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In memory, upon which Jules Feiffer draws so powerfully in his new play, New York after the war was a great, big wonderful town. Broadway boomed. You heard the music of return and embrace from a thousand radios blaring from open windows. The ballplayers were heading home, at last, to the sweet green grass of Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium. If you were a kid, you thought you could do anything: play left field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, go to law school, be a sportswriter or a singer or an artist. It didnt matter if your father was a longshoreman, a shoemaker, or a factory worker. Everything now seemed possible.
That exuberant optimism was unleashed, of course, by the triumph in World War II over the worst villains in history. But that wasnt the only reason. In my Brooklyn neighborhood (and ten thousand like it), men and women were celebrating the end of a sixteen year period that began in 1929, the year Jules Feiffer was born. That is, they exulted in the end of the war and the Great Depression.
You heard the giddy talk in tenements and run-down private homes, in saloons and grocery stores. It was over. We were free now from an endless cycle of austerity, sacrifice, and self-denial, a time when poverty placed an iron ceiling on dreams. Fear seemed to evaporate, the fear once talked about by Franklin Roosevelt as the only thing we truly had to fear. We no longer had to fear Nazi bombardment, or the loss of jobs, or the humiliation of relief. In our Brooklyn flat, Roosevelts picture was on the kitchen wall, sharing space with the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He was not alive at the end, but now, my mother told us, the things he stood for would all come true. We could see the Manhattan skyline from our back window, and when I was eleven I imagined it blossoming with flowers.
Time itself seemed extended in some languid, slow-moving golden haze. We rode the subways to the packed beaches of Coney Island. We played stickball across the summer days, from early morning until dusk, and somehow found time to read The Count of Monte Cristo and analyze the drawing styles of Milton Caniff and Roy Crane and Harold Gray. In memory, the time was like the line in the song, like a summer with a thousand Julys.
It turned out, of course, that we were living in a naïve parenthesis. I was delivering the Brooklyn Eagle after school, and began to move beyond the comics and sports pages to the news on page one. A new kind of fear was rushing into our lives. Joseph Stalin was building a ruthless iron curtain around the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. The Cold War had begun, and the newspapers and radio were soon filled with tales of Communist spies and American traitors. The Soviet Union detonated its own atom bomb in 1949, (surely, we were told, with help from those infamous American spies), and a few months later Maos Communists were victorious in China.
We had to absorb a whole new set of proper nouns: Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Harry Dexter White, Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty, Elizabeth Bentley, on and on. We heard about subversion, loyalty oaths, dupes, pinkos, fellow travelers. The New Deal, shouted the Republicans, was not the beacon of hope we thought it was in a bad time. It was wormy with treason.
Then in June 1950, on my fifteenth birthday, the North Korean army crossed the 38th parallel. In my neighborhood there was an almost audible hopeless sigh. You heard people say: Not again. You heard them say: Will our Eddie be called up again? We quickly heard that Buddy Kelly, a young soldier from the neighborhood, had been killed in the first weeks of fighting in Korea, and the parenthesis closed.
I dont remember any surge of flag-waving patriotism in my Brooklyn neighborhood. It was one of those neighborhoods where the young men fought the wars, instead of profiting from them. There were going-away parties for young men called up by the draft, with tearful girlfriends and too much drinking, and mothers with forlorn faces. There were debates about Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur. There were flag-draped funerals. But the idealism represented by Roosevelt seemed to be part of a distant century.
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