Alan Sokobin
Introduction
I begin with three vignettes: The first was a view of a Brooklyn Hasidic community. The streets were busy with the normal activities of commerce and socializing. The men were uniformly dressed in their uncorrupted black suits with flapping tsitsit and very broad-brimmed black fedoras. The less-uniformly clothed women exhibited their individuality in different-colored long dresses and sleeves that covered their arms. The sheitles tended to be dowdy brown or muted auburn. It was, after all, not Shabbat . Suddenly there was an inharmonious and charming oddity. A young boy, peot flapping down from his shaved head, ran through the streets wearing a jacket upon which was boldly emblazoned the name of a favored team, The Mets. The traditions of the eighteenth century, the traditions of the Pale, had met and succumbed to one intrusive element of the twentieth century.
Notes for this section begin on page 168