Playing Till We Have to go - A Jewish Childhood in Inner-city LA
By Larry Derfner
Why read the
account
of someone else's life and
experiences if not to capture a
sense of time and place and, maybe, to
compare it – in conceit or envy – with your own life.
Larry
Derfner's Playing Till We Have to go - A Jewish Childhood in Inner-city LA
pulled me in from the first page and made me reflect on how our experiences as
first-generation Americans differed.
Derfner
and I worked together at the Jerusalem Post years ago. My hope was this
book would help me understand what made him tick – why he became leftwing, and
I didn't, why he looked for trouble where I went the other way, and why a basically
huggable guy was often infuriating.
I think of Larry Derfner as the Jimmy Breslin of Israeli English-language
advocacy journalism. His newspaper features were exhaustively reported while his opinion
columns were exhaustingly strident. I always loved reading his stuff. He also drove me
crazy.
I was his sometimes editor, not that he
needed one. I needed his dexterous writing style and clean prose to fill and
balance my pages even if I found his politics hard to swallow. Even when I disagreed with
Larry, I could appreciate his plain-speaking conversational writing style, which I envied.
It seemed effortless, and I wished I could write that way.
As an
editor, I'd handle copy I might disagree with. In Derfner's case, his positions
were rooted in heartfelt principle. Unlike some contributors I edited, Larry made no off
the wall claims, engaged in no emotional manipulation. And – best of all – he didn't
just write to his amen corner.
In Playing
Till We Have to go, I learned that his European-born parents moved from the
City of New York to Los Angeles in 1960 to pursue their American dream. He grew
up in a mostly agreeable Los Angeles, California district where neighbors knew each
other, and kids played companionably outside their rental apartment buildings.
Larry ruefully enjoyed the fruits of his parents' upward mobility and was
molded into adulthood by a very present father and full-time stay-at-home
mother. Considering his parents arrived in the country in 1940, only a year
before the US entered World War II and a year after Hitler invaded Poland, the
author grew up a pretty normal American -- one who had fond memories of Trick-or-treating on Halloween.
At the same time, I was growing up on the other side of the continent on the Lower
East Side of Manhattan in a household on a downward social-economic spiral. There
was nothing convivial about my mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood, one of the
most dangerous in NYC. In 1910 there were half a million Jewish people on the Lower
East Side. By the time I was born in the 1950s, there was only a remnant
community of mostly poor and working-class Jews left behind. In 1963, there
were 548 murders in the Big Apple, and the mayhem just got worse (by 1980, the annual
murder rate reached 1,814).
In 1972,
NYPD cops Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie were gunned down by the Black
Liberation Army on Avenue B. My mother and I had only recently escaped from the
Avenue D Jacob Riis project to other public housing on Madison Street in a comparatively
less turbulent area of the Lower East Side.
Unlike
Larry, I dreaded Halloween, which was an occasion for resident louts to harass Jewish children coming home from yeshiva, vandalize apartment doors
by banging socks full of flour and urinating in elevators.
His
father, Manny,
was a larger-than-life garrulous figure. A red who was entrepreneurial, owning a couple of liquor stores and dabbling in real
estate. Mr. Derfner was a communist in Poland, then in British Mandate Palestine, and eventually in America. While capitalism was good to him, it didn't transform him into a
capitalist roader – not at the character level. My father, in contrast, having
spent WWII in Europe doing forced labor, was an emotional basket case when he
reached America. Never a provider, he would find solace in insular ultra-Orthodox
Judaism and disappear from my life for 30 years.
Different coasts, different sensibilities: I grew up kosher, yarmulke-wearing, and frum. Until I went to
college, I never sat in the same classroom with a girl, much less a non-Jew.
Larry's Jewishness was cultural and ethnic. Like mine, his people spoke
Yiddish, but ritual and shul played a minor role in his life. His parents'
friends were mostly Polish Jewish refugees, including the greenhorns who came after the Holocaust (he reminds us that
no one spoke much about the Shoah in those days). Most of Larry's Jewish friends
were the children of Polish immigrants or refugees. He noticed that kids whose
parents came after the war seemed less self-assured and assertive.
In
school, Larry rubbed elbows with Chinese and Japanese, and African Americans. He
was perfectly comfortable hanging out with goyim. In fact, he developed an
appreciation for the black aesthetic – music, dialect, and style. He reveled in
being the only white boy on a black baseball team.
I loved
his descriptions of handling puberty. During
his bar
mitzvah, though his mind was on a neighborhood girl, he somehow
managed to focus. "I chanted the haftorah perfectly. Just finishing it
was a tremendous relief..." a universal
feeling among every boy who has been through the experience.
In Playing
till we have to go, Larry reveals how well he reads people. He paints delicate
sketches of his father's African American liquor store customers, coworkers,
and Polish Jewish neighbors. He can spot the type of schoolboy who will be
agreeable to be liked or the underprivileged
youth whose threatening exterior cloaks essential decency. Here is what happens
when he tries to help James, a black boy with fractions: " 'Larry, I never
did know how to divide.' We were in the eighth grade. Here was this magical kid
with a noble soul, a boy I felt real affection for, but suddenly there was a
gulf between us. He didn't even know how to divide. I felt sorry for him, and
the feeling made me sick."
Larry
prides himself on being a non-conformist and contrarian. I figure that to go against the crowd, you need to be self-confident and
feel secure. Maybe Larry got his rootedness from
his father.
From
Manny, he learned to try to do the right thing. To see his surroundings with eyes open. He savored the edginess of the neighborhood where his father's liquor
store was located – he calls it a black ghetto.
He develops
into a chevraman – a people person, an
athlete, a tough guy, a reader, an observer of different human types, capable of
learning from his miscalculations about who to trust.
There are
hints about Larry's motivation for making his future life in Israel – he is
excited by the action. Larry gets his political fierceness from Manny, who is portrayed
as protesting some Israeli policy vociferously.
So many
Jewish coming of age memoirs are written by feckless nebbish types like me. It is refreshing to
get a different, heartening perspective – a kid who grows up to appreciate his
advantages whatever emotional baggage his parents gave him. Larry doesn't turn
his back on his parents' religious traditions because you can't reject what
they didn't much cherish. Instead, he embraces their commitment to making the
world a better place – and, anyway, in left-leaning circles, tikun olam is the
central tenant of Judaism.
Well-paced and compelling, readers interested in what
it was like to grow up a relatively typical first-generation Jewish American in
the 1960s will find this book hard to put down. His is also a story of
purposeful acculturation – choosing to connect to people who are different and
relishing the experience.
I sense a
sequel coming.
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I am open to running your criticism if it is not ad hominem. I prefer praise, though.