Bronx Primitive by Kate Simon

excerpts from Bronx Primitive by Kate Simon, 1982 by Harper & Row Perennial Library

p12

There were no other pictures, an effect of poverty or superstition that might have been a lingering whisper of the biblical injunction against graven images.

p14

 He was a royal baby, his birth a gift of immortality. He was a miracle, a sudden kindling of cold ashes stirred by God's hand. All privilege was his. Year after year my grandmother had produced girls and only girls, a few stillborn, one or two victims of diphtheria or scarlet fever, but five or six thriving as big, marriageable maidens. The menopause years were approaching while my embittered grandmother muttered over the cholent (a stew of potatoes, carrots, meat, and prunes) that she shoved into the oven on Friday afternoons to cook slowly through the night and provide a warm meal on Saturday when no stove might be lit. She mumbled angrily while she ironed, spitting the dampening water as if it were venom. Someone, maybe an old witch who envied her her good house, her gold watch, her silky new shaytl, had cursed her with the Evil Eye, depriving her of a son, a Kaddish to pray for her after her death. The girls' prayers, if they prayed at all, counted for nothing; like animals, they had no souls and no voices to God's ear.

p21

The last doctor my mother saw in Warsaw, made blunt by the misery he could not remedy, shouted at her, "Leave the boy, he's going to die anyway. Take the girls to America while there's still time Or do you want two sit with two dead children in this graveyard city.

            We left for America. My brother was two and a half.... I was four, grown silent and very capable. I could lift him to the pot, clean him, and take him off. I could carry him to bed and mash his potato. I knew where he might bump his head, where he might topple, how to divert him when he began to blubber. It was a short childhood. I had my first baby at not quite four, better trained in maternal wariness and responsibility than many fully grown women I later observed. At four I also knew one could intensely love and as intensely hate the being who was both the core and pit of one's life.

...I am sitting with my brother on my lap, in a room full of heavy dark furniture that I have never seen before. I am telling him that our mother went to buy food and will be back soon. I hope that she will come back, but I'm not sure; over and over, in every dark dream, I am not sure. I don't say this to him but wonder what I will do, where we will go, if she doesn't come back, as our father didn't.

p38

The boxes bore the noble letters, MACY'S, a legendary world where no one else I knew had ever wandered.

p47

In none of my assiduous eavesdropping on the street did I ever hear any mention of unhappy marriage or happy marriage. Married was married. Although a Jewish divorce was a singularly easy matter except for the disgrace it carried, the Jewish women were as firmly imbedded in their marriages as the Catholic. A divorce was as unthinkable as adultery or lipstick. No matter what—beatings, infidelity, drunkenness, verbal abuse, outlandish demands—no woman could run the risk of making her children fatherless. Marriage and children were fate, like being skinny,  like the skeletal Mr. Roberts, or humpbacked, like the leering watchman at the hat factory. "Es is mir beschert," "It is my fate." was a common sighing phrase, the Amen that closed hymns of woe.

p52

Why didn't my mother minde her own business, what the hell did these people, these foreign ingoramuses, mean to her? The answer was short and always the same, "Es is doch a mench," yet these are human beings, the only religious training we ever had, perhaps quite enough.

p58

Summer was another country whose fathers had, suddenly, bare, shy arms, whose mothers padded like cats on bare feet. Time was still summer air, as slow and round as pregnant women. In the mornings, time sat quietly, waiting for me as I commanded it to, watching me think, shape, arrange the world. ...

...Cloaked in the royal robes of omnipotent childhood, I went down—it was very early—to check the condition of my domain and my subjects. I was the queen of my block. No one but I knew it and I knew it well, each morning making a royal progress on my empty street, among my big garbage cans, my limp window curtains, my sheet of newspaper slowly turning and sliding in the gutter, my morning glory on Mrs. Roberti's porch vine, my waiting stoops fronting my sleeping houses; my hat factory on the corner of 179th Street, resting from its hours of blowing pink and blue and purple dye smoke; my Kleins, my Rizzos, my Petrides, my Clancys safely in bed, guarded by my strength and will.  Even after I had been heavily assaulted with school proofs that very little of the world was mine, that history existed of itself and not as a huge crowded stage hurriedly arranged the day I was born, I maintained a deep interest in my subjects, moving out of absolute control to the more subtle control of observer and critic.

p152

I had to finish a stuffed doll I was making for her in school and finish hemstitching a camisole; I would never wear it, I didn't know what it was for, but the orderly stitches becoming a pretty row had become as satisfying as drawing.