Taking the Stand

1

Born and Religiously Educated in Brooklyn

Williamsburg and Boro Park

I was born on September 1, 1938, in a hospital--the first in my family not delivered at home. My parents lived in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, having moved as youngsters from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Their parents were Orthodox Jews who had emigrated from Poland at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.1 When my mother was pregnant with my brother, Nathan, who is four years younger than me, we moved to the Boro Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, where I grew up and where my parents remained until their deaths. The Boro Park of my youth was a Modern Orthodox community of second-generation Jews. Following the end of World War II, some displaced persons who had survived the Holocaust moved into the neighborhood. The current occupants of Boro Park are Chasidic Jews who have moved from Williamsburg seeking to re-create the shtetels of Eastern Europe. (My daughter Ella and her contemporaries now see Williamsburg as a cool neighborhood--a far cry from the "old country" where grandparents with Yiddish accents lived when I was growing up.)

My parents grew up in Williamsburg during the peak of the Depression. My mother, Claire, had been a very good student at Eastern District High School, graduating with honors at fifteen and a half. She then enrolled at City College in the fall of 1929--the first of her family to attend college. She was forced by her father's deteriorating economic situation to leave before the end of the semester. She worked as a bookkeeper, earning $12 a week.

My father, who was not a good student, attended Torah V'Daas--translated as "Bible and Knowledge"--Yeshiva in Williamsburg. He began to work during high school and never attended college.

My grandparents knew each other from the neighborhood. My grandfathers were both chazanim, cantors, who sang the Jewish liturgy in small synagogues, called shteebles. They were involved in the founding of several Jewish institutions, including a free loan society, a burial society, the Young Israel synagogue, and the Torah V'Daas Yeshiva.2 Their day jobs were typical for their generation of immigrants. Louis Dershowitz sold corrugated boxes. Naphtali Ringel was a jeweler. My grandmothers, Ida and Blima, took care of their children. Each had eight, but two of Blima's died of diphtheria during an epidemic. My mother, Blima's second surviving child, nearly died during the influenza outbreak of 1917, but according to family lore, she was saved by being "bleeded."

Born toward the end of the Depression and exactly a year to the day before the outbreak of the Second World War, I was the first of more than thirty grandchildren on both sides of my family.

My maternal grandfather had been married to my grandmother's older sister, who died during childbirth, leaving two children. Pursuant to Jewish tradition, he then married the younger sister, my grandmother Blima, who was fifteen. In the 1930s, he traveled to Palestine by boat. Having little money, he worked as a mashkeach--the person whose job it was to make sure the Kosher food was ritually acceptable--to earn his fare. Once in Palestine, he purchased a small parcel of land on which he someday hoped to build a home, but he quickly realized that he couldn't earn a living there and returned to Brooklyn. Several years later, he suddenly died. Since I was a toddler, I knew him only through family memories and sepia photographs. My grandmother, who still had three unmarried daughters at home, one son in the army, and another in California,3 could not afford to maintain her apartment, so my family moved in and my father paid the rent. We took in a border to help with the expenses, and I shared a room with her. After about a year, we moved to our own small apartment and then to the two-and-a-half-family house in which I grew up.

My paternal great-grandfather, Zecharja, who was the first of us to arrive in America in 1888, died in 1921 at age sixty-two. His wife, Lea, died in 1941, at age eighty-two, and I vaguely remember her.

My family has now been in the United States for more than half of our nation's existence. Most of Zecharja's numerous descendants have been very religious and relatively poor, giving rise to the family quip that the Dershowitzes have the lowest rate of wealth to time in America of any Jewish family.4 My grandfather Louis Dershowitz died when I was fifteen (he was seventy-one), so I knew him as a child. Though poor, he was respected for having saved many relatives from the Holocaust, by creating "jobs" for them as rabbis, cantors, ritual slaughterers, and other religious functionaries. The questionable affidavits he had concocted to "make up" these jobs helped to secure visas for twenty-eight of his European relatives, who arrived in America just before the outbreak of the war. A twenty-ninth relative, a young girl who was studying the violin in Poland, was trapped. My grandfather refused to give up on her, sending his oldest, unmarried son--my uncle Menash--into the belly of the beast to find and "marry" her, so she could come to America. Although the marriage was supposed to be a sham, it lasted for more than fifty years, ending with their deaths less than a year apart.

Both of my grandmothers, Blima and Ida, lived to ripe old ages (Blima into her nineties, Ida into her eighties), and I knew them well. Blima played a significant role in my upbringing, since my mother worked and "Gramma Ringel" was always there to serve me milk and her homemade cookies when I came home from school.

Among my earliest memories were vignettes from the Second World War, which ended when I was nearly seven. I can see my father pasting on the Frigidaire door newspaper maps depicting the progress of Allied troops. I remember hearing radio accounts, in deep, stentorian voices, from WOR (which I thought spelled "war"), announcing military victories. I can still sing a ditty (sung to the tune of the Disney song from Snow White):

Whistle while you work

Hitler is a jerk

Mussolini is a meanie

And the Japs are worse5

The comic books we read during the war always pitted the superheroes against the Nazis and the "Japs," and I wanted to help. I decided that if Billy Batson could turn into Captain Marvel by simply shouting "Shazam!," so could I. And so, after making a cape out of a red towel, I jumped out of the window yelling "Shazam!" Fortunately, I lived on the first floor and I only sustained a scraped knee and a bad case of disillusionment.6

When I was four years old, German spies landed on Long Island in a submarine. Although they were quickly captured, there were rumors of other planned landings. If I couldn't help our war effort by turning myself into a superhero, at least I could look out for German spies. Over the next few summers, which my family spent in a rented room near Rockaway Beach, a police officer paid us kids a penny a day to be on the lookout for "Kraut subs." We took our job seriously and spotted a few suspicious objects that turned out to be birds, or flotsam and jetsam.

I remember both VE (Victory in Europe) and VJ (Victory over Japan) days. There was dancing in the streets, block parties, and prayers. Our soldiers, including several of my uncles, were coming home. (My father received a medical deferment because he had an ulcer, which my mother said was caused by my bad behavior.)7

We weren't told of the Holocaust or Shoah, just that we had lost many relatives in Europe to Hitler (Yemach Sh'mo--"May his name be erased"). We cheered Hitler's death, which, according to a Jewish joke, we knew would occur on a Jewish holiday--because whatever day he died would be a Jewish holiday!8

The "greenies" (recent immigrants, "greenhorns") who moved to Boro Park from the displaced persons camps never talked about what had happened "over there." The tattooed numbers on their arms remained unexplained, though we knew they were dark reminders of terrible events. Even my grandfather rarely talked about the noble role he had played in saving family members, because he knew how many friends had lost relatives in Europe. My maternal grandparents lost nearly all their families, except for one couple who had managed to emigrate to Palestine before the war.

I grew up in a home entirely free of any racial prejudice. My parents admired black leaders (we called them "Negro" or "colored"). My father, who sold men's work clothing and underwear, had several black customers, whom he treated as equals. My favorite college professor was black. Once every two weeks my mother hired a "cleaning woman" to dust and help her with the house. Some were black. Some were white. A few were Jewish immigrants. The only bigotry I remember was directed against Hungarian Jews by my maternal grandmother. She had obviously brought her prejudice with her from Poland. Following the end of World War II, several Hungarian Jewish families moved into the neighborhood. My grandmother immediately expressed a dislike. I recall her joking about the recipe for a Hungarian omelet: "First steal two eggs!"