Thursday Jan 10

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Attended meeting of our newly
organized camp of the order
Sons of Zion,
I’m glad that my motion
to call name our org, Maccabean
was passed although after a big battle.

I accepted the nomination
and Election of Master of Ceremonies
and I certainly will see to it
that all rituals be strictly
enforced.

[note: a continuation of the next day’s entry fills the bottom of this page]

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Matt’s Notes

Looks like Papa was a member of a Jewish fraternal order, and presumably in his capacity as Master of Ceremonies he was the keeper of rituals and parliamentary procedures. At the moment I have no idea what they were up to (I’ve never joined any sort of order myself, though I am a member of the Film Forum at the $150 level) but I’m looking into it (and please chime in if you know anything about Jewish fraternal organizations). Papa’s account of a “big battle” over the group’s nickname hints at some organizational self-importance or frivolity, but I really I don’t think he’d be part of it unless it was somehow directed toward raising funds for a Jewish homeland, serving the labor movement or performing acts of charity.

Then again, maybe it was just a club. Papa was single, prone to sadness, and in only the 11th year of reconstructing his life from scratch in a burgeoning, indifferent city; he might have just wanted to go somewhere for a heated discussion every so often, to replace the people he had lost with a few manufactured “brothers,” to hedge against loneliness. He was just a human being, after all. I’ll need to remind myself of this as the year progresses, to view his journal not as a lost gospel but a sliver of a life, a look at a twenty-nine-year-old, a man younger than me, who had not yet become who he would be. As I mentioned previously, he has been an abstraction to me all these years, remembered more as a feeling than as a real person. To see him as fallible and real is, perhaps, another way to relate to him more closely, to put his example within reach.

Update

Shows you how much I know. The above meditation on relating to my grandfather still stands, but in poking around a little more I’ve learned that immigrant fraternal organizations cropped up all over the place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Fraternal societies played a big role in American life back then; for many immigrants, to join an order was a way to become in effect more American.1

Jewish immigrants formed plenty of their own orders, often geared toward community service (B’nai Brith is a well-known example, though until today I knew nothing of its fraternal origins). B’nai Zion, my grandfather’s order, was formed in 1908 and still operates today as a charitable organization. When Papa joined, they were certainly not frivolous — they helped provide life insurance to immigrants and were closely allied with Keren Hayesod. (For more, check out the B’nai Zion Web site). I’ve been in touch with them, so I’ll add updates as I learn more.

—————–

References for this post

1 – Soyer, Daniel, “Entering the ‘Tent of Abraham’: Fraternal Ritual and American-Jewish Identity, 1880-1920”, Religion and American Culture, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 159-182

Friday Jan 11

by


The evening partially at home
& radio. Later went to a movie,
The Clinton, where I so often
go and I must mention once
in here, of that place where I
spend hours, going to a movie
is the best way to forget my troubles
for awhile,
It carries me away to a land
of enchantment where all
dreams are realized, where
every story has a happy ending.
I suffer with the heroes during
the plots and am happy with
them at the conclusions, Some
people go to this place of illusions
while their own beautiful dream is
still in process of development,
and others (soldiers of misfortune as
I would call them) who have played

continued from page 11

the game of love or some other (usually
the love game) which did not turn out
to their expectations, or utterly disappointed
and [are] ironically watching the picture
which in their pessimistic mind is nothing
but fiction (MY OPINION: SOME ARE AND SOME ARE NOT FICTION)
Yes the movies are a great relief

——-

Matt’s Notes

Movies!

I’ve been thinking about this entry ever since I transcribed it, and now I don’t even know where to start. Film fanaticism is a defining trait for my mother, my sister and me, so reading this entry is like watching my own DNA get decoded and seeing the movie gene first express itself in the presence of flickering light.

I always like to think about the origins of seemingly self-evident ideas, so what I like most here is how novel the idea of cinema as escapism is to Papa, how he needs to work it out on paper and make a case for it. It’s like reading an an optimistic position paper on the prospects of the Information Superhighway. His sincerity, too, is striking. Evocative phrases like “land of enchantment” and “house of illusions” remind me of the warmed-over sentiments we expect from Oscar presenters, but to Papa they’re vital, fresh and original, so enchanted is he by the very act of sitting in a movie house.

But even while waxing poetic on cinematic diversions he’s never quite diverted from his real concerns. On New Year’s Eve he searched the crowds for lonely souls; so too does he evaluate his fellow moviegoers. Are their lives ahead of them, or are they broken by disappointment? Do they believe in happy endings, or do they sneer at them? Papa carefully strikes a balance for the record (“MY OPINION: SOME ARE AND SOME ARE NOT FICTION”) but the very presence of this meditation shows how preoccupied he was with whether his own life was still beginning or starting to end. With all this churning in his head, I wonder if he’s being ironic when he says “Yes the movies are a great relief.”

Update

Looks like Papa got his movie fixes at the Clinton Theater at 80-82 Clinton Street, around the corner from his apartment on Attorney Street. According to cinematreasures.org, The Clinton featured Yiddish vaudeville as well as movies and operated from around 1914 to 1950. It’s now a store called Home Basics. A fan of old movie houses has a photostream over at Flickr that features The Clinton, so head over there if you want to see what the spot looks like now.

Papa doesn’t mention the movies he saw that day, but my new best friend the New York Times Archive helped me cobble together a list of what was playing in town in January of 1924, including a few biggies. Here’s what he had to choose from:

– The Temporary Husband
– The Great White Way
– West of the Water Tower
– Through the Dark
– The Hunchback of Notre Dame
– The White Sister
– Scaramouche
– Black Oxen
– Pleasure Mad
– The Ten Commandments (Papa must not have seen this — I can’t imagine that he wouldn’t mention it in his diary if he had)
– The Courtship of Miles Standish
– Anna Chrystie
– Reno
– Under the Red Robe
– Let no man put asunder
– Lucretia Lombard
– The Humming Bird
– Unseeing Eyes
– The Man from Brodneys
– The Shepherd King
– The Covered Wagon
– The Acquittal
– The Steadfast Heart
– A Lady of Quality
– Don’t Call It Love

Another Update:

Here’s a 1938 article from the New York Times (subscription required; PDF) in which William Hays publicly acknowledges that, yes, American movies are officially escapist.

Saturday Jan 12

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Slept late, in the evening visited
the K.H. office, the 2nd and 3rd Zionist
Districts and the remainder of the time
about 3 1/2 hours (from 11:30pm to 3:00am) at
the Cafe Royal.

Goldstein introduced me to Dr. Murdoni
the famous dramatic critic, the Dr. M.
told me of a sad experience
while in Siberia on a mission of the
Russian Jewish Relief Comittee during
the war, He met ther 500 Galician
Jews in one place, very religious
old jews and jewesses and children
were forced to live among the
wild Tatars in the villages in
Siberia, where they were forced to go
for no reason whatever, and what
horrible experiences they had to go there.

Only one picture of the Golus

————–

Matt’s Notes

Yesterday Papa talked about escaping to the movies, but today he’s got more serious things on his mind. It’s interesting to be reminded that, as modern and American as his life seems, he could relate quite closely the dark, almost regressive-sounding world of the Jews in “Dr. M’s” story. His life might easily have gone that way and he knows it.

I had a bit of trouble reading a couple of words in this entry. I’m not sure if I got “Dr. Murdoni” right or the word “Golus”. Take a look below and see if you think I got them right. Any idea who or what he could be talking about?

——————-

Updates

1/13 – I didn’t have much time to poke around when I wrote this yesterday, but a quick Web search today reveals a bit about the term “Golus.” “The Golus,” as my grandfather uses it, roughly refers to the Diaspora and the plight of Jews in exile. So, when he refers to “Dr. M’s” story of Jews being shipped to Siberia as “one picture of the Golus,” he means it’s one example of Jewish suffering in the absence of a Jewish homeland. The more strident Zionists scorned and sought to eliminate the “golus mentality,” which they saw as a tendency for Jews to resign themselves to defeat and abuse.

Papa didn’t have a violent bone in his body (my mother tells a story of him reprimanding my cousin for swatting a bee because “even a bee has a right to live”) but he must have had a touch of distaste for the image of the “golus Jew,” else he wouldn’t have pushed to nickname his B’nai Zion lodge “The Maccabeans” after the Jewish warrior heroes of the Hannukah story.

2/4 – I just came across a February 26th article in the New York Times about the Yiddish theater that mentions Cafe Royal. Looks like it was on 2nd Avenue and 12th street and was, according to the article, a hangout for Yiddish actors. My mother adds that “it was a gathering place for ‘intelligentsia’ to meet, greet and harangue each other. It was very popular back in the day.”

4/7 – Ari, an Assistant Professor of American Studies at UC Davis, adds:

…Second Avenue was known as “the Yiddish Rialto” or Yiddish Broadway, as it housed most of the Yiddish theaters in NYC. The Royal was the hangout for artists and intellectuals, who would go there before and after the shows, to debate politics, communism, and whatever they wanted to.

And:

Dr. Murdoni is, in fact, Alexander Mukdoni, a prominent and prolific Yiddish theater critic. Most of his work is rendered in Yiddish, and not much of it is translated, but there should be a good bio out there somewhere. He was quite well-respected and very serious about his criticism, scholarship and journalism.

Sunday Jan 13

by


Visited Freides children at
Claras house, and then
visited Herman at home to comfort them
Did not work today

————–

Matt’s Notes

I assume Papa is comforting Herman over the death of cousin Freida Kurtzberg, but I haven’t been able to learn yet who Herman or Freida were or what their relationship was.

The Clara referred to here is not Papa’s cousin Clara mentioned in a previous post, but Papa’s younger sister Clara, known to me (not surprisingly) as “Aunt Clara.”

I don’t remember Clara as much more than a wizened, friendly woman with a thick accent. My last memory of her is at my Bar Mitzvah in 1979, at which point she had shrunk to just about the size of a walnut and was confined to a wheelchair. Sensitive to her condition and respectful of her elder status, I thereafter referred to her as “Disco Clara.”

But as I write this now and react to the first mention of Clara in Papa’s diary, I’m flooded suddenly with a feeling I can’t name, flooded with a sense of the voluminous connection between two such lives, so many stories between them: of a younger brother taking his sister’s hand in the crush of her arrival at Ellis Island; of the room they shared while penniless; of the precious steadiness they nurtured together against the maddening whirl of tenement life; of the suspenseful illnesses; of the optimism glimpsed through her marriage, his work; of the aid he gave her when her luck turned; of the sheer volumes of words spoken, dinners attended, celebrations and vigils; of the gifts he bought her children; of his own long-awaited marriage, and, at last, the birth of his own child; of the times she stopped and wondered how she had such a brother, how he had so much charity left for so many others when what he did for her alone would have been enough; of his illness and death, an unimaginable loss dealt so many years before she would, frail and at the end of her own life, watch his grandson at the lectern.

My sister and I live around the corner from each other, just like Papa and Clara did in 1924.

—————-

Updates

1/14 – I made some slight modifications to the above passage to correct a few errant details since I published it yesterday.

And here’s Aunt Clara at my Bar Mitzvah:

Monday Jan 14

by

6:30 am Slept last night with
checker, and now am writing at
Claras house for the morning services
at which a child of a friend will
be named after the departed cousin

10:30P.M.
I did not work today I
wandered around many
places, and I am dead tired. For the first time
I am going to retire early today

Received an annoying
letter from father, my mother
did not feel well.
Oh god keep my parents safe
and in good health.

————

Matt’s Notes

It’s a little incongruous to see Papa describe a worrisome letter from his father as “annoying,” considering how he follows it up with a sincere prayer for his parents’ health. Maybe “annoying” had a different connotation back then, or maybe, having just read a letter from home in what was probably Yiddish, German or Hungarian (or one of the other six or seven languages he grew up with) Papa is thinking in another language and has therefore slightly mistranslated an appropriate foreign word for “worrisome” into the less appropriate “annoying.”

The point is, kids, you should never call your parents annoying. I certainly never would.

This entry also has a word I can’t figure out in the second line — it looks like “checker” but I don’t know why he would say “slept last night with checker.” I assume Papa’s saying he slept outside of his home, maybe at his sister’s, but I’m not sure. Any ideas?

Tuesday Jan 15

by

Reading all evening

Man . by Sir John Davis

I know my soul hath power to know all things,
Yet she is blind and ignorant in all:
I know I’m one of Nature’s little kings,
Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

I know my life’s a pain and but a span;
I know my sense is mock’d in everything;
And, to conclude, I know myself a Man –
Which is proud and yet a wretched thing.

Matt’s Note:

This poem is by John Davies. (I originally transcribed it as Davis, but on closer inspection it looks like Papa wrote it correctly.)

Wednesday Jan 16

by


Living in board it is really
so hard to get an appointment to
make my entries, just when I
feel like doing it, I am somehow
prevented.

Received invitation to
attend a party at the
Kessler Zion Club Saturday.

—————-

The next time I want to complain about not having enough time to myself, I’ll have to remember to say something classy like “it is really so hard to get an appointment to watch my Netflix.”

Papa’s complaint is far less petty, of course. His living situation is more comfortable than when he first arrived in America and slept head-by-toe with his two sisters in a cousin’s bed, but he’s still boarding in a tenement apartment where privacy is precious. What prevents his “appointments” with his diary, other than tubercular neighbors wandering in for help? How many hours does he lose in line for the hallway bathroom, how many times must he hastily hide his diary when his hosts suddenly arrive home, how often do the lights fail? When he says he listens to his radio and reads by himself, is he really by himself, or does he just stick on his headphones and tune out the noise and activity around him?

I wonder, too if Papa is apologizing to future readers for the day’s short, furtive entry, as if he feels a responsibility to, say, his unborn grandchildren to keep a complete journal. (I feel a little guilty when I don’t get to spend as much time on this blog as a like. A family trait?) Then again, I’m doing this project in part because I wish I’d known him longer, spent more time in his presence, shared more words with him. Maybe I want to think he’s apologizing to me for his short entry because I just want him to talk to me in any way.

Hmmm. This post is, ironically, turning into a bigger subject than I have time to write about now. I’ll make an “appointment” to revisit it.

—

Updates

I guess some bigger questions about my grandfather are: Who did he feel most responsible to when he wrote this? His parents? His sisters? Zionism? Posterity, as I initially thought? What underlies his need to explain why he can’t write in his diary to his satisfaction? What standards has he set for himself? I know his father was a hero to him. Is that who he’s talking to, whose standards he wants to meet?

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