WHEN HE WAS FIVE YEARS OLD, JOSEPH BOSKIN AND HIS family moved from Williamsburg to Brighton Beach, in large part because his mother, a strong swimmer, wanted to live near the ocean. As he was growing up, Boskin, who later became a longtime professor of history at Boston University, was caught up in the political fervor of Brighton Beach, the heart and center of the radical movement in Brooklyn. Though he was barely a teenager, he was acutely aware of issues concerning social justice and civil rights, and the fact that the country—Brooklyn even—was segregated. At Abraham Lincoln High School, one of the largest high schools in the city, if not the country, there were but two black athletes in the entire school. Boskin, the sports editor of the school newspaper, highlighted their accomplishments by putting their pictures in the paper as often as he could. When Jackie Robinson came to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Boskin, and the thousands of other Jews who believed in social justice, were jubilant.
JOSEPH BOSKIN “My grandparents all came from Russia and settled in Williamsburg. My grandfather on my mother’s side left because they were going to conscript him into the army. He departed, came to the United States, accumulated some money, and went back and got my grandmother.
Ebbets Field under construction, 1912. Library of Congress
“My father was one of nine children, which was unusual for a Jewish family. There were six boys and three girls, and all were independent-minded. A number became political radicals. Not my father. He became a minor hood.
“His name was Abraham Jay, but he was known as Brummie. From Abraham, the Hebrew is Avrum, and from Avrum you get Brum, and pretty soon you have Brummie. That’s how he was known.
“He was a runner for the Jewish mafia, Murder Incorporated. He told me about it later in life. He used to carry guns. They elevated him to running numbers. Then during Prohibition he drove a hearse from New York to New Jersey, filled with booze. He made $75 a night, which was a lot of money.
“I met a number of them. There was Louie, Paul, and Bernie. I didn’t know last names. He was in the lower ranks. Any person who drives a hearse is not a major player.
“He had to get out of the rackets because he had two babies quickly, and my mother insisted he leave, otherwise she would end up a widow. My father was devoted to my mother. He called her ‘Queenie,’ and he meant it.
“My mother was born Dihan Guyer. Every five or six years, when she got bored, she would decide to change her first name. She became Dora, Dina, and Diana. All starting with D.
“My mother was a crackerjack typist and stenographer. When she met my father in high school, and in 1927 decided to marry him, there was a great deal of wailing that went on in her family. They thought she was marrying beneath herself.
“My father became a plumber, and when the Depression hit, he was thrown out of work. He hustled for jobs. He was a master hustler, did all kinds of things. Eventually he and two of his friends took out across the country on a building program, going wherever the WPA had jobs.
“I lived in Williamsburg until I was five, and then my parents moved to Coney Island, and from there to Brighton Beach, two working-class neighborhoods where the rent wasn’t very high. We lived a block and a half from the ocean. My mother loved to swim and wanted to be near the water, and she felt it would be healthy for the kids. She used to swim miles out into the ocean. She walked the boardwalk, did calisthenics, square dancing. What a blessing it was to live there.
“Brighton Beach was essentially Jewish, but it was essentially working-class, so you had a lot of tough guys around. Italians lived right across Sheepshead Bay and in Coney Island, so there were gangs. At the same time, because it was Jewish, the upward sense of mobility was huge, in terms of education. The students really vied against one another in school, even though they were at odds physically with each other. There was a sense of the value of education, which permeated the Jewish community.
“I can remember in the fifth grade at PS 225, there were thirty-five of us in the class. In their wisdom, the New York Board of Education numbered the classes according to ability and intelligence. So the number-one class, 5A1, was the smartest, and then the 2 class was the dumbest, and 3 came after 1, and 4 came after 2, and so on. And within the classes, they ranked everybody according to reading ability. Once you were locked into a class in the third grade, basically you stayed where you were.
“I was in the slow class, the dumb class. Truly the dumb class. For one, I was physically precocious, meaning I was very big for my age and very tough, very angry. I got into a lot of fights. I fought with kids in the neighborhood. There were a lot of tough kids who wanted to fight. You got in an argument over a call in a stoopball or punchball or stickball game, or someone would step on you when they shouldn’t have, playing football, and you’d fight. I enjoyed it enormously.
“And I think I was just a slow learner. So they put me in the slow class, and that’s where I stayed until high school, and then during my sophomore year I flunked half my classes, and so the dean called me in and said, ‘If you flunk another class, I’m going to send you to trade school.’
“I was so humiliated and embarrassed I decided I’d better do something about it.
“Abraham Lincoln High School had over 5,500 students in it, so it was enormous. Once again, the competition was severe. And a substantial number of my teachers were radicals, because Brighton Beach was the center of radicalism in Brooklyn. Coney Island–Brighton Beach was the center of the Communist Party. The AYD, the American Youth for Democracy, was located there. The Folklore Movement was there. They were a group of people who were into folk singing and folk songs, and their music was closely tied to protesting inequality. The Zionist Movement had a center there, and the Socialist movement, which included the Socialist Party and Socialist Youth. I was a socialist. All of these groups had their headquarters near the corner of Brighton Beach and Coney Island avenues.
“Neither my father nor my mother had any political consciousness or awareness, but I did. I got it from the zeitgeist of the community. If you walked on the boardwalk, there were always a huge number of people making political arguments. It was astonishing how many people spoke on the boardwalk or on Surf Avenue over the nature of socialism and communism. My friends and I would argue all the time, and often I’d get taken apart because I didn’t know much, didn’t know as much as a lot of people knew, and that goaded a lot of us into reading in order to better ourselves in the arguments. I had teachers who were members of the CP who also directed us into certain kinds of reading, and gradually we became very good debaters.
“Some of the arguments were theoretical. Some were about Stalin and in particular his purges. That began when I was nine or ten years old, and the arguments got pretty severe. When Stalin signed the nonaggression pact with Hitler, the consternation was enormous. The arguments were fierce as to what it all meant. And then my friends would ask me, ‘Why aren’t you coming to more of the meetings? Why aren’t you more rigorous and vigorous in your political stance?’ At the same time we were trying to learn to live with women. We were trying to find our place not only in the political community but also we were laden with teenage issues. We found if you went to the Village, you found more girls who were more amenable. We also found they were part of the Folklore Movement and the Socialist Movement.
Professor Joseph Boskin. Samuel Fuchs
“Every now and then I read the Daily Worker, but I didn’t find it interesting. I read the New York Post, the Daily Compass, P.M. I would say P.M. was my favorite newspaper. It was left. It had Mex Lerner and Markee Childs, wonderful columnists, and a host of others. It wasn’t as dogmatic as the Daily Worker. Also I. F. Stone published a little magazine called In Fact, which was very popular.
“In 1940 I was aware the Rapp-Coudert Committee was going after college and high school teachers, but it didn’t have much impact on my teachers at Abraham Lincoln. There were a couple of teachers who were members of the Communist Party. They didn’t reveal it, but I knew. But they continued to teach the way they always taught. It wasn’t until 1947–48 that the crackdown took place.
“As a boy I played all different sports. My sports were boxing and football. I was not very good in baseball. I was a good fielder, but not a very good hitter. I followed the Dodgers. I went to Dodger games, which I enjoyed immensely. I was well aware of the racism that existed in baseball, as I was of the racism that existed in the country. There was a civil rights movement in our high school that was very much a part of the whole folklore tradition, related to the folk songs of Woody Guthrie and others. And when World War II started, we became even more aware of how everything was segregated. We were aware of how badly the black troops were being treated during the war. It was common knowledge in my neighborhood. Absolutely.
“We grew up on Paul Robeson. I used to listen to his ‘Ballad for Americans’ in elementary school. The ‘Ballad for Americans’ is an entire operetta. It begins, ‘In ’76 the sky was red, thunder rumbling overhead. And old King George couldn’t sleep in his bed…’ This was the story of the American Revolution. Robeson sang it for about an hour and a half. ‘On that Sunday morn old Uncle Sam was born…’ It goes on like that. It’s beautiful. My teachers would play it over and over in the fifth and sixth grade, and then they’d discuss Paul Robeson, which was very unusual, but this, after all, was Brighton Beach. We used to play it among ourselves. So we were aware of Paul Robeson.
“When I was in Abraham Lincoln High School, we were completely aware there were no blacks in the school. In fact, when one or two black players did show up, they were heralded as heroes. They were given first-class treatment. I was the sports editor of the student newspaper, the Lincoln Log, and I used to play it up. I would show photos of the black athletes to highlight them. One was on the track team, and one was on the football team. They lived right on the edge of Coney Island in a poorer neighborhood.
“And so when Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to play for the Dodgers late in 1945, in my neighborhood all of the radicals were well aware of what it meant.
Robinson came up to Brooklyn in 1947, and I made a desperate attempt to contact him because I wanted to interview him for the paper. I placed a lot of calls to the Dodgers and made a nuisance of myself. Pretty soon they got to know who I was.
“I had played baseball in the Public School Athletic League, so I contacted them to help me. In Brighton Beach there were social athletic clubs, both boys and girls. We played in the PSAL league, and I was the captain of my team. So I called PSAL and asked them to help me in getting an interview with Jackie Robinson.
“Finally, I was granted an interview. It was all set. I was to meet him in the Dodger clubhouse before the game, an afternoon game. And it rained, and the game was rained out. When I got to Ebbets Field, no one was there. I never did get the chance to interview him. I had Regents exams to take—it was the end of the academic year—and then I had graduation. But I hustled my ass off to get that interview. And it rained. I didn’t know what to do after that. I was thrown by it.
“But I got to watch him play many times. Jackie was exciting. He was an unbelievable player, as you know. Every time he got on base, there was always a rising excitement, because everyone knew he was going to try to steal. I was at Ebbets Field once when he stole home. Everyone went berserk. Berserk! They had to stop the game for a while.
“Jackie succeeded, and for a variety of reasons. Because of who he was and the way it was handled. It was handled very judiciously, and they lucked out with guys like Pee Wee Reese, whose behavior was exemplary. Whereas Dixie Walker refused to have anything to do with him and asked to be traded. And we turned off to people like Dixie Walker. I was there when he was booed. I was doing the booing. So we were all aware of how the lines were drawn racially.
“Brooklyn was a very complex community, so it isn’t easy to talk about Robinson’s effect on Brooklyn. You could go into the Italian community, because there was an affinity between Jews and Italians. The Irish community was hostile to blacks and hostile to him. We avoided going into it. Once or twice when I went into it, I could actually sense the palpable violence and antagonism that existed there. We got out very quickly.
“Once in a while we played the Irish baseball teams. We were ahead once in a game, and it must have been about the fifth or sixth inning, when one of our guys came over to the bench and said, ‘Listen, they are talking about beating the shit out of us because we’re winning. We got to start losing. We gotta get the hell out of here.’
“We were playing on their turf, and the only way we could get home was on the subways. There were no cars. You took the subway. He said, ‘We’re not going to make it if we win this game.’ And we went out and lost, and we lost big, to make sure.
“So the impact of Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn was primarily among the Jews. He was embraced. There was an enormous amount of acceptance and pride, especially among the radicals, that someone from a minority had actually broken through. Not unlike following the only Jewish ballplayer in those days, on the Detroit Tigers, Hank Greenberg.
“This was a clear indication that social justice was a possibility.”
Jackie Robinson’s first game as a Dodger was on April 15, 1947, against the Boston Braves. It was opening day at Ebbets Field. Jackie played first base.
The announced attendance was 26,623. Of those, 14,000 were black. In his first game, Robinson had earned his $5,000 salary.
That day, eighteen-year-old Joel Oppenheimer was working in his dad’s leather goods store in midtown Manhattan. Joel was home from Cornell University for spring break.
JOEL OPPENHEIMER “There are two kinds of fathers in the world to work for. There’s the kind who makes his kid the president of the firm, and there’s the kind who is convinced that he must bend over backward not to show favoritism. Guess which type of father I had? Not that Dad was mean. He just didn’t want the other employees to think his son was getting away with anything.
“On this particular day, I was sweeping the floor. It was about eleven in the morning, and Dad was standing behind the cash register up front. He called me over, and I assumed he had another errand for me to do. Instead, he asked me, ‘If you could do anything in the world today, what would you like to do?’ I was so stunned I couldn’t answer. He said, ‘Isn’t there something you want to do?’ ‘You mean like going to the moon?’ I said. ‘No,’ he said, ‘something real.’ I couldn’t think of anything to say. He asked me, ‘Wouldn’t you like to be at Ebbets Field today?’ And I couldn’t believe my ears. Of course I wanted to go. I knew Jackie Robinson would be playing his first game, and I was astounded that, one, my father was even aware of Robinson, and two, aware that I would want to go.
“So off I went, and when I arrived in the grandstand it was standing room only. I remember standing behind third base in a thick crowd of people, and for the first time in my life I was in a crowd of blacks.
“For years we used to hear stories about this fantastic black pitcher who once was supposed to have struck out all the Yankees. We didn’t know his name—Satchel Paige—but we had heard about all the great black ballplayers and how they weren’t allowed to play, and so for me Jackie was all those guys rolled into one, and he was going to lead my Dodgers to glory.
“During the game Jackie made a good play in the field, at which point everyone was yelling, ‘Jackie, Jackie, Jackie,’ and I was yelling with them. And suddenly I realized that behind me someone was yelling, ‘Yonkel, Yonkel, Yonkel,’ which is Yiddish for Jackie. With great wonderment and pleasure, I realized that here was this little Jewish tailor—I always assumed he was a tailor—the only white face in a crowd of blacks aside from me, and he’s yelling, ‘Yonkel, Yonkel, Yonkel.’ It was a very moving moment.”