Just Kids From the Bronx Read Online Free PDF Page B

mean, I had real heroes. And I learned my craft by studying the work of these guys in the daily newspapers.
    But I did have one friend in the Bronx, Irwin, who read books, who liked to talk, who liked opera. He was on his way to being an intellectual and because we were teenagers, you know, we had hard-ons all the time. And his luck went amok because he came from an Orthodox Jewish family and he happened to fall in love with an Italian Catholic girl. It broke the whole family up. It wasn’t because of her but because of the upset in the family. When he got out of college, he married a Jewish girl but changed his name. He never had contact with his parents again. All because he was so angry and so upset that they tried to sit on him, which they did.
    Years later, after I had become known, I was on a radio show being interviewed on one of those call-in shows. A woman got on the phone and said, “Jules, this is Irwin’s mother. Do you know where he is?” Just like that. On the air! Well, I said, “If you give the person who takes the phone calls your number, I will call you as soon as I get off the air and we’ll talk.”
    So then I called her and we had a painful talk. I told her what little I knew. I’d seen Irwin a few times after school but had lost touch. Then later I heard that he had died of a heart attack because his daughter, who worked for Tom Brokaw when he had the evening news, contacted me. But she had no contact with her grandparents. She didn’t know anyone in her father’s family. That’s why I’m so fond of religion. The day after my bar mitzvah was the last day I went to synagogue.
    My father was a Polish Jew. My mother was also a Polish Jew, but after first settling in New York her family moved to Richmond, Virginia. She grew up as a southern girl. She didn’t have a southern accent and didn’t have a Jewish accent. She sounded, as I used to say, like Walter Cronkite, quintessentially American. And because in our Jewish neighborhood you had either a New York accent or an Eastern European accent, she was Eleanor Roosevelt. She was treated as the lady on the hill because she sounded superior to everybody and also felt that she was superior.
    She had always wanted to be, and was, a fashion designer. She kept the family afloat during the Depression while my father got occasional jobs. Essentially she would go door to door to those in the rag trade on Seventh Avenue and sell sketches for three dollars a sketch. She was very adept at that and kept us going somehow. Over the years, in criticism of my father, she would say, “He’s a good man, but…”
    My mother was very seductive with other people and with her own children in terms of being charming—and then Hitler. All my friends and all my sister’s friends would fall in love with my mother. She would seduce them socially.
    I don’t know the following for sure, but she didn’t believe in sex. I think she got married because her family made her. It’s what I’ve surmised. If my mother had her druthers, she would have been a single woman with a career as an artist or an illustrator and wouldn’t have had sex at all, although if she did it might have been with a woman. I don’t think she was attracted to men. And I don’t think for a second that she was attracted to my father. But my mother came from a poor Jewish family and she wasn’t going to defy anybody. One of the things that terrified her was when her Communist daughter and her radical son defied—no, went into the business of defiance. That scared the hell out of her.
    Because of her art background, the fact that I wanted to be a cartoonist was fine with her. When she was growing up, some of the cartoonists, like those in The New Yorker , had great reputations. The newspaper strip cartoonists had great reputations too. Some of them went on the vaudeville circuit and she loved show business. She used to quote me stories about Moss Hart and what a down-and-out kid he was in the Bronx