East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's by Sidney Weissman

important New York State Regents exams.
    Since almost everybody had a nickname, I was called Lion because my first name was Leo and there was a Leo the Lion that roared out when they showed the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movies. That was my nickname.
    The students of our school were almost all Jewish, the few non-Jewish boys were those whose families lived on the fringes of the Lower East Side.
    For some time, almost from the beginning when I had first met him, I had called him Joey, Yussel, or Yussie, its Jewish-Hebrew equivalent. He didn’t care, he seemed at home with us and when he visited my house when we studied together my mother didn’t even know he was Catholic-Italian.
    “Yusseleh,” my mother would say to him on those occasions, “it’s good to see you. You feeling all right?” Yussie, smiling, would nod. “And your mama and papa, they’re all right?” Again Yussie’s nod. “Your father’s working?”
    “Sometimes,” Yussie would reply. “You know how it is.”
    My mother knew that Yussie’s father was a bricklayer. It wasn’t a usual Jewish trade, she thought, but after all, work was work, you did what you had to. Anything to make a living, anything to feed your family, anything to exist.
    “You make good marks in school?” she would ask him.
    And he, embarrassed, would squirm somewhat in his seat and say nothing and I would reply, “He’s an A student, mama.”
    That was always the catechism when he visited us. After that my mother would serve us a glass of milk and some cookies or a piece of cake, and all of us, Yussie, myself, Goldie, Danny, Max, Izzy, whoever was present, would move all the chairs close to the porcelain top of the bathtub set against the wall in the kitchen and we would begin our studying, asking each other questions. Someone, any one of us, would correct the answers if they were wrong.
    My mother, as she worked on the other side of the kitchen, would occasionally stop to stare at us, a huge smile on her face. “Good boys!” she would whisper to herself. “Such good boys!”
    For some reason, Yussie preferred to come to my house to study although sometimes we did go to other houses. When I asked him about it he said, “Lion, I feel comfortable in your house, there’s something there that’s okay, you know?”
    Even his speech, his cadences, had become like ours. To my mother, to all of us, he was a Jewish boy whose name was Yussie. Only in school when he was called up by the teacher, “Joseph DeSimone,” his last name pronounced by the teacher,”Dess-Si-mohnee,” were we reminded that he was Italian. But even that, over time, had ceased to penetrate our minds. Yussie was Yussie, he belonged with us, he was part of our group.
    Once my mother had asked him, “Fahrshtayst Yeeddish, Do you understand Yiddish?” a phrase she had used with all of my other friends.
    And Yussie had replied, “Ah bissel, A little.”
    My mother had smiled broadly at that. Ah! Here was a Jewish boy who was learning Yiddish, less and less of the young ones were, here was a good Jewish boy, a good boy for Leo to be friends with.
    Yussie ate the Jewish food, the kugels, the pickled herring, the chopped liver, he ate it like all of us, there was nothing that was served to him that he didn’t eat. My mother liked that tremendously, a good eater!
    And when he went home, to his own neighborhood, his speech patterns changed, the Italian rhythms and words returned to him, even in his English. Yussie was a language chameleon.
    He was my partner that morning on the handball court. We lost. As we left the court, I said to him, without malice, “You’re a lousy handball player. You don’t have that swing.”
    “I know, I know,” he replied. “But I sure as hell can run, can’t I?” He had won a number of track events during our school’s Field Days in the nearby park where athletic competitions were held. “You can’t have everything,” he said with a smile.
    “Try,” I said. “Practice