The Sunday Memory Drawer - The People Next Door

The house in the photo above looks pretty much the same as it did when I was growing up in the white house to the left.  As a matter of fact, I can remember when the house wasn't even there and there was a vacant lot in its spot. 

I've told tales before of that empty patch of land and how it pitted me in an awkward position between the other kids on the block and my grandmother, who didn't want to be living next door to a playground.  Well, this is all about what happened when the lot owner sold the land for new construction.  And the very first inhabitants of that domicile.

The Antlers.  A family that provided a turning point for my family in so many ways.

But I need to put it in reverse briefly...

I can recall, brick-by-brick, the year or so that this home was constructed.  Where the lot was no longer a Ring-O-Levio destination for the other urchins in the neighborhood, the building site was now a wonderful place for me to go places I shouldn't have been.

This was to be a two-family house.  A small mother-in-law-like apartment on the first floor and the main living quarters on the second floor.  I knew this pretty quickly because I would wander around the place quite easily every weekend. 

I had discovered that the workmen never looked the doors when they weren't there.  So, every Saturday or Sunday, I'd help myself to a tour.  Hmm, the kitchen upstairs is half done.  Hmm, the bathtub is not in yet.  Wow, there are some steps missing in the staircase.

I probably should have broken my neck four or five times on these unauthorized sneak previews.  That's a nice and fancy way of saying that I was trespassing.

The promise of new neighbors rattled my family a little bit.  There was really no fence or hedge between our properties.  And our driveways would rest side-by-side and it would be important that there be detente.  We knew very little of the folks moving in, except that they were older and relocating to Mount Vernon from the Bronx.  Hell, back then, who didn't?  But, somehow, my folks became aware of some needed background information that was only spoken in whispers.  Finally, I pressed Mom for the goods.

"The new neighbors are Jewish."

What???

"The new neighbors are Jewish."

Huh?  Speak up please.

"The new neighbors are Jewish."

Oh.

Now, that wasn't that big a deal.  But, back then, folks traveled in their own circles.  We knew our relatives, who were mostly all German and Protestant.  And our block in Mount Vernon was practically all Italian and Roman Catholic.  So, we had too European countries and religions covered.  But, this one....

Jewish?

This would be our first curveball as a family.

My grandparents took it philosophically.  Grandma, as always, was the spokesperson for that generation.

"They'll stay in their yard.  We'll stay in ours."

She didn't really care since it was all upside for her.  From now on, her life was an upgrade as she was no longer retrieving errant Spaldeens from my friends. 

Grandma may have expressed ambivalence at the prospective new family, but she certainly did her share of spying out windows on the day of their arrival.  With salient commentary on the items being transported in.

"That dining room table looks so cheap."

"Their sofa has a tear in the back."

"Plastic slipcovers?"

Oh, Grandma, you mean like the ones you put on every summer?

"Mine look better."

Boy, these folks had no clue about the hornet's nest they were moving next door to.

Yep, the Antlers were here.  Max, his wife Anna, and his widowed sister Minnie who live in the small apartment downstairs.

I'd like to think that my family would be the one to extend their hands of friendship to the new neighbors, but it was the other way around.  The Antlers would be first to reach out.  In a very unique way.

On their second day in their new home, there was a quiet knock on our back door.  Grandma's interest was piqued.  Nobody ever knocked on the back door.

It was Max.

"You eat bread?"

Grandma was a little confused by the question.  Who didn't?

"Well, I work overnights at the Diamond bakery and you'll have fresh bread on your doorstep every morning."

And there was.  Plenty of it.  Onion rolls, kaiser rolls, rye breads, challah bread.  And then that inventory expanded even further.  To coffee crumb cakes and cheesecakes and struedels.  My family didn't set foot in a bakery again for years. 

Friendship came that simply.

It wasn't very long before the lawn chairs where my family was seated in the backyard moved ever so closer to the lawn chairs that housed Max, Anna, and Minnie.  And conversations over the most trivial of neighborhood matters always resulted.  Before long, they were all gossiping about the same people.

And we were chowing down on fresh baked goods with our own personal Entenmann's next door.

More importantly, religion never came up.

About a year after they moved in, the Antlers announced that they would be taking a month-long tour of Israel.  They had never been, as they put it, "home."  And would we see them off on their journey at the airport?

Now this was a really big deal for us.  None of us had ever been to an airport, let alone the newly-christened JFK Airport all the way out in Queens.  A location that tapped into two of my dad's patented excuses for not going someplace.

1:  "It's too far."

2:  "There's too much traffic."

As it turned out on the day of the Antlers' departure, my father's third excuse was served.  The temperature hovered around 95.

3:  "It's too hot."

But, fresh onion rolls every day being a lure, Dad's restrictions melted away quickly in the hot June sun.  We were off to JFK Airport for the first time. 

And to the departure terminal at El Al Airlines.

Gee, I had heard of Pan Am and TWA and American.  What was this airline?

"It's for Jewish people only."

Oh.

We went to a lounge in the terminal and toasted the Antlers off with champagne and, in my case, Coca Cola.  I had heard mysterious stuff about this Kosher food.  To me, the Coke tasted like, well, Coke.

Max and Anna had a grown daughter named Rhoda and she had all the same nuances and mannerisms that Valerie Harper brought to the name years later.  She even wore some "schmata" on her head whenever she visited with her husband Jesse and their teen-age son, Allen. 

Their kid was a few years ahead of me, but we played together nonetheless.  Or, in reality, talked together.  The age difference was a chasm as Allen appeared and sounded to be much more worldly.  With a language to boot. 

Some weeks later, I was in a snit over some injustice in my house and uttered an inappropriate body part in disgust.  Right in front of my mother. 

"Who taught you that word???  Allen???"

I didn't have the nerve to tell her that I probably heard it from one of the Italian kids up the street.  But, Mom's added barb was curious to me. 

"Those Jewish kids are so much freer with their language."

Hmmm.  In retrospect, it sounds anti-Semetic.  But, back in that day, my mother was simply stating something she had formulated from opinions and viewpoints handed down to her.  Did I really think you were more likely to hear private parts uttered in everyday banter by Jewish people?    As was the case with many mysteries of childhood, there was never any answer.

When my grandfather died, there was another barrier torn down.  Actually two. 

When my folks wisely decided not to inundate this 12-year-old completely in three days and nights of funeral parlor viewing, they asked Max and Anna to "babysit" me for the evening.  I was even invited over there for dinner.

I started to panic.  Was I at last going to eat Jewish food?  My mother almost jumped out of her skin.

"She's making hamburgers!!!"

Oh.

And, on Max' freshly baked onion rolls, they were delicious.

Meanwhile, Breakthrough #2 would fall in the Antler's column of personal growth and advancement.  They truly were grief-stricken about the passing of Grandpa and sheepishly came over to ask for an imposition.

Could they come to the funeral service?

We were all touched, but none of us had any idea just how big this was for our neighbors.

They had never ever gone to a Christian funeral.  Seeing someone dressed in a casket was totally alien to them.  It was a gracious gesture on their part.  I still remember them sitting in the back of the funeral home, staring ahead at Grandpa with Max' eyes glistening with sadness.

For some reason, as I got older, I remember little about how the Antler saga played out on South 15th Avenue in Mount Vernon, New York.  I had other interests in high school and college.  I think Minnie passed on first, then Max.  But those events seem very distant to me. 

Indeed, their stay in the house next door ultimately was fairly unremarkable.  They were simply neighbors.

But apparently so much more as each of us contributes in our smallest of ways to the brotherhood of man.

Dinner last night:  BBQ ribs and broccoli salad from Gelson's.