Ruchaly’s Illness

Thursday Feb 28

by


Visited Sister Nettie
I am so worried over
Ruchalys illness, I love the
child so much oh lord
help this child to come back
to normal health and bring
a little more happiness to her
unfortunate parents,

Another letter form home
father is still confined to bed
May the next letter bring me
the news of his renewed health.

Attend meeting of Maccabean
Camp the rest of the
Evening.

Got a letter from brother
Isaac criticising me for
not helping him, It hurts
me that I cannot help every-
body that wants such a thing
from me.

—————

Matt’s Notes

Four paragraphs, three of them filled with dread and anxiety. I suppose an optimist might see the glass as one-quarter full instead of three-quarters empty, but by most standards I’d say Papa had a really bad day.

Ruchaly’s illness is not fatal in this case, though she did eventually die of meningitis at age 11. It’s hard not to think about this, or the permanent emotional collapse Nettie suffered as a result, when Papa brings her up. It’s like a spectre hangs over her every mention.

Still, the letter from Isaac stands out as the day’s unkindest cut. Isaac probably thought the streets of America were paved with gold — this would not have been uncommon back then — did he honestly believe Papa was holding out on him? The accusation must have really stung Papa because it was so insulting to his character (consider how he was trying to untangle a problem for his brother-in-law just the day before) and came at a time when Papa already felt awful about his inability to see or help his ailing father more.

I want to tread lightly on Isaac’s memory, partly because I’m named for him (my middle name is Ian) but mostly because I know he died in terror, chased into the woods and shot by Nazi soldiers along with the other Jews of Sniatyn. I also think his angry letter to Papa is, to a great extent, just an expression of his own helplessness in the face of their father’s illness. Still, it couldn’t have been his finest moment.

As my mother notes, it’s difficult to think about how “Papa suffered for his family…He was so good and wasn’t getting much happiness in return.”

But later, Papa, this was you:

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Update March 1

My mother writes:

It occurs to me that Papa never held a grudge in his life. When he had to pick of any of his relatives to name you after, he chose Isaac, who apparently had given him such grief.

Do you know the people in the photo? Of course you know the back line [my grandmother, a.k.a. “Nana”; my great grandmother, a.k.a. “Nannycoo”; my mother; Papa – MU]. In front were sister Fula, who escaped to Israel [from Sniatyn before the Nazi occupation], her second husband, Mr. Abramowitz (I never heard him called anything else) and our cousin Moishe who was Papa’s nephew via sister Gittel. I always thought that he was a high government official in Poland, but [cousin] Jeanie says it was France.

Monday Mar 3

by


Lonesome!!!
to escape monotony I
went to the Capitol Theatre

————-

Matt’s Notes

With his faraway father’s injury and his nearby niece’s illness on his mind, Papa had more to escape from this day than just the monotony of his lonely apartment. Other men may well have sampled a bit of prohibition liquor under such circumstances, but the movie-loving gene runs strong in my line and luckily kept Papa from more dangerous vices.

While I inherited Papa’s taste for cinematic escapism, my New York does not, unfortunately, bear any active trace of the cinemas Papa escaped to. As mentioned before, the Capitol Theater was one of many grand movie palaces designed to give the proletariat a taste of old-world grandeur via nouveau gaudiness. These theaters typically programmed live music, ballet and opera performances along with feature films, too, giving its patrons access to high culture they might not otherwise have had.

On this night, Papa saw a screening of Wild Oranges, directed by the legendary King Vidor and adapted from a novel by Joseph Hergesheimer. (A prologue called “Popular Fantasy,” presumably a live performance of some sort, preceded the film.) The story of a violent man-child who terrorizes a young woman, “Wild Oranges” struck an anonymous New York Times reviewer as “entertaining and thrilling” even if “its subtitles are mostly of the long-winded variety.” (The Times’ blow-by-blow review practically obviates the need to see the film at all, which is helpful in this case since it’s not available on video.)

The Times archive also mentions Wild Oranges in a couple of other interesting articles. One, called “The Birth of a Picture,” tries to disabuse readers of their glamorous impressions of the movie business by outlining the tortuous path a movie takes from concept to completion; it’s a great read. An overview of movie goings-on called “Grinding out Amusement for the Millions” mentions the Wild Oranges opening, but is also has this paragraph:

Joseph H. Hazelton, who is said to have seen President Lincoln assassinated, and Calvert Carter, another aged actor who was an associate of Hazelton’s in the days of the Ford stock companies, the other day worked in the same film studio. Hazelton is playing in “San Francisco,” and Carter with R. William Neill’s production, “Rose of the Ghetto.” Hazelton was a program boy at the Fort Theater in Washington when Booth shot the great Emancipator.

I like to come across these little reminders of what a different era Papa lived in when he wrote his diary. 1924 was a lot closer to 1865 than it was to 2007.

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Additional references for this post:

Capitol Theatre Image Credit: Library of Congress LC-USZ62-113144. Inquiring into ownership.

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Updates:

Time Magazine‘s archive also has a write-up on Wild Oranges. According to the anonymous reviewer,

The tale is told with extraordinary vividness and pungency by King Vidor, a director who can evoke a heart-quaking spirit of mystery without a single trapdoor. Frank Mayo, Virginia Valli, Ford Sterling, Nigel de Brulier are splendid instruments in one of the exceptional pictures of the year. And a most extraordinary characterization is done by Charles A. Post as a modern Caliban, a hulking beast with a child’s mind that wanted to be good.

I really hope this gets released on DVD soon.

Monday Sept 15

by


Found both Nettie’s
children ill, and coughing
badly.

I pray constantly for them
Oh Allmightly, heal them
and restore them to perfect
health, and may they be
a blessing and a source
of happiness to their tried
parents. Amen.

—————-

Matt’s Notes

Though Papa has struggled with his fair share of personal, emotional and financial difficulties this year, his sister Nettie’s life has, at least from what we’ve seen, described a bleaker version of tenement life, an immigrant experience dogged by disease and unemployment and casual cruelties. Her daughter, Ruchaly, has been ill all year; her husband, Phil, has been in an out of work and kicked around by the unscrupulous headmaster of an English-language school; and, in one of the strangest episodes of the year, she gave birth to a new son just as Papa received word from overseas of their father’s death, though no one told her for ten days while she convalesced.

Papa’s prayer for the health of Nettie’s children is typically heartfelt and touching, but there’s nothing melodramatic about it. New York’s infant mortality rate had been on the decline for years, but it was still, at sixty-six deaths per thousand, ten times higher than it is today. With tubercular neighbors wandering about and fresh air at a premium, the sound of a child’s cough was terrible to hear. Unfortunately, the shadow of future unhappiness hangs over this entry, for we know Papa’s plea to the Allmighty went unanswered in the end; Ruchaly was destined to die of meningitis, and Nettie, years later, gave in to a long emotional deterioration and took her own life.

Still, I suppose Papa’s capacity for prayer and hope is partly responsible for the resilience and resourcefulness with which he faced his own trials. Among other things, the difficulties of immigrant life, the death of his sister and the devastation of his family during the Holocaust all gave him ample reason to grow bitter as he aged, but he chose not to. He defined his life by what he had, not by what he’d lost, tallied up his gains, and not his deprivations. It sounds simple, but: How?

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Papa wrote his prayer in English but also concluded this entry with a Hebrew phrase. Alas, I can’t make it out and neither can Stephanie, who is both my wife and my go-to for Hebrew translation. If you can make out what this says, please drop a note or comment:

———

Update 9/17/07

As we subsequently learned, the Hebrew at the bottom of this entry reads “Avraham Zvi, son of Joseph, the Cohen.” It seems to be a kind signature through which Papa conveys to the Allmighty his name, his father’s name, and the fact that he’s a Cohen, or member of Judaism’s high priest caste.

Tuesday Sept 16

by

the children Yosef and Rahel
are still ill

Oh, Creator of worlds, bring
them back to health

Avraham Zvi bar-Yosef, the Cohen

——————-

Matt’s Notes

Another day, another prayer for the health of Papa’s terribly ill niece and nephew. He’s written both of their names in Hebrew, and concluded this passage with the same Hebrew phrase he used yesterday. Thanks to our friend Inbar, we now know it’s a formal signature of sorts that reads “Avraham Zvi bar-Yosef, the Cohen,” or Abraham Zvi, son of Joseph, the Cohen. (Papa was a Cohen, or member of Judaism’s high priest caste, so perhaps he used this signature as a matter of course.)

Wednesday Sept 17

by


Ruchale is feeling
a little better, but
Josale is still coughing
much.

May the Allmighty speed
p boths recovery

———

Matt’s Notes

This is the third day Papa has discussed the illnesses of his sister Nettie’s children, Ruchale and Josale, and prayed for their recovery. He doesn’t mention what they had, but a 1924 New York Times article on childhood mortality rates cites measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough and diptheria among the most fearsome (it also credits “Schick testing and the injections of toxin-antitoxin to approximately 500,000 children” with a sharp drop-off in diptheria-related deaths).

I expect Papa was most worried about whooping cough or tuberculosis, but if you know more about this subject please drop a comment.

Monday Oct 27

by


At home.

Ruchale was operated
on tonsils last week and
is still so weak and
Yosale is still ill. Oh
Allmighty speed their recovery.

Those constant pre election
speeches almost get my
goat, and all the
candidates seem to flock
to my block every night
and disturb my rest.

—————————

Matt’s Notes

I don’t think Papa has ever mentioned Ruchale, his sister Nettie’s daughter, without referring to some kind of illness. Sadly, her newborn brother Yosele (who was born right after Papa’s father died and was named for him) took after her and started coughing incessantly when he barely a month old. This wouldn’t have been too unusual; childhood illnesses like whooping cough, measles and diptheria were on the wane in the 1920’s, but they still haunted the halls of New York’s tenements. I wonder, too, if something was particularly wrong with the ventilation, gas jets or other environmental conditions in Nettie’s home.

Then again, with Nettie’s husband Phil also recovering from a recent, debilitating injury to his hands, I’m tempted to say, as Halloween approaches, that Nettie’s life was just cursed. As we’ve discussed before, Ruchale would not survive a later bout of meningitis and Nettie would one day die by her own hand. (This made her only the second of four wives Phil would eventually see die under tragic circumstances, earning him the nickname “The Serial Killer” among certain members of my family.) I don’t really believe in curses, but I certainly do detect an absence of blessings here.

The thought of Ruchale’s surgery immediately conjures images of unsanitary Victorian operating theaters, but the 1920’s were pointedly post-Victorian and, in fact, the period was witness to a bit of a tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy renaissance. According to an abstract for an article called “The rise and decline of tonsillectomy in twentieth-century America” in The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy was the most frequently-performed operation in the United States between 1915 and the 1960’s. If you don’t believe that, the Web site for the American Academy of Otolaryngology−Head and Neck Surgery says this type of procedure accounted for 33% of all U.S. surgeries performed between 1920 and 1960. Quoth:

Tonsillectomies were typically performed in response to hypertrophy, recurrent tonsillitis, and enlarged cervical lymphatic glands. Ether vapor was often used as anesthesia. If local anesthesia was preferred, cocaine, novocaine, or bisulphate of quinine was usually used. A mouth gag held open the mouth and retracted and elevated the tongue. A gauze pack was placed in the nasopharynx to block the entry of blood, saliva, and/or vomit into the tonsil area. The tonsils themselves were normally removed by sharp dissection – no snares or tonsillotomes. Black silk was used to suture the area.

This still strikes me as worrisome, and I’m sure Papa would have lost sleep over it even if he wasn’t kept awake by politicians hawking their candidacies until all hours. It looks like the campaign onslaught was particularly intense in New York City, with Democratic Presidential nominee John W. Davis, Republican Vice Presidential nominee Charles Dawes, incumbent New York State Governor Al Smith and his challenger, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt (the eldest son of the former President of the same name) all in town for a final push before the November 4th elections.

Radio was just emerging as a campaign tool for the first time in 1924, but old-fashioned, street-clogging hawkers, brass bands and loudspeaker-equipped autos were still the preferred broadcast media of the day. By the last week in October, the city was so full of campaign-related traffic that a marching band hired by a Republican group accidentally found itself leading a Democratic torchlight parade. I can only imagine what the Lower East Side, which had more than its fair share share of flyer-waving union reps, Socialists, Democrats and Zionists running about and shouting, must have been like.

Yet note how Papa says such activity “almost,” but not completely, gets his goat. He was an inherently tolerant soul, but he was also no stranger to expressing his own political passions. With that in mind, he probably thought it best to remember his own days of street campaigning, contemplate the joys of democracy, and fold a pillow over his ears.

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Update:

My cousin Ken, the dentist (who I only just met after he read about Papa’s Diary Project in the New York Times and found his grandfather’s name in it) says:

Tonsillectomies were very common up until probably the late 1960’s. I had mine removed, so did my sister and probably most people my age. I didn’t realize they were so common in the early 20th century. When kids got numerous colds and sore throats, doctors thought a tonsillectomy would help because the tonsils would enlarge and become very swollen and they thought their removal would decrease the number and severity of their infections. We now know that tonsils play an important role in fighting infections in the throat and their removal doesn’t affect the number of colds a person gets. When they swell up they are just doing their job of fighting the infection.

Today they would be removed only if they became chronically so enlarged they caused problems with breathing or sleep apnea. I had my tonsils removed as outpatient surgery. The person you are writing about probably was given ether or another anesthetic gas and the tonsils(and usually the adenoids at the same time) would be cut out(the tonsils are on each side of the throat at the base of the tongue). I don’t know if they cauterized the area to stop the bleeding back then, as they do now.

I guess it was a more serious procedure when she had them because they did not have many antibiotics(maybe sulfa?) and one could die from an infection. The tonsillectomy probably made her breathe better when she had a cough or cold but did not lessen the number or severity of illnesses she developed. Doctors today realize that tonsillectomies are one of those common procedures that were overdone and didn’t really help most patients.

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References from the New York Times archive: