New York in the Thirties

Growing up in New York during the thirties meant, for me, the Jewish slums of the East Bronx, endless talk about Hitler, money worries of my parents migrating to my own psyche, public schools that really were schools and devoted teachers whose faces lived in memory longer than their names, fantasies of heroism drawn from Austria and Spain to excite my imagination, the certainty bordering on comfort that I would never find a regular job, and above all, the Movement. At the age of 14 I wandered into the ranks of the socialist youth, as much from loneliness as conviction, and from then on, all through my teens and twenties, the Movement was my home and passion, the Movement as it ranged through the various left-wing, anti-Communist groups. ...