Cheer Leaders in Boro Park

Can you imagine such a thing?

The crowd roared.  The cheer-leaders did their acrobatic routine.

Benito, Benito,

Benito Mussolini,

Umpapa, umpapa….

The verses rolled out one after the other, and soon reached the most mysterious cry:

Alamen, alamen

Alamen ticonda

And on it went, until it finally reached a rousing conclusion in the tried and true college cheer:

Ishkas pishkas

Kick’em in the kishkas.

Then everyone jumped up, the crowd with their arms waiving, the beautiful and muscular girls in the cheering squad, and how they all cheered. But cheered about what?

At the time, long ago in the other world of our youth, a few of us may have known who Mussolini was because, after all, our neighborhood in Brooklyn was part Jewish and part Italian, and as much as most if the local Italians disapproved of the Fascist regime back in the Old Country, they also took a certain mixture of pride in his vaunting ways and a bizarre superior delight in his ridiculous antics, not least in the invasion of Ethiopia—and in how long it took Il Duce to defeat the naked savages over there. 

No one back then, even before I was young enough to remember, I am pretty sure, could have worked out the allusion to Germany in the word alamen—or was it some more subtle reference to El Alamein?  But considering that this was the part of the chant that was likely the oldest, going well back before the Second World War, if not further even, and the identification in either case is unlikely.

Ticonda?  Could it have anything to do with Ticondaroga and the Indian wars?  Probably not.  It was and is a complete mystery.

Kishkas we all knew.  Guts.  If nothing else in Yiddish, this was one of the few dozen words and phrases that were intrinsic to our speech and thought. 

And pishkas?  Obviously it was related to pish and pishikers and other words for piss, urine, and the organs from which it flowed, and hence too the kind of people, that is, children, who have no control over their bladders.  It reminded me of my sister’s little girl friend, a girl of five or less, from a refined home, so assimilated they thought themselves as American as the goyim, who would say, “I must meticulate”, when she “had to go wee-wee.”  She was sure to have been one of those who grew up to run a crowd who talked about “going to the flicks” instead of “to the movies.”  They were the kind of girls who would look me straight in the eye if I dared ever to approach them and, before the words asking them out for a date came into my mouth, they would say, “Well, I could like you as a friend, but as a boy—no way.”

But why was this crowd roaring?  You would think it were a high school football game at some big stadium on an island in the East River.  But only because you take too literally the words “crowd” and “cheerleaders”.  You create a make-believe context of Andy Hardy movies or you read too much in the newspapers about the Roman Catholic Notre Dame University and Fordham College playing together at Thanksgiving or the Army versus Navy games on Christmas or New Year’s Day.  Are you totally mishuggah?  We are talking 47^th Street, stickball, a gang of a dozen or so Jewish kids, and voices in our imaginations.

Yes, in my imagination.  In the other kids’ heads, I should  know?  There could just be two or three of us tossing a ball around, you know, a Spalding fifteen cents pink and smooth high bouncer, and sometimes someone with the handle of a broom or a mop as a bat knocking it around, not an organized game, no rules, no innings or scores.  But all the same the voices inside my mind were busy and very loud.