dating

Saturday Jan 19

by

Visited Rifke and then attended
the Kessler Club Installation
of Officers (offices?) party.

Again pretty girls but ridiculous
stupid, I saw girls falling for
strange boys whom they never
met before allowing them to
get too familiar with them
and let them take them home.

Those boys who were not members
of the club just visitors for the
evening took advantage of
some stupid girls weaknesses
and even in public did not
act gentlemanlike.

Where is that perfect girl
I dream so much of finding?

———-

Matt’s Notes

Ever since co-ed parties were invented, sensitive young men have found themselves at the edges of the room, puzzled by the body language and easy laughter of those who make sport of sex. And so, piqued and frustrated, unable to penetrate the flirtatious fray, they have retreated to their journals, picked up their pens and issued some variation of the eternal lament: “why do the assholes get all the girls?”

At least that’s part of what’s happening here. Against his usually formal prose, Papa’s use of the word “stupid” to describe the women at the Kessler Zion club feels especially acidic; a less discrete writer (okay, I) might have ranged to the saltier side of the dictionary. Papa’s instinct for forgiveness, his reflexive ability to make the most gentle assessment of the least gentle people would become nearly legendary in my family, but here we see it shakier, nascent; only after twice calling the women “stupid” does he find the generosity to say they’re merely naive.

He makes no apologies for the men, though, who offend his sensibilities from too many angles. First, they are merely crude, and Papa is conscious of his distaste for their behavior (“even in public [they] did not act gentlemanlike”). Perhaps more deeply offensive, though, is the fact that they ply their crudeness at a club to which they don’t belong. As I’ve mentioned before, such clubs were crucial for the well-being and comfort of uprooted people like Papa, so party crashers at the Kessler Zion Club would have struck him like burglars in his family’s house.

Fueling his frustration from still farther beneath the surface is the way this party makes Papa question his footing. At 29, he was certainly among the older people there. Those cavalier boys and giggling girls might have been ten years his junior or even American-born. They may have had no use for his Edwardian sense of propriety, his grown-up politeness. Make no mistake, he would have been happy to take (or at least walk) a woman home, but such a possibility must have seemed urgently unlikely that night.

But perhaps, at the deepest root, his dismay is a just symptom of his resilient, baffling, beautiful romanticism. The boys and girls chatter in crass, ugly cadences, not in the poetic strains Papa would prefer. Yet notice how he asks “Where is that perfect girl I dream of finding?” rather than questioning whether such a girl could possibly exist; his belief in poetry is absolute. His anger, then, is not so much a bitter reaction as it is a necessary response to those who would shake what he knows to be unshakable. We see the strain such principles put on my grandfather as a young man, but to the end of his life he would remain capable of feeling only surprise when the world tried to disappoint him.

Update 1/20

My mother confirms that, even later in life, Papa was not a “hail-fellow-well-met,” as they would have said back in the day — that is, he remained gentle and somewhat serious-minded and never felt at ease with more jovial, back-slapping types. This is consistent with his disapproval of the the un-“gentlemanlike” men described above.

Thursday Jan 31

by


A longing to see Miss Weisman
brought me to her home at
Pulaski Bklyn. I enjoyed
seeing her again after a lapse
of nearly 2 years took a long
walk with her conversing about
days gone by. I invited her
to join me at the banquet of
the Camp this Sat.

On my way home in the Trolley
Tillie that once worked with
me about 8 years ago in a
neckwear [shop], came over to me
while telling me that she was
engaged she also told of a
great love she felt for me until
she met her present fiance,
She said she would live on
bread and water and in a
small room just to be with me

[continues on unused portion of previous page]

but she never dared to tell me

She is still pretty and in a
moment of excitement I could
not help taking her in my
arms and kissing her, that
was on the Plaza, it looked to me
inviting. (This was the first and last kiss for her)
This is really the first time a
woman ever told of her great love
for me. If I had only known.

————

Matt’s Notes

One more time:

A longing to see Miss Weisman brought me to her home at Pulaski, Brooklyn. I enjoyed seeing her again after a lapse of nearly 2 years. Took a long walk with her, conversing about
days gone by. I invited her to join me at the banquet of the Camp this Saturday.

On my way home in the trolley, Tillie, that once worked with me about 8 years ago in a neckwear shop, came over to me while telling me that she was engaged. She also told of a great love she felt for me until she met her present fiance. She said she would live on bread and water and in a small room just to be with me, but she never dared to tell me.

She is still pretty, and in a moment of excitement I could not help taking her in my arms and kissing her. That was on the Plaza. It looked to me inviting. (This was the first and last kiss for her.) This is really the first time a woman ever told of her great love for me.

If I had only known.

—————–

New York can pull these pranks like no other city. Papa’s already wistful over his visit with an old girlfriend, wondering what went wrong, wondering if he’d ever find someone. That would be hard enough work for anyone. Certainly the last thing he now needs is for a woman who he hasn’t seen in eight years to confess her secret love for him and at the same time tell him there’s nothing to be done about it since she’s engaged. All this on a trolley car headed for Manhattan — a few more moments and they’ll be back to their irrevocably separate lives. So, a kiss, and for one heady moment they hide from everything they’ve missed and from everything they ever will miss.

Why did he kiss her? Had he loved her too? Or was she just a substitute for Miss Weisman? How many times did he think back on that kiss in later years? Did she carry it with her, too, turning to it again and again, retreating to the memory when life’s compromises overwhelmed her?

It all feels like something out of a (silent) movie, as these moments often do, especially in New York where they happen in public, among people, in front of soaring backdrops. And here’s Papa, looking the part:

The view (presumably from Cadman Plaza) might have looked something like this:

At least his story has a happy ending. Papa, this is you:

—————–

Image Credit: New York from Williamsburg Bridge, 1920. Library of Congress # LC-D4-73392

Saturday Mar 15

by

Sent home to parents $5.00
& to Solomon & Priskas 2.50 each

Met Beite & her new husband
at Breindel’s and spent the
remainder of the evening at
Brother Rothblums house in E.N.Y.
making new aquaintances
especially that of a [pretty] girl who is
unusually gifted with knowledge

It was indeed not at all a burden
for me to take her home from the
farthest point in Brooklyn to the
farthest point in the Bronx, our
conversation was a varied one
being that of music, arts, business
etc, and she certainly made a
hit with me, she is not of that too naive
kind but shrewed and clever.

I reached home at 5 a.m.

——————

Matt’s Notes

Six weeks earlier, a woman Papa hadn’t seen for eight years approached him on the BMT from Brooklyn to Manhattan and confessed her love for him — fruitlessly so, for she was also engaged to be married. Though fate had denied her to him, he grabbed her for one impossibly melodramatic kiss before they reached their destinations. “If I had only known,” he wrote in his diary that night.

And now, another romantic, cinematic sequence aboard the BMT: Papa offers to escort the young woman to the subway and ride with her into Manhattan. He looks sharp and handsome; she’s happy to accept.

photo of papa in a sharp hat

As they cross the Williamsburg bridge, he tells her how his cousin Breindel, who he had seen in the early part of the evening, met him and his sister Clara when they arrived at Ellis Island in 1913.

At the Canal Street BMT stop, just a few block from his home, he walks her to the Broadway IRT; the train pulls up, and, impulsively, he jumps on board with her. If this were a silent movie, the title card might read:

Cupid's arrow finds its mark

The long ride up through Manhattan begins. Every few stops she assures him he does not have to see her home, but each time he tells her it’s his pleasure, he’s enjoying their talk, it’s getting late and she shouldn’t be alone, he wants to hear what she has to say. She asks him why he calls their mutual friend Rothblum his “brother,” and he explains that they are lodge brothers in the Order Sons of Zion.

He will not budge, so transfixed is he by her face

Finally, the subway emerges from under ground and becomes an elevated train at 161st street. Papa leans in close to point out Yankee Stadium, promises to take her to a game some day.

photo of Yankee Stadium

Only a few stops left now: Mt. Eden, 176th, Burnside, 183rd, Fordham Road, Kingsbridge Road. Finally, with the hour nearing 4:00 AM, she gets out at Mosholu Parkway. Perhaps she declines his offer to walk her to her door, a final treat she’ll save for another time.

photo of IRT map

He relives every moment of their ride on the way back, each stop reminds him of the way she turned her head, laughed, accidentally brushed her hand against his, impressed him with her strong opinions, her command of facts.

lost in his new memories, he nearly misses his stop

When he emerges onto the street, the sky is already a light purple. The streets are mostly empty. It is Sunday. The air is fresh and cool.

and so the world welcomes a new day. But what dawns for him?

————————

Image sources:

Sunday Mar 16

by

It was like a dream. My
last night’s experience, I will
try to have my dream repeated,

Visited Freidas children

Incidentally met the
Sherman sisters at Jeans house
Jean tells me that the Rose
Sh. cares for me which makes
me feel bad as I haven’t any
interest in her. —

I shall wait for the
certain girl and with certain
qualities.

I either I met her
or and I’m hopefull of meeting
her again or I am have yet
to find her.

———————

Matt’s Notes

Looks like Papa was officially smitten with the woman he met the night before, when he shared with her an epic, movie montage of a subway ride “from the farthest point in Brooklyn to the farthest point in the Bronx.” He couldn’t have slept much — he got home at 5:00 AM and I’m sure he was far too dutiful to be a late sleeper — but the first thing he did in the morning was grab his diary and get his excitement on paper. His romantic mind is hard at work, turning his encounter into “a dream,” something more than just a long ride, a memory he cherishes as if he were remembering it twenty years hence as the start of something big.

It’s quite a thing to be single and struggling in New York City. Every conversation is heady with potential, every flirtation could be the turn you took, every subway platform could be the stage for act I. (I went through a little Roosevelt Island Tram phase myself, though Papa’s aphrodisiac seems to have been the BMT.) And the more strange dramas the real world forces on you — your faraway father is ill, like Papa’s was, and you don’t even know what he looks like anymore — the more you believe the unexpected must work the other way, too, that a two-hour subway ride you didn’t see coming has the power to make everything different.

Wait: Papa was a living, breathing, young man, too, not just a nexus of plotlines and motivations; he had almost no choice but to get excited about the woman he’d met. I like this entry because it shows his excitement and immersion in this moment so clearly — the uncharacteristically hurried handwriting, the crossed-out letters, the free associative weighing of what happened to him the previous night. He reveals it in the way he discusses “Rose,” the woman cousin Jean is nudging him toward. She’s not his speed, he’s really sorry, but she just doesn’t have those “certain qualities” he’s looking for. But we know who does, right? Well, let’s not go that far, he tells himself, let’s be objective, “I shall wait for the certain girl,” whoever that might be, but in a flash he’s back to the night before: “I either met her, or am hopefull of meeting her again,” written as if they are two separate options but, of course, refer only to his subway companion.

He checks his tone one last time, cautioning himself that maybe “I have yet to find her,” but he can’t contain his excitement. He wants to have the “dream repeated.” Who could blame him, but who wouldn’t tell him to be careful?

Monday Mar 17

by


Movies & home

My only companion radio
is again entertaining me
this evening.

My heart is full of dreams,
I am longing for a girl to
love me sincerely.

I can’t bear the emptiness
of my life.

H. whom I met Saturday
is a girl that appeals to me
most. I’m planning inviting
her to the opera —

But have I the right as a
wage earner to propose to
a girl like her?

I’m happy in the thought
that she is my friend now
being having been introduced to me by
my friend Rothblum.

———————

Matt’s Notes

“Perhaps in the pursuit of action yesterday’s dream will be forgotten before the day is over…”

Papa wrote those words a few weeks earlier after staying out all night with friends and acquaintances from the old country. How well he knew himself, or at least enough to dread his own swings from dreaminess to disappointment.

And here it is again: Just day ago, lost in fantasies, Papa dared to think he’d met the woman who would change his world. Now he corrects himself abruptly, angrily, declares himself unworthy of her, prepares himself to settle for mere friendship. A day in the factory, an evening alone, a night with his humble possessions — radio, chair, photo of his faraway parents — have shamed him, dissolved his illusions.

To see this reminds me of why Papa’s diary feels so important to me. His beautiful, spare prose speaks richly of his struggle to reconcile what he wants with what he has and is worth reading in its own right. But taken in view of his whole life, it testifies to a deeper, more difficult struggle — the struggle for perspective familiar to those of us who swing between extremes of expectation and judgment.

Papa has as little reason to call his life “empty” as he does to think “H” can transform it, yet he is convinced each is true, and the contrast is unbearable to him. Still, we know he rode out the stormy swings of his inner life to become a man who conveyed and imparted a sense of modulation, realism, and calm. I have idealized Papa, but the more I read about him, the more I realize he must have always retained a trace of his internal changeability; perhaps it was, in part, his mastery of it that made him so remarkable. I’m certainly no stranger to the private, stormy swings he writes about. (Is anyone?) It’s good to think they might be worth it.

—————–

Additional Notes:

Movies Papa might have seen that night include:

  • The Thief of Bagdad
  • The Covered Wagon
  • Thy Name is Woman
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame (I wonder if he saw this — it would have matched his mood)
  • The Great White Way
  • America
  • The Ten Commandments
  • A Society Scandal
  • Yolanda
  • The Hoosier Schoolmaster
  • The Fighting Coward

The New York Times also published an article that day on the potential of the “phonofilm,” or sound movie. Author Lee De Forest takes on those who doubt its prospects and makes a strong case for the use of sound movies in news reporting and political coverage. While he’s not sure how it might help dramatic films, he seems most excited about the potential use of music. It’s worth reading here.

Tuesday Mar 18

by


Spent the night with
Rothblum first motoring around
with him and Mrs. Rothblum
in their car, and discussing
the possibility of my further
aquaintance with Miss. H.

After taking Mrs. Rothblum
to her sisters apt. we spent the
night at 2nd Ave Baths

I have resolved to call H.
the 20th Century girl because
in my opinion she mentally
stands above other women
her gayety, full of pep, and I’m
even told that she is smoking
cigarettes (to which I don’t object)
just the perfect 20th Century girl

—————–

Matt’s Notes

The roller coaster ride called “The 2oth Century Girl” continues. On day one, Papa is sure he’s met the girl of his dreams; on day two, seized by pessimism, he literally says “I’m not worthy” and reprimands himself for his folly; on day three, in a scene that could be from a Jewish version of The Great Gatsby, we find him back in the game, “motoring around” and taking a steam bath with the friends who’ll help him plot his next move.

He’s rebounded quite energetically from the previous day’s funk, and in the process has given us another great look at the texture of life in his New York. When he says he motored around in a car, he likely means something like a Model T Ford or a Chevy touring sedan:

My friend Sixto, the highest car authority I know, says there were “hundreds of thousands” of these cars on the road by the 1920’s, and even wage earners like Papa’s friends could have picked one up for very little money. (There were also “a lot of car builders in Manhattan and Brooklyn,” but odds are Rothblum owned a Model T, especially since Henry Ford’s antisemitism wasn’t so well-known yet and wouldn’t have dissuaded a Jewish activist from buying his products.) Sixto also says:

The model T was incredibly sturdy as it was
built to run on crappy rural roads (many, if not most,
unpaved) and share the road with horses on cobble
stoned streets…

The driver of that car drove the car with a huge
steering wheel, and he most likely worked the fuel
from a lever on the steering wheel, while shifting AND
adjusting the timing of the ignition as required
(another lever on the steering wheel). THAT was real
driving.

I don’t have any pictures of Papa driving, but I do have this studio photo of him posing in a prop car with a “huge steering wheel”:

I can picture Papa discussing the “20th Century girl’s” non-objectionable tobacco habit at the Second Avenue Baths, obviously one of the many “schvitzes,” or Russian bath houses, that used to be common in New York. (“Schvitz” literally means “sweat” in Yiddish, and it can be used either as a verb, as in “I’m schvitzing from the heat already,” as a noun to refer to a bath house itself, as in “get me to the schvitz on time” or as a reference to the act of taking a steam bath, as in “I can’t think straight without a schvitz“.)

The only schvitz I’ve even been to is the Tenth Street Baths between First Avenue and Avenue A, and as far as I can tell the overall experience hasn’t changed in a thousand years (except for some coed schvitzing on select nights). The intrepid schvitzer can choose from a Turkish-style steam room, which doesn’t seem very popular, or a dry heat room, which is always full of betoweled men sitting on stone risers that appear to have been carved by ancient peoples from the very bedrock of Manhattan. For a couple of dollars extra, a large person will rub mineral-infused, soapy water on you with a leafy tree branch, and your friends will question your manhood if you don’t take a couple of dips in the icy pool right outside the sauna. This is apparently good for your circulation, which is important if you’re going to avail yourself of the steak-heavy menu in the restaurant upstairs. I usually only take a schvitz before a major milestone, as I did before my wedding, but in Papa’s day it was a much more casual diversion, and certainly an appropriate environment in which to discuss dating strategies.

Update 4/7:

Reader Dina points out the existence of an 1895 comic operetta by Ludwig Englander called “The 20th Century Girl.” Here are the details according to a site called musicaltheaterguide.com:

The 20th Century Girl; comic opera; 3 acts; libretto by Sydney Rosenfeld; Bijou Theatre, New York; 25 January 1895; revised and reopened 6 May 1895 (total 43 perfs)

And here’s a New York Times humor piece from 1912 that uses the same expression (subscription required). Looks like it was, not surprisingly, a common expression.

—————-

Image credits

Library of Congress reproduction number LC-USZ62-63968. No known restrictions on publication.

Library of Congress reproduction number LC-DIG-npcc-02566. No known restrictions on publication.

Wendesday Apr 2

by

Movie & home
Sent home to parents $10.00

It is funny how I am trying
to pass my idle hours,
nothing seems to cheer me.

Its a period of one great
longing for me.

—————-

Matt’s Notes

Movies Papa might have seen in this day included:

  • Sporting Youth, a car-racing comedy starring Reginald Denny (“a good-looking, virile young man who does not overact,” according to the New York Times)
  • Try And Get It, a farce about competing salesmen, accompanied by a short film of boxing match recreations called Great Moments in Great Battles (the latter sounds more interesting to me)
  • Woman to Woman, a Moulin Rouge drama with Betty Compson condemmed by the Times for its overuse of rain effects, a bad habit perpetuated, unfortunately, by modern movies
  • Three Weeks, an adaptation of an Elinor Glyn novel by the same name (Papa probably saw this if he was in the mood for a first-run movie at a big movie palace, since it was playing at The Capitol Theater, one of his preferred venues)
  • Beau Brummel, starring John Barrymore in the title role and Mary Astor as Lady Margery
  • Virtuous Liars, a light comedy dismissed by the Times as “a modern entertainment, the story of which does not bear close scrutiny.”

Papa’s local theaters like the Loews Delancey or the Clinton Theatre probably showed movies a few weeks after they had opened rather than first-run movies, so if he was in the mood to pass his “idle hours” in the neighborhood he might have seen:

  • The Covered Wagon
  • America
  • Secrets
  • The Thief of Bagdad
  • The Ten Commandments

And for those of you just joining us, note that Papa’s $10 disbursement to his family back in the old country was larger than usual. He was no doubt worried about his father’s ongoing convalescence from an injury sustained in a fall a few weeks earlier. This, along with a bevy of romantic woes including his infatuation with an aloof woman named Henriette, would have contributed to his ongoing malaise.

—————–

Additional notes

We’ve talked about the Loews Delancey Theatre and Clinton Theatre before. Both were within walking distance of Papa’s apartment on Attorney Street.