sniatyn

Thursday May 29

by


I had hoped to go there
and see my beloved
people on the other side,
But the World War, and
my bad luck kept me
from it.

It is now my sole aim
to keep my dear mother
comfortable for the rest of her
life.

——————-

I’ve wondered before if Papa’s father’s death would “spoil” the idea of visiting home for him, and the resigned tone of this entry makes me think that might be the case. Without his father to anchor the image of his “beloved people on the other side,” his thoughts of home cannot sustain him as they once did.

It’s unusual for Papa to hold outside influences responsible for the course of his life, so I think we can see how profound and jarring it is for him to be stripped of the prospect of a family reunion in Sniatyn — only a global upheaval like a World War or an unseen force like “bad luck” could be responsible. I think this notion may actually help him feel less guilty about not making it back and not being able to do more for his family, though such resignation doesn’t suit him; perhaps his vow to take care of his mother is a way for him to withdraw from his foray into helplessness.

Friday June 13

by

And so life goes on,
Today was a quiet day.

Nothing of importance happened
quietly I am doing my
duty to my father by going
to the synagogue to say Kadish,

With my fathers passing
there is really no one in this world
who can give me advice,
My beloved mother (may God
spare her for me) cannot write
and the others of my blood
family do not care even to write
me, Is it because I do not
send them any money, They will
never realize how I am struggling
daily for my very existence, If
they ever did write it was with
a big gimme

—————-

Matt’s Notes

Yesterday Papa tested out a few new ideas about love and marriage, and today he again takes us into unfamiliar territory with the angriest, harshest entry he’s ever written. This isn’t the first time he’s described the financial pressure he gets from his family in the old country or wished they’d understand how little spare money he has, but it is the first time he’s admitted to such exasperation (he usually laments his own inability to help them more when faced with their requests).

It’s almost as if Papa has started squabbling with his siblings in the absence of his wise and stabilizing father, even if he can only do it through his diary. On the other hand, he also uses the same language to describe his own life — “struggling for my very existence” — that he has several times used to describe his father (and we know from previous entries that he thinks he should step into his father’s shoes and take care of his family). So, who is Papa today: A bereft child or struggling breadwinner? I think he’s a little of both, and the clash between those two ways of thinking is making him grouchy.

It’s also interesting to note that Papa tries to spare his mother from his anger in this entry — since she can’t write, she can’t write to ask him for money like everyone else does. I’m not sure why, but he went back later and crossed out the words “cannot write” in pencil; maybe he went back days or weeks or years later and did this because he didn’t want it to be known. In any event, it changes the sentence from “My beloved mother (may God spare her for me) cannot write and the others of my blood family do not care even to write me” to “My beloved mother (may God spare her for me) and the others of my blood family do not care even to write me.” In attempting to spare his mother’s reputation, he inadvertently becomes more critical of her. Does this accident mean anything, or am I just playing amateur psychologist?

Thursday July 10

by


C.I.

Sent home $15
5 for Mother, 5 Gittel,
3 Ettel, and 2 for Fule

————-

Matt’s Notes

Papa has been spending a lot of time at Coney Island since he and his friends took a locker for the season at Hahn’s Baths on the Boardwalk at 31st Street. I don’t have any photos of Hahn’s, but I do have this picture of what a Boardwalk bath house (in this case the Washington Baths at 21st street1) would have looked like in the 20’s:

Here it is a little closer:

And closer still:

As nice as it was for him to spend his days at the beach, Papa would have preferred to be at work. He was on a forced vacation due to his factory’s slack season, but he disliked idleness and, especially in the aftermath of his father’s death, dreaded free time, saw each unoccupied moment as a hazardous, risky invitation to depressing, worried thoughts.

He had also vowed to give more support to his family in the old country now that his father was gone, but working less obviously made this more difficult. I think that accounts for the careful distribution, and this entry’s careful accounting, of the $15 he sent home. I’m sure he gave to each person according to his perception of her needs, with his newly-widowed mother and his sister Gitel, who recently let him know she and her family were starving, getting the most and Ettel and Fule, the oldest and youngest sisters respectively, getting the least.

Regardless of Papa’s financial constraints, his siblings surely analyzed and discussed whatever messages, preferences and signs of failing generosity his disbursement described. If his previous descriptions of their attitudes are accurate, they thought the streets of New York were paved with gold and were sure he held out on them. Papa has described of both his guilt over not having the means to do more and, in one unusually dark moment, his resentment of their demands, and I can’t help but find some signs of related tension in this entry. He has never described who got what in such detail, and he also leaves out his brother Isaac, who has been the most vocal about his dissatisfaction with Papa’s support. Did Papa not name Isaac for this reason, or did he feel that Isaac, as a man, did not need as much help?

In any event, the women Papa mentions above are pictured below. They are, clockwise from the bottom right: Gittel (in a photo from 1938) Ettel (in a photo from 1895) his mother, Fagale (from an undated photo, but probably taken in the 1910’s) and Fule (in the photo with Gittel from 1938).

——————————

References

1 – According to a 1930’s Coney Island directory archived at the Coney Island History Project, the Washington Baths were a place “Where young and old enjoy the swimming pool, handball courts, athletic fields, and tennis courts” and also “nude sun bathing.” The same brochure also touts “Baby Incubators,” “where premature infants first see the light of day. An educational journey through a miniature hospital.” If that grabs your interest, do yourself a favor and check out the Coney Island History Project’s collections.

Saturday July 19

by


Another empty day

I dared not even enjoy
at The Country mens affair
when a Torah was presented
to the Sniatyner Synagogue

The thought of my beloved
father (olam haba) kept me away
I went there but soon
left as I could not stand
the merriment.

—————–

What a difference a death makes. The last time Papa went to a “Country mens” affair (by this he means an event for people from his home town of Sniatyn, a.k.a. his “countrymen,” or landsmen in Yiddish) he described it as a “dream,” and he stayed up and wrote about it until four in the morning to hold onto the heady, happy buzz it gave him. And that was merely an annual dance; the presentation of a new Torah to his congregation should have been an even more intoxicating convergence of spiritual joy and fortifying thoughts of the old country.

Sadly, in the same way that, on the previous day, the prospect of earning more money only made him more conscious of his debts, the celebration at the Sniatyner synagogue reminded him, in yet another new and cruel way, that his dreams of home, of one day reuniting with his family, of somehow recapturing the “lost paradise” of his youth, died with his father back in May.

His fellow congregants probably danced in the halls of the schul and poured out onto East Broadway, singing Hebrew songs and crowding together as they did on Simchas Torah, just like they did in the old country. But Papa suspected the ritual would unsettle him, and like many such prophesies his was self-fulfilling. The Torah, a symbol of renewal and progress and hope, symbolized for Papa only the loss of his father, who had been a Torah scholar and teacher. The cheerful crush of his thronging landsmen, who celebrated not just a new Torah but their own freedom to demonstrate their faith on the streets of their adopted country, made Papa feel like he was at the center of a storm, brought home only the isolation he felt in New York, the trouble his mother and brother and sisters were in back in Europe.

Would he have felt guilty to share in the deep satisfaction he should have felt on this day? Did he feel like he didn’t have the right to be happy if his father was dead? Is that why he said he “dared not even enjoy” the presentation of the Torah? And what did he do when he left the synagogue? Did he wander around through Chinatown or up through the Lower East Side? Did he head back to his apartment to listen to the radio and pore over his photos from home? Did he take grim satisfaction in his detachment or did it strike him, in some small way, that the past was past, that Sniatyn no longer belonged to him, that his only chance at happiness was to build, at last, a brand new life for himself?

—————–

References

1 – As previously noted, the Congregation Sniatyner Agudath Achim gathered at a multi-use facility called Broadway Manor at 209 East Broadway between Clinton and Jefferson Streets. It’s now the location of the Primitive Christian Church.

Image Source: Image source: “Portrait of a ‘siyum ha-toyre’ (completion of the writing of a Torah scroll).” Courtesy of the Yivo Institue for Jewish Research’s People of a Thousand Towns site.

Thursday July 24

by


Had supper with Sister
Nettie,

Received another bad letter
form home, eternal strife
among the children at home

I am so worried, what
can I do? My aim to bring
my mother & Fule here seems
hopeless, unless I can manage
to get naturalized early, but
the hopes are very slim, however
I’m hopeful.

In the meantime the
constant worrying is having
its effect on me, it weakens
me I think I have super-
strength when I can stand
all these worries.

——————-

Matt’s Notes

I speculated on why Papa’s naturalization status might be on his mind when he first mentioned in a couple of weeks ago, but I didn’t realize its practical effect on his efforts to bring his family over from the old country. I’m sure he would have encountered many other obstacles even if he was naturalized (Would he have enough money? Could his mother handle the trip?) but the opaque bureaucracy holding up his Petition for Naturalization obviously felt the most impenetrable. Was Papa so focused on it because there was some sort of loophole for relatives of naturalized immigrants in the recently-strengthened immigration quota laws?

Papa never would get his mother, sister Fule or any of his other siblings out of Sniatyn, though Fule eventually made her way into the world at large through a series of marriages and adventures. (She went to Palestine after her Viennese husband just before World War II. Upon her arrival, she married a near stranger on a boat just outside Palestinian waters so she could enter as the wife of a citizen. My mother tells me the family knew this second husband only as “Mr. Abramowitz.” He was, it seems, somehow related to David Sarnoff, the Russian-born broadcast innovator and RCA founder who I’ve read about while researching early radio history for this site.)

I’m sure the worrisome letter Papa refers to contained details of his family’s financial struggles and desperate requests for more money. As we’ve discussed before, he felt compelled to provide for them all after his father died — note how he refers to his siblings as “the children” here, as if he’s really taken on a patriarchal role. Papa was naturally generous and responsible, but I think he also took on his father’s role (and worries) in part because it helped keep his memory alive. Whatever the reasons, though, his concerns as an immigrant were personal, painful, typical and timeless.

Monday Nov 10

by


3 P.M.

Slow and no work today
and tomorrow, Received
picture of mother and Fule.

Sending home $5.00, I only
enter moneys sent home whenever
I remember about it.

—————–

Matt’s Notes

I’m not sure why work slowed down for Papa around this time, but maybe his factory had met its annual or holiday production quotas. It wasn’t unusual for him to have a few days or even weeks off during slack periods, but he never enjoyed these times, not only because he didn’t get paid but because idleness left him contemplative and blue. Perhaps he wrote “3 PM” at the top of this entry because he was he was so conscious of the day’s slow passage, or maybe he just noted the time because he normally didn’t pick up his diary until the end of the day.

I suppose, on such a day, a trip to the post office to wire money home seemed worth recording, though Papa wants to make it clear that, just because he noted it today for lack of other news doesn’t mean he didn’t frequently send money home without recording it. I wonder, in turn, if he also received photos from the old country fairly often but only bothered to write it down when nothing else was going on.

We don’t have the photo of his mother and youngest sister, Fule, mentioned in this entry, though we do have pictures of them both from other times. The photo of his mother, below left, is probably from the early 1910’s (it’s taken from a portrait of her with Papa’s father who, as we know, died in 1924) and the photo of Fule is from a group portrait of Papa’s relatives in the old country taken before Fule left for Palestine in the 1930’s. As we’ve discussed before, Fule was the, third, and final, of Papa’s siblings to get out of Snyatin before the Nazi occupation; his sisters Gitel, Ettel and brother Isaac were not so fortunate.

May 4, 1925 – Brooklyn

by

[Note: This is the sixth letter Papa wrote to my grandmother while she was vacationing at her cousin’s farm in Connecticut. To see full-sized scans of the letter, click the thumbnail images on the right of this page.]

——–

May 4th 1925

My dear Jeanie:

Back in the old town writing to my
soul friend.1

It certainly was a dream in reality
the country, the beautiful natural
surroundings which I love so much
and with you there it was a pleasure
and inspiration, such as only the pen
of an artist can describe.2

My heart was filled with longing as
the train pulled out of the Willimantic
station3, knowing that every second the
train carried me further and further away
from you.

The trip presented an opportunity
to view a fine scenery of towns, villages
and beautiful landscapes, as the train
rushed through the wide open spaces.3A

I arrived at 10:30 daylight saving
time and immediately at the station
called up your folks, I spoke to Sally
and after I mail this letter I will go
there and tell your folks of what I’ve seen

(over)

I’ve put through today an honest day’s
work, but all day I’ve been thinking how
different it was yesterday at this time.

At the noon hour during the great rush
at the restaurant I thought of this very
moment a day before when I sat near you
when you were in the hammock, I sang
for you trying to put you to sleep.
Do you remember? It was so quiet around
that you could hear the telephone wires
humming, and here I am again between
the tall structures and the mass of
humanity.4

I guess it will be enough of sentimentality.
Again I wish to thank the Kresewitzes
for the fine treatment, that bargain you
know was a surprise.

In closing I wish to extend my
kindest regards to the Kresewitz family
to Oscar & Barney the Steins and all
all others that are kind to you.

I am as ever

Your devoted

Harry

P.S.

Will write another one tonight.

———

Matt’s Notes

1 – In his previous letter, Papa mentioned his plan to get on an “Express-train” and visit my grandmother at her cousin’s farm in Connecticut, and he’s obviously just returned from the trip.

I find Papa’s use of the expression “back in the old town” sort of charming, but when I looked around to see if it was prohibition-era vernacular I learned it was actually old-fashioned at the time Papa wrote this letter. (To wit, the World War I song “Back in the Old Town Tonight” was around in 1916, and “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” had been a standard since the 1880’s.) Did Papa write “back in the old town” in a jokey, retro sort of way? Would my grandmother, at nineteen, have understood the irony?

For our own reference, here’s Bessie Smith’s 1927 recording of “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”:

2 – Despite the wall-to-wall urban trappings of Papa’s life as depicted in his diary and letters (he writes about subways, operas, baseball games, “auto” trips to Coney Island, walks on the Brooklyn Bridge, romantic encounters on trolleys, and on and on) this passage reminds us that, as of the mid- 1920’s, he’d still spent the better part of his life in Sniatyn, an Austro-Hungarian hamlet surrounded bordered by the river Prut and surrounded by woodlands. A modern-day satellite view of Sniatyn shows it to be relatively rural still:

View Larger Map

Papa no doubt spent endless boyhood hours in the woods or by the river, lost among the leaves and lichens and frogs and birdsong, feeling comfortable and safe. It could have been among those trees that he played with his friends, had his first kiss, savored the rare chance to walk alone with his father. When he longed for home and family, as he had done for so many years, part of what he missed was the forest and its surrounding hills. (I’ve often read and heard that Eastern European Jews started vacationing in the Catskill Mountains in part because the terrain is not unlike Eastern Europe’s. A Ukrainian friend recently told me, after he hiked in the Catskill region, that the area reminded him of the Carpathian Mountains. I suppose I’ll have to go and find out for myself.)

When Papa finally built a family of his own, he did his best to find “beautiful natural surroundings” in the parks and plant beds of Brooklyn. My mother particularly remembers how he would take her out each spring to hunt for nascent plants and flowers and teach her their names.

3 – The Willimantic Train Station:

View Larger Map

3A – Updated 2/12/07 – Papa’s Diary Project’s Executive Director of Transportation History, a mysterious figure who goes only by the name “Fred,” has this to say about Papa’s train trip from Willimantic: “Papa probably traveled on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad from Willimantic to New Haven, and thence to New York. I believe you’d have to take a bus from Willimantic these days to connect with Amtrak at New London.” There’s more on this page at Willimantic’s Connecticut Eastern Railroad Museum site (scroll down to the middle right of the page).

4 – When Papa wrote this, he must have still been intoxicated with the memory of singing my grandmother to sleep in the noonday quiet of the country. Did this memory, and the feeling of perfect simplicity it evoked, stay with him throughout his life? Did he drift into a reverie when he thought about it in later years? I also wonder if, when he wrote “do you remember?” to my grandmother, he was referring to a more intimate detail of their time in the hammock (a memorable kiss, perhaps) that he found unnecessary (or maybe improper) to write down.

I’d also like to know what song he chose to put her to sleep. If the setting reminded him of his boyhood home he may have chosen something from his youth, or maybe he selected something more modern with a touch of old-country flavor. My best guess is “The Gypsy Love Song,” a.k.a. “Gypsy Serenade (Slumber on My Little Gypsy Sweetheart)”, which Papa had heard on the radio a year before and used to sing to my mother in later years. Here it is again, from archive.org:

The Internets have informed me that this song was written by Victor Herbert and Harry B. Smith for the 1898 musical “The Fortune Teller” and became relatively famous thereafter. A number of artists covered it, including Chico Marx (in 1929’s The Cocoanuts) and the Isley Brothers. A look at the lyrics shows it to be a good candidate for Papa’s serenade to my grandmother on a warm spring Sunday:

The birds of the forest are calling for thee
And the shades and the glades are lonely
Summer is there with her blossoms fair
And you are absent only

No bird that nests in the greenwood tree
But sighs to greet you and kiss you
All the violets yearn, yearn for your safe return
But most of all I miss you

Slumber on, my little gypsy sweetheart
Dream of the field and the grove
Can you hear me, hear me in that dreamland
Where your fancies rove

Slumber on, my little gypsy sweetheart
Wild little woodland dove
Can you hear the love song that tells you
All my heart’s true love

The fawn that you tamed has a look in its eyes
That doth say, “We are too long parted”
Songs that are trolled by our comrades old
Are not now as they were light hearted

The wild rose fades in the leafy shades
Its ghost will find you and haunt
All the friends say come, come to your woodland home
And most of all I want you

————-

References:

  • “Back in the Old Town Tonight” sheet music is available at the University of Indiana Web site.
  • Information on “Hot Time In the Old Town“, including a scan of the sheet music cover, is available at the University of San Diego Web site.
  • A New York Times article from 1898, the year “Hot Time in the Old Town” became the theme song of American soldiers in the Spanish-American war (Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders) says it was written by a “Denver negress” named Amanda Green. Most other sources, like this 1935 Time Magazine article, credit Theodore Metz and Joe Hayden with its composition.
  • “Gypsy Love Song” lyrics are available at lyricsplayground.com, and the Duke University Library site has scans of the original sheet music’s cover page, lyrics, and music.