Papas Diary Project

I met on my way to work [I met] C.
How different she looks now
She lost weight and looks bad,

Saw Clara home from hospital

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Matt’s Notes

Poor “C.” Perhaps Papa hid her name because she was an old flame or had inspired a bout of infatuation in her younger, plumper days. He certainly didn’t suffer any shortage of might-have-beens after 11 years in New York — he runs into them here and there, goes on blind dates, and can even make a day of wistfully pasting their pictures in a photo album — so the smart money has “C.” among their ranks.

I don’t mean to minimize Papa’s loneliness or imply that he left New York littered with the prostrate forms of Harry Scheurman groupies who did nothing all day but drink absinthe and fondle his old neckties. I’m just starting to think he was tormented more by his pursuit of a perfect, and perfectly unattainable, romance than by any difficulty in meeting women. As I’ve mentioned before, his idealism was a mixed blessing at this stage of his life; it drove him to help change the world, but it also kept him personally disappointed. How he finally developed the right mix of idealism and realism, how he discovered the difference between what he wanted and what he needed, and how he learned to feel satisfied with what he had without sacrificing his ability to seek more is not yet clear to me.

Home

Presented sister Clara
with a beautiful cradle
for baby.

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Matt’s Notes

Clara, as we know, was one of Papa’s sisters who lived in his neighborhood. She got home from the hospital with her new son, Julius, the previous day. I’m trying to figure out what the cradle Papa bought might have looked like, but no luck so far. (If anyone knows where I might find an image of an early 1920’s cradle, please write to the address below.)

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A couple of months ago I wrote a post about the efforts people like my grandfather made to challenge the image of Jews as bookish and physically inept. In this post I mentioned the documentary film Watermarks, which tells the story of an all-Jewish Viennese swim team called Hakoah (“The Strength”) Vienna that enjoyed tremendous success until its members were forced to flee Austria in 1938. My wife and I saw the movie over the weekend and enjoyed it immensely. It consists mostly of interviews with the surviving members of Hahoah Vienna, all of whom are articulate and full of interesting stories.

In one scene, a woman named Hanni and her sister Judith (a national champion who was stripped of her records for refusing to participate in the 1936 Olympics) get together for their daily poetry reading, and the poem they choose to recite is Heinrich Heine’s “Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen (A Young Man Loves a Maiden).” This is an interesting coincidence, since Papa quoted the same poem back on February 4th while he was in the midst of a particularly difficult romantic episode. I knew the poem was well-known (Schumann set it to music in his Dichterliebe song cycle, and the song appears on the Watermarks soundtrack) but seeing other Austrians recite it from memory reinforces how popular it must have been.

The film’s subtitles don’t make an effort to translate the poem to rhyming verse, but I’ve transcribed it below, along with the version I quoted on February 4th, just for laughs:

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A Boy (Watermarks version)

A boy loves a girl
She has chosen another
That other loves another
and it is this one he has wed.

The girl in anger takes
the next best fellow
who comes her way
The boy takes it badly

It is an old tale
But it always stays fresh
and to whom it actually happens,
it breaks his heart asunder.

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A Young Man Loves a Maiden (Papa’s Diary Project version, adapted from Henrich-Heine.net)

A young man loves a maiden
But another she prefers,
The other one loves another,
And ties the knot with her.

From spite, the maiden marries
The first who comes along,
And happens `cross her path;
The youth must rue it long.

It is an old, old story,
Yet still forever new;
And every time it happens,
It breaks the heart in two.

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Update 4/11

Reader Carol sent this link to a picture of a cradle from the late 1800’s. It might give us some idea of what Papa’s gift to Clara looked like:

Sisters night.

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Looks like an uneventful day for Papa. The temperature as he strolled from his sister Nettie’s apartment to his sister Clara’s was in the mid 50’s. (Or did he have dinner with Nettie and Clara at the same time? They didn’t get along later in life, but they might have seen more of each other when they all lived on the Lower East Side; perhaps Papa made sure of it).

News of the day they might have discussed over dinner included the new plans for a Roosevelt Hall at the museum of Natural History; the fate of 26 Ku Klux Klan members after their Pennsylvania rally resulted in a riot and the deaths of three men; or the upcoming baseball season. Then again, they may have ignored these subjects and discussed instead the health of their father, who was convalescing back in the old country after a bad fall earlier in the year. Most likely, though, they spent the evening ogling Clara’s new son, Julius, who had been home from hospital for less than a week and, perhaps, passed the evening in the new cradle Papa bought him two days earlier.