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brother Henry, Frank. Frank Herbst, we were friends from that point on, and our lives seemed to parallel -- they moved to Boro Park, we moved to Boro Park. We were both active politically together. He went to City College 23rd Street, with Henry, and he later went into the labor movement. He was with Elliot Godoff and Jack Bigel in the public workers. We were very close friends, we were close friends after he was kicked out when the purge took place, and we were friends until his death a few years ago. But I've moved away from your question.

I was just curious about the community and the sense of consciousness or identity that it engendered in you, for you as a Jewish identity, a working-class identity, or was there no sense of identity?

It's hard to say that there was a sense. We weren't among the most religious people, although we went to shule on the holidays. Everybody did. It was very, very rare, although I remember that on the floor we lived, there were six families on the floor three on one side, there was the next-door neighbor and the one in the center. The person in the center, named Cooper, Bernie Cooper was the son, his father was an anarchist. I remember there were pictures of Lenin in their home, and they were known as anarchists. His mother also was an active anarchist and maybe a communist, it's hard for me to remember, but I do know there were pictures of Lenin in their room. I knew that they were talking about Sacco and Vanzetti. I remember hearing about it. It make no great impression. My brother Henry was very close to Bernie, to their son, and spent more time with them, but I don't think he absorbed any political influence. They seemed to be sort of queer people to us in the sense that they seemed very intellectual, as distinct from all the other people.

Even more intellectual than everybody around them?

The parents.

The parents were intellectual.

Oh, yes, yes, very distinctly. The books, they had a lot of books in their home. But nobody singled them out. People may have made remarks about them but they were not considered outsiders, you know, or boycott them. The atmosphere, I remember, intellectual only in the sense that I can recall that we would, in the hot weather, we were always out in the street at night and the smarter ones were always -- I was younger than the people I associated with, so that when they were in high school I was still in public school. I remember