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Authors: Arlene Alda
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MARK CASH
Lawyer, with a specialty in tax law
(1931– )
We had been living in Westchester and I met—I can’t remember his name right now—a very bright person who had gone to our elementary school. We were on the train together, and he told me about a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the construction of P.S. 76. There was going to be a gathering at the school, so I called up my sister and I called up my cousin who had lived across the street from us in the Bronx, and I told them I’d meet them there.
We left late, and I got down to our old neighborhood to go to P.S. 76, and there were cars all over the place. When we grew up there were never any cars. This was really the first time that I had driven around those blocks. I drove around looking for a place to park when it dawned on me that in all the years I had lived there, I’d never even been to the east side of P.S. 76. The east side was Italian, and to the west of the school it was basically Jewish. That’s the way the neighborhood was set up. We lived to the west of the school.
My grandparents and my aunt lived across the street from us on Arnow Avenue. They were Orthodox Jews. The rest of the family wasn’t. Out of respect for my grandparents, my mother kept a kosher home, but I was very interested in not being Jewish. In integrating. My grandmother spoke Yiddish. Only Yiddish. I refused to speak it. I would listen and I would understand, but I wouldn’t speak it. Now I live on the Upper East Side. There are all these young kids wearing yarmulkes all the time. This is something we never saw when we were growing up. We never saw any religious young Jews in our neighborhood, although there was a synagogue across the street and the rabbi lived at 788 Arnow Avenue. Most of us in our building shied away from the “old country.”
Our parents, by the way, let us run all over the place by the time we were six, seven, eight years old. One Passover we were going to have a Seder at my grandmother’s. I got dressed up in my holiday suit and then I went downstairs to where all the kids were playing. I don’t know how we wound up there, but we found ourselves late in the afternoon in the park. We were actually playing in Bronx Park, and I’m wearing this suit. We went down to the Bronx River, and there’s a mattress lying at the bank of the river. The mattress looks like it would make a great boat. We got on the mattress in the water, maybe two or three of us. It looked sturdy enough. We launched the mattress into the river and the next thing we knew we were sinking. We actually thought that we would just float away. We didn’t think of where. Once the mattress started sinking, we figured we had to get off that thing. Fortunately, the river was shallow there so I got off. I walked home dripping wet in my Passover suit.
The Depression and the losing of jobs and money were a big influence on us as kids. I think that most of the families in our building were relatively small because of that. There were even a lot of single kids in our building although I had a sister and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment. Once while I was sleeping in our living room on a hot day, we left our front door open to the hallway so the air could circulate. I woke up in the middle of the night with a big dog licking my face. It was common to sleep with the doors open in the summer. Because of the stories I had heard about the Depression, I think I definitely knew that we were a lot luckier than many who lived before us, in tenements.
But at about that same time, something happened that was really terrifying. That’s when the polio epidemic hit. Everybody was affected by the fear of getting polio. Our parents knew about the 1918 flu epidemic, where people in New York were dying like flies. In Philadelphia, they were lying out on the street. My parents never told us anything about it. Never mentioned it. When polio hit, they were terrified all over again. A few
MARK CASH
Lawyer, with a specialty in tax law
(1931– )
We had been living in Westchester and I met—I can’t remember his name right now—a very bright person who had gone to our elementary school. We were on the train together, and he told me about a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the construction of P.S. 76. There was going to be a gathering at the school, so I called up my sister and I called up my cousin who had lived across the street from us in the Bronx, and I told them I’d meet them there.
We left late, and I got down to our old neighborhood to go to P.S. 76, and there were cars all over the place. When we grew up there were never any cars. This was really the first time that I had driven around those blocks. I drove around looking for a place to park when it dawned on me that in all the years I had lived there, I’d never even been to the east side of P.S. 76. The east side was Italian, and to the west of the school it was basically Jewish. That’s the way the neighborhood was set up. We lived to the west of the school.
My grandparents and my aunt lived across the street from us on Arnow Avenue. They were Orthodox Jews. The rest of the family wasn’t. Out of respect for my grandparents, my mother kept a kosher home, but I was very interested in not being Jewish. In integrating. My grandmother spoke Yiddish. Only Yiddish. I refused to speak it. I would listen and I would understand, but I wouldn’t speak it. Now I live on the Upper East Side. There are all these young kids wearing yarmulkes all the time. This is something we never saw when we were growing up. We never saw any religious young Jews in our neighborhood, although there was a synagogue across the street and the rabbi lived at 788 Arnow Avenue. Most of us in our building shied away from the “old country.”
Our parents, by the way, let us run all over the place by the time we were six, seven, eight years old. One Passover we were going to have a Seder at my grandmother’s. I got dressed up in my holiday suit and then I went downstairs to where all the kids were playing. I don’t know how we wound up there, but we found ourselves late in the afternoon in the park. We were actually playing in Bronx Park, and I’m wearing this suit. We went down to the Bronx River, and there’s a mattress lying at the bank of the river. The mattress looks like it would make a great boat. We got on the mattress in the water, maybe two or three of us. It looked sturdy enough. We launched the mattress into the river and the next thing we knew we were sinking. We actually thought that we would just float away. We didn’t think of where. Once the mattress started sinking, we figured we had to get off that thing. Fortunately, the river was shallow there so I got off. I walked home dripping wet in my Passover suit.
The Depression and the losing of jobs and money were a big influence on us as kids. I think that most of the families in our building were relatively small because of that. There were even a lot of single kids in our building although I had a sister and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment. Once while I was sleeping in our living room on a hot day, we left our front door open to the hallway so the air could circulate. I woke up in the middle of the night with a big dog licking my face. It was common to sleep with the doors open in the summer. Because of the stories I had heard about the Depression, I think I definitely knew that we were a lot luckier than many who lived before us, in tenements.
But at about that same time, something happened that was really terrifying. That’s when the polio epidemic hit. Everybody was affected by the fear of getting polio. Our parents knew about the 1918 flu epidemic, where people in New York were dying like flies. In Philadelphia, they were lying out on the street. My parents never told us anything about it. Never mentioned it. When polio hit, they were terrified all over again. A few
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