Passover

Wednesday Mar 5

by


Sent home 20 pounds of Matzos for the
Passover holiday in 2 packages
I hope they get them in time.

Nettie received a letter
from the School to come and
pay up for her husband, when
she went there with Mrs Breindel
asking what does he mean by
writing letters when he rejected
Philip from School, also reminding
him that he was agreed to me and
her on $2.00 a week.

He chased them out of the office
without any reason whatever
this is outrageous.
I shall stop from work for some
time tomorrow and go to Lawyer
Levine about it

———

Matt’s Notes

To recap: Philip, who was married to Papa’s sister Nettie, was taking English lessons at a place called the Success School. Papa was paying for the lessons but couldn’t raise the $50 tuition fee all at once, so he’d arranged to pay the school in installments of $2 a week. The school’s headmaster agreed to this arrangement but later changed his mind, tried unsuccessfully to get full payment from Papa, and finally kicked Philip out of school.

Looks like the headmaster now tried to get the full tuition from Nettie, who brought Mrs. Breindel (a neighbor?) with her for backup since Papa was at work. Papa’s use of the phrase “chased them out of the office” strikes me as absurd, as if the whole episode is a scene from a silent film: the headmaster, wearing a mortarboard and robes, chasing after Nettie and Breindel with a pointer as they bustle down the hall, flinging Yiddish curses and trying not to trip over their skirts. It’s not absurd at all, of course, since assholes like the “school man,” as Papa called him, were (and still are) all too common in the lives of immigrants. I’m sure they didn’t go a day without someone trying to exploit, intimidate or quietly cheat them in some way.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to picture how Papa sent 20 pounds of Matzoh back to the old country. There must have been dozens of shipping companies around, and probably plenty geared toward specific immigrant groups. Did he just walk over to one of their offices with two ten-pound boxes? Did the landsmanshaftn have special services to help transport perishables around the holidays? In my dream, I answer my questions when I find a 1924 photo of a shipping company storefront with Yiddish signs in the window. I would have to read Yiddish to know what I was looking at, of course, but since it’s a dream I can do that, too. While I’m dreaming, I’ll also throw in some way of doing nothing all day but working on this diary project. Maybe I’m a pitcher for the Mets and have a lot of free time in the off-season.

Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if Papa bought his Matzoh at the fabled Streit factory, or if he even knew and admired the Streits. They opened their shop only three years after he arrived in New York and only two blocks from his first apartment, so he would have watched them grow, found encouragement in their success, and admired the mix of old-world tradition (matzhoh making) and American-scale ambition (a matzoh factory!) in their example. I really can’t remember the last time I bought Matzoh, but this year I’m definitely going to pick up a box of Streit’s, which still has a factory on the Lower East Side.

————

Additional references for this post:

  • Here’s a page on koshertoday.com that discusses the history of Matzoh in the U.S.
  • This piece in wirednewyork.com discusses the changing Lower East Side and mentions Streit’s

(Thanks to Beth at Jewcy.com for the pointers)

—————-

Updates:

My mother adds:

It just occurred to me that Mr. Breindel was the man who met Papa and Nettie when they disembarked at Ellis Island. I think this is correct, but I’m hazy about it. Could he be the one that brought them to his apartment to sleep in the same bed as his three daughters? They were distant cousins –this may be why Mrs. Breindel was so helpful to Nettie.

Also, I learned earlier today that Beth at Jewcy.com, who pointed me to the links above, also wrote a nice little post about this project on her blog.

Friday Apr 18

by

This the first Seder night
I celebrated with Sister Nettie

——————

Matt’s Notes

A “Seder,” for those who aren’t familiar with the term, refers to the traditional dinner served on the Jewish holiday of Passover (I point out that I’m Jewish because someone I met yesterday thought for sure my last name made me a Mennonite). The Seder combines special foods, prayers, and ritualized storytelling to commemorate the Exodus of Jews from Egypt (including all the good stuff from The Ten Commandments like the Ten Plagues and the drowning of Pharaoh’s army).

Like many less religious Jews, I grew up skipping a number of the more drawn-out passages in the Passover Haggadah (the Seder instruction book) to shorten Seder’s length. I remember my mother telling me, though, that Papa used to go into another room after our short Seders and finish the ritual himself, in Hebrew, while we went about our business. I always thought this was because he was older, religious, and stuck in his ways, but reading his diary makes me realize it was much more emotionally important to him than I originally believed.

The Seder commemorates the historical oppression of Jews, urges awareness of ongoing bigotry, and offers prayers for better times. For someone like Papa, who was forced out of his childhood home by anti-Semitism, lost much of his family to the Holocaust, and devoted so much of his life to the Zionist cause, the Passover message must have struck him with particular urgency. Also, we’ve seen before how milestones and holidays put Papa in reflective, often wistful moods; I wonder if his diary silence over the previous three days indicates a contemplative phase — intensified by his ongoing worry of his far-off father’s illness — triggered by the onset of a holiday as family-oriented and personally resonant as Passover.

Saturday Apr 19

by

2nd night with Sister Clara

Saw a ball game today
Giants defeated Braves

Received a letter from
Henriette informing me
that she accepts my invitation
for next Sunday. I’m glad

————-

The “second night” Papa refers to is a Passover Seder, the first of which he attended at his sister Nettie’s house the night before. Passover traditionally involves two Seders, and in some families it also involves political squabbles over who goes to whose house on which night. Nettie and Clara supposedly didn’t get along, so I expect some such scandal arose; they may not have seen each other at all for the holiday even though they lived in the same neighborhood.

I’m sure Papa wasn’t bothered by any familial tension — or much of anything — since Henriette, the storied “20th Century Girl” who had put his heart through a ringer a few weeks earlier, finally agreed to see him again. (He had written her a declaration of affection on March 30th after they’d gone to the opera together. Could this be the first time he’d heard from her since then?)

Papa further enjoyed himself at the Polo Grounds that day, which answers my question about whether Jewish law permits baseball game attendance during Passover. And much as Moses smote Pharaoh’s army, the Giants defeated the Boston Braves on a game-winning Henry Groh double in the bottom of the ninth. (The New York Times account is a great specimen of the humorous, ironic baseball writing they practiced in that era.)

On the field for the Giants was Irish Meusel (pictured below with his brother, Yankee slugger Bob Meusel, who Papa had seen in an exhibition game a few days earlier) while the Boston Braves fielded the legendary Casey Stengal and a four-time MVP with the fantastic name of Stuffy McInnis.

Here are the full lineups:

New York

Billy Southworth, cf
Heinie Groh, 3b
Frankie Frisch, 2b
Irish Meusel, lf
George Kelly, 1b
Travis Jackson, ss
Hank Gowdy, c
Bill Terry
Virgil Barnes, p
Jimmy O’Connell
Rosy Ryan, p

Boston

Dave Bancroft, ss
Johnny Cooney, rf
Bill Cunningham, lf
Cotton Tierny, 2b
Stuffy McInnis, 1b
Casey Stengel, cf
Ernie Padgett, 3b
Mickey O’Neil, c
Joe Genewich, p

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Additional References:

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Image sources:

  • Meusel, Emil F. “Irish” (Giants) & Bob Meusel (Yankees), 10/10/1923. Library of Congress #LC-B2- 6077-13
  • Polo Grounds, 1923. Library of Congress #LC-B2- 5982-2

Sunday Apr 20

by


Both days of Pesach
with my sisters. —

Met little Sadie at Sister
Claras house and took her
home to Evas, where I sat
a little while.

—————

Matt’s Notes

Papa had spent the previous two evening at his sisters’ Pesach (Passover) seders, but I’m not sure why he starts this passage off by pointing it out again. Was this a happy recap? Was he flushed with affection because he felt fortunate to have his sisters close by? Or did he just not realize he’d written about Pesach over the last couple of days? A holiday like this with its family-oriented, sit-down dinners must have made Papa especially anxious about his ailing father back in the old country, so maybe this entry’s little Passover wrap-up is an unconscious sigh of relief.

I do wonder if his family in Sniatyn ever got the 20-pound shipment of matzoh Papa sent them back on March 5th. I’m still not sure how he would have sent the matzoh (those who have memorized this site will recall my speculation about the logistics of international matzoh transport in my comments about that entry) but a friend of this site named Ari, an academic who knows about such things, told me recently that the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had an infrastructure in place to get food over to Eastern Europe back in the 20’s. Perhaps Papa read their ads in the Yiddish papers and trusted them with his precious cargo.

Alas, no one can tell me who “little Sadie” was, why Papa brought her from his sister Clara’s place to Eva’s, or even what it means when he says he “met” her. Did Clara and Eva collude to set Papa up with Sadie and drum up some reason for him to walk her from one place to the other? Was she a young cousin who he just hadn’t seen in a while? Perhaps it was typical for Lower East Siders like Papa to mill around the neighborhood on a Sunday night, dropping in on friends and family, picking up conversations on the street, and sitting “a little while” with someone here and there. It sounds kind of relaxing.

Friday Apr 25

by

Had dinner this eve at
Claras house, Nettie and Philip and
little Rosie, Max and Dora Breindel
were there too,

Later came Eva, Sadie
and others

A nice little home affair

—————

Matt’s Notes

A few days ago I mistakenly speculated that “little Sadie” was a woman Papa got set up with, but as it turns out Sadie, Eva and Clara were the daughters of Max and Dora Breindel, the cousins who gave Papa and his sister Nettie a place to stay when they first came to New York.1 Papa and Nettie had actually shared a bed with the three Breindel sisters for a long while (in later years my grandmother would jokingly shout “you slept with my husband!” when she ran into Sadie) and apparently everyone enjoyed themselves immensely during that time. (I wonder if, having gotten to know each other under such close and adventurous circumstances, they all regressed and behaved like kids when they got together in later years. What games had they played? What secret language had they developed?)

I think a “nice little home affair” (probably Passover-related, since it happened at the tail end of Passover week, when traditional Jews get together) was just what Papa needed. The holiday had intensified his longing to be with his father, who was struggling with a protracted illness in the old country. He’d written, just the day before, about how “alarmed” he was over the lack of contact from his parents, though I think this was just one intense manifestation of the powerful, pervasive homesickness behind Papa’s chronic loneliness. Perhaps Max and Dora, who had welcomed Papa when he arrived at Ellis Island in 1913, reminded him of a time when his memories of home were still fresh, and the voices of his friends and family still rang in his ears.

—————-

Additional Notes

1 – How could I have erred so profoundly about Sadie’s identity, you ask? I made the mistake of neglecting to run her name past my mother before writing my initial post about her, and I took a gamble and assumed she would remain as mysterious as many of the other people Papa mentions in his diary. In fact, my mother says “they were all lovely people, with whom our family was most friendly in later life.” Lesson learned.