munger

Wednesday Apr 23

by


Visited Kinereth Camp
in Borough Park with
Jack, Julius and Shapiro
there were representatives
of other Camps, The occasion
was a Passover festival

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Matt’s Notes

Papa, Jack, Julius and Shapiro were all members of B’nai Zion, a fraternal order that, like many such organizations, provided support services to its members (like life insurance and burial services) but also had a strong Zionist agenda. Papa was Master of Ceremonies of his chapter, or camp, which had formed only a few months earlier. At the time, he argued to nickname his camp “The Maccabeans” after the Jewish warriors of old. This resulted in what he called a “big battle” — perhaps his fellow members objected to the political or social implications of such an aggressive nickname — but, driven by his desire to challenge the popular image of Jews as weak and vulnerable, Papa eventually prevailed.

Though a chapter’s nickname was worth battling over, I hadn’t thought much about what other B’nai Zion chapters might have called themselves until I read about the “Kinereth” camp in today’s entry. Kinneret is the Hebrew word for the Sea of Galilee and, more significantly, the name of an early kibbutz, or collective farm, built on its banks. Maybe the Borough Park members chose this nickname because they felt like pioneers out in distant Brooklyn (so far from B’nai Zion’s head office on 23rd Street in Manhattan). The name’s socialist-agrarian flavor is certainly on the mellower side, though the settlers who started Kvutsak Kinneret in the early 1900’s must have been mighty rugged, tenacious people.

I wonder how much a chapter’s nickname really reflected its personality. Papa and his Maccabean pals certainly weren’t prancing around the B’nai Zion Passover party like young Turks, turning over tables and snatching matzoh out of the hands of less assertively-nicknamed chapter members. Still, I would wager his camp’s nickname continued to trigger debates at larger gatherings. How would such arguments have sounded, at a time when Zionist organizations felt that the future could turn on every gesture?

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Additional References

Thursday Apr 24

by


Enjoyed movie
The Song of Love, at Clinton

I am alarmed I have
not heard from parents
for a long time. —

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Matt’s Notes

As Papa mentioned in an earlier entry, he loved to escape from his daily worries to the “land of enchantment” he found at the movies, an easy enough vice to indulge since both the Clinton Theatre and the Loewe’s Delancey were around the corner from his apartment.


The Song of Love would have met Papa’s need for escapism; it was a big-budget Arabian extravaganza starring Norma Talmadge (“the highest-salaried screen actress,” according to the New York Times review) playing a French spy masquerading as an Algerian belly dancer. Time Magazine described this as Talmadge’s “first semi-vamp role,” certainly a big deal at the time, though I imagine it was equally unusual for films to have a female co-director as this one did in the person of Frances Marion.

I haven’t seen The Song of Love and it doesn’t appear to be available on video (has anyone out there seen it?) but I did find this picture of Normal Talmadge at the Library of Congress Web site:

Norma Talmadge

Papa had little relief from his anxiety over his ailing father in the old country — his “alarmed” words at the end of this entry even look anxious on the page — so I hope the lovely Ms. Talmadge’s excursion into cinematic sensuality was enough to distract him, for at least a little while, from his worries.

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Additional References

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Image source:

Norma Talmadge. Library of Congress #LC-B2- 5472-10

Friday Apr 25

by

Had dinner this eve at
Claras house, Nettie and Philip and
little Rosie, Max and Dora Breindel
were there too,

Later came Eva, Sadie
and others

A nice little home affair

—————

Matt’s Notes

A few days ago I mistakenly speculated that “little Sadie” was a woman Papa got set up with, but as it turns out Sadie, Eva and Clara were the daughters of Max and Dora Breindel, the cousins who gave Papa and his sister Nettie a place to stay when they first came to New York.1 Papa and Nettie had actually shared a bed with the three Breindel sisters for a long while (in later years my grandmother would jokingly shout “you slept with my husband!” when she ran into Sadie) and apparently everyone enjoyed themselves immensely during that time. (I wonder if, having gotten to know each other under such close and adventurous circumstances, they all regressed and behaved like kids when they got together in later years. What games had they played? What secret language had they developed?)

I think a “nice little home affair” (probably Passover-related, since it happened at the tail end of Passover week, when traditional Jews get together) was just what Papa needed. The holiday had intensified his longing to be with his father, who was struggling with a protracted illness in the old country. He’d written, just the day before, about how “alarmed” he was over the lack of contact from his parents, though I think this was just one intense manifestation of the powerful, pervasive homesickness behind Papa’s chronic loneliness. Perhaps Max and Dora, who had welcomed Papa when he arrived at Ellis Island in 1913, reminded him of a time when his memories of home were still fresh, and the voices of his friends and family still rang in his ears.

—————-

Additional Notes

1 – How could I have erred so profoundly about Sadie’s identity, you ask? I made the mistake of neglecting to run her name past my mother before writing my initial post about her, and I took a gamble and assumed she would remain as mysterious as many of the other people Papa mentions in his diary. In fact, my mother says “they were all lovely people, with whom our family was most friendly in later life.” Lesson learned.

Saturday Apr 26

by


Had Miss Rosen out at
Ball game, I was glad
after I saw her home. —

She is far from the type that
I need, No more such
matrimonial tryouts.

Spent the entire evening
visiting various Zionist
Clubs on the East Side.

———-

Matt’s Notes

Poor Miss Rosen. Papa had been down on her from the moment his friends, the Linzers, introduced him to her a few days earlier, and she obviously didn’t help her cause at the ball park. (I’m tempted to say she “struck out” at the game, but as you can see I restrained myself.)

I’m not sure which game they saw that day, but Papa must have felt heavily handicapped by Miss Rosen if he couldn’t enjoy himself at either. Out in Brooklyn, the National League champion Giants climbed into first place with a 5-2 victory over the Robins (a.k.a. Dodgers) which would have been tough enough to frown through on a sunny, 60-degree day. Meanwhile, up at the Stadium, the Yankees defeated the Red Sox, 4-3, in an 11-inning thriller that included an inside-the-park home run by Wallie Pipp and a game-winning bunt by Whitey Witt. “Search the records far and wide and you won’t find many better games,” declared the New York Times, “it was packed with all the thrills of a lifetime.”

Papa would have needed catastrophically bad chemistry with Miss Rosen to see such games and remain unmoved. But what offense could she have given? Did she eat ketchup on her hot dog? Did she say she didn’t like movies? Had she never heard of Palestine? It’s hard for me to imagine what might have made Papa so dismissive of her, but maybe his romantic sensibilities didn’t permit him to enjoy something as crass as a “matrimonial tryout.” Maybe Miss Rosen wasn’t really that “far from the type” Papa needed — she just might have been a victim of his desire for a less contrived love story.

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Additional Notes:

I think Papa says “spent the entire evening” at the beginning of the third paragraph of this entry, but I’m not sure if I have the word “entire” right. Here’s what it looks like:

Please write or drop a comment if this looks like something else to you.

Also, if you’re a baseball fan, do yourself a favor and check out the Times‘ recaps of the day’s games. I can’t get enough of their baseball writers’ bemused tone:

Sunday Apr 27

by


Again an unexpected
dissappointment by Henriette
By something unforeseen
she could not join me to the
party at Shapiros,

I went alone, but not the
only one to come alone.

It was a kind of reunion
of old times in my group
and credit to Shapiro for the
wonderful arrangements.

————-

Matt’s Notes

For those of us who have been following the story of Papa and Henriette, a.k.a. “The 20th Century Girl,” the disappointment she caused him is hardly “unexpected,” but then again neither is his willingness to be surprised by her unreliability.

She had proved, again and again, to be aloof and shallow, a poor Jew with sophisticated pretensions and little regard for Papa’s gentle advances (in his typically courteous, old world way, he courted her with a night at the opera and mailed a follow-up letter to declare his affections). Yet Papa, who never held grudges, who believed that people would, if given the chance, eventually show their good sides, does not judge Henriette harshly, does not seem angry even though she had accepted his written invitation to Shapiro’s party a week earlier. He even manages to put a good spin on it — “I went alone, but not the only one to come alone” — and thus absolves her further.

A reporter interviewed me about this site a couple of weeks ago and asked what similarities and differences I’ve discovered between myself and Papa. It’s not an easy question, because one point of this project is to figure out how, if he died when I was four, I can figure out whether he was a genuine influence on me, whether I can evolve into the same kind of adult he did. Yet I do know I’m far less forgiving of Henriette than he was. I get furious when I read about her behavior. And so I wonder if that capacity for forgiveness, which makes it so difficult for him to finally dismiss Henriette and see her as the highly flawed, unimpressive person she is, is another quality that, like Papa’s idealism, has a dual edge.

On the one hand, Papa allows himself to feel disappointed and stung by people when they don’t behave as he hopes they will. Constant hopefulness cannot help but lead to frequent disappointment. Yet it prompts me to ask a variation of a question I posed a few weeks ago: when does hopefulness, which makes a young man suffer the pangs of naiveté, evolve into something so useful that it allows a grown man to live so remarkably? For his hopefulness and generosity of spirit is also what made him such a memorable, positive and serene person, someone who lived through the traumas of his generation yet conducted himself without bitterness or resentfulness, someone who so affected me before his departure in my fourth year that, thirty-six years later, I search his diary every day for the feel of his presence, even though I can hardly remember the sound of his voice.

Monday Apr 28

by


Matt’s Notes

home radio

Hurrah the Gypsy Orchestra
The most fascinating on he
air is here. The first number,
Gypsy Chardash 2) Tosca,
3. Shuberts Waltz op 64#2
4. Serenade by Drigo
5 Indian Love Lyrics

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Matt’s Notes

If you’re at all interested in the evolution of American media, Papa’s accounts of his radio listening are truly precious artifacts. They allow us to witness a moment of enormous transition in our culture, when the broadcast industry was barely two years old and, like a two-year-old child, was growing furiously, dashing about like mad on its newfound legs, and shouting its head off even though it didn’t quite know what to say. It’s amazing to think that just three years before Papa wrote this entry, “wireless” communication was known only to military personnel and the few crazed enthusiasts willing to build their own radio transceivers and spread the broadcast gospel (not that there was always much of a distinction in the early days, since many engineers who served in World War I were recruited from the ranks of these ur-nerds)1.

It looks like Papa was a bit of a technical enthusiast himself. Though all-in-one radios with cabinet configurations or Victrola-style horn speakers were commercially available in 1924, the photo below shows him listening to a much earlier radio set:

The headphones he’s using, along with the overall messy look of the radio, indicate that it was most likely hand-built:

It also looks like Papa’s early radio enthusiasm reflected the broader Jewish community’s attitudes of the day; radio listings appeared in the Daily Forward (the influential left-leaning Yiddish language newspaper) as early as 1923. Papa undoubtedly checked out these listings every day, and maybe even let out a little “hurrah” when he saw a mention of his beloved Gypsy String Orchestra, “the most fascinating on the air.” (It’s interesting to note that the expression “on the air” was in circulation even at this early point in broadcasting history.)

The phrase “Gypsy String Orchestra” refers generally to a type of music ensemble, but in this case probably refers specifically to a group of New York-area musicians known for their appearances at such venues as Cafe Royal, The Rainbow Restaurant, and the Parkway Restaurant.2 Few recordings of 1920’s radio exist so it’s unlikely that we’ll ever know exactly what Papa listened to, but the wonderful Internets do afford us a chance to hear some early recordings of the songs he mentions above.

Here’s a 1921 Edison Diamond Disc recording of “Indian Love Lyrics” from the Library of Congress:

And here’s a 1920’s-ish “Chardash” (a.k.a. “tsardas,” “czardas,” “tzardash,” etc.) from Archive.org:

For good measure, here’s a “Gypsy Love Song” from 1923:

According to our friend Jill, who knows about such things, a Tzardash is technically more of a Hungarian folk form than truly Romani (i.e. more Gypsy-like than Gypsy) and points out that “in parts of austria and the old austro-hungarian empire– and still today in vienna– there are hungarian musicians who travel around and play hungarian folk music in the street. but i could see how one could take them to be gypsies or conflate it with gypsy music.” Papa probably did exactly that, though I expect less because he was Austro-Hungarian than because it was common practice in the 20’s to label Hungarian music as “gypsy” — or at least is was for the Gypsy String Orchestra and the group that recorded the above Tzardash, Bibor Olga Ciganyzenekara or (Olga Bibor’s Gypsy Ensemble).

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Update 4/29 — Well, that was fortuitous. I just stuck the “Gypsy Love Song” clip on this post because it happened to be on Archive.org, not because Papa mentioned it specifically. But, my mother just wrote to say “I can remember, as a little girl, Papa singing the Gypsy Serenade to me. What lovely memories this evoked.” How about that.

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References:

1 – I got this from Erik Barnouw’s A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933.

2 – Most of the information about the Jewish relationship to early radio and the cultural scene of the 20’s comes from Ari K., an academic advisor to this site. If you want to know more, you can purchase a copy of his dissertation at the University Microfilms (UMI) site. The site is stunningly shitty, but the dissertation number is 1392538.

I can’t find Web streams of the other pieces Papa mentions above, though most appear to be available in modern recordings (alas, I find no references to Schubert’s Op. 64 #2). I’m playing the above-mentioned “Serenade,” a selection from Richard Drigo’s ballet Les Millions d’Arlequin, right now. Anyway, here are some sources:

Tuesday Apr 29

by


The climax of the
White Sister
at the Capitol Theatre
brought forward my tears

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Matt’s Notes

When I watched A Woman of Paris, one of the movies mentioned in Papa’s diary, I was pleasantly reminded of the artistry and maturity of 1920’s silent films and noted how surprisingly subtle and persuasive many of the performances were. The White Sister, which I watched yesterday, is much more of a Hollywood extravaganza, replete with exotic locales, grand special effects and feverishly manufactured plot twists, but it does bear out Norma Desmond’s great boast about silent film actors: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” In this case the face belongs to Lillian Gish, whose heartbreaking expressions and powerful charisma (apparent even in the film’s abysmally poor video version) transcend the movie’s contrivances and give it real emotional resonance. (“There is something about her hopeless wistfulness that squeezes sobs from the coldest heart,” said Time magazine of Gish.)

Lillian Gish

Gish plays Italian countess Angela Chiaromonte, who decides to become a nun after her jealous stepsister Marchesa (Gail Kane) robs her of her inheritance and her fiancee, Govanni Severini (Ronald Colman) seemingly dies on an African military mission. Govanni has, in fact, merely been imprisoned by Arab bandits, but Angela has already taken her vows by the time he escapes his captors and returns to Italy. He tries desperately to get Angela to leave the Church, but she takes her marriage to Christ seriously and will not budge (melodramatic, yes, but Gish expresses her sorrow and resolve convincingly).

As I watched the climax to figure out what Papa could have found so moving, I was initially stumped because it overdoes the deux ex machina something fierce, with a volcano eruption and a resulting flood forcing the resolution (even the New York Times reviewer, who lavished praise on the film’s grand landscapes and “serious, enthralling narrative,” found the ending “dissapointing”). The ending’s biggest problem is Govanni’s death — he drowns while saving people from the flood, but instead of affirming his character’s nobility this episode just feels like a handy mechanism for the filmmakers, who need to dispense with Govanni somehow (we never quite stop wanting Angela to renounce her vows and marry him, and that would do at all).

The climax also finds Angela’s treacherous stepsister Marchesa mortally wounded in a carriage accident. She crawls to Angela’s church to seek absolution for cheating Angela out of her inheritance, and, in her delirious state, mistakes Angela for a priest and confesses to her. Here, I think, is where Papa must have taken notice: Dying in Angela’s arms, Marchesa wonders aloud if Angela could ever forgive her, and Angela, mustering all her will and mastering all her pain, says:

God is love – she has forgiven you.

Papa, who based so much of his behavior on a deep, spiritual belief in the power of forgiveness, must have understood this moment keenly. And as I think more about the circumstances of Papa’s life when he saw this film, I realize the story must have touched him in other ways, too: How could he have watched the death of Angela’s wise, loving father in the movie’s opening scenes without thinking of his own father, so sick and so far away? How could he have watched the behavior of Angela’s resentful stepsister without thinking of his own brother Isaac, who so upset Papa by berating him for not sending more money to the old country? How could he have watched Angela vow to spend her life in the service of others without thinking of the sacrifices and efforts he made on behalf of his own people? It’s no wonder that Angela’s climactic moment of forgiveness “brought forward” his tears — for how could he be told, by Lillian Gish, no less, that all his loneliness and longing and trials might, in the end, be worth it, and not cry with relief?

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Speaking of tears, I have to confess I find it very hard to hold back my own when I watch the movies or listen to the songs Papa mentions in his diary. To hear the things he heard and to see the things he saw allow me — almost, almost — to be like Papa, to be with Papa, two things I want so much. I can’t not watch, I can’t not listen. But it breaks my heart. The films are here. The songs are here. But he is gone. He is gone.

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References:

And here’s the Capitol Theatre, where Papa saw The White Sister

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Image Credits: