A life in New York, 1924
?
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Matt’s Notes
Like yesterday and the day before, Papa finds nothing interesting to report about his day and, with a single question mark, asks whether his life is worth discussing at all.
Slowly, slowly, in the coming years he would realize his life mattered. But on this day he had only a vague sense that it should, but not how it would.
What can I write when
there is nothing of importance
and no inspiration to write.
C. hasn’t changed a bit
I’m satisfied not to have her
she is thoughtless.
does not consider things
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Matt’s Notes
Here Papa writes out the sentiment he’s expressed over the page few days by writing only a question mark in his diary entries: “What can I write when there is nothing of importance…?” The day-to-day details of his life, which I and my legions of readers would certainly find interesting, don’t strike him as worth discussion so long as he feels stuck, lonely, with no prospects for immediate or dramatic change.
As I’ve speculated before, though, I think he was, in fact, growing up very quickly right now. The need to reinvent his world was more pressing now that his father, and the familial security and connection to the old country he represented, were gone. In some way I think the recent, deeper quality of Papa’s loneliness may signal a keener, realistic awareness of his circumstances. He doesn’t yet know exactly what he needs to do to change things, but I think he’s starting to understand that he can’t do it by daydreaming alone.
Meanwhile, the saga of “C.,” or Clara, continues, though Papa still hasn’t explained their long history or why its romantic turbulence has suddenly come to a head. My mother has suggested that Clara might be one of the Breindel sisters, the cousins with whom Papa shared a bed when he first arrived in New York (Eva and Sadie were the others). It wouldn’t have been so odd for distant cousins to romance each other in the 1920’s, so maybe that’s what’s going on here. It would certainly explain why Papa seems to know her so well and why he saw no need to introduce their storyline when it suddenly popped up, clearly continued from some earlier point, a few days ago.
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Update 8/25
I just realized that Clara might also be “Clara the daughter of Cousin Leizer” who Papa met on January 6th after her arrival from Europe. After describing the evening he spent with her and his other cousins, Papa went back and wrote an extra line about her in his entry: “The above mentioned Clara Leizers arrived from Europe recently.” I didn’t think much of it when I first read it, but maybe that extra little attention to Clara hints at his attraction to her.
I outfitted her to the station
because she forced herself upon
me. I deserted my friends
in order to accommodate her,
what was the reward?
Humiliation
Disappointment
I shall not be fooled
by trickery again.
Owing to a cold I went to
bed early, and had my sisters
visit me for the first time in
a long while.
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Matt’s Notes
By “her,” I assume Papa means Clara, the mysterious woman who has both fascinated and, it seems, tormented Papa since well before he started his 1924 diary. (The story of his disappointing, ongoing relationship with her showed up in full flower a week ago without introduction. He seems intimately familiar with her foibles and behavior, so he surely had a long history with her. She might even be one of the distant cousins he lived with when he first came to America.)
What type of disappointment and humiliation befell Papa when he changed his Sunday plans to see her off on a trip? Did she imply he’d get a kiss? An invitation to join her? A hint of a deeper romance? Or did they have an unspoken understanding in which she fed his appetite for hopes and dreams (remember, until this point Papa’s dreams and romantically unrequited hopes were important food for his poet’s soul, perhaps even more important to him than much of his real life) in exchange for assistance with her luggage and other odd jobs?
Whatever the particulars of their relationship, Papa and Clara manage to at least partly fill each others’ needs through a well-established, pseudo-intimate routine. I imagine Papa has vowed a million times before to “not be fooled by trickery again” in the course of his association with her, but I expect he’ll keep allowing it until he establishes a truer, more productive romance with someone else.
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Additional note:
Papa writes “I outfitted her to the station” in the first line of this entry. It’s an odd phrase but the word “outfitted” is quite clear:
I’ve always thought the verb “outfit” referred specifically to the collection or preparation of equipment and clothing, as in “Admiral Peary outfitted himself for his expedition to the North pole.” But, Papa uses it here in a more general way to indicate that he brought Clara’s stuff to a train station and perhaps loaded it onto a train. Was the word used more broadly this way back in the 20’s?
Received from [?] S. a letter
I would say rather [almost] affectionate
letter.
I shall gladly answer her.
She is the type of a girl I may
associate with.
I’ve just been informed that Miss R.
an intelligent American girl, was about
to propose to me but was stopped by her
parents who want their daughter to marry
wealth.
She a beautiful girl having gone through
all phases of life having all sorts of
admirers, game to the core, age 26.
seeks to propose to me the quiet, as
a climax to a gay and merry girlhood
life. — She saw me but twice, but
asked me to take her to a concert at
the Stadium. I may do it yet.
Yes. She was once an actress too.
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Matt’s Notes
I can’t make out the name of the woman who surprised Papa with her interest in him, but it looks something like “Sarah”:
I also can’t figure out from Papa’s tone whether he’s disappointed or simply surprised by news of “Miss R’s” thwarted proposal, but his discussion of it does reveal a few interesting details about Papa’s world. He refers to Miss R. as an “American girl,” which is the first time he’s used this phrase in his diary and no doubt means she was born in America and was more assimilated than he. I’m not sure if he therefore thought of her as part of a higher, more genteel social class, but her parents certainly did.
I also find it odd that a woman we’ver never heard of before planned to propose to Papa but I suppose my understanding of the word “propose” is quite different than Papa and Miss R.’s. Papa must have met her through a marriage broker and forgotten about her with the faceless prospects he described, or rather found too uninspiring to describe, back in early August. By “proposing” to him, she probably would have indicated, through the marriage broker, her willingness to marry him if he were amenable. I imagine the marriage broker delivered the news of her sentiments and of her family’s disapproval to see if Papa was willing to check her out again and, perhaps, try to win her family over.
Despite his description of her qualifications, I don’t think Papa was very excited about her. He could be very hard on himself about his lack of money and social standing when he was really interested in a woman who he felt was too good for him, but it doesn’t seem to bother him here. Also, news of Miss R.’s near-proposal doesn’t disappoint him nearly as much as his dramatic encounter back in January with “Tillie,” who sent him into a days-long tailspin when she confessed her love for him even though she was engaged to someone else.
In any event, the “concert at the Stadium” Papa planned to take Miss R. to was the August 20th performance of the New York Philharmonic at City College Stadium (a.k.a. Lewisohn Stadium, formerly located at 138th Street and Amsterdam Avenue). This was 1924’s final installment of the popular “Stadium concerts” summer music series, which was introduced in 1918 (when soldiers and sailors got in free) and continued until the mid-1960’s when Lewisohn Stadium was razed to accommodate City College’s expansion plans.
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New York Times References:
Got a card from Clara from
Spring Valley. I am indifferent to her.
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Matt’s Notes
As we know, the Clara mentioned above is not Papa’s sister Clara, but probably one of the cousins he stayed with when he first came to America in 1913. Clara II, as I shall hereafter refer to her for clarity’s sake, became an object of affection for Papa at some point in the intervening years, but their relationship has gotten stuck, engines revving and wheels spinning fruitlessly, at the relationship of friendship and intimacy.
Papa knows Clara II well and therefore hasn’t formally introduced her to us, but it looks like their orbital behavior is well-established: Clara II leads Papa on in order to get attention or favors from him, and Papa, frustrated, vows to wash his hands of her and resist her “trickery” only to answer when she again comes calling. We can almost see it unfold in his reaction to her postcard, which he writes about in his diary but only in order to deny his excitement over hearing from her. I suppose anyone who has ever been unable to exit a relationship that was clearly going nowhere knows the feeling.
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Additional Notes
Spring Valley was likely the site of a Jewish summer colony where Clara II went to get away from the city (women generally went to such colonies for extended stays, while the men in their families stayed in the city to work and joined them on weekends). As reader Marisa notes on this site’s “Cry for Help” page:
spring valley, new york is part of suburban rockland county which is 30 minutes northwest of new york city. currently spring valley and its neighboring town monsey are home to one of the country’s largest concentration of orthodox jews. (the rest of rockland county is also densely populated with jews of all denominations)probably in the 1920’s it was more rural and used as a summertime retreat for urban dwellers such as papa and other LES jews. since people began to move out of the city and populate suburbs such as rockland and westchester counties in the 1940’s and 1950’s, people began moving further north for such summertime family retreats. for example the catskill mountain region.
Just a little ride to C.I.
with Blanche.
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Matt’s Notes
I’m pretty sure Papa’s Coney Island companion on this day was a new character named Blanche, though I might be reading the name wrong (the “a” after the “l” doesn’t look exactly like his usual “a,” but I can’t think of what else it might be):
Whatever her name might be, I wonder who she is and how Papa met her. Could she be “Miss R.,” the “American girl” who expressed her affection for him a couple of days ago? He said he planned to take her out, and he often did his romancing on public transportation trips like train or ferry rides to Coney Island. He certainly would have been happy to be among the couples strolling the boardwalk rather than wistfully observing them from afar, as he has done in the past.
On the other hand, Papa said he planned to take Miss R. to a concert, and this entry seems a bit brief and offhand for a description of such a potentially important date. The phrase “just a little ride to C.I.” could indicate the jaunty cheerfulness of someone who’s had a great time with a new gal and can’t be bothered to describe it right now, or it could literally mean that his trip to Coney with Blanche was nothing remarkable. We’ve never met Blanche before, but since Papa’s diary isn’t a novel it often introduces his well-known acquaintances without ceremony, as it recently did with Clara II. Is Blanche just an old friend?
Nothing from Papa today. Perhaps he’s exhausted from all the attention he’s been getting from women over the past couple of days. If he had enough energy to look at the papers, here’s what might have caught his eye in the New York Times:
POLITICS NEVER POLITE. — Remember, there was a Presidential campaign underway in 1924. Even though the Democratic nominee, John W. Davis, had no real chance after his party’s contentious convention back in July, he was still out there campaigning. This editorial takes the Republicans to task for complaining about Davis’ tough language on the stump.
ARGUE FOR HANGING OF FRANKS SLAYERS; State Prosecutors Call Leopold and Loeb Fiends, While the Youths Listen Unmoved. — I admit this might be more interesting to me than to Papa since I just finished Compulsion, Meyer Levin’s excellent, thinly fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb saga. Still, the trial was a national sensation, so perhaps Papa was following along.
MOVIE OPERATORS VOTE TO STRIKE; Union to Collect Defense Fund of $200,000 for Strife to Begin Sept. — As a labor activist and movie lover, Papa must have been intrigued by the prospect of a movie operators’ strike (I think projectionists called themselves movie operators in those days). Negotiations broke off a week later, but theater owners apparently had no problem finding operators from outside The Motion Picture Operators’ Union, Local 306.
Today’s Radio Program – The Times radio listings (they appear to be a new innovation in August 1924, but I need to figure out when they first started appearing) show that Papa might have heard some of the following if he spent the evening at home with his headphones: