My Father's Bodega

My father had a bodega that he bought in 1949. He had worked in a Jewish deli on Delancey Street for about 20 years when he first arrived in New York City. When that deli was torn down, luckily he had a sister-in-law who had told him years before, "Tito, you should really start saving your money because you never know what can happen. Don't keep it under the mattress. Put it in a little savings account." And so he was able to buy this little bodega, which was a hole in the wall, three steps down, basement, very small. And he called it, without a sense, of irony La Fortuna (The Fortune), because that was a place where he had worked as a teenager when he had to leave school in fourth grade in Puerto Rico because his mother was widowed with eight children and he was the oldest one living at home at that time.

So he bought this bodega and made a go of it. We were able to, several years later, move out of the poor neighborhood that we lived in, which was Williamsburg and then Fort Greene, which are now very trendy neighborhoods in Brooklyn and buy our first and only house, a small house in a working-class, middle-class neighborhood. And that changed everything for us. His bodega gave us the opportunity to have these "Brooklyn dreams" as I called the memoir that I wrote because our lives changed dramatically from being in poor schools to being in more middle-class schools, and the difference was amazing.