Summary

From Steven V. Roberts comes My Fathers' Houses, a memoir of growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, an immigrant community in the shadow of the Statue if Liberty, and the story of how his father and his grandfather's dreamsand their own passion for writing and ideasinfluenced Steven's future, and inspired him to seek his fortune in New York City, the media capital of the world. This is a story of a town and a time and a boy who grew up there, a boy who became a New York Times correspondent, TV and radio personality, and bestselling author. The town was Bayonne, New Jersey, a European village so close to New York that Steve could see the Statue of Liberty from his bedroom window. The time was the forties and fifties, when children of immigrants were striving to become American and find a place in a booming postwar world. The core of Steve's world was one block, where he lived in a house his grandfather, Harry Schanbam, had built with his own hands. But the story starts back in Russia, where the family business of writing and ideas began. Steve's other grandfather, Abraham Rogowsky, stole money to become a Zionist pioneer in Palestine before moving to America. The tale continues through the Depression, when Steve's parents lived one block apart in Bayonne, wrote letters to each other and married in secret. During the war years, Steve's father wrote children's books and based one of his best sellers on outings he took with his twin sons to the local train station. As his byline, he used his boys' middle namesJeffrey Victorso Steve got his first writing credit before he was two. The story concludes with the boy leaving Bayonne, going on to Harvard, meeting the Catholic girl who became his wife, and starting work at the New York Timesacross the river, and worlds away, from where he began. Now a grandfather of five, Steve Roberts looks in the mirror and sees his own father and grandfather looking back at hima family chain that started in 19th century Russia and thrives today in 21st century America.

Acknowledgments

1. A BOTTLE IN A BUCKET

(20)

2. OLD WORLD ORIGINS

(21)

3. BECOMING AMERICANS

(18)

4. LOVE IN THE RUINS

(17)

5. OUT WEST, BACK EAST

(15)

6. THE "TWINNIES" ON THE BLOCK

(20)

7. WARS AND WORDS

112

(17)

8. THE STICKBALL CHRONICLES

129

(18)

9. TOUGH TIMES

147

(16)

10. ABE AND BUSSY

163

(18)

11. NEWSPAPER BOY

181

(16)

12. BEYOND BAYONNE

197

(14)

13. WHERE'S HARVARD?

211

(15)

14. THE PERFECT GIRL

226

(17)

EPILOGUE: CROSSING THE RIVER

243

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Excerpts

My Fathers' Houses
Memoir of a Family

Chapter One

A Bottle in A Bucket

I still dream about Bayonne. Usually I'm back livingthere, often in the house where I grew up, a two-familyframe structure on a crowded block that ends at a lowbluff overlooking Newark Bay. All the houses on The Blockwere the same, about twenty-five of them, separated by alleysso narrow that you always knew what your neighbors were arguingabout or having for dinner. The Block was the center ofmy world for thirteen years, from my birth in 1943 until wemoved all of five blocks away in 1956, and it could have beena European village, on the top of a mountain, surrounded bymedieval stone walls. All the families knew each other,strangers were sparse, and you could walk to the shops aroundthe corner for most of your daily needs.

That's no accident, I suppose, since most of the families,including mine, were only one generation removed from their Old World origins, and they re-created the patterns oflife they had known in Poland and Russia, Ireland and Italy.There were a handful of Catholics on The Block, but most ofthe families were like us, Jewish people with roots in EasternEurope -- Lipkin and Lauton, Moritz and Hoch, Reznick andLevy. Some were manual workers, like my grandfather HarrySchanbam, a carpenter who had built the house we lived inwith his own hands. Some in the next generation had gottenan education and become professionals. Yale Greenspoon'sfather taught at the high school, Artie Schackman's dad wasa photographer. Many owned small businesses. The Pennersran a clothing store on Broadway where we bought our CubScout uniforms. The parents and grandparents of the girl Itook to the junior prom ran a hardware store. New York wasonly a short bus ride away, but "the city," as we called it, seldomintruded into our lives. Broadway and Forty-secondStreet in Bayonne (there really is such an intersection) waslight years away from the more famous corner just across theHudson River. My father commuted daily to "the city," wherehe ran a small children's book publishing company, but few ifany of my friends had parents who did that. Most peoplelived and worked, met and married, grew old and died, allwithin the confines of this urban village. Bayonne was notexactly Anatevka, and we didn't have any fiddlers on ourroofs, although we did have Mr. Friedberg, who deliveredseltzer to the door in blue glass bottles with silver spritzers.But when I saw the movie Avalon, Barry Levinson's ode to theJewish community of Baltimore, I felt a pang of recognition. In that movie the immigrant generation clings to the oldneighborhood and the old ways, and when their kids move tothe suburbs, the old folks find the adjustment disorienting.Bayonne, like Baltimore, was actually closer to the OldCountry than the suburbs were to the inner city.

Bayonne is a peninsula, about five square miles, surroundedon three sides by water: Newark Bay to the west, theKill Van Kull on the south, and the Hudson River on theeast. In fact, after we left The Block, I could catch a glimpseof the Statue of Liberty from my new bedroom window. ButI've never been there and I'm not sure why. I guess you don'tplay tourist in your hometown. During my childhood, youcould enter and leave Bayonne in only two ways—by citystreet to Jersey City and by bridge to Staten Island—so theword "insular" really did apply. I flew over it recently, headingfor Manhattan, and I was struck again by how distinctiveBayonne is. You can pick it out immediately from the air.And since it was such a separate and self-contained place, ithad a strong sense of identity. One public high school, onedaily newspaper, one downtown shopping district. To this dayI meet people all over the country who want to tell me abouttheir connections to Bayonne. My friend Barney Frank, nowa congressman from Massachusetts, who grew up there, sayspeople always talk about being from Bayonne because theyare "so proud of rising above their humble beginnings." But Idon't think that's quite right. I think it's because Bayonne is areal place, with a long history, dating back to its discovery byDutch explorers in the seventeenth century. It's not a fake city, bordered by arbitrary lines on a suburban map and bearingsome insipid variation of the name Parkforestglenwood.

It's also true that Bayonne has become something of ajoke, like Secaucus, employed as a punch line by comediansand cartoonists. One of my favorite references is a New Yorkercartoon showing a man sitting at a bar and saying to no onein particular: "I'm a citizen of the world, but I make my basein Bayonne." Jackie Gleason once did stand-up comedy atthe Hi-Hat Club in Bayonne, and his TV show The Honeymoonerswas loaded with local references. If he frequentlythreatened to send his wife, Alice, "to the moon," he oftenvowed to dispatch his pal Norton to Bayonne. My brotherMarc remembers Gleason portraying a pitchman in a TVcomedy skit. If you call in right away, he promises, and orderthe food chopper or vacuum cleaner he's selling, he'll throwin a free pennant from Bayonne Technical High School.Who could refuse that offer? The New York Times obituary ofthe comic Rodney Dangerfield noted that he got his startplaying "dingy joints" in places like Bayonne. As Dangerfieldhimself might have said, my hometown "gets no respect." ANavy ship was once named for the city, the USS Bayonne, butin the middle of World War II it was actually given to theRussians, who then scrapped it ...

Excerpted from My Fathers' Houses: Memoir of a Family by Steven V. Roberts
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