Minna Street

If you travelled down the streets of Boro Park along the wider road that was and still is Thirteenth Avenue, moving, that is, from say 50^th Street to 49^th to 48^th and so on down to 39^th Street, 38^th, 37^th, eventually and suddenly it would be as though you entered a whole new world.  The atmosphere was different, as was the architecture, the aromas and the sense of reality.  It was not just that New Utrecht Avenue had veered away and Fort Hamilton Parkway angled itself closer than it had been for a mile or more, or that Greenwood Cemetery had emerged to be a part of the landscape, though still unseen.  Nor was it that the two major subway lines of the BMT, the West End and the Sea Beach trains—called subways although they had already come up out of the underground tunnels and hovered on the tall tracks two storeys above the street level—converged and then went off at radical angles to make their way through Brooklyn towards Coney Island.  No, it was that suddenly, without warning, the numbered streets and avenues themselves would disappear off the map, replaced by strange, exotic names like Church Avenue and Louisa Street, Clara Street, Tahama Street, and Minna Street, each short, small, off at an angle, and lacking shops and familiar style houses. Everybody is patriotic and hangs out flags on holidays.  Hooray, hooray, hooray!

            Familiar in Boro Parl, therefore, means having buildings two or three stories high, for the most part, made of bricks, and the colour of the bricks was kind of brownish red close to orange and sometimes for a design on the top floor was yellow, gleaming like the sun in an image of the great civilizations of the ancient world, like Ur of the Chaldees. These houses had stoops with ten steps proper for playing ball games, five points for catching without a bounce from the flat part and ten for the pointy part, and twenty five if you could get the last little thin white band next to the doorway.   Now, however, on the other side of the nearly forbidden lands, the architecture was unfamiliar, as was the layout of the streets, and even the kind of shops and people.  For here were wooden sheds, an ice factory, a stable for horses, little fields where used to be victory gardens, and strange people.  The buildings here were small and had two stories, row type houses, made of grey or brown stone, with little gardens in front and also in back, with stoops only four or five steps up.  It was as though you entered a magical little village that time had forgotten, and you felt, when you thought about it, like those children who were lost in the deep dark forests of the Old World and then suddenly found themselves in a clearing in front of a witch’s cabin or a woodsman’s hut.  Even today, wherever I am, if I see such little houses with American flags waving on the porch, I think in my kind of Minna Street and of a little girl shouting in sheer joy.  If only it could have been forever after, all that happiness and exuberance—if only.

As you had walked or biked down Thirteenth Avenue and passed the big rose-coloured concrete Public Market building, the smells from the Jewish peddlers and the stores transformed into other stalls and stands with the savoury and pungent odours of Sicily and Naples—big fat yellow and orange cheeses that hung down from the ceiling, different marbled salamis that were curly or oblong, and wonderful Italian breads with magnificent crusts.  By the way, were anyone to venture still further along towards Macdonald Avenue and Prospect Parkway, everything was far more strange, intimidating and big, for you would then leave Boro Park altogether and be, my God! in the heart of Brooklyn itself.  But I don’t want to tell you about near fantasies. 

We must stay close together in time and space from now on.

            What I want to tell you about today, however, is this little enclave of smallish streets with women’s names.  For it was on Minna Street that my father’s parents, Grandma Leah and Grandpa Jake lived—before they moved up to the Bronx, a shift that marked the end of my early childhood.  Of all the boroughs in New York City only the Bronx is on the mainland; all the rest are on islands, some large and some small, all at any moment, it seemed, perhaps to be shaken loose from their moorings and beginning to drift out into the ocean drawn back not all too reluctantly to the strange places on the other side.

To get to Minna Street, we could all walk together, my father, sometimes my mother, myself, though my sister was too small and perhaps was not even born yet; whereas to the Bronx you had to travel a long time, two or three hours on the subway, or two hours by car, when we had our own automobile to drive by ourselves.  Grandma and Grandpa moved up there to the very top of the Bronx by the reservoir and the park because my Uncle wanted them close to him.  That was what children were told, but somehow in the eyes of grown-ups you could see something else, something painful and sad.  For up there, on the boundaries of the city, with West Chester and Upstate glaring down from Bear Mountain and the Catskill Mountains, there was nature and the environment, and even, it was whispered, America.

Now back to the Bronx, however.  Apartment buildings there are taller and, except for the few big parks, there are no little gardens for children to play in or for older people to grow their vegetables and flowers.  In the days I am talking about, they all lived in the Project, the Amalgamated, the dwellings built for union members,  with my grandparents, that is, my uncle, aunt, and my two girl cousins, one my age and one still virtually a baby.  There were no colourful banners flapping in the wind, and no youthful exaltations of patriotic fervour. 

Minna Street was different from anywhere else I had ever been to visit.  Everything and everyone was different, different people alive, different people dead, and a different world around me.  You walked all the way down Thirteenth Avenue, and then you saw two things.  What did you see?

First you saw a tall, thin wooden building painted gray.  It was the icehouse.  When I saw it, it didn’t have ice, but my father told me, because he remembered, that in the olden times, in the winter, men would go down to the river and cut big blocks of ice, and then they would bring the large chunks in horse-driven carts to the ice house, cover the blocks in sawdust, pile them way up to the top of the building, and it would last all through the spring, the summer, and into the fall, so people could have pieces in their ice boxes at home, and the butcher and the fish monger could have pieces in their shops, and the candy store owners could keep cold the ice cream and soda water they wanted to sell.  What I remember was the night the icehouse burnt down.  We had recently moved to our own house on 47^th Street, so it was early in 1947.  A mystical conjunction of numbers.  That night the sky was a jagged crimson red streaked with yellow.  There was lots of noise in the streets all around.  Fire engine trucks came by with bells and sirens.   From our house, you could see ominous black plumes of smoke, and then above them the red glow.  I ran and ran, and the closer I got the more the sky was covered by the heavy smoke and the smell was terrible.  By the time I had run just two streets down Thirteenth Avenue, cinder was falling and policemen stopped people from going any further.  More and more fire appliances screamed into the darkness.  For this reason, everything about the fire is from my imagination.  It all happened like in the movies, the old-fashioned silent kind, or in a dream when the whole world comes to an end.  Dalmatian dogs, who rode along with the firemen, barked, and jumped off the trucks when they came near the icehouse. These spotted hounds knew how to sniff out people hidden in smouldering and smoking buildings.  

In the morning there was a lot of black pieces of wood and a terrible stink.  Then it was gone, the old ice house.  Later, somehow, there was just an empty lot, and eventually, who knows how, there were new houses there, and very few people remembered what had been there before.  This is, by the way, not a digression, something off the mark, but a way of preparing you for the main point of my story.  You have to remember that I am talking about the end of one universe of experience  and the failure of another to properly materialize itself.

The other thing you saw as you left the familiar part of Boro Park where I lived, so that you knew for sure you were leaving the familiar and normal, and were coming to a different kind of place, was a big open field, so big three or four houses might have fit onto it, and it was covered with grass, but it didn’t have junk, so it was not an empty lot, and in the corner was a shed that was a stable, and in that stable there were three horses who also were allowed to wander about the field and to nibble the grass.  One horse belonged to the muscular iceman who delivered the cold chunks to people’s houses, and also up many flights of stairs to apartments in the buildings that were in our neighbourhood, and to the stores along the avenue that needed ice.  Another horse was owned by the fruit and vegetable man who came around our street every few days selling fresh produce.  The old and gnarled Italian went slowly up and down the narrow one-way streets, clippity-cloppity, crossing the wide avenues, and stopped whenever a housewife waved to him from her window.  He waited patiently until she came down out of her house, walked over to the wagon, and, when she arrived, he discussed important news of the day with her, and then he helped her choose what he had for sale on that particular day.  The last horse was really not a horse but a pony.  I used to think it was a baby horse when I was very small, and then I found out the difference between ponies and colts, and this was very definitely a pony.  The pony belonged to the merry-go-round man who only pulled his little cart in the summers.  He too was very small, hardly taller than the children who would race out into the street when they heard him coming.  He would pull up in front of one house on every street and start to wind the little moving disk on his cart on which there were three tiny carved wooden and painted horses, just the same size as the horsy chairs in the barbershop, and when this very very old man with his scraggily beard cranked the handle to make the tiny carousel go around, the machine made music like an organ-grinder, a little old-fashioned tune only a few measures long which played over and over, slow or fast depending on the speed he turned the handle.  Children would come with nickels and they would sit, three at a time, to ride round and round on this miniature carousel, how long depending on how many boys and girls were waiting to ride and how many nickels each one had.  There were other horses that came through Boro Park in those days—for the I-cash-clothes man, for the knife-grinder, for the special and rare sellers of used furniture or collectors of scrap metal—but these steeds didn’t live on the field around the corner from Minna Street and across the road from where the icehouse used to be before there were houses built on it.

By the way, this description about horses is also not a digression but a preparation and a symbolic key to what will not follow.  You see, I have to explain everything to you, my dear readers, because I am telling you about experiences that are not like what people from today can easily understand or reproduce merely from a few general words: I have to create from old words that are probably unfamiliar to you that you may understand patterns of speech, with special tones and textures, that all together I hope will give you an idea of what it was I am trying to say in these memories of strange adventures beyond 47^th Street  Of course, such memories cannot be exact.  I was very young and did not understand all the things that went on around me, and because they either were so normal I paid little attention to them or so strange I didn’t know what to make of them, I have to add this, delete that, make a twist of something and a different twist of something else.  It all has to be turned like a kaleidoscope, the same little pieces of broken glass but in new mosaics, with new glittering patterns.  Also because I don’t want you to think because I use my imagination that  everything I tell you is just make believe or not even true at all, it behoves me to tell you what I am doing, or trying to do, because such a great writer I know I am not, that everything you could understand from hints and clues.  You have to help me by using your own imaginations too.

Imagine this.  Two events stand out in the history of the house of my Grandpa and my Grandma Leah (the ones who not so long afterwards moved to the Bronx) on Minna Street when I was a just a little pisher.  One has to do with my architectural feat, the other with my baby cousin’s exclamation when she was standing out on the front porch overlooking Minna Street.  In addition, though it wasn’t an event or act or a process, something else always stands out in my memories, and that is the brightly painted porcelain rooster that stood by the porch door and was used in the summer as a stopper to keep the door from banging in the wind.  This magnificent rooster, white, red and green, was in the time I most remember as tall as I was because this was when I was not yet as tall as Grandma herself.  You can measure all the other facts in this story by this device.  But you really can’t because it was probably broken during the move northwards, for I don’t ever recall seeing it in the new apartment on the Parkway near the reservoir way up at the top of the Bronx.

Now, let me see.  Yes, we are ready to begin.  I don’t recall exactly when or why, but as long as my memories exist, for whatever reason, I was engaged in a major engineering feat, that is, I sat down in the corner of the wall that divided the two houses that were joined together, now-a-days called a fancy-shmancy name of duplex, the corner where the front wall and the side wall met, and, using an old grey soup spoon I had found somewhere or other, slowly and patiently, with infinite patience and great imagination—for I always imagined I was digging some grand canal or subway tunnel—I twisted and turned the blade into the plaster.  We surely did other things when we visited my grandparents on Minna Street: there were seder meals to eat, birthday parties to celebrate, visiting relatives to welcome, conferences to attend on important family matters….but all I can remember is sitting quietly in the corner, perhaps humming a monotonous tune, maybe talking to myself about the project in hand, slowly grinding a spoon into the wall.  Day after day.  Week after week.  Month after month.  But surely not year after year.  Time for a child is not the same as for an adult, but more like the illusion of events occurring in a dream. 

There never seemed to be a pile of plaster dust when I arrived nor when I left.  One day, however, wonderful to tell, the digging tool broke through the wall, light shone, and the other side, where Mr and Mrs DeSantos, the Italian family, lived.  When this happened, I sat in the corner stunned—what had I accomplished?  How long I sat there in silence I do not know, but at some point the grown-ups must have noticed, my father and mother hovered over me, saying something unrecollected but it was something that made my nose sting and my eyes were getting ready to tear because I guess they were telling me that what I had done was naughty.  Yet before any teardrops could fall, something else happened.  Someone was laughing.  More than one person.  Many voices, some close, some more distant.  The nearby voices were my grandparents, Grandpa Jack who was very tall in those days, way over six feet, and strong because he was working in the markets and travelling down to the South, and Grandma Leah who was always small and gentle, though small I didn’t realize until I reached the age of twelve and was taller than she.  They were praising me.  “A fency hengineer, this kid.  Hoo-ha! he’ll grow up a regular genius and make skyte skreppers yet.”  The distant voices were coming through the wall and then coming through the front door.  “He’s a finally make a da break tru, this boy of yours.  I am no tink he ever be finish.  What a we gonna do now, hey Jacky?  Maybe we charge a toll for d’ trains.  I’m a like a dat.  We be a better neighbours now, hokey dokey?”  By then everybody was laughing, even my father and mother, and then Uncle Martin and Aunt Hannah too. 

Now the other event I want you to imagine has to do with my little cousin Sybil.  The strangest thing is that I can’t recall it all as an actual event, and perhaps I was not even there when it happened.  But I remember it because it is part of my memory of those times.  She was merely a toddler.  Bright, chubby and chirpy.  This is what everyone always told me.  And it was probably the summer.  The fourth of July, and though my birthday, what happened had nothing to do with me.  It was Independence Day and therefore there was an American flag on the front porch of my grandparents’ house on Minna Street, as there were on most houses on this and other streets, all the inhabitants, Italian and Jewish, eager to show their love of the country that had taken them in as immigrants one and two generations before, especially in those years right before and after the First and then the Second World War, when so many had lost husbands and sons and whole families.  Red, white and blue, forty-eight stars: hooray, hooray, hooray!

Since I have no vivid memory of what went on at this time, all that I recall is that in later years it became a family catch-phrase to repeat what Sybil said that summer.  Her father and mother must have been there and her big sister Rebekka.  Little Sybil must have stood on the porch, looked at the star spangled banner and all the other red, white and blue flags on Minna Street and she shouted: Vlaggie! Vlaggie!  Over and over again.  In that little repeated word all our cultural and ethnic differences and all our strangenesses melted away.  It is the main memory I have of her.  There are a few other moments, but they are blurred, with no context.  She is a middle-aged woman and sits at a table by herself and smokes.  She is sometimes thin and sometimes chubby and when eats too much and grows fat, she becomes older again and is anorexic.  In my mind, she is always in that other house, always silent, never a full person.  What I recall of her then comes from that one afternoon sometime in the late 1940s on Minna Street, that strange, anomalous enclave of Boro Park, virtually out of time and space.

Vlaggie! Vlaggie!

It was a triumphant cry, in all its childish ecstasy, and yet it seemed beyond our understanding, and we would hardly have guessed this was all anyone could  remember of those times.