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Long Time Passing
by
Harry Buschman
The "Tenement" stories were written from memory. They were seen through the
eyes of a young Brooklyn boy who did not see all the sadness and drudgery of
life that his parents did. Nonetheless, they are an accurate picture of family
life within those five-story wall to wall dwellings in New York City between
the great wars.
Today middle America can not fully understand what times were like in the
beginning of the 20th Century. They are not understood by many New Yorkers as
well. America is a big country now -- much bigger than it was in the twenties.
Most of us have some degree of breathing room about us -- our own space -- a
window to look out of. We have heat and light and a phone on the kitchen wall.
We
turn on a television set and watch news happen -- while it happens, in many
ways we make it happen.
We didn't know much about America in my day. The little we knew was limited
to our personal experience. The subway would take us from one end of our world
to the other -- from the sand and sea of Coney Island, to the forests of the
Bronx. The morning newspaper told us of far away cities but they didn't concern
us. We would never see these places. None of us could understand why America
would go to war because of an assassination in Europe or help people
devastated by an earthquake in San Francisco. They were foreign places to us, as
alien
as the moon. We would never see them, we weren't even sure they existed. We
were sentenced to life like prisoners within the four brick walls of our
apartment in Park Place -- people above us, below us and on both sides.
You can read Jacob Riis -- and he'll tell you far better than I how such an
environment affected the children of the tenements and how it colored their
adult lives forever. All I can tell you are the things I remember well, and if I
seem indifferent to them, or if I find humor in situations I recall, it is
because the awful truth has been rubbed down smooth by a long time passing.
The first of the tenements were built in upper and lower Manhattan before the
turn of the century, and as the city grew, they expanded to Brooklyn and the
Bronx. A law was passed making them illegal, but there were already 86,000 of
them in Manhattan alone. The early tenements were six storys high and the
backs of them stood sixty feet from the backs of the tenements on the next
block.
They were built wall-to-wall with shafts that passed light down through
transoms and windows to the interior rooms. The bottom of the shafts were
littered
with rubbish thrown from the windows above.
A landlord could build a six-story tenement for as little as $25,000 on a
single 25 by 100 foot lot and collect rent from as many as twelve families. The
street fronts of the six-story tenements were a steel lattice work of fire
escapes from the sixth to the second floor of each unit. We slept on them in the
summer and kept our food cold on them in the winter. In an old book by Moses
King written in 1893 it was recorded that there were as many as 3500 residents
living along one city street. He extrapolated that a square mile of such
tenements would house 1,000,000 people.
The danger of fire, disease, crime and ethnic friction threatened all of us.
There was no central heating, we carried red hot kerosene stoves from room to
room to warm our bedrooms. Fires were a common occurrence in winter, and while
the fire department could cope with outbreaks on the ground floor and
basement, it was difficult to reach the apartments above. No government agency
kept
records of disease and there was no way to take a census except by estimate. In
short it was a Ghetto, pure and simple -- a Ghetto in the new world, and
although the city eventually outlawed the tenements, it could not make the
decision retroactive. Where would they put the people?
The people! "yearning to breathe free." They came from the four corners of
the earth. To America, where every golden paved street led to a life of freedom
and independence. Where every man could find security and a future for his
wife and children. Thank God there were jobs to be had. New York was a seaport,
a
center of commerce and a place where a craftsman could make a living doing
what he learned in the old country.
Every worker was confined to a small space on the factory floor. He traveled
to and from his job on the subway, shoulder to shoulder with strangers he
never spoke to. He and his family lived in a crowded building yet he didn't know
his neighbor's name. He might grunt a wary good morning to someone he passed on
the stair, but more than likely he would pass them by without looking. He was
never alone, yet if he needed help in a family emergency there was no one he
could turn to. The walls were thin, and there were sounds and smells of other
families surrounding him night and day -- strange tongues -- strange odors --
strange rites of worship. You might think this closeness would bring people
together and foster understanding, but instead it bred estrangement and distrust
and left a lasting wound.
Children were a different story, they played together. They learned the
fascinating language of English in the schools they attended, a language they
rarely heard at home. In the middle of all the mistrust and suspicion their
parents
felt for their neighbors, the children developed a common bond of fellowship
with kids their own age. They called each other Kikes, Wops and Niggers,
Polacks, Micks and Guineas. There was no resentment -- none of them got excited
--
after all, that's what they were. None of them took their heritage seriously
.... they were young Americans and each of them had an equal shot at life in
the only world they had ever seen.
It was the English language that bonded them. That beautiful and flexible
tongue that borrowed so much from the old world. They spoke it fluently in their
own company and then lapsed clumsily into German, Italian or Polish at home.
With every passing day they drifted farther from the shores of the old
country, farther from their families. They were a family of the young.
My friend Ernie's father, a pants cutter in the garment district, would nod
to me as he sat at the dining room table and turned the pages of his Jewish
Daily -- "Oy, Ernie's little goyem friend," then it was back to the Jewish news.
The 'Promised Land' he never saw and never would see. I never saw Ernie's
father, Moshe, without a yarmulke, I never saw him in the street without his
skin
tight black coat and black fedora -- regardless of the heat or the cold. He
would not dress for the weather, he dressed for Palestine. America opened its
doors to him and like the kid at the bakery store window he stood outside
looking in. Ernie, with no interest in his heritage would be an American, his
father
would not.
Our friend Ralph was a nigger from Atlantic Avenue. Oh, that "N" word! So
hateful now, but spoken so naturally then, without bitterness or rancor. Ralph's
mother, with skin like brown velvet, soft and sweet smelling, welcomed us
whenever we trailed in from the street -- "you childs gotta be hungry .... here,
try these, they just come from outta the oven." Shrimps and fried bananas,
chicken wings and refried beans. We ate tentatively, never having tasted such
strange things before, and we thanked the good Lord for giving us Ralph as a
friend. I ask you how! -- how in the name of God can we be so far apart today?
Ralph Mandeville didn't move up with us to PS 9, and that was the first tier of
bricks in the wall of mutual distrust that still stands between us. That wall of
black and white bricks .... we built it ourselves with our own hands. We
became strangers day by day, never really knowing why.
Of late, these years come back to haunt me, the people are gone now .... all
of them, and I often wonder why I have been spared for a time to write some
words of repentance for the wounds we inflicted on each other. It seems to me a
huge responsibility and I take it seriously. I will write these stories as
best I can with no excuses for the part I played in them. At the same time I
will
show, as fairly as I can that I was not the only guilty one. But, to be
honest, there are occasions in the middle of the night when I wake with a
nagging
conscience and remember a time when maybe I could have spoken a kinder word or
lent a hand -- done something that would have made our friendship last.
Life is so short -- friendship is so fleeting, and when it leaves on the
outgoing tide, it leaves not a wrack behind.
©Harry Buschman 1995
(1560)
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