Not Always Is Nostalgia Nostalgic

We arrived on the shores of the United States in 1948. My father a”h was wont to say that he had one penny in his pocket for each year, 48 cents. Don’t rightly know what was in those few valises. Couldn’t have been much. Much later he confided in me that “the Joint,” a Jewish philanthropic agency, gave six months of assistance. From that point on, we were totally reliant on chasdei Hashem.

Conscious memories begin with fuzzy images ingrained in a very young child’s mind.

Teller “Ehvenoo” (Avenue) in “deh Brunx” between East 175th Street and East 176th Street is where we lived till we moved to Boro Park. It was a narrow canyon nestled between towering walk-ups, each clustered with tiny apartments opening to semi-dark, echoing hallways.

The first stop was 1052 Teller Avenue . The apartment was right over the boiler, so we had a surfeit of heat even in the summer. Floor warm to little bare feet that pattered about, careful to avoid the hard, sharp edges of the linoleum curling up, in spite of the best efforts of my father a”h to tack them down. Making friends with the various fauna that shared the apartment rent free.