Lawrence Block - Step by Step

It must have been the following year, when I was in seventh grade, that I started taking long solo walks around the city.

I don’t remember the impetus behind them. You would think my inability to ride a bike must have had something to do with it, and perhaps it did, but not on a conscious level. Looking back, I think I can recall a desire to gain knowledge of the city I lived in, and to do so in the most basic way — not by reading books about it, not by acquiring information, but by walking its streets.

Then, too, I got a sense of accomplishment out of those walks. I would walk four or five or six miles at a clip, and then I would get on a bus or trolley and come home. I’d go to my room and unfold my Buffalo street map and look at all the ground I’d covered.

Once or twice my friend David Krantz joined me, and I may have had other companions. We followed a routine I’d established on my own — we stopped at drugstore soda fountains and asked for a glass of water, and we hit every gas station along the way to collect road maps. Service stations gave them away free at the time, if you can believe it, and it was challenging to see what ones you could get. Just about every station had New York and Pennsylvania and Ohio, but, strange as it may seem, not too many gas stations in Buffalo felt the need to stock road maps of Oregon. Go figure.

Where did I go? Well, not to Oregon, and not even to Pennsylvania. I’d pick some big street, big enough to be on a bus line, and stay on it. I remember I walked all the way out Fillmore to Broadway, and I walked the length of Main Street to Shelton Square. I’m not sure I knew anything more about Buffalo at the end of one of these excursions, but I’d had a couple of hours of good exercise and I certainly felt as though I’d accomplished something.

One day I must have told one of my new seventh-grade classmates about my activities, and the next thing I knew we had a hiking club, with six or eight members. Come Saturday, we met at the school and set out. I don’t remember what route we took, but I remember that there were enough of us so that soda jerks and gas pump jockeys regarded us less as an eccentric diversion than as a pack of vermin. We wound up walking to Phil Dorfman’s drugstore at East Ferry and Wohlers, where instead of free glasses of water everybody got a soda or a milkshake.

That part was okay, but the walk itself really wasn’t the same. And the general consensus seemed to be that this was sort of fun, but it would be even better if we did it on our bikes.

And that, as you may imagine, was the end of that.

We hiked once a week at Scout Haven. That’s the Boy Scout camp where I spent six weeks every summer for three years. I loved it there, although even then I was aware of the essential strangeness of the experience. Because the camp I went to was a camp within a camp. It was Hopi Village, and it was the Jewish part of Scout Haven.

The whole camp was divided into little subcamps with Indian names, and different troops would come to the different villages, generally for two weeks at a stretch. But Hopi Village was different. Boys from all of the Jewish scout troops attended, and you could come for two or four or six weeks, depending on what your parents could afford. (It cost my parents $20 a week. I knew kids who went to fancy camps in Canada, and their parents paid around $800 for the season. We got a hell of a bargain, but, to keep things in perspective, the gentile kids in the main camp only paid $12 a week.)

We had our own activities and ran our own program. We swam in Crystal Lake, the same as everybody else, and the main camp’s lifeguards made sure we didn’t drown, but aside from that we were as isolated as if we’d been in a medieval ghetto. And it goes without saying that we had our own meals in our own separate mess hall.

That, of course, was the justification for this merry little experiment in apartheid. We had to have our own mess hall because of the dietary restrictions that have made being a Jew such a fucking pleasure over the centuries. No pork, no shellfish — but that’s the least of it. No milk and meat at the same meal, and, to play the game properly, you need two sets of dishes. There are, I understand, families who have two kitchens, not because you absolutely have to, but because it makes things simpler.

Hey, if you want to make things simpler ...

We were Reform Jews. It’s been said (well, by me, actually) that Reform Judaism is sort of like Unitarianism but with better food. The movement arose in Germany in the nineteenth century with the aim of bringing the religion in tune with the times — and, I shouldn’t wonder, of facilitating the assimilation of Jews into mainstream German society.

There were no rules for Reform Judaism. Each synagogue worked things out for itself, and so did each family. There was, however, a general disposition to do away with the dietary laws en bloc, and they certainly didn’t apply under our roof.

The story was told of my great-grandmother (she was my maternal grandfather’s mother) and the kosher chicken. While she didn’t keep a kosher home (although I suspect she may have early on) she did continue to patronize a kosher butcher, taking it for granted that the kosher meat was simply better. After my grandfather married, and when he’d saved up a few dollars, he bought a two-family house on Hertel near Shoshone. He moved his wife and kids into the lower flat and gave the upper to his two unmarried sisters, my aunts Sal and Nettie, and their mother.

One day my great-grandmother came home with a chicken from the kosher butcher. And my grandmother, her daughter-in-law, was in the kitchen preparing to cook a chicken herself. My great-grandmother went in to observe. She looked at the chicken, plump and perfectly plucked, and she took her own kosher bird from its wrapping and considered it. It was a scrawny bird, its color was nothing great, and there were still bits of pinfeathers in it.

“That chicken of yours,” she said to my grandmother. “It’s not kosher?”

“No,” said my grandmother. “It’s not.”

“Hmmm,” said my great-grandmother, looking back and forth, from one bird to the other. And she never bought another kosher chicken for the rest of her life.

I never knew my great-grandmother, who died when I was nine months old, so I can’t say what sort of cook she was. But my mother and grandmother were superb, and neither felt constrained by the dietary laws.

We ate a fair amount of ham at home, and no end of bacon. We ate, of course, the many choicer parts of the cow that some curious Talmudic interpretation has proscribed. We rarely had shellfish at home, because my father didn’t care for it, but my mother and sister and I ate shrimp and crab and clams at restaurants. There was, I realized many years later, only one forbidden food we never had, and that was anything at all with the name “pork” attached to it.

Now ham is pork, and bacon is pork, and no one in our family was dim enough to think otherwise. But you could buy it and cook it and eat it without ever encountering that particular four-letter word.

And so no one in the family ever had a pork chop or pork sausage or crown roast of pork or indeed any form of schweinefleisch that called itself pork. On my own, away from the family table, I continued the practice without realizing it. It never occurred to me to order a pork chop. There was something inexplicably distasteful about it. Far more civilized, surely, to have a bacon cheeseburger, or a ham steak.

It was some years before it dawned on me that we’d been the unwitting observers of an unwritten dietary law, and a linguistic one at that. I thought of asking my mother why we never had pork on the table, but I kept forgetting, and then she was gone, and that became one more question I’d never be able to ask.