Of Things That Used to Be

"Of Things that Used to Be" describes the rich and colorful lives of the Jews in the Southeast Bronx between 1916 and 1926 where Nathan Lobell grew up. Here you will discover how to score a point at stoopball, how to cheat the gas company, and how to tamper with a butcher's scale. You will learn how kosher meat is slaughtered, how gas is made from coal, and how to prepare darrflayshe-starting with a trip to Bronx Park to gather wood and ending with a gourmet dish on a carved-out oak plank. You will find out how the buying of soup-greens could be a searing experience. The violence is here-between father and son, husband and wife. The ambitions for the children are described-for the son to be a doctor and for the daughter to marry one. The "woikizz" or vurrkers" (depending on what part of central Europe you came from) are overheard in the passionate arguments about the unions and their politics. The shopkeepers, their women, the peddlers, the back-yard musicians-the whole cast of characters that made up the pageant of the street is paraded in these pages. In the streets, on the roofs, in the flats-people are everywhere-the kids and their parents struggling to find a way up and out.