A b e c e d a r i a n

I am an urban dweller. The urban has been in my blood through a line of pedlars who came to New York at the beginning of this century. The urban is a tributary that runs through my life. The Bronx: subways, schoolyards, delis, NY Yankees, barbershops that smell of talcum and aftershave, candy stores, streets with names like Bruckner Boulevard, The Grand Concourse, Tremont Avenue, Mott Street. Visceral landmarks that stake my personal history. Place, and the pursuit of community inform my life as a teacher.

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My scholarship has roots, one of the deepest of which runs from my paternal great-grandfather. David Weiner, a fruit peddlar. I was too young to take note, but I grew up associating the words "gentleness" and "kindness" with Grandpa Weiner. He wore his intellect, his dignity and his honor like a fine suit, an image captured in the home movies that my father shot at Passover Sedars.

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He was also what my Aunt Mildred called a "learned" man; a scholar. It is from him I learned what I define and practice as scholarship.

For my parents' family, and I suspect for many others like them (third generation Polish Jews transplanted to New York City at the turn of the century) "learned" had multiple meanings, none of which held elitism or arrogance of authority. It meant to be knowledgeable and in constant dialogue with the Talmud. It pertained to how you conducted yourself outside of synagogue in the ordinary arena of family and social interactions. It was also an ethically driven notion of how you put knowledge to use. According to my Aunt Mildred, Grandpa Weiner loved reading as much as he loved his children. On most Saturdays after shul you could find him at one of the Public Libraries, in the process of reading the entire Yiddish collection. "There wasn't a question you couldn't ask him that he didn't try to explain or more importantly come back to when he had an answer," Aunt Mildred remembers. His curiosity for reading the world was derived from his pleasures in explaining the world, especially to his children and his grandchildren. His life, selling fruit on the streets of the Bronx, with horse and cart, was what Gramsci called "a scholarship that lies close to practice": using intellect as a form of social action in bringing decency to the world, and as a means for living honorably in it.