FRESH YARN PRESENTS:

First They Came for the Dogs, But I Was Not a Dog
By Albert Stern

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Those fellows were part of the faceless mass that comprises the majority of one's New York neighbors. Some neighbors, though, get one step closer. You may be aware of them, but you don't know who exactly they are -- for example, the couple whose bloodcurdling arguments resonate in the airshaft, the fellow who regularly messes up the garbage room, or the enraged individuals screaming at a yelping dog in the middle of the night. Though this type of neighbor mostly stays anonymous, sometimes, if the opportunity presents itself, they might intrude on your life more directly. For me it happened one year after my tax refund was late. When I inquired about it to the IRS, I was informed by mail that my refund had been paid; attached was a copy of the canceled check, which was endorsed by Sidney Stern. I went straight to the phone book and looked up Sidney Stern. He lived two entrances away in the same block of flats.

So I called him up and said: "Sidney -- it's Albert Stern. The guy down the block whose IRS check you cashed."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Sidney, who did.

"Sidney," I said -- I don't know why, but it was fun saying 'Sidney' -- "you've got my money and I want it."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he repeated. "If you call me again, I'm going to call the police." Click.

So I tore out the page from the phone book, highlighted Sidney Stern's name, wrote a brief explanation to the tax auditor of what I thought happened, and sent the material off to the IRS. In a few months, I got a check. Sidney, I assume, got some grief. For years after, I would sometimes walk down West 107th Street wondering whether a man I passed might be sneaky Sidney Stern.

Then there are those neighbors about whom you glean one or two things that are not obvious and maybe products of your imagination. Like the bearded guy whom I had never seen with another person. One day, I entered the garbage room and found it stacked from floor to ceiling with pornographic magazines -- literally thousands of them. In a few days, I noticed that the bearded guy was in the company of a pretty middle-aged Asian woman who, it became apparent, was living in the apartment with him. In time, they became one of the jolliest couples I have ever encountered. My fantasy was that she was his mail order bride, and I still cling to it only so I can say that I have in my repertoire a happy story about a lonely wanker made joyful by a mail order bride from the Far East.

And finally, there are the neighbors who will not be ignored. Foremost among them was Mrs. Weissman, the jewel of the block, who, along with her husband, represented the last of the Eastern European immigrants who once predominated. Her people's era on West 107th long since past, Mrs. Weissman had no fondness for the coarse new crowd, and in truth, was a kind of pitiable figure -- a yenta who had lost her nosiness. Seeing her walk without interest down the block (despite being surrounded by all sorts of goings on that were none of her business) was sad, sort of akin to seeing Gene Kelly in the film Xanadu or Willie Mays in a Mets uniform.

Mrs. Weissman, desperately wanting me to be a nice Jewish boy, took me under her wing. "Take orange to eat!" she'd enjoin me if we happened to pass as she came back from the market; "Come upstairs for tea and cookie!" if she encountered me walking alone. She spoke five languages (English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and Polish), often in the same sentence. "And then and bedziemy twoja rodzina na zawsze in the ." I remember her saying, "Yeah and makheteyneste so I over there. Furshtaisht? You understand? Because they are vildeh chayehs." Wild animals. Those were the words she kept coming back to as she'd point at the lightly-parented urchins, the young men and women with all the time in the world to hang out, and the council of elders who sipped beer from 8-ounce cans outdoors from April through October. "All a bunch of vildeh chayehs -- vildeh, vildeh, vildeh chayehs."

A person like Mrs. Weissman would not have been surprised by the neighbors' furious reaction to a cast-off dog's barking in the middle of the night -- "Look with your own eyes at what goes on with them," I could imagine her saying, "then tell me what you'd expect." Mrs. Weissman survived Nazi persecution and fled Eastern Europe in the mid-1950s, and might have shared an attitude toward neighbors that I learned from Mr. Schwartz, who lived next door to me when I was growing up in Miami Beach. He made it out of Auschwitz, and his attitude about neighbors could be summed up as: "Neighbors are the people who are dividing up your possessions in their heads as the police are taking you away." Actually, he never said anything of the sort -- his wife, who hadn't been in a concentration camp but acted like she had, was the one who actually voiced those sentiments. But I'd always felt that she had them on good authority.

The message drilled into me as a child was that even if you don't know your neighbors, you can be pretty well certain that they're up to something. Watch yourself. Mrs. Schwartz also sometimes mentioned that her husband would never own a dog because of the way he had seen them tear apart prisoners in the camps. At the command of their human handlers, those dogs performed good or evil acts indiscriminately -- and as long as they were fed, they were just as happy. So don't trust dogs, either.

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