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said. (I bit my lip to keep from asking if they’d left some way for their father to find them, like children dropping bread crumbs in a fairy tale.) Andrew joined the U.S. Army to fight in the Texas Revolution, and his life almost ended then. His company was losing in battle and surrendered in exchange for the Mexican general’s promise to spare the men. But the general lied. Once the Americans surrendered, the general had them all shot. All except one: Andrew Boyle. The generalhad at one time stayed in the town where Boyle’s family lived; they’d treated him kindly, and he’d told them he would help Andrew if he ever had the chance. That promise he kept. He let Andrew go.
    “You see, girls,” Papa said, “Andrew Boyle survived because his family was kind to Mexicans. And later he chose to live with Mexicans and Indians as his neighbors. Remember, I showed you his house on Boyle Avenue? That’s why, in Boyle Heights, we have so many different kinds of people and we all get along.”
    The real story, I learned when I got older, was far less pretty than what I’d heard from Papa. Andrew Boyle may indeed have been a paragon of tolerance, as Papa said. But after Boyle died, his son-in-law literally gave away plots of land to attract “desirable” neighbors. At first the plan succeeded, and the son-in-law’s friends built the grand Victorian mansions around Hollenbeck Park (named for one of the friends). But Boyle Heights was still on the wrong side of the river. Eventually it filled up with cheap little wood and stucco houses and with undesirable people like us—and our Mexican, Japanese, Russian, Armenian, and black neighbors. Papa wouldn’t have told children such an ambiguous tale, of course. And whether it reflected Andrew Boyle’s populist spirit or was simply a happy accident, Papa was right that our involuntary League of Nations formed a surprisingly harmonious community. When I was growing up, Boyle Heights was home to people from fifty different ethnic groups. And we didn’t dissolve into some kind of treacly melting pot; each of the largest groups—the Mexicans, the Japanese, and especially the Jews, who were over half of Boyle Heights’ residents then—had its own neighborhood.
    The Jewish area was centered at the intersection of Brooklyn Avenue and Soto Street. Brooklyn is now called Cesar Chavez Avenue, and Boyle Heights is entirely Hispanic, but back in the 1920s and ’30s, you could walk in either direction from the corner of Brooklyn and Soto and pass kosher bakeries and delicatessens with barrels of sharp-smelling pickles and
matyas
herring sitting out front. Canter’s was the deli where all of the junk men had breakfast and a shot of whiskey every morning at six, and every year before Passover it was the site of the crying man—a man who sat on the sidewalk in front of Canter’s grinding horseradish, tears running down his face. There was also the notorious chicken store, whereJews from all over Los Angeles came on Thursdays to buy kosher chickens for their Friday dinners. You pointed to a live, clucking chicken, the unfortunate bird was then taken into the back room and hung upside down, and a religious butcher called a
shochet
slit its throat. At some point, every child became aware of what went on in the store’s back room and refused to eat chicken for several weeks; some stayed vegetarians for years.
    Stores had signs in both English and Yiddish, and there were Yiddish workers’ societies, community centers, and socialists debating outside the vegetarian cafe. Boyle Heights had many synagogues, too; we lived on Breed Street, a block from the majestic Breed Street Shul, and sometimes went there on the High Holidays. That was the only time we went to synagogue, though, and a number of our neighbors didn’t go at all. We were modern Americans; what did we want with Old Country superstitions? We didn’t need to pray to God to relieve the misery of our lives. What misery? In America,