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From Brooklyn To Baltimore

Author to discuss memoir of growing up in Brooklyn neighborhood

“Being Jewish was what defined most of us who grew up in Brownsville,” writes Sylvia Siegel Schildt, who was born and raised in that neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., but has lived in Randallstown for the past 30 years. “Religious or not, American-born or immigrant, our Jewishness was a given — something in the air itself.”

Ms. Schildt will talk about her new book, “Brownsville: The Jewish Years” (BookSurge), this Sunday, April 13, at a 2 p.m. lecture in the auditorium of Baltimore Hebrew University, at 5800 Park Heights Ave.

The talk, presented by BHU, the Jewish Museum of Maryland and Chizuk Amuno Congregation, is part of the “On the Same Page Baltimore” series, a project coordinated by the Center for Jewish Education. Ms. Schildt considers the gathering a “coming-out party” for her book.

A free-lance writer and copy editor who serves as president of the 14-year-old Yiddish of Greater Baltimore club, Ms. Schildt said the book “touches her life in many ways.” She said she wrote it — with only one typing hand, due to a May 2006 accident — to share the experience of daily life in Brownsville, a densely populated, impoverished “shtetl” of immigrants in the 1930s, ’40s and early ’50s, where the mamaloshen, Yiddish, was heard constantly in the home, street and stores.

Brownsville produced such luminaries as baseball great Sandy Koufax, comedian Danny Kaye, composer Aaron Copland, writer Alfred Kazin and Gen. David “Mickey” Marcus, a hero of World War II and Israel’s War of Independence.

“I talk about the shopping, going to the movies, how there was a shul on every street,” Ms. Schildt said. “You could sleep on the fire escape, the roof, people didn’t lock their doors. It was one of the poorest neighborhoods, but somehow people managed to get their kids to college and out of Brownsville.”

The residents there were a diverse group of Jews, Ms. Schildt said, but they co-existed with each other. The difference between Jewish life in Brownsville and in Pikesville, which some consider a modern Jewish shtetl, is that in the Brooklyn neighborhood “your Jewishness hung out,” according to Ms. Schildt.

“I get the impression here that the Jewish neighborhood is an enclave in a much larger non-Jewish world. It’s more Americanized,” she said.

In her book — which is subtitled “Celebrating Hope, Hard Work, Tolerance and the Triumph of the Human Spirit” — Ms. Schildt recounted that glorious day that the Brooklyn Dodgers finally won the World Series (Oct. 5, 1955) and the time “the Kishke King” handed out free foot-long hot dogs to anyone who wanted them.

“The lines of people who came to get these hot dogs were unbelievable. They went around the block two or three times!” she said.

Ms. Schildt also told of how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt drove down Brownsville’s main thoroughfare — Pitkin Avenue — in a convertible. “I tried to paint the whole picture,” said Ms. Schildt, “so someone who has never been there gets an idea of what life was like. My book is a quilt.”n

Admission to the lecture is free, and a book signing and dessert follow. For information, call 410-578-6905. To learn more about the “On the Same Page Baltimore” series, visit http://www.onthesamepagebaltimore.org.

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