Bernard Axelrad Scholarship Fund

Thomas Wolfe is known for that oft quoted phrase, "You can't go home again." I recently tried, in a fashion, and discovered for myself how difficult it is.

During a recent trip to New York I turned my steps back to my birthplace, the Lower East Side. It was my first return to 8th Street and Avenue C in many years, and I was unnerved by the changes time had wrought. Coventry and Dresden could not have looked worse after the heavy bombers were done.

I walked about fearfully - and yet irresistibly - gripped by the sights of burned out tenements and storefronts: some buildings half demolished, broken glass, garbage and debris littering the sidewalks and streets. Windows of those buildings still standing were broken and boarded up. Here and there lay the rubble of a building burned to its foundation. And, in empty lots, there lurked the furtive, shadowy figures of the homeless, making do with the shelter provided by the walls of the abutting structures.

There were few cars or pedestrians in the area. It resembled a war zone.

Nor were there many people about even though it was daytime. The few faces I saw ranged from the ruggedly defiant (claiming this no man's land as their territory) to the blank stares of the hopeless or maybe drug-dazed.

I didn't stop to question or investigate for, in truth, I was scared. Spellbound and nervous, I trod the streets around 10th, 9th, 8th and 7th Streets and Avenue B and C where I was born, went to school and played. It was obvious that fear now reigned and nobody in his right mind would frequent those streets.

But as my gaze swept from one side of the desolate streets to the other, I didn't see only the blight and ruins before me. My thoughts faded to the contrasting happier scenes there of my youth.

What a teeming, noisy, busy place those streets of 50 years ago were. They were our playground, and we kids made them our domain. If the apartments belonged to the parents, the streets were our turf.

Every one of the tenements - stacked side by side into the scores - had five walk up floors and 20 apartments, and each apartment had an average of two kids. So with 40 kids per building and with perhaps 25 tenements on each side of the street, there was no shortage of playmates. It's a good thing, too, because there was a dearth of the equipment and paraphernalia that abound in the playgrounds today.

The streets provided relief from the steamy heat of cramped apartments. If it was sizzling hot, there was always a nearby fire hydrant to open and send a stream of cool water on parched youngsters romping in the spray. At least until the cops came, shut off the water and chased us away.

All we needed was a 5 cent Spalding rubber ball and some ingenuity. We played punchball, stickball, boxball, stoopball. The only additional equipment we ever needed was a convenient stoop, an abandoned broomstick, a piece of chalk for box ball, and the existing sewers for bases in punchball and stickball.

For a change of pace and without a ball, we could play kick the can and hide, ringo-leavio, marbles and agates, and jacks and potsy (for girls). Our inventiveness for equipment-less games knew few bounds.

None of these pastimes needed grass or spacious grounds, which were not exactly ghetto staples.

Or, in the summers, we could go swimming in our own "watering hole." That notable experience entailed jumping off the 10th Street dock into the East River, filthy and oily. It was there I perfected my closed mouth breaststroke, pushing garbage out of my path!

To go from the litter to the literary, the libraries were only two or three blocks away. There, for any of us with sufficient imagination, the world of books provided vicarious travel and adventure into whatever fairyland one selected.

Interspersed among the tenements were small grocery stores, bakeries, butcher stores, barber shops, shoe repairs and - oh, yes - candy stores! Usually, two or more candy stores on each block. For a penny I could buy four chocolate kisses (now five cents each) or a glass of seltzer and numerous other goodies.

Every block had at least one deli whose seductive aromas I found impassable. A delicious kosher frank on a bun with sauerkraut was only a nickel and my mouth still waters at the thought (even as my stomach cringes).

Ethnicity at home - assimilation in public: the best of both worlds.

The wares and services were handy; it was only money that was scarce.

As I walked along Avenue C, I thought of the pushcarts that once lined the thoroughfare. One could buy everything from bagels and bananas to ready-to-wear eyeglasses. I honed my bargaining skills shopping these pushcarts where nothing was one price: as you turned away from the initial quote, the peddler, anxious for a sale late in the day, would come down in price rather than store his wares for the morrow.

In my mind's eye I could visualize the mothers, with small children in baby carriages, conversing among themselves as they distractedly rocked their little ones to sleep - on the sunny side of the street in the winter and the shady side in the summer. Fear had not yet cut its swath there.

All the public schools, the Talmud Torahs, and the shuls were within easy walking distance, as was the rest of the mishpocha (the extended family included grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins of distant degree and even landsleit from the same European neighborhood).

It was easy to be Jewish there!

Not only the stores but also the public schools were closed on Jewish holidays - not by fiat, but as a practical natter with 90% of the students and teachers observing the religious tradition. There was a storefront shul on every block, and many a time I was yanked from my play to make up a minyan for evening services.

What a memorable sight it was when streams of people marched to the East River on the first afternoon of Rosh Hashana to observe the ceremony of tashlich (casting away). We emptied our pockets into the water to signify the washing away of our sins and thus start the New Year with a clean slate.

While most of my block was Jewish, there were nearby enclaves of Irish, Italian, German and Polish immigrant families. English was rarely heard as each ethnic group was more comfortable with its own mammaloshen. Most of these people were hardly 'off the boat', and had neither the time nor opportunity to learn English. On my street the Jewish Daily Forward outsold the Daily News by a large margin.

The abundance of traditions and folklore brought by these immigrants from the Old World blended with the new land's customs, freedoms and opportunity to provide a rich and polyglot cultural mix. The Lower East Side I knew was truly a melting pot where the various ethnic groups retained their different backgrounds, languages, cultures and religious rituals at home and in houses of worship, yet came together in the schools and public forums as absorbed and proud Americans. Ethnicity at home - assimilation in public: the best of both worlds.

In the summer of 1986, as I uneasily walked the area seeking among the detritus those familiar stores and sites of my youth, I conjured up for one final time the swarming throngs who once peopled and enriched the Lower East Side. It is now history and stuff of legend.

I had indulged myself in a nostalgic journey, and I have no need to venture there again.

Thomas Wolfe was right.