Journal of Jewish Identities

Marc Straus had a long career as a medical oncologist and researcher, during which time he also became an award-winning poet, a collector of contemporary art, and an art dealer and critic. None of this is knowable from his new memoir, however, whose narrative voice belongs to the ten-totwelve-year-old street-fighting, yeshiva-going boy Straus was between June 14, 1953 and June 26, 1955. Straus has something akin to a photographic memory; despite the passing of time he remains able to visualize scenes, remembering what people were wearing and what words were exchanged. Recounted in the first person and present tense, his memoir relates with astonishing vividness events that took place nearly seventy years before he committed them to pen and paper. Straus was highly precocious, a keen observer of character, an avid reader of literature, and deeply interested in politics, professional sports, and Jewish-Christian relations. And he was an obsessive street fighter. Three hundred pages devoted to so narrow a slice of his life give the book an unusual depth. The glue that seals it all together are the reconstituted eye and voice of the protagonist. To read this memoir is to come of age with him, a Jewish picaro in 1950's New York. It doesn't take long to learn that he has a secret burden to bear.

Dwight Eisenhower, Joseph McCarthy, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Milton Berle, Alfred Einstein, Sugar Ray Robinson, and the countless books suggested by Mrs. Mahoney the librarian, from The Call of the Wild to The Count of Monte Cristo, Gulliver's Travels, The Last of the Mohicans, The Old Man and the Sea and The Lord of the Flies: together, these figures and events, these books, give texture to the times in which the boy lives. Each also becomes a lens through which he sees and understands the circumstances of his own individual life. When he is enraged against a neighbor woman who may have poisoned his dog, he locates his models in Eisenhower's strategy for the Normandy Invasion and the Count of Monte Cristo's twenty-year plan for revenge. When a local man hired to drive neighborhood children to school stops and extracts a pistol from the glove box, he observes: "I know now that this will be repeated, that Charlie will stop many more times to shoot a squirrel. You know these things in advance just as you know Buck will eventually go off on his own in The Call of the Wild. You know that Tonto will always be loyal to the Lone Ranger even if that is fiction. … I will go to the yeshiva today in the Annex and tonight Charlie will clean and cook his squirrel" (45).

Not everything is remembered, of course. Straus knows how, by literary means, to carry a recalled event in a narrative that recreates his perspective as a boy. Referring to himself and his younger brother just before they are overtaken by older boys bent on revenge for a beating received earlier, the young Straus relates: "We were walking as slow as worms" (11). While maintaining [End Page 102] the verisimilitude of the ten-year-old's narrative voice, the declaration is made with a writer's awareness of its dramatic function and sets the stage for the ambush around the corner. Readers witness the scene through the eyes of the child-narrator, much as he himself, moving into street fighter mode, sees "everything in slow motion just like Ted Williams sees a fast ball coming to the plate. He can even see the rotation of the ball" (12).

Straus the fighter. From one tale to another—transferring to the yeshiva in Queens, Talmudic study, the encounter with the African-American boys while crossing their neighborhood, his father's store, armed robbery, Camp Massad, the poisoned dog, road rage, a nearly fatal car accident—fighting is an ever-present part of Straus's life. And it's an intensely serious matter: "For me it is simple. There is a line, and when it is crossed there is no turning back, and I am someone else. Not like Superman. I don't duck into a phone booth and make a quick change. I am ten, average size. What I mean is I tunnel my mind down into a private place where fear and pain are gone. I feel lighter and free. Invincible" (12). In the quiet, mild-mannered, hardworking father, who nearly starved as a child in Poland/Ukraine and learned to defend himself when local children were told to set the dogs on him, the young Straus has an important role model. The more significant key to his behavior, however, comes with his burden. As though in a trance, Straus's mother repeatedly and savagely beat him during these years: "The strap comes down like a sickle ripping at my left shoulder. Then my left arm. My mind is already floating away. I am in the waves on Rockaway Beach and the lifeguard has just whistled. Get out of the water, the undertow is too dangerous. But I watch for the next big wave to come in. I will duck under it. It will be fabulous" (48). Even though readers know rationally that the connection between this child abuse and the fighting must exist, for much of the memoir the narrator, self-confident and normally self-aware, does not make the association himself. By the end, however, his quest for self-knowledge takes him inexorably to her. "I am not like Mom. I've had a lot of fights because I've had to, and I always know exactly what I am doing" (67). Here, however, we wonder whether the self-understanding of this precocious boy has reached its limit. And whether the extraordinary has succumbed, sadly, to the ordinary: "I never told Dad and sometimes wish I had. But I know if he knew he would leave her, and then where would Miriam, Stephen and I go?" (67). [End Page 103]