Sally

July 2, 1927 – New York City

by

——–

[This letter has no envelope]

——–

New York July 2, 1927

My dear Bright Eyes:

I received your letter and was
glad to hear from you.

I was a bit surprised that the
idea of writing letters was not so pleasing,
The end of your letter was like this “The
true fact is that I am too lazy”.

Of course my dear I do not doubt
that this is actually the truth, since you
stated it, but I do not agree that is was
at all necessary to mention.

Believe me I was one of the busiest
men in Atlantic City1 and yet I managed
to find enough time to write to you and
to others. There is no such thing as being
too lazy with me.2

Last night I visited your home
and I am in a position now to write
you a little about every one.

Everybody was there but Rob and
Ben, Rob left Thursday morning with

./.

2

his inseparable companion the other
half of his WE (a la Lindbergh) his
Rolls Royce for the country, and Ben
was absent in business with his own WE.3

The evening was fine and when I came
to the house, Mother, Father, Gertie and
Rose were sitting very comfortably on the
new white bench enjoying an early summer-
nights breeze, Sally was inside the house
during the two and one half hours I was
there, and trying to find out the reason
for her not coming out I found her engaged
in reading a thriller entitled “Secrets”
Well she hat to put the secrets on the table
and join the gang outside.4

Your friend Millie came over for a few
minutes to say good bye as she was leaving
for the week-end for a certain camp, where
she will later in the season spend her
vacation.

Rose is all prepared to leave this
coming week with Sally, and by the way
your niece Miss Shirley is getting smarter
and smarter every day.

./.

3.

Imagine at just one mere request to sing
she gave us a nice little concert which
we enjoyed better then a Galli Curci concert
on the radio.5

We tried to make merry but your
absence was clearly felt not only by me
but by every one.

It is not my intention my dear to get
sentimental in this letter, so I am trying
to avoid my sentimentation as much as
possible.

Asking everyone what sort of greeting
they have to send you through me so
here it is as much as I can remember:

Father: he is longing for you.
Mother: Take good care of yourself
Rose: Don’t let that guy you met on the
train get away from you, the one with the
mustache. (My personal remark: I don’t like
this business)6
Abe: Sends you his love
And Gertie thanks you for the card you
didn’t send but she excuses you at
the same time for you don’t know her
address.7

./.

I am first planning now to get
away for the Fourth, for around my place
they have already started off the fireworks
and the noise is deafening and I don’t
like this sort of noise, if I can get company
I will surely go.

As you see I tried my best to fill
out my letter, for I know that no matter
what I am writing it will be interesting
for you when you are far away from
home.

I expect you in return to make
an effort to write me all about yourself
I am quite sure that you won’t be lonesome
there, you have that winning way of making
friends.

Oh yes my dear, remember whenever you
intend to come home I will meet you
at the station, just write the exact time
of your arrival and what station.

And now my dear, wishing you
a most enjoyable Fourth of July.

I am as ever your devoted

Harry

———–

Matt’s Notes

1 – Papa had recently returned from a Zionist Organization of America conference in Atlantic City. While there he had written my my grandmother several letters.

2 – Papa’s letters to my grandmother invariably contain some kind of good-natured entreaty for her to write him longer, more frequent letters, though this is the first time her indifference toward correspondence has resulted in an overt expression of his frustration. What Papa’s really expressing here, of course, is his frustration over her continued indifference toward his two-and-a-half years of courtship efforts. Her attempt to stop his requests for more letters (“I am too lazy to write”) clearly offended him and probably scared him a little, too, because it demonstrated exactly how little effort she was willing to put into their relationship. Perhaps it even made him wonder if he’d wasted his time on her. No wonder why he found her sentiments “not so pleasing” and not “at all necessary to mention.”

3 – This passage quite nicely captures a moment in the American popular culture of 1927. Charles Lindbergh had, on May 20th of that year, completed his monumental solo crossing of the Atlantic in his single-engine monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis. I’m sure it’s hard to overstate how ubiquitous Lindbergh and his image had become in the ensuing weeks; huge crowds, adoring press, and heads of state greeted him wherever he went. On July 2nd, the day Papa wrote this letter, an article in the New York Times reported that Lindbergh was about to finish a well-publicized effort to crank out an autobiography. Its title, “WE“, referred to Lindbergh and his plane in the first person plural and must have been a bit of a cultural buzzword.

So, when Papa says my grandmother’s brother Bob’s car is “his inseparable companion the other half of his WE (a la Lindbergh)” he’s making a joking comparison to Lindbergh’s well-documented relationship with The Spirit of St. Louis. (Papa makes another little joke when he calls Bob’s car his “Rolls Royce for the country.” The car wasn’t a Rolls, but Bob must have treated it like it was.) Ben, who “was absent in business with his own WE”, was the husband of my grandmother’s sister Rose, and obviously a car owner himself.

4 – Sally, one of my grandmother’s sisters, was well known to be a grouch who never got along with my grandmother and certainly wasn’t friendly to Papa. Papa had expressed his impatience with her in an earlier letter (he accused her of being too lazy to write letters which, as discussed above, was a serious criticism) and must have felt, thanks to my grandmother’s own antipathy toward her, that taking her to task for her antisocial behavior was fair game. (In fairness, we should remember that my grandmother’s family originally tried to set Papa up with Sally, but he fell in love with my grandmother instead. As rude as Sally might have been, I can understand why she wouldn’t have liked to hang around with Papa.)

I can’t find a book from the 1920’s called “Secrets” in the Library of Congress catalog, but perhaps Sally was reading the 1927 novel “House of Secrets,” a thriller by Sydney Horler. (The 1936 film adaptation is now on my Netflix queue.) Maybe the book’s cover emphasized the word “Secrets” in large type, like this…

House of
SECRETS

…so Papa only caught the word “secrets” when he found Sally secreted in her reading nook.

5 – Shirley, my beloved cousin, is the daughter of my grandmother’s sister Rose and her husband Ben (he of the “WE” car). She would have been a baby when Papa compared her cries and giggles to the voice of Amelita Galli-Curci, who was at the time a major star with the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Here’s a photo Galli-Curci, improbably posed with a goat and a sheep:

And here’s a clip of Galli-Curci singing “Caro None” from Verdi’s Rigoletto, via archive.org:

Anyway, Shirley would later serve as a flower girl when Papa and my grandmother got married. Though she did not pursue a singing career, she continues to get smarter every day.

6 – My grandmother’s family didn’t take kindly to it when, as mentioned above, Papa fell in love with my grandmother (a young beauty pursued by an army of wealthy suitors) instead of Sally (who was no great prize and therefore needed to settle for a man of modest means like Papa) and they tried for years to discourage his courtship efforts. It looks like Rose was in on the game, too — she couldn’t possibly have thought that asking Papa to convey a message about one of my grandmother’s other boyfriends was anything other than an insulting way to marginalize him.

7 – I love the phrase “Gertie thanks you for the card you didn’t send,” an example of Jewish guilt-giving in its purest form. It looks like Papa wasn’t the only one got annoyed with my grandmother for her poor correspondence habits.

———–

References:

——-

Image sources:

The photo of Galli-Curci and her four-legged friends comes from the Library of Congress catalog.

The WE book jacket appears on Wikipedia, which makes a case for its use qualifying as fair use under U.S. copyright law.

August 7, 1928 – New York City

by

1

——–

Aug 7, 1928 10 P.M.

My beloved Jeanie:

You will know by the paper I’m using that
I’m using that (pardon this error) I’m writing this at your home.2

Oh Dear if you only knew how miserable I felt
all day yesterday and today without news from you
you would realize how happy I was when I heard
your sweet voice on the phone, I was so determined
to speak to you that I would have waited all
night until you’d come to the phone from anywhere,
and I will surely call you on Saturday at
8:30 Eastern daylight saving time to find out from
you at what time we may expect you, and whether
I should wait for you at the Wise home or not,

I am under the impression that that man will
not arrive there before 12 noon as he might try to
bring passengers along on the [trip] there, and perhaps
he might be there Saturday night yet, at any
rate you will be able to tell me more about it3

[I, your father, 
and your mother, send you the best wishes that you 
should be healthy and remain healthy, from me, 
your father Shimon David Ben Jacob Pollack.]4


at the appointed time on Sat. night.

Mom tells me now that she sent you
a letter today, the only news that I can add is
that Murray (your Intended in law) intends
to come this Sunday with a truck (exactly
a truck) to give your folks and Sally a ride
to Coney Island, You know that his car is rather
small for the whole family therefore the truck idea.
It’s too bad that you will have to miss this sport,
Last Sunday he (Murray) 5 gave pop a ride in his
Pierce and as Sadie was in it too, he had to
take the door out so as far as air is concerned
they had plenty of it and by the way Sally is
out with him now having their Midsummernightsdream
and if she ever saw this she’d shoot me with a
knife. 6

Your folks were glad to hear that I’ve spoken to
you they’re O.K. and kibitzing.

Please write at least one more letter before you
return besides those you’ve already written.

Closing with Love and Kisses

Harry

More greetings to the Wise sisters

P.S.

I’m adding this at home, your
father added his love and ma’s
you will easily recognize his handwriting
He signs his full Hebrew name as follows
Shimon David Ben (Son of) Jacob Pollack

Please don’t think because of my
funny writing that I’m casting any
reflections upon Murray God forbid!
I think him a fine gentleman of fine
calibre whom I tip my hat for, I’ve grown
to like and admire him, I’m sure Sally
does and that you’ll like him too 7

Love Harry

————

1 – Papa addressed this letter to “Fraulein Jean Pollack”, continuing a little foreign honorific joke he started when he addressed his last letter to “Mmle Jean de Pollack”. Perhaps, if Papa had reason to write more, he might have joked in all of the seven languages he spoke. Alas, my grandmother was about to return from her summer vacation, so this is the last letter Papa wrote to her (or at least the last she saved) in 1928.

2 – I’m not quite sure what Papa means by “You will know by the paper I’m using that I’m writing this at your home” since he’s written this letter on what appears to be ruled notebook paper as opposed to some kind of recognizable stationery. Perhaps, if he wasn’t writing on his own paper and therefore not at home, my grandmother would have assumed he was at her family’s home because he hung around there so much.

3 – This paragraph seems a little cryptic, but I suppose “that man” is merely the person who was giving my grandmother a ride back from the country and dropping her at “the Wise home.”

4 – As Papa notes in his postscript, my grandmother’s father wrote this passage in Yiddish, most likely at Papa’s behest. Here’s how it looks up close:

We know Papa put a big premium on whether or not people wrote to each other and had been trying to get my grandmother’s family to write her more often for years (just as he had been trying to get my grandmother to write him more often). His first letter to her contains a reluctantly-penned passage from her sister Sally; in subsequent letters, he assures her that others intend to send her letters; and here, five years later, he’s finally gotten her father to scribble a few lines to her. I wonder if my grandmother’s family began to dread Papa’s visits because they knew each one would involve a discussion of their correspondence habits.

I’m kind of amused by the contents of the note, too. It reads more like a prayer than a greeting, a request from God for good health with an implicit reminder to my grandmother of how thankful she should be for the absence of illness in her body. Note, too, how my great-grandfather phrases his request, wishing not only that my grandmother “should be healthy” in the present but that she should “remain healthy” in the future as well, a clever hedge designed to make sure God doesn’t lose track of my grandmother’s condition or play gotcha with my great-grandfather’s request (“well, you didn’t say whether or not she had to remain healthy, did you?”). Ladies and gentlemen, these are my people, the Jews — always waiting for God, that prankster, to nail us on a technicality.

5 – So, Sally is engaged at last!

For those of you just joining us, Papa was introduced to my grandmother’s sister, Sally, for matrimonial purposes in early 1925 but fell in love with my grandmother instead. This didn’t sit will with my grandmother’s family, a relatively wealthy bunch who considered Papa, a salaried garment worker, good enough for the less desirable, grouchy Sally but not in the same league as my beautiful, younger grandmother. Sally probably didn’t feel too good about it either, nor could Papa’s dogged pursuit of my grandmother’s hand have done a lot for Sally and my grandmother’s already strained relationship.

But, here we are in 1928, and it’s a new day as Murray, Sally’s future husband and the man with whom she would raise a child (my cousin Doris) comes around regularly and takes the family on excursions in his various vehicles. Here’s what his 1928 Pierce-Arrow might have looked like (via webshots.com):

1928 Pierce-Arrow

And if the truck in which he brought everyone to Coney was a Ford pickup, it might have looked a little something like this (via Wikimedia):

I’d like to say Murray’s presence and Sally’s new found bliss helped ease the tensions between Sally and my grandmother, but they still found plenty to fight about in the ensuing decades.

6 – I can’t tell if the phrase “shoot me with a knife” is an amusing slip of Papa’s pen or if it was some kind of comical catch phrase in the 1920’s. In any event, I’m going to say it from now on.

7 – This postscript appears on what looks to be a torn-off piece of brown wrapping paper. It’s not Papa’s style to write on scraps, but even though he was out of writing paper he really must have really wanted to make sure, for the record, that my grandmother didn’t think he was “casting reflections” on Murray.