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5

It is amazing to hear Krasner talk about her childhood. Every house is in place. The name plates bear the old name. Trees lift their branches where they did. The flowers still bloom in the fields.

She lived in Brooklyn, but not the Brooklyn of stereotypes. Where I lived there were beautiful flowers, I loved it. A  back yard with irises. My fleurs de lis - my favorite flower. And wild daisies. Bridal veil. And lilac. It was gorgeous. And roses on the fences, and in all the back yards.

I would walk to school through the lots with buttercups everywhere. There was a farm with a pail and cows. Smells. Warm milk in the bucket. I hated the taste but for my mother and family it was a treat. So I would go through the fields to get there.

Or we would walk over a little wooden bridge.

There were old houses.....traditional saltboxes. Miss Reagen lived in one with a picket fence. Across the street, the Miller's, with a vegetable garden. Trees? Not so many. An oak in our front yard. Next door where Cissy and Mable lived, a chestnut. I loved that chestnut, especially when it was in bloom. Ruth Jacobsen lived in the last house. I can't seem to remember what tree her house had, but that chestnut! Every time I see another one I think of that chestnut. And the memories of walking to school through the vacant lots. Buttercups and purple clover. I used to stop and pick them.

That is what is was like. Rural. Not a city. That was my childhood. To say East New York, now, is to mean the biggest alum area. But my early recollections of it are different. Not until I went to Washington Irving Highschool in Manhattan, on the subway, did I have contact with a "cityl"

It was a Russian immigrant family from a forest d village near Odessa by the Black Sea. Lenore was the 5th of 6 children, the first one born in this country. The household languages, when she was growing up, were Russian and Yiddish, only gradually English. Life was hard. "Yes we were poor. Everyone had to work. Every penny had to be dealt [[strikethrough]]h[[/strikethrough]] with." The mother, herself an orphan, and father worked in the family fruit, vegetable and fish store. An elder sister cooked and was the caretaker of the young.