THE BRONX – WHAT AM I DOING HERE!??

Memories of my family get-togethers in the Bronx makes Woody Allen’s dream sequences seem Gentile in comparison.  There we were, our Bresler clan, with some newbies thrown in, made up of the quirkiest characters to step out of Poland.  All cramped inside an apartment on the Grand Concourse — once the showpiece of the Bronx but now the home to thousands of Eastern Europeans, many Holocaust survivors — in the middle of a sweltering New York summer,

• archival film footage and sound effects of 1950s New York ….  steam rising from the pavement, cooking smells wafting in through the doors and open windows, the sheer lace curtains blowing in and getting caught between the slats of the hissing, hiccuping radiator.  Outside, the sounds of the city – fire truck sirens, laughing children and the constant whizzing of cars – competed with what was going on inside:  heavily accented English mixed with the English of the new generation, each one in a constant state of motion and verbal assaults.  The adults would be in the living room, stuck to the melting plastic-covers on the furniture, each one trying to be heard, their speech slipping in and out of Yiddish.  Tea was served in glasses held by filigreed silver glass holders which had been lovingly brought over by a survivor from the old country, but looking incongruous in the new world of chrome and linoleum tile.  Some of the relatives held a sugar cube between their teeth as they sipped the hot tea.  (Probably the Russian neighbour — the oddball in the group.)  The good china would have been taken out to serve “some-tink a bisele sveet.”  We kids would be in the fetter’s bedroom trying to kill each other, threatening the designated victim – usually my cousin Ruthie – with hanging out the window, three flights up.  Her crime was that she would always wear a life preserver into the bathtub.  To us, that was punishable.  And if any one of us dared to complain to our parents, it would be as quickly ignored and dismissed.  We would be sent packing right back.  “Go back! Go back in derr und verk it out!”  Talking quietly was never a part of this group.  Screams and temper tantrums were the designated modes of speaking.  Convinced already that I had been kidnapped as a baby and mistakenly placed with this family, these family get-togethers only reinforced my resolve.  I was definitely adopted….well, wasn’t the evidence there in plain view?  I did not belong.  My place was in Fred Astaire’s world — civilized, aristocratic.  Only he, the white gentile hero could rescue me – a miscast Jewish girl.