The Sunset Gang
“His real name, in his mind, was Itch. He had been known as Itch for sixty of his seventy-two years, ever since his grandfather, in his broken Yiddish-English got up from his nap in a bad mood after Itch had put a baseball through his bedroom window.
"Dot Izzy gibt mir an Itch." Someone had heard the remark, probably his sister Fanny, and from then on, in that mysterious way that nicknames are born, he had become Itch. Since he had lived in only two neighborhoods during his entire lifetime, not ...counting the shtetl in Kozin, Poland, or the hold of the USS St. Louis, he had had no trouble in establishing his real name. In Brownsville, where he had spent forty years of his life, and in Brighton Beach, where he had spent the last thirty-one, it would have been unthinkable for anyone to have addressed him by any other name but Itch.
Now that he had moved to Sunset Village and was getting his mail addressed to Isaac Kramer, everybody seemed to be calling him Isaac. It was as if the yentas had peeked into the cellophane panel of his envelopes and spread the word to the four corners of Sunset Village.MoreLess
"Dot Izzy gibt mir an Itch." Someone had heard the remark, probably his sister Fanny, and from then on, in that mysterious way that nicknames are born, he had become Itch. Since he had lived in only two neighborhoods during his entire lifetime, not ...counting the shtetl in Kozin, Poland, or the hold of the USS St. Louis, he had had no trouble in establishing his real name. In Brownsville, where he had spent forty years of his life, and in Brighton Beach, where he had spent the last thirty-one, it would have been unthinkable for anyone to have addressed him by any other name but Itch.
Now that he had moved to Sunset Village and was getting his mail addressed to Isaac Kramer, everybody seemed to be calling him Isaac. It was as if the yentas had peeked into the cellophane panel of his envelopes and spread the word to the four corners of Sunset Village.MoreLess
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