Streetwise

Chapter 1
Advantages

When I go into a room full of people, I have to decide whether I'm going to be the member of the establishment or the kid from Brooklyn.

I am a product of East New York, Brooklyn, where I grew up in the projects, and I still see the world through those eyes. To this day, I have to concentrate to say rather and not rath-uh. I can't compare myself with people I've worked with who overcame really severe disadvantage, like broken homes, civil wars, extreme poverty, or forced emigration. But growing up in public housing, in a family that was just getting by, and attending public schools that were failing, left its mark on me. I struggle with ambivalence. I spend half my time wanting to give stuff to my kids, the other half tormenting them for having stuff I gave them that I didn't have.

My earliest memories are from the South Bronx, where my family lived in a tenement building on Leggett Avenue. I used to love watching the coal that heated the building get delivered. It made a roar as it poured from the truck down a chute into the cellar. Another memory: the organ-grinder who sometimes played on the sidewalk outside our apartment. My mother wrapped a coin in paper and threw it out the window for his monkey to pick up.

When I was three, we moved from the Bronx to East New York, in search of a better life-which, for a time, we found. The year was 1957 and the city hadn't yet finished paving the streets of the new public housing development we were moving into, the Linden Houses, run by the New York City Housing Authority. This was subsidized housing for the working class, with buildings arrayed in an irregular pattern bordered by bits of landscaped greenery. They were not yet "the projects." At the time, it must have seemed like Shangri-la to my parents. Everything was clean and new. Children had an actual playground, with swings and monkey bars to climb. The neighborhood was reasonably safe. Those nineteen largely identical redbrick high-rises were not yet blighted in the ways they would be by the time I was in high school.

My mother, my father, my sister, my grandmother, and I occupied a small apartment with two bedrooms and a bathroom, maybe eight hundred square feet, on the fourth floor of a fourteen-story tower at 243 Wortman Avenue. My sister, Jacky, and I shared a bedroom, while my grandmother, Lilly, slept on a foldout couch in the living room. It was tight but neat. You weren't allowed to sit on a bed-beds were for sleeping, not sitting, according to my mom. There were plastic slipcovers on every piece of furniture that anyone could sit on or lean against. When we got our first TV, a big console set that I watched every afternoon and evening while lying on the living room floor, my mom made me rotate to different places on the floor so I wouldn't wear out the rug unevenly. When my parents retired to Florida decades later, the furniture they left behind was in pristine condition.

My Blankfein ancestors were Yiddish-speaking Jews who emigrated in the 1880s from a shtetl that was then in Russia and is now part of Poland. Isaac Blankfein, my paternal great-grandfather, worked as a tailor on Delancey Street, on the Lower East Side. He started a wholesale garment business that moved around Lower Manhattan, first to Greene Street-long before that neighborhood was called SoHo-then to Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, then to East 14th Street. My grandfather Saul, who died when I was six, was the youngest of Isaac's five sons, and the only one who stayed involved in the family business. When that business went bad during the Depression, our branch of the family became the poor relations. Over the years, as I became more famous (or notorious), I've heard from various Blankfeins descended from the other four brothers. They ended up as professionals-teachers, doctors, and lawyers. Not our side of the family. My dad worked as a clerk in the post office, while his younger brother, my uncle Sheldon, worked as a cutter in the Garment District.

After my grandfather Saul died, my grandmother Hannah Blankfein stayed in their apartment in a brownstone in the South Bronx, which I remember surrounded by rubble-strewn vacant lots as the neighborhood declined. On the long drive from Brooklyn to visit her, I would sleep, or pretend to sleep, stretched out in the back seat of our car. Because Hannah's mother was from Austria and spoke German rather than Yiddish, I understood that she was from a slightly higher social class among descendants of Jewish immigrants. A voluble, outgoing woman, my grandmother was uneducated but might have been the most accomplished person in our family. She was active in Bronx politics, served as a district leader, and even attended the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City as an alternate delegate.

My mother Blanche's family, the Krellmans, came to the United States a little later, around the turn of the twentieth century. They were also from the Pale of Settlement at the western edge of the Tsarist Empire. My mother's parents had a bitter divorce when she was young, and she broke off relations with her father, who subsequently remarried and had another family. My mom stuck with her mother, my grandmother Lilly, so I never knew my grandfather on my mother's side. When I shared a room with her as a kid, Grandma Lilly never talked about him. She worked at S. Klein, a department store on Union Square in Manhattan, which was a long ride on the 2 train from New Lots Avenue. Her job at Klein's was "floorwalker," which meant helping lady customers find the right size dresses and assisting the regular salespeople.

My mother was an extrovert and a schmoozer, always engaging strangers in conversation-an instinct she passed along to her children. But while she projected a lot of warmth to the outside world, she was all business at home, where she was the principal decision-maker about everything in our crowded household. During the day, she worked as a receptionist at a burglar alarm company-one of the few growth industries in the neighborhood. Other than watching TV in the evening, her main form of recreation was playing mah-jongg with women friends. She was only nineteen in 1940 when she married my father, Seymour, who was five years older. They met while working in the same dry-goods store in the Bronx. When he was drafted into the army in 1942, he was sent to Omaha, Nebraska, to work as a mechanic at the Army Air Corps base there. My mom moved there to be with him. My older sister was conceived there and was born on V-J Day, September 2, 1945.

My father was a big man-223 pounds at the time of his enlistment, according to his army records-but quieter than my mother and somewhat overshadowed by her. My dad liked to point to new car ads and say, "I can't wait to buy that car in six years." I inherited both his sense of humor and his anxiety. He was a constant worrier who never let the gas gauge on our secondhand Pontiac fall below three quarters full. I remember him taking that car, with its old-style divided windshield, to be checked out at a garage before the longest drive we'd take every summer, to Weiner's Hotel, a Jewish-owned resort in Moodus, Connecticut. Part of the "Connecticut Catskills," the hotel had cabins and a kind of musty main building. As I write this, I can still smell the mildew. You didn't really want to unpack. There was a shared bathroom on every floor.

My dad worked nights as a mail sorter at the post office because it meant a 10 percent pay boost above the day shift. We all had to be quiet during the day while he slept. In our world, nobody's father, if he had a job, went to work in a suit. No one I knew had a parent who had gone to college. My friends' fathers worked for the government, drove taxis, or were store clerks. I knew kids whose parents were Holocaust survivors, or "refugees" as they were called back then. My father was content with his job at the post office, or at least glad he had a secure job. Earlier, when I was very young, he was laid off from his job as a delivery driver for a dry-goods company. He was unemployed for a while, and the atmosphere at home was miserable and anxious. He never wanted that to happen again, hence his attachment to the civil service.

I had never been to the place where my father worked. He retired while I was in law school, and his coworkers threw a small party for him on his last day, at their station at the General Post Office in Brooklyn. Our family was invited. I remember going in, seeing the cramped space where letters moved by on a conveyor belt and the guys sorted them into slots. I remember thinking, How soul-destroying. But it got worse. Behind my dad and his colleagues was a large piece of equipment, literally in a plastic wrapper. I asked what it was. It was a machine that could sort mail at hyperspeed via an "electronic reader." It was meant to perform the same job held by my dad and his coworkers, only a lot faster, more cheaply, and better. But the government wouldn't deploy the machine and displace the workers until they retired. Imagine performing that mindless job when you knew it didn't even need to be performed. I still feel so sad when I think about the waste of my dad's brains and effort.

There was always tension and fighting at home about the lack of money, the lack of privacy, the need to be quiet, and miscellaneous stresses, like whose turn it was to use the bathroom and how long someone was taking. Cutting "cents off" coupons from newspapers for grocery items was the arts-and-crafts project I remember. A searing memory for me as an eight- or nine-year-old kid was breaking my glasses while roughhousing with friends. I didn't get yelled at, but I was made to feel that new glasses were budget breaking. My folks did the best they could, and I loved them, but we didn't always get along.

Even more than my mother, my sister, Jacky, was a people person-we used to say she could talk to a lamppost. Nine years older than me, she was in some ways more of a parent than a sibling. She was my coconspirator, the person with whom I could always laugh about our lives. Jacky was the one who took me to the World's Fair in Flushing in 1964. We rode Walt Disney's "It's a Small World" ride and watched a life-size animatronic Abraham Lincoln deliver excerpts from the Gettysburg Address. My strongest memory is of a futuristic technology you could try inside a bubble-shaped "Family Phone Booth": the speakerphone. To ten-year-old me, it seemed like a contraption from Dick Tracy.

Jacky, cut from the same cloth as me, was a victim of the attitudes of the 1950s and early 1960s. At school, she was channeled into a "commercial" diploma, which meant studying stenography and typing instead of history and English. She married at twenty, mostly, I think, to get out of our house. That turned out to be a costly mistake. She had a baby within a year, right after her husband, a bookkeeper, was discovered to have stolen from his employer. She moved back into our apartment with her baby, which meant that I had to share a room with my grandmother in the slightly larger apartment we were assigned in one of the other towers. My sister's divorce was ugly, and the police were often called to mediate disputes over child custody.

Because my father worked nights, we seldom had family dinners together. My mom put everything in the toaster oven, even hamburgers, and we ate a lot of Birds Eye frozen dinners. Corn and spinach, as far as I knew, came from cans, not the ground. Sometimes my grandmother would cook something slightly more effortful. Our kitchen table wasn't exactly a lively intellectual environment. I don't remember my parents having any political conversations, unless you count the constant cursing of Mayor Lindsay because of the deterioration of the neighborhood. But like everyone else in our world, my parents voted Democratic. We got the Daily Mirror, a Hearst tabloid that folded in 1963, and later the New York Daily News. I would play the Jumble word puzzle, perhaps a precursor to the New York Times Spelling Bee, which I'm addicted to these days, but a great deal easier. The Times never made an appearance in our household, and I doubt that anyone in my immediate family had even heard of The Wall Street Journal.

For kids in the projects, there were no organized sports or teams-no Little League or junior football. There were cement playgrounds, where children could play street games like skelly, where you flick bottle caps into squares outlined with chalk, or stickball, which you played with a rubber Spaldeen or a handball. Ring-a-levio was a game of team tag. I was the best at Chinese handball, which we played against the side of P.S. 190 on Sheffield Avenue. In the fall, we played touch football in a mostly deserted parking lot, using the parallel lines as yard markers. If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, as Wellington is supposed to have said, a lot of personalities and characters were shaped playing those street games in Brooklyn.

We kids sorted ourselves out-there were no adults supervising. I was slightly chubby in those days, not a great athlete, not great eyesight, and I tended to get picked nearly last. Joining the local Y swim team and later the swim team in high school got me in better shape. But I was funny, and I made friends like Felice Yurkiewicz and Richard Kalb, whom I've been close to my whole life. When I'm with them, my Brooklyn accent comes back in full force. At school, my report cards usually identified me as the class clown.

Felice, who lived on the second floor of our building, was a friend throughout our childhoods. We both taught ourselves to read from DC and Action Comics. We used to quiz each other: Where does Superman keep the Bottle City of Kandor? In his Fortress of Solitude. At seven or eight, I'm not sure we understood the concept of solitude, but we knew the answer. As my tastes matured, I came to like Batman better. Superman didn't earn his superpowers. He got them by virtue of being born on the planet Krypton-a nepo baby if there ever was one. Batman, on the other hand, was a regular guy, albeit from a wealthy family, who through smarts and hard work became the peer of other superheroes with supernatural advantages.