Free Just Kids From the Bronx by Arlene Alda

kids in our building even got polio, as I remember. It made my mother very protective. I couldn’t go to the pool in the summer and summer camps were closed because of the epidemic. When we were kids at that time in the 1940s, I think that some people wore something around their necks to ward off polio. It was some superstitious thing. I don’t remember what it was. Maybe it was a clove of garlic.

 
    ARLENE ALDA

    Author, photographer
    (1933– )
    We lived in a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment. Mother, father, older sister, older brother, the mutt fox terrier Spotty, and me. We ate our meals, played cards and board games, did homework, and told jokes in a small area adjacent to the kitchen, called the dinette. I can easily picture my father sitting at the dinette table telling us one of his favorite jokes about these three American soldiers, lost and thirsty in the desert during the war. “Two of them called for ‘Water, water,’ and this Jewish boy called out—.” My father’s belly laugh drowned out the punch line even though it tried to gurgle to the surface. What’s the punch line? What’s the joke? Please! He’d manage to blurt it out, “Seltzer, seltzer.”
    My parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe—Lithuania and Poland, or was it Russia? I never really understood when they told me that the borders kept changing according to the wars, with the winners taking this piece of land or the other. Tell me again where you were born? What language did you speak? Where did you go to school? Who were the Cossacks again? Why did they hate the Jews? What was a pogrom? With its details of shootings into houses and hiding in basements, our family history was both exciting and confusing to me. I was a kid from a Bronx neighborhood, a place where I could freely roam in the streets of our own mostly Jewish ghetto without fear of meeting up with some wild men on horses who with their guns and their hatred of Jews could kill me and my family.
    My brother Harry was an avid builder of balsa wood model airplanes when he was a young teenager. The smell of the glue stank up the dinette as well as the rest of the apartment—and I loved it. I also loved the finished airplanes that actually flew once the rubber bands were wound tightly around their propellers. His warnings of “Don’t touch!” were words that I listened to, mostly out of fear rather than understanding. I had no idea how that anger might materialize, but Harry was ten years older than I was and I wasn’t going to test it either.
    My mother, Jean, who was patient enough with the mess that we kids always left in the dinette, also wanted it to be unique and stylish. My father usually went along with her wishes. The dinette was wallpapered and decorated many times. Simon, I think the room needs something new on the walls. Something cheerful. Maybe a flower pattern. He hand-stencilled the walls with a repeated pattern of a drooping tulip with pink and white stripes.
    On the windowsill of our well-decorated dinette was a small, wooden rectangular box filled with dirt. Originally, this box held a brick of orange American cheese sold by the pound and sliced to order in our local Allerton Avenue Appetizing store by the behind-the-counter man, Moish. If I’d politely ask Moish if he had an empty Breakstone’s cheese box, he would give me one or tell me to come back in an hour or maybe tomorrow. The box was a treasure: an indoor garden where my sister Shirley and I planted petunia seeds from packets we got from P.S. 76, our local public school. I wanted to water the seeds often because I was impetuous and impatient, unlike my mother and Shirley, who seemed to be able to wait forever for things to happen, like chicken to roast or a cake to rise or clothes to dry on the indoor bathroom clothesline. The petunias miraculously grew into cascading trumpets of pink, white, and purple, despite my sneaking in some extra watering when no one was looking. To this day,