I begin singing an Irving Berlin song, “Heaven, I’m in heaven…and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak…”
Everything was going splendidly until I hear tumult and consternation from down below. What could be going on? So I look out and there on the front stoop below our window is my mother and all our neighbors looking up from the front steps of the building. One of the neighbors points to the window and shouts, “Kitty! It’s coming from your window!”
Oh no. Soon after I hear the thumping and bumping of what sounds like a small rhinoceros coming up the tenement stairs. I dive back in my bed and pull the covers over my head. Just as my mother enters our apartment Bernie comes out of the bathroom with a big smile on his face and says, “Hi, Mom!”
Bang! She greets him with a resounding smack that sends him crashing to the floor and screams, “How could you do that? Are you crazy?” I stayed hidden.
My brother Bernie was a real sweetheart of a guy. I didn’t confess the truth about this to him until I was nearly sixty-six and he was seventy. But even then, with a faint smile I could see he still resented it.
In those days our neighborhood had an open-window policy that created a sense of community where families looked out for one another, especially one another’s kids. Although from the perspective of a free-spirited young kid it also felt like you had dozens of parents who were watching your every move.
The neighborhood was full of kids and we never stopped playing games. Ring-a-levio, Johnny-on-the-pony, kick the can, and, a little later on, stickball and roller hockey. On Saturdays and Sundays I was always too busy to come up for lunch, so my mother would often make a sliced tomato sandwich on a buttered kaiser roll and put it in a paper bag and fling it out the fifth-story window for me to catch and have lunch. I almost never missed, but once when I did, the bag hit the sidewalk and flattened out, drenching the kaiser roll with rich tomato juice from the sliced tomatoes. It was one of the best things that I ever tasted. I loved it. From then on, I always missed it on purpose so the sandwich would flatten out. It was probably the first version of a “pizza” I ever ate.
I’ve told you about my mother’s side of the family, now let me tell you about my father’s side. My father’s father, Abraham Kaminsky, came from Gdansk （which back then was known as Danzig）， a thriving Prussian seaport. He and his brother Bernard were in the herring business. They’d meet the Swedish fishing boats loaded with herring and take the fish to their warehouse where they processed them in big wooden barrels. They made five or six different kinds of cured herring: namely pickled herring, matjes herring, schmaltz herring, rollmop herring, and god-knows-what-else herring.
When they came to America they found a big warehouse on Essex Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and continued in their herring trade. My uncle Lee, who was the youngest of ten children that Abraham and Bertha Ruchel produced （and by the way also one of my favorite uncles, more of him later）， told me how they set up their business. Putting together their meager savings and a loan from a bank they built a hundred pushcarts. They fitted out the pushcarts with galvanized metal trays that held a block of ice on top of which were scooped-out metal containers that held the herring. They provided wax paper and brown paper bags for the customers. It was a simple but brilliant deal. Each morning they got a hundred pushcart pushers to take the herring out and sell it in Jewish neighborhoods all over Manhattan. At the end of the day the pushcart pushers got fifty percent of the take, and the other fifty percent went to Abraham and Bernard for providing the wherewithal to sell the herring. Sometimes I think that formula would have been good for all kinds of enterprises, but I doubt very much if Henry Ford would have gone for it.
My grandfather Abraham was really a sweet, loving man. The only problem was he hugged and kissed all his grandchildren, and unfortunately, he had a beard made of steel wool and his grandchildren had to suffer those Brillo kisses. It was not a thrilling experience. When my father passed away my grandfather always sent my mother a little money to help us every month. He was a good man.
I think one of the reasons I am a comic is because of my uncle Lee. Very funny, and very peppy, Uncle Lee was a good-looking guy who really loved show business and was a naval lieutenant on a destroyer during WWII. We would all go to my grandfather Abraham’s house in Bensonhurst for the Passover seder meal. It was a long table filled with aunts and uncles. Uncle Lee sat right at the bottom because he was one of the youngest, and then next to him were me and my brothers and cousins; we were at the children’s table. So my grandfather would read from the prayer book, chanting in Hebrew. My uncle Lee would lean over to the kids’ table to translate for us what Grandpa was reciting in Hebrew. But he gave it a twist—he turned into a sportscaster calling a baseball game: “It’s a high fly ball heading out to right field! Will it be a Dodger home run? No! The Giants’ right fielder Mel Ott leaps into the air and snags it just before it can get into the stands! Crushing the Dodgers’ hopes for a chance to even the game and going down to miserable defeat, six to five.”