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newly acquired purchases.
    For a number of years, Negro boys, some as young as ten, entered New York via freight cars from the South. Unable to find work and starving, they went from bakery to bakery to beg for bread. If they stumbled into Pollack’s bakery on Hester Street, Mrs. P. didn’t spare them as much as a two-day-old kaiser roll. Instead, she directed them to Manya’s Restaurant, where until she ran out of food, Bubby gave away everything that was left over from the midday dinner and the scrawny young black boys scurried down the stairs with their bits and pieces, looking like underfed birds whose skinny legs hardly seemed able to carry them.
    One such youngster moved Bubby deeply. In the midst of a cold spell, with a wind that made it impossible to catch your breath in the street, he showed up in pants that were literally in shreds and with no shoes on his feet. He may have been the runt of his family’s litter because though he swore he was twelve, he appeared no more than seven: short, with a washboard chest and a pinched face.
    At first we thought he was mute. He seemed incapable of answering the simplest questions, such as his name or the place from which he had come. But gently coaxed by Bubby, who embraced him and whispered in his ear, he uttered his name: “Carlton.” This was too difficult for her to pronounce so she renamed him Clayton, gave him some of my brother’s old clothes, a jar of cabbage borscht with beef in it, and as much bread as he could carry. The next morning when she opened the door to go out to the toilet in the hall, she discovered Clayton curled up on the floor, his arms wrapped around the soup jar.
    Bubby could not resist nurturing him. At first he slept under the stairs or on the hallway landing and worked for his meals. He did the afternoon dishes, scrubbed the kitchen floor, took a steel brush to the oven and burners that otherwise rarely received more than a passing nod at cleanliness. Unlike the other neighbors who kept locks on their hallway toilets, we did not because Bubby hated the idea of locks. But our customers in their haste to get away often pissed on the floor, or failed to flush the toilet with its pull chain. First thing in the morning, Clayton cleaned the toilet. Bubby bought a remnant of linoleum, which he cut and fit around the base. He found lye to bleach out the stains in the bowl and seemed to be a master of domestic knowledge. And whatever he didn’t know he soon learned from Manya.
    My grandmother’s purveyors often cautioned her against Clayton, sure he would cut us to pieces in our sleep. To these admonitions she responded with merriment. “I lived through the czar, I lived through the Cossacks and pogroms, now I should be afraid of a little boy? Forget such foolishness!” she said, laughing.
    Because of the rats that inhabited all the tenements, she worried about Clayton sleeping in the hall, so after a few weeks she walked to the Bowery and found him a room close to Chinatown that would rent to nonwhites. The exploitative rent was a dollar a week, but she admitted to me that she lied and told everyone that it cost her fifty cents. Customers would say, “Manya, that boy will take advantage. You shouldn’t be so kind to him.” But Clayton became a permanent fixture in our lives.
    Evidence of Manya’s generosity was part of ghetto lore during the weeks before the High Holy Days in early fall that marked the Jewish new year. As we grew older, the kitchen grew smaller, but every year when Rosh Hashanah came, Bubby collected or bought Mason jars that she scrubbed and stacked beneath the kitchen window, and filled with single-course meals: chicken soup with homemade noodles, carrots and chicken breasts or thighs. Three or four cauldrons simmered on the gas flames. When the contents cooled and were poured into jars, Bubby, Clayton and I set out to distribute them, together with quarter-loaves of challah.
    Walking from tenement to tenement, Bubby