marriage broker

Thursday May 8

by

Again a marriage broker
tried to induce me to get
hitched up. He gave me
the phone numbers to some
fair maidens. I shall try.

————–

Matt’s Notes

Since my wife Stephanie sings the entire soundtrack to Fiddler on the Roof at least once during any long car ride (and we take a long car ride at least once a week) it’s hard for me to read about Papa’s marriage broker and not have the song “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” running through my head.

As you’ll recall, Fiddler‘s Yente faced a challenge as a new generation of young people who preferred to choose their own mates threatened the importance of her profession. Papa’s matchmaker (that’s shatkhn in Yiddish, so if you know someone named Shatkin, chances are their Anglicized name reflects a matchmaking heritage in Eastern Europe) must have struggled with an even more difficult cultural moment, since young Jews in America — even those right from the old country like Papa — were learning to date, eat in restaurants, congregate, go out in public and dress like any other Americans.

Papa certainly displayed some old-school attitudes toward dating, as his formal letter of affection to the “20th Century Girl” proved, so I’m sure he wouldn’t have dismissed the efforts of the shatkhn. Still, we’ve seen him balk a bit at blind dates because (I think) his poetic heart demanded a romance with more dramatic, sincere origins, so he most likely pored through the shatkhn’s catalog with some reluctance. I think, too, his skeptical attitude comes through in his use of the term “hitched up” and the phrase “He gave me the phone numbers to some fair maidens,” making this just about the only entry to date in which Papa employed American vernacular or irony.

All in all I think we see, in this account of Papa’s grudging interaction with the shatkhn, a well-preserved example of how Lower East Side Jews of the 1920’s started to shift, in their attitudes and behavior, away from the old country and into the new.

Wednesday July 2

by


I saw the girl that the
marriage broker wanted
me to meet and to
my dissappointment she was
really good looking and
to my impression is very
refined and naive.

I enjoyed being there
for some time, and I will
try to meet her again,

She has the qualifications
that I desire, but will
a man of my nature appeal
to her? I would make an
end to my bachelor days
for the sake of relieving
my loneliness, and may God
help me to succeed.

She is worthy of love.

————–

Matt’s Notes

I first asked my mother if I could borrow Papa’s diary back in Thanksgiving of 2006, and when she brought it to the table my sister picked it up, opened it, and read this passage out loud. It was my first look at the diary in about 20 years, and it certainly dispelled any question of whether Papa’s writing was as compelling or poignant as I remember.

The real surprise of this entry is the unexpected sharp turn it takes in the first paragraph: “To my disappointment” followed by “she was really good looking” and an array of other compliments. It’s an incongruous, surprising phrase. Why would he be disappointed to meet such a desirable woman through his marriage broker? The sentiment becomes clear a few lines later when we realize Papa feared he was not in her league. It’s reminiscent of his early doubts about the 20th Century Girl, when he wrote “But have I the right as a wage earner to propose to a girl like her?” and “has a poor dog [like me] a chance? Is a girl even of her type ripe enough to see my qualities, and truly love me despite my poor standing?”

Could Papa’s previously established distaste for the marriage broker (a.k.a. “shadchan“) have its roots less in his rejection of such a mercenary approach to romance (as I have posited) and more in his reluctance to see himself through the eyes of a prospective wife and find himself wanting? Does he fear his own tendency to idealize “naive” and “refined” women with the “qualifications” he desires, to see them as unattainable, towering presences, to embark, with each crush, on a Cyclonic roller coaster ride of infatuation and doubt and disappointment?

Whatever the reason, the confused and urgent pattern of this entry hints at some inner turmoil. She is attractive and well-qualified; he is not worthy; he would like to put an end to his loneliness; he prays to find someone who might help him. He seems to lose track of the woman he’s met as he goes through these ideas, as if he’s thinking more of what she represents, what she says about his need to marry, to raise a family, than who she really is.

But finally, he tells us, “she is worthy of love.” This assertion, and the way he delivers it, could not be more sad or perfect. It embodies everything he’s going through at once: all his doubt, all his need, all his bewilderment, all his abstraction, all his desire, all his hope. It is absolute; it is tentative. It is the declaration of a man who knows where his path leads but wonders, desperately, if someone will ever help him find where it starts.

Thursday July 3

by


I started to clean up
my nest and will try
to make it more attractive
even if it is for me alone.

Now I’ve been told that I made
not hit with yesterdays girl
however she wishes to go out
with me just so. Strange

—————-

Matt’s Notes

Papa met a woman through a marriage broker yesterday, examined himself through her eyes, and found himself wanting. He questioned whether he was a worthy suitor, whether a laborer of his lot had a chance with a lovely, “naive” woman like her. I wonder if, when he got home, he maintained her point of view and made a similarly unforgiving survey of his bachelor pad: the piles of newspapers he while he idled through his factory’s slack season; stacks of Zionist flyers he hadn’t yet distributed; a cup and a plate unwashed on his table; his monstrous radio, all knobs and bolts and snaking wires, on a makeshift stand, its headphones resting on the seat of his chair.

It was the apartment of a man on his own, a man underemployed, a man who had, since his father’s death two month ago, been too sad and distracted and lost in the whirl of profound grief to pay much attention to his surroundings. Perhaps he felt the need to clean house because the sadness was fading and the need to rebuild his life, rethink his relationship to the world, had taken hold a bit more. Perhaps the approaching Fourth of July milestone made him take stock, or the messiness of the Democratic Convention, now past its fiftieth ballot and still deadlocked, made him feel the need to straighten up what he could.

Then again, maybe he just liked the woman he’d met and thought he might one day have her up for coffee. The marriage broker’s mixed report on her feelings about Papa — she wasn’t that impressed, but would deign to see him again — may have been a familiar part of the matchmaking game, a bit of a ruse to keep him on his toes. So when he says he wants to make his “nest…more attractive even if it is for me alone,” is there a touch of a wish, a hint of a hope, that it might not be that way for long?

—————–

References:

  • HOW DELEGATES TOOK BRYAN’S SPEECH; Turmoil and Disorder Prevails as He Attempts to Push McAdoo. NEW YORK GROUP IS QUIET But Interrupters Were Plenty in the Other State Delegations. (From the July 3rd New York Times)
  • M’ADOO DRIVE FALTERING; Vote Drops Steadily in Second Day of Continuous Balloting. (From the July 3rd New York Times)
  • UNCEASING BALLOTS BENUMB GALLERIES; Din Headquarters Become Dormitories After Fiftieth Polling. (From the July 4th New York Times)

Monday July 14

by


Saw Clara this evening,
It seems that I lost my
interest in her as far as love
is concerned.

I visited today the new
place where I am going
to work, it’s a fine place
as long as I have still to work
for others this is not a bad
place, if the employer would
only realize my value and
raise my salary, I’d be more
content.

—————–

Matt’s Notes

Papa seems to be well-acquainted with “Clara,” or at least he’s known her long enough to compare his past and present feelings about her, but I’m not sure who she is. She’s obviously not his sister Clara, nor do I think she’s the distressingly skinny woman he ran into back in April (“…on my way to work I met C. How different she looks now, She lost weight and looks bad”).

If Clara is a character from Papa’s diary, she could be the woman he met through a matchmaker on July 2nd and deemed “worthy of love.” If so, his lack of interest in her now doesn’t surprise me, since from the outset he saw her as an abstraction, an applicant with the right “qualifications” through whom he might end his “bachelor days,” but also an inaccessibly ideal representation of womanhood who might be too good-looking and refined for “a man of [his] nature.” Papa’s tendency to idealize women, only to be disappointed when they turned out to be flawed humans, is well-known to us by now. We also know this tendency toward idealization would, as Papa matured, mellow into a more useful capacity to see good things in people. I think this helped him cultivate the forgiving, gentle and comforting nature those of us who knew him found so striking.

Meanwhile, Papa has revealed for the first time that he’s going to be starting a new job shortly, which surprises me since he just got a $5 raise few months ago. Perhaps he’s just starting in a new factory owned by the same boss, or maybe his factory has moved to a new location. In any event, I’m trying to figure out how much Papa would have earned as a machine operator in the 1920’s; we know, thanks to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, that the going rate was around $15 a week in the in the early 1900’s and 1910’s. Even if Papa’s experience and labor affiliation had him earning a bit more than that, we get a good sense of how hard it must have been for him to live in New York and still send money back to the old country.

Monday Aug 18

by


Received from [?] S. a letter
I would say rather [almost] affectionate
letter.

I shall gladly answer her.
She is the type of a girl I may
associate with.

I’ve just been informed that Miss R.
an intelligent American girl, was about
to propose to me but was stopped by her
parents who want their daughter to marry
wealth.

She a beautiful girl having gone through
all phases of life having all sorts of
admirers, game to the core, age 26.
seeks to propose to me the quiet, as
a climax to a gay and merry girlhood
life. — She saw me but twice, but
asked me to take her to a concert at
the Stadium. I may do it yet.
Yes. She was once an actress too.

—————–

Matt’s Notes

I can’t make out the name of the woman who surprised Papa with her interest in him, but it looks something like “Sarah”:

I also can’t figure out from Papa’s tone whether he’s disappointed or simply surprised by news of “Miss R’s” thwarted proposal, but his discussion of it does reveal a few interesting details about Papa’s world. He refers to Miss R. as an “American girl,” which is the first time he’s used this phrase in his diary and no doubt means she was born in America and was more assimilated than he. I’m not sure if he therefore thought of her as part of a higher, more genteel social class, but her parents certainly did.

I also find it odd that a woman we’ver never heard of before planned to propose to Papa but I suppose my understanding of the word “propose” is quite different than Papa and Miss R.’s. Papa must have met her through a marriage broker and forgotten about her with the faceless prospects he described, or rather found too uninspiring to describe, back in early August. By “proposing” to him, she probably would have indicated, through the marriage broker, her willingness to marry him if he were amenable. I imagine the marriage broker delivered the news of her sentiments and of her family’s disapproval to see if Papa was willing to check her out again and, perhaps, try to win her family over.

Despite his description of her qualifications, I don’t think Papa was very excited about her. He could be very hard on himself about his lack of money and social standing when he was really interested in a woman who he felt was too good for him, but it doesn’t seem to bother him here. Also, news of Miss R.’s near-proposal doesn’t disappoint him nearly as much as his dramatic encounter back in January with “Tillie,” who sent him into a days-long tailspin when she confessed her love for him even though she was engaged to someone else.

In any event, the “concert at the Stadium” Papa planned to take Miss R. to was the August 20th performance of the New York Philharmonic at City College Stadium (a.k.a. Lewisohn Stadium, formerly located at 138th Street and Amsterdam Avenue). This was 1924’s final installment of the popular “Stadium concerts” summer music series, which was introduced in 1918 (when soldiers and sailors got in free) and continued until the mid-1960’s when Lewisohn Stadium was razed to accommodate City College’s expansion plans.

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New York Times References: