summer months it swarmed with tattered, unkempt humanity.
There was a peculiar odor to the place which I can still smell.

(Indeed, many of the things that I conjure up from the past appeal
as much to my sense of smell as to my visual memory.) It was
anything but a grateful odor

The far end of our street was part of a squalid little suburb known
as the Sands. It was inhabited by Gentiles exclusively. Sometimes,
when a Jew chanced to visit it some of its boys would descend
upon him with shouts of "Damned Jew!" "Christ-killer!" and sick
their dogs at him. As we had no dogs to defend us, orthodox Jews
being prohibited from keeping these domestic animals by a
custom amounting to a religious injunction, our boys never
ventured into the place except, perhaps, in a spirit of dare-devil
bravado

One day the bigger Jewish boys of our street had a pitched battle
with the Sands boys, an event which is one of the landmarks in the
history of my childhood

Still, some of the Sands boys were on terms of friendship with us
and would even come to play with us in our yard. The only
Gentile family that lived in Abner's Court was that of the porter.
His children spoke fairly good Yiddish

One Saturday evening a pock-marked lad from the Sands, the son
of a chimney-sweep, meeting me in the street, set his dog at me.
As a result I came home with a fair-sized piece of my trousers
(knee-breeches were unknown to us) missing