My Kaduchas And Yours
Geltman, Emanuel
In a recent issue of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz published an article called "My Negro Problem—and Ours." In it he told about the time a bunch of Negro kids clobbered him when he was a...
...Memory is tricky...
...If you live in the Village you get used to dogs but I still had little close contact with dogs...
...But not until I had children of my own did I really have to face the problem of dogs...
...The family moved to Boro Park...
...I got to know a dog that belonged to a doctor I knew when I lived in L.A...
...I cannot now remember whether it was a big dog or a little dog but I must have thought it was a big dog because I backed away...
...I don't want to drag this story out...
...I can't say that I was really comfortable in the presence of dogs but on the whole I was rational about it...
...Well, this started me to thinking about my own childhood because I, too, was a kind of sissy—although I'll say for myself that I was also very radical and sang "We Are the Builders" at a very early age...
...Except for a few dissenters like the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, most of the letters were ecstatic in their praise of Podhoretz' courage in speaking so honestly about his cowardice...
...And these were no ordinary letter-writers...
...The fact is I recovered...
...It just wasn't an issue at the meetings I increasingly attended...
...They were tougher, meaner, more independent...
...I retreated fur ther, and the dog kept after me until I broke into a run with the dog in hot pursuit...
...As I grew up life presented me with few opportunities to face the dog question...
...Jews too, but had some goyim as well because even the Jews there were strictly rich—or so we thought...
...I burst through the door, and shut that one, col lapsing in sweat and fright...
...I don't know what it's like now, but at that time the Italians lived in the few streets closest to the BMT sub way terminal, and the Jews lived further out toward Sea Gate (which was mostly * Be patient, this will be explained presently...
...The fact is that we were pretty scared, by and large, of the Italian kids...
...I was about 6 or 7 at the time, not long after we had moved to Coney Is land, and I knew nothing about dogs...
...Yet, I will have to admit that it would distress me if my daughter wanted to marry a dog...
...My kids, of course, haven't the slightest fear of dogs...
...The dog followed...
...In it he told about the time a bunch of Negro kids clobbered him when he was a little boy in Brownsville, and how he didn't squeal on them, and how he grew up to believe in full justice for the Negro, intermarriage and everything, but how he could never get over a residual fear or distrust of Negroes—so that while he would not forbid his daughter to marry a Negro, he wouldn't be happy about it either...
...As for myself I've really gotten over any lingering suspicion of dogs...
...Then back to Williamsburg in the depression years, and by that time the Village was really home for me...
...My mother wouldn't have forgiven a tsad dik* for messing up the floor...
...When I had not recovered in another day my mother took me to a new doctor in the neighborhood, a young man not long out of medical school who also remembered what his mother had taught him...
...In a recent issue of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz published an article called "My Negro Problem—and Ours...
...But that's another problem, and if it's still yours, it is no longer mine...
...Nowadays when Jews, even ones not so rich, live in suburbs, have bas mitzvahs for their daughters, and go to Community Centers, it's commonplace for Jewish kids to have pets...
...The next day and the day after that I had chills and fever...
...I was tricked into the collie, but I brought the beagle home...
...My mother took me to a doctor who said I had the ague and prescribed some evil-tasting powders...
...The issue of cats and then dogs (and other animals) came up and while I admit that I offered hesitation if not resistance, I yielded to the point where we now have a collie and a beagle and they are an acceptable part of my life...
...Like many Jewish families of the time we had edged up slightly in social status (if not income) by moving from the East Side where I was born to Williamsburg to Coney Island...
...very holy...
...I was playing on the street when a dog bounded up to me...
...My children are a younger generation, and products of a mixed marriage so pets are more natural...
...Arthur Cohen, Melvin Lasky, all kinds of really thought ful people...
...He promptly diagnosed my fright-induced chills and fever (alternating) as The Kaduchas**— * One of God's anonymous emissaries...
...I walk the dogs more than anyone else in the family, really enjoy it, but complain about it...
...In my childhood and in my neighborhood cats were known, but dogs were a rarity...
...Once, perhaps remembering that they had been closer to nature in the little Polish village from which they came, my parents got a rheumy-eyed poodle...
...The pip...
...My mother had never heard of the ague and distrusted the diagnosis...
...My son and my daughter will approach the most monstrous beast without the least tremor, and I admire them for ti...
...Big names, big thinkers, a regular who's who of the intellectual world...
...I mean, who had dogs...
...Maybe you know about how Jewish families like mine were about pets...
...and prescribed some evil-tasting powders...
...Commentary received an absolutely staggering amount of letters which have been published in three successive issues...
...By the time I reached my house I was too panicky to shut the downstairs door and the dog followed me up to the second floor where we lived...
...Not that my parents had anything against animals...
...I understand that Coney Island has changed a lot since my childhood, which, come to think of it, was longer ago than I realized...
...But it lasted only two weeks...
...We were living in Coney Island at the time I had this experience I want to tell about...
Vol. 10 • July 1963 • No. 3
