When the snow starts coming down hard on Mozart Street, my mother, who has lived in West Rogers Park (aka West Ridge) for more than 50 years, can usually rely on her neighbors to help her out without even having to ask. Ari, one door to the south, shovels the snow. Or Benji, who lives with his family one door north, does the job. When my mother’s windshield wipers snapped in the cold, Mr. Seruya across the street replaced them
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As I work, men in black hats and overcoats walk briskly between home and shul, using the street because the sidewalks are too snowy for their dress shoes. Children, down coats over their suits and dresses, kick their way through the white fluff, but this isn’t really a day for playing. The only neighbor I recognize, Mr. Nathan from a few doors down, cracks wise as he walks quickly past me. “How much’ll you pay me to shovel my own walk?” he asks.
“Go around, go around, no shoveling today, go around!” he shouts.
In 1979 I was in seventh grade, and the snowdrifts were so deep the front steps of houses became invisible and cars were buried headlight deep. Our neighbors grew weary of waiting for plows we knew would never come. Mrs. Fingerhut called a private tow truck company and went door-to-door asking each household to chip in $20. The truck plowed the middle of Mozart, then towed each car to the middle of the street as more than a dozen of us got to work, shoveling out parking spaces like a road gang—digging, heaving, throwing; digging, heaving, throwing. Everyone shoveled—Rabbi Small and the rebbetsen, the Fingerhuts, the Nathans, the Ellises, the Friedmans. Also the Irish Lady and the Italians and the policeman—my family tended to identify the Jewish families by surname and the Gentiles by ethnicity or occupation. One neighbor brought out cups and thermoses of coffee and hot cocoa.
“I cleaned off your mother’s car last night,” he says with a smile. “We did the whole sidewalk too.”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t the worst one,” he says. “You should have seen 1978 when we were living on Washtenaw. Now that one was really something.”v
