I am a native of lower Maspeth, a neighborhood in the Borough of Queens of the City of New York. It is an industrial neighborhood on Newtown Creek, abutting the East Williamsburg(h) and Bushwick neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Lower Maspeth is to be distinguished from "Up Maspeth" —a primarily residential area that is similar to the neighboring communities of Middle Village and Elmhurst. "Up Maspeth" is a fine place and it is the site of many of the landmarks of my youth, but it was not the same neighborhood as mine. Long before the Long Island Expressway divided Maspeth in the 1950s it had been divided by the Long Island Rail Road, and 54th Street was on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks.

What we lacked in aesthetics, however, we made up for in industry. The landscape of my neighborhood was one of warehouses, factories, trucks, and freight trains. My family had lived in this neighborhood since my grandfather was a boy in the 1910s. It was still largely farmland then; over the course of his life it became an industrial center. The banks of Newtown Creek (where he swam as a boy) became the site of metal-plating factories, fat-rendering plants, glassworks, oil tanks, and other monuments to the industrial age.

I come from a union family. My stepfather was in the Communications Workers of America. My grandfather was in the Bakery and Confectionery Workers International. My brother-in-law is a member of the United Federation of Teachers. I am in management myself, but leave it to the adoptee to break from family tradition.

So yes, we were a Roman Catholic, working class, Outer Borough family. We rooted for the New York Mets (and previous to them, the Brooklyn Dodgers). My maternal grandparents owned the house where I lived while I grew up. My grandfather was descended from Germans. His great-grandfather emigrated from the Franconia region of northern Bavaria in the late 1850s, served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and lived until 1921. My grandmother's parents were immigrants from Poland. Her mother (who lived until I was a teenager) was from Gdynia, on the Baltic coast, and like the true Pole she was, she settled in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I remember her as one of those old Polish ladies who scrubbed their stoops daily and made a good pierogi.

My mother and my legal father (whose surname I bear) separated when I was two years old. I had no contact with him from the time I was three years old to the time I was twenty-eight. I looked him up after twenty-five years not knowing what to expect. He and his wife proved to be pleasant enough people, but I never felt as if there was much common ground or much of a connection between us. He was a truck driver and a Teamster until he retired a few years ago. He declined to attend my wedding because he did not want to see my mother, and I have not spoken to him since then.

My mother was an interesting person. She got married at age eighteen and gave birth to twin girls at age nineteen. One of my sisters had heart trouble as a child and needed a great deal of care. She took me in as a foster child when I was six weeks old and subsequently adopted me. She sent my legal father packing when I was two and went to work as telephone operator. She divorced him when I was six years old (after a few years without contact with him other than his child support payments).

My mother married my stepfather shortly after divorcing her first husband. My stepfather died in February 2004. You can read more about him here.

My mother died in June 2007 after a long illness. Much of the good that I can see in myself came from her.

After moving away from my childhood home in 1984, I spent several years moving around Manhattan, The Bronx, Long Island, Atlanta, Santa Fe, and New Jersey. I settled in Jersey City in 1998. My wife and lived there for five years. In 2003 we moved to Bloomfield, New Jersey, where I still live.

 

I have been in bookselling and publishing for twenty years now. I have worked for independent booksellers, national bookstore chains, and publishers.