Disciplines

Jewish Studies

Abstract

Summarizer: Sophia Maier

Louis Levine was born in 1940 on the Grand Concourse to immigrant parents. His mother came to the United States from Poland at three years old, in 1906, and his father came from Vilna at 28 years old, in 1931. Both worked in manufacturing, making and selling women’s garments and gloves, respectively, before his father opened a small glove making factory of his own. Levine grew up on 168th Street and Walton Avenue. He attended Yeshiva Salanter from the time he was five years old and then Bronx High School of Science, which was also predominantly Jewish at the time. Levine describes the difference between yeshiva and Bronx Science as being exposed to people of a different socioeconomic class than his family and directing his social life away from the Bronx and towards Manhattan.

Levine explains his West Bronx neighborhood as 70% Jewish and 30% Irish and Italian, with a sense of a divide among the children. He says his own friends were all Jewish. One block away was “Synagogue Row” on 169th Street, which contained a diversity of synagogues including Temple Adath Israel on the corner with the Grand Concourse, and in the other direction on 167th Street was the shopping street with Jewish delis and bakeries. Levine remembers playing in the street, building his Erector Set, reading, seeing movies, and going up to a bungalow colony in the Catskills for the whole summer to avoid polio. Joining the Boy Scouts, he enjoyed attending their summer camp much more.

Levine was bar mitzvah at a Lithuanian (Litvak) shul and later joined United Synagogue Youth (USY) through his friends at Park Avenue Synagogue to meet girls and socialize. Through USY, after graduating from high school, Levine spent a year in Israel on a kibbutz with Habonim. He went on to become an archeologist, working in Iran for 14 years, before going on to museum work. He did not live in the Bronx again after his 1957 graduation, and his parents eventually left the Bronx after their apartment was broken into while they were in it. Levine credits Bronx Science with opening up the rest of the world to him.

Keywords: Walton Avenue, Grand Concourse, 167th Street, 168th Street, 169th Street, Poland, immigration, manufacturing, Yiddish, yeshiva, Salanter, Bronx High School of Science, education, Catskills, summer camp, Boy Scouts, United Synagogue Youth, Israel, socialism, crime, family

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