A tale of having the “Baby”restored

For the first 5 years of our lives, there was not too much contact between myself and my kid sister. I was almost 4 years older, and not much of one to play with dolls, which is what Andrea was at the time.

We could be coaxed into a shot for a photographer, circa 1947.

Between 5-10, she wanted to hang out with Big Brother, but the age discrepancy was too great — 10-year-old boys were climbing cyclone fences and playing stickball, two things little girls couldn’t do, or weren’t allowed to.

By the time I burst into my teens, the psychological barrier broadened even more and I certainly was not interested in her ugly duckling friends. Dating was not going to happen on the South Bronx tenement street where we lived my first 15 years. 

We shared a bedroom, our folks slept in a double bed in the  corner of a decent-sized living room. The only difference between us and most friends? Their parents slept in the bedroom, the same-sex kids shared a living room sofa that folded out to a bed. 

Taken 65 years later, this  was the entry to our ground-floor apartment, that probably was intended to be the superintendent's apartment.

That door — whIch then had a dozen glass panels — provided me with my earliest memory in life.

I was toward the rear of the one-bedroom apartment, playing in the walk-in “junk closet,” as we called it, when I heard a knock at the door.

Through the windows I saw the top half of an Army soldier, wearing his campaign hat, framed against the brick wall of the tenement across the street that the late afternoon sun had turned into Jerusalem gold. 

I heard my mother scream and run from the kitchen, from the left of the entrance hallway. She screamed at the sight of her kid brother, known as Sonny, returning home safe and whole after years of war in CBI — the China, Burma, India theater.

The memory is an instant, I remember nothing more, certainly not the crushing hug he gave his first and only nephew.

It was the post-World War II years, sacrifices were still being made,  but they were not thought of as sacrifices. We all had gotten used to doing without during the war. There were shortages, and rationing, and while there was some grumbling, all Americans knew we were having two experiences that would later turn into two words that became popular: an existential war that could go on forever, especially in the early days when America lacked the will and materiel to fight.

The will returned first, with the spine-chilling call to battle. “Remember Pearl Harbor,” where the surprise-attacking Japanese killed 2,403 Americans in Hawaii, and even more as it put other Pacific islands, such as Guam, to the sword.

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My sister, nicknamed Baby, and I were four grades apart, so we didn’t mix much at school, and we weren't much closer at home, either. I was a bit of a trouble-maker, and she was a bit of a snitch. The “Baby” nickname fell out of favor.

I was in and out of middle school before she got there, and we went to different high schools, after we fled the rapidly-deteriorating Bronx for the safety of a Brooklyn housing project — Marlboro Homes.

Yes, safety in a low-income project.

On a visit a few years ago, here’s how the front entrance looked.

Not long after we moved there, I became a student at Brooklyn College night school, and joined the school newspaper, which set the trajectory for the rest of my life, thanks to the editor, mentor, and forever friend, Gordon Lattey, who has since passed. He knew, through a 60-year friendship, how much I loved him, and how much I am in his debt.

My sister married and moved away and life’s currents pulled us apart, rejoining us at a few religious holidays, and family celebrations, of course.

Deep in my bones, with hardly a conscious thought, I knew my son and daughter were in some way a symbolic replacement for the 6 million European Jews murdered by the Nazis (and the Russian communists, too.)

Over the years, as adults with families, we drew closer and I am very happy that her children and mine — the cousins — enjoy a close relationship, even though separated by miles.

That has become very important to me, along with the strong love I feel for my sister, who my wife and I are visiting this week in her beautiful Florida home. The “Baby” nickname has resurfaced.

The picture at the top was taken at her grandson Evan’s bar mitvah in 2020. It was Covid time, but it couldn’t keep us away.

My sister and I healed long ago; how is a story that is hers to tell at the appropriate time.