'There Would Be No Pearl Harbors for Us'

On the morning of December 7, 1941, my father, in his knicker pants, went to his friend Walter Stickney’s house on Macombs Road in the West Bronx to play marbles and jacks. They were both twelve years old. As they played in his apartment, a bulletin came over the radio: The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

Shortly after that infamous day, my father’s older brother, my Uncle Gus, was called up. My grandfather—the diminutive Galitzianer who spoke no English—went down with Gus to the army induction center at Grand Central Station. My father told me that Grandpa Abe, who had many times been to Grand Central, on that day could not find his way out of the terminal. He was lost in its catacombs mumbling in Yiddish until kindly people led him out of the station and into the 1940s daylight. His son had gone to war. The country was at war, and he lost access to who he was and where he was.

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