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female member. They used an abandoned shed behind a bakery as a clubhouse, and periodically fought other gangs in the neighborhood—but nobody then had guns, and serious injury was rare.
    Though Karla preferred to run rather than fight, she did get into a fair number of brawls. She was once attacked by a group of girls and burned with cigarettes, and another time a girl ripped open the back of her leg with a compass. When one of the neighborhood boys hit her in the face, Karla smacked him back—and broke his jaw. When another little boy came after her, she got him in a leg lock and cracked several of his ribs. Her disposition was friendly, but from an early age, Karla proved a tough, stoic little kid, a determined survivor.
    Karla’s athletic ability also contributed to her acceptance, especially since her skill was marred by clumsiness. She was good enough at running and at punchball to join the boys in the street, yet a puzzling lack of depth perception made her terrible at touch football and stickball; all this made her an accomplished, likeable klutz rather than an awesome superwoman. She fell down so often and got so manyscratches and cuts that her father at one point started good-naturedly calling her Stitch.
    Most of her awkwardness was due to extreme nearsightedness that for a long time went undiagnosed; if she bumped into a wall, her parents simply ascribed it to her being “the worst clod who ever walked the earth.” When she started public school in Brooklyn, she was given an eye test, but when the technician pointed to the chart and Karla said she couldn’t see anything, it was thought that she was “clowning around again.” That, combined with poor reading skills, got her put in a class for slow learners—a nightmare experience which lasted some four years and from which she barely escaped in time to make up for lost skills.
    Her class of mostly delinquent, emotionally disturbed children (as adults, a number of them ended up in Dannemora prison) was considered unteachable. At the beginning of every day, the reluctant teacher assigned to them would put lists on the blackboard which the children were told to memorize; in one column were the characteristics of a “good citizen,” such as cleanliness; in the other were those of a “bad citizen,” with special emphasis on “communism.”
    The children were thought too stupid to learn their own names, so each was assigned a number. Karla’s was 36. She became so used to responding to it that at home Nene could sometimes get her attention only by calling out “Thirty-six!” When it finally was discovered that Karla’s vision was 12,000/300, and she won a transfer to a regular class, she found herself way behind the other kids. But once she did begin to read—as a fourth-grader—she turned to books avidly: Because of her nearsightedness, she had never developed any alternative interest in television.
    Starting at age five, Karla was sent away summers to Camp Swatonah in the Catskills; Abraham thought it wise to give her a break from family squabbling. Rhoda was usually too ill to visit, but Nene and Abraham came up periodically to check on how Karla was doing. They needn’t have worried. She took to camp immediately, never felt a twinge of homesickness, and went back happily every summer until she was twelve. She was mystified at the kids who would cry for their parents and mope miserably around the bunk. The only time Karla cried was at the end of the summer—when she had to go home.
    She had terrible crushes on the female counselors. “It was my first awareness,” she later said, “that I was gay,” though at the time, of course, she lacked that descriptive vocabulary. The counselors weremostly Southern teenagers with stark “duck” haircuts, and in retrospect Karla has little doubt that most of them were lesbian. All she knew at the time was that when she