This is how my story begins…
I was two years old in 1938. These were the hard times of the Great Depression, and the WPA was at its peak. My father, Manny, dug ditches during the day, and at night, he worked in the garment district making buttonholes on garments. Still, it wasn’t enough to feed a family of six, and when they couldn’t use him digging ditches, we had to live on Welfare.
We were living then on Croes Avenue in the South Bronx. One morning my mom was cooking beef neck-bones in a large jar she had placed in a pot of water, simmering it very slowly over a low flame to extract the juices from the bones. The rich smell warmed our kitchen.
Without knocking, a thin woman with her face flushed almost beet red, walked into our apartment. She was a Welfare worker. Never said a word. As if my mother wasn’t there, she investigated our apartment like she owned it and owned my mom.
“What are you cooking there?” Not giving my mom a chance to answer, “Is that beef I smell? How can you afford meat?” She said it as if my mom had committed a crime.
“I didn’t pay a dime for dem neck-bones. The butcher gave it to me for nuttin’.”
In those days you didn’t have to pay for beef bones, the neighborhood butcher would give them for free. The Welfare worker didn’t believe my mom and talked down to her, scolding her like she was a child.
“It’s people like you ignorant foreigners who come to this country and take advantage of the good people. You should be ashamed of yourself!”
“I don’t have to take dis crap!”
Even if it meant not being able to collect Welfare, Mom took hold of the woman’s coat collar and threw her out of our apartment.
She went back to the stove where she was rendering chicken fat with onions. When she finished, she poured the chicken fat into a few jars, leaving the greasy-crisp pieces of chicken skin and onions in the frying pan -- what my mother called ‘greavelach,’ and I later called a heart attack. But my sister, Millie, and I craved those little, greasy missiles that detonated in our stomachs. It was a losing battle in our childhood of indigestion -- what we thought was a natural condition.