Day 141 Nat'l Emergency: 6th Grade Memories

Buried deeply in a pandemic-fueled tribute article in Monday’s New York Times to the “soothing comfort” Johnny Carson infused in “The Tonight Show” was a reference to the TV host’s master talent of extracting interesting tidbits during small talk with guests. Aside from engaging in long interviews on weighty subjects, Carson might “suddenly decide to ask every guest on an episode what they recall about their sixth-grade teacher” (https://nyti.ms/32TpirK).

If you’re like me (btw, proper grammar would be “as I am,” but I tend to write colloquially, not always per the Queen’s English), you would have paused and reflected on your sixth-grade teacher, presuming, of course, you have any such memories. Gilda, for example, cannot recollect who her teacher was but she does remember being named valedictorian of her graduating sixth grade class at Public School 182 in the East New York section of Brooklyn. She also recalls attending a sixth grade prom, sixth grade being the end of public elementary school before the transition to junior high school. 

I had four teachers in sixth grade. As I attended Yeshiva Rambam in Brooklyn, a Modern Orthodox Hebrew day school, through eighth grade, we had separate teachers for Hebrew and English studies, mostly women for the latter, rabbis for Hebrew classes except in first and second grades. In sixth grade we had one Hebrew teacher whose name I cannot remember, and separate teachers for mathematics, English language and social studies. It was my social studies instructor who left a lasting impression.

Perhaps it was because Mrs. Saperstein was the first teacher that looked young. She was tall and attractive, with short hair.

As the 1959-60 academic year coincided with the run-up to the presidential election, Mrs. Saperstein structured a candidates’ debate among the students. She chose to focus on eight hopefuls: Hubert Humphrey, John F. Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Adlai Stevenson, Lyndon B. Johnson and two more whose names escape me. I was assigned to represent Rockefeller.

Rockefeller might have been my governor but I knew little about him. So I tapped into my human Google equivalent—my father. Though he had lived in America for just 20 years at the time, Dad was politically informed. 

The day of the “debate” is rather fuzzy in my brain. I can see myself on the left as the eight candidates stood before our classmates. I think by the time my turn as Rocky approached class was almost over so my speech was gratefully cut short. Much like the governor’s campaign which he abandoned shortly thereafter, easing the way for Nixon to secure the Republican Party nomination.

For another of Mrs. Saperstein’s projects I was assigned to report on Bolivia. For that I consulted the Encyclopedia Americana my parents had recently bought. 

All I remember from that exercise is that Bolivia was named for Simón Bolívar, a Venezuelan freedom fighter who liberated the region from Spanish rule, that part of the country lies in the Andes Mountains, that La Paz is the highest administrative capital in the world, that tin mining was a major segment of the economy, and that Lake Titicaca is part of the border with Peru and is the highest commercially navigable lake in the world as well as being the largest lake in South America. 

Beyond that I retained very little knowledge about Bolivia.

Mrs. Saperstein didn’t last very long at Yeshiva Rambam. Within two years she left, with not even a mention in our 1962 graduation yearbook. 

Day 45 of Nat'l Emergency: Family Mystery Half Solved

The mystery began for me in the middle of the night. Early Friday morning.

I couldn’t fall back asleep after a nocturnal awakening. I opened Facebook on my iPhone. Laura, a cousin in France, had posted an appeal. She asked for help in translating a short note in Yiddish she had found on the first page of her deceased maternal grandfather’s prayer book, his siddur. She included a picture of the note.

I don’t speak or read Yiddish but the letters resemble Hebrew. Perhaps I could make out some words. I was thwarted in my attempt to read the note. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it until I turned the picture upside down. I remained stymied for a while until I figured out the one word third line was the family name of her grandfather.

I also deciphered the year of the note. It was written according to the Jewish calendar using letters with specific numerical values. To calibrate it I got out of bed and searched for my 1962 8th grade graduation yearbook from Yeshiva Rambam, hoping it would contain a Hebrew calendar date I could use as a reference. It did. The year of the note was 1959.

Unable to translate more text I sent the note to friends and relatives seeking help. On her side of the Atlantic Laura was similarly engaged.

About the same time, with outside help, we independently configured the puzzle. Here’s the text:

“As a testament to my appreciation to the Borensztejn family,

From Golda Meir

11 Iyar 5719” (May 19, 1959)

Laura believes he received the siddur during a trip to Israel. “He never mentioned that he had met her (Golda Meir) during this trip … If it IS her writing and signature, why ? What did my grandfather do? Or another member of the family?,” Laura wonders. “I am EXCITED but I don’t get it!”

We solved the mystery of what the note said but a larger mystery remained. What did Laura’s grandfather do to merit this personalized, handwritten note from the then Israeli foreign minister and future prime minister?

We may never know.

Foreign Affairs: This is not the first bit of international intrigue involving Laura’s maternal grandfather. Along with his wife and some extended members of their family he emigrated from Poland to Lens in northeastern France, in the 1930s. Before Nazi Germany invaded, Laura’s grandfather urged his relatives to move south. Only his immediate family went with him to Lyons. But they weren’t safe there, either. 

Warned they might be picked up in a roundup of Jews, her grandparents fled with their two daughters to the border with Switzerland. Because Bonnie, Laura’s mother, was a baby, the Swiss allowed the family to enter, but placed them in three separate refugee camps, one for the father, one for seven-year-old Miriam, and the third for Bonnie and her mother. 

For three years they remained in internment. Miriam was able to see her mother and sister from time to time but her father could not see any of his family. After the war ended the family re-united. They returned to Lyons. 

Their family in Lens was killed. The Nazis rounded up the Jews from Lens on September 11th, 1942. It was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Among them were Laura’s grandmother’s elder sister, Rosalie, and her daughter Betty. They were sent to Belgium, to a place called Kazerne Dossin (now a memorial, museum and documentation center on Holocaust and Human Rights in Mechelen, Flanders). They waited there two days before being shipped out on Transport X, arriving in Auschwitz-Birkenau on September 17. 

There is no archival record of how or when Rosalie died, but official papers show Betty was selected as a forced laborer. She died of unknown circumstances on October 20, 1942. Portraits of Rosalie Fursetzer and her daughter Betty Mohr are part of the memorial and the Memorial Wall at the barracks of Kazerne Dossin.

According to Kazerne Dossin, “X Transport included 1,048 deportees, including 229 children less than 15 years … The youngest was Josef Jozefowicz, aged one month and a half.”  Only 17 survived the war. 

On Reaching Three Scores and Ten

I reached a biblical milestone of life today, three score years and ten. Seventy. 

Did you ever wonder how we developed the idea that 70 was a full lifetime? Here’s one explanation, as drilled into me during my formative years attending a Jewish day school. 

Genesis V states Adam died when he was 930 years old. He was, according to Jewish exegesis known as midrash,  supposed to live a full 1,000 years. Here’s what the sages say happened:

God previewed to Adam all of his future descendants. Adam was saddened to see one baby die almost at birth. In a gesture of compassion Adam donated 70 of his years to that newborn, leaving his own lifetime at 930. 

Turns out that newborn’s fate was to grow up to be King David, who lived to be 70. A perfect fit. 

But David was a wily fellow. You don’t get to be a king— 40 years as monarch, seven in Hebron, 33 in Jerusalem— without some street smarts. He knew the lore about his lifespan. He wanted more. So, according to the rabbis, David devised a plan to thwart the Angel of Death. He reasoned that as long as he was studying Torah death could not overtake him. He studied day and night. 

Not to be denied from fulfilling his mission the Angel of Death had his own tricks. He caused David to be distracted from learning by simulating a voice calling him. When David got up from his desk the Angel of Death tripped him into a fatal fall. 

I am not making this fairy tale up. This is what they taught early elementary school students at Yeshiva Rambam in mid-1950s Brooklyn. 

As I write this a thought just entered my mind. Could this fable about a fatal fall be the reason elderly people fear falling, why a fall often precedes the end of life for so many seniors?  How serendipitous that Jane Brody, the health columnist of The New York Times, recently wrote about ways to minimize falls. Her article noted that in this country an elderly person dies as a result of a fall every 19 minutes (https://nyti.ms/2NsluE9). 

Half a lifetime ago, on the morning of my 35th birthday, I woke up with a sharp pain in my hip. A pain of unknown origin. I had not recently bumped it. I had not strained it playing ball or exercising. It just hurt. A message from within that my structure was finite. 

The pain lasted perhaps ten minutes. Maybe less. Never returned. As I have never angsted over advancing age I did not ascribe the pain to anything more than coincidence. 

I would be fooling no one if I said I didn’t think of my mortality. I don’t contemplate achievements I might leave unfulfilled. Rather, I project out years—how old would I be when each grandchild celebrates their bar or bat mitzvah. How old until they graduate college, get their first job, marry. Will I live to be a great grandfather?  

Lest you come away from this truth-telling wondering about my frailty, in mind and/or body, please worry not. I am for the most part sound in both respects (even if some family members and friends complain I am a hypochondriac). 

Blogging assumes some obligation to reveal inner thoughts, so I let you in on my political leanings, some family history and days to come. Nothing more. No birthday surprise today. Till next time … 

Toting a Briefcase: School Days Sans Backpacks

You see them everywhere. Now that school has reconvened I am treated to the adorable vision of children walking city streets with a backpack chock full of books, pencils, erasers and other supplies strapped to their backs. The older they get the fuller and weightier the backpacks appear.

I didn’t have a backpack when I attended elementary school back in the 1950s. I lugged around a leather briefcase that weighed almost as much as I did (I kid you not. I was severely underweight as a youngster, so much so that my sister every day prepared a milk shake enhanced with a raw egg for me, alas to no avail. I remained a stick figure of bones barely covered by skin. My parents, especially my mother, threatened to send me to the polar opposite of a fat farm, a place where skinny kids were bulked up. Of course, my overly skinny childhood and teenage years paid off when I failed my military draft physical as a 21-year-old but that’s a story for another day—if you can’t wait for that day, here’s a link to a previous blog about my draft physical: http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2009/11/veterans-day-salutes.html).

As a youngster toting a heavy briefcase my hands would develop blisters at the base of my fingers. The briefcase was golden brown in color and a size that would have made any first year law associate proud. That’s the closest I ever came to experiencing life as a lawyer. 

I leaned to the opposite side of the hand grasping the handle, the better to maintain balance. I could barely walk half a block before switching hands for relief. The only benefit from the heavy load was it anchored me to earth should a brisk wind threaten to lift my slight frame off the ground.

My elementary school didn’t have lockers to store books overnight. Neither did our desks have large storage wells. We had to schlep books to and from school each day. And since I attended a Jewish day school in Brooklyn (Yeshiva Rambam) we had more books than public school kids because of the extra courses in Hebrew and religious studies.

Now, you might be wondering why I am making such a big deal about lugging a heavy briefcase. Didn’t I ride a  school bus? Not after first grade. From second grade on I took two city buses, the B49 from Avenue W up Ocean Avenue to Kings Highway, then the B7 along Kings Highway to East 31st Street.

Ocean Avenue was a block and a half from our home on Avenue W. School started at 9 am. The trip to school, if the buses were on time, took 30 minutes. On many a morning my brother, sister and I would be challenged to arrive at the bus stop in time to catch the 8:30 bus. Often it was late.

There were no bus shelters, not along Ocean Avenue or at the transfer point at Kings Highway, no place to seek shelter from the weather. If it rained we got wet. If it snowed we got wet and froze. If it was just cold and windy, we froze. If it were hot and sticky, we sweated. 

Each month we’d get a different colored bus pass. Five dollars for unlimited travel. 

All in all, while going to and from school wasn’t as arduous as the process recounted by my father in his shtetl in Poland (“We had to walk miles in snow up to our knees”), my experience was not pleasant. 

As long as I’m recalling early school days, the recent hurricanes in Texas and Florida evoked an enduring memory. It was early in the school year. I was in either first, second or, most probably, third grade. I remember strong winds lashing leafy tree limbs across the windows of our classroom. Our teacher, probably Mrs. Schlesinger, tried to assure her 35 seven- and eight-year-old students there was nothing to fear, but as dismissal time approached, no one was eager to head home. Fortunately, at 4:30 the storm subsided and we hurried to our respective school or city buses for the ride home.

Remembering a Respected Teacher

If you looked at him during class, every so often you would see him wince. His eyes would squint ever so slightly. A sour crease would envelope his lips. Sometimes he would rub the side of his head with his fingertips. One side of his brow, the right side if I remember correctly, had about a one inch square indentation, as if a chisel had been taken to his skull.

Amnon Haramati was different from all the other Hebrew studies teachers I encountered during my 12 years of parochial school education at Yeshiva Rambam and Yeshivah of Flatbush High School in Brooklyn. Unlike the others, he would not let us address him as Rabbi or Rav Hamarati. It was Mar (mister) Hamarati, though in later years he did acquire the title of rabbi. Unlike the others, his accent was not eastern European. It was Israeli. He was clean shaven. He stood tall. Erect. Defiant in stature and status. He embodied a dignity that commanded respect. No student ever made fun of Amnon Hamarati. You only wanted to secure his recognition for a job well done.

I was pretty good at Judaic studies. But some time during my high school years I began having trouble completing sentences entirely in Hebrew. My mouth could not keep up with my brain. So I would throw in the occasional English word to round out my thoughts. Amnon Haramati was not amused. He would demand I speak slower. In Hebrew. Only in Hebrew.

He was younger in age and temperament than the other Hebrew studies male teachers, just 18 years older than my classmates and me. He had a sense of humor. One of his pet theories was the belief that the Hebrew Bible contained references to everything ever created. We would challenge him to prove it. Show us, we would demand, where the telephone or television were in the Bible. Amused at our simple request, he would cite the revelation at Mount Sinai, God speaking to the people of Israel and appearing before them not in a black and white broadcast but in living color.

His only vulnerability, that occasional wince. There were rumors his skull harbored a metal plate, a souvenir of Israel’s war of independence. I never heard him talk about it not in class at Flatbush nor earlier, during the summers before high school when I saw him at Camp Massad Aleph where he counselored an older age group than mine.

More than 20 years ago, in his short but moving acceptance speech of the 1994 Covenant Award as an outstanding Jewish educator, he related in third person testimony the tale of a soldier so severely wounded in the head during the battle for Jerusalem in 1948 that doctors pronounced him dead, only to be reclassified as barely alive but blind after a nurse heard him moan, only to be told he should not consider pursuing academic studies after another nurse discovered he was not sightless (https://vimeo.com/122476742?ref=em-v-share).

Word came Thursday that Amnon Haramati passed away. He was 86. 

Memories of a Bible Contest, Russian Vodka and a Ponytail

Every now and then contemporary events reported in the media evoke memories of my past. So it was with last Tuesday’s New York Times article about a Bible quiz of the Tanach, the Jewish Old Testament (BTW, The Times refers to the Jewish Bible as the Tanakh, but I prefer a transliteration of the Hebrew that is more gutteral, hence the “ch” ending  of Tanach with a sound similar to the beginning of the Yiddish word “chutzpah”). 

Anyway, to return to the present and memory at hand, here’s a link to The Times article: https://nyti.ms/2kDSObW.

Fifty-seven summers ago, as an 11-year-old, I competed in the first Bible quiz at Camp Massad Aleph in Tannersville, PA. I was well prepared for this endeavor, having attended six years of intensive Jewish instruction at Yeshiva Rambam in Brooklyn. Of course, all the other contestants my age had similar preparation, though not from Rambam. They came mostly from other Brooklyn Jewish day schools: Yeshivah of Flatbush, or Yeshiva Eitz Chaim, or Yeshiva Bialik, or Shulamith, an all girls school.

Preliminary testing of the 300 or so campers culled the finalists down to three boys from my age group. Years before feminism took hold, camp administrators realized it would be wrong not to have a girl among the finalists. 

She sat next to me on the stage in front of the assembled camp. I can’t remember her name. Nor do I remember any of the questions. I do remember we were the two final contestants and that she answered a question that stumped me. 

For her victory she received a large Bible. As the runner-up, my Bible measured half as large. Same complete text, but in a much smaller font.

Za zdorovje: The Russian toast “for health” is a cruel joke these days, given the outbreak of deaths from tainted vodka. As reported in The Times, a cheap substitute for vodka presumably made from ethanol actually contained methanol which is deadly.

At least 76 unsuspecting drinkers in Irkutsk have died from imbibing the lethal mixture. (https://nyti.ms/2m9doBx)

It is not the first time bad vodka has killed Russians. When Gilda and I took a river cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow back in 2010 we were told about the time Mikhail Gorbachev tried to cure excessive drunkenness by limiting the sales of vodka in state-run stores to one bottle a month. Thirsty Russians resorted to distilling their own brews. But their vodkas exceeded the safe 40% alcohol levels and many became ill or died.  

Ponytail Down: Two weeks ago during a monthly poker game, Gregg asked aloud if I was still retired. Told I was, he wondered, again aloud, why I didn’t have time to get a haircut. 

Normally a reliable reader of this blog, Gregg had missed or forgotten the December 29 posting in which I wrote I was growing a ponytail to fulfill my wife’s request. Alas, my curly hair becomes a Jewfro which is not, as Gregg diplomatically observed, always appealing. So last week I told Gilda my valiant try at a ponytail would be sheared away. 

While sitting in the haircutter’s chair, I was reminded that about 30 years ago she was set to cut the ponytail that our son Dan had grown during day camp. “Set to cut” because upon further inspection she spotted an all-too-common invasion in any camper’s hair—lice. 

An application of Rit resolved that problem. A week later Rosie clipped off his tail which for many years he kept in a clear plastic storage bag. 

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. 

School Day Memories

With the beginning of school in most communities I started reminiscing about my early education years at Yeshiva Rambam in Brooklyn.

I started first grade in September 1954 when I was five years old. As my birthday is in March I should have been enrolled in kindergarten, but my mother pressured the school to accept me into first grade or she would take my brother and sister out of the school.

Before I started school I would watch from our dinette window as my siblings boarded the yellow school bus each morning. Now it was my turn. I don’t recall anything from the initial bus ride but the return trip is imprinted in my memory.

First grade ended at 3 pm, 90 minutes before dismissal for my brother and sister’s classes. I would ride the bus home by myself. I stepped onto the bus and walked halfway down the aisle before sliding into a row on the right side. The ride home would take about 30 minutes.

The next thing I recall is waking up back at school. I had slept through the drop off in front of our house. The bus driver apparently thought I had made other arrangements to get home. As my mother worked full time she was not aware of my troubled ride home. Our housekeeper, meanwhile, did not realize I was lying across a bench invisible to the bus driver and her.

I’d like to say I handled the situation as any five-year-old would. Indeed, I did. I started crying. Only upon seeing my brother and sister did I stop.

That was the only time I recall ever sleeping through my stop, even as an adult commuting home for more than 30 years on Metro North.

My first grade teacher was Mrs Malka. She was a cheerful woman. She must have been in her mid 20s. Some 50 years later I recognized her sitting next to her brother in the pew ahead of me in our White Plains synagogue on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. For the next decade I looked forward to seeing her every year.

I would not have looked forward to seeing my second grade teacher. Mrs. Mare seemed to enjoy dispensing corporal punishment. Her two favorite cruelties were pinching one’s nostrils and grabbing a student by the upper arms, pulling them back and sticking her knee into the small of the back.

Naturally, my classmates and I complained of mistreatment but my parents, like all the others, reasoned that we must have done something wrong to warrant such discipline.

In third grade we had separate Hebrew and English teachers. Mr. Ben-Shemer was a jovial, Eastern European Holocaust survivor who wore garters to keep his shirtsleeves up. He played the concertina and would admonish us not to put our feet on the frame of the chair in front of us by saying, “When the feet go up, the brains go down.”

Mrs. Schlesinger taught English. She was a tall, prim woman with a less physical style of punishment. She would banish an offender to a wardrobe closet for an indefinite stand in darkness. She was reprimanded one day for leaving a student in the closet when the dismissal bell rang.

Whose History Is This, Anyway?

One of the reasons I write this blog is to provide a written record of my family’s history for my children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. Of course, these are my memories. It’s been said, history is written by the victors. In today’s world, history, at least family history, is written by the blogger.

But that doesn’t mean my family always agrees with my recall. My sister Lee insists our father disdained tomatoes for many years until he was offered one by a kindly customer on his stationery sales route outside Danzig, Poland. He had resisted tomatoes, she said, because that’s what he ate almost daily in his small hometown of Ottynia. 

Rubbish, say my brother Bernie and I. How credible would it have been to have caches of tomatoes to eat in the dead of winter in a shtetl in Galicia where indoor plumbing was scarce and paved roads were an anomaly? We think she confused tomatoes with potatoes, a staple of the peasants and townfolk who lived through brutal winters and hot summers. 

Lee also maintains our father liked ham during his years in Danzig. News to Bernie and me. In the 50 years I knew him, Dad never ate any meat or fish that was not from a kosher animal (though it might not have been slaughtered according to Jewish custom). Never did I hear him ever talk about eating ham. Bernie agrees.

Bernie believes our Hebrew elementary school Lag Ba’Omer trips were to a park on Staten Island. He forgets the Verrazano Bridge linking Brooklyn to Staten Island opened in 1964, six years after he graduated Yeshiva Rambam, four years after Lee did and two years after I. There’s no way the school bus trip of several hundred students and parents took the ferry across the Narrows. No, we went to Cunningham Park in Queens.

Lee is of the opinion we all attended Rambam because Bernie was encouraged to do so by a teacher he had at the Talmud Torah affiliated with our parents’ synagogue. That teacher, she says, also taught at Rambam. Bernie agrees he was influenced by the teacher but he was not affiliated with Rambam. Eight-year-old Bernie wanted to attend the yeshiva but his Hebrew skills were not up to snuff. Indeed, the school’s Hebrew principal, Isadore Lefkowitz, tried to talk him out of it, telling him he’d have to give up most of his summer vacation in exchange for intensive tutoring. Bernie enthusiastically agreed. I just heard this story a week or so ago. I am still stunned by his response.

I’ve written several times about Mel Brooks’ penchant for making fun of my given name during his 2,000-year-old-man routines with Carl Reiner. Turns out, my brother was singled out, as well. Here’s dialogue from a 1966 appearance on The Andy Williams Show:

Reiner: Of all the discoveries of all time, what was the greatest—the wheel, the lever, fire?

Brooks: Fire. Far and away, fire. It was the hottest thing going. You can’t beat fire. It used to warm us, it used to light up our caves so you wouldn’t walk into the wall, so we wouldn’t marry our brother Bernie.

Yeah. For once he didn’t say “marry our brother, Murray.” Brooks actually had a brother Bernie, as well as a brother Irving and Lenny. Why he couldn’t stick with those names instead of introducing Murray into many of his routines is a burden I’ll have to bear all my life. 

Speaking of exercise, it’s one of Gilda’s and my recurring disagreements, my lack of interest in physical activity other than team sports. Now, a new study suggests I can blame my parents. Here’s how The NY Times positioned the findings: “A study on rats suggests that portions of the brain that control reward behavior may play a role in the decision to work out or to remain on the couch. If you give a rat a running wheel and it decides not to use it, are genes to blame? And if so, what does that tell us about why many people skip exercise?” (http://nyti.ms/XFqSVO)

Gilda and I recently visited my sister in Los Angeles. A problem with visiting relatives is it feeds my hypochondria. Lee wears a night guard because she grinds her teeth. So do I, meaning, I grind my teeth and wear a night guard, as well. Over dinner one night I found out one of our cousins on our mother’s side suffers from gout, as does one of Lee’s children. When I said my toes sometimes hurt, Gilda chided me for thinking I, too, had gout. 

One of Gilda’s missions in life is to cure my hypochondria, or at least puncture some of my more outrageous self-diagnoses. She also is there to expose my indiscretions and correct my mistakes. She’s pretty good at those last two, still has lots of work to do on the first. 

I guess that’s enough Forseter family history for one day. I’ll close with a short comment from the opening of a eulogy our friend Barbara delivered last week for her father who died at the age of 87. The last few years of his life he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. 

Barbara related how at the recent graduation of her daughter Alexandra from Brandeis University, one of the speakers from the Sociology department asked how well the students knew their parents’ life stories. Her father, Barbara said, rarely talked about his early life. My parents, as well, left many of their early years blank in my mind. Through this blog I hope to leave the next generation a more complete picture of our history, even if it is filtered through my imperfect memory. 

Graduation Day

Fifty years ago I graduated from Yeshiva Rambam, a Jewish elementary day school in Brooklyn, the most notable feature of which was its playground on the roof of its building at 3121 Kings Highway. Thirty-one boys, 13 girls were in my eighth grade class, some of whom have gone on to notable careers, previously mentioned in this blog entry: http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2012/01/elementary-ties.html. 

We studied Jewish material—Bible, Talmud, Hebrew language, ritual practices—in the morning, English subjects in the afternoon. Classes began at 9; by the time we were in eighth grade they finished at 5. It was a long day, interrupted only three times, for 20 minute outdoor recesses on the roof in the morning and afternoon plus a 30-minute hot lunch in the school auditorium. 

I was among the youngest in my grade, my birthday falling as it did in March. Just 5-1/2 years old when I entered first grade, by rights I should have been placed in kindergarten. But with the leverage of paying for two other children at Rambam, my mother insisted I be a first grader. 

Rambam was just under three miles from our home on Avenue W. When I started, my brother, sister and I rode a school bus to Rambam. As a first grader, however, my dismissal was at 3, theirs at 5. That first day I boarded the bus for the return trip home all by myself. The next thing I knew I was back at school. I had slept through my stop and did not awaken until the bus had returned to school for its next round of deliveries. Being disoriented, I panicked. Fortunately, my sister arrived on the scene to calm me down. (In case you’re wondering, my mother had gone back to work so she wasn’t home when the bus pulled up in front of our house.)

By second grade I had matriculated with my siblings to public transportation, the B-49 Ocean Avenue bus, a block and a half from our home, to Kings Highway where we transferred to a bus going east to 31st Street. We had student bus passes which, if I remember correctly, cost $1 each month for unlimited rides. 

Two things made those rides memorable. First, it was a lot colder back in the 1950s. I know I sound like our parents and grandparents who would regale us with tales of their slogging through the snow to get to school. But trust me, it was colder when I grew up, especially if you had to stand waiting for a bus to arrive. There were no bus shelters along our route, no stores you could pop into to catch a few moments of warmth while you waited. 

Second, books were heavier back then. I used to shlep to school each day a big leather briefcase packed with thick textbooks. My family teased me that the weight of the briefcase was the only thing keeping me grounded against strong gusts of wind given my skinny-malink status. 

My first grade English teacher was Mrs. Malka. She was probably just around 25 at the time, but seemed older to me. Years later, some 40 years later actually, on Rosh Hashanah eve in our temple in White Plains, I sat behind a fellow congregant whose sister was visiting him. It was Mrs. Malka. She looked the same. I’d see her every year. She passed away a few years ago.

Second grade introduced us to corporal punishment. Our English teacher exacted discipline by either pinching your nose tightly or by bracing your arms while standing behind you and thrusting her knee into your back. When we complained to our parents they, naturally, sided with her, reasoning we must have done something bad to merit such cruel punishment. 

Our third grade English teacher opted for solitary confinement as her preferred means of discipline. She’d place you in a dark coat closet, a practice the administration ultimately forced her to abandon after she forgot to liberate a student when the dismissal bell rang and he was left at school. 

Her Hebrew counterpart was much beloved, especially for the concertina he would play. His most memorable foible was not allowing you to use the footrest in the back of the desk in front of you. “When your feet go up, your brains go down,” he would admonish us. 

Almost all of the Hebrew teachers were either Israeli or from Europe. Our eighth grade Hebrew teacher was thin, bespectacled, with an air of Peter Lorre about him. He’d break cigarettes in half and smoke them in class, holding them like a pincer in his forefinger and thumb, just as we’d seen too many Germans do in too many World War II movies. It gave us the willies.  

There are lots more memories, but this blog, no doubt, already has exceeded most of your tolerances. The elementary school is no more, the building transformed into a wing of Kings Highway Hospital. Yeshiva Rambam, as the saying goes, was very good to me.  

Elementary Ties

Many people use Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites to keep abreast of, or catch up with, relatives, friends, acquaintances or business associates. I mostly rely on the old fashioned conveyers of information: traditional media including newspapers, magazines, radio and television.

Take, for example, a column by Nicholas D. Kristof in the NY Times last Thursday. Entitled “Waiting for Mitt the Moderate,” the Op-Ed piece listed several of Romney’s foreign affairs advisors including Dov Zakheim. Some might recognize that name as a former Defense Department official in recent Republican administrations, most prominently identified as the analyst who shot down support for Israel’s internal development of the Lavi jet fighter in the late 1980s.

I know Dov as a masterful Talmudic scholar from our elementary school days at Yeshiva Rambam in Brooklyn (modesty does not keep me from saying I was no slouch either in the ways of our learned sages). He delivered the English valedictory address at our graduation ceremony in 1962, along with being the co-winner of a Hebrew Department scholarship.

Lest you think Zakheim was a unique performer, our class of 31 boys and 13 girls (yes, this was a co-ed, Orthodox Hebrew school—my, how times have changed!) had several notable achievers.

One of our more interesting classmates was Alan Zelenetz. He was a good graphic artist. To amuse us, he would eat chalk and paper. Perhaps that was the source of his creativity juices. After becoming a rabbi and a junior high school principal at the Yeshiva of Flatbush in Brooklyn, Alan became a film producer and comic book writer. He co-created the Alien Legion series for the Marvel Comics book imprint Epic Comics. He also co-founded Ovie Entertainment, an independent film production company.

Alan’s cousin, Arnold Saltzman, is a rabbi as well but is probably more well known as a cantor, composer and recording artist. At Rambam, Arnold’s voice was head and shoulders better than any other. Indeed, he was a child singer with the New York Metropolitan Opera.

Dennis Prager stood taller than anyone in our class. Dennis and I continued our association through high school at the Yeshiva of Flatbush and Brooklyn College. While the rest of his high school mates were learning compulsory French, Dennis quietly taught himself Russian. He was, you might say, a gifted student. It was in high school that Dennis met future rabbi Joseph Telushkin, his co-author of several books on Judaism (I knew Joe before Flatbush—we bunked together in Camp Massad Aleph for four or five years in the late 1950’s). Today Prager is a well-known conservative columnist and radio talk show host.

Michael Shmidman is a rabbi, too (is there a pattern here?). He's now the dean of Touro Graduate School of Jewish Studies. I don't know how tall he is today, but as a youngster he was short. Still, when it came time to pick our school basketball team, the coach chose him over me. I exacted some measure of unintended revenge the following spring during a class outing softball game. Michael was pitching for his team. I batted a ball right into his stomach, hard enough to double him over and end the game.

Yeshiva Rambam closed the doors to its elementary school in 2005 but it's nice to know my classmates still can make the news. Of course, they don't always do so in a positive light. One of them, who shall remain anonymous, is a major New York City landlord not known for the beneficent treatment of his tenants.

By the way, in case you’re wondering why I have not included any updates on the girls in my class, it’s not because they have not done anything noteworthy. But under their maiden names their accomplishments did not show up in any of the social media I consulted.

Mrs. Nightmare

I awoke this morning to a radio news report about a first grade teacher in Silver Spring, MD, charged with choking and hitting students during the school day.

Now, ordinarily I wouldn’t pay attention to such a story. Except, her alleged brutal treatment of her charges paralleled my experience in elementary school in the 1950s. I attended a private Hebrew school, Yeshiva Rambam, in Brooklyn. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Mare, or more appropriately, Mrs. Nightmare, had a unique way of dealing with recalcitrant children. She would tightly pinch your nostrils for 10 seconds or longer. If you were really deserving of re-education, she would stand behind you, grab hold of your arms just above your elbows, pull them back towards her while sticking her knee into your back.

Of course her students complained to their parents. But as they were mostly immigrant or first generation parents, they sided with her, believing if we were disciplined we surely must have done something egregious to warrant corporal punishment.

Our third grade teacher, Mrs. Schlesinger, educated us into the tribulations of solitary confinement. Her version of the modern day “time out” in the corner was to isolate an offender in a dark wardrobe closet in our classroom. Usually your term of sentence was 10 to 20 minutes standing in the dark, but one spring day Mrs. Schlesinger lost track of one of her inmates and left him inside his cell when dismissal came. So did the rest of the class. His parents were not amused when he failed to show up at home when the school bus made its normal stop at their door. Mrs. Schlesinger reluctantly agreed to more benign punishments after that incident.

Our seventh grade Hebrew teacher, Mr. Kulik, was real old school. That means he saw nothing untoward in some physical contact with students. He took a particular interest in Walter, a chubby, not overly ambitious or attentive student. His patience finally exhausted one day, Mr. Kulik decided to eject Walter from the classroom. Physically eject him. He literally decided to throw Walter out the door. Trouble was, the door was closed. Walter, being round and pudgy, bounced off the door right back into Mr. Kulik’s arms. Only after two or three repeat tossings and rebounds did Mr. Kulik finally realize it was not Walter being insubordinate that kept him coming back time and again. I should note that throughout this ordeal Walter was laughing.