Celebrating a Bar Mitzvah 55 Years Ago Today

Fifty-five years ago today I became a man, at least according to Jewish tradition. I celebrated my bar mitzvah on February 10, 1962.

Like today there was snow on the ground, between three and six inches. It crunched as I walked the three and a half blocks to our Orthodox shul where I was to share the morning’s glory with Mark Fortgang, another 13-year-old I casually knew from the playground of Public School 254 on Avenue Y in Brooklyn. 

Unlike Mark, I attended a Hebrew day school, Yeshiva Rambam. But being a timid fellow, I deferred, as he did, reading from the Torah (the first time I finally read Torah was at our son Dan’s bar mitzvah 29 years later). We split reciting the haftorah while I complemented my transition to adulthood by leading the musaf service, having spent months preparing with our synagogue’s cantor, Willy Cohen, who lived two doors down our block of attached row houses on Avenue W.

My father was so enthralled with my prayer recital that he 

had me audio tape it for friends in Israel. He borrowed a reel-to-reel tape recorder for me to chant into. The tape was converted into records. But when we played the discs before sending them overseas we heard a disturbing background noise. It was the voice of our neighbor Charlie talking on his ham radio set. His transmissions apparently came through our contiguous row house electrical lines. We had previously experienced interference from Charlie on our television set, but this was beyond the pale. There was, however, nothing we could do about it.

Even though it was the dead of winter, the bar mitzvah party began at 9 pm at the Aperion Manor on Kings Highway, the same catering hall where my brother celebrated his bar mitzvah four years earlier. After hors d’Ouvres guests feasted on an appetizer of Sweetbreads Regence with rice followed by roast prime ribs of beef, stringbeans amandine, Idaho souffle and derma Farci (you don’t find stuffed derma, or kishka as it is known in the Yiddish vernacular, on too many bar mitzvah party menus these days). In case you’re wondering how I recall the food selections, it took me a couple of hours but I finally located a copy of the menu inside a box of old photographs.

For the party I wore a rented tuxedo sports jacket, burgundy with black stripes. Very chic. I liked the way I looked. My ears didn’t stick out too far that night. I think I had a good time. Hard to say from the commemorative album, though in all honesty, I and most of my peers were really awkward looking. To the music of the Perry Colen Orchestra, I partnered with Adina Berzon for the first dance, a twist, if I’m interpreting the picture in the album correctly. Upon further review, my ears did stick out. Ah, well …

The Aperion Manor is long shuttered, and so is Yeshiva Rambam elementary school, but the neighborhood I grew up in has mostly stayed the same. The houses are well kept. I have no way of knowing if the residents are predominantly Jewish as they were back in the 1950s and 1960s. My parents’ home was purchased by their next door neighbor, a Greek family. 

A few years ago Gilda and I drove by my parents’ home on our way to Coney Island. As we stopped to survey the street, we were recognized and invited to see how the neighbor had changed the inside of the house. She had modernized the kitchen, the first floor bathroom, and the basement where my brother and I slept as teenagers and where my mother transformed the open layout into a party spot for our sister’s sweet 16. 

Now that Ellie and her family moved from Brooklyn to Omaha more than a year ago, no one from our immediate family lives in Brooklyn. Only memories, almost all good, reside there for me. 

Leaving Brooklyn Means Crossing Time Zones

My parents set up their homestead in Brooklyn in the 1940s. They raised three children of whom I am the youngest. Aside from sojourning eight weeks at summer camp, my brother, sister and I never ventured away from Brooklyn when we were young. After we graduated from high school my brother and I attended Brooklyn College. Our sister went to an out of town school—Queens College. She commuted. That is, until she finally got her wish to expand her horizons and truly go to an out of town school. For her sophomore and junior years Lee attended Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She came back to Queens College for her senior year.

Even after Bernie moved to Washington, DC, Lee’s Israel experience was the first and only time any of our family lived more than a five hour car ride from Brooklyn. The nuclear family had been stretched but the protective amniotic fluid had not been pierced. We could still assemble for holidays with relative ease, as long as traffic for Bernie on the New Jersey Turnpike and for me coming south from Syracuse and then New Haven cooperated. 

But in 1973 Lee moved to Los Angeles. The outward migration of offspring had begun for the Forseter family. Fast forward to present times. Lee has three children: After a stay in New Orleans, Ari lives in Washington; Lauren and Jonathan in San Francisco. Jonathan spent several years in Singapore.

Bernie’s son Eric lives near him in a Maryland suburb. His daughter Karen followed her future husband across the pond to London.

Gilda’s and my son stayed in the Boston metro after attending college there. Boston has been Dan’s home for half his life. His family is a “short” three hour drive away. Dan and wife Allison remain New York Yankees and New York Giants fans which so far they are transmitting down to their children.

Now we get to Ellie and Donny and their daughter, Cecilia, the reason for this posting. Today they moved out of Brooklyn to Omaha.

Why Omaha? Well, Donny’s parents and one of his sisters live there. But the bottom line has to do with lifestyle and affordability. It could be Omaha or Cincinnati or Asheville or any number of smaller cities. They all offer a more affordable, more spacious environment to raise a family than do Brooklyn and many New York suburbs. Sure, Omaha lacks as full a restaurant and cultural scene. But it is not the backwater it was 10-15 years ago. 

Gilda and I will miss watching Cecilia take her first steps, speak her first words, grasp a spoonful of food to feed herself. We are envious of friends who get to enjoy these milestones firsthand, not through Facetime or Facebook.

Our situation is not uncommon. Many children of our friends and family have moved a plane-ride away. The emotional hole is made larger when grandchildren are involved, especially if they were born when their parents lived nearby. We were an hour away from Cecilia. I could come by easily to take her and Ellie to the pediatrician. Or to Costco. Or pick them up for a weekend visit to our home.

Gilda and I loved taking trips to Brooklyn to explore different neighborhoods, the Brooklyn Museum or Prospect Park, Coney Island, or Brighton Beach and end the day with a visit and dinner with Cecilia and her parents. We will still go to Brooklyn but surely not as frequently.

I hope I haven’t given the impression Cecilia is more precious to us than our other grandchildren, Finley and Dagny, that proximity promoted preference. They are all equally loved and cherished, as are their respective parents. But there was never any chance of close, frequent, non-electronic observation of Finley and Dagny growing up. Dan and Allison opted to live in the Boston metro long before they had kids. Ellie and Donny lived in Brooklyn.

Not the Brooklyn of my youth. That was, and still is, very unhip. Ellie and Donny lived in trendy Park Slope, near vibrant restaurants and cultural venues, near equally hip Carroll Gardens, Fort Greene, Prospect Heights, Williamsburg and Red Hook. Sure, I knew of these neighborhoods before Donny and Ellie lived in Brooklyn, even drove through them, but I never “knew” them. Never tasted them. Never observed them from the sidewalk on foot. Who now will take us to the hot restaurant only Brooklyn insiders know before The New York Times or some other outlet reveals its existence to the world?  

The move to Omaha separates Brooklyn for me and Gilda (who grew up there, as well) across the time zones of our past and present.

The move to Omaha separates our family across standard time zones. It will be harder to visit, for us and for Cecilia’s cousins. We get to see Finley and Dagny every six to eight weeks. We will try for the same frequency with visits to Omaha and return trips for holidays by Ellie’s family. 

My brother manages such a schedule with trips to and from London. He and Annette combine stays in London with side trips to parts of Europe and even Israel and recently South Africa. I guess Gilda and I will get to know the middle of the country from Mount Rushmore to the Crystal Bridges Museum of Modern Art in Bentonville,  AR, built by Wal-Mart heir Alice Walton. I presume I will show her Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville.

I’m not embarrassed to say I cried when I dropped off Ellie, Donny and Cecilia at LaGuardia Airport Monday morning. The fog shrouding the city made driving home alone difficult, the difficulty enhanced by the blurry vision of my moistened eyes.

Brooklyn on My Mind and Everyone Else's

Brooklyn is enjoying another moment in the sun, not that it was ever truly dark. Lately, however, the cognoscente have seemingly rediscovered my native borough, driving up real estate prices, populating the byways with flavorful, exotic fare, building skyscraper apartment houses, even turning the once tallest structure in the county—the Williamsburg Savings Bank on Flatbush Avenue—into a co-op with multi-million dollar penthouse units.   

The latest enchantment to illuminate Brooklyn is a film adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn. The movie opened Wednesday (http://nyti.ms/1iBkP1T); the book was published in 2009. I didn’t read the book, haven’t yet seen the film. But I did grow up in the time and place the heroine of Tóibín’s tale emigrated to from Ireland in the 1950s.

There’s a lot of nostalgia surrounding Brooklyn these days, an emotion that has engulfed me as well. Perhaps it is pushed forward by Bernie Sanders’ quixotic campaign for the presidency as evidenced by an article a few months ago chronicling his Kings County roots (http://nyti.ms/1VFhZZi).

A few weeks earlier The New York Times ran a story about ex- Brooklynites returning to live in, or at least visit, the borough (http://nyti.ms/1JXIeno). 

Truth be told, the parts of Brooklyn mostly and longingly portrayed in film and print—areas such as Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Fort Greene, Brooklyn Heights—are far removed from the Brooklyn of my childhood, the northern part of Sheepshead Bay along Avenue W between East 18th and East 19th Streets, a block west of Ocean Avenue. It was on the southern side of this treelined street of attached single-family row houses with the occasional (to my knowledge, illegal) ground floor tenant where I enjoyed a pleasant, if not idyllic, upbringing.

Small things now evoke long-cached memories. 

The other day I spotted a tennis ball atop a grated storm sewer cover. I was transported back to the street stickball games I played. The leafy maple and sycamore trees along Avenue W posed one type of hazard to be overcome—if you caught a ball on its way down from a tree you recorded an out, but if it fell to the ground you would call “hindoo,” and a do-over was in order. 

The trees, however, were not the biggest obstacle. Balls, usually pink Spaldeens, falling into storm drains could wash out any game. Unless, unless you had a wire clothes hanger you could stretch out and, lowering the hook end into the sewer basin, fish the ball up from the murky bottom.  

Our grandson Finley loves playing with toy trucks, usually in his home’s carpeted basement or living room. I, on the other hand, played “dump truck” outside, on the dirt edge of the grass of our front lawn. 

As we got older, my friends and I shifted our play spot to the dirt under the trees between the street and the sidewalk. Our choice of “toy” also “matured” into pen knives. We’d play a game called “Territory.” You would start off with equal plots of land. By throwing your knife into your adversary’s dirt adjacent to your plot, you could claim more territory, but only if the blade stood the knife upright with at least two fingers’ worth of clearance from the ground. 

Oh, I neglected to mention an important part of the game. When your foe threw his knife you were required to stand astride your territory, an act of courage made all the more challenging as your territory diminished in size. I don’t recall any foot injuries, though I would not be surprised to know I am repressing memories of mishaps. 

One doesn’t see any yellow Checker cabs anymore, but they were the preferred and common conveyance when our mother took us to the beach back in the 1950s. Their back seats were deep enough to accommodate two round jump seats that folded into the floorboard when not used. We’d go to Brighton Beach, eat cold meatloaf or hamburger sandwiches our mother made and buy cool orange drinks in short, cardboard containers from vendors who pushed through the sand with hot ice boxes slung over their shoulders while wearing safari hats to shield the burning rays of the sun. 

Sometimes, Saturday nights during the summer, our whole family would go to Coney Island. My favorite ride was a train ride on a track that circumvented the entire kiddie park. When darkness veiled the night, we would sit on the sand and take in the weekly fireworks display. Afterward we’d bundle back into the car and as we approached home our father would sing one of the few American western songs he knew, “Home, home on the range/ where the deer and the antelope play/ where seldom is heard, a discouraging word/ and the sky is not cloudy all day.”

Free Range Child Rearing

I called home from work one day to discover Gilda had left 10-year-old Dan in charge of watching himself and seven-year-old Ellie while she went to and from the cleaners four blocks away. I went ballistic.

How could you be so delinquent, so irresponsible, I demanded of Gilda when I came home. She calmly responded there was nothing to fear, that Dan was more than capable at his age of caring for both of them in the few minutes she was away.

I bring this up now because of a segment on the Brian Lehrer Show I listened to Thursday. His WNYC public radio guest was Lenore Skenazy, author of the book and blog Free Range Kids, her conceit being that children today need more independence, that fear they will be snatched, or worse, has been overblown by the media and overtaken our collective psyches, particularly those of parents of young children.

Lehrer and Skenazy discussed the recent arrest of a South Carolina woman who let her nine-year-old daughter, armed with a cell phone, play in a popular park while she worked in a nearby McDonald’s. For details of the alleged charge of unlawful conduct toward a child, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in jail, and their conversation, click on this link (http://www.wnyc.org/story/less-hovering-more-exercise/), or for a CNN article click here (http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/21/living/mom-arrested-left-girl-park-parents/index.html?iref=allsearch).

I will avoid taking sides, though the Murray of 25 years ago clearly had an opinion. But I can’t seem to be anything but nostalgic for the freedom my friends and I had in the Brooklyn of the 1950s and early 1960s to play outdoors, even in the street, to walk two long avenue blocks to play in the PS 254 schoolyard all day where stocky-built, black curly haired Tyrone was the local bully, to ride city buses to school and sometimes often wait 20 minutes or more in the rain or freezing cold and snow for a bus to arrive. 

This was not the bucolic Stand By Me coming-of-age experience. Rather, it was an ongoing immersion into city life complete, for me at least, with a mugging in Coney Island when two early teenage friends and I snuck away on the elevated subway one Saturday afternoon to enjoy the rides in Steeplechase Park. It was a quick, almost casual, mugging. We were about to walk into Steeplechase. I held a $20 bill aloft and before I realized it wasn’t Stanley or Jerry reaching for the money, the twenty was snatched from my grip by three youths who jostled all of us before racing away. We were unsettled, but still had enough money to spend an hour or two at Steeplechase. 

We had to keep our trip secret. Stanley and Jerry came from families that prohibited traveling on Saturday, or touching money. I didn’t have those restrictions, but my cousin Michael was coming to our house that afternoon and I had some explaining to do about why I was not home to play with him. I fibbed that I was at the schoolyard playing ball and had lost track of time. 

Fast forward to Gilda’s and my parenting prerogatives. When Ellie started seventh grade we were surprised to learn she no longer qualified for busing. White Plains provides busing to students who live at least a mile from school. We hadn’t moved. The school hadn’t moved, so why had Ellie been stripped of busing privileges? Seems a new busing administrator had mapped out a different, less than a mile, route. 

Gilda and I were upset. Ellie was unperturbed. Gilda ferried her uphill to school every morning; Ellie relished the down hill walk home, even disdaining offers of rides from parents no doubt concerned about a 12- or 13-year-old girl trekking on streets without sidewalks with the need to cross busy Mamaroneck Avenue.  

Some parents are reluctant to send their kids to sleep away camp, much less for a full seven or eight week summer. We shipped Dan out when he was nine, Ellie when she was seven. When Dan asked for an all-night birthday party, we agreed, never thinking he and his friends would stay awake the whole time. But they did and it is still fondly remembered as another example of Forseter libertarianism. 

When Dan learned to drive at 16, we gave him a credit card. Thirteen-year-old Ellie got one, as well. Both credit cards have their pictures on the back. Nearly 20 years later the pictures have yet to be updated by the bank. The point is, we trusted them to handle the cards in a responsible fashion. They did.

Yes, bad things happen. But they can happen even in the most careful circumstances. It’s normal to be vigilant. It stifles growth and independence to be suffocating. 

Father's Day, Baseball Edition

It’s Father’s Day. Great day to go to a ball game. Gilda, Ellie, Donny and I are off to Coney Island to see the Brooklyn Cyclones take on the Staten Island Yankees. It can hardly get any better than that, unless, of course, Finley and parents would be with us. Alas, they’re up in New Hampshire at a Mixter family reunion.


Speaking of Finley, I was happy to see Finley is the name of Brian Gordon’s 4-year-old son. Who’s Brian Gordon? Why, he’s the Aaron Small of 2011, we hope.

NY Yankee fans will remember in 2005 the perennial minor leaguer Aaron Small was called up to fill a pitching gap and wound up winning his first 10 decisions, helping the Bronx Bombers finish first in the American League East. Gordon is somewhat like Small, a long-term minor leaguer who relies on deception rather than fastballs to retire batters. Gordon pitched well in his debut last Wednesday, without getting a decision. His next outing will be in Cincinnati Tuesday. Here’s hoping lightning strikes again for the Yanks, and Gordon.


During Derek Jeter’s stay on the 15-day disabled list, can we please have a moratorium on TV ads starring the Yankee captain? I know it’s asking too much, but really, do we need to be constantly reminded he’s not in the lineup pursuing his 3,000th hit?

Is it too soon to think of Jeter as the modern-day version of Wally Pipp, the Yankee star first baseman who sat himself down because of a headache in 1925 and never got his job back because Lou Gehrig replaced him and played the next 2,130 consecutive games? I’m exaggerating, of course, but Eduardo Nunez is taking full advantage of his playing time during Jeter’s leg injury layoff. Nunez drove in the winning run Saturday. He is seven for 18 (.388) since replacing Jeter, including a home run on his 24th birthday Wednesday. On the negative side, he still is prone to mistakes in the field. He has committed eight errors, mostly errant throws, in 14 games.

Jeter will get his position back once he’s physically fit, but barring a trade or a career-ending injury, Nunez is showing he’s the Yankee shortstop of the future.


Is it my imagination or is Robinson Cano, underachieving at the plate, also underperforming in the field? He just seems to be a step slower this season after his Gold Glove year, not paying enough attention to the ball, not keeping it in his mitt, not throwing with the same accuracy. He’s already made six errors in 68 games compared to just three in 158 games during the full 2010 season.

Cano is a hard player to gauge. He’s so naturally talented and smooth, what in other players might appear to be indifference is just his normal style. Still, I think something is not right with him overall. (I can’t be too critical as he’s Allison’s favorite Yankee.)


I’m still waiting for baseballdom to adopt my idea about tracking a pitcher’s statistics when confronted with the bases loaded. Hitters already are evaluated in such situations but you never hear an announcer tell you how a pitcher has fared when the bags are full. I’d measure their efficiency with no out, one out and two out.


And now a word from a sponsor who doesn’t know baseball. Or at least its copywriter doesn’t. Riding around Friday listening to the Yankee pre-game show, AT&T ran an ad themed around a character named Sam who always wanted to be a Yankee and was on his way as a standout high school pitcher. He went on to become...an IT technician, and so, in the words of the ad, “would never bat lead-off for the Yankees.”

Duh! No kidding. Pitchers don’t bat lead-off. Indeed, unless the Yanks are playing interleague ball in a National League ballpark, as they’re doing today against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field, Yankee pitchers never come to bat.

Someone should take that copywriter, and his supervisor, to a Yankee game so they can see first hand the error of their ways.


Record Time: For those keeping score, today is the two-year anniversary of my last day of work for Chain Store Age and Lebhar-Friedman. The time has gone swiftly by, Gilda and I both agree, not the least because of this blog. This entry will be the 333rd I’ve posted to No Socks Needed Anymore since I began blogging September 8, 2009. Thank you for indulging me with your readership.

Coney Island Memory

Murray Handwerker is dead. He was 89.

For one who shares his given name fading into obscurity, except for the occasional comedic or animal character in movies and sitcoms, it’s an occasion to mourn, especially if you grew up in Brooklyn and enjoyed the legacy of Murray Handwerker and his parents, Nathan and Ida. For it was Murray Handwerker who took his parents’ busy Coney Island hot dog stand at the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues (and another unit in Oceanside, Long Island) and made it into a national, if not international, sensation. Across the country today there are 234 Nathan’s Famous outlets. The franks are sold in more than 18,000 locations worldwide. Last year, according to the company, Nathan’s sold more than 425 million hot dogs. They no longer sell for a nickel, but they remain among the tastiest you can sink your teeth into. And the crinkly-cut French fries are a meal unto themselves.

Truth be told, I wasn’t a big fan of hot dogs when growing up. I preferred Nathan’s hamburgers smothered in grilled onions. Grease extraordinaire. Delicious!

Any trip to Coney Island, about three miles from my parents’ home, required a stopover at Nathan’s. My most memorable visit came before the one and hopefully only time I would be mugged.

One Saturday afternoon in late spring, when I was 14, my friends Jerry and Stanley talked me into going to Coney Island with them. Jerry and Stanley came from more Orthodox Jewish families. They weren’t supposed to ride on the Sabbath, or spend money. I was supposed to hang around home because my cousin Michael was coming over, but the lure of friendship and the enticement of Coney Island, back then a less than secure venue, trumped blood lines. Besides, Jerry and Stanley said they’d spring for the rides and food.

We took the BMT train from Neck Road a few stops to the end of the line, Stillwell Avenue. After eating at Nathan’s, the 90 degree turns of the Wild Mouse ride almost made us give back our food. Undeterred, we were walking toward Steeplechase Park with our entry fee money in our hands when we were jumped from behind by several ruffians. We didn’t know what hit us, but we quickly realized our $20 was gone with the tussle.

With no more mad money to spend, we headed back home. I caught a lot of flack from my parents for not being around to play with Michael. I fibbed I was playing ball at the schoolyard a few blocks away and had lost track of time.

Years later, in 1977 while a field editor for Nation’s Restaurant News, I interviewed Murray Handwerker. I did not tell him of my escapade that day in 1964.