Up From Orchard Street by Eleanor Widmer Page A

September. Then, as she left me at my classroom, she repeated again, “Remember, when the teacher asks you when you were born, say September seventh.” I must have appeared stricken, because she cajoled me, “You’ll get all the books you want to read. Free.”
    On the first morning of school, no one inquired, but on the second, Mrs. Clarke, an imperious woman with a pince-nez around her neck, asked everyone to state their name and date of birth. Automatically, I told the truth and repeated it. I was sent home immediately—the class was burgeoning with children, as many as forty-five—with a note saying that unless my mother could produce my birth certificate, I wasn’t to return.
    My mother screamed, “Dummy, didn’t I tell you what to say? Why didn’t you say what I told you? What are you, stupid?” She began to shake me. Bubby came to my rescue immediately, “What are you crazy, you have to listen to everything that Ada Levine tells you? So your child told the truth, and for this you are yelling and screaming? She’s four years old, she can stay with her Bubby a little longer. She’ll be a professor six months later.”
    “A professor?” my mother protested. “Who will marry her if she’s so smart? Who, who,
who
?” And she burst into tears, crying almost as hard as when she thought she would be having another baby.
    Hearing the early morning ruckus, my father left his bed and came in to settle the disturbance. “Look,” he said to my mother, “does it put you ten ahead if she starts now or six months later? In a few months she’ll be five, you’ll bring the birth certificate, you’ll behave like a lady. And you can tell your friend Ada Levine she can show her ass in Macy’s window for all I care. Let her put her own daughter in school six months early.” Then to soften the message, he smiled at her and said, “Come on, Lil, we’ll have Danish and coffee at Ratner’s, my treat.”
    Since there were no secrets in the Jewish ghetto, this kindergarten mishap soon reached Shirley Mathias, who rarely failed to taunt me that I had been “left back.”
    The third Shirley who drove me crazy was Shirley Feld, the granddaughter of Mrs. Feldman who lived in the apartment one floor above us. Mrs. Feldman, a widow three times over, admitted, “I’m burning like fire” in between mates. Her only child, Yussel, whom my father still called Yussie, had shown an affinity for fresh fruit from his earliest years. Not eating it, but lifting it from pushcarts, stands and fruit stores.
    Notorious throughout the streets for his quick fingers and for the voluminous sweater under which he adroitly tucked apples, oranges, grapes, bananas, even watermelons larger than his head, Yussie made off with the fruit as the helpless vendors watched, unable to give chase because that would lay them open to ten other thieves. Yussie could drive a truck by the age of twelve, and though he was a runt, with red-rimmed eyes and a snotty nose, he was agile, fast and bursting with self-assurance. Not only did he jimmy open a parked truck, but in broad daylight he emptied out a fruit warehouse on Front Street. He couldn’t work nights because he had to stay home with his mother.
    Caught in the act, Yussie was convicted of two counts of robbery, the truck and the fruit, and lived “out of town” for several years. When released at sixteen, however, he confided to my father, “They beat the shit out of me,” and went straight after that, as ambitious as ever, loving fruit as ever, but now conducting himself on the up and up. As an adult and married man he now lived on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, sported a pinky ring with a large yellow diamond, wore hand-tailored expensive clothes and drove a Cadillac.
    Having changed his name legally to James Feld, he opened a gourmet fruit store on Fifty-seventh Street. His gift baskets graced the best homes in the city, and were photographed in the staterooms of French liners leaving for