28043877
On a cold, gray afternoon my wife and I visited the National Museum of American Jewish History at Fifth and Market streets. Although my wife is a first generation Italian-American and I am second generation, in a strange and wonderful way we have been influenced by Jewish culture. In visiting this gleaming, modern repository of Jewish history in America, we were visiting part of our own past.
My wife’s aunt married a Jewish man. Their children were raised as Jews. In those days inter-faith marriages were not much easier than marriage between the races. Some of the family were not very accepting, but not so my wife. Their relationship was warm and loving, and went beyond the normal familial ties when she went to work for her cousin’s travel agency. Some of them are now gone, but our ties have lasted with her cousin’s daughter and husband, and we hope into succeeding generations.
My own cultural background was enriched by the Jewish experience through happy circumstance. For most of the first seven years, I lived with my parents in an apartment house around Seventh and Jackson streets. We shared the building with Jews. I first took notice of the opposite sex when I found Bela, a beautiful playmate with flaming red hair. Our friendship was marked by our conspiracy to clog the toilets with toilet tissue. A spanking was meted out. But not to Bela, who was nowhere to be found when it was time for the punishment.
After I turned 7, my parents purchased a home on Fifth Street between Jackson and Wolf. The neighborhood had sharp dividing lines across religious and racial lines. The side streets below Jackson were mainly Irish with black families living on the side streets above Jackson.
The main street where we moved was Jewish. We were the first Italians to move there. Because we had spent time living a couple of blocks away, my parents were already comfortable living in a Jewish neighborhood. If I had any prejudices, Bela had pretty much wiped those away.
As my wife and I visited the various exhibits in the Jewish Museum, my thoughts went back to the old neighborhood. I saw evidence of how our cultural experience had mingled with that of the Jews. The faded photos of the immigrants passing through Ellis Island could easily have been the faces of our own relatives.
The photo of an old deli in New York looked very much like Stein’s Deli across the street from me where my mother would send me to buy green tomatoes and pickles from huge barrels (I can still smell the vinegar and dill spices), the chunks of unsalted butter that we had come to favor, the thinly sliced corned beef and pastrami, and smoked fish (which caused my non-Jewish friends to wrinkle up their nose in disgust, and a spicy stick of Jewish salami that mom called “butcherwurst.” There was a dairy store that only sold butter and eggs and a fish store where row upon row of fresh fish on ice fascinated a young boy.
Our neighborhood melting-pot was stirred vigorously once more when a Cuban-Jewish family moved next door. Cuba was in the grip of the Batista dictatorship when the Gold family left for America. There were five of them — the grandparents, their daughter and son-in-law, who was a kosher butcher, and an infant son, Sidney. Their English was touched by a musical mix of Yiddish and Spanish. We became great friends.
My mother grew very close with Paul’s wife, Hilda, a woman of bubbly emotions. She was like a daughter to mom. They traded recipes and shared life experiences, especially the difficulty of raising children. We watched Sidney grow up into a fine young man. My father was a retired policeman who worked as a runner in a law office in his later years. He helped Sidney get an internship at the law office. Today, he is an accomplished attorney. They should put that story in the Jewish Museum.
Not everyone accepted the mingling of cultures so graciously. I remember getting punched in the stomach by some young toughs who ran away shouting, “Christ killer.” That memory still lingers with me as an example of living, even if only for a brief moment, in the other guy’s shoes. As we passed an exhibit that depicted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg being sentenced to death for passing secrets about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, I recalled the hysteria surrounding that event, the angry charges being hurled at Jews that they were all communists.
South Philadelphia High School was an extension of the melting pot experience for me, as was Temple University. It was as if life were being planned for me as a learning experience for getting along with people who were different than me and yet were the same. Awaking from my self-absorption I realized, as we neared the end of our visit, that it wasn’t just my experience or my wife’s experience or even maybe your experience, dear reader.
It was just another piece of that colorful, vibrant, and yes, at times intolerant piece of tapestry that we know as the American experience.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
28043877
