Childhood Memories - The Bronx - 1946-1951

We return to a Bronx childhood where heat, fear, and secrecy shape memory before language can explain what it means. 

In this chapter, we follow Ken Klonsky’s early life on Wallace Avenue in the late 1940s and early 50s, where the street feels like an entire universe and history hangs in the air like weather.  We talk about what it means to grow up around Holocaust survivors and the ongoing aftershocks of the mass atrocity. Ken recounts a disturbing violation he never tells his parents about, then shows how easily a child can step back into “normal” life while the memory lodges inside. We trace the impact of myth and media on children - the way stories teach a child what strength and beauty is supposed to look like.  The chapter widens into family history and family storytelling: grandparents shaped by migration and loss, a home charged with perfectionism and rage, and the truths that surface decades later and change everything. We hear a painful account about the family business that exposes racism hiding behind a polished veneer of respectability, then return to the defining family legend of a childhood fire and rescue, with one question still unanswered, "where were you"? 

Subscribe to Out of the Fire, share this chapter with someone who loves memoir storytelling, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show. What do you think it means to turn damage toward the light?

Episode Blog Post 

The music for this episode, Rain is performed by our current artist in residence,#TracyJones from his album #LuckyTime

You can find out more about Tracy by visiting the Blog Post for his episode

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Heat, Sleeplessness, And A Black Face

Ken Klonsky 0:00

The first thing I remember is heat, not the comforting kind blanket heat, summer heat at the beach, but the kind that makes your skin feel too small for your body. I was in bed. I couldn't sleep. The air was thick and my pajamas stuck to me. Then my bedroom door opened. It wasn't my mother checking on me. A shape stood there, black, featureless, a face in black with no human features, a body shrouded in black. I didn't know what death was. I was too young to know that word. But I felt something enter the room. A chill. The chill of death entering sweaty pajamas. The next minutes are unremembered.

Blake Melnick 0:59

This

The Bronx Where History Lingers

Blake Melnick 1:00

is Out of the Fire, a serialized memoir adaptation from For What It's Worth. I'm Blake Melnick. In this series, you'll hear two voices: Ken Klonsky, the author, speaking from inside the lived experience, and me stepping in only when it helps you find your footing. Some experiences enter our lives before we have words for them, before memory becomes story, before story becomes meaning. The episode takes us to the Bronx, the late 1940s, and into the early 50s, to a block that felt to a small child like the whole world. And to a question that will echo far beyond childhood. When something breaks you early, what do you do with what's left or what it's worth?

Ken Klonsky 1:52

The first five years of my life were spent on the stage of Wallace Avenue, five blocks from the New York Botanical Garden. It was a mixed European immigrant neighborhood. Several families on the block were Holocaust survivors. Even as a child, I heard names repeated like incantations in my family's lore. Hakem, Forgioni, Fuchs, Rappaport, Rempel. My father once told a story about me and Victor Hakum. Victor was a boy from a death camp. Victor barely spoke English, and yet, my father said, Victor and I used to fight like mangy cats, scratching, biting, pulling hair. The strange thing was it never started from an argument. There was no insult, no debate, no misunderstanding to resolve, just a running feud, as if violence itself were the language. The adults tried to keep us separated. But kids moved freely in those days, even little kids, even kids as young as four. And I did what children do. I

The Man On The Sidewalk

Ken Klonsky 3:12

walked. There was a park I went to. It wasn't really a park, more like an empty lot, a rope with a tire attached to a tree. One day, on my way there, I noticed a grizzled man on a lawn chair near the sidewalk. He stood up when he saw me. He was leering. He held out a red enema. He mumbled something I couldn't understand, and then he pulled down my shorts. He squirted water into my anus. I didn't know if what was being done to me was improper. My mother performed this ugly ritual from time to time. So part of me recognized the action without understanding the intent. I arrived at the park where older kids were swinging on the tire, as if nothing had happened. And I did what children do. I joined life again. After that I found another route. Then maybe three weeks later, I got up the nerve to return to that sidewalk. The old man was still there, but this time he was farther back, close to the row house. We locked eyes. He stood up again, brandishing the enema. I ran. I never told my parents what the man had done to me, but the memory sits inside, palpable. And later, much later, another question entered the memory. What happened to this man in Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, or wherever he was taken and from which he was supposedly liberated? The mass atrocity hung over the neighborhood like the angel of death. Innocent victims, survivors, and their offspring were violated by the atrocity. And the offspring, the children, victimized others, passing it on to the next generation, and then to the next. This never-ending cycle leads to one of the great existential questions of our times. Do you turn the damage into evil and revenge? Or do you turn it toward the light and the good?

Blake Melnick 5:34

Some memories don't arrive with meaning attached, especially in early childhood. Especially when the world is unsafe in ways a child can't name. A child learns the shape of danger before the language catches up. And the body remembers what the mind can't yet interpret. In Ken's chapter, the Bronx isn't just a place, it's an atmosphere. One where violence, secrecy, and confusion move through ordinary days like weather.

Samson, Delilah, And Body Shame

Ken Klonsky 6:09

For days I heard talk in our house about a movie called Samson and Delilah. Who were they? What was a movie? Adults spoke about events that piqued my curiosity, but were never fully explained. Then I remember walking with my mother, my brother, and my sister, and arriving at the neighborhood cinema. Billboards out front showed fleshy, muscular drawings. Hetty Lamar, ravishing, Victor Mature, wooden. Ah, that must be Samson and Delilah. I throb with excitement. We joined a short line to buy tickets and entered a vast, mostly vacant auditorium. My mother forced me to sit beside her. The lights went down. A black and white newsreel came up on the screen. Armed soldiers marching in some strange place. Military music blared. Where is that? I asked. Then I let loose a barrage of questions, answered by shushes from my brother and sister. And when the feature began, something happened in my mind. I couldn't separate what I saw on screen from the world of the Bronx, mainly because Hetty Lamar, at least to me, looked like my mother. The violence of the film, especially the ending, echoed the violence of the neighborhood. I was also aroused, likely by the erotic costumes. I put a hand on my pants, my mother pulled it away and slapped me loudly. I had momentarily forgotten that my body did not belong to me. After the film, I queried my brother David mercilessly. Why would they dress like that? That's what they look like in history, like our picture Bible, stupid. Was Samson Jewish? Of course. Why did Delilah cut his hair off? Did you see him kill that lion? He had super strength. Delilah was a Philistine. The Philistines wanted to weaken Samson's so the Jews would lose. Is that where being strong comes from? Can I grow my hair like that? Shut up. Why did Samson pull the room down? Because he couldn't stand hearing you talk anymore. Did the hero's name awaken something inside me? My father was Sam. I was his younger son. Was the biblical Delilah also an image of my mother? I grew up valuing two parental attributes more than any others. My father's strength and toughness, my mother's beauty, and as I came to see myself, I had neither.

Blake Melnick 9:26

Movies, Bible stories, older siblings, the tone in a parent's voice. Myth becomes a kind of early scaffolding, strength, betrayal, rescue, punishment. But a myth is also a warning if you're paying attention. It tells you what your world believes and what it fears.

Ken Klonsky 9:49

Back in the late 1940s, New York City summers were a steamy version of hell for adults and

Stoop Ball And Childhood Stakes

Ken Klonsky 9:57

heaven for children. Open fire hydrants, playing screaming kids, people fanning themselves, remnants of New Amsterdam, like the word stoop, still survived in the big city. Most stoops in our neighborhood were nothing more than three or four narrow cement stairs leading up to the front door of a cramped house. Those stoops served as meeting places and the focal point for stoop ball. I was too young to play, but I watched. The game was an imaginary facsimile of Major League Baseball. And the wonder of childhood imagination is that things don't have to be authentic to be authentic. The batter threw a rubber ball at the cement stairs. It ricocheted up into the air or shot off the bottom stair. If someone caught it, out. If it got past the fielders, single. If it bounced once in the street, single, twice, double, and so on. And if you hit the step just so, the ball might land on a driveway or strike the house across the street. A home run into the seats. The older boys I worship would trot back and forth thinking they were mantle or DiMaggio. The rules were ironclad, and still there were disputes and bloody noses. Because in New York City the stakes were always high. Everyone had to know the greatest, biggest, most terrific, most fabulous person, parent, ferris wheel, roller coaster, car, everything. Because it was New York, the biggest, greatest city in the richest, greatest state, the grandest country on planet Earth. That little game of stoop ball mattered as if Wallace Avenue were Yankee Stadium and not just another working class street sitting in its massive shadow. Sometime you could imagine hearing the muffled cheers rising from the stone and steel structure, echoing past the L trains through the cement canyons of the Bronx. My grandfather Morris lived on Sedgwick Avenue, a sturdy old brick apartment

Grandparents, Illness, And Family Tension

Ken Klonsky 12:21

building with a recessed courtyard at the front. The entrance door was framed with stained glass. The elevator door, diamond-shaped window, slid silently open. We emerged into a well-kept brown carpeted hallway. The apartment was always dark. Its few windows stared out at the cavernous courtyard that never received direct sunlight. As a child, I came to love every aspect of apartment living. The elevator rides, the hint of other people behind numbered doors, the smells of pot roast in the hallways. All of it more enticing than a private house, especially a private house filled with ridicule, rage, and tension. Morris came from a shtetl near Minsk, Belarus. He arrived at Ellis Island in the late nineteenth century. He was the gentlest, kindest person I ever knew. But in my younger days I was ignorant of his journey and of the traits that helped him survive. He escaped from the Russian army where, because he was Jewish, he was forced to do the lowliest jobs. Any of his extended family who did not go to New York before the war were liquidated. Who knows how many uncles and cousins I would have had? That lacuna existed in every Jewish family I knew. My mother, Miriam, carried her own early wound. Her mother died of breast cancer, and her father died of TB when Miriam was three years old. She was raised by her grandfather and extended family. Losing her parents that young was a seeping wound. It led to her perfectionism, her fear that the world might fall apart if all the pieces were not in their rightful places, and the rage that automatically ensues when that order is upset. Our living room was a no-go zone, belying its title. Once, when she found my brother David there with his friends sprawled on the couch, she screamed bloody murder. Grandpa's living room, where my family gathered every other Sunday, my uncle Lou's family alternating, had several armchairs and a small couch. I would fidget with the white doilies on the arms. Grandpa Morris always formally dressed, served Hershey's kisses, Tootsie rolls, bottles of Pepsi, corned beef sandwiches and pickles that my father brought along. My grandmother Sarah drifted in and out like a wraith, spending half the visit in the bedroom. We children sat there bored, the Pepsi insufficient to make up for the language barrier, the Yiddish spoken by Sam and Maurice. My grandfather's English was more than good enough to be understood, so I concluded my father was keeping secrets from us. Behind the Yiddish, odors of camphor and body rot permeated. Whisperings and groans came from the bedroom. All of us heard. Grandma's flesh, as I learned later, was a battleground. I got to know the word leukemia, leukemia, leukocytes running amok in the bloodstream, disease fighters becoming the disease, blood cancer. What relief then to take the elevator down to the third floor where my Aunt Helen and cousin Martha lived. Helen's husband was an Italian man, a Catholic, who left soon after Martha was born. For my father and Uncle Lou, Helen's marriage was the family scandal. Her brothers belittled her endlessly, but she deflected with laughter. Whenever anyone complained, she'd say cheerfully, You always need a little salt with the sugar. Martha was a teenage rebel. She blasted Elvis Records for us in her bedroom. Helen was too cowed by her daughter to come in and complain. I was in awe of Martha, and of all New York City kids, really. They did outrageous stuff. Anything that came into their mischievous heads, those same kids would come to lead rebellions later. Feminist rebellions, stonewall, anti-Vietnam protests. But back then as a child, I just felt the electricity of it. A different life was possible. On the trip home, whether from the stadium or a steakhouse, crammed into the back seat between my brother and sister, punches were thrown, hair pulled, insults flew, peace was restored when the car radio came on broadcasting the Jack Benny show. I remember it as one of those few times when my entire family laughed together. Benny, a Jewish man, portrayed a rich, parsimonious white Anglo with a black servant. Rochester. The interplay provided the humor. Looking back, it wasn't a master servant relationship. No master would have allowed his servant to puncture his pomposity that way. That radio show still mystifies me, given Jim Crow. But back then you just laughed. Sailo fabrics was central to our lives. My uncle Lou, short, chunky,

The Lie Families Learn To Tell

Ken Klonsky 18:12

hot tempered, would holler red-faced on the telephone at recalcitrant buyers and delinquent pays. My father, Sam, across the way, sometimes treated customers with sarcasm. You're a nothing, Dave, I heard him say once, deriding a pathetic businessman running his late father's business into the ground. Two other people worked at Salo. One was Al Thompson, a black shipping clerk who held the job for over fifteen years. Al was one of the few adults in my life who treated me as an equal. He let me play with the packing tape machine, pulling down a lever that dragged tape through a small trough of water and came out sticky on the other side. He gave my brother, sister, and me samples of dyed fabrics, all the colors of the rainbow. My sister sewed them into ridiculous costumes. We wore them like three harlequins. Al left the business suddenly when I was in my early twenties. Knowing he was no longer part of my father's business was as painful for me as it must have been for him. My father explained that Al was a devoted Jehovah's Witness, and that the elders demanded he stop working for Jews or risked being disfellowshipped. Some fifty-five years later, my brother gave me a shockingly different account. Al had asked my father to take him on as a salesman. After all those years, he knew the business as well as anyone. My father refused. He didn't hesitate. He simply refused. And Lou, an overt bigot, was not even asked. Even twenty years after my father's death, it saddens me. My father didn't want a black person to represent his firm. And he threw Al's religion under the bus as an excuse. I told my father's disingenuous story dozens of times over the years, always believing he was thoroughly honest.

Blake Melnick 20:22

Families run on stories. Stories told for comfort, stories told for status, stories told to keep shame at bay. And sometimes, only sometimes, truth arrives decades later and changes the meaning of everything that came before. Not because the past changes, but because we finally see what we were trained not to see.

Ken Klonsky 20:50

The defining story of my very early childhood, the legend my father told again and again,

The Fire Story And The Missing Answers

Ken Klonsky 20:57

happened when he was driving my brother and sister to Sedgwick Avenue for grandpa's birthday. It was a hot, muggy summer evening, still light outside. Flashes of details are branded into my brain, the brain of a traumatized three-year-old. The frame of the story, like most of my family's stories, was provided by my father, the sometimes unreliable raconteur. But this story was confirmed by my brother and sister. Hidden inside the story was my mother, really the main character. Miriam stayed home to babysit me. I couldn't sleep in the heat. The door to my bedroom opened, but it was not my mother checking on me. I saw a face in black with no human features, and a body shrouded in black. The chill of death entered my sweaty pajamas. The next minutes are unremembered. My father told his tale so many times that my mother fed up would murmur, here we go again. But I loved hearing it, especially. Especially since I was at the center. I turned the car around and headed back home for no reason at all, my father would say. You just forgot the reason, my mother would answer. For no reason, Miriam, I'll never get over it. Jesus Christ, my mother would blurt out, or some other sacrilegious oath. When I got back to Wallace Avenue, there were fire trucks blocking our part of the street. He'd continue, looking at my brother and sister. I got out of the car with you kids and saw a ladder propped up against the house, and Kenny being carried down by a fireman. Then he'd say to me, I took you from the fireman's arms and carried you to the Bucksbound. It took me years to connect the face in black with a gas mask. And then, as always, my father would turn to my mother. Where were you, Miriam? I was looking for you. How many times are you going to tell this story, Sam? I still don't know where you were. My mother never participated in the telling, aside from confirming that thick black smoke was coming up from the basement where the boiler was being repaired. Her memory was clearer than my father's. Uncannily clear. But she never explained why she left me inside a burning house. And I never asked. Would I have responded any differently had my little boy been trapped on the second floor of our house? I hope so. I can only speculate about her, and speculation leads to bad places. Why was I always forced to go to bed before I was sleepy? Did she hate the sight of me? An even uglier question would arise throughout my youth. Did you set the fire? Unlikely. But I came to see that the answer didn't really matter. Leaving me to burn was only marginally different. My dread. Was it so palpable it flew the boundaries of the house? For me as a child, the story was never about the fire that I didn't see. It was about the horror of being picked up from the bed and carried out the window. Did I blackout temporarily from fear? Did the fireman put a blanket over my head so I wouldn't choke on smoke or see the distance from the second floor to the ground? Maybe that's why I don't remember going out the window, but do remember being carried through the street and taken by my father to the Bucksbaums. The Bucksbaums. Who were they? When I visited the Wallace Avenue house years later with an old college friend, I was embarrassed by its tawdry look. What's more, the house had no front stoop, just a brick wall, a garage, and a driveway. Had my memory failed me? Had they gotten rid of the stoop? Or was the game in another place in time? If it were possible to communicate through space without the aid of technology, would it not be possible to communicate through time as well? My father died in 2005. Can he still be reached? And what about you, my mother? Would you be willing to answer the questions that still remain?

Blake Melnick 25:39

There are chapters of childhood that don't behave like stories. They behave like weather, like pressure, like a

Turning Damage Toward Light

Blake Melnick 25:46

taste in the mouth you can't name. In this episode, the Bronx is both place and inheritance, a neighborhood shaped by survival and its consequences, by what people carried home from history, and what children absorbed without consent. Ken ends this chapter with questions that can't be resolved, only lived with. And maybe that's the point. When you can't change what happened, you can still decide what you do with what it's made inside you. Do you turn the damage into evil or do you turn it toward the light? Next time on Out of the Fire, we keep going for what it's worth.