The Christmas Kid

The world didn’t remain the same. The Korean War meant that we had not seen the end of war. Young men who were thirteen when World War II ended were now being drafted and trained to kill for their country. If most Brooklyn veterans of the first of those wars used the GI Bill for housing benefits, the Korean veterans began using it for higher education. I was one of them, but I was certainly not alone. Everywhere in our country the tradition of following your father into his union started to end. But there were other huge changes underway. The arrival of television. And, much worse, the spread of heroin. In a neighborhood where none of us owned anything worth robbing, locks appeared on all the doors.

Years later, when I was a young newspaperman at the New York Post, my editor, Paul Sann, once stopped at my desk in the city room and handed me a collection of the stories of Sholem Aleichem. “Read this,” he said. “It’s about your tribe, too.” And so it was. Tevye the Dairyman was Murphy the Milkman. There were few saints, many sinners, some small heroes, a few cold villains. I understood then that in our world, each neighborhood was a kind of shtetl, an urban hamlet, complete with its own lore and legends and heartbreak.

But change never stopped. I wrote most of these tales in a city without personal computers, cell phones, tweets, digital cameras, or iPads. A world where “friend” was not yet a verb. The sources of the stories were varied: chance encounters on the Brooklyn streets, phone calls at the newspaper, letters from old classmates. My press card took me many places and to many stories. A court officer at a trial would stop me in the hall during a recess and tell me a tale. At a murder scene a detective would take me aside and tell me what happened to so-and-so from the Tigers. I’d visit grieving friends sitting shivah, or gathering at a wake, and once I was back out on the sidewalk, the tales came in a stream.

They are flowing still. I hope somebody is writing them down.

— Pete Hamill

The Christmas Kid

I

IN THAT LOST CITY of memory, the wind is always blowing hard from the harbor and the snow is packed tightly on the hills of Prospect Park. They are skating on the Big Lake and the hallways of the tenements are wet with melted snow and the downtown stores are glad with blinking lights and the churches smell of pine and awe. And when I wander that lost Christmas city, I always think of Lev Augstein.

He was to become our Christmas kid. But he came among us one day in summer, a small, thin boy, nine years old, speaking a language we had never heard. His eyes were wide and brown and frightened, and he wore short pants that first day, and he stood on the corner near the Greek’s coffee shop, staring at us as we finished a game of stickball. When the game was over, my brother, Tommy, asked him to play with us, but the boy’s face trembled and he backed up, his eyes confused. Ralphie Boy handed him the Spaldeen and the boy shook his head in refusal and said something in that language and then ran away on toothpick legs to 11th Street.

“He don’t speak English,” Ralphie Boy said, in an amazed way. “He don’t even speak Italian!”

Within days, we learned that the new kid was from Poland, which we located with precision in our geography books. Poland was wedged between Germany and Russia, and the language he spoke was called Yiddish. We also learned that the boy was living with his uncle, a cool, white-haired man named Barney Augstein.

“If he’s related to Barney,” my father said at the kitchen table, “then he’s the salt of the earth.”

Barney Augstein was one of the best men in that neighborhood, and one of the most important. He was the bookmaker. Each day, dressed like a dude, smiling and smoking a cigar, Barney would move from bar to bar, handling the action. Until Lev arrived, Barney lived alone in an apartment near the firehouse, and they said in the neighborhood that long ago, he had been married to a Broadway dancer. She had left him to go to Hollywood, and this gave Barney Augstein an aura of melancholy glamour. Ralphie Boy, Eddie Waits, Cheech, and the others all agreed that any nephew of Barney Augstein was okay with us.

We learned that the new kid’s name was Lev. Ralphie Boy showed Lev how to hold a Spaldeen, throw it, catch it, hit it, and the rest of us taught him English. We told him the names of the important things: bat, ball, base; car, street, trolley; house, roof, yard, factory; store. Soda. Candy. Cops. Lev stood there while we pointed at things and he named them, proud when he got the word right, but trembling when he got it wrong. “I hate when he does that,” Ralphie Boy said one morning. “It’s like a dog that got beat too much.” And we noticed two things about him. He never smiled. And he had a number tattooed on his wrist.