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SIMON (1912-1990)
    Born in Poland, Kate Simon immigrated to New York City when she was four, as a steerage passenger with her mother and younger brother. Her father, who had made the journey three years earlier, was a shoe designer; her mother was a corsetiere .
    Simon earned her B.A. at Hunter College, then worked for the Book-of-the-Month Club , Publishers Weekly, and Alfred A. Knopf. She reviewed books for The New Republic and The Nation, and wrote personal, urbane, and witty travel guides to New York, Paris, London, and Rome. It was as a memoirist, however, that she showed the fullness of her literary gift .
    This is a section of Simon’s first memoir , Bronx Primitive (1982) . A second volume , A Wider World, appeared in 1986, and a third , Etchings in an Hourglass, in 1990 .
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    from B RONX P RIMITIVE
    W hen my brother was born, I was eighteen months old. My father, for whom I was still searching, had been in New York for six months. Our Warsaw apartment turned dark, the singing stopped. It need hardly be said that I was jealous, felt abandoned, unloved, coldly shadowed while the full warm light that was mine now circled him. It cannot have been that my grandmother and aunts and mother suddenly stopped loving me, and I might in time have grown interested in him, beginning with the gallant way he peed, upward in a little shining arch, out of a finger in a peculiar place. But he was a very sick child and the household alternated between sad, quiet staring and frantic dashing to rescue him from death. His head was bright, alert, and very large compared to the arms and legs that would not develop beyond thin, boneless ropes. He was a classic picture of the rachitic famine child who still tears the heart of the newspaper reader, the television viewer. We werenot too poor to buy the food he needed; it was simply unavailable, grabbed up by the military for its soldiers. My mother took the baby from doctor to doctor, all of whom gave her the same short answer: “All this child needs is a steady, normal diet.” Because her food intake was meager, the milk she gave him was insufficient; my aunts scoured the city, offering large sums for an orange or two, an egg, a pint of milk, with no success. I grew thin and listless.
    The last doctor my mother saw in Warsaw, made blunt by the misery he could not remedy, shouted at her, “Leave the boy, he’s going to die anyway. Take the girl to America while there’s still time. Or do you want to sit with two dead children in this graveyard city?”
    We left for America. My brother was two and a half, a babbler in several languages, a driven entertainer and flirt. His arms and hands were weak but usable, his legs not at all; he moved with amazing, mischievous rapidity by shuffling on his behind when he wasn’t being carried. I was four, grown silent and very capable. I could lift him to the pot, clean him, and take him off. I could carry him to bed and mash his potato. I knew where he might bump his head, where he might topple, how to divert him when he began to blubber. It was a short childhood. I had my first baby at not quite four, better trained in maternal wariness and responsibility than many fully grown women I later observed. At four I also knew one could intensely love and as intensely hate the being who was both core and pit of one’s life.
    The month-long journey across devastated Europe to reach our ship, the Susquehanna , in Rotterdam remains with me as snatches of dream. I am sitting with my brother on my lap, in a room full of heavy dark furniture that I have never seen before. I am telling him that our mother went to buy food and will be back soon. I hope that she will come back, but I’m not sure; over and over, in every dark dream, I am not sure. I don’t say this to him but wonder what I will do, where we will go, if she doesn’t come back, as our father didn’t. I continue to talk to him. We’ll soon be on another