NOSTALGIA AND THE MIDTERMS October 23, 2026

The ongoing renovation of the House of Bagels a few blocks from my home says something about what’s at stake in the midterm elections.

Carolyn and I have been buying bagels at the House of B. for fifty years. Our kids always were given a tiny bagel. Walking around our neighborhood today triggers such nostalgia, in part because the neighborhood has undergone constant change.

My own memories go back to 1950s-New York, growing up in Rego Park (Queens). The neighborhood seemed very stable. Across 63rd Drive stood Abie and Irving’s grocery store. When my mother bought groceries, Abie or Irving would “mark it down” in a black book. My father paid weekly. A supermarket put Abie and Irving out of business. 

Another fixture, the candy store, was owned by Morty, then Leon and Susie, then Jack. All were Jewish and knew their customers—mostly first-generation American Jews and their kids. Trust was inherent. My father would send me to the candy store with a dollar bill to buy a four-pack of Garcia & Vega cigars. No questions asked. I never smoked one. Dad, however, started smoking cigars at 12. The candy store is ancient history.

Everyone knew the butcher, the shoemaker and the people who worked at a variety of stores like Shelley’s Bakery, and Dave-Ed’s deli, later Gold-Bel. Friday nights, my father brought in corned beef sandwiches to nosh while watching “Twilight Zone” on TV (black and white). Few people remember those places.

Was life better in the ’50s? Living in a primarily Jewish neighborhood, I was shielded from the antisemitism we all knew about. (We also knew about the Holocaust.) My Aunt Anne and Uncle Moe once were turned away from the Cadillac Hotel in very Jewish Miami Beach because it was “restricted.” No Jews. No Blacks, either.

If you were Black, you lived with de facto segregation in the North and West, de jure segregation in the South. TV showed President Eisenhower sending troops to Little Rock to integrate Central High School. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King started what the late John Lewis would call “good trouble”—the Montgomery bus boycott. No more being forced to sit in the back.

But wasn’t the post-War period essentially peaceful? War broke out in Korea in December 1950. President Truman called it a “police action.” The war took the lives of more than 36,000 American troops.

At home, TV broadcast the Army-McCarthy hearings. The Red-baiting Wisconsin (Republican) Senator Joe McCarthy cost a great many people in Hollywood and Washington their livelihoods. He took on the Army. He lost. (My novel Ride the Tyger includes that.) 

We also had air-raid drills in school. We ducked under desks should Russia drop an A-bomb or two on Manhattan. Not much protection against blast and radiation.

Reality dictates viewing the past with perspective. Fond memories are precious. We should treasure them. But they shouldn’t conceal the difficulties Americans faced years ago and face now—poverty, food deserts, challenging job prospects, insufficient or absent healthcare, and the rise—yet again—of white nationalism.

When Americans vote in the midterms, I hope we’ll look forward rather than backward. There’s nothing wrong with nostalgia. But it can be tempting to mire ourselves in the past rather than advance towards establishing a more perfect union.

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