from Bridges Volume 5 Number 2

Working Class Words: on Tenements and Gardens

Gail Simon, Merrill Black, and tova are working-class Jewish lesbians who grew up in apartment buildings in New York City in the fifties. Presently, they live in Seattle and have been friends for a number of years. They have been and continue to be active in various political groups that involve issues about Jews, lesbians, women, people of various class backgrounds, ages, abilities, and races; the Middle East, environmentalism, health care and more. While they all live in the city, each has gardened for a number of years and spends as much time as possible in the surrounding rural environments. Land issues have a great deal of meaning and implications for their past, present, and future. One day this summer they got together and started discussing issues of Jews, class, and "land." In the end, they realized they had barely begun to scratch the surface of the myriad of ways land issues affect their lives and their identities.

Merill: I grew up in the Bronx in a 6-floor apartment building. The apartment I grew up in was three rooms and it was a very dark building. A lot of Holocaust survivors, a lot of quiet, there weren't many kids. And the block was the whole world, going around the block was like a big world.

Gail: From the ages of one through twenty I lived on the seventh floor of a housing project that had twenty-two, eight story buildings. There was a cement playground with monkey bars, other climbing structures, a water sprinkler to run through in the summer, and lots of kids. There was an empty lot we used to fly kites in that was across the street so it was kind of far away in a sense, but that was our open land. The housing project was in Canarsie [Brooklyn] alongside a major highway on one side and then the water, Jamaica Bay, on the other side. I had some sense of nature because of the bay, but I lived in a housing project with scary stairways and smelly elevators. In honor of the neighborhood some people know me as Canarsie.

tova: I grew up in Borough Park. We lived two stories above the butcher shop. It was a row of tenements all attached, but with some separate entrances. You could get from one to the other through the fire escapes. The fire escape was my land. We hung out there in the summer when it was hot and sometimes even slept out there. On Pesakh we put the non-Pesadikhe food on the fire escape. We lived by the fire house and so the sidewalk was wide because of the walls of the fire house. We played most of our games by the fire wall.

Merill: The fire escape was also definitely my sense of space because my mother and father shared the living room. That was their bed room and my brother and I had the bedroom and the only place that was "space" when I think of land was the fire escape.

Gail: On each floor of the building, we had this cement fenced in space in between the apartments that was called a terrace or a patio. There was a brick wall at the end and we used to play handball on the walls and have birthday parties out there and stay there in the rain.

Merill: I was just thinking the only green I saw were trees surrounded by cement. The trees had a small square of green around them and every thing else was cement. I used to watch TV and love the commercials about Ireland--that was my fascination. I knew I was supposed to want to go to Israel but my thing was Ireland be cause there were these rolling green hills.

tova: Irish Spring Soap?

Merill: No (laughing) that came later. I'm a little older than you. We didn't have a park anywhere nearby. We put chalk on the sidewalk and played hopscotch and my brother would play stick ball in the gutter and I would go fishing in the sewer. My father played handball sometimes. So that was land. There weren't growing things. My mother and brother and I would take 2 or 3 busses to get to this park where there were big rocks and some grass and a lot of broken glass. But I thought it was an empire.

tova: Did you ever go to the beach?

Merill: No, never. I can remember water when I was much older, but not when I was young and lived in the Bronx. There was the Hudson River I saw sometimes but I didn't think of it as mine. It was really far from where I was. It would have involved 2 or 3 busses to get there.

Gail: Sometime I went to the beach in the summers. We didn't have a car and even though we lived right along the water, there was no direct transportation to the beach. So instead of a short drive to Coney Island we had to take a bus and 2 or 3 trains in order to go. We left at 9 in the morning and came back 10 at night and shlepped everybody and everything. But I do remember the beach and sand in my face (laughs), dunking under the waves and the hot soggy knishes they used to sell in bags. But it was more a people experience and a family thing. It felt very much like a city experience to me, but it was great to be out. I liked the heat.

The interesting thing is I lived right across from Jamaica Bay near Canarsie Pier, but the only time we every went to the pier was to do tashlikh for Rosh Hashanah. There was a lot of segregation around the pier. A lot of Hispanic people came in from other neighborhoods on the bus to fish and my parents did not take us or let us go to the pier due to their racist attitudes. We went to Canarsie Park which was about a half a mile away. We put everything in the old baby carriage and had picnics almost every weekend unless we went visiting. It took me many years to realize I love living near water because I grew up near water.

tova: I remember parks being cement. There was a park a few blocks away that had swings and stuff like that. I mostly played outside the house--tag, punchball, kings. Occasionally we'd go to the beach with my parents and siblings or with some neighbors. My mother and grandmother hated the beach and hated to swim, although most of my aunts lived on Brighton Beach so we'd go to the boardwalk sometimes to walk. If we went to the beach, my grandmother stayed home. She didn't like the sand in the house, so when we got home she'd scream out the window "Don't you bring that beach in the house with you." Everyone in my neighborhood would scream out the window. I had a strong sense of "community" with the people in my tenement.

Gail: We definitely had the sense of our floor. Everybody had the doors open all the time and neighbors would go back and forth, the neighbors' kids especially. But it didn't go beyond your floor even though I knew people who lived on other floors. In terms of possessiveness, or turf, if anybody peed in the elevator it would infuriate my parents especially. It was "our elevator, everybody's elevator" and people should take care of it, and how could anybody deface it? People knew each other. We all sat outside 'til it got dark or past dark in the summer. But the interesting thing is the grass was very much off limits because you used to get a monetary fine (laughter) if you went on the grass. My brother would always be caught going to get the ball in the grass. So what was the relation ship to the land? That you didn't touch it (laughter) .

tova: The landlords on my side of the street built a really huge chain link fence so the people from the apartment building on the other side of the street--where I was born--couldn't hang out on our side. Everyone wanted to be on our side of the street because the firewall made a good place to play games. But the people who lived in the big apartment across the street were mostly prostitutes and junkies and our landlords wanted to keep them out. So I had a sense the landlords owned "property," owned the street. I didn't think of it as owning land. The butcher, Mickey, was our landlord. I liked him because he gave me free food. Actually, Mrs. Danter, Mickey's mother, was the landlord until she died. I thought land lords were either old women or men, and Jewish, at least on our side of the block.

Gail: I didn't know of landlords. The housing project didn't have landlords. You paid your rent in the office. You dealt with maintenance men. No women at the desk. The manager of the housing project always had a bad rep because they never wanted to help and do the repairs you needed fast enough. There was a real separation between living there and owning it. It was about three quarters Jews living in the housing project. I never thought much about Jews and the land.

I didn't have a sense of who owned the projects. I had more of a sense of power. I mean I knew the NYC Housing Authority was involved, but the sense of power I had came out of the housing project office. My parents dealt with the people in the office a lot because of the fines my brother got. They went in to yell at them "stop scapegoating Howie--all the kids were playing in the grass, how come you always get my kid" and that kind of thing. But in terms of ownership, I didn't know what that meant. I lived there until I was 20, so for a long time the housing project was just this thing where people lived. As I grew older I learned it wasn't the best place to live. Owning your own house was a better place to live.

Merill: When people started buying into co-ops I definitely felt the breakdown in class. There were people who were better off. I know right now my parents live in NYC and are very worried because they're afraid they're going to be squeezed out of the neighborhood because everything is going condos or co-ops. But the whole concept of owning private homes vs. renting didn't mean much to me when I was growing up...All I knew was we paid rent. We didn't even talk about a landlord, we dealt with the super, the superintendent. I remember meeting a girl who lived in a private home 2 blocks away from me. It was a completely different world. She was also Christian and had been given a chicken for Easter. I was fascinated that they could have this live, walking-around, pecking thing in a yard. In terms of now living in Seattle, WA where a lot of people have a yard of some kind, it wasn't more than a teeny, tiny patch of grass, but I thought it was absolutely amazing.

tova: The only piece of land my grandmother ever owned was her plot in the cemetery. And she didn't originally own that individually. She bought it through some radical socialist group, a Workmen's Circle kind of thing. When they went defunct, she got the deed to the land. It was this big thing to her that she owned this piece of land to be buried in.

Merill: I think at least for working-class Jews, from what I know historically, it was a very important thing to have a place to be buried, and that it be a Jewish cemetery or a place where they could be buried in a Jewish way. There was a lot of talk in my family about the cemetery plot, like that was paradise. Going to the cemetery was definitely a seasonal thing, you went around the holidays, for instance.

I wanted to say something about country side because I think I did have a different experience in that I was raised partly by my grandparents. I lived with them from Friday until Monday and with my parents from Monday until Friday. My grandparents started renting in a bungalow colony and I would go with them sometimes during the summers, although I al ways envied people who went to camp because that sounded much more fun. It was all Jewish, but I didn't really think of it as land, again it was renting.

It was wonderful. My grandfather would make dill pickles. He didn't grow the cucumbers, he bought the cucumbers. He bought the dill, he bought the spices. It was a very big project. Jews and dill pickles, at least in my family, it was absolutely a necessity. So there were these huge glass jars. And I remember walking to Fallsburg. We walked on a road, not a sidewalk, and I remember that being really something. There were also blueberries growing behind the bungalow. It was this big deal to actually walk on a path, uphill, not paved, into this blueberry patch and pick blueberries. That was my first time actually seeing something grow and I must have been about 10 at the time.

Gail: I got to go out to the country when I was about 9. A friend who lived in the next building had a relative who lived in New Jersey some where. I was very excited and kind of scared. I didn't know what it meant. A lot of what I knew about "out of the city" was just through other people's stories because several of my relatives had bungalows. I never thought we were in any other class from them, I thought we were just variations of the same class. But they seemed to have more spending money than we did. When my family was thinking about moving to a cheaper housing project, they were still renting the bungalow in the summertime. But my parents had these friends who lived in New Jersey and that was a different world. They were an Italian family with lots of kids and a house and a pool. The other family I knew who lived out of the city on Long Island, a grandchild of a neighbor, also had a pool. I just remember swimming pools were very important. I thought if you lived out of the city you could have a pool and a dog, maybe, and a barbecue. These are the things I envied and re ally wanted as a city kid. I never knew there were public pools in the city. When you tell me about that, I'm still shocked. All we had were the sprinklers in the school yard or in the park.

tova: How aware of the seasons were you, especially as they related to being Jewish? I remember Sukkas-- again the fire escape. We didn't make a Sukkah on the fire escape, but all the Orthodox people did. They had blue cloth prefabricated Sukkot set up on the fire escapes. The synagogue also had a Sukkah. I remember having some awareness of marking time and cycles by the Jewish holidays, although I'm not sure how conscious I was of "natural cycles." I think I knew Passover was full moon. Even though I lived in such an urban environment in a sense being Jewish made me aware of things like the harvest at Sukkas. Once I made a "mini" Sukkah out of a shoe box for Hebrew school. I remember hanging grapes up in the shoe box as little decorations like the fruit you hang in the Sukkah. It was a miracle to me when they turned into raisins 'cause they were in a window and sunlight. That was my big farming experience at the time.

Merill: Always at the Jewish new year we did apples and honey for a sweet new year. There were always foods, of course, associated with Jewish holidays. But I don't think I really understood where foods came from or that these were seasonal holidays related to Biblical times growing seasons, harvest seasons, darkness, light. I certainly didn't know about moon cycles. I remember there was the blackout in NYC. I don't remember what year it was. I was at the library and had to walk back and there were no lights, but the moon was out. The moon lit the street and I looked up and it was a major spiritual experience. It was the first time I really saw the night sky. There was this whole world up there beyond the fire escape, beyond the buildings.

tova: Do you think those experiences have an effect on your relationship now to "natural" things--that in a way you were raised to think about cycles?

Merill: Yeah, definitely. I think that's a major part of what I treasure now about being Jewish--the realization that holidays in different ways are in fact connected to seasons and to land and to cycles and to moons.

Gail: I never knew the reason behind holidays. I don't know if I ever knew that Sukkas was a harvest holiday in those words, but I was very drawn to holidays and seasonal changes and celebrations. I used to love changing my wardrobe. We had limited space and closets. We'd always change clothes for the seasons, pull the summer clothes out of the box and put the rest away. My mother used to buy certain foods. She never said it's because it's the Jewish new year but there were things like a pomegranate in the fall. I remember these special treats. They were important to me. We went to the synagogue for the holidays. Some way it got into me about things coming at a certain time. I didn't know about new moons or full moons with Jewish holidays.

When I was in college studying education courses, I had a teacher who was in charge of the sciences. She really opened my mind up to seasonal changes because she was big on bringing nature into class. She lived in a house. I didn't even know anybody who lived in a one-family house in Brooklyn until about that age. She used to bring cuttings of forsythia and other spring blossoms. This was just fascinating to me. She was Jewish also. Maybe that was the beginning of my broader sense of nature and things growing beyond the house plants my mother had.

The conclusion of this article appears in BRIDGES Volume 5 Number 2
If you would like a copy of this or other back issues, see the subscription page for ordering information.

Many thanks to Ruby Trauner for transcribing this conversation.

Gail Simon is a forty-one year old working-class Jewish lesbian who lives in Seattle. She loves cooking, especially with her own home grown food which she gets from her ever-expanding garden, that she works and plays in with her partner, Rebecca. She's always happy to share fresh food and good cooking with friends.

Merrill Black is a work in progress. Dealing with CFIDS (chronic fatigue) has changed the direction of her life. Her bio here reflects her mood and the time of its writing. She lives in Seattle.

tova is a working-class Jewish lesbian Aquarius writer very new mom. She's been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and is an editor of Bridges. She writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction and is trying to find a way to make a "living" from freelance writing (big dream); is working on a poetry manuscript and a cookbook (needs a publisher for both); gardens as much as possible; and despite her lifelong seriousness, loves playing, giggling, singing, and dancing with Mayim, her 9-month-old (yikes! 9 months old already??), her lover and companion, Anne, and her friends. She is, not surprisingly, exhausted a lot.

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