Operation Schayes: A Bronx Confession

In the fall of 2003, I biked from Manhattan, where I had just moved, to the Bronx, where I was just hired as a teacher. This was my first job in New York City. I was assigned a classroom, given a set of keys, and left alone. I stood in the empty classroom, a bit anxious about teaching, when suddenly I grew dreadfully nervous, sweat dripped from my hands. I could hear my own heart beat. . . lub-dub . . . lub-dub. . . lub-dub. It took me a few seconds to realize what was happening. I knew the sound well. Someone was dribbling a basketball. I opened the door and saw the gym was across the hall. 

Regardless of the time of day or night you can find someone shooting on those unforgivable rims at the park, you can see someone clutching a ball in their arms as they walk home at dusk, or you can hear someone kvetching about the Knicks on the 4 Train. I didn’t know it then, but I know it now: Basketball is the heartbeat of the Bronx.

Recently, I was riding down the Grand Concourse, the vast French inspired boulevard, but Paris wasn’t on my mind. My thoughts traveled to other European cities like Vilnius, Radom, Minsk, Kishinev, and Odessa as I zipped by those lost synagogues still majestically hugging the Concourse. When Jews first arrived in the Bronx, this was the desired place to live and raise a family. Here was the pinnacle of Jewish life. 

Coincidently, I stopped in front of the Bronx Museum (a former synagogue) on 165th Street. I looked up and spied a Bronx Walk of Fame street sign honoring Dolph Schayes. It seemed like I couldn’t have found this monument celebrating the greatest Jewish basketball player of all-time at a more felicitous moment. I paused and thought about the connection between Jews and basketball in the Bronx. My mind raced through immigration and assimilation stories. Then flipped to zone offenses and pick-n-roll coverages. I’m interested in Jewish history. I’m interested in Jewish memory and what role it plays in our lives. As traffic moved along, I froze. Has the Jewish Bronx basketball saga become completely erased? Well, not completely. The Dolph Schayes signpost commands us to do one thing: Zakhor (Remember). 

(Photo by Marc Skelton)

In 1983, Schayes wrote an article in The New York Times:

“Growing up in the Bronx in the 1940s at 183rd Street and Davidson Avenue, I was but a short walk from the University Heights gym of N.Y.U. Playing ball for N.Y.U. was the dream of every high school player–especially me. Lower middle class kids like me rarely got a shot at a school like N.Y.U. I dreamed of a scholarship, an education, and a chance to play big-time ball at the Garden.” 

While N.Y.U. is no longer in the Bronx, the hoop dreams remain. Schayes was the child of immigrant parents, who were born in Romania; dad drove a taxi and mom was a balaboosta. It’s a familiar tale that is deeply American, yet today, kids and residents are unaware. Teachers, politicians, and media are motivated by the need not to see the Bronx as formerly Jewish. However, if you listen acutely, you can hear the Jewishness of the borough’s pulse. 

Maybe because the Bronx is always in transition, history can’t always fuse with memory. They become obscured, forgotten, and obsolete, especially as young people look forward, not towards the past. A collective amnesia. In the Bronx, you can trace the game back to when the Irish, Italian, and Jewish kids taught the Black and Puerto Rican kids to dribble, pass and shoot. As the Bronx morphed, the Black and Puerto Ricans showed the Dominican kids how to drive to the rim. Now the Dominicans teach the Muslim kids from Mali and Yemen how to make step-back three-pointers.  As people arrive from all around the world, basketball is here like an attentive host to greet them and help them get settled.

I recall an elderly Jewish woman who taught briefly at my school who told students she grew up around the corner on Freeman Street. Nobody believed her. She also told them her parents kept a carp in the bathtub right before Passover. Both seemed unimaginable, as far-fetched as telling students that once upon a time an ambidextrous Jewish kid from the DeWitt Clinton High School was the N.B.A.’s all-time leading scorer. Jewish fiction. 

The majority of young Bronxites have never met a Jew. They do not think of Jews as part of their shared history, despite the abundance of gargantuan synagogues and small high schools. My school, Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, was founded by a left leaning Jew, Peter Steinberg. Steinberg modeled the school after Central Park East which was founded by another Jewish educator, Debbie Meier. A lot of ink has been spilled about the Jewish exodus from the Bronx, but the Jewish values are still present in the borough and need to be celebrated. 

By the time I started teaching, the Jews of the south and east Bronx were long gone. They had relocated. Ian Frazier writes in his new book Paradise Bronx that “the poor parts of the Bronx are often where people start then they have very little. They work, and earn, and in time, with luck, they move upward, and new arrivals take their place.” 

Perhaps. . . there is still room to acknowledge and celebrate the Bronx. A place where a lot of us can start a career, where others move on, and some of us stay. It can’t be overstated that the Bronx transformed my life. Coaching and teaching have to do with a lot more than what most people imagine goes on with coaches and teachers in the Bronx. They are small parts of another puzzle project that I have no idea what the end product looks like. Coaching doesn’t come in a box with instructions, but Judaism does. 

Because basketball is so central to almost everything I do, my love affair with the Bronx continues to deepen with each passing season. After all these years, I’m still biking to the same school at 1021 Jennings Street. Pedaling to and from work, I have internalized the stubborn potholes. The steep incline at Boston Road has entered me and I think I could ride blindfolded through the Bronx at this point. I own the commute. On the way to work, I run into former students. I see Ty bringing his kids to school. I wave to Bernard driving the Bx35 bus. On the way home, Roland, the mailman, shouts my name as I pass by. 

According to the American Jewish Committee almost 600,000 Jews lived in the Bronx in 1943. Now, there are around 29,000 Jews mostly living in Riverdale. When I ask about Irwin Dambrot and Ed Roman, two tough Jewish kids from Taft High School, I get blank stares. The Bronx is like those former Pale of Settlement cities where nobody acknowledges that Jews once lived there because their stories vanished with them. 

It was in this absence of Jews in the Bronx that allowed my imagination to grow. The Schayes’ street sign, the fading menorah on the side of a church, the vanished toy store where Colin Powell shlepped and learned Yiddish all help the Bronx retain its Jewish sensibility despite the feeling that I’m the only one who thinks about these things. 

So you can imagine what happened in 2018, when Will Feldman, a high scoring guard from Riverdale Kingsbridge Academy High School showed up at the corner of West Farms and Jennings for a game against us. Like a Jewish phoenix, Feldman’s ferocity was obvious during warmups; I remember him not missing a shot. He was one of those flamethrowers who could shoot from anywhere. He also unpacked a historical suitcase with each three-pointer he launched that night. He was like an extinct language suddenly brought back and he was fluent in Jewish Bronx basketball. 

(Photo courtesy of https://lehmanathletics.com/sports/mens-basketball/roster/will-feldman/4360)

I asked Feldman about basketball in the Bronx. “Grittiness, it’s slapping the floor when playing defense, diving for loose balls,” he said. “You have to really want it. It’s being the ultimate competitor.” 

There was Feldman driving down the lane on the same corner where Jewish merchants once sold fruit and pickles from pushcarts a century ago. Feldman is a descendent of the Jewish Bronx basketball brotherhood. He is part of that storied dynastic line that includes Joel “Shikey” Gotthoffer, Bernard Opper, Marvin Kay, Ralph Kaplowitz, Leo “Ace” Goldstein, Lenny Rosenbluth and Hank Greenberg (yes, the Hebrew Hammer also played basketball) and countless others. 

While Judaism wasn’t really on Feldman’s mind as he played. “The reason I fell in love with the game was because of the teamwork aspect,” he told me. “Dwyane Wade was my favorite player growing up.”

Admittedly, Feldman had a bit of Wade’s gamesmanship. After high school he went on to star at Lehman College under legendary coach Steve Schulman. Feldman, like Schayes, willed the dreams of playing college basketball and getting an education into existence. Feldman graduated and is now an assistant coach for the Lightning. 

I remember that night when the game collapsed self, place, and history. I saw beyond what was visible and saw the infinite. I no longer see the Bronx in different eras. The gyms, the coaches, and the players are all superimposed on top of each other forming a complicated kaleidoscope inside my heart.