Monday July 21

by


I went this Eve. with a
struggling artist to help him
sell some pictures, I took
bought two myself, that
are now adorning my walls.

This is the first day when
I started to work again,
and I am happy about
it, I shall [be able to] pay out my
debts now.

———————–

Who was the anonymous “struggling artist” Papa assisted on this cool summer evening? A neighbor? An acquaintance from Zionist meetings? Papa had been visiting Coney Island a lot lately, so maybe he struck up a conversation with an artist who regularly showed on the Boardwalk, learned he lived on the Lower East Side, and promised to give him a hand some time. Or, more romantically, did Papa and his artist friend first meet at the Cafe Royale, gathering place for the Yiddish cognoscenti, and engage in a caffeinated conversation about the emerging “Hebrew” art movement in Palestine?

I’m also trying to imagine what kind of sales assistance Papa might have offered his friend. Did he help him lay out paintings on the sidewalk? Did Papa direct passers-by to his stand from down the block? Did he help guard his friend’s booth at some kind of annual street fair or art fair? And, I wonder, what sort of art would a struggling artist, presumably Jewish, have pursued in the 1920’s? What would Papa have purchased? A representation of the old country? Something more modern or experimental? Straight-up Judaica?

I don’t pretend to know much about art of the 1920’s, much less what was going on in the Jewish immigrant art community in New York, so I’ll need to look into it more. (Please drop a comment or write if you think you can help narrow down the infinite possibilities.) Still, it’s nice to see Papa treat himself to a couple of pictures now that he’s returned to work after a three-week, forced vacation. More burdensome that the debts he ran up to support his family in the wake of his father’s death has been his feeling that he doesn’t truly belong anywhere — he’s an unnaturalized guest in America and, with his father gone, he can no longer think of Sniatyn as his home. Maybe his urge to decorate his apartment a little signals some small waning in his sense of dislocation.

Tuesday July 22

by


Attended the farewell
dinner for Judge Strahl
who is leaving for Palestine
to install in Jerusalem the
Judea Insurance Co, given
by the Order sons of Zion,

Only in the midst of
idealists I find myself at home.

——————

Matt’s Notes

Judge Strahl was one of the most prominent leaders of Order Sons of Zion (B’nai Zion) the Zionist fraternal order and mutual support society Papa belonged to. Here’s what the 1917-1918 Jewish Communal register had to say about him:

Jacob S. Strahl was born in the New York in 1876, was educated in the New York Public and Hish Schools and received his degree of Bachelor of Laws from the New York Law School in 1897. He was elected Justice of the Municipal Court of the City of New York in 1909. Prior thereto, for nine years, he was associated with former New York Supreme Court Justice James A. Blanchard.

Judge Strahl has shown a great interest in Jewish work. He is the president of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association of Williamsburg, and the Nasi of the Order B’nai Zion.

Archived New York Times articles about Strahl attest to his reputation as a liberal judge, as does this 1920 reelection campaign postcard depicting him protecting two hapless tenants from an eviction-minded “rent profiteer.” It looks like his campaign methods got him in trouble with the Brooklyn Bar Association, though their campaign to discipline him for “conduct unbecoming an attorney” eventually came to naught. Strahl was no longer the Nasi of B’nai Zion in 1924 (“nasi” roughly translates from the Hebrew as “prince,” so I suppose B’nai Zion was no different from other fraternal organizations in its use of grand, archaic titles for its leaders) but he was on its executive committee and obviously one of its most active ambassadors.

Interestingly, the Judea Insurance Company he helped install in Palestine would, five years later, list as its Vice President none other than Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of Israel’s founding fathers. This was part of a larger development in which B’nai Zion threw its support behind Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism Movement, an aggressive strain of Zionism that put Jabotinsky at odds with the Chaim Weizmann’s more moderate, centrist movement. This brings up some interesting questions about which brand of idealism Papa preferred — as of 1924 he seemed enamored of Weizmann, and as a pacifist he may not have liked Jabotinsky’s militarism. I’d love to know where he stood when B’nai Zion aligned with Jabotinsky, but we can only speculate.

—————-

References:

Wednesday July 23

by


I had supper with sister
Clara, and after a visit
to sister Nettie I spent
the rest of the eve. at home

——————-

For those of you just joining us, Clara and Nettie are two of Papa’s five sisters, and lived near his Attorney Street apartment on the Lower East Side. His other three sisters, Ettel, Gitel and Fule, plus his only brother, Isaac, still lived back in Papa’s Austro-Hungarian home town of Sniatyn.

Clara and Nettie never got along too well, so Papa rarely saw both of them at the same time even though they all lived near each other. Both sisters had relatively newborn babies for Papa to play with. Clara’s son, Julius, was born on May 28th, surprising Papa with his early arrival. Still, the circumstances surrounding the May 20th birth of Nettie’s son were far more unusual: When Papa wired home news of the birth, the response he received informed him that his own father had just died. Papa and Clara, now in mourning, kept the news from Nettie during her 10-day postpartum hospital stay. They didn’t even tell her the news when their mother requested that the baby be named Josele after their father, whose name was Joseph. (Jews traditionally don’t name their children after the living.)

Papa’s reputation among my family’s younger generations was stellar — he impressed us all with his gentle, comforting vibe, born in part, no doubt, of the genuine pleasure he felt to see his family well-established in his adopted country. Still, I wonder if Papa found it hard to be around Josele since he was tied so closely to Papa’s father’s death, or if, especially in 1924 when the wound was still raw, Papa’s behavior and countenance darkened ever so slightly when he visited Nettie.

————–

My mother adds:

I think Papa was able to keep these things separate. He loved all his nieces and nephews very much, and was very devoted to Aunt Nettie, especially since she had such an unhappy life.

I never saw his face darken, except for the bad news during and after WW2 and anything unfavorable to Israel.

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.

Friday July 25

by


Had supper with Nettie
and all evening at home

———-

This is Papa’s second dinner in a row with his sister Nettie, which is slightly unusual but really only notable because he received news the day before of their family’s troubles in the old country. At first I figured Papa and Nettie might have talked about it the previous evening and gotten together again to continue their conversation, but on second thought I’d be kind of surprised if this was the case. Unless Nettie got her own distressing letter from Europe, Papa would have protected her from such worrisome news — with two sickly children and a husband who had trouble staying employed, she had problems of her own. (Papa had kept bad news from her before, most notably back in May when he decided not to tell her their father had died just after her son was born.)

So why two dinners in a row? Maybe Papa just felt the need to see Nettie a little more since the siblings he couldn’t visit were on his mind. Then again, I could be trying to dig too much out of this entry. They might have gotten together the second time for no real reason or because she happened to have some extra soup on the stove when he stopped by. Sometimes a dinner is just a nice dinner.

Saturday July 26

by


In an effort to kill a
monotonous day somehow
I went with Friend Weiner
& others to an Excursion given
by the Jewish National Workers Alliance

It seems that hard luck
falls on me everywhere, first
the reckless crowds and their
noisy wild shouting did not agree
with me, and to make the
day complete I lost a 10 dollar bill
or somebody stole it from my
pocket, I feel sorry but I had
some tougher luck in these my
trying days.

What will I do tomorrow?

————————-

Matt’s Notes

The Jewish National Worker’s Alliance sounds like the name of a labor union, but according to the 1923-1924 American Jewish Yearbook, it was a fraternal, social and support organization along the same lines and around the same size (6,100 members) as B’nai Zion (7,000 members) the fraternal order to which Papa belonged. Their office was at 228 East Broadway, just a few doors down from the Sniatyner Synagogue at 209 East Broadway, where Papa often worshipped. Here’s what an October, 2006 article from the Jewish Daily Forward has to say about them:

In Yiddish, farband means brotherhood and is also shorthand for the Yidisher Natsyonaler Arbeter-Farband (the Jewish National Workers’ Alliance), a labor Zionist fraternal order founded in the beginning of the 20th century. The Farband provided insurance and medical plans, and it also organized schools and Yiddish-cultural activities and participated in political affairs.

The Farband also built the Farband Houses, a cooperative housing development in the Bronx, and was closely aligned with Poale Zion, the far-left “labor Zionist” organization that saw Socialism and Zionism as inextricably linked. I may be butchering history here, but I think Poale Zion’s youth movement, Young Poale Zion, was also known as Zeire Zion. Papa didn’t much like Zeire Zion and even wrote a nasty article about them for Dos Yiddishe Folk, a weekly published by the more centrist Zionist Organization of America. His distaste for Zeire Zion probably would have compromised his Farband excursion even if the crowd hadn’t been intolerably reckless or a served as a haven for pickpockets.

I think Papa’s use of the word “monotonous” and the concluding question “What will I do tomorrow?” indicate more impatience with bachelorhood than with boredom. I would wager the “noisy wild” labor Zionists he spent the day with less raucous than they were young and carefree, irritating his lower-key, old-world sensibilities just as the “wild women” did at a Zionist ball back in January. Really, how wild could these people have been? Did they sing their labor songs too vigorously? Make too many sloppy speeches?

I think the scene “did not agree” with Papa because he was growing up fast and feeling the burden of his 29 years. He had suddenly become the de facto head of his family after his father died, and he was waking up to the inexorable passage of time and to the inevitability of life’s less savory surprises. As someone who had a good innate understanding of how important it was to concentrate on what he could do for himself and not on what he couldn’t control, he rarely lamented his “bad luck” or “hard luck” unless he felt as battered by circumstance as he seems to have on this day. (Still, it’s worth noting that he almost apologizes for seeing the loss of ten dollars as a sign of cosmic trickery when he says at the end of this entry “I feel sorry but I had some tougher luck in these my trying days.”) With such considerations afoot, it’s no wonder he got irritated among people who acted so cheerful and unburdened.

Sunday July 27

by


Again C.I.

I am so unhappy

I went to the C.I. Synagogue
to say Kadish

I always had the greatest
sympathy for those who
said Kadish

and now I am one of
those unfortunate

—————–

Sometimes I feel irrationally helpless when I look at Papa’s entries, as if I could relieve his unhappiness if only I tried hard enough. He seems to have tapped a new vein of sadness, too, recently remarking on his hard luck and boredom and constant worries. Even Coney Island, where he at least enjoyed the water and the breezes and the scenery once in a while, registers as little more than another place to mourn, as if its only attraction was a surreal, synagogue-themed simulacrum off the Boardwalk.

I have little more to say right now other than Papa, this is you:


I miss him today.

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