My son and his wife have become parents for the first time, and I would dearly love to offer them some nuggets of wisdom on the subject, but we are of different generations, as different as Bach from the Beatles, and I foresee that advice might be misconstrued. I suppose that a safe alternative is to relate a few pertinent and perhaps pedagogic memories of my own upbringing, such as it was.
Though it may sound unkind of me to mention it so early in their parenthood, there may well come a time, now hard to believe, when Haley sheds her halo and appears to be in need of cognitive readjustment, which I gather from the media has become an increasingly popular alternative to the good, all-too-solid discipline of my youth. Certainly, I can't remember the last time I visited Home Depot and spotted rods for the purpose mentioned in Proverbs 84:18. Lucky for Haley that she lives and is loved in Buffalo Grove in 2008 and not on New York's Lower East Side during the Great Depression.
Slapping and spanking a naughty kid was regarded as meritorious back there and then, when, to borrow a Christian metaphor, the Holy Grail of child development was to follow tradition come what may, as in "Fiddler on the Roof." Responsible Jewish parents slapped and spanked at the drop of an obscenity or of a grade on a report card, modus operandi which they never doubted that they had the moral, legal and, above all, the biblical authority to employ. However. despite circumcision, boys were considered lucky, because God no longer told fathers to do what Abraham almost did to poor Isaac, who never even did anything really reprehensible, such as swiping a nickel ride on the Grand Street trolley and then, worse, being caught by the conductor. What if the conductor, probably an anti-Semite, had reported the kid to the cops at the police station on Clinton Street? Once arrested, he would be locked up with real-life counterparts of Humphrey Bogart and the Dead End Kids. He would spend the rest of his days at Sing Sing or Alcatraz unless he participated in a successful breakout with George Raft, after which there would be a shootout for the affections of dubious dames like Ann Sheridan or Barbara Stanwyck.
Also entitled to slap kids, but never spank them, were my teachers at long-gone P.S. 147 on East Broadway and the Bialystoker Hebrew School on Willet Street. The Bialystoker Synagogue, which housed its Hebrew school up flights of stairs higher than Mount Sinai, is still extant and now also a landmark. But, on the other hand, gone and never to be forgotten, if only by me, is Gus's pool parlor down the block, where local prostitutes could avail themselves of a side entrance to avoid the cops. The ladies were so attractive in their snug and colorful dresses from maybe S. Klein's on Union Square that we kids hoped they were still in business and free from VD when we were of age to employ their services and could afford them. Toward that end, we hoped also that President Roosevelt wasn't kidding us when he said that prosperity was just around the corner and would last as long as we voted the straight Democratic ticket.
Especially forthcoming with physical as well as verbal punishment at my Hebrew school was Mr. Rubin, our bar mitzvah teacher. Over the long years, he has come to look to me like the modern-day actor Christopher Walken when he plays the sort of villain who, when apprehended, will end up in a mental hospital rather than a prison. Somehow, Mr. Rubin's unusually long black skullcap added to his menace, and he has always reminded me of executioners in horror movies with Boris Karloff. I don't like to think about what he wore at home, but in class, in addition to the skullcap, he always wore a shirt that may once have been white, a gray tie with stains that had held their own against Carbona, and a black suit that could have used a cleaning and pressing if not a replacement from Orchard Street, where the shops stretched from Hester Street to East Houston and may have been the country's original strip mall.
In fairness to Mr. Rubin, I must add that he wielded a wooden ruler rather than an axe, and that his instruction enabled me and all my classmates, even the dumbest of us, to perform acceptably at our bar mitzvahs, which ceremony would mark our assumption of the responsibilities of an adult Jewish male. As for the privileges, they would mostly have to wait till we married a nice Jewish girl of whom our parents approved after enough snooping to qualify them for the FBI. We were told repeatedly that when it came to brides, a good heart was more desirable than good looks, but we were too young and foolish to appreciate such profundities.
Though official and binding in the eyes of God, a shoddy bar mitzvah would have disgraced not only our parents but also our ancestors all the way back to Canaan if not the Garden of Eden. Up in paradise, Kings David and Solomon, to whom every Jew is related, would have been forced to abdicate their thrones and maybe shed a few of the concubines that also served as status symbols. In many a household more pious than my own, such a scandal would have resulted in at least an hour of verbal punishment back home. The good news was that the amount of physical punishment to fit such a heinous crime was considered to be work, and that was forbidden on the Sabbath. But, an even worse punishment, parents could have withheld the weekly dime to attend that afternoon's double feature at a local theater, probably the Loew's Apollo, where the kindly ticket seller let you in for the children's price of a dime until your voice changed or you needed a shave. On the day of my friend Phil's bar mitzvah I accompanied this lucky kid to not a double but a triple feature, at the Palestine Theater on Clinton Street. One of the movies featured a rerun of Tod Slaughter in the perennial local favorite "The Mad Barber of Fleet Street," and it made us postpone for weeks our next visit to Mrs. Fiedler, the unisex barber on Stanton Street who also told their fortunes to women and was rumored to perform abortions when her advice led to misfortunes.
These homey folkways and others were practiced during the Great Depression. Were children better behaved then than now? Speaking for myself, the only thing I ever stole, in addition to the heart of my wife, which turned out as good as her looks, was second base during a punch ball game in the school yard across the street from P.S.147. Sure enough, God punished me when I next tried to steal third base and was tagged out by, of all people, Herman Zimmerman, whom I had recently given quite a big bite of my hot dog from Katz's deli.
I could offer a few valuable thoughts about friendship and people like Herman Zimmerman, but I will save them for when a schoolmate steals a bite of Haley's hot dog, assuming that she is not a vegetarian like her father.
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