"There was no television. Radio was king. My father and
every Jewish family in our neighborhood hung on every word Franklin Delano
Roosevelt spoke. Every week Roosevelt held a 'Fireside Chat' with America. He
said the depression would go away. He gave us hope and we adored him.'
I remember driving with my father to a neighborhood shopping avenue where
there were shops and banks. Hordes of depositors were storming the banks whose
doors were slammed shut. The rage. The shouting. "Give us our money back."
was the cry.
The jobless rate was 25%. Men with hats, shirts, ties, jackets, respectable
men who had once supported a family stood on soup lines, sold apples
on street corners, held their hats out for donations.
My sister took a job at Macy's for $15 a week. So did her friends. Macy's
supported so many families in our street.
It was a Jewish street in Boro Park, Brooklyn. Italians, Norwegians, Irish
lived in an adjacent neighborhood. We never played together though they were
just a block or so away.
We played games on the street us kids. There were practically no cars
parked on our street. Cars were expensive and an unaffordable luxury. The few
cars on the street were parked in garages in back of the houses. So the streets
were empty and perfect for our games. We played TouchFootball (passing but no
tackline), kick the can, roller skate hockey (the evenly spaced sewers
were our goals), stick ball, two feet off (don't ask me to describe
it), Johnny on the Pony (another don't ask game), hide 'n seek, handball, stoop
ball, grounders.
Our life as kids was a celebration. While our parents could scarcely
read English and spoke with deep Russian accents, we were expected to be
stars in school. Report cards were how they kept track of us and a less
than an A in any subject was a family crisis.
My father had bought our house in 1927 for cash. A two family house. The
idea was to rent the lower apartment which would cover taxes. But the family who
moved in had three children and the father lost his job. They were absolutely
broke. My father wanted to evict them but my mother, Saint Ida, said, "over my
dead body." So they lived there rent free throughout the depression.
The depression. The WPA (Works Projects Administration). It sponsored jobs
in remote, Western areas where men tilled soil, built infrastructure projects.
rebuilt America. There was a WPA Theatre program and I saw The Mercury Theatre
Production of Julius Caesar with Orson Welles and company. It was a life
changing experience for me. I never again said, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen
.... " in a stentorian way. After that. It became first a cajoling call to the
mob, then a command, finally a defining patriotic exhortation.
We exalted men on our street who were Socialists, Communists and
revolutionaries who volunteered to go to Spain as members of the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade. They were our heroes.Many didn't come back and others came back without
limbs, stumbling along with canes. They wore their wounds as medals and we loved
them.
It was a time of suffering but it gave birth to a gifted America.
It fostered creativity, a work ethic, social consciousness, ideological debate,
gave birth to a host of new ideas, brilliant men and women. Retrospectively, it
set the stage for the America that entered World War 11 and turned the tide
against Hitler and Hirohito. The depression? It became America's gift to Western
Civilization.and rescued Europe from the Nazis."
