Implicit Knowledge (nursery edition)

We earlier shared an anecdote of implicit or “chrysalis-enclosed” knowledge, from an introspective five-year-old of our acquaintance:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/09/implicit-vs-active-knowledge.html

Compare this childhood reminiscence of a boy growing up on the Upper East Side:

I remember my grandmother’s house quite well.  It was a very cold formal place.  There was an enormous marble entrace hall …

We behaved extremely well.  We knew the rules inside out  without knowing the rules.

Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This:  An Oral History of Manhattan  from the 1890s to World War II (1989), p. 120

“Friending” -- Then and Now

In a book  valuably organized by neighborhood, we hear an Upper West Side resident, Olga Marx (b. 1894):

On New Year’s Day, all the women stayed at home  to receive callers. … When a man would call, it was a sign of gentility to leave an engraved visiting-card in an urn at the door.  Then my mother would use them to compare with friends.  Of course, it was very important to have more cards than anybody else.

-- Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This:  An Oral History of Manhattan  from the 1890s to World War II (1989), p. 203

[Note]  Most of the testimony in Kisseloff’s engaging collection  comes from ordinary folks, but often with a solid street-eloquence.   The woman looking-back in the above quotation  was Olga Marx, one of the more observant of Kisseloff’s informants (or “witnesses”  as he calls them).   Also one of the better educated -- Barnard, then a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr.   There followed a modest literary life.  But what caught my eye  was this detail:  she published “several mysteries for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.”    Salutations from across the decades, Dr. Marx!  That magazine is also where I got my start, chronicling the saga of the Murphy Brothers, Private Investigators.   You can check out the action  here:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

Testimony from a Shabbos goy

A Depression-era reminiscence of a working-class Gentile growing up in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan:

There was also some Jewish fellows who I made a few dollars from.  I’d be standin’ around on one of the holidays  and the Jewish man would say, “Come up and light my fire.  I’ll give you a nickel.”  So, great, I’d go up the stairs, but I never could understand the whole concept of the Jewish holidays  where somebody would stand right next to you and you would light it for them, but who was gonna question them? I nickel here and a dime there -- that was big money.

-- Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This:  An Oral History of Manhattan  from the 1890s to World War II (1989), p. 575

[For the full essay to which this is an update, see

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/08/phrase-for-sabbath-shabbos-goy-updated.html ]