History and the Typewriter

This photograph was taken outside our apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, around the corner from Barbra Streisand’s high school, and next door to a gas station (a fact that inspired the book reports I wrote about ecology and pollution that year). Our flat was in a two family house owned by Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz–Holocaust survivors who gave me my first typewriter, a manual Olivetti “their son, the doctor,” had used in college. To get to our place, you had to climb a steep flight of stairs; when I went to Amsterdam for the first time, I understood the houses, the steps: they were in the architecture of my feet and memory. I loved the Schwartzes, and the mysteriousness of their flat–the Sabbath candles, not turning the electricity on, sitting quietly in the heat. Sometimes, when we didn’t have a TV that worked, the elderly couple invited us downstairs to watch television with them. “The Brady Bunch.” In the TV glow that reflected a laugh track family I did not know, I tried hard not to stare at Mrs. Schwartz’s tattoos–the blue numbers on her arm. Who had done such a thing to her, and in what world? I had yet to see piles of the dead in ditches in strange countries with strange names. Treblinka. The Schwartzes had survived. That’s what our mother said. Survived. That was more than a word. I loved my brother and sometimes, when our mother was at work, we’d cook. I read recipes in books. We tried everything, mostly bread. Sometimes it didn’t rise, but we made it anyway. Because I loved and admired the Schwartzes so much I wanted to be Jewish. Once, not understanding, I blew a sputtering sabbath candle out–I thought I was protecting them from potential fire and harm. Mrs. Schwartz looked away, while her husband lit the candle again. I have yet to forgive myself. When the Schwartzes moved to Florida, our building was taken over by terrible people who shoved us out–the inevitable rejection of the poor–but I held on to that typewriter.