Kessler Zion Club

Wednesday Jan 16

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Living in board it is really
so hard to get an appointment to
make my entries, just when I
feel like doing it, I am somehow
prevented.

Received invitation to
attend a party at the
Kessler Zion Club Saturday.

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The next time I want to complain about not having enough time to myself, I’ll have to remember to say something classy like “it is really so hard to get an appointment to watch my Netflix.”

Papa’s complaint is far less petty, of course. His living situation is more comfortable than when he first arrived in America and slept head-by-toe with his two sisters in a cousin’s bed, but he’s still boarding in a tenement apartment where privacy is precious. What prevents his “appointments” with his diary, other than tubercular neighbors wandering in for help? How many hours does he lose in line for the hallway bathroom, how many times must he hastily hide his diary when his hosts suddenly arrive home, how often do the lights fail? When he says he listens to his radio and reads by himself, is he really by himself, or does he just stick on his headphones and tune out the noise and activity around him?

I wonder, too if Papa is apologizing to future readers for the day’s short, furtive entry, as if he feels a responsibility to, say, his unborn grandchildren to keep a complete journal. (I feel a little guilty when I don’t get to spend as much time on this blog as a like. A family trait?) Then again, I’m doing this project in part because I wish I’d known him longer, spent more time in his presence, shared more words with him. Maybe I want to think he’s apologizing to me for his short entry because I just want him to talk to me in any way.

Hmmm. This post is, ironically, turning into a bigger subject than I have time to write about now. I’ll make an “appointment” to revisit it.

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Updates

I guess some bigger questions about my grandfather are: Who did he feel most responsible to when he wrote this? His parents? His sisters? Zionism? Posterity, as I initially thought? What underlies his need to explain why he can’t write in his diary to his satisfaction? What standards has he set for himself? I know his father was a hero to him. Is that who he’s talking to, whose standards he wants to meet?

Saturday Jan 19

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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?

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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.

Sunday May 25

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Visited Rifke Mauale
Schechter & Kessler Club
& Rosenstock in E. N.Y.
& Eva at Hospital. —

Thus I am spending my
sad days.

I am off next week how
will I kill the time?

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Matt’s Notes

We haven’t seen any of the people mentioned above before, though Papa did discus the Kessler Zion club back in January when he went to the installation ceremony for its new officers (it was probably a Zionist fraternal society like B’nai Zion, the organization to which Papa belonged). I don’t know much else about the club, but I expect it was located out in Brooklyn since Papa’s Kessler Zion visits usually coincided with trips to said borough of Kings.

Papa’s upcoming week off couldn’t have been more unwelcome. To lose a week’s pay when he needed to send more money home in the wake of his father’s death was bad enough, but even worse was the prospect of idleness. Papa was already inclined to get depressed when he was by himself on weekends or after work, and after his father died he found his bachelor pad so intolerable that he invited his neighbor’s son to stay with him at night. Sadness waited to burst upon him at every free moment; the “vacation” stretching out before him must have looked as desolate and dangerous as a minefield on the Western Front.

Tuesday Sept 9

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Visited Nat. Eisenberg at
Kessler Club

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Matt’s Notes

The “Kessler Club” has appeared in Papa’s diary before as the Kessler Zion Club. It seems to have been a fraternal organization or mutual support society like B’nai Zion, the group Papa belonged to. Papa’s last visit to the Kessler club coincided with visits to several friends in Brooklyn, so I assume it was located in Brooklyn as well.

Of course, it wasn’t a big deal for Papa to pop over to Brooklyn since, as a Lower East Side resident, he had easy access to Brooklyn via the BMT, so just because he went to the Kessler Club on the same day as Brooklyn visit doesn’t really mean anything. Still, I’ll stick with my theory until I can find out more. (My usual sources of information for such things, especially the Jewish Communal Register and American Jewish Yearbook, don’t have anything on the Kessler club; as ever, if you know anything more, please write or drop a comment).

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Subway image source: nycsubway.org

Sunday Nov 16

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at Rifke’s in E.N.Y.
at Pennsylvania Ave. Synagogue
& Kessler Club

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Matt’s Notes

Papa’s trips to East New York always included stops at the Kessler Zion Club and his friend Rifke’s (when last seen at her place, he was pitching a group of women on the gowns he’d just started selling on the side), though this is the first time he’s mentioned the Pennsylvania Avenue Synagogue.

My uncanny powers of deductive reasoning tell me this synagogue was located on Pennsylvania Avenue, a north-south artery on the western side of East New York, not far from the “new law” tenements that had cropped up in the neighborhood since the passing of the Tenement House Act of 1901. These tenements boasted at least one bathroom for every two families and relatively plentiful windows, so Jewish immigrants, drawn by these amenities and encouraged by new subway construction, had been flocking to the area from Manhattan’s Lower East Side for most of the early 1900’s.

Like his bretheren, Papa must have seen East New York as a sort of promised land. Perhaps, whenever he emerged from the Pennsylvania Avenue BMT stop and beheld the surrounding wide streets and airy skies, he grew starry-eyed and dreamy and thought to himself: One day, I too will live in Brooklyn.

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References for this post:

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Image sources:

BMT subway map sample from nycsubway.org.

Pennsylvania Ave. looking south, 1923. Courtesy of Brooklynpix.com. Just for laughs, here’s another shot of Pennsylvania Ave. from the same source: