TEXT C When I was growing up, the
whole world was Jewish. The heroes were Jewish and the villains were Jewish. The
landlord, the doctor, the grocer, your best friend, the village idiot, the
neighborhood bully: all Jewish. We were working class and immigrants as well,
but that just came with the territory. Essentially we were Jews on the streets
of New York. We learned to be kind, cruel, smart and feeling in a mixture of
language and gesture that was part street slang, part grade-school English, part
kitchen Yiddish. One Sunday evening when I was eight years old
my parents and I were riding in the back seat of my rich uncle’s car. We had
been out for a ride and now we were back in the Bronx, headed for home.
Suddenly, another car sideswiped us. My mother and aunt shrieked. My uncle swore
softly. My father, in whose lap I was sitting, said out the window at the
speeding car, "That’s all right. Nothing but a few Jews in here." In an instant
I knew everything. I knew there was a world beyond our streets, and in that
world my father was a humiliated man, without power or standing.
When I was sixteen a girl in the next building had her nose straightened; we all
went together to see Selma Shapiro lying in state, wrapped in bandages from
which would emerge a person fit for life beyond the block. Three buildings
away a boy went downtown for a job, and on his application he wrote "Anold
Brown" instead of "Anold Braunowiitz." The news swept through the neighborhood
like a wild fire. A nose job A name change What was happening here It was
awful; it was wonderful. It was frightening; it was delicious. Whatever it was,
it wasn’t standstill. Things felt lively and active. Self-confidence was on the
rise, passivity on the wane. We were going to experience challenges. That’s what
it meant to be in the new world. For the first time we could imagine ourselves
out there. But who exactly do I mean when I say we I mean
Arnie, not Selma. I mean my brother, not me. I mean the boys, not the girls. My
mother stood behind me, pushing me forward. "The girl goes to college, too," she
said. And I did. But my going to college would not mean the same thing as my
brother’s going to college, and we all knew it. For my brother, college meant
going from the Bronx to Manhattan. But for me From the time I was fourteen I
yearned to get out of the Bronx, but get out into what I did not actually
imagine myself a working person alone in Manhattan and nobody else did either.
What I did imagine was that I would marry, and that the man I married would get
me downtown. He would brave the perils of class and race, and somehow I’d be
there alongside him. Anold Brown changed his name because ______
A.there was racial discrimination in employment B.Brown was just the same as Braunowiitz C.it was easy to write D.Brown sounds better