It was work that identified and distinguished our neighbors for
me far more than religion. Nobody in the neighborhood had a
beard or dressed in the antiquated Old World style or wore a skullcap
either outdoors or in the houses I routinely floated through
with my boyhood friends. The adults were no longer observant in
the outward, recognizable ways, if they were seriously observant at
all, and aside from older shopkeepers like the tailor and the kosher
butcher—and the ailing or decrepit grandparents living of necessity
with their adult offspring—hardly anyone in the vicinity spoke
with an accent. By 1940 Jewish parents and their children at the
southwestern corner of New Jersey's largest city talked to one another
in an American English that sounded more like the language
spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously
spoken across the Hudson by our Jewish counterparts in the five boroughs.
Hebrew lettering was stenciled on the butcher shop window
and engraved on the lintels of the small neighborhood synagogues,
but nowhere else (other than at the cemetery) did one's
eye chance to land on the alphabet of the prayer book rather than
on the familiar letters of the native tongue employed all the time
by practically everyone for every conceivable purpose, high or low.
At the newsstand out front of the corner candy store, ten times
more customers bought the Racing Form than the Yiddish daily,
the Forvertz.
Israel didn't yet exist, six million European Jews hadn't yet ceased
to exist, and the local relevance of distant Palestine (under British
mandate since the 1918 dissolution by the victorious Allies of the
last far-flung provinces of the defunct Ottoman Empire) was a
mystery to me. When a stranger who did wear a beard and who
never once was seen hatless appeared every few months after dark
to ask in broken English for a contribution toward the establishment
of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, I, who wasn't an
ignorant child, didn't quite know what he was doing on our landing.
My parents would give me or Sandy a couple of coins to drop
into his collection box, largess, I always thought, dispensed out of
kindness so as not to hurt the feelings of a poor old man who,
from one year to the next, seemed unable to get it through his head
that we'd already had a homeland for three generations. I pledged
allegiance to the flag of our homeland every morning at school. I
sang of its marvels with my classmates at assembly programs. I eagerly observed its national holidays, and without giving a second
thought to my affinity for the Fourth of July fireworks or the
Thanksgiving turkey or the Decoration Day double-header. Our
homeland was America.
Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything
changed.
For nearly a decade Lindbergh was as great a hero in our neighborhood
as he was everywhere else. The completion of his thirty-three-and-a-half-hour nonstop solo flight from Long Island to
Paris in the tiny monoplane the Spirit of St. Louis even happened
to coincide with the day in the spring of 1927 that my mother discovered
herself to be pregnant with my older brother. As a consequence,
the young aviator whose daring had thrilled America and
the world and whose achievement bespoke a future of unimaginable
aeronautical progress came to occupy a special niche in the
gallery of family anecdotes that generate a child's first cohesive
mythology. The mystery of pregnancy and the heroism of Lindbergh
combined to give a distinction bordering on the divine to
my very own mother, for whom nothing less than a global annunciation
had accompanied the incarnation of her first child. Sandy
would later record this moment with a drawing illustrating the
juxtaposition of those two splendid events. In the drawing—completed
at the age of nine and smacking inadvertently of Soviet
poster art—Sandy envisioned her miles from our house, amid a
joyous crowd on the corner of Broad and Market. A slender young
woman of twenty-three with dark hair and a smile that is all robust
delight, she is surprisingly on her own and wearing her floral-patterned
kitchen apron at the intersection of the city's two busiest
thoroughfares, one hand spread wide across the front of the apron,
where the span of her hips is still deceptively girlish, while with the
other she alone in the crowd is pointing skyward to the Spirit of St.
Louis, passing visibly above downtown Newark at precisely the
moment she comes to realize that, in a feat no less triumphant for
a mortal than Lindbergh's, she has conceived Sanford Roth.
Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today's globalized world.
The story of an American family, middle class in middle America, ordinary in every way but one. But that exception is the beating heart of this extraordinary novel.
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Trite but true, all good things must come to an end. I so wanted to keep reading the wonderful prose, the settings that let one think they are part...
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Kenn Nesbitt is new Children's Poet Laureate(Jun 12 2013) Kenn Nesbitt has been named the new Children's Poet Laureate: Consultant in Children's Poetry to the Poetry Foundation, which noted that the two-year position...
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