Jew World Order

Dear God, you made many, many poor people.

I realize, of course, that it’s no shame to be poor.

But it’s no great honor either!

—Fiddler on the Roof by Jerry Bock/Sheldon Harnick

California’s crime rate has gone through the roof. Still, I guess if you are going to be a crime victim, Los Angeles is still one of the nicer places for that to take place. My wife recently asked, “If we were to move, where would you want to move to?” I quickly answered, “I’m not sure where, but I’ll need two things: a Jewish neighborhood and to be near a hospital.” All Jews need to live near an MRI. But if I could only pick one, I’d pick a Jewish neighborhood.

Even though we were not religious, my parents always liked living in Jewish neighborhoods. Although it was not strictly Jewish, the Bronx was cheap, and it was New York, so there was a smattering of all types. We lived in the Bronx until I was 10 and moved in 1962. It was a vibrant, noisy, one-step-up-from-poverty neighborhood. To this day, I have never lived anywhere quiet.

We lived in a six-floor walkup (no elevator). When I was 5, I fell down three of those flights. I fell down one flight, got up, and then fell down another. My mother took me to get stitches in my head from someone up the block. I think they were a doctor — or at least wanted to be one.

Just like Abe Lincoln, no matter what the weather was like, I walked to school. I remember many mornings when the snow was taller than me, begging my mother to let me stay home. Her answer was always, “Too bad. Wear boots and gloves.”

I am also an only child, but I had plenty of friends if you consider roaches, water bugs and, in the summer, mosquitos. No matter how clean my mother kept the apartment — and she did keep it clean — we could not get rid of the bugs that lived behind the walls and down our pipes. Sometimes, if my father was trying to kill a bug and missed, he yelled, “Come here you. Come here you.”

We had no air conditioning. Just like the city swimming pools (which also doubled as urinals) that were open from June until September, so were our screenless windows. If the mosquitos were hungry, they knew they could always pop in for a quick bite. My mother, being a good Jewish mother, said she hated seeing even the mosquitos fly on an empty stomach.

Our sinks never stopped dripping. There was a perpetual brown stain where the water dripped, making the sink look like it was a heavy Camel smoker. When you took a glass of water from the sink, you had to wait for it to clear up. We lived in a virtual petri dish.

In the frozen New York winters, occasionally the superintendent would send up some steam heat. To get the heat sent up, we had to bang on the pipes, so the superintendent got the message people upstairs were popsicle-izing. But steam heat sucks all the moisture from your skin; my poor father had to get a third job to keep my mother supplied with lotions. She would scare me half to death when she would tell me her skin was about to fall off.

To get rid of our garbage, we had something called a dumbwaiter in the apartment. A dumbwaiter is a small platform made of wood, attached to a pulley system, located behind a small door inside a brick chute, that you pulled up and down by hand. If you had garbage, you pulled the platform to your floor, put the garbage on the platform, then lowered it back down. Sometimes during the day, the superintendent would pull the garbage out from the chute. If it was one of those days when he was shorting you on heat, you might drop a bag of soaking wet garbage on his head.

All our water pipes were made of lead. Our bathroom and kitchen were always covered with lead paint. I drank lead-based water and ate lead paint chips that fell into my cereal and my mother’s cake batter. The lead flakes looked like dried coconut shavings. In school, I would chew on number 2 lead pencils. And when my father gassed up the car, I stood near the gas tank and sucked in the lead fumes. Because of my high lead content, my doctor had me stand in front of his patients while x-raying them instead of making them wear the lead vest.

Because of my high lead content, my doctor had me stand in front of his patients while x-raying them instead of making them wear the lead vest.

Growing up, the only reason I knew we were semi-poor is because my mother always complained about it. My father’s answer was, “What do you want me to do? I’m already working sixteen hours a day.”

When I look back, I remember the Bronx as a powerful place to grow up. The Bronx was my little Isaac Bashevis Singer moment. Singer had Warsaw. I had the Bronx and the cast of characters that came along with it. But my mother’s mantra was, “One day I want to get the hell out of the Bronx. I have had it with the roaches.”

Like the Jeffersons, my parents eventually did move out and moved on up a few notches to Forest Hills (also in a Jewish neighborhood). No roaches, no water bugs and a much nicer place. We had screens on the windows and an elevator to our fourth-floor apartment. I was skinny in the Bronx and got fatter when I started riding the elevator instead of walking 25 flights a day.

My parents are gone, and the Bronx is a fading memory. I now live with my wife in a lovely 1700 square-foot, 40 million dollar, 100-year-old copper piped house in Los Angeles. Until I moved to California, I never lived in anything with more than one door. My little house has two. Like my parents, I live in a mixed but mostly Jewish neighborhood. When I walk my neighborhood, I feel very much at home and feel a surge of gratitude for what I have. Seeing tzitzit hanging out of a shirt lowers my blood pressure. My life has somehow worked out much better than I could ever have imagined.

Occasionally, when it gets extremely hot and has not rained for a long period of time, we might spot a water bug or three come up through the pipes looking for a drink. Before it crawls in my mouth and before I kill it, I first smile and remember the Bronx, especially my father chasing the bugs in his underwear, yelling, “Come here you. Come here you.” Ah, the good old days.

Mark Schiff is a comedian, actor and writer.

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