Book Excerpt: 'My Fathers' Houses'

June 16, 2005 — -- Veteran journalist Steven Roberts, husband of Cokie Roberts, tells the story of his life growing up in Bayonne, N.J., in the 1940s and 1950s, where life was lived much like it was in the Eastern European villages of his immigrant family.

You can read an excerpt from "My Fathers' Houses" below.

I still dream about Bayonne. Usually I'm back living there, often in the house where I grew up, a two-family frame structure on a crowded block that ends at a low bluff overlooking Newark Bay. All the houses on The Block were the same, about 25 of them, separated by alleys so narrow that you always knew what your neighbors were arguing about or having for dinner. The Block was the center of my world for 13 years, from my birth in 1943 until we moved all of five blocks away in 1956, and it could have been a European village, on the top of a mountain, surrounded by medieval stone walls. All the families knew each other, strangers were sparse, and you could walk to the shops around the corner for most of your daily needs.

That's no accident, I suppose, since most of the families, including mine, were only one generation removed from their Old World origins, and they re-created the patterns of life they had known in Poland and Russia, Ireland and Italy. There were a handful of Catholics on The Block, but most of the families were like us, Jewish people with roots in Eastern Europe -- Lipkin and Lauton, Moritz and Hoch, Reznick and Levy. Some were manual workers, like my grandfather Harry Schanbam, a carpenter who had built the house we lived in with his own hands. Some in the next generation had gotten an education and become professionals. Yale Greenspoon's father taught at the high school, Artie Schackman's dad was a photographer. Many owned small businesses. The Penners ran a clothing store on Broadway where we bought our Cub Scout uniforms. The parents and grandparents of the girl I took to the junior prom ran a hardware store. New York was only a short bus ride away, but "the city," as we called it, seldom intruded into our lives. Broadway and 42nd Street in Bayonne (there really is such an intersection) was light years away from the more famous corner just across the Hudson River. My father commuted daily to "the city," where he ran a small children's book publishing company, but few if any of my friends had parents who did that. Most people lived and worked, met and married, grew old and died, all within the confines of this urban village. Bayonne was not exactly Anatevka, and we didn't have any fiddlers on our roofs, although we did have Mr. Friedberg, who delivered seltzer to the door in blue glass bottles with silver spritzers. But when I saw the movie "Avalon," Barry Levinson's ode to the Jewish community of Baltimore, I felt a pang of recognition. In that movie the immigrant generation clings to the old neighborhood and the old ways, and when their kids move to the suburbs, the old folks find the adjustment disorienting. Bayonne, like Baltimore, was actually closer to the Old Country than the suburbs were to the inner city.