“My God, he’s cross eyed!” That was the first thing my Aunt Adele said when she saw me quayside in New York, disembarking from the steamship that had carried us to safety from the hostile German Reich.
My mother, already dedicated to denial in all its forms was grievously wounded by this observation, although it was true she didn’t speak to my father’s beautiful seventh sister for years afterward.
Two years later, when I was five and about to enter kindergarten, my mother was forced to admit the possibility that my Aunt Adele’s observation may have been accurate. In those days every child starting public school got a thorough health check from the school nurse. She quickly determined that the vision in my left eye was barely 20/400 and that its erratic movements were totally unrelated to those of the other eye.
Having been brought up as a good German, my mother had to accept the nurses’ diagnosis; after all, she was an authority and wore a uniform. It was confirmed a few days later at the Children’s Eye Clinic of the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital where the word “Amblyopia” was inscribed on my records. I was promptly fitted for an embarrassing pair of standard-issue thick pink plastic-rimmed glasses.
The treatment for my disorder was tedious. For several hours every day I wore a black patch over my good eye to strengthen the muscles of the weaker one. Also, I had to look through an old-fashioned stereopticon viewer for at least an hour a day. The eye muscles grew strong enough to rid me of the cock-eyed appellation and through the stereoscope I became an expert on Egypt and the contents of the tomb of Tutankhamen as well as the construction of the Empire State Building. I soon threw my glasses away because they did nothing for my nearly blind left eye.
With just one functioning eye I was hopeless in sports that required hand/eye coordination like baseball or tennis; but I developed my physical strength in sports like rowing and wrestling and turned my competitive drive into intellectual games like chess.
Kindergarten was hell, both mentally and physically. The sunny ideal of an educational paradise for children didn’t work for me at PS 93. There were two teachers, one a dowager type with a Midwestern pile of coiffed blue hair who was the senior pedant. She had neither a sense of humor nor much empathy for her charges. Her assistant, much younger and a bit juicier, gave in to an occasional smile when blue-hair wasn’t watching.
Much of that kindergarten experience has faded into a hazy blur of unremarkable routine, though I do remember the daily ration of chocolate-covered graham crackers and the paper cups of cold fresh milk; and, seventy years, later I can still summon up the olfactory memories of glue, finger paints and all purpose oaktag construction paper.
I also remember the traumas. Blue-hair was a disciplinarian. She had a Republican idea of what constituted order. Whenever she sensed that the children in her charge might be acting like kindergartners, she ordered, “I want you to be absolutely still and quiet! Clasp your hands together on the table in front of you! Put you feet flat on the floor! KEEP YOUR KNEES TOGETHER!”
That last part was my special torment. I desperately wanted to obey, to be a good boy, to do exactly what the blue-haired lady wanted. Besides, I was scared to death that if I did not comply I would be subject to some horrible punishment. But, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much pain I endured, I could not bring my two knees together — I was bow-legged! Some nutritional deficiency had caused my legs to form like parentheses, making it physically impossible for me to keep my knees together no matter how hard I tried.
I sat at my little table in mortal fear of being outed. What would happen if Miss Blue-Hair discovered my knobby knees were always several guilty inches apart? What if she looked under the table? What if she learned my unwillful disobedience? Would she boil over in anger, enraged and sputtering to publicly ridicule and humiliate me? What draconian punishment would she exact? My God, what if she sent a note home to my mother?
“Dear Mrs. Abrahams,
Your son Fred does NOT keep his knees together when told. Please send him back to Germany at once!
Sincerely,
Miss Blue-Hair”
Another misery was the daily musical experience. Perhaps there is a syndrome that presents as a constellation of Amblyopia: bowleggedness and the complete inability to produce recognizable musical sounds. In my case the Musical aphasia included tone deafness, lack of rhythm, uncoordinated dance moves, and the inability to maintain pitch. In my mind I can hear and reproduce all sorts of beautiful musical sounds and phrases. The problem is that I cannot express these sounds audibly. They invariably come out as dissonant atonal unrythmic sounds.
Miss Blue-Hair saw herself as the Toscanini of the kindergarten world. Each day, after lunch she would summon the instruments of harmonic destruction: drums, penny whistles, recorders, triangles, cymbals, tambourines and cow bells. There was also a choral section. The musical selections included that nautical favorite Row, Row Your Boat, and an Elizabethan cantata, London Bridge (is Falling Down).
After a short-lived experiment on the cow bells, and an even shorter moment with the triangle, I was put in charge of distributing and retrieving the instruments. Eventually summer arrived and without ever having gotten my wayward knees under control I graduated to the 1stGrade.
Elementary school posed a new set of problems. My first language, of course, was German, and, although I learned to speak fluent New York peppered with street slang, I had an unacceptable speech impediment. German does not have a “th” sound as in “this” or “that.” PS 93 could not tolerate the “d” sound I produced instead; so three times a week I was pulled out of class and sent to Speech Therapy. Being taken out of class three times a week in order to learn to speak English properly was just one more thing that set a cross-eyed, bow-legged, speech-impaired refugee apart from his classmates. Gee, I wasn’t self-conscious or anything. It didn’t affect my self-esteem at all!
The human body does not like emotional misery, and my discomforts set me up for a severe middle ear infection, which in those pre-antibiotic days was life threatening. At first, my mother thought I was malingering when I complained of an ear ache. She gave me an aspirin and sent me to bed. The next day, after my fever spiked at 104°F, she decided a doctor might be helpful.
Dr. Altmann was well known and well respected in the German refugee community. An Ear Nose and Throat specialist from Berlin, it was rumored he had been forced to leave because he had refused to treat Hitler for a throat infection. True or not, he was an excellent physician and made house calls. While lying on my mother’s lap, Dr. Altmann put me to sleep with an ether-soaked handkerchief. There was the familiar ether smell and rotating image of colorful toy soldiers marching round in circles. He lanced my ear drums and drained the infected material that had built up behind them. I was swaddled in hot wet blankets that made me sweat profusely. My fever broke, and I was on the road to recovery, having missed three weeks of school.
When I returned I was far behind my class in vocabulary. The teacher called my mother in and gave her a word list to go over with me. There were about fifty words that I had to memorize. Unfortunately, the teacher had not considered the fact that, although my mother was literate in German, her knowledge of English was rudimentary. This turned out to be another educational disaster. My mother assumed that English and German were basically the same. So, every afternoon we would sit at the kitchen table and proceed to study the word list. My mother would point to the words and I would say them. The problem lay in the fact that the list contained a lot of “J” words.
In German the letter “J” it is pronounced like the “Y” in “you.” So, when I said “just” she would correct me, it’s “yust!” . She’d repeat it, louder and louder, “yust”, ”YUST”, “YUST” and I’d stare at her blankly. Finally she’d give up and we’d start on “juice” which she insisted was “yuse.” I can still feel the frustration as we fought at the kitchen table over the pronunciation of these words. I had no idea about accents, and she was convinced the illness had left me severely brain damaged, a belief she never quite overcame. It wasn’t pretty.
Fortunately, the problem didn’t carry over to school, I was quick enough to pick up the correct pronunciations from the class work, but the fights at home continued for weeks. I finally began reading Dictionaries.
In those days, New York streets were not only clean, they were also mostly free of cars because of wartime gas restrictions, and we kids took full advantage. We were city athletes playing stoop ball (where a pink ball (a “spaldine”) was bounced off the stoop steps), classic stick ball, street hockey, penny pitching, touch football, and handball. There were also marble tournaments — not the classic circle marble games of small town America, but a unique Metropolitan version that drew players from blocks around. Targets made from cigar boxes with cut-out slots were placed at the curb. A chalk line was drawn 12 feet away. The slots were marked according to size. Players would roll marbles at the targets. If a marble went through the slot they would win that number of marbles. If they missed, they lost their marbles to the owner of the spot. It was quite a sight. Thirty or forty players lined up on both sides of the street trying to roll marbles into the slots. Variations included “purees” smaller, clear marbles and oversized ones. Suddenly, without preamble, the marble season would start; and, just as suddenly, it would end and some new game would take its place.
At the western end of 93rd Street there is a small narrow Island park that houses an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc. This park was our territory for Ring-o-levio, Hide and Seek, and other war games. In the winter it was the place for snowball fights and constructing elaborate snow men.
Just two blocks away on West End and 95th sat a tennis club that was way beyond our means in the summer; however , as soon as the weather turned cold, the nets were removed, the courts froze over, and it became an inexpensive ice skating rink. We’d warm ourselves in the club house which had two wood burning stoves that glowed red from the fires within. A hot coca was a nickel. We went almost every winter day there.
In the evenings our whole family would gather around the radio after dinner and listen to the war news and variety programs, I remember the Sunday afternoon Texaco Metropolitan Opera broadcasts with Milton Cross which I actively disliked, and the somber fireside chats that cemented our relationship with FDR. We also listened to a comedy program called “Can You Top This” and a quiz show featuring precocious pre-adolescents answering really tough questions…where are you now Joel Kupperman?
During WWII New York schools made every effort to become part of the “home front.” They found numerous ways of participating in the war effort, both actively and symbolically. At PS 93, we participated in almost continuous scrap and paper drives, among other things. Students, parents and neighbors would donate in piles of old books, newspapers and magazines. I was one of the volunteers who sorted and bundled them. I was allowed to temporarily borrow those issues of Look, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, Popular Science, Time, the National Geographic or The Readers Digest I hadn’t read. I would take my prizes home, read them cover to cover and bring them back a few days later. For a young German Jewish immigrant boy the Readers Digest offered valuable lessons in both language and culture, particularly with its features like, “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” and the “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met.”
I spent much time with dictionaries, especially as I entered adolescence looking for the titillating words. I didn’t neglect the world of fine literature either: I was a devoted reader of Classic Comics (the Cliff Notes of that earlier era) which I augmented with contemporary literary excursions into the Saturday Evening Post for short fiction and (again) the Readers Digest Condensed Books for bowdlerized best sellers. I also acquired the habit of finding a particular authors’ works and hunting down everything they had written. This included Albert Payson Terhune who authored a huge body of fiction about hero animals, especially dogs; Nordoff and Hall who wrote the “Mutiny on the Bounty” series and other sea tales. I read all the Jules Verne standards; a few, like Michael Strogoff, his novel about Siberia, affected me more than Captain Nemo’s voyages. I read an occasional New Yorker magazine, but they were pretty much over my seven-year-old head. However, when I was eleven or so, I encountered “the best Magazine ever” in a doctor’s office and have read nearly every issue, cover to cover, since!
When my Mother discovered that I was reading this stuff in the classroom instead of the Run, Spot, Run that was on the curriculum, she was upset and complained to my teacher for allowing such liberties. It was unheard of in Germany for a student to read anything that wasn’t part of the class work. To her everlasting credit, my teacher, Miss Quinn, God Bless her, told my mother that she let me read what I wanted because the regular class reading would have bored me intellectually.
By the time I was nine I divided my afternoons between the St. Agnes branch of the New York Public Library and the Museum of Natural History. Frustrated because my age restricted me to the thick-paged picture books in the 2nd floor children’s section, I finally convinced the Librarians to give me access to the kaleidoscope of the main floor.
A class trip and weekend family outings exposed me to the treasures housed at the American Museum of Natural History. Alone, several times a week, I walked the twenty blocks from school to the museum. I wandered through the exhibition halls, awed by Akeleys’ massive central Elephant Group. I dreamt of paddling the Pacific in the great Polynesian outrigger canoe that stood near the lower level entrance. I spent hours in front of the life-sized animal dioramas, memorizing the names of all the creatures from the plaques on the wall. I knew all about Peary and Byrds’ Arctic expeditions from the National Geographic and I spent hours in front of the glass cases that displayed their sleds and artifacts, imagining myself an explorer fighting Polar Bears on the ever shifting ice floes. I wandered over to the Planetarium and ran my hands over the 34 ton Iron meteorite that Peary had brought back from Greenland.
As I gained confidence, I widened my range and sat in on anthropological lectures given by a maternal white-haired lady named Margaret Mead. On another day I would enter a room lined with rows tables with microscopes. There, a silver-haired man named Roman Vishniac was showing an assembled group of scientists the beauty of micro-photography. Noticing me, he put a wooden milk crate under my feet and opened my mind to a world of incredible color and abstract images.
I also wandered into films and lectures about great scientists like the Curies, Pasteur, and Koch‘s Magic Bullets. Once I attended a lecture by a gentle Mark Twain mustachioed doctor who was raising money for his hospital in the African village of Lambarene ... the Nobel winning savant named Albert Schweitzer.
Only in those more relaxed days was a very young old boy allowed to explore one of the world’s greatest repositories of knowledge without restrictions.
When it was hot in the summer, we would sleep out on the metal fire escape; during the day we’d run into the sprinkler spray on the playgrounds of Robert Moses’ newly built Riverside Park, an afterthought that framed the Henry Hudson Parkway. On Sundays we’d go on excursions to Coney Island where we spent hours in the Penny Arcades. The games actually cost only a penny or two. Sometimes we would ride the ferry to Staten Island which was a rural retreat within city limits. Every subway ride was an adventure; we would always ride in the first car of the IRT and stood by the window in the locked front door watching for rats on the dark track.
New York during WWII was a very different place from what it has become. For one thing, nearly every block on the west side of Manhattan had empty lots. They were often overgrown with weeds, but all provided play space for children. In those innocent days we were allowed to play outside without obsessive parental supervision. Roosevelt had said that the only thing we had to fear was “fear itself,” although on the west side of Manhattan fear seldom raised its’ head. We played all over the neighborhood and in the parks without fear of being abducted or molested. Oh, occasionally a bike or sled would be stolen, or some toughs from another neighborhood would steal our lunch money. Or occasional fights would result in a black eye or bruised cheek. And I once broke my left arm jumping over a park bench, whereas my brother dislocated his elbow falling into a curbside ditch. But those were normal events, exceptions, and not malicious acts.
As Europe became a battleground, an increasing number of refugees found their way to New York. Some trickled into PS 93, and because I was the resident refugee and an assimilated German speaker, I was assigned the job of helping new arrivals acclimate. It wasn’t a very demanding job. Within only two to three weeks every one of them was sufficiently fluent in English and able to keep up with the class work. Young kids are like sponges soaking up culture and learning as fast as the information is offered. There was no need for bilingual education or psychological counseling despite the fact that some of these kids had been through holocaustic events. They were here, safe and free; and they adjusted.
Another battle with my chronic virulent middle ear infections kept me home in bed so that when I finally joined my new fourth grade class, I had missed the first four weeks of school. Over the summer I had gotten water in my ears swimming in the Susquehanna River on the farm where we spent the summer. The life-threatening infection flared up just after we returned to the city. Again, the doctor came to our house and lanced my ear drums allowing the infection to drain away. I spent most of that September at home, recuperating. Since my mother had a part time job cleaning apartments, my only companion was the AM radio until she returned to make me lunch.
Day time radio in those days consisted of game shows and soap operas. I remember the radio as a visual, almost hallucinatory experience. I would see the events that were being portrayed on the air in my mind as if they were real.
The day would begin with THE BREAKFAST CLUB, a feel-good variety show little different in format from the morning TV offerings of today. The program started with the live studio audience (supposedly?) marching around the studio singing an inane ditty that went….”GOOD MORNING BREAKFAST CLUBBERS, WE’RE GLAD TO SEE YA.” I would visualize a ragged line of overstuffed Midwestern tourists in funny hats marching around the radio studio, four abreast, led by baton twirling teenage cheerleaders. I have no idea where this image came from, but every time I heard that theme, I would imagine this bizarre parade marching around the studio.
Next came the soap operas. My favorites were STELLA DALLAS about the social misadventures of a mother and her grown daughter in the Southwest. I always imagined them both padding around their house dressed only in slips. None of the story lines were memorable. Next, MARY NOBLE, BACKSTAGE WIFE, which was about the disordered life of Mary Noble, a benighted woman who was married to an oily Broadway matinee idol with an affected English accent. I can still hear the announcer portentously intoning the name of the program, but little else. My love of the legitimate theatre must have been ignited then.
The program highlight of each morning was QUEEN FOR A DAY, a non-transgender semi-game show that clearly foreshadowed what is now referred to as reality programming. Three female contestants would be interviewed by the cheery MC. They would recite heartbreaking stories about their misfortunes: the chronic and near fatal illnesses that were afflicting their large families; their tragic losses in hurricanes, floods and windstorms; the foreclosures of the family homestead because of drought or crop failure. Each contestant was more miserable and deserving than the next. Then the audience would vote by applause, and the most touching or deserving of these pathetic ladies would be selected as QUEEN FOR A DAY. The winner would be feted in New York City, showered with gifts of appliances, groceries, clothes, and even a “make over.” I remember one particularly touching case, a Kentucky lady whose house had lost its roof in a wind storm. Her three children were suffering from various harrowing illnesses like diabetes and tuberculosis; and her invalid ex-miner husband coughed constantly from black lung disease. According to formula, the MC asked her what she most wanted if she were selected as QUEEN FOR A DAY.
“I’d like a swimming pool for the kids,” she said wistfully, her priorities clearly in order.
School was in full stride when I walked into the new class and met my new teacher, Miss Taylor. She was a tall orange-haired stick figure, well known as a disciplinarian with some peculiar educational ideas. For one thing, perhaps because of her angular appearance, she despised cursive writing. In my previous four years of school I had developed a nice copperplate handwriting of which I was rather proud of; but now, arbitrarily, it was taboo. Everything we wrote for her class had to be in print. In her class I totally lost the ability to write script; to this day, the only cursive vestige is my illegible signature
Other than that, she was a pretty good teacher and I received generally good grades; however, for some reason, she and I never warmed up to each other; I felt like an interloper, always uncomfortable in her class.
One morning, she was at the blackboard printing out a lesson, when someone a few seats behind me launched a piece of chalk across the room. She turned at just that moment and saw the piece of chalk in flight, assuming, without any justification that I was the one who had lobbed it.
“Did you throw that; it could have taken someone’s eye out!”
“No ma’am, it wasn’t me,” I answered sincerely.
“Step out into the hall,” she ordered. I did as I was told and she followed me out, closing the door behind us. Without another word she slapped my face so hard that my glasses went flying across the hallway and I saw stars. I didn’t feel pain; I felt shock, anger, humiliation. My entire body flamed red with rage. This was wrong. I had never been hit by a teacher before, and now I was hit for something I hadn’t even done. I found my glasses, ran down the stairs and out of the school. Home was only two blocks away. Sobbing and gasping, I rushed inside to find my mother preparing lunch.
Through my sobs I told her what had just happened. I insisted she come back to school with me and confront Miss Taylor. My mother didn’t hesitate. She put on her coat and walked back to school with me.
When we got to the classroom, my mother asked Miss Taylor to come out into the hall. She defended me, and told Miss Taylor that, no matter what, she had no right to hit me, pointing to my very red cheek. I insisted on an apology. My mother insisted Miss Taylor never touch me again, ever. We were both so angry, Miss Taylor probably realized our next stop would be the principals’ office, so she apologized, reluctantly, to me and explained that she had lost her temper because of the danger the flying chalk posed. And it wouldn’t happen again.
For the rest of the term she was civil but even cooler with me. For my part, the anger never left me. I suspect she always believed I was the culprit. The joy which had accompanied me to school every day wasn’t there anymore, and authority figures have had to work hard to earn my respect ever since.
My mother had attended a Jewish school in a small German town where corporal punishment was the norm. Although we had only been in the United States for a few years, somehow she had learned that not only did teachers in New York not have the right to slap pupils, she also had gained the courage to confront authority and demand an apology. In just a few short years in this country, she had somehow absorbed the real lesson of America. For me, it would take many more years.