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whose parents were better educated and more cultured than mine. I must have picked up some appreciation of music and art from them. When I went to sleep away camp

and we loved to ask because it was free and it showed them that we had ""culture"" (pronounced ""culchah"").

especially opera and choral music. As an adolescent I had sung alto in the local synagogue choir and had a fairly good voice. I was ""fairly"" good--but not very good-- at lots of things in addition to singing: athletics

all we had was a small plastic radio that lived in the kitchen

The Red Badge of Courage; Moby Dick; and a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

I was amazed at how faithful the comic was to the tone

we could see what he looked like! My first erotic desires were aroused by the illustration of the dark-haired ""Jewess"" Rebecca. (I can still picture her and have searched for a copy of the Classic Comic at flea markets from coast to coast...

we had a library that was also tiny and somewhat decrepit

shortly after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been sentenced to death. A Rosenberg relative was accosting people getting off the train

expect for a small used book shop that smelled old and seemed to specialize in subversive books. The owner

so we had to use the areas around the house as our play area. Our house became the magnet for my friends because we had a stoop

stickball in the driveway and basketball in front of the garage--shooting at a rim screwed to an old ping pong table that was secured to the roof of the garage by a couple of two by fours.

such as restaurants. We passed down clothing from generation to generation and ate a lot of “leftovers”. (Remember the comedian who said “we always ate leftovers—nobody has ever found the “original” meal.) My mother has always said we were....

politicians and Zionists. After the end of the war

whose son Moshe went off to fight in Israel’s War of Independence. There was a big party to celebrate his leaving. Several months later

just a few years after the war. My family members were religious Zionists (“Misrachi Zionists”). We had a blue and white Jewish National Fund “pushka” (charity box) in our homes

which according to a Jewish joke of the time

at least I could look out for German spies on our beaches. When I was four years old

which ended when I was nearly seven. I can see my father pasting on the Frigidaire door newspaper maps depicting the progress of allied troops toward Berlin. I can hear radio accounts

it was a modern Orthodox community of second generation Jews whose grandparents had emigrated mostly from Poland and Russia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Following the end of World War II