Our house in Weequahic
The inspiration to do a private tour of our house and environs in Newark came from an organized bus trip to those precious places that my husband, a native of now trendy Brooklyn, and I did with a local shul group here in West Orange. We had a wonderful time that day and decided to offer a similar private jaunt to one of our sons-in-law and one of our adult grandsons. We did not offer tuna fish wraps like the group’s participants had enjoyed, but we did provide sufganiot to commemorate our journey on the last day of Chanukah 5786.
I started the excursion by relating that this Jewish district, this Weequahic of ours, never knew from Chanukah sufganiot at all when I was a kid in the’40s. It was latkes all the way until years later, when we wisely began to observe the Israeli tradition of jelly donuts, drenched with oil, and deliciously fried to make them even more caloric. I suppose you might argue they’re filled with healthy fruit (the jelly!), but that would be stretching the truth more than a bit since they’re never filled, and the jelly is always more sugar than fruit.
My narration began as I pulled our car into my regular spot, right in front of the four brick steps that made up our stoop at 83 Aldine Street, near the corner of Forest Place, which they could readily see was no forest, populated as it is, and was, by only a couple of scrawny trees. I told the guys that I could easily imagine Mom in the kitchen, no doubt frying the final batch of latkes, imbuing the apartment with the aroma of the luscious mixture of fried potatoes and onions. Dad would be sitting at his secretary desk, working hard, his mouth signaling that he was adding up numbers, never having resorted to using a calculator in his almost 98 years. Their division of labor was clearly defined, he at his desk and she, wearing a comfortable housedress, working at the stove. After work was done, he would meander over to the living room and perch on his green-flowered club chair, where the nonfiction book of the moment always awaited him. She would whip out the New York Times crossword puzzle, which she would finish with incredible acumen — often in ink.
We had decided to do this tour when we realized that some of our family members had lived for many years close to our family’s 20th-century roots without actually visiting the sites. They witnessed my nostalgia, but it was as if it were in a textbook. Now the places so familiar to me would come alive, of course tinged with the romanticizing of my old age.
Our four-family house, built by Zayda, Dad’s father, in 1929, now nearing its 100th birthday, looks better than ever. It is covered in handsome gray aluminum siding, and the exterior is well maintained. I only wished I had the chutzpah to ring the doorbell and see the inside. I didn’t.
I recently wrote about the garage, four-car freestanding, that had had an etching of Hitler on an interior wall. I was surprised to see that the entire structure is no more. I remember well the day that Dad rushed to pull his car out of it when the snow-covered roof was in danger of collapse. Dramatically, the instant he was out, the entire structure crashed noisily to the ground, an unforgettable crunching sound I will never forget. It was a miracle that it hadn’t taken my young father into that path of destruction. He lived on for an additional half century!
But the garage had been rebuilt in our family’s time and served us well. Where had it gone? I don’t know. You just don’t lose a garage, but, then again, maybe you do.
The four apartments, all railroad flats, not due to proximity to a train but because of the straight line of construction where one room led to another with barely any hallways, were family-occupied, except for the first floor lower right, which was home to longtime tenants, the Hoffmans. It was truly like a single-family home since no one locked their doors, day or night, and no one even knocked on each other’s doors. We simply walked in.
Lena, the gray housecat, belonged to everyone. She had no special owner. We all owned her, fed her, and mostly ignored her the rest of the time. She lived to old age and made her way home every day without ever making a fuss. I can’t say that about our dogs. They were much more demonstrative and demanding, venting excitement when appropriate, or not, and dripping with affection, when appropriate or not. I always favored the dogs. Lena was too cool and composed for my tastes. Those icy green eyes never showed us the same adoration as the big brown canine eyes.
Both of my grandfathers lived in our house, and they walked to shul together twice daily, no matter the weather. Our shul, Rodfei Shalom, was across the street, around the corner. It, and all the homes opposite us, eventually were replaced by a junior high school. There were three temples in Newark, one Conservative, one unaffiliated, and one Reform, but Rodfei Shalom was then one of more than 40 Orthodox shtibels. It was a big part of our lives. My father served as financial sSecretary for about five decades and Mom always was on the Ladies Auxiliary.
Further afield were the places that made Newark so welcoming to us as Jews and as Americans. Medical care was state of the art at Newark Beth Israel Hospital, today still standing tall and now known as a medical center, with its Magen David high on a pillar for the world to acknowledge its founding and ongoing commitment to Jewish life and superior medical care. I am proud to have been born at the Beth!
The YM-YWHA was the Jewish social binder of the neighborhood, especially for teens. Although most of us attended the famed Weequahic High School, there were Jewish kids from neighboring towns who gathered at the Y, so we became a network of young Jews. We thought we owned the world.
There were abundant kosher butchers, bagel stores, delis, and Jewish purveyors of lox and herring. Bakeries included Bakers, Silvers, Mittelmans, and others. Everyone had a favorite. While certainly not everyone was kosher, most were, at least at home, and others were kosher-lite, eating Jewish style at places like the Weequahic Diner, the Tavern, Syds, or the Hot Dog Haven.
Our Weequahic Park brought us the beauties of nature.
Our neighborhood was bountiful, meeting the needs of all of us. Our visitors on our tour could see that. I miss it still!
Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of nine. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com