munger

——–

April 17, 1930.

Dearest:

I couldn’t call you before
6. p.m. so I didn’t, knowing that you
would go to the dentist earlier.

But I do wish I could
Call you now but I just won’t call
you next door on the phone, I just
want to know whether the dentist
cemented the bridgework and how
you feel in it. ¹

When I left the place I went
downtown immediately to the synagogue
just in time for the evening prayer
to say Kadish.²
2.

Sweetheart: I hope you will go to
bed early tonight so that you may
have rosy cheeks in the morning
after a real good nights rest.

There’s nothing doing at the store
tonight which may be due to the
weather.

Tomorrow I will call you earlier
about 12:45 because I have to to to meet
someone (about work) but if you
desire to be down in the sunshine
(if any) don’t let the fact that I want
to call you earlier keep you within
the office if you should not be in
I will call you back later in the day.

Beloved: My spirit is high
my courage is great just because
I am inspired by you Dearest
of all Dear ones to whom my life
is dedicated.

There’s not a moment when the
sweet thoughts of you should leave
me, your image is always with
me, even in my slumbers I dream
of you my “Beautiful Chippie”³

These lines a written at
the store, and as Archie is
proposing to close the place,⁴ I
will have to close this note with
the sweetest thoughts of you

and countless kisses
to you My Precious

Your own Harry

——————

Matt’s Notes

1 – Those fascinated with the minutiae of Papa’s Diary Project will no doubt remember that my grandmother paid a visit to her dentist’s 42nd street offices on February 27th; the bridgework mentioned in this letter was probably related to that appointment. My cousin Ken, who is a dentist (and of whose existence, as you may recall, I was unaware until he discovered this blog and wrote to inform me that we shared the same great-great-grandparents) tells me:

A bridge takes a few visits, the teeth have to be prepared and shaped, an impression taken which is then sent to the dental lab where a technician would make the bridge. If it was a bridge replacing a back tooth it would have been made out of all gold. I’m not sure if they used porcelain to replace front teeth back then but it was very common to have gold front teeth also. If porcelain was used, it was probably very expensive. When the bridge was finished, it is tried in, the bite adjusted and then cemented with a dental cement. The procedure must have been somewhat uncomfortable because they did not have high speed drills and the slow speed drills produced a lot of heat which could cause pain, even if you received Novocain.

Update: My mother says that my grandmother always had trouble with her bridgework and eventually had it removed in favor of a dental plate. She also points out that Papa probably wrote “I just won’t call you next door on the phone” because my grandmother may have been sharing a phone with a neighbor at this point due to her family’s recent financial reversals.

2 – Observant Jews like Papa say Kadish, the prayer for the dead, at several intervals throughout the year, most notably on Yom Kippur (a.k.a. the Day of Atonement), just after or on the anniversary of a loved one’s death, and on a few other occasions. Papa wrote this letter on the fourth day of the eight-day Passover holiday, which is not normally a day of mourning (correct me if I’m wrong, dear reader) so perhaps he said Kadish for a member of his family, a member of my grandmother’s family, or even a fraternal brother. (Papa was a member of B’nai Zion, a.k.a. Order Sons of Zion, a Zionist fraternal order and mutual support society which, like many organizations of its kind, guaranteed its members a proper Jewish burial and the attendant mourning rituals.)

In any event, Papa did not mention any deaths in the April 17th entry of his 1924 diary, so whomever he prayed for in 1930 almost certainly died in the intervening period.

3 – I assume that Papa, who had an old-fashioned respect for grammatical rules, capitalized and enclosed in quotes the phrase “Beautiful Chippie” because it was in popular circulation in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, but then again he may have just been having fun with a nickname he came up with for my grandmother. I’ve been poking around to see if it might be a reference to a movie, book or celebrity, but so far I haven’t come up with anything. Stay tuned.

4 – Papa wrote many of his 1930 letters from a retail store where he moonlighted as a tailor and attended to his correspondence between jobs. I suppose, had Papa’s co-worker Archie glanced at this letter, he would have thought Papa was freshly captivated and excitedly planning a future with his “beloved.” I’m sure Papa didn’t reveal, even on slow nights when he and Archie had nothing to do but chat and smoke and watch the clock, the difficult six years he’d spent courting my grandmother, his painful efforts to overcome her and her family’s indifference to him, or how reluctantly she’d finally agreed to marry him.

I think Papa would have had more to reveal than appropriate had he tried to explain to Archie his commitment to my grandmother. Would he have mentioned how displaced he felt years before as a young man in America, how attached he remained to his family and memories in Eastern Europe, how hard he found it to meet a woman, fall in love, start a new life if it meant letting go of the old? Would he have even recognized the urgency with which he fell in love with my grandmother in the aftermath of his father’s death, furiously compelled to start a family of his own as if he’d suddenly awoken from a spell? Could he have explained that his own endless wellspring of empathy and self-sacrifice could flow into no more appropriate vessel than my grandmother’s own bottomless dissatisfaction and neediness?

Perhaps Archie once met my grandmother, perhaps he noticed the difference between Papa’s happy glow and her dour expression, perhaps, at a moment when he felt his relationship with Papa was turning from something incidental into a genuine friendship, he tried to find out, without seeming overtly puzzled, why Papa had put so much effort into courting my grandmother and winning her hand. “She’s a lovely girl,” he might have said, “but tell me, Harry, how do you romance such a serious person?”

Papa surely would have understood the confusion behind Archie’s question, but he would have known how to answer because, in fact, there was only one answer he could give, a simple and sincere answer, an expression of a desire he had nursed through his whole youth in exile, through all the years of solitude and cramped quarters and sewing machines and nights alone with his radio, through all the activism and baseball and opera and visits to Coney Island, the synagogues and subway rides and distressed letters from the old country, the dating and disappointment and expectation, the train trips to the mountains and the occasional motor car rides, the diaries and letters, the whole intimate epic of his life in New York.

“Archie,” he would have answered, “I just try to make her happy,” though he would never have known if Archie understood.

——–

June 5th 1930

Dear Sweetheart: –

I had no chance to call you
My Dear after 5 where I stopped working
and since I cannot call you on the phone
next door, I shall related to you about
the demonstration in this note. ¹

I arrived at Madison Square
at the start of the parade, the square was
jammed with countless thousands, Rabbis
and radicals young and old came in
masses notwithstanding the terrific heat to
join in protest against the recent action
of the British government in stopping
Jewish immigration into Palestine.²

I had to be there, dearest I have
been inactive for too long a period in
a cause that is so dear to me, for
the Zionist cause is romantic one
that fire the imagination of every

./.

2

Jewish dreamer, and there I found
myself again amidst old timers,
veterans in the movement, to me it
was a sort of reunion.³

Once more I convinced myself
that when the Jewish cause is in
danger strife among Jewish factions
dissappear, as the parade has
proven, where every faction of Jewish
society life participated.

I know my Dear that you
weren’t feeling well today, but I can’t
see you tonight, that long march in
the hot sun got me all fatigued,

I sat at the store however all
evening but nothing came my way,

Baby I hope that by the time
you read this letter you will have

./.

3

enjoyed a good nights sleep and
be all well, and Baby remember
I will call you as usual at the
usual hour.

Mr. Katzman is waiting for me
to finish this as he wants to close
the store, ⁴So I will close

with love and Kisses

Your Harry

———–

Matt’s Notes

1 – Papa often used his letters to schedule phone calls with my grandmother, sometimes while she was away on vacation (in the Catskills, of course) and sometimes when he just wanted to call her at home and hear her “sweet voice.” As I recently noted, though, in 1930 he began to write about calling her “next door,” probably because the financial reversals her family had suffered in the wake of her father’s death forced her to share or borrow a neighbor’s phone.

2 – The British government’s move to restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine was in part a response to a series of infamous riots and massacres that had, a few months earlier, demonstrated the severity of Arab-Jewish antipathy in the region. (The Hebron riots are probably the most well-known to casual students of Israeli history.) This policy change did not sit well with Zionist activists; according to the New York Times, an estimated 25,000 took part in the protest “parade” Papa describes above:

In the sultry heat of late afternoon yesterday an 85-year-old Jewish patriarch, holding Hebraic writings, walked slowly down Fifth Avenue, while behind him followed 25,000 of his faith, voices changing an age-old song of Israel, a song of hope…

From Madison Square, down Fifth Avenue and into the depths of the East side, past the Bowery to Rutgers Square, over a tow and a half mile course, the white bearded man, carrying a small blue starred flag of Zion, marched. For nearly three hours the aged man, Dr. Manesse Nezinzha, born in Palestine, walked in the hot sun or stood in Madison Square to listen to a fiery speech of protest by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise…

In Grand Street near Rutgers Square the marchers passed beneath an arch of flags and then gathered under a temporary speaker’s platform on the balcony of The Day, Jewish daily, at 183 East Broadway.

My request for help (via Twitter) finding images of this event yielded a good one from our faithful reader Jim. Its rights are expensive so I’ll have to settle for this link rather than display it here, but I have helpfully included a map of the likely march route below as a courtesy to my legions of obsessive readers who get together on weekends to retrace Papa’s steps. (Note that Rutger’s Square, the sliver of space at the intersection of Rutgers Street, Canal and East Broadway, is now called Straus Square in honor of retail legend Nathan Straus, who devoted his life to philanthropy after his brother, Isidor, died on the Titanic in 1912. Double note that Straus Square is not the same as Straus Park, another triangular bit of greenery at 106th Street and Broadway, which is named for Isidor and his wife, Ida.)

View Larger Map

3 – The Times lists the organizations that took part in the march, many of which Papa has mentioned either directly or by association in his diary and letters, including Hadassah, Poalei-Zion, Zeiri Zion, and Jewish Sports Clubs. Order Sons of Zion, a.k.a. B’nai Zion, the mutual support society and Zionist fraternal order to which Papa belonged, also participated, and I imagine Papa joined the parade as part of their contingent.

The certificate reads, in both English and Hebrew:

While this certificate is not dated, it was obviously issued at some point before Israeli statehood, though the only other clue as to when Papa received it is the fragment of the World War I-looking war bond poster on which it’s mounted:

If there are any experts on identifying war bond poster fragments out there, I’d be much obliged if you could tell me when you think this one was in circulation. I’ll keep poking around, of course.

4 – Because this letter is the last bit of Papa’s writing I’ve got (yes, it’s true, this is it) it’s hard not to see the Zionist march he describes as a sort of valedictory circuit, a farewell tour conducted for our benefit of his most trafficked pathways between the Garment District and the Lower East Side. It rounds out the narrative of Papa’s Diary Project, once again giving me the sense that Papa has obeyed an unseen god of literary structure in choosing what to write about: When we first picked up his story in 1923, he walked down a crowded Broadway on New Year’s Eve, cold and contemplative, surrounded by people but feeling entirely alone. Seven years later, when he gives us this last look at the world through his eyes, the day is sunny, the weather is hot, and the packed streets, no longer indifferent, throng with friends, allies, and those who make him feel comfortable and at home. His words appear not in a diary written in solitude, but in a letter to the woman he would marry. Does this not seem like a happy ending?

Even our last glimpse of Papa is fittingly conclusive: Sunburned and exhausted, surrounded by dresses and bolts of cloth, he sits at his sewing machine in the tailor’s shop where he moonlights. He is half perched in his chair, ready to pop up, rushing to finish a letter as Mr. Katzman stands impatiently behind him. (Papa usually works with someone he calls Archie, so presumably Mr. Katzman is a more important person, probably the store’s owner.) Papa stands up, seals his letter in an envelope, crosses to the shop’s glass door and pulls down the shade. Papa holds the door open while Katzman exits, turns off the lights, grabs his hat and follows Katzman out. From inside the darkened store we can see Papa, silhouetted by streetlight, as he locks the door. We hear a gentle click as he checks the doorknob for good measure. Then his shadow moves away, mixing in with those of other passers-by, and he is gone.

———–

References

25,000 JEWS MARCH IN PALESTINE PLEA; Led by Patriarch, 85, Paraders Brave Heat to Protest Immigration Ban

COMMITTEES BLAMED FOR PALESTINE INFLUX; British Tell League Mandates Commission Jewish Groups Push Emigration Too Much.

WALKER BACKS JEWS IN PALESTINE PROTEST; Expresses Sympathy for Mass Meeting Against British Ban on Immigration.

QUESTIONS BRITISH ON PALESTINE RIOTS; League Mandates Body Closely Presses Examination on the Wailing Wall Incident

Remember when I wanted to create a fake TV show about The Dist?