What was going on when I was born?

-regulated tenants in New York City's tight, high-priced apartment market often are confused about the right of relatives to succeed to their apartments after they leave. Also confused are the many investors who hope to gain quick possession of apartments occupied by rent-regulated tenants that the investors have bought in buildings recently converted into cooperatives. Among the questions that keep arising are under what circumstances may a resident relative not named on a lease become the leaseholder when the primary tenant moves out, and are there differences in succession rights between rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments? The situation behind these questions is the desire of tenants to pass their below-market rentals along to children and other relatives. It also is a reflection of the strong demand for apartments, even at high rents, in many desirable neighborhoods and particularly in Manhattan.

ANGELES GLICK travels frequently to Mexico, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic from her home in the hills of western Connecticut. Sometimes people tell Mrs. Glick she has no business being in thosecountries and doing what she is doing, which is finding children who urgently need medical care and arranging for them to receive it in the United States. ''They say I should leave those children alone and stay home where I belong,'' said the 38-year-old New Milford resident. Others tell her she should work to help ill children in Connecticut. Mrs. Glick can rarely resist responding to such detractors.

MOSCOW THE dry, official announcement was carried in the Soviet press without commentary: The Soviet Union and the United States had agreed to new talks ''with the aim of achieving mutually acceptable accords on the entire complex of questions concerning nuclear and space weapons.'' Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko would meet Secretary of State George P. Shultz on Jan. 7 and 8 in Geneva ''to work out a joint understanding of the subject and aims of such talks.'' Just two paragraphs under the characteristically matter-of-fact headline, ''On the question of negotiations between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.'' But the impact was instant. That same evening, Aleksandr A. Bessmertnykh, the head of the American Department at the Soviet Foreign Ministry, joined John Denver in singing ''We're all in this together'' at Ambassador Arthur A. Hartman's Thanksgiving dinner. A Soviet movie director was optimistic that now he could make an often-postponed trip to the United States. On Friday evening's television news, the usual litany of American warmongering and social injustices was replaced by a report from New York quoting some American businessmen about the need to get Soviet-American trade rolling again. It wasn't, of course, as if detente had broken out all over. Tass continued to churn out attacks on Washington, and there was no guarantee that the movie director would get his visa soon.

Alan Lelchuk's novel, ''In Her Forties,'' will be published next fall. This essay was adapted from a talk he gave at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the series, ''Writers Speak: America and the Ethnic Experience.'' Let me start with two anecdotes concerning Saul Bellow and the varieties of ethnic displeasure he has caused. In Jerusalem in the 1970's, I was sitting in the living room of Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism and one of the tribal chiefs of secular Judaism, when the discussion turned to American literature. At the mention of the name Bellow, Scholem, normally cool and relaxed, immediately grew livid, stood up and, striding back and forth, began to downgrade Bellow as a writer and to berate him personally. At the bottom of Scholem's ire, it turned out, was Bellow's remark after he had received the Nobel Prize, that he was ''An American writer first, and a Jew second.'' How could an intelligent man who was Jewish say such a thing, Scholem charged, instead of acknowledging his Jewish identity first and foremost? To Scholem, the claim was either stupid or cowardly, the product of an assimilationist culture and/or personality, and Scholem would never forgive Bellow for it. For Scholem had not come to primitive Palestine in the early 1930's - abandoning his civilized Germany to be mocked by family and assimilationist friends - only to hear a Jewish Nobel Prize-winner de-emphasize his Jewish heritage.

The scenario could be entitled ''The Dream Deferred - Once Again.'' The promise of cable's programming abundance raised some hope among viewers that the producers of American cable fare would try more often to match the quality of such imported gems as ''Brideshead Revisited'' and ''Berlin Alexanderplatz.'' Yet, the production record of the nation's biggest pay-cable operator, Home Box Office, which supposedly has been leading the way for the rest of the industry, has been discouragingly dismal.

A major battle is shaping up over the Administration's contention that the fiscal condition of the states is much stronger than that of the Federal Government and that the states can absorb further reductions in Federal aid and the loss of some tax benefits. State and local officials reply that their fiscal outlook is not nearly so rosy as Treasury studies would suggest. They express fear the studies will be used to justify cuts in Federal funds for housing, health and employment programs that they consider vital. Treasury officials said the states had a cumulative surplus of $6 billion for fiscal years ending in 1984, and they estimated this figure would rise to more than $60 billion in 1989 if state tax laws and spending policies continued unchanged.

TRENTON NEW JERSEY has not met the requirements for Medicare to continue paying hospital rates set by the state's Department of Health, according to the head of the Federal Health Care Financing Administration. The official, Dr. Carolyne K. Davis, informed Governor Kean of her view in a letter, the first official response to the state's application for a three- year waiver from the Federal program that establishes Medicare hospital payments in most other states. The New Jersey application, Dr. Davis wrote, is ''not approvable.'' In that application, submitted Sept. 28, the state said its D.R.G. (Diagnosis Related Groups) approach had saved Medicare $229 million and would save an additional $126 million from 1985 to 1987.

MATISSE By Pierre Schneider. Translated by Michael Taylor and Bridget Strevens Romer. Illustrated. 752 pp. New York: Rizzoli. $95. Not so long ago there were people who thought of Henri Matisse as a leisure-class lightweight - a man who turned out paintings of pretty interiors beside a southern sea. Many were the women of fashion who needed one of those interiors the way they needed a trim little Chanel suit. This state of affairs did Matisse no good, but it persisted in Paris, where until 1970 there had never been a comprehensive exhibition of his work. In this country the record was set straighter, both by the great Matisse paintings in American museums and by Alfred Barr's pioneering ''Matisse: His Art and His Public,'' published in 1951.

The border police said today that 126 more Polish tourists on a cruise to West Germany had abandoned a ferryboat with the apparent intention of seeking political asylum. The incident brings to 428 the number of Polish travelers who have jumped ship in West German ports in the last two weeks, seeking to emigrate to the West. A police spokesman said that the Poles had come ashore from the 7,500- ton ferry Rogalin during a 14-hour stopover Friday in Travemunde, a small port near the border with East Germany, and that 126 passengers failed to return to the ship and were expected to seek asylum. Increase in Asylum-Seekers The Rogalin plies a route twice a week between Szczecin, Poland, and Travem"unde. Though it is not unusual for small numbers of Poles to desert Polish cruise ships and ferryboats when they put into north German ports on sightseeing and shopping trips, the number has grown sharply in the last two weeks.

Since underdeveloped corner sites in midtown are growing ever more scarce, even the heavy hitters among New York City's development community are making do with midblock lots. Among them is George Klein, one of the developers named to build the Times Square redevelopment project.

Scott Bowman was left waiting again tonight, foiled for a fourth consecutive time in his attempt to tie Dick Irvin's league record of 690 victories by a coach. As for the Islanders, who breezed to a 6-3 victory over Bowman's Buffalo Sabres at Nassau Coliseum, they wait for nothing these days. ''You begin to wonder where your next win is going to come from,'' Bowman said. ''We've lost four in a row. But the Islanders are so strong. It doesn't take much to trigger them. We got the first goal, then they got those two, and that was it.''

PARALLELING the movement to develop unspoiled land and modernize industries on the East End are efforts by local citizens and officials to preserve remnants of the area's history. One effort under way is the repair, sometimes requiring extensive renovation, of East End windmills. Two of them, the Hook Mill and the Wainscott Mill, both in the Town of East Hampton, are undergoing repairs scheduled to be completed in the spring. This will mean that within a few months a vital aspect of Long Island's Colonial past will be available to visitors of the present. These structures will look the way they did when constructed by East End businessmen nearly 200 years ago. The first windmill on the East End was built in 1644 in Southold by settlers who had sailed from New Haven four years earlier. The South Fork's first mill was a water mill built on a stream five miles from the center of East Hampton in 1648. Nine years later, the first windmill was built in the village itself. As the population grew and the demand for flour and meal increased, particularly on the South Fork, more mills were built.