The Guy Second from the Right

This picture is from the graduating class photos taken in 1940. The guy in the middle, L. Moskowitz, is my father. The picture is from P.S. (Public School) 30 Junior High School in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. My father was 18 at the time, and he was just graduating junior high. My father came to this country four years earlier (1936) from a small town of what was then Czechoslovakia. He spoke no English. At home he and his parents and siblings spoke Hungarian, because their town was in Hungry before World War I. (It's now part of Ukraine.) From an Orthodox Jewish upbringing, he was initially sent to a yeshiva in Brooklyn for his education. He rebelled and insisted that his father let him go to the local public school. His family lived on 82nd Street; the school was on 88th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. When I was a kid, I lived on East 88th Street and I remember walking by. By then the school was closed and abandoned. Later it was torn down entirely to make way for an…