Not exactly fitting in but always trying: That was my experience of childhood. I struggled and thought I had to prove myself. Being sick a lot of the time served only to amplify those feelings. The sole upside to being sick was that I got to spend more time with my mother, who was at her best when I was ill. She would play cards with me and help nurse me back to health. That summer my parents rented a lakefront house in Maine. We had lots of guests and, of course, Bill and Lorraina. By the end of our time there, I was in pretty good health.
Riverdale Country School was a hard slog of trying to make friends with kids who had known one another for a long time, and keeping up with the demands of the teachers. The school was a bus trip away at the outer reaches of the city, on a hill near the large homes of the wealthy. Still in recovery mode, I was behind the curve on the sports field. To make things just a little more difficult, I was nearsighted, and my parents had no idea. It took about a year before I complained and got glasses. In most other ways Riverdale was okay. There were no tough kids to avoid as there had been at PS 6. The message was that we were members of the elite, a select group who went to one of the city’s finest private schools. I am almost certain there was not a nonwhite face on the campus—not among the students, faculty, administrators, or clerical workers. Maybe not even among the maintenance men and service people. Peering out of the bus windows on the way to Riverdale from Park Avenue, we saw black people as we traversed Harlem. It seemed as if they were contained in a separate world with garbage-strewn streets and sad-looking tenements all stuck together and falling apart. To us Harlem was a dangerous place that was best to pass through as quickly as possible. It was a foreign world, a hostile territory that existed between the well-maintained buildings that comprised my worlds at home and at school. As we rumbled toward Riverdale, however, we were safe and protected. With the 1948 presidential election approaching, we sang, “Dewey’s in the White House, Truman’s in the ash can!” Everyone seemed to be a Republican back then.
* * *
Grandma Bessie presided over Friday-night dinners for the Levy clan in a private dining room at the Park Royal Hotel on West Seventy-Third Street, where my great-grandparents, Moe and Esther, lived. Bessie’s sisters and brothers and their families always showed up. Moe and Esther were kosher, but as far as I could see there was little religion among the Levy offspring. Family members gossiped that one of Bessie’s brothers, Ralph, married a Catholic and the son of her sister Dee married a Protestant, which was another thing to talk about.
John and I received no religious training, and our family never went to temple, but that didn’t seem to matter. My father’s brother, Carl, had been captured during the war in the Battle of the Bulge and put in a concentration camp with other Jewish soldiers. He came home weighing eighty pounds. So even though we always had a Christmas tree and Easter-egg hunts, I knew we were Jewish and that there were people out there who really didn’t like us. Without being taught, we learned that being Jewish was something that mattered.
Uncle Ralph’s Catholic wife as well as my aunt Dee’s daughter-in-law looked more or less as if they might be “one of us,” and they were friendly enough, but still, when it came to the family they were outsiders, which meant they weren’t part of the inner circle that got to sit at the dinner table where the family congregated on Friday nights after they were switched to the Hampshire House, the exclusive Central Park South hotel–co-op where my grandparents lived.
Bessie’s sister Ruth Leeds and her husband, Al, who called me Blackie (which I hated), were sometimes there. On other evenings they would come after dinner, with their daughter, Helene, and her husband, Ross Newhouse.
“Why does Uncle Al call me Blackie?” I remember asking my father.
“He doesn’t mean anything by it,” my father told me. “You have dark hair.”
Blackie was what someone might call a black man, and I didn’t want to be black. Black