more research needed

Saturday Oct 18

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[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]

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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.

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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):

WELCOME HOUSE SETTLEMENT Jewish 223 East Thirteenth Street 1909 ESTABLISHED May 1904 asa part of the work of Clara de Hirsch Home for Immigrant Girls The resident workers of the home felt that they wanted to know their neighbors and invited them in NEIGHBORHOOD The people are largely Jews MAINTAINS library penny provident bank clubs for school children and young people with dramatic literary social and civic aims civic club for adults Lectures on sanitation and street cleaning in Yiddish to which the neighborhood householders are invited a club of Hungarian Jewish girls who come back to the house to meet dances plays and various social events Summer Work Vacation Home cares for 200 girls FORMER LOCATIONS 712 E Sixth St May i 1904 375 East mth St May 1906 RESIDENTS Women 2 VOLUNTEERS Women n men n HEAD RESIDENT Julia Rosenberg May i 1904 Literature Report 1904 1910

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.

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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.

Monday Nov 3

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Home night.

I arranged with Mr. Snidert
to sell gowns to individuals
on a percentage basis.

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Matt’s Notes

It looks like Papa, like countless New Yorkers before and after him, figured it couldn’t hurt to supplement his income with a little side business, and I imagine this was especially common among Papa’s contemporaries in the garment industry. Labor laws had pretty much put and end to the days when full-blown garment manufacturing actually took place in the living rooms of tenement apartments, but Jewish New Yorkers (and other recent immigrants, of course) still took in plenty of sewing and washing and tailoring. I’m sure it was typical for people like Papa to work as sales reps, too.

I wonder whether the man he sold gowns for was his factory boss as well, or if he was a neighbor or acquaintance he’d met through friends or co-workers. I also wonder what his name really was. It looks like Papa wrote “Mr. Snidert,” but I can’t really tell:

Saturday Nov 15

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Initiation of O.S.Z. members
at “Yavne” Camp
Bensonhurst

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“O.S.Z.” stands for Order Sons of Zion (a.k.a. B’nai Zion) the oft-mentioned Zionist fraternal order to which Papa belonged, and the “‘Yavne’ Camp Bensonhurst” is one of its Brooklyn chapters.

As we’ve seen, B’nai Zion chapters often nicknamed themselves after legendary Jewish heroes and ancient landmarks in Palestine (like the Bar Cochba Camp and Kinereth Camp previously mentioned in Papa’s diary). The city of “Yavne” appears in the Bible and, it seems, also became a seat of rabbinical scholarship and a holy place after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. (Nowadays its a modern city in Israel.)

Papa was Master of Ceremonies of his own Judaically-nicknamed camp, “The Maccabean,” and in that capacity often participated in initiation ceremonies for other camps. I’m not yet sure where “Yavne” met, but I’ll add the Bensonhurst neighborhood to the map of Where Papa’s Been.

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References for this post:

Sunday Nov 30

by

Dist & Bronx
relatives

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Matt’s Notes

Once in a while Papa made a trip up to the Bronx to visit his relatives (sometimes catching a baseball game along the way) though I’m not yet sure who they were or where they lived. I am pretty sure that if he started his day at the “Dist,” a.k.a. the “District,” a.k.a. the Downtown Zionist Centre on St. Marks Place, he most likely took the 2nd Avenue IRT from 8th Street to 149th Street in the Bronx and transferred to another train there.

photo of IRT map

The more I think about “The Dist,” the more it seems like the title or subject of a TV melodrama: a bunch of passionate twentysomethings from different places, all with different problems, priorities and professions, gather each night to work, flirt and find common cause at “The Dist.” And here’s the twist: It all takes place in the roaring 20’s!

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I’ve been thinking, too, about Papa’s Thanksgiving entry, and how, in looking around for something interesting to mention about Thanksgiving that year, I learned that 1924 was the first year of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. It seems like there were so many seminal events that year: It was the first time a Presidential campaign played out on the radio, it was the year Adolph Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in prison, it was the year Jewish Labor got behind Zionism, the year of the Leopold and Loeb trial, the year J. Edgar Hoover became head of the FBI, the year the Washington Senators finally won the Series. I’m not a historian, but it looks like the modern era was a-birthing right in front of Papa’s eyes. Does every year seem this important when examined closely? Would I have been as impressed with 1925 if Papa kept his diary that year?