Sitting on the Stoop: A Girl Grows in Brooklyn, 1944-1957 by Janice Pearlstein Alper; self-published; ISBN 9781734-859317; 297 pages; $15
Sitting on the Stoop by Janice Alper
SAN DIEGO – La Jolla resident Janice Pearlstein Alper has a wonderful memory. She is an octogenarian, yet she is able to recall vividly the sights, smells, and her first impressions while a child growing up a Brooklynite in a three-generation home ruled by her Orthodox Jewish grandfather.
Her contemporaries will smile with nostalgia while perusing many of the 63 vignettes in the easy-to-read memoir. Younger generations of readers will learn what it was like to live in a home that followed the rhythms of the Jewish calendar and observed such bubbe-meises as the necessity for a little girl to hold the Havdalah candles high “so you’ll get a tall bridegroom.”
Observances of Sukkot are remembered fondly with her Zayde telling her to hold the etrog with the stem facing up because “if the stem falls off, it’s not kosher anymore.” The lulav, said Zayde, “we’ll wrap in newspaper and put in the refrigerator.”
Some of her secular memories from childhood are endearing—being scared the first time she ever talked on a telephone; getting her first library card; her first pair of roller skates; having all the neighbors come over to watch Milton Berle on their first television in the neighborhood; and using a Trip-Tik to go on a family car trip to Niagara Falls.
She also describes the first time she went to a Broadway Show (The King and I) and the first time she watched the Brooklyn Dodgers play at Ebbets Field.
Alper remembers how she was teased in Hebrew School because her Yiddish name was “Yenta,” which people equated to an old gossiper, and how pleased she was at a different Hebrew school when the instructor informed her that in Israel her Hebrew name is Yona.
Her Uncle Abe, the younger brother of her father, played the trombone in the NBC Symphony Orchestra, so a family tradition was to sit quietly around the radio listening to the broadcast of the concerts conducted by Arturo Toscanini, whether or not Uncle Abe had an important solo. Her Bubbie told Abe that he should invite the maestro over to sample her blintzes, but somehow the conductor never realized that pleasure.
The family listened to the radio breathlessly as the United Nations voted in 1947 on whether to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab States, and thrilled over Israel’s Declaration of Independence pronounced the following year by David Ben-Gurion.
And so, the memories flowed through Alper’s fingertips to her keyboard. Working in her parents’ small grocery store … the excitement of opening up a supermarket … packaging meat and pricing it by weight … playing clarinet in the school band … going away to the Catskills.
One story reminded her of another, and with these individual brush strokes, Alper has painted a loving portrait of a bygone era.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via
