tear and the dog drool.
My father carefully flipped the spluttering, crispy planks, and broke six eggs into the pan, cooking them until the whites were firm and the yolks just set. He portioned the meat and the eggs out onto three plates and set them down alongside each other. We sat down to eat at our counter, side by side in silence; he reached over me to slice my breakfast into small squares. When he was done, he cut his up the same way.
The Spam was tender and unctuous and encased in a crackling jacket of golden fried pork fat. It was salty and bitter and rich; it tasted of spite and fury and betrayal, and clandestine flavors that I had never tasted before.
We sat together in silence, and ate.
âGood?â he said.
I nodded.
My father read
The Times
and lifted fork to mouth, fork to mouth, not looking up when my mother walked into the kitchen, dressed for the day in her favorite brown wool blazer and tan suedejeans, a blue and gold silk Hermès horse-bit scarf tied around her neck. Her plate sat on the counter next to mine; her breakfast was cold. She picked up the empty can, squinted at it, and threw it into the garbage.
âWeâre Jews,â she said, scraping the Spam and eggs directly into the trash and dumping her plate into the sink. She turned on the water and blasted away the sheen of pork fat and sticky yolk.
âWe donât leave our children. And we donât eat dog food.â
5
The Neighbors
T here were the synagogues and the kosher butchers, the Tung Shing House and the Oasis, and the bar mitzvahs that took place every Saturday in 1974. But Forest Hillsâbefore Son of Sam and after Kitty Genovese, who was murdered in 1964 a few blocks from The Marseilles while her neighbors famously pulled closed their shutters against her screamsâwas a mixed community of residents with one foot planted squarely in the past and the other shuffling clumsily into the future like a sweaty-palmed boy learning the fox-trot. For many, the town was a midway point, a way station to breathe and refuel, a not-quite-verdant pit stop stuck between the grimness of first-generation Brooklyn and the Bronx, and the promise of the Long Island border towns, which my father called The Golden Ghetto, and where, almost without exception, we all dreamed of living.
When I was a young child and just learning how to read, Gagaand my parents filled my bedroom with books; there were colorful storybooks and alphabet books, books of light verse and a set of illustrated presidential biographies that arrived once a month through a Time-Life childrenâs subscription that my father had ordered for me. There was a spine-broken, taped-together hardcover copy of
DâAulairesâ Book of Greek Myths
, which had been handed down to me by Aunt Sylvia from her youngest daughter, Sarah, and which I slept clutching under my covers the way some children do a stuffed toy, so enamored was I of my teenage cousin that her castoffs felt to me like love itself. My parents and Gaga read to me constantly: Gaga preferred poetry, and I knew the first lines of
The Song of Hiawatha
before I was five; my mother liked the singsong simplicity of Dr. Seuss. When Gaga and my mother werenât looking, my father devised his own way of teaching me how to read that was more practical and produced immediate results: he handed me a heavy catalog of toys from FAO Schwarz. My eyes bugged: there were pictures of stuffed animals, sulkies meant to be pulled by actual small ponies, gorgeous wooden blocks in brilliant colors. He showed me how to match the letter next to the toy to its description:
a
matched up to a watery-eyed German teddy bear, its arms open in beckoning love, from a company called Steiff;
b
connected to a life-size Tudor-style dollhouse big enough for a small child to stand up in. Surrounded by childrenâs books piled in every corner of my bedroom, I learned how to read by analyzing advertising copy for things I longed
My father carefully flipped the spluttering, crispy planks, and broke six eggs into the pan, cooking them until the whites were firm and the yolks just set. He portioned the meat and the eggs out onto three plates and set them down alongside each other. We sat down to eat at our counter, side by side in silence; he reached over me to slice my breakfast into small squares. When he was done, he cut his up the same way.
The Spam was tender and unctuous and encased in a crackling jacket of golden fried pork fat. It was salty and bitter and rich; it tasted of spite and fury and betrayal, and clandestine flavors that I had never tasted before.
We sat together in silence, and ate.
âGood?â he said.
I nodded.
My father read
The Times
and lifted fork to mouth, fork to mouth, not looking up when my mother walked into the kitchen, dressed for the day in her favorite brown wool blazer and tan suedejeans, a blue and gold silk Hermès horse-bit scarf tied around her neck. Her plate sat on the counter next to mine; her breakfast was cold. She picked up the empty can, squinted at it, and threw it into the garbage.
âWeâre Jews,â she said, scraping the Spam and eggs directly into the trash and dumping her plate into the sink. She turned on the water and blasted away the sheen of pork fat and sticky yolk.
âWe donât leave our children. And we donât eat dog food.â
5
The Neighbors
T here were the synagogues and the kosher butchers, the Tung Shing House and the Oasis, and the bar mitzvahs that took place every Saturday in 1974. But Forest Hillsâbefore Son of Sam and after Kitty Genovese, who was murdered in 1964 a few blocks from The Marseilles while her neighbors famously pulled closed their shutters against her screamsâwas a mixed community of residents with one foot planted squarely in the past and the other shuffling clumsily into the future like a sweaty-palmed boy learning the fox-trot. For many, the town was a midway point, a way station to breathe and refuel, a not-quite-verdant pit stop stuck between the grimness of first-generation Brooklyn and the Bronx, and the promise of the Long Island border towns, which my father called The Golden Ghetto, and where, almost without exception, we all dreamed of living.
When I was a young child and just learning how to read, Gagaand my parents filled my bedroom with books; there were colorful storybooks and alphabet books, books of light verse and a set of illustrated presidential biographies that arrived once a month through a Time-Life childrenâs subscription that my father had ordered for me. There was a spine-broken, taped-together hardcover copy of
DâAulairesâ Book of Greek Myths
, which had been handed down to me by Aunt Sylvia from her youngest daughter, Sarah, and which I slept clutching under my covers the way some children do a stuffed toy, so enamored was I of my teenage cousin that her castoffs felt to me like love itself. My parents and Gaga read to me constantly: Gaga preferred poetry, and I knew the first lines of
The Song of Hiawatha
before I was five; my mother liked the singsong simplicity of Dr. Seuss. When Gaga and my mother werenât looking, my father devised his own way of teaching me how to read that was more practical and produced immediate results: he handed me a heavy catalog of toys from FAO Schwarz. My eyes bugged: there were pictures of stuffed animals, sulkies meant to be pulled by actual small ponies, gorgeous wooden blocks in brilliant colors. He showed me how to match the letter next to the toy to its description:
a
matched up to a watery-eyed German teddy bear, its arms open in beckoning love, from a company called Steiff;
b
connected to a life-size Tudor-style dollhouse big enough for a small child to stand up in. Surrounded by childrenâs books piled in every corner of my bedroom, I learned how to read by analyzing advertising copy for things I longed
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