munger

——–

March. 18. 1930¹

Beloved:

Before I go to the store I wish to write to you a
few lines, it is raining now and I won’t miss anything
if I’ll get there a little late. ²

You know Dear, your promise to be at the store
tomorrow after the court session was the stimulant that
gave me new life.

I had passed another miserable night in the fear
that I might lose you a thought that is torturing my mind.

You know Beloved: that I am of the idealistic
kind, and of all my ideals you are the one and only one
worth living and fighting for. ³

I have often read of people who who felt tired of
life, then I could hardly conceive anything of the sort, but
last night I felt it, I was so sceptical for a moment that
I really had those thoughts.

Sweetheart! let the opinion about me by your
your better friends like Mr. Richman, Aunt Celia etc.
outweigh that of gossips who really haven’t your best
interests at heart.

Oh Dear: when I reached home last night the world
was dark for me, I was whol wholly distressed.

With you Beloved life will be one of sunshine, everything
happiness, ambition and indefatigable spirit.

Without you (Lord beware) a life of desolation and
neglect, ambition killed and nothing to live and fight for
If I’d hear a melody it would fill my heart with sadness
instead of joy, The sun, the moon in fact everything that
beautiful nature has to offer would only remind me of You Sweetheart
and my lost happiness.

Beloved we are both meant for each other, Believe in
me, trust me. I am fighting my uphill battle and with your
encouragement nothing will stop me from getting to the top. ⁴

I will call you at 1:05 P.M. tomorrow (Wed.) on phone.

Meanwhile Dear Sweetheart Adieu.

Your loving

Harry

—————-

1 – I have only a few of Papa’s letters left and, since I remember how melancholy I felt when I published the last entry in his diary at this time last year, I’ve tried to put off the day when I publish his last letter (and with it the last words of his in my possession) by taking longer and longer between posts. In any event, I’ll pick it up again with this particularly difficult and raw moment in March of 1930, after my grandmother had agreed to marry Papa but had not, apparently, let him think it counted for much.

2 – Papa was an honest and responsible sort who was probably never late to work, much less deliberately so; his need to get his feelings on paper really must have been overwhelming. What could my grandmother have said to him to make him think their engagement was so tenuous? Had she hinted that she might change her mind, or even overtly told him that she was having second thoughts?

3 – As we’ve discussed at length before, Papa’s idealism was one of his most admirable qualities, but it may also have led to many of his romantic difficulties. As we saw in his 1924 diary, his need to find an ideal, perfect partner often left him unexcited by “ordinary” women, or, even more dramatically, resulted in cycles of elation and disappointment in which he’d meet a seemingly perfect woman only to be dismayed when she (as all people do) inevitably displayed less-than-perfect behavior.

For a number of reasons that we’ve also discussed, Papa had decided, by early 1925, to break these patterns. While I have no doubt that he truly loved my grandmother, I also think he was resolved not to find fatal faults or grow disenchanted with her. The fact that my grandmother was not ready, at 17, to be the object of his resolve didn’t seem to bother him much, at least for a couple of years. It was not until 1929 that his belief in the inevitability of their union started to buckle under the weight of her pointed attempts to cool his ardor and her ongoing interest in other men.

By the time Papa wrote this letter, though, my grandmother had agreed, decisively if not enthusiastically, to marry him. This would have been a great relief to him because it put an end not just to six years of courtship, but to the sense of displacement Papa had never shaken in the seventeen years he’d been in America. Now, at last, he could settle in this country and make it his own. Expressions of doubt from my grandmother, at this late stage, revived the specter of Papa’s long bout with loneliness and disorientation, and I don’t doubt that the idea of slipping back into that state was truly “torturing” his mind.

4 – Papa was a romantic sort and loved the melodrama of opera, great poetry, silent movies. I think the language he uses here stems from those influences, though of course the worry he expresses is sincere and immediate. What he meant here by getting to “the top” is hard to say since it means different things to different people, but I think I can guess what he had in mind:

——–

March 20. 1930.

Dearest:

I’m writing this at home, I was rather
busy at the store this evening with no chance to write
there.

But the time you will receive this my Beloved
it will be the final day of spring, the hard cold winter
has passed and this is the dawn of a world reborn.

To You my Dear this passed winter was one
of deep tragedy and suffering, may the beginning of this
new season mark a new era of joy and happiness in
your life.

You know well my Dear that since I’ve had the
extreme happiness to learn to know you, your happiness
and joy was mine and your sorrows were mine too,
my fervent prayer goes fort to the Lord that we may
share our happiness together forever after. ¹

Tomorrow (Friday) I shall call you (I hope you
will forgive me for taking the liberty) at 1:05 P.M. and
again at 5:30 or a little later.

It will be a pleasure Sweetheart if you could
arrange to have your mother and brother to go with me
to the Royal for a little diversion Sat. night. ²

I intend to take off Sunday, that I may
spend the day with you, that is with your kind
consent of course.

In conclusion may I not ask you to offer my
kind regard to Mr. Richman? ³

Your own Harry

————–

1 – Those of us who have been following Papa’s diary and letters for the past couple of years will recognize a few of his essential qualities in these first few paragraphs: His taste for romantic language, as reflected in his turns of phrase; his optimism, as reflected in his belief that Spring will soothe the pain of my grandmother’s difficult winter (in which her father died and her family’s financial security dissolved); his empathy, as reflected in the way he accepts my grandmother’s sorrows as his own; his faith, as reflected in his prayer for a happy future.

2 – “The Royal” most likely refers to the popular Cafe Royal, a lynchpin of the lower Second Avenue strip known as the “Yiddish Rialto” for its prominence in New York’s early Twentieth Century Jewish cultural life. Papa spent many a youthful night there debating the intricacies of the Zionist movement and socializing with friends, but he certainly didn’t invite my grandmother’s mother and brother there for a casual night out. He was, at the time, quite worried that my grandmother might break off her engagement to him, and the Royale excursion was probably part of an ongoing campaign to line up the endorsements of her family and friends.

3 – Mr. Richman was the attorney for whom my grandmother worked as a legal secretary. As we learned in Papa’s last letter, Richman supported my grandmother’s engagement to Papa and therefore made Papa’s list of her “better friends” who had her “bests interests at heart.”

——–

March 21, 1930

Dearest:

Isn’t it funny, just about when the time
was approaching to cease work a heated argument
started between Mrs. Surdut ¹and one of the cutters,
the entire place was in uproar.

It was my lot to settle the argument
between the two but I did it even if it took me an
hour to do so thereby avoiding a crisis at the place.

It just had to occur at a time when I was
so anxious to talk to you, and when I finally had
time to call you up a mans voice informed me
that you were gone.

I missed your sweet voice so much,
but I will with the Lord’s help have the pleasure
to listen to it tomorrow after you’ll have read these lines.

It is 7:50 P.M. now I am at the store
and already registered job #1. I hope there will be
many more before I leave tonight.

Auf Wiedersehn Sweetheart

Your Harry

P.S.

In recognition for settling the argument
Mr. Surdut told me a nice little joke, it was
the first time in a long while that he was in good
humor. Please pardon the hurry up scribble.

————

Matt’s Notes

1 – Mr. and Mrs. Surdut, owners of the Lion Costume Company and Papa’s employers, have appeared regularly throughout Papa’s diary and letters. They had taken an interest in Papa as early as 1924, inviting him to their home for holiday dinners, giving him sales work on the side, setting him up with women, and, in Mr. Surdut’s case, traveling with him to Zionist conferences. (Mr. Surdut may have been a member of Order Sons of Zion, a.k.a. B’nai Zion, the Zionist fraternal order to which Papa belonged.)

I have speculated before that Mr. Surdut was a sort a father figure to Papa and may have eventually placed Papa in a position of authority at Lion Costume, which could be why it fell to Papa (who was also a union activist) to resolve a dispute between Mrs. Surdut and a worker.

2 – I think Papa often worked into the evening at Lion Costume, but I’m not sure what “it is 7:50 P.M. now I am at the store and already registered job #1” could mean. Was he working the sales floor for some kind of pre-Spring seasonal push or trade event that featured lots of nighttime buying and selling? (Such pressure might account for flaring tempers at the shop.)

Then again, Papa’s shorthand term for Lion Costume was usually “the place” and not “the store,” so “the store” might have been a different establishment where, eager to make some extra money and prove his viability as a husband, he did piece work after hours. Papa also hoped to buy a dress store in partnership with my grandmother (provided she finally married him). Could this have been “the store” he meant? Was he working there in preparation for taking it over?

3 – Papa wrote this letter in March of 1930 when the Great Depression was gathering steam, so I’m sure purveyors of ladies’ dresses like Mr. Surdut had little to keep them “in good humor” at this time. Things must have been troubling indeed if the “nice little joke” Surdut told Papa “in recognition for settling the argument” (I expect it was a casual quip and not a self-contained knock-knock joke or the like) seemed so important. Perhaps Papa’s own worries about the the economy, and his need to reassure my grandmother of his ability to provide for her, made his employer’s rare lighthearted moment seem particularly welcome and worth reporting.

——–

11:30 P.M.

March 24. 1930.

Dearest:

It is getting to be a habit with me to
write you a note before retiring.,¹ It is indeed a
pleasure to write and relate to you everything that’s
happening around me.

My implicit faith in you Sweetheart was
amply rewarded by your attitude of late, it was
heaven on Earth to gaze at your sympathetic eyes and
to listen to your sweet and friendly voice.

Oh Dear, words fail me to express the true
feelings and heavenly joy I’ve experienced in
your company Sat. and last nights.²

My only object in life shall be to make you
happy and contented, I shall try hard to live
up to your expectations, and with the Lords help
I shall succeed.

The fact that you gave my competitor the
(as you call it) b.r. proves to me that your mind
and heart have cooperated to guide you in the
right path. ³

It was divine power that impelled you
to look at my approaches in a different light
to see that my love for you was of [the] immortal kind.

I have ever since I’ve known you Sweetheart
known of the existence of a spark of love for me,
and now I shall make myself worthy of it, for
when you Dearest love it is more than sincere. ⁴

And now in closing I want to let you know
how anxiously I’m looking forward to meeting you
tomorrow (Tuesday) night, but I’ll have to come a little
later as Archie is off tomorrow and I’ll have to close
the store at 10 sharp. ⁵

So Dearest Good night,

Pleasant dreams tonight and every other night,

Your devoted

Harry

—————-

Matt’s Notes

1 – Remember, in the days of twice-daily postal delivery, Papa could send a letter late at night and expect my grandmother to receive it in the following morning’s mail. (He wrote this at 11:30 PM and it’s postmarked 7:00 AM the next day.)

2 – In his Thursday, March 20th letter, Papa mentioned that he wanted to take my grandmother’s mother and brother for night out at Cafe Royale (a famous gathering place for New York Jews in the early 20th Century) on Saturday the 22nd.   I’ve speculated that Papa planned to pitch them on his plan to marry my grandmother, who still had doubts about his matrimonial viability, and drum up their support. It appears, from this letter, that my grandmother joined the party as well, and in the ensuing few days turned the corner in her attitude toward Papa. In fact…

3 – …it looks like I must have have misread Papa’s last few letters. I’ve been thinking my grandmother dismissed her other suitor and agreed to marry Papa in January of 1930, but clearly she waited a bit longer to give Papa’s “competitor” the “b.r.” (“B.R.” is, I expect, short for “bum’s rush,” which you may or may not recognize as a slang expression for chasing away undesirable people. According to multiple dictionary sources, this phrase was in relatively fresh circulation in 1930.)

The anxiety Papa expressed in his last few letters makes more sense to me now; he was worried not because my grandmother was second-guessing her decision to marry him (as I had thought) but because she was still entertaining thoughts of marrying someone else. Now, though…

4 – …the decisive language he uses in this letter clearly indicates that my grandmother had, at last, accepted his proposal (perhaps over dinner at the Royale). Alas, though Papa believed her “mind and heart” had “cooperated to guide [her] in the right path,” my grandmother would, in later years, admit to my mother that she married Papa for practical, and not romantic, reasons.  Her mind said he would take good care of her and that was, at a time when her family’s finances were in disarray, the loss of her father was still on her mind, and a Depression loomed large, more important than whether her heart said she truly loved him.

5 – As in many of his other letters, Papa suddenly switches here from soaring, romantic rhetoric (“It was divine power that impelled you to…see that my love for you was of the immortal kind”) to mundane business (“Archie is off tomorrow and I’ll have to close the store at 10 sharp”). I find this transition to be a little jarring in a love letter, but I imagine it wasn’t so odd in an era when letter writing was (as noted above) a frequent and relatively immediate form of communication (and perhaps more so in Papa’s case since he typically wanted to squeeze everything into one note while stealing time at work or “before retiring.”)

——–

March 26, 1930.

Dearest

It is 8:30 now and I am writing this
at the store, I chalked up two alts. ¹
there is a lull now, nobody in the store
I hope I am interrupted with a few
more jobs, but it seems that I’ll be
able to finish this note without any
interruptions.

Tomorrow at this time we will be
at Mecca Temple ² honoring the memory
of the greatest friend the Jews had in
modern history, you will at the same time
have the opportunity to listen to some
very interesting adresses. ³

I may not be able to call you up
tomorrow (Thursday) at noon as I
expect to be detained settling prices.

At 6:15 P.M. I shall be at the
appointed place to meet you and
to take you in my care until you are
safely home.

God Bless You Beloved
and countless kisses

Your ardently loving

Harry

P.S.

This is the only kind of paper
at the store, Forgive for using
such plain paper to write to you ⁴

———–

Matt’s Notes

1 –  In a letter he wrote a few days prior, Papa told my grandmother  “it is 7:50 P.M. now I am at the store and already registered job #1”, and now he writes “It is 8:30 now and I am writing this at the store, I chalked up two alts.”   “Alts.” almost certainly means “alterations,” so he must have been working a few nights a week as a tailor in a retail clothing store and getting paid by the job. (As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think “the store” had anything to do with Papa’s longtime employer, the Lion Costume Company.  I’ve questioned whether it was the same store he intended to buy and run with my grandmother and if he was working there to do some advance scouting of its customers, but if that was the case he would have written about it differently.  I think he just had a straightforward night job, and unfortunately I don’t think I’m ever going to find out where it was.)

2 – Mecca Temple, located on 55th Street and 6th Avenue, was originally built and managed by the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, a.k.a. the Shriners, who opened it in 1924 for their own use and for rental income.  The Shriners ran into financial problems shortly thereafter, and New York City eventually took over the building and turned it into City Center, the well-known performing arts venue that’s still there today.

3 – When Papa refers to “the greatest friend the Jews had in modern history,” he means Lord Balfour, the statesman whose famous Balfour Declaration articulated British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”  Papa felt genuinely attached to those world leaders he admired (remember how loyal he was to President Wilson) and, considering his powerful belief in the Zionist cause, would have been deeply affected by Balfour’s passing. 

Balfour’s memorial service was organized by the Zionist Organization of America, a group Papa had been involved with for many years. (One of the “interesting addresses” was delivered by the now-famous writer Maurice Samuel, who Papa secured to speak at a Z.O.A. district meeting back in 1924 and thereafter knew as “Maurie”.) When Papa surveyed the 5,000 attendees, he must have seen scores of the comrades with whom he’d campaigned in the streets, laid plans in crowded apartments and offices, and spent countless, coffee-filled nights reflecting on the countries they’d lost and resolving to make a new country of their own. Perhaps, despite the melancholy circumstances, this gathering felt something like a family affair.

4 – This composition on “plain paper” is one of the last of Papa’s letters, and because it comes toward the end of his written narrative it feels to me like it has additional literary weight, as if some unseen author had placed it toward the end of a book for closer examination. But is this book about the American Jewish experience, with Papa standing in for all Eastern European Jews as we watch his progression from emigration to assimilation? Or is it a more intimate work, meant to examine the trade-offs and decisions one man has to make to find his place in the world?

I suppose Papa’s narrative can serve both purposes: When we first meet him, he is a lonely tenement dweller, sleeping on someone’s couch and laboring in a garment factory, longing for the simple confines and the familial comforts of his Eastern European boyhood. He devotes his time to organizations and the landsmanshaftn where he might find safety among others like himself, but glimpses and tests and samples a little more each day the vibrant city, the young country he finds himself in: baseball games in three different stadiums, opera, movies, boxing on the radio, Election Day, the Democratic Convention, automobile rides in the mountains and the boardwalk of Coney Island. Still, when his father dies back home and the old world is finally, clearly lost to him, he learns that without someone else to love as much he cannot make the new world his own.

The story continues and claustrophobic depictions of tenement life and factory work give way to wider vistas and brighter thoughts: Papa meets a woman, falls madly in love, and begins a long campaign to win her affection. (But is he, a devotee of self-sacrifice and hard work, more fascinated with her or with the fortitude he must muster to pursue her?) His boss gives him more responsibility, his co-workers look to him for guidance. He becomes an American citizen and crosses international borders at his leisure. His Zionist work takes him to Atlantic City, where he moves and socializes with surprising ease among its wealthy goyish visitors (and learns that, perhaps, all boardwalks are more alike than he thought).

And so we arrive at this latest milestone, where he joins hundreds of friends and thousands of fellow Jews in the strangely American exercise of paying open tribute to an English lord in a huge Midtown Manhattan auditorium named, oddly enough, for the city of Mecca. All this with his fiancee in tow, as if to announce: I am here, I am going to build my family in this city, I am going to make its vast and varied streets my own because it is, after all, where I live.

———

References:

• JEWISH LEADERS PAY TRIBUTE TO BALFOUR; 5,000 Bow Heads in Service at Mecca Temple–Plan Palestine Forest to Honor Him. The New York Times, March 28, 1930.
• The Balfour Declaration at Wikipedia
• Streetscapes/City Center; From Shriners’ Mecca Temple to Mecca for the Arts.  The New York Times, April 11, 1999.

Image source: Mecca Temple postcard at Wikipedia

——–

April 2, 1930.

Dearest:

I’m so blue because you didn’t feel well this
evening, I pray that when this reaches you, you
will be restored to good health again.

Instead of going to the touring agency, I called
up that office, they promised to mail to me immediately
a prospectus on tourist prices on various steamers, the
dates and departures and returns.¹

Beloved: My mind isn’t at rest just because
of your indifference to my most ardent courtships, I
know that your so called acting of last night was
true to an extent.

It tortures my mind to live in doubt, Would you
have said those things if you really loved me?

You told me Sweetheart that I’m getting what I
want, its true, but my my life will be miserable
knowing that you [are] unhappy.

Can’t one whose love is holy and pure ask from
the only girls to reciprocate?

Especially when she is ready to trip to the altar
with him.²

I feel Sweetheart that the realization is dawning
upon you and that eventually to will find that
that you’re loving me a great deal more than you
think you do, and when the realization comes
you will keep faith with me and be content
with my life companionship and all that I’ll
be able to offer you.³

Don’t expect of me a sudden revolutionary
transformation, I will endeavor to raise my
standards step by step.

I’ve already learned (thanks to your urge)
the value of a $ and I’m clinging on to it
as soon as it comes my direction.

After all in this worst industrial crisis
in years when most everyone is affected, I can
./.

I can manage to save, and believe me I’ll
take care of it.⁴

It is very late now, and I have to rest a little
for tomorrows grind.

I will call you at 1:05, and please don’t refuse
when I ask to meet you at 6:15 on 42nd St.

God Bless You Darling Sweetheart
and countless kisses from your
own

Harry

———–

Matt’s Notes

1 – Papa and my grandmother must have been planning a trip to celebrate their engagement (they wouldn’t be married until a year after Papa wrote this letter, so I don’t think he was looking into their honeymoon arrangements already). With steamship travel as common as it was, they could have had in mind anything from a short jaunt up the coast to a longer ocean voyage, but in any event I’ll try to track down what the “tourist prices” would have been like in those days.

Update: In response to an e-mail inquiry, Michael at the shipping history site wardline.com tells me:

I have also looked though my files and come across timetables for NY-area steamship lines like the Merchants and Miners Line and Eastern S.S. Co. which had ships on shorter, tourist-oriented routes… rates range from $1.75 to $3.00 per berth (not room–generally 2 berths to a room) for short votages to up to $37.50 for one of the better private rooms on slightly longer voyages.

Michael also pointed me to the travel history site, Maritime Timetable Images, where we can find the following images of Cunard line brochures from 1929 and 1930:

–

We don’t know what kind of trip Papa was planning, but I’d wager that, due to the Cunard line’s popularity, he received at least one of the brochures pictured above.

2 – Oh, dear. If I’m reading this letter right, it looks like my grandmother must have said some really nasty things to Papa the previous evening: she wasn’t happy about marrying him; it shouldn’t matter to him because he was getting what he wanted; he was an unworthy candidate for her affections. It also seems like she tried to take a little of it back and tell him she only said those things because she wasn’t feeling well, but Papa clearly knew better.

3 – I’ve speculated quite a bit about why Papa pursued my grandmother so persistently in the face of her years-long efforts to dissuade him. I suppose the same theories apply to the question of how, now that her decision to marry him had apparently inspired her to treat him more harshly, he could remain so doggedly hopeful about their potential happiness. (In later years, those who knew them would but marvel at both the sharpness of my grandmother’s tongue and the contrasting evenhandedness of Papa’s attitude.)

4 – Throughout his diary and letters, Papa has shown himself to be both romantic and pragmatic, an idealistic dreamer who does not practice wishful thinking, a believer in God who would never count on divine intervention. From the moment he called himself a “nonbeliever in resolutions” in the New Year’s Eve entry of his 1924 diary, he has outwardly eschewed unrealistic concepts like “sudden revolutionary transformation”, though he would, in his darkest moments, believe in luck long enough to question his own. (Interestingly, the one resolution he did make in 1924, “to spend less and save more,” did not come to fruition that year but, according to this letter, finally did by 1930 despite the unfolding Depression.)

This belief in “step by step” progress shows itself in Papa’s approach to the most important pursuits in his life: the Zionist cause, for which he worked as a grassroots activist and to which he made countless small contributions over the course of decades, knowing he might never see it fulfilled; the garment industry labor movement, a perfectly literal demonstration of the way a class of people, seemingly powerless on their own, could, bit by bit, join together to wield great influence and improve their lot; and of course his courtship of my grandmother, a six-year affair that may never have led to an ageless romance but did lead to marriage, a child, and something like the life Papa dreamed of as a young man.