My father had four or five siblings and only one of them went... went to high school as far as I know. My mother had two sisters and a brother… three sisters and a brother and they all went to high school. So my... my mother's family's a little better off, not well off at all, but a little better off. My father was essentially raised in what was a slum at that time, a Jewish slum in Newark. I grew up in a... in a different neighborhood from my father in Newark. I grew up in what was called the Weequahic section and that is the section which was really settled in the 1920s or so by the post immigrant generation and it was a Jewish neighborhood. The city of Newark had about 400,000 people at that time when I was born, the city was divided up really into ethnic villages. There... there was our predominantly overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood, there was an Irish neighborhood, there was an Italian neighborhood, there was a Slavic neighborhood.
The Slav's, the Italians, the Irish, tended to sometimes live together, they were Catholic together, they had that in common. Then there was a black neighborhood – then called the Negro neighborhood – and the Negros, and the Jews were the smallest minorities in the city. So I came of age in this Jewish neighborhood and in my recollection, I think in fact, it was a wonderful childhood. I didn't feel… I was too young to feel the depression. I didn't know how little money we had and my memories really begin with the war. My memories really begin very vividly with December 7th 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Two days later, I think, Hitler declared war on the US as well. So there we were in the Second World War and from that moment forward my childhood becomes quite vivid to me.
