munger

May 7, 1925 – Brooklyn

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[Note: This postcard is the ninth note Papa wrote to my grandmother while she was vacationing at her cousin’s farm in Connecticut. It’s also the last surviving bit of Papa’s correspondence from the year 1925. To see a full-sized scan of the card, click the thumbnail image on the right of this page.]

——–


N.Y. Thursday May 7th, 1925
12 noon

My dear Jeanie:

I showed them the pictures, and they were all
glad to see them.1

There was a portly girl I just don’t remember
her name but she seems to be very much in love
with Bob.2 She played the piano and Bob the violin
but father refused to sing his famous song
A Yingele fon Poilen.3 Yes you ought to see Honey
with his new boyish haircut, He recognized on the
pictures, Symie, the dog Barney and almost everybody.4

Please write me exactly the time when you’re leaving
With kindest regards to all I am yours faithfully

Harry

————-

Matt’s Notes

1 – In his last letter, Papa mentioned his intention to visit my grandmother’s family and show them pictures he’d taken while visiting her for the weekend at her cousin’s farm in Connecticut. Even though they didn’t seem especially anxious to have her back — her sister Sally certainly wasn’t sorry to see her go and her mother had suggested that she stay in the country an extra week — Papa obviously thought her family shared his inability to live without a glimpse of her a moment longer.

2 – As we’ve mentioned before, my grandmother’s brother, Bob, was a bit of a rake and his family was probably quite familiar with him bringing home women who seemed “very much in love” with him.

3 – The Yiddish song “A Yingele fon Poilen (A Little One from Poland)”, also known as “Di Mame iz Gegangen in Mark Arayn” (Mother Went to Market)”, tells the story of a young man whose mother introduces him to several lovely young women, one of whom he eventually falls in love with. Dozens of artists from Itzak Perlman to the Klezmatics have made recordings of this song, including this one by the Kharkof Klezmer Band (via Last.fm):

There are a couple of translations of this song floating around the Internets, but the most authoritative seems to be this one from the 2000 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival Web site:

“Di Mame iz Gegangen in Mark Arayn”

Oy di Mameh iz gegangen in mark arayn noch kayln.
Oy hot zi mir tzurichgebracht a maydeleh fun Payln.
Ay ay iz dos a maydeleh, a shayns un a feins,
Oy mit di shvartzeh aygelech, oy ketzeleh du meins.

Oy di Mameh iz gegangen in mark arayn noch krayt.
Oy hot zi mir tzurichgebracht a maydeleh fun bayd.
Ay ay iz dos a maydeleh, a shayns un a feins,
Oy mit di shvartzeh aygelech, oy ketzeleh du meins

Oy di mameh is gegangen in mark noch a katchkeh.
Oy hot zi mir tzurichgebracht a maydeleh, a tzatzkeh.
Ay ay iz dos a maydeleh, a shayns un a feins,
Oy mit di viseh tzayndelech, oy ketzeleh du meins.

Ich hob gegessen mandlen; Ich hob getrunken vein;
Ich hob geleibt a maydeleh; Ich ken ohn ir nit zein.
Ay ay iz dos a maydeleh, a shayns un a feins,
Oy mit di rayteh bekelech, oy ketzeleh du meins.

Translation

“Mother Went to Market”

Oh, Mother went to market to buy coal.
She brought me back a girl from Poland.
Oh, what a girl, beautiful and fine,
With those black eyes, little kitten you’re mine

Oh, Mother went to market to buy cabbage.
She brought me back a girl, just off the carriage.
Oh, what a girl, beautiful and fine,
With those black eyes, little kitten you’re mine.

Oh, Mother went to market to get a duck.
She brought me back a girl, a treasure.
Oh, what a girl, beautiful and fine,
With those white teeth, little kitten you’re mine.

I’ve eaten almonds; I’ve drunk wine;
I’ve loved a girl; I can’t live without her.
Oh, what a girl, beautiful and fine;
With those rosy cheeks, little kitten you’re mine.

“A Yingele fon Poilen” was well-known in the Yiddish-speaking community at large, and my grandmother’s father must have sung it a lot if Papa called it “his famous song.” So why was my great-grandfather reluctant to sing it on this occasion, especially since his violin-playing son, Bob, and Bob’s piano-playing girlfriend could have accompanied him? We can’t know, of course, but I tend to think he didn’t approve of Bob’s new girlfriend and didn’t want to give her a tacit endorsement by joining her in a song about a Jewish boy in love.

This may seem like a lot to infer from a short line in a postcard, but it wouldn’t be out of character for my grandmother’s parents to disapprove of a potential child-in-law so overtly. As you may recall, they originally wanted Papa to marry my grandmother’s relatively undesirable sister, Sally; Papa may have been a poor factory worker, but they figured he was better than nothing. When he fell in love with my young, beautiful grandmother instead, they tried for years to cool his ardor. My great-grandfather directly asked Papa to forget about her and pay attention to Sally, and when that didn’t work the family tried to turn Papa off to my grandmother by messing up her hair and dressing her in unflattering clothes and glasses when he would come around. Eventually they became plain unfriendly to Papa, according to my mother. Did my great-grandfather stop singing “A Yingele fon Poilen” in front of him, too?

4 – As mentioned previously, “Honey” was the nickname of my great-aunt Rose’s son, Harold. We don’t know who “Symie” was, but he certainly had a good nickname.

————–

References:

Other recordings of “A Yingele fon Poilen”, a.k.a. “Di Mame iz Gegangen in Mark Arayn”, available on the Web include:

June 26, 1926 (A.M.) – Buffalo

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[Note: This postcard is the first note Papa wrote to my grandmother while he was at a Zionist Organization of America conference in 1926. To see large-sized images of the card, click the thumbnail images on the right of this page.]

——–


Sat. Morning

My dear Jeanie:

Well I am here, I retired
in my sleeper in N.Y. and awoke
this morning in Bufalo. It is
a fine town. I am now preparing
my ammunition to shoot pictures
at Niagara Falls. It feels great
to be here among so many
co-idealists,1 There is no sea as
in Long Branch2 but I’ll have
enough of the falls. My friends
are rushing me and the bus is
waiting to take me to the falls.
I therefore write only a card3

Harry

—————

Matt’s Notes

1 – Papa was in Buffalo “among so many co-idealists” at the 29th annual convention of the Zionist Organization of America.

2 – Five days earlier, Papa had gone to Long Branch, New Jersey to attend the convention of Order Sons of Zion (a.k.a. B’nai Zion) the Zionist fraternal order and mutual support society to which he belonged. The New York Times briefly described this gathering:

Sons of Zion in Convention

Long Branch, N.J. June 20 –

Two hundred delegates and as many
more visitors attended the opening of
the seventeenth annual convention of
the order Sons of Zion at the Scarboro
Hotel today. Commissioner W. Stan-
ley Bouse welcomed the delegates.
Louis Lipsky, Chairman of the Zionist
Committee, spoke. The convention
closes tomorrow, when new officers
will be installed.

And, the next day:

Sons of Zion Elect Officers

Long Branch, N.J. June 21.–

The Sons of Zion, meeting in the Scar-
boro Hotel here today, elected Sol
Friedman of New York, President;
Judge Jacob S. Strahl, New York, Vice
President; Jacob I Kiskor, Brooklyn,
Secretary, and Max Fenwick, New York,
Treasurer.

Long Branch was a well-established beach resort community at the time, less than 20 miles as the crow flies from Papa’s usual seaside haunts at Coney Island:

Papa probably attended the Sons of Zion conference with the same fraternal brothers, like Blaustein, Bluestone, and Zichlinsky, that he used visit Coney with in 1924. The conference may have been all business, but I’m sure Papa’s ocean-loving crew found a moment to join the frolicsome crowds on the beach, like those pictured in this 1923 photo of Long Branch:

Here’s a shot of Long Branch’s Broadway as it may have looked to Papa during the busy summer season:

And here’s the Scarboro hotel, where the B’nai Zion conference took place and where Papa most likely stayed. According to Eddie at historiclongbranch.org (the source of all these Long Branch images) the corner of Bath and Ocean Avenues saw two incarnations of the Scarboro hotel over the years, but by the time Papa got there the newer, modern version was in place:

We should also note that Judge Jacob Strahl, the newly elected President of B’nai Zion mentioned in the Times article above, made a couple of personal appearances in Papa’s 1924 diary: one in which Papa accompanied him home from the Bronx after a lecture, and one in which Papa attended a dinner in his honor.

3 – The front of this particular card reads:

67:–Statler Hotel and McKinley Monument, Buffalo, N.Y.

Buffalo was the site of hotel pioneer E.M. Statler’s first permanent hotel. Built in 1907, it featured amenities for which his hotel chain would later become famous: cheerful service, affordable rates, and luxuries, like bathrooms in every room, normally unavailable to proletarian travelers. (As my legions of readers who get together each weekend to quiz each other on Papa’s Diary trivia no doubt are aware, my comments on Papa’s January 30th, 1924 diary entry quotes a brochure about Statler’s Hotel Pennsylvania in New York that advertises these very sorts of advantages.)

Like the Hotel Scarboro in Long Branch, the above-pictured version of the Statler Hotel that Papa stayed in was not the original, but a second incarnation. Statler built it in 1923 (and renamed the first Statler the Hotel Buffalo) so when Papa stayed there in 1926 it must have still felt fresh, novel and impressive. It may well have been the most comfortable place that Papa ever stayed, since until then he had known only Jewish ghetto life in Eastern Europe and tenement life on the Lower East Side of New York. Developers converted the building to office space in 1984 and renamed it Statler Towers, but as of this writing it’s under new ownership and on its way to becoming a mixture of condominium, hotel and commercial space.

Interestingly, Papa addressed this card not to my grandmother’s home on Hart Street in Brooklyn, but to an address just around the corner at 185 Pulaski Street. No one in my family is entirely sure what was at this address, but we think it was a factory owned by my great-grandfather and that my grandmother worked there. This is probably right. Mail was delivered twice a day in those days, so Papa would have addressed letters to her daytime address to make sure she got them as soon as possible. Perhaps he thought this would give him an advantage over other suitors who, he was convinced, were competing with him for her affections.

————

References:

June 26, 1926 (P.M.) – Buffalo

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[Note: This postcard is the second note Papa wrote to my grandmother while he was in Buffalo for a Zionist Organization of America conference in 1926. To see a larger view of the card, click the thumbnail image on the right side of this page.]

——–


Sat. Afternoon

My dear Jeanie:

I am in Canada now1,
The sight of the falls on both
sides in indescribable.2
For heavens sake, someday
I must take you out here
to see one of the worlds
wonders.3 Harry

———–

1 – In his previous card, Papa mentioned that he was about to get on a bus to Niagara Falls. It was typical for him to write my grandmother morning and night when he was separated from her.

2 – The Falls were indescribable for Papa, perhaps, but whoever wrote the copy for the back of this postcard compensated with a Niagra-like torrent of descriptors:

NIAGARA FALLS BY ILLUMINATION
This new beauty of Niagara differs from
the beauty that the Creator made working
through inanimate life. For here He
worked through the inventive genius of
man, and gave Niagara a new glory that
can be turned on and off at the mere
pressing of a switch-button, throwing
on the billion candle power batter of elec-
tric searchlight which floodlights the Falls,
the batteries being hidden in the foliage
work invisibly and in no way mare the
scenery with the imprint of man’s hand.
Nor does the conquest end here, for the
searchlights of Niagara when sent upward
into the sky may be seen for seventy five
miles away.

This breathless passage takes up almost the entire back of the card and forced Papa to squeeze his note to my grandmother into the limited remaining space. I suppose the lighting of Niagara Falls was truly remarkable in a world where electric light was still making its way into everyday life, so perhaps we should forgive our postcard writer’s wordy triumphalism. Meanwhile, those who prefer a slightly more objective description can turn to a New York Times report on the debut of the Fall’s evening light show, which occurred just over a year before Papa’s visit:

Niagara Falls Glows Under Electric Lights
As Vast Beams of Colors Flash Upon It

NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y., May 1925 Niagara was illuminated tonight by electric light of 1,300,000,000 candle power, generated by its own power…

On top of an old spillway in Victoria Park on the Canadian side, midway between the Horseshoe and the American Falls, a battery of twenty-four 36-inch Ryan scintillators had been placed, under the direction of W. D’Arcy Ryan, illuminating engineer of the General Electric Company. When night settled the lights were turned on. The initial beams were of white light, and the falls took on the appearance of milk pouring from the higher to the lower level.

As the display progressed color screens were brought into service. There were red, orange, green, blue and violet of the spectrum colors and deep red and magenta of the special colors, while the soft colors were pale blue, orange and rose. A change of screens made the falls look like a torrent of blood. Another change gave an orange hue to the falling waters, which turned to green with another shifting of screens.

For the record, the Horseshoe Falls had felt the touch of electric illumination, if only momentarily, prior to 1925. A Times article published on October 19, 1919 describes a ceremony in which “the Prince of Wales arrived at Niagara Falls, Ont.” as “the guest of Dr. Harry Grant, Park Commissioner of Queen Victoria Park. When the Prince reached Dr. Grant’s house he pushed a button that lighted the Horseshoe Falls. It made a wonderful sight, the first time the Horseshoe Falls have been illuminated.”

3 – Papa did eventually take my grandmother to Niagara Falls — on their honeymoon, of course.

————–

References

June 27, 1926 – Buffalo

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[Note: To see full-sized scans of this letter, click the thumbnail images on the right of this page.]

——–

Please pardon
my abrupt script
and corrections

June 27, 1926.
1:55 a.m.

My dear Jeanie:

This is the third time that I am writing
to you today1, and believe me this certainly
was an adventurous day for me.

I shall try to describe to you in my way of
today’s events.

The day was very fair when a group of
us started out in a big car from the hotel
for the falls, which are twenty-five miles
from here.

After an hour ride we reached the
stormy Niagara river, and soon afterward
the beginning of the American rapids and
a few minutes later we’ve reached our destination.
We came to a spot where the most bewitching
most enchanting (believe me I haven’t got
enough words to describe it) spectacle presented
itself before my eyes.

If I were a poet perhaps I’d be able to give

./.

2

you a fair description of the view, however
I will make an attempt to do it in my
meagre way.

The American part of the falls were before
my eyes, a picture of unsurpassing beauty
and splendor, On a stretch of about 5 city
blocks streams from the Niagara river falling
into a depth of about 200 feet and the suns
reflection makes it look like an endless
stream of pearls, the reaction on the bottom
of the falls makes it look like a huge
white cloud.

After recording things on my camera2
we boarded the car again headed for the
international bridge, after paying a toll
to the American officers of for leaving the country
we reached the Canadian side where
I had to produce my citizen papers
(I took it along as I’ve been told that I’d
need them)3 in order to be let through,
Well in Canada the falls presented themselves
in their full beauty and the Canadian
horseshoe falls are yet more beautiful
than the American.4

./.

3

There I stood as in a haze I could
hardly believe my eyes, I saw Gods
wonder which no artist can paint, I
would travel to the end of the world to see
another such sight, I shall relate to you
in person about this sight.

Now while I Canada I thought it was the
proper time to quench my thirst (Canada
is not a dry country) and revenge myself
on old Volstead,

Yes I drank three glasses of honest to
goodness beer, enough to last me until
the prohibition act is repelled.5

I also brought a little bit of Canadian
candy for you,

Of course by the time you receive this
you will have received the card that
I mailed in Canada.

Well after speeding through some Canadian
Villages we returned late in the afternoon
to the dear old U.S.A.

Here at the hotel we are busy all evening
with receptions tendered in our honor.

./.

I hope that the pictures of the falls that
I’ve snapped come out O.K. especially
the one of myself with the falls as a
background.

I believe that I have faithfully
described to you my experiences, and
now I will call it a day.

You may read this letter to your folks
to whom I’m sending my kindest regards
I expect to be very busy the next 3 days6
however if I should have time I shall
write you more.

Hoping that this finds you in best
of health I am as ever

Your

Harry

—————-

Matt’s Notes

1 – Papa had already sent two postcards to my grandmother after his arrival in Buffalo for the Zionist Organization of America’s annual convention, one immediately before he left his hotel for a tour of Niagara Falls and one a few hours later from the Canadian side of the Falls.

Papa wrote this letter at 1:55 AM on Hotel Statler stationery, presumably in his room. (Little amenities like stationery and pens usually associated with higher-priced hotels helped cement the Statler hotel chain’s reputation among travelers of modest means.) His excitement and exhaustion are evident in the “abrupt script and corrections” for which he apologizes at the top of the letter:

2 – As mentioned previously, I have had Papa’s No. 3A Autographic Kodak (Model C) camera in my possession since I was a kid, and it may be the camera he refers to in this letter. However, the few amateur photo prints I have from this period of Papa’s life are too small to have come from a 3A Autographic, so he may have had a different camera at the time. Alas, I’ll probably never know for sure unless photos from his Buffalo trip turn up somehow.

3 – In July of 1924, Papa wrote in his diary of his frustration with the glacial pace of the naturalization process, so he couldn’t have been a citizen for that long when he visited Canada in June of 1926. Did he feel a little rush of pride when asked to prove his citizenship, or was the commotion at the border (surely all the Zionist companions with whom he rode to the Falls were immigrants and had to produce their papers as well) too distracting?

4 – I’ve seen the Horseshoe falls from the Canadian side and, though the cynic in me wants to say the whole thing is a cheesy tourist trap, I cannot help but agree with Papa. They Falls really are spectacular and I remember them fondly. Alas, not everybody has the same experience:

5 – I love this passage because it comes so unexpectedly and places Papa so squarely in the 1920’s. Alcoholic beverages would have been a real attraction for American tourists who visited the Canadian side of Niagara Falls during Prohibition, and here we have Papa, who wasn’t a big drinker, hitting a bar and downing three beers out of pure excitement. (In later years, according to my mother, he liked to stroll on hot days from his Brighton Beach apartment to a Boardwalk bar and enjoy a glass of bock. I wonder if, having experienced Prohibition firsthand, he had a little more fun than other people did when he ordered a beer legally.)

I had a similar, though less satisfying, experience at the Canadian Falls a few years ago when I bought and smoked a dry, disgusting Cuban cigar just because it was legally available. I suppose, if American-Cuban relations ever normalize, the only harmful vice worth traveling to Canada for will be poutine.

6 – The Zionist Organization of America’s conference in Buffalo had 1000 attendees that year, and Papa was one of 200 from New York. The agenda set forth by Chairman Lewis Lipsky in his opening remarks (delivered, most likely, at one of the “ceremonies” Papa refers to in this letter) included the need to address Britain’s recent lackluster support of the Zionist cause in Palestine and the condemnation of a Joint Distribution Committee effort to designate a region of the Ukraine for Jewish settlement, which the Z.O.A. saw as an attempt to distract Jews from the Zionist cause.

Most absorbing for Papa would have been the the Z.O.A.’s rejeection of a resolution adopted by his own fraternal organization, Order Sons of Zion (a.k.a. B’nai Zion) to push the Zionist movement toward the aggressive, nationalistic, “revisionist” Zionism advocated by Vladimir Jabotinsky. Interestingly, though B’nai Zion had adopted this stance at a conference attended by Papa a few weeks earlier, several prominent B’nai Zion leaders, including the writer Maurice Samuel, objected to it and said so at the Z.O.A. convention. I’m not sure where Papa would have stood, but we know he admired Samuel and may even have been friendly with him (he mentions Samuel several times in his 1924 diary and refers to him as “Maurie” at one point) so I would imagine he joined Samuel among the dissenters.

A final note: In this letter, Papa starts using this symbol at the bottom of every page except the last:

I assume it means “turn the page” or “more to come”. From now on I’ll include it in my transcriptions and write it out as “./.”

———

References:

Some Nice Press from Family Tree Magazine

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The vast and efficient machine that is the Papa’s Diary Project public relations department has scored another coup: A piece in the May issue of the leading genealogy publication Family Tree Magazine, part of a larger spread about the preservation of family diaries.

The editors have been kind enough to let me post the section about Papa’s Diary Project as a PDF, so you can click here or on the image below to grab it.

August 1, 1926 – Brooklyn

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[Note: To see large scans of Papa’s letter, click the thumbnail images on the right of this page.]

——–

New York Aug 1. 1926

My dear Jeanie. —

I was really so dissappointed
when the guard wouldn’t let me
through the gate to the station
platform, which kept me from bidding
your farewell in my way. —1

I called up Rose this afternoon
she says that Herold is feeling
better but he is a little hoarse.

Nothing new has occurred in the
few hours since you left this village.2

I already feel a little lonesome
since I know that you are over a
hundred miles away from [heart] street3
and I cannot see you when I want to.
(I always want to see you)

./.

2.

I am anxiously awaiting mail
from you, telling me how the effect was
of the change of environment, the kind
of fun you’re having,4 how mother is.

I consider myself so intimate to you
having your best interests at heart,
that every bit of good news from you
will make me so much happier.

I shall write to you every day
and if there should be any news
I shall report to you like a faithful
reporter to his boss.

With kindest regards to your
mother.

I am as ever

Your

Harry

P.S.

Regards to Mrs. S. and to Gertie if you see her.

————

Matt’s Notes

1 – Papa wrote his previous set of letters to my grandmother from Buffalo, where he attended a Zionist Organization of America conference in late June. Now it was August and it was my grandmother’s turn to leave New York for her regular summer trip to the country.

Papa’s disappointment over not seeing her off at the train platform in his “own way” may have reflected a greater anxiety about her destination. The Lakeside Inn was located in Ferndale, New York, also home to Grossinger’s, the ultra-popular Catskill Mountain Jewish resort. The previous summer, my grandmother had vacationed at her cousin’s farm in Connecticut, and even though Papa visited and kept tabs on her, he still imagined her surrounded by suitors. (“You are bound to have a lot of fun,” he wrote, and expected she would “find the country hicks regular sheiks beating old Harry”.) With my grandmother now headed off to the very epicenter of the Borcht Belt social scene (the Lakeside Inn was in such close orbit to Grossinger’s that Grossinger’s purchased it for employee housing in the 1950’s) terrible thoughts of her inevitable participation in singles dances, poolside flirtations and campfire snuggling must have driven Papa to distraction.

Perhaps an unwanted goodbye at the train station held other associations for him, too. I cannot help but remember the passage in Papa’s 1924 diary, written in the wake of his father’s death, in which he describes his departure for America from his home town of Sniatyn:

A beautiful Spring night at the
foot of the hill where my hometown
Sniatyn lies, at the Railroad station
early in June 1913, my father went
to bid me farewell on my long Journey
to America.

The train is waiting, a long
embrace a kiss, tears streaming
down from his eyes,

Did he have a premonition that
we would see each other no more?

The train is moving out slowly
and by the light of the moon I
could see through the window in the
distance my father weeping
and wiping his tears.

This incident may have happened in 1913, but Papa still felt its full force when he wrote about it in 1924. Is it unreasonable to think that such a powerful, lasting memory subsequently shadowed moments of departure, difficult farewells, and last looks at train stations throughout his young life? In 1913, the Sniatyn train station was where his boyhood ended, where he suddenly lost a world he would long for but never recapture. In 1926, did he think he’d witnessed, at Grand Central Station, the loss of a future he’d hoped for but might never know?

2 – I know Papa means to be ironic and playful here when he refers to New York as a “village”, but I wonder, in the same vein as the above note, if he unknowingly chose the word because he had his village of Sniatyn on his mind.

3 – Then again, though I believe I’m on to something with the above notes and I do think Papa was genuinely worried about my grandmother’s trip to Ferndale, I don’t mean to say he was overtly depressed when he wrote this letter. In fact, I think he was in a playful mood, hence his boyish urge to write “Hart Street,” where my grandmother lived, in this way:

While we’re looking at a closeup of Papa’s writing, it’s worth pointing out that he wrote this letter on a heretofore unseen type of blue-gray paper densely lined with blue fibers. The sheet is about 10 1/2 by 6 1/2. Papa folded it in half on the vertical and wrote on the front and inside right pages, greeting-card style, after which he folded it horizontally to fit it into a matching envelope.

And speaking of the envelope, the back of it has what seems to be the remnants of a long-ago Yiddish penmanship lesson. The word “Jeanie” (my grandmother’s name) written in childish English handwriting, runs along the middle left of the envelope flap and the Yiddish transliteration of the word — “Djean” — runs along the right side between two hand-drawn horizontal guidelines in what appears to be Papa’s Yiddish hand.

It looks to me like a child got hold of this envelope after it was in my grandmother’s possession and, while playing with a messy fountain pen, wrote “Jeanie” on it. Perhaps Papa saw our youthful scribe in action and decided to show him or her how to write the same word in Yiddish. Who was the child, though? Was it my mother? Was it one of my grandmother’s nieces or nephews? Maybe it was little “Herold”, the son of my grandmother’s sister Rose, whose name appears in this letter.

4 – When Papa asks what “kinds of fun” my grandmother was having, it betrayed, I think, a bit of his anxiousness over the way she was spending her time in Ferndale. As noted above, in a letter from the previous summer he had nervously joked about what a “lot of fun” she would have with the “sheiks” in the country. Now he can’t help but start worrying about the same thing right away; remember, he wrote this letter while she was still on the train and therefore technically incapable of having had any fun yet in Ferndale. She probably wouldn’t have had any fun by the time she received the letter, either. (Nor, for that matter, did she seem to have any fun in the 75 years after she received the letter.) I think Papa was headed for a worrisome few weeks.

————-

References:

  • The fate of the Lakeside Inn gets a mention in Phil Brown’s In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in “The Mountains” (via Google Books).

August 2, 1926 – Brooklyn

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[Note: To see large scans of Papa’s letter, click the thumbnail images on the right of this page.]

——–

New York Aug 1. 1926

August 2, 1926

9 P.M.

My dear Jeanie: –

I am glad at this time to inform you
that Honey is O.K. I called up Rose
just before, Sally answered the phone
she said that he isn’t home any more
he is all well and at this time playing
outside with the kids.1

I tried to call up your father but there
was no answer, I suppose that he must
be in the restaurant now.2

I was in C.I. last night, I took the
Iron Steamboat to the Battery, oh how
it was lonesome, my other friends do
not seem to interest me much now. — 3

Oh Jeanie, you ought to be glad to
be away from the City, this is another
hot day like those of 2 weeks ago
a little shower would be a great relief,4

I do not write much now as I am a little
fatigued from business, but one of this weeks
letters will surely be a bigger one.

Regards to dear mother.

With love,

Harry

————-

1 – Honey, as we’ve mentioned before, was the nickname for Harold, the son of my grandmother’s sister Rose. My grandmother and great-grandmother, who were both vacationing at the Lakeside Inn in Ferndale, NY when Papa wrote this letter, would have been anxious to hear about Harold’s health if he had been ill. My mother tells me that no one in my grandmother’s family liked to use telephones, so this may have been the first news they had of Harold’s recovery.

2 – My great-grandfather was, according to family lore, a rather imperious, traditional sort of man. As such, he certainly wouldn’t have been able to cook for himself, so he must gone out to eat a lot when his wife and daughters weren’t around. I imagine he ate at the same restaurant all the time since Papa refers to it only as “the restaurant” and not by name.

3 – The Iron Steamboat Company started running a ferry from Manhattan to Coney Island in the late 1800’s, and at the time Papa wrote this letter would drop its passengers exclusively at Steeplechase Pier. (Steeplechase Pier was was an entrance to Steeplechase Park, one of Coney’s most famous amusement parks. The Iron Steamboat Company started bringing passengers there in 1911.) The undated postcards below (from a site hosted at USGenNet.org) show a couple of Iron Steamboats in action:

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Papa seems to attribute his loneliness and lack of interest in his friends to my grandmother’s absence, but, interestingly, this isn’t the first time he’s been hit with a blue mood on a Coney Island ferry. His June 22, 1924 diary entry describes a similar experience:

The heat chased me out
to Coney Island, where I
took the first dive in the
cool ocean. Lonely I spent
there several hours and
in the evening I certainly
was refreshed by the cool
ocean breezes on the boat
ride back to town.

I could have stayed on the
island later, but I escaped
the gay throngs on the boardwalk
there was no place for a lone
sad man, to get that boat, but
on the boat again were gay couples
which in my loneliness tended to
make me sadder.

Papa wrote this diary entry a few weeks after his father’s death, a time when he was subject to long bouts of melancholy. In subsequent weeks he would visit Coney Island frequently, but he often felt low and would occasionally take leave of his friends to say kaddish in a nearby synagogue. I wonder, then, if he continued to associate Coney Island with those difficult times and if, when he wrote the above letter to my grandmother two years later, his mournful memories triggered his “lonesome” feelings and his seemingly inexplicable desire to separate from his friends.

I’ve also speculated that crowded boats full of people like himself recalled even more distant memories of his passage to America and, by extension, the family he left behind and missed so terribly. Did all this make his longing for my grandmother even more keen, his loneliness more pronounced?

4 – Temperatures were at 88 and rising on the day Papa wrote this letter, though the late July heat wave he refers to was even worse, with temperatures topping off at 97. The New York Times headlines of the day told tales of massive Coney Island crowds and heat-related deaths and prostrations (see references below). It was certainly a few degrees cooler and less dangerous in “The Mountains”, as my grandmother called the Catskills, where the Lakeside Inn was located.

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References: