Discovering 1930's Brownsville

He may be approaching his mid-eighties, but when Yiddish Book Center docent Arthur Klein talks about growing up in Brownsville in the 1920s and 30s, he’s a teenager again. “It was like a paradise for Jewish kids. My grandparents were very frum (observant). They really wanted to obey the laws…But of course, youngsters like myself just went ahead and had a good time and did whatever we wanted to do.”

This past summer, Arthur was our guest for a Discovery Project ethnography training session, part of the curriculum at our Steiner Summer Intern Program. Just back from his morning rehearsal with “Young At Heart,” Northampton’s world-renowned geriatric choral group, his recollections of life in New York’s most populous and arguably most influential Jewish neighborhood delighted our students and visitors. The interview he recorded that day will become part of our permanent oral history collection. View the video (9:44 minutes)

Arthur recalled that both sets of his grandparents came to New York from Russia with almost no money but somehow saved up enough to buy multi-family homes. “My father’s father had a route where he would wash shop windows, charging twenty-five or fifty cents a store. My mother’s father would walk through the back yards shouting ‘I cash clothes.’ He would buy clothes that people didn’t need and then sell them. Sometimes he would get lucky and find a five-dollar bill in one of the pockets.”

During the Great Depression, Arthur remembers waiting with his mother in lines that stretched several blocks to try to get ten cents on the dollar out of the bank. But Arthur recalls that as a child with lots of friends in the neighborhood, even in the worst of times they went on with their games of stickball, tag, kick the can (“soccer for kids who wanted to make a lot of noise”) and “chase the white horse,” the local name for an extremely rough game that Philadelphians still call “buck-buck.”

He described the blocks of pushcarts at the Prospect Place Market, and the kosher market where you could fill your glass jars with pickles or sauerkraut, or pick out a live chicken and have it ritually slaughtered while you waited. To earn money, he would re-set the pins at the bowling alley, or hang out at the drug store where the only phone on the block was located. When anyone called he would go find who the caller needed to speak with and hopefully he’d earn a tip.

As Samuel Peckerman wrote in Alter Landesman’s classic history of the neighborhood, “To write the story of Brownsville without mentioning Pitkin Avenue would be like telling the story of the landing of the Pilgrims and omitting Plymouth Rock.” Running for a mile or so through the heart of Brownsville, by 1942 its 14 blocks (between Stone Ave. and Ralph Ave.) housed 372 businesses of every possible description. One of Arthur’s favorite hangouts was Hoffman’s Cafeteria, a neighborhood fixture that was open all night.

But I don’t need to tell you all this – you can watch an excerpt of Arthur’s interview yourself (including the incredible tale of an ersatz Hasidic pool shark)! And if you have recollections of Brownsville or stories or cultural treasures to share with us – don’t be a stranger! Write to me at the National Yiddish Book Center, Jeannette and Harry Weinberg Building, 1021 West Street, Amherst, MA 01002 or email me at hnetsky@bikher.org.

-Hankus Netsky