Answer:
ear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of
course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I
would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn"t
been president or if I hadn"t been the offspring of Jews.
When the first shock came in June of 1940—the nomination for
the presidency of Charles A. Lindbergh, America"s international
aviation hero, by the Republican Convention at Philadelphia—my
father was thirty-nine, an insurance agent with a grade school education,
earning a little under fifty dollars a week, enough for the
basic bills to be paid on time but for little more. My mother—
who"d wanted to go to teachers" college but couldn"t because of the
expense, who"d lived at home working as an office secretary after
finishing high school, who"d kept us from feeling poor during the
worst of the Depression by budgeting the earnings my father
turned over to her each Friday as efficiently as she ran the household
—was thirty-six. My brother, Sandy, a seventh-grader with a
prodigy"s talent for drawing, was twelve, and I, a third-grader a
term ahead of himself—and an embryonic stamp collector inspired
like millions of kids by the country"s foremost philatelist,
President Roosevelt—was seven.
We lived in the second-floor flat of a small two-and-a-half-family house on a
tree-lined street of frame wooden houses with redbrick
stoops, each stoop topped with a gable roof and fronted by a
tiny yard boxed in with a low-cut hedge. The Weequahic neighborhood
had been built on farm lots at the undeveloped southwest
edge of Newark just after World War One, some half dozen of the
streets named, imperially, for victorious naval commanders in the
Spanish-American War and the local movie house called, after
FDR"s fifth cousin—and the country"s twenty-sixth president—
the Roosevelt. Our street, Summit Avenue, sat at the crest of the
neighborhood hill, an elevation as high as any in a port city that
rarely rises a hundred feet above the level of the tidal salt marsh to
the city"s north and east and the deep bay due east of the airport
that bends around the oil tanks of the Bayonne peninsula and
merges there with New York Bay to flow past the Statue of Liberty
and into the Atlantic. Looking west from our bedroom"s rear window
we could sometimes see inland as far as the dark treeline of
the Watchungs, a low-lying mountain range fringed by great estates
and affluent, sparsely populated suburbs, the extreme edge
of the known world—and about eight miles from our house. A
block to the south was the working-class town of Hillside, whose
population was predominantly Gentile. The boundary with Hillside
marked the beginning of Union County, another New Jersey
entirely.
Explanation:
