name?”
“Lil Roth.”
Carefully he printed a large
R
with a small
I
on the left. “Your middle name?” he asked. My father, born Abraham Jacob, signed his name Jack A. Roth, but my mother had no middle name. “I think it’s Leah,” she replied.
I pulled at her elbow and whispered. “That’s your Jewish name, that’s why they call you Lil. You can’t call yourself Lil Leah, it’s the same thing.”
“Fine,” replied the skinny salesman, “that’s easy,
I R I
.” My mother thanked him and we hurried home. “I must have a middle name,” she declared. Grasping at the first one that came to her mind she asked, “How about Shirley? Lillian Shirley Roth.”
I knew three Shirleys: one more hateful to me than the next. They may have been named during the Shirley Temple craze when so many of the Jewish Sarahs, Sylvias and Shoshanas became Shirley. And here was my mother, a grown woman, wanting to adopt the name for herself.
My contempt for Shirley Levine arose from her lack of brains. Like her mother, Ada, she liked to talk about dresses—when she bothered to talk at all. She would repeat endlessly, “My mother is buying me a red dress, with a petticoat to match.” Neither the dress nor the petticoat materialized, a promise, typical of Ada, that she had no intention of fulfilling. For her daughter, that one sentence, “My mother is buying me a red dress, with a petticoat to match,” summarized the extent of her conversation.
Yet just as I admired and feared my Grandma Rae’s impeccable housekeeping, I admired and feared Shirley Levine’s physical agility. She roller-skated for years, not on learners but on real skates with steel wheels, and in the coldest weather she wore socks, not stockings, a fashion my mother associated with the upper class.
The second Shirley I loathed was Shirley Mathias, who lived with her brother, Nate, and her parents above their men’s hat store on Canal Street. The Mathias Hat Company had a citywide reputation and the store itself was a marvel: gleaming wooden shelves, dozens and dozens of hats stacked one on top of another: derbies, fedoras, snap-brims, hats made from real fur, beaver hats fit for a Czar, curly gray Persian lamb hats with side flaps that generals sported in movies, top hats for the opera. During the summer Mr. Mathias displayed stiff straw skimmers with tricolored hatbands, soft Panamas with perforations for air at the crown, caps for boating, caps for golf, white visors for tennis. Everything we knew about sports—and it was painfully little because on the Lower East Side handball reigned: slapping a hard ball against an equally hard wall—we learned from the Mathias Hat Company. My father, considered a paragon of sartorial splendor, always bought his fedoras—worn with the brim turned down on all sides—at Mathias.
But little Shirley Mathias possessed the tongue of a devil. Each time I walked on Canal Street she would shout, “Skinny pickle, skinny pickle,” darting her head in and out of her father’s store like a snake’s. And as soon as I started kindergarten, she yelled, “She got left back, she got left back!” a wound not easily forgotten.
True. Thanks to the odious Ada Levine, my mother had registered me at the Hester Street P.S. 21 at the age of four. Ada always referred to me not by name but as “That one.” “That one has a dried-out knish.” “That one has an old lady’s head.” “That one can read all the signs on Orchard Street.” Ada advised my mother to start me in school a half year early, to say that I was born in September, instead of January. “That one,” she told my mother, “will be the smartest one in kindergarten. Get her out of the house. How long is she going to hold her Bubby’s hand and go shopping? Get rid of her.”
I had nothing to say in the matter. My mother brought me to register at school. She claimed she had lost my birth certificate but swore, smiling winsomely, that I had been five in
“Lil Roth.”
Carefully he printed a large
R
with a small
I
on the left. “Your middle name?” he asked. My father, born Abraham Jacob, signed his name Jack A. Roth, but my mother had no middle name. “I think it’s Leah,” she replied.
I pulled at her elbow and whispered. “That’s your Jewish name, that’s why they call you Lil. You can’t call yourself Lil Leah, it’s the same thing.”
“Fine,” replied the skinny salesman, “that’s easy,
I R I
.” My mother thanked him and we hurried home. “I must have a middle name,” she declared. Grasping at the first one that came to her mind she asked, “How about Shirley? Lillian Shirley Roth.”
I knew three Shirleys: one more hateful to me than the next. They may have been named during the Shirley Temple craze when so many of the Jewish Sarahs, Sylvias and Shoshanas became Shirley. And here was my mother, a grown woman, wanting to adopt the name for herself.
My contempt for Shirley Levine arose from her lack of brains. Like her mother, Ada, she liked to talk about dresses—when she bothered to talk at all. She would repeat endlessly, “My mother is buying me a red dress, with a petticoat to match.” Neither the dress nor the petticoat materialized, a promise, typical of Ada, that she had no intention of fulfilling. For her daughter, that one sentence, “My mother is buying me a red dress, with a petticoat to match,” summarized the extent of her conversation.
Yet just as I admired and feared my Grandma Rae’s impeccable housekeeping, I admired and feared Shirley Levine’s physical agility. She roller-skated for years, not on learners but on real skates with steel wheels, and in the coldest weather she wore socks, not stockings, a fashion my mother associated with the upper class.
The second Shirley I loathed was Shirley Mathias, who lived with her brother, Nate, and her parents above their men’s hat store on Canal Street. The Mathias Hat Company had a citywide reputation and the store itself was a marvel: gleaming wooden shelves, dozens and dozens of hats stacked one on top of another: derbies, fedoras, snap-brims, hats made from real fur, beaver hats fit for a Czar, curly gray Persian lamb hats with side flaps that generals sported in movies, top hats for the opera. During the summer Mr. Mathias displayed stiff straw skimmers with tricolored hatbands, soft Panamas with perforations for air at the crown, caps for boating, caps for golf, white visors for tennis. Everything we knew about sports—and it was painfully little because on the Lower East Side handball reigned: slapping a hard ball against an equally hard wall—we learned from the Mathias Hat Company. My father, considered a paragon of sartorial splendor, always bought his fedoras—worn with the brim turned down on all sides—at Mathias.
But little Shirley Mathias possessed the tongue of a devil. Each time I walked on Canal Street she would shout, “Skinny pickle, skinny pickle,” darting her head in and out of her father’s store like a snake’s. And as soon as I started kindergarten, she yelled, “She got left back, she got left back!” a wound not easily forgotten.
True. Thanks to the odious Ada Levine, my mother had registered me at the Hester Street P.S. 21 at the age of four. Ada always referred to me not by name but as “That one.” “That one has a dried-out knish.” “That one has an old lady’s head.” “That one can read all the signs on Orchard Street.” Ada advised my mother to start me in school a half year early, to say that I was born in September, instead of January. “That one,” she told my mother, “will be the smartest one in kindergarten. Get her out of the house. How long is she going to hold her Bubby’s hand and go shopping? Get rid of her.”
I had nothing to say in the matter. My mother brought me to register at school. She claimed she had lost my birth certificate but swore, smiling winsomely, that I had been five in
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