Penguin Press
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In his new memoir, “Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs” (to be published March 1 by Penguin Press), former CEO Lloyd Blankfein writes about a life that stretched from the projects of New York City to the pinnacle of Wall Street.
Read the excerpt below, and don’t miss Jo Ling Kent’s interview with Lloyd Blankfein on “CBS Sunday Morning” March 1!
“Streetwise” by Lloyd Blankfein
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Chapter I: Advantages
When I go into a room full of people, I have to decide whether I’m going to be the member of the establishment or the kid from Brooklyn.
I am a product of East New York, Brooklyn, where I grew up in the projects, and I still see the world through those eyes. To this day, I have to concentrate to say rather and not rath-uh. I can’t compare myself with people I’ve worked with who overcame really severe disadvantage, like broken homes, civil wars, extreme poverty, or forced emigration. But growing up in public housing, in a family that was getting by, and attending public schools that were failing, left its mark on me. I struggle with ambivalence. I spend half my time wanting to give stuff to my kids, the other half tormenting them for having stuff I gave them that I didn’t have.
My earliest memories are from the South Bronx, where my family lived in a tenement building on Leggett Avenue. I used to love watching the coal that heated the building get delivered. It made a roar as it poured from the truck down a chute into the cellar. Another memory: the organ- grinder who sometimes played on the sidewalk outside our apartment. My mother wrapped a coin in paper and threw it out the window for his monkey to pick up.
When I was three, we moved from the Bronx to East New York, in search of a better life— which, for a time, we found. The year was 1957 and the city hadn’t yet finished paving the streets of the new public housing development we were moving into, the Linden Houses, run by the New York City Housing Authority. This was subsidized housing for the working class, with buildings arrayed in an irregular pattern bordered by bits of landscaped greenery. They were not yet “the projects.” At the time, it must have seemed like Shangri-la to my parents. Everything was clean and new. Children had an actual playground, with swings and monkey bars to climb. The neighborhood was reasonably safe. Those nineteen largely identical redbrick high-rises were not yet blighted in the ways they would be by the time I was in high school.
My mother, my father, my sister, my grandmother, and I occupied a small apartment with two bedrooms and a bathroom, maybe eight hundred square feet, on the fourth floor of a fourteen-story tower at 243 Wortman Avenue. My sister, Jacky, and I shared a bedroom, while my grandmother, Lilly, slept on a foldout couch in the living room. It was tight but neat. You weren’t allowed to sit on a bed—beds were for sleeping, not sitting, according to my mom. There were plastic slipcovers on every piece of furniture that anyone could sit on or lean against. When we got our first TV, a big console set that I watched every afternoon and evening while lying on the living room floor, my mom made me rotate to different places on the floor so I wouldn’t wear out the rug unevenly. When my parents retired to Florida decades later, the furniture they left behind was in pristine condition.
My Blankfein ancestors were Yiddish-speaking Jews who emigrated in the 1880s from a shtetl that was then in Russia and is now part of Poland. Isaac Blankfein, my paternal great-grandfather, worked as a tailor on Delancey Street, on the Lower East Side. He started a wholesale garment business that moved around Lower Manhattan, first to Greene Street— long before that neighborhood was called SoHo—then to Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, then to East 14th Street. My grandfather Saul, who died when I was six, was the youngest of Isaac’s five sons, and the only one who stayed involved in the family business. When that business went bad during the Depression, our branch of the family became the poor relations. Over the years, as I became more famous (or notorious), I’ve heard from various Blankfeins descended from the other four brothers. They ended up as professionals—teachers, doctors, and lawyers. Not our side of the family. My dad worked as a clerk in the post office, while his younger brother, my uncle Sheldon, worked as a cutter in the Garment District.
After my grandfather Saul died, my grandmother Hannah Blankfein stayed in their apartment in a brownstone in the South Bronx, which I remember surrounded by rubble-strewn vacant lots as the neighborhood declined. On the long drive from Brooklyn to visit her, I would sleep, or pretend to sleep, stretched out in back seat of our car. Because Hannah’s mother was from Austria and spoke German rather than Yiddish, I understood that she was from a slightly higher social class among descendants of Jewish immigrants. A voluble, outgoing woman, my grandmother was uneducated but might have been the most accomplished person in our family. She was active in Bronx politics, served as a district leader, and even attended the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City as an alternate delegate.
My mother Blanche’s family, the Krellmans, came to the United States a little later, around the turn of the twentieth century. They were also from the Pale of Settlement at the western edge of the Tsarist Empire. My mother’s parents had a bitter divorce when she was young, and she broke off relations with her father, who subsequently remarried and had another family. My mom stuck with her mother, my grandmother Lilly, so I never knew my grandfather on my mother’s side. When I shared a room with her as a kid, Grandma Lilly never talked about him. She worked at S. Klein, a department store on Union Square in Manhattan, which was a long ride on the 2 train from New Lots Avenue. Her job at Klein’s was “floorwalker,” which meant helping lady customers find the right size dresses and assisting the regular salespeople.
My mother was an extrovert and a schmoozer, always engaging strangers in conversation—an instinct she passed along to her children. But while she projected a lot of warmth to the outside world, she was all business at home, where she was the principal decision-maker about everything in our crowded household. During the day, she worked as a receptionist at a burglar alarm company—one of the few growth industries in the neighborhood. Other than watching TV in the evening, her main form of recreation was playing mah-jongg with women friends. She was only nineteen in 1940 when she married my father, Seymour, who was five years older. They met while working in the same dry-goods store in the Bronx. When he was drafted into the army in 1942, he was sent to Omaha, Nebraska, to work as a mechanic at the Army Air Corps base there. My mom moved there to be with him. My older sister was conceived there and was born on V-J Day, September 2, 1945.
My father was a big man—223 pounds at the time of his enlistment, according to his army records— but quieter than my mother and somewhat overshadowed by her. My dad liked to point to new car ads and say, “I can’t wait to buy that car in six years.” I inherited both his sense of humor and his anxiety.
Excerpted from “Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs” by Lloyd Blankfein, courtesy Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Copyright © by Lloyd C. Blankfein.
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