because I didn't want to be a bully at all.

“What would you really like to do? She asked.

“I want to play with the big blocks all morning. By myself.”

A child doesn't realize—How could he?—that what goes on in a war is both a game and not a game. The ancient poets knew this; and you don't have to believe it was because they lived in the childhood of the human race. In their heroic songs they showed the same events over and over. Sometimes it happens first in a dream or in a prophecy of shaking leaves or in a mural painted on a temple wall; then again it happens in the hero's actions; and then it happens in a recollection, an analogy or an allusion. The unassuming modem reader, taught to look only at the surface of things and search carefully for personal feelings, misses the depth of the epic singer's subservience to the Muse because he does not see the sound of words, the shape of the spelled cipher on the page, the little fragments of roots and etymology locked away inside other words. We are taught to read logically and as though everything were happening now or in a novel. Sometimes we have a sense that something is amiss, that the door to meaning was left ajar and an alien being has sneaked inside the sentence and is crawling about pretending to speak in the languages we understand, while along these foreign creatures are have gobbled up the letters in a word or the glow of an image and make a false show of being the other they have devoured or sucked dry from within. We forget to ask the important little questions that would make a passage spring back into life. We are afraid to be afraid in our readings and keep pretending we are masters of the text and its messages.

A child does not understand the grown-up world but knows when he is afraid and also knows that some things are deliberately being hidden from him behind pretty sounds and soothing pictures. He knows the language of the adult world is at war with him and he fights back in the only way he can, subversively, with scribbles and silly questions. He knows that words can be swords in the thick sleepy shadows of a big plush chair, and worlds are whirled away in the motes and sparkles of the late afternoon light shining down on an old man's dying face. No child can express his rage when he is crushed down by his innocent age, rushed out of the room carried into oblivion.

---

[*] This was published originally as“The Obsession with War: Aggression and Deceit. A Simple Almost True Story” in I Want to Speak of Tenderness: 50 Writers for Anne Ranasinghe, ed. Gérard Robuchon (Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 2003)  pp. 328-340.