Grandma Golda discovered pizza in the summer of 1953 at The Pelham Parkway Pizza Parlor, a dingy store located on the very edge of her three-block kingdom in the Bronx.
She’d never paid much attention to the place. Why should she? It was just a shop with a dirty red-and-white sign, generally crowded with teenagers who smoked cigarettes, talked loudly, and fed their allowances into a pinball machine while they waited for a coke and a slice of pizza. It certainly wasn’t the sort of place where you’d expect to find a small, frail woman in her eighties who didn’t speak much English. She’d long ago decided that learning another language made no sense. She spoke Yiddish perfectly well, and anyone who had anything to say to her could say it in that language.
But when she heard one of her grandchildren mention that he and his friends were going to hang out at the pizza shop, she decided she had better find out what was going on there. Grandma did not believe that her daughters-in-law properly supervised their children. She put on her long black cardigan sweater, changed from worn slippers to her black orthopedic shoes, patted her sparse white hair, and lightly powdered her wrinkled face.
She walked slowly, a little unsteadily, but with great determination. She barely paused to glance at the car driven by the rude man who blew his horn and pointed at the red traffic light as she crossed the street.
When she got to the pizza parlor, Grandma Golda sniffed, nodded her...
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