Physical education or gym was also a required subject and that too was taken during the summer. To pass the course, students had to swim a specified distance and that was another challenge that had to be overcome. The class, by the way, was not coeducational. I told the instructor that swimming and Marvin Schick were two incompatible phenomena, whereupon he grabbed hold of me, flung me into the pool, and as he fished me out proclaimed, “You pass.”
* * * * *
When I look back at these years, I am often amazed at what Allen and I were able to do. In addition to yeshiva and college and work in the bakery, especially for me there was a great deal of communal activity, primarily involving Agudath Israel. I was also active in Torah Schools for Israel or Chinuch Atzmai, the Israeli elementary school network established by Rav Aharon Kotler, raising funds and attending meetings. My first published writings also appeared during this period.
Typically, Allen and I came home a bit after eleven, made supper for ourselves (often a steak fetched out of the freezer), and then did our homework, including writing term papers, some of which ran to one-hundred handwritten pages or more. (I did not type then and still do not, as computers remain entirely foreign territory for me.) We often got to sleep close to 3 a.m.
We were good students, making the Dean’s List regularly. Allen’s grades were better than mine. There were classes I was scarcely interested in and probably too often I winged it, meaning I attempted to get by on my wits without sufficiently studying the course material.
My guess is that most yeshiva students also winged it or cut corners because they, too, had rather onerous schedules. As for the Dean’s List, it was dominated by Orthodox students. There was a yearly reception honoring Dean’s List students and on several occasions Allen and I asked our mother to provide cookies and cake without charge so that the religious students would have something to eat.
Brooklyn College then was a young institution and much of the faculty was young. Although it might have been expected that the evening classes would be taught by adjuncts and less highly regarded faculty, generally that was not the case. As I recall, during the 1950s Brooklyn was routinely selected as one of the top colleges in the country for the emphasis it put on teaching and for the high quality of its faculty. There were many outstanding teachers. One of them was Howard Zinn, a historian who went on to become a fierce critic of the United States. However, the first course I took was in economics and it was taught by a professor whose ineptitude permanently turned me away from that discipline.
Almost by predetermination, Allen and I majored in political science. The introductory course we took was taught by Martin Landau, who took a great liking to Allen and me. Although he lived in Bensonhurst where he was a neighbor of Rabbi Elias Schwartz, the truly great menahel of Yeshiva Toras Emes, Professor Landau usually drove us home. He was a magnificent teacher. Allen and I also had him for an advanced seminar that was limited to about ten students. Years later, he was selected as one of the outstanding college teachers in the U.S.
After Brooklyn College he taught at Berkeley in California, one of the country’s preeminent universities. For all of his talent, he was afflicted with a terrible case of writer’s block and his scholarly output consisted primarily of a handful of essays published in a slender volume. In the introduction, he listed a small number of exceptional students, including Allen and me and also the late Professor Jacob Landynski, a noble person and dear friend with whom I had the privilege of teaching during the years I taught at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research.
