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for New York on a certain date. Europe was apparently still civilized enough for such an arrangement, and after three weeks in steerage—the bottom deck where the light of day never shone, an area near the chains that operated the steering gear, where twice a day a barrel of salt herring was opened for the scores of emigrant families, from which, naturally, a child traveling alone got no more than the leavings—he arrived in New York with his teeth loose and a scab on his head the size, they used to say, of a silver dollar. His parents were too busy to pick him up at Castle Garden and sent his next-eldest brother, Abe, going on ten, to find him, get him through Immigration, and bring him home to Stanton Street and the tenement where, in two rooms, the eight of them lived and worked sewing the great long many-buttoned cloaks that were the fashion then. Abe, a scamp, walked my father uptown pointing out building after building that their father, he said, already owned. Izzie was put into school for several months and then removed to take his place at one of the sewing machines in the apartment, never to see the inside of a school again. By the time he was twelve he himself was employing two other boys to sew sleeves on coats alongside him in some basement workshop, and at sixteen he was sent off as salesman by his father, Samuel, with two big steamer trunks filled with a line of coats for the Midwest stores. But, as he explained on my back porch more than half a century later, “I got to the train station, but I come back home—I was still too lonesome for my mother. So I started out again the next year, and then I could do it.” He told me this in his seventies and still, even then, felt somehow embarrassed by his dependency on his mother, a woman to whom, until he married at the age of thirty-two, he handed over his sizable weekly pay in return for an allowance. Histhree brothers had done the same. A formidable woman, she would decline, at a particularly desperate moment during the Depression, to loan him money—but that was still far away from my time on the floor, and far behind us when we were having our quiet conversation on my porch.
    My brother, Kermit, lived only on the periphery of my life until I was five and faced the exciting prospect of going to school too. Until then he was merely a nuisance who kept getting in my way whenever I wanted to write on something or cut something out of a magazine or drive a nail through the phonograph cabinet. Now that I would be joining him in school he became my ideal, which required that I love him. As the eldest son he had all the responsibility, and I had all the fun, but he was handsome and I was funny-looking, with ears that stuck out and forced me to endure my mother’s brother Moe’s inevitable salutation when he came to visit, “Pull in your ears, we’re coming to a tunnel.” As for my father’s side of the family, they invariably greeted me by staring at me with supercilious smiles—they were all very large white blue-eyed bison, and extremely satisfied with themselves as they grazed—and saying, “Where did
he
come from?” I alone being dark, with brown eyes and dark hair. Of course my mother had the same coloring, a mistake of nature in their view, she being the sole dark woman to have married into that immense family. They were an unusually inbred clan and married only people who resembled them. In fact, one of my most beautiful cousins married her flesh-and-blood uncle against the rabbi’s warnings, and though they lived in love for years, holding hands and endlessly admiring one another, I think the guilt finally got to her, for she withered strangely in her early forties with something no one could then diagnose, and died looking like a bent hag, her hair gone, her eyes nearly blinded by some inner calamity, having no known disease. My dark mother seemed somehow alien to them, perhaps even an