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Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve, by Dannie Abse
- Abstract
For all its toughening know-how, and the deracinating power that New York’s brash and sophisticated force is supposed to exert on the children of the city’s immigrants, sucking them out and away from the language-barriered narrowness of kinship they feel about the heights of the Bronx or the depths of Brooklyn, it has always seemed a little preposterous to us to think that Jews very much like us, speaking roughly the same kind of Yiddish, punctuating their remarks with much the same kind of gestures and intonation, could be living in parts of the world whose Population and Chief Products made up the grinding routine of geography lessons in P.S. 125. Maybe Chicago and Boston can be let in with the rest of us, and Los Angeles, and even [laughter] Rosenberg, Texas, even the East End of London (because Tante Nachamke had lived there for a while before she finally embarked for America, and that hard-headed dowager was no spinner of fairy tales). We’d allow these places the possibility of having Jews “like us,” allow it with a certain incredulous smirk, knowingly suspicious as we were of their authenticity, tending to say, as someone I know once remarked about a friend of ours who grew up in (of all places) Portsmouth, New Hampshire, “Well, he’s really sort of a goyishe Jew.”
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