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having three grandparents living in the same neighborhood.
    Leah’s parents, Philip and Jennie Posner, had rented a white frame house at 819 Glenwood Avenue since 1939, the fifth home they had lived in since their marriage. Arnold Spielberg remembers it as “a very nice home. When I was going to school at the University of Cincinnati, they lived just one block over. Leah would go over to their house, I’d come back after school, and we’d sit down and have a Sabbath lunch. Then we’d pray after lunch and sing songs. I learned all their songs.”
    Sam and Rebecca Spielberg had lived in ten homes before the family settled in 1935 into half of a red-brick duplex they rented at 3560 Van Antwerp Place. “Our street was ninety-five percent Jewish,” Arnold recalls. “And all of them were successful people, doctors, dentists, or lawyers. It was very education-oriented. My brother and I were the only engineers that came outof that street. We used to brag to each other as to how religious the families were. My friends were almost all Orthodox. We were one of the few Conservative families on the street.” After Sam’s death, Rebecca continued to live there, supported by her children. Although Sam’s grandson would amass a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine in 1996 at $1 billion, Sam’s estate amounted to only $1,728.57, of which Rebecca received $1,182.15 after the costs of his final illness, burial, and probate.
    By the time of Steven’s birth, many of Avondale’s old homes had been cut into duplexes or subdivided into three or four apartments, with the former maid’s quarters on the top floor often serving as the tiny apartment of an elderly or unmarried family member. After Arnold’s discharge from the U.S. Army Air Forces in September 1945, he and Leah rented their modest first-floor apartment on Lexington Avenue from Mrs. Bella Pritz, who lived upstairs with her daughter (the apartment occupied by the Spielbergs was one of two on the first floor). Though Avondale was already being vacated by German Jews, who kept moving northward into fresher and more rustic suburban acreage, it still was only “lower middle-class at worst” in those years, historian Jacob Marcus recalled. With housing growing scarcer as veterans began coming back from the war, the newlywed Spielbergs were lucky to find a decent apartment.
    â€œIt was a lovely neighborhood,” recalls their neighbor Peggie Hibbert Singerman. The houses had “big backyards, huge porches on the front, swings. They were elegant houses, with wonderful woodwork in some of them.” Many of those beautiful old homes remain well preserved today, long after the white flight of the 1950s that saw the Jewish population abandon Avondale to blacks climbing the economic ladder behind them. The house where Steven lived as a young child is still standing; it is a rental property owned by the Southern Baptist church, which in 1967 bought the Adath Israel building across the street, now a national historic landmark.
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    I N their growing restlessness with the comfortable but limiting environment of Cincinnati’s Jewish enclave, Arnold and Leah Spielberg were typical of many second-generation American Jews whose postwar ambitions for themselves and their children would lead them to turn their backs on their aging hometowns and depart for the brave new world of suburbia.
    Arnold Spielberg, his sister Natalie Guttman recalled, “was always a questioning , exploring, and highly intelligent youngster whose quest for learning was and has never really been quenched.” But when Arnold was attending Avondale Grade School, he was regarded as “a nerd,” according to a schoolmate , Dr. Bernard Goldman. “He didn’t fit into the group. Other kids played ball, but he never seemed to join in that. He wasn’t a spectator. He probably had his own interests.”
    From early boyhood,