dating – Page 3 – Papas Diary Project

Monday Aug 11

August 11, 2007 by munger

It being a hopeless affair
although affection almost gone
I enjoyed this evening spending
2 hours with C. She asked me
to come out just as I thought
for a certain favor when she
made a party recently she forgot
about me

There will be nothing between
us, there being no other I
cannot resist the call [of her] so
it seems my heart is still
there.

—————

Well, well. It seems like an entire subplot has unfolded in Papa’s life without us knowing much about it. We do know “C.” is a woman named Clara — Papa mentioned her once before, on July 14, to note the hopelessness of their relationship — but that’s about all we’ve got. What “certain favor” could he have willingly let her use him for? His wording recalls his description of the “certain undertaking” he failed at back in June, so it must be something he considers embarrassing or inappropriate for even his private diary.

What is so compelling about her that Papa should tolerate her even though she keeps him on the sidelines of her social life? And when did he first succumb to her siren song? Is she an old love from the more distant past, or is she one of the many women he met this year through friends or a marriage broker?

Tuesday Aug 12

August 13, 2007 by munger

The letters and cards
that I receive from some
girls make me believe that
there is still something in
me that attracts them.

But what is it? I am so
lonesome.

—————-

Matt’s Notes

The long months of mourning and worry since his father’s death in May have taken their toll on Papa. He must feel burned out, used up, old. Why else would he talk about his attractiveness to women in the past tense and wonder how they “still” find him attractive?

Another question, too, is why, if so many women show their interest in him, does he dismiss their attention? Why does he find it impossible to see past his loneliness, imagine an end to it? Have his father’s death and his family’s struggles back in the old country made him feel like he’s committing some crime because he’s alive and active in a vibrant place like New York? Does he think a criminal such as he doesn’t deserve to be happy?

Tuesday Aug 26

August 26, 2007 by munger

Clara lived up to her old
traits, After what a strenuous
effort to see her safely off
to the station when she went
to the country & she does not
write me.

Well, she don’t interest me
anyway.

Excused myself on phone before
the unknown girl that on account of
a cold I could not keep appointment

—————-

Matt’s Notes

Boy, Clara II really gets under Papa’s skin. To review, Clara II (so nicknamed to distinguish her from Papa’s sister Clara) is a distant cousin on whom Papa’s had a crush for a while. She likes to have him around to flatter and do favors for her, but she obviously doesn’t plan to get romantically involved with him.

For example, as Papa mentions above, the other day she convinced him to help her to the train station as she left for for a Jewish country retreat in Spring Valley, and afterwards he wrote of the “disappointment” and “humiliation” he felt because she’d manipulated him through “trickery.” He received a card from her a couple of days later but insisted he was “indifferent to her.” And today he continues to protest too much: She’s obviously been on his mind enough for him to write an unprompted diary entry about her letter-writing negligence, but he insists she “don’t interest” him.

I wonder if his uncharacteristic use of improper grammar indicates how distracted and angry Clara II makes him, or if he’s trying out some stern-sounding slang for effect, or if he just made a mistake. I also wonder if he called in sick to his blind date because he was really sick or if his irritation with Clara II — which, again, was strong enough to surface in his diary out of the blue — made him too grouchy to deal with an “unknown girl.”

—————-

Additional Note

I added this as an update to my August 16th post, but I’ll mention it a few more times for those keeping score: Clara II might not be Clara Breindel (on of the cousins Papa temporarily shared a bed with when he first came to America) as I’d originally thought. I think she actually might be “Clara the daughter of Cousin Leizer,” a.k.a. “Clara Leizers,” who Papa met shortly after she came over from the old country back in January. Seven months would certainly have given them enough time to establish their patterns of flirtation and frustration, especially considering how quickly and completely Papa could become absorbed with women he found attractive.

Friday Sept 12

September 12, 2007 by munger

Went to Miss S.S. a
fine type of a girl, I wish
I had some affection for
her, went with her to the
park (Prospect), and another
picture of flaming youth,
by just getting friendly
with her.

The Enchanting atmosphere
in the stillness of the night
tempted me to take her in
my arms and kissed her.

Flaming youth

Nettie made an appointment
for me without my knowledge, but
I could not keep it as I had the above, the
girl came, according to
Nettie, she is a very pretty girl,
she will come again.

————-

Matt’s Notes

The expression “flaming youth” sounds like one of Papa’s own romantic turns of phrase, but it’s actually a reference to the title of a racy novel and its 1923 film adaptation. The story deals with the romantic trials of Pat Fentriss who, among other things, gets involved with her deceased mother’s ex-lover. The movie “endeavors to establish that young men and maidens wild are going up in the smoke of their own cigarettes,” said Time Magazine‘s film reviewer, who nevertheless found it “rather ingenious.”

Flaming Youth became a sensation partly because its relatively unknown young lead, the proto-flapper Colleen Moore, launched an era-defining trend by appearing on screen with bobbed hair. Moore became an immediate superstar and went on to appear in dozens of films, remaining “at the vanguard of fashion’s first revolution of the 20th century as skirts rose above the knee, bosoms vanished and waistlines slid down to the hips,” according to her New York Times obituary. While her name isn’t as recognizable as those of other silent greats, it’s easy to see from the clip below why she was so appealing:

Anyway, Papa’s feelings about such modern women were subject to change. To call a woman “naive” was one of his higher compliments (though he could also use it disapprovingly) and he hated a party earlier in the year because it was full of “wild women” and “Jazz babies…none of that good type which appeals to me and [is]so rare among women.” Later on, though, he became infatuated with a woman he nicknamed “The 20th Century Girl” because he admired, among other things, her “passion for cigarette smoking,” and still later he battled turbulent, mixed feelings for his distant cousin Clara and her outspoken, seductive ways.

It would be easy to say his standards were inconsistent because, like most mortal men, he had no standards that a pretty face couldn’t derail, but he really might not have known where he stood regarding the emerging flapper phenomenon. He was certainly possessed of an old-world, formal approach to courtship, and he disliked men who took advantage of women and “did not act gentlemanlike.” Also, at age twenty-nine in an era when twenty-nine was not so young, Papa may have had trouble embracing emerging dating habits and meeting the expectations of younger women who wanted to act like Colleen Moore.

Papa mixes tenses in this paragraph so I can’t tell whether he actually kissed “Miss S.S.” in Prospect Park or if he was just tempted to, but to even think about kissing a woman he didn’t feel strongly about clearly threw him for a loop and sent him searching the popular vernacular for the right words to describe it. The expression “flaming youth” was obviously in circulation by the time Papa wrote this entry¹, and the way he repeats it makes me think he was either taking it for a test run (as he did with the phrase “date her up” a few days earlier) or was genuinely amazed by the bold, permissive world in which he now found himself.

—————

Additional references for this post:

1 – “Flaming Youth” would also become the title of a Duke Ellington song, a Kiss song, and the name of Phil Collins’ first band.
Colleenmoore.org – As you would imagine, this site has everything you want to know about Colleen Moore
Flaming Youth’s synopsis at allmovie.org. Alas, it looks like only a short piece of the film survives.

Saturday Sept 13

September 13, 2007 by munger

Another meeting at 2nd
dist.

Sent home to mother $20
for which took $5 each from
Nettie and Clara.

—

Yes Nettie and Clara want to
see me married, and they are
using every effort to find a pretty
wife, just as if I’d be lacking
girls.

——————

Matt’s Notes

Papa’s diary entries often raise questions about which we can only speculate, but this one answers a few I’ve been wondering about for a while:

1 – Was the first district of the Zionist Organization of America still in trouble?

Looks like it was. Earlier in the year, Papa had put a lot of work into recruiting new members for the first district, or chapter, of the Z.O.A., but the results weren’t so good. While he implied the first district’s continued existence when he described a meeting of the “three downtown districts” a few weeks ago, he hasn’t mentioned the first district by name in a while. Most of his recent Z.O.A. activities have revolved around the third district and, in this entry, the second, so I get the feeling the Z.O.A. had either shut down the first district or had decided to let it die on the vine.

2 – Was Papa solely responsible for sending money back to the old country?

Papa supported his sister Clara when she first came to America several years earlier, and more recently helped Nettie, his other sister in New York, with at least one financial problem. (He paid for her husband’s English lessons at “The Success School” and wound up eating the tuition when the schoolmaster turned out to be a scumbag.) I’ve often wondered, in light of these histories, whether Clara and Nettie ever kicked in when Papa sent money back to Sniatyn.

Today’s entry shows they did, though it may have been a rare occurrence since $20 was an unusually large amount for Papa to wire overseas — he may have been reacting to some kind of desperate message, emergency or angry demand (his European relatives often complained about what he sent back home) and, since he had already gone into debt to pay for his father’s funeral expenses back in May, had no choice but to swallow his pride and ask Nettie and Clara for help. I imagine he didn’t feel too happy about it.

3 – Did Papa realize how much women liked him?

Papa’s diary is full of longing, loneliness and accounts of his inability to connect with women, but it also depicts an unending flow of dates, romantic encounters and infatuations, many of which he doesn’t even bother to discuss at length. There’s no reason to think all this activity would make him feel any less alone, especially since we know his failure to find love was rooted deep, personal and complex burdens that he was only now starting to shake.

Still, I have wondered if he even realized how many women he had in his life or if he considered himself an eligible bachelor. This passage provides an answer, and in it Papa even seems a bit cocky in the way he gently pokes fun at his sisters’ efforts to find him a date “as if [he’d] be lacking girls.” He knew he was responsible for his own loneliness, then, and he knew he was responsible for fixing it, as well.

Saturday Oct 18

October 17, 2024October 18, 2007 by munger

[Note: Papa accidentally wrote his October 18th entry on the October 11th page of his diary. I’ve included thumbnails of both pages at right]

————-

Obliged Jeans call to
go there, only to meet the
Phila. girl, who does not
appeal to me in the least,
and again to oblige Jean
I promised to take the
girl out Tuesday.

Later in the Eve, I met
two Bettys, Rosenberg
and Ehrlich, the first at
the Stoyjer S.C., a fine type
and the other at the Welcome
House, very naive and
charming, got both
phone numbers.

——————

This entry feels a bit like it’s missing a first paragraph. We know “Jean” is a cousin who does double duty as Papa’s personal love counselor, but where’s the “there” Papa goes at her behest? Perhaps his disappointment with “the Phila girl” (is this a girl from Philadelphia, or someone whose last name is Phila?) and his annoyance with Jean for arranging his date got him too keyed up to provide many details, as if he just wanted to get it over with when he set down to write about it.

The two women named “Betty,” on the other hand, both earn adjectives Papa reserves for women he likes (“naive” usually means innocent or sweet, while “a fine type” means the marrying kind) and both warrant descriptions of the time and place he met them. The “Welcome House” was, I think, a Jewish settlement house on East 13th Street, and like many settlement houses offered a combination of residential and social services for the disenfranchised and also served as a gathering place for the civic-minded. Papa may have gravitated to the Welcome House, where he encountered Betty Rosenberg, because it focused on Hungarian immigrants, at least according to this record from a 1911 book called the “Handbook of Settlements” (excerpted below from Google Books):

I’m less clear on where Papa encountered Betty Ehrlich, but only because I can’t make out his writing. It looks like he says he found her at the “Stoyjer S.C.”, but while I’m pretty sure that “S.C.” stands for “Social Club,” I’m also pretty sure that Papa really didn’t write “Stoyjer.” Please drop a comment or note if you read it differently:

I should also note that Betty Ehrlich shares my wife’s last name, though I don’t think I’m about to discover that I’m somehow related to my wife or anything; Ehrlich is not a particularly unusual Jewish name and, in fact, my wife got it from her stepfather. Still, it gave me a jolt to see it in Papa’s handwriting and triggered a momentary, science fiction daydream in which I discover some overlooked part of Papa’s diary addressed specifically to me. As if, as 1924 entered the home stretch, Papa saw me in the distance and wrote down exactly what I needed to know.

————–

Update: Aviva, one of our most loyal readers and contributors of well-researched comments, added a comment below that I don’t want to go unnoticed:

I believe Papa wrote Stryjer, a benevolent club from the shtetl of Stryj. See URL https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/stryj2/stre019.html

Strij, as it’s spelled in Google maps, is about 100 miles northeast of Papa’s home town of Sniatyn, and both towns are in what is now known as the Ukraine. It looks like, for whatever reason, Papa spent this evening hitting all of New York’s hot spots for Austro-Hungarian Jews.