Long, long, long before my encounter with a classic schoolyard bully, my grandfather Jacob took ship from Paris to Boston. At fourteen years old, he was escaping the strictures of Judaic Orthodoxy — which he had reckoned was unhealthy, especially for children.
Grandpa arrived in the United States without much education but not without American-type skills: he’d been experientially introduced to sales and marketing at a very early age. His mother, Sarah, ultra-Orthodox, sent her eleven kids out into the Paris streets daily to sell flowers to passers-by, and gave their earnings to the shul.
Grandpa Jacob thereupon developed a credo: If this was the kind of god it was, he didn’t want any part of it.
There were many tales about Grandpa, whose life brimmed over with incidents and the eccentricities producing the incidents. He and my grandmother Bessie had nine children, providing us grandchildren, all but one of us born after they died, with a plethora of relatives who delighted in telling us Grandpa Stories. Which we loved. Indeed, in response to that love, my Uncle Noah, called Noni, wrote two treasurable little books about Grandpa and the family, both of which contained lots of Grandpa Stories.
My Aunt Gert, the oldest of the children, once offered a caveat: “Pop sounds colorful now but he wasn’t always fun to live with,” although she had told me a few odd stories herself.
It was my mother who passed on the particular Grandpa story vaguely relevant here.
The family was living in one or another tenement apartments in Revere, Massachusetts, one in the Beachmont neighborhood. Such is the nature of our ethnic crazy quilt that while Revere itself had many Jewish families, Beachmont had only four. The local school, though, had a solid group of Irish Catholic kids.
In any consideration of immigrant populations at any point in American history, there will be conflicts. The folks who landed here first look askance at the newer arrivals, the ones who are not like them. The other ones, objects of derision or worse, cope in whatever form their culture provides.
In Beachmont, as in greater Boston, the most recently arrived Irish had come to America in the mid-1800’s; they were the establishment. The Jews, like my grandparents, who arrived in the late 1800’s, were the newbies. When the school-age children in my family (five, six or seven of them) approached the school for the first time, they encountered a blockade of belligerent Irish boys who physically tried to keep my family from going into the school.
Eventually, the Jewish kids got in, albeit with bruises.
I’m not sure who told Grandpa about the battle or when he was informed. I imagine Grandma, using a directive as old as humanity, telling him, “Jake, you’ve got to do something about this.”
Grandpa did.
I’ve told you Grandpa had brought with him from Europe American-quality skills, marketing and selling, although he called this “peddling.” He was a peddler, yes, but he had another American-quality skill: boxing. Fighting. As a young teenager, he’d fought successfully in the French version of Golden Gloves.
It may seem unusual that Grandpa had been a boxer, a Jewish boxer. Yet, among the narrow American opportunities for skilled Jewish immigrants to make a living despite prejudice and quotas was boxing. Barney Ross, Slapsie Maxie Rosenberg, Max Baer: I’d heard those names when I was a kid, although they were spoken quietly, with a sort of reticent Jewish pride. (An opportunity for unskilled Jewish immigrants was the mob. As a boy, my father, an athlete but not a boxer, shot pool with Dutch Schultz‘s bodyguard, “Lulu” Rosenkrantz.)
You might now suppose Grandpa accompanied his children to school and opened the Irish barrier with his fists. He did not. What he did was turn the back yard into a gym and teach his nine children, boys and girls alike, how to fight bullies, how to punch. (Uncle Noni said Grandpa taught his four boys; my mother said he taught them all. I’m going with my mother’s memory here.)
They had no further problems getting into school.
Multiple years later, my Uncle Noni was on a train platform when a priest came over to him with a smile. He’d recognized Uncle Noni from their days at the Beachmont School, when he was one of the Irish kids who had pummeled my family. They had a friendly conversation about their past. Story of immigration in American life.
Why didn’t my mother, first generation American, pass her father’s useful skill down to her three second-generation children? Maybe because there was no longer a need for it.
Story of immigration in American life.