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who mended old sheepskin coats for a living. My memories of home are inseparable from the odors of sheepskin and paste and the image of two upright wooden screws (the bookbinder’s “machine”). The soldier had finished his term of military service years before, yet he still wore his uniform—a dilapidated black coat with new brass buttons, and a similar overcoat of a coarse gray material. Also, he still shaved his chin, sporting a pair of formidable gray side-whiskers. Shaving is one of the worst sins known to our faith, but, somehow, people overlooked it in one who had once been compelled to practise it in the army. Otherwise the furrier or sheepskin tailor was an extremely pious man. He was very kind to me, so that his military whiskers never awed me. Not so his lame, tall wife, who often hit me with one of her crutches. She was the bane of my life. The bookbinder’s wife was much younger than her husband and one of the things I often heard was that he was “crazy for her because she is his second wife,” from which I inferred that second wives were loved far more than first ones.
    The bookbinder had a red-haired little girl whom I hated like poison. Red Esther we called her, to distinguish her from a Black Esther, whose home was on the same yard. She was full of fight. Knowing how repulsive she was to me, she was often the first to open hostilities, mocking my way of speaking, or sticking out her tongue at me. Or else she would press her freckled cheek against my lips and then dodge back, shouting, gloatingly :
    “He has kissed a girl! He has kissed a girl! Sinner! Shame! Sinner! Sinner!”
    There were some other things that she or some of the other little girls of our courtyard would do to make an involuntary “sinner” of me, but these had better be left out.
    I had many a fierce duel with her. I was considered a strong boy, but she was quick and nimble as a cat, and I usually got the worst of the bargain, often being left badly scratched and bleeding. At which point the combat would be taken up by our mothers.
    The room, part of which was our home, and two other single-room apartments, similarly tenanted, opened into a pitch-dark vestibule which my fancy peopled with “evil ones.” A steep stairway led up to the yard, part of which was occupied by a huddle of ramshackle one-story houses. It was known as Abner’s Court. During the summer months it swarmed with tattered, unkempt humanity. There was a peculiar odor to the place which I can still smell. (Indeed, many of the things that I conjure up from the past appeal as much to my sense of smell as to my visual memory.) It was anything but a grateful odor.
    The far end of our street was part of a squalid little suburb known as the Sands. It was inhabited by Gentiles exclusively. Sometimes, when a Jew chanced to visit it some of its boys would descend upon him with shouts of “Damned Jew!” “Christ-killer!” and sick their dogs at him. As we had no dogs to defend us, orthodox Jews being prohibited from keeping these domestic animals by a custom amounting to a religious injunction, our boys never ventured into the place except, perhaps, in a spirit of daredevil bravado.
    One day the bigger Jewish boys of our street had a pitched battle with the Sands boys, an event which is one of the landmarks in the history of my childhood.
    Still, some of the Sands boys were on terms of friendship with us and would even come to play with us in our yard. The only Gentile family that lived in Abner’s Court was that of the porter. His children spoke fairly good Yiddish.
    One Saturday evening a pock-marked lad from the Sands, the son of a chimney-sweep, meeting me in the street, set his dog at me. As a result I came home with a fair-sized piece of my trousers (knee-breeches were unknown to us) missing.
    “I’m going to kill him,” my mother said, with something like a sob. “I’m just going to kill him.”
    “Cool down,” the retired soldier pleaded, without