ne SomA Lonely Philistine Unlike the parents of many Jewish-American boys of my generation in New York, mine were born in this country. My grandparents all came here as adults, but two of them died before | was bom, and a third died in the year in which I was born. My parents never told me much about them or about my fourth grandparent, who survived until | was fifteen but with whom | could hardly communicate because she spoke very little English and was very ill. My mother and father, like so many “Yankees” of their generation, wete not particularly interested in their origins. 1 don't know whether there was anyone in that past worth remembering, but | do know that my parents were cager to dissociate themselves from that past. They thought of themselves as Americans, to some extent looked down on their parents as foreigners, and looked forward to a life without pogroms, ctars, and emperors. Unlike some of my contemporaries, | was never told much about any real or imagined rabbinical ancestors; I learned only that my father's parents came from Hungary and that my mother's came from a place that moved back and forth like a geopolitical football between Russia and Poland. My father, Robert Weisberger, was born on the Lower East Side of New York in 1891, the fifth of mine children born there—one of them a half brother. My mother, Esther, was also born there, in 1892, and was one ofz A Phikssopher's Story three children boen there—one of them a half sister. My parents were married in 1915, when they began to live at 76-80 Madison Street, which is not to be confused with Madison Avenue; and I was born on April 29, 1917. The apartment in which | first lived still stands today, a dreary, gray-brick five-story tenement on the comer of Madison and Catherine Streets. In my day it had no electricity and was gaslit; | vividly remmember times when the gas ceased to come out of the jets, because the time provided by a twenty- cent piece in the meter had run out. [lived im that aparumenc uncil 1 was six years old, in 1923. In that year, when | began elementary school, we moved across Catherine Street to a newer building, which | was taughr to call an apartment house as opposed to a tenement house. Although the move was from a lesser to a greater building, the greater was definitely not grand. The halls of che apartment house were no cleaner than the halls of the tenement house across the street. Indeed, because of the way in which a public dumbwaiter was used, they were much smellier. Instead of reaching in and pulling the ropes in order to get the elevator to come up, and instead of secting garbage pails on the elevator, which then should have been returned to the basement, the residents abandoned the entire principle of the elevator in their haste to get rid of their garbage. When the elevator ceased to tide up and down the shaft, that became a chute into which all the crud was dumped. | can remember the horrible smells that wafted up to us on the third floor, and whenever | was delegated to take out the garbage, | would have to take a deep breath before opening the door to the dumbwaiter and disposing of my bundle in the accepted way. | often came close to fainting during these episodes, The building at 72 Madison Soret not only housed my family, it also housed my father’s shoe store on the ground floor. My father had inherited it from his father, who had come to this country in, I think, the 1870s; it was the third and last owned by my grandfather before he died in 1917, the year of my birth. His first had been a cobbler’s shop on Water Street, from which he moved to a larger store on the comer of Catherine and Monroe Streets. In my grandfather's time, and in my father's as well, Catherine Street was the main business street of what was sometimes called the “Two Bridges” area because it was bounded by the Brooklyn Bridge on ome side and the Manhattan Bridge on the other. When | was. a boy, its other accepted boundaries were the East River and East Broadway, the latter being one block from the Bowery, beyond which Chinatown, as 1 knew it, lay. Therefore during my first twenty-two years | moved, lived, and had my being three or four blocks from