Thursday Feb 28

by


Visited Sister Nettie
I am so worried over
Ruchalys illness, I love the
child so much oh lord
help this child to come back
to normal health and bring
a little more happiness to her
unfortunate parents,

Another letter form home
father is still confined to bed
May the next letter bring me
the news of his renewed health.

Attend meeting of Maccabean
Camp the rest of the
Evening.

Got a letter from brother
Isaac criticising me for
not helping him, It hurts
me that I cannot help every-
body that wants such a thing
from me.

—————

Matt’s Notes

Four paragraphs, three of them filled with dread and anxiety. I suppose an optimist might see the glass as one-quarter full instead of three-quarters empty, but by most standards I’d say Papa had a really bad day.

Ruchaly’s illness is not fatal in this case, though she did eventually die of meningitis at age 11. It’s hard not to think about this, or the permanent emotional collapse Nettie suffered as a result, when Papa brings her up. It’s like a spectre hangs over her every mention.

Still, the letter from Isaac stands out as the day’s unkindest cut. Isaac probably thought the streets of America were paved with gold — this would not have been uncommon back then — did he honestly believe Papa was holding out on him? The accusation must have really stung Papa because it was so insulting to his character (consider how he was trying to untangle a problem for his brother-in-law just the day before) and came at a time when Papa already felt awful about his inability to see or help his ailing father more.

I want to tread lightly on Isaac’s memory, partly because I’m named for him (my middle name is Ian) but mostly because I know he died in terror, chased into the woods and shot by Nazi soldiers along with the other Jews of Sniatyn. I also think his angry letter to Papa is, to a great extent, just an expression of his own helplessness in the face of their father’s illness. Still, it couldn’t have been his finest moment.

As my mother notes, it’s difficult to think about how “Papa suffered for his family…He was so good and wasn’t getting much happiness in return.”

But later, Papa, this was you:

————–

Update March 1

My mother writes:

It occurs to me that Papa never held a grudge in his life. When he had to pick of any of his relatives to name you after, he chose Isaac, who apparently had given him such grief.

Do you know the people in the photo? Of course you know the back line [my grandmother, a.k.a. “Nana”; my great grandmother, a.k.a. “Nannycoo”; my mother; Papa – MU]. In front were sister Fula, who escaped to Israel [from Sniatyn before the Nazi occupation], her second husband, Mr. Abramowitz (I never heard him called anything else) and our cousin Moishe who was Papa’s nephew via sister Gittel. I always thought that he was a high government official in Poland, but [cousin] Jeanie says it was France.

Friday Feb 29/Saturday Mar 1

by

[1924 was a leap year, so I’ve published February 29th and March 1 on this page]

Little Ruchaly still seriously
ill, which worries me greatly.

After listening for some
time to the radio. —
I went to Jack Zichlinsky’s
house where in company of
friend I spent until 1:15 a.m
Ruchaly feels slightly better

after visiting some Zionist
societies in the Evening with
friend Louis Bluestone, I spent
the rest of the evening at the
Cafe Royal where I met many
friends until 3:30 a.m.

I sent to parents $5.00

—————

Matt’s Notes

Once, around twenty years ago, my mother, grandmother, sister and I were driving around Brooklyn when my grandmother looked at a building and suddenly blurted out “Jack Zichlinsky lived there!” I laughed for about three hours because she really exploded and I had no idea who she was talking about.

Obviously, though, Jack was a good friend of Papa’s since at least the 1920’s, so they had really been through the ringer together if their lives were at all similar. My mother tells me that, when Papa died in 1971, Jack cried while saying kaddish for him. Jack’s tombstone apparently displays the insignia of the Order Sons of Zion (B’nai Zion) the fraternal order to which he and Papa belonged.

Speaking of B’nai Zion, the March 1 post mentions Louis Bluestone, which surprises me because I thought the “Bluestone” Papa has talked about was Dr. Joseph Bluestone, one of the early B’nai Zion leaders (Papa often says “Bluestone” in the same breath as “Blaustein”, who was also a B’nai Zion leader). Perhaps Louis was Joseph’s brother or son; I’ll have to look into it.

————-

Update March 1

My mother adds:

What was even more funny about the J.Z. story is that every time we passed Sheepshead Bay, Nana would point out his home. It became a dumb family joke.

Sunday Mar 2

by

Geller & Bluestone visited me
during the day in evening
met friends at the Z.Z.

———

I think “Z.Z” refers to Zeire Zion, a left-leaning Zionist organization that strongly favored Jewish settlement in Palestine. Papa has mentioned them before, and while I know he liked to socialize at their local chapter I don’t know if he did much else with them. I’ll keep looking for more information.

Monday Mar 3

by


Lonesome!!!
to escape monotony I
went to the Capitol Theatre

————-

Matt’s Notes

With his faraway father’s injury and his nearby niece’s illness on his mind, Papa had more to escape from this day than just the monotony of his lonely apartment. Other men may well have sampled a bit of prohibition liquor under such circumstances, but the movie-loving gene runs strong in my line and luckily kept Papa from more dangerous vices.

While I inherited Papa’s taste for cinematic escapism, my New York does not, unfortunately, bear any active trace of the cinemas Papa escaped to. As mentioned before, the Capitol Theater was one of many grand movie palaces designed to give the proletariat a taste of old-world grandeur via nouveau gaudiness. These theaters typically programmed live music, ballet and opera performances along with feature films, too, giving its patrons access to high culture they might not otherwise have had.

On this night, Papa saw a screening of Wild Oranges, directed by the legendary King Vidor and adapted from a novel by Joseph Hergesheimer. (A prologue called “Popular Fantasy,” presumably a live performance of some sort, preceded the film.) The story of a violent man-child who terrorizes a young woman, “Wild Oranges” struck an anonymous New York Times reviewer as “entertaining and thrilling” even if “its subtitles are mostly of the long-winded variety.” (The Times’ blow-by-blow review practically obviates the need to see the film at all, which is helpful in this case since it’s not available on video.)

The Times archive also mentions Wild Oranges in a couple of other interesting articles. One, called “The Birth of a Picture,” tries to disabuse readers of their glamorous impressions of the movie business by outlining the tortuous path a movie takes from concept to completion; it’s a great read. An overview of movie goings-on called “Grinding out Amusement for the Millions” mentions the Wild Oranges opening, but is also has this paragraph:

Joseph H. Hazelton, who is said to have seen President Lincoln assassinated, and Calvert Carter, another aged actor who was an associate of Hazelton’s in the days of the Ford stock companies, the other day worked in the same film studio. Hazelton is playing in “San Francisco,” and Carter with R. William Neill’s production, “Rose of the Ghetto.” Hazelton was a program boy at the Fort Theater in Washington when Booth shot the great Emancipator.

I like to come across these little reminders of what a different era Papa lived in when he wrote his diary. 1924 was a lot closer to 1865 than it was to 2007.

————–

Additional references for this post:

Capitol Theatre Image Credit: Library of Congress LC-USZ62-113144. Inquiring into ownership.

—————-

Updates:

Time Magazine‘s archive also has a write-up on Wild Oranges. According to the anonymous reviewer,

The tale is told with extraordinary vividness and pungency by King Vidor, a director who can evoke a heart-quaking spirit of mystery without a single trapdoor. Frank Mayo, Virginia Valli, Ford Sterling, Nigel de Brulier are splendid instruments in one of the exceptional pictures of the year. And a most extraordinary characterization is done by Charles A. Post as a modern Caliban, a hulking beast with a child’s mind that wanted to be good.

I really hope this gets released on DVD soon.

Tuesday Mar 4

by


Got up late so I went
to work in the afternoon. —
Evening visited sister Clara
and spent the reminder
of the evening at the
academy of Music.

————–

Matt’s Notes

The Academy of Music Papa refers to here was probably the New York Academy of Music at 14th Street and Irving Place, where the Con Edison building now stands. Built in 1854 and reconstructed after a fire in 1866, the Academy was a major opera house and the site of numerous grand balls, social events and diplomatic receptions for much of the late 19th century; it was even where Samuel Morse sent his final ceremonial telegraph transmission as part of an elaborate celebration New York threw for him in 1871.

According to musicals101.com, the Academy lost much of its cache as society moved uptown and the Metropolitan Opera took over as the city’s primary opera house (the Metropolitan Opera’s Web site describes how a group of wealthy New Yorkers built the Metropolitan Opera House in part because box seats were scarce at the Academy of Music).

The progression of images in the Library of Congress archive attests to the Academy’s decline:

In 1860, we’ve got a reception for the Prince of Wales:

academy of music -- prince of wales reception

In 1871, the Samuel Morse celebration:

academy of music -- samuel morse

But by 1898, fifteen years after the Metropolitan Opera’s inception, the academy had removed all of its now-unfashionable box seats and was host to such popular entertainments as pro wrestling:

academy of music -- pro wrestling

In 1910, a New York Times article reported that the Academy had been leased by the New England Theatre Company, “and hereafter is to be the home of musical plays at which a maximum admission of 75 cents will be charged.” While the new occupants denied any intention to present other types of entertainment at the Academy, six years later the Times would, in an article about the general decline of Union Square, characterize it as “given over to melodrama and the movies.” The Academy’s last hurrah came in 1926, when the Consolidated Gas Company arranged a star-studded, sentimental farewell evening for former performers and patrons before knocking the place down to make way for its new headquarters.

———————-

Additional references for this post:

Library of Congress images are LC-USZ62-132410, LC-USZ62-116332, and LC-USZ62-21438 respectively. All images are labeled “No known restrictions on publication.”

Wednesday Mar 5

by


Sent home 20 pounds of Matzos for the
Passover holiday in 2 packages
I hope they get them in time.

Nettie received a letter
from the School to come and
pay up for her husband, when
she went there with Mrs Breindel
asking what does he mean by
writing letters when he rejected
Philip from School, also reminding
him that he was agreed to me and
her on $2.00 a week.

He chased them out of the office
without any reason whatever
this is outrageous.
I shall stop from work for some
time tomorrow and go to Lawyer
Levine about it

———

Matt’s Notes

To recap: Philip, who was married to Papa’s sister Nettie, was taking English lessons at a place called the Success School. Papa was paying for the lessons but couldn’t raise the $50 tuition fee all at once, so he’d arranged to pay the school in installments of $2 a week. The school’s headmaster agreed to this arrangement but later changed his mind, tried unsuccessfully to get full payment from Papa, and finally kicked Philip out of school.

Looks like the headmaster now tried to get the full tuition from Nettie, who brought Mrs. Breindel (a neighbor?) with her for backup since Papa was at work. Papa’s use of the phrase “chased them out of the office” strikes me as absurd, as if the whole episode is a scene from a silent film: the headmaster, wearing a mortarboard and robes, chasing after Nettie and Breindel with a pointer as they bustle down the hall, flinging Yiddish curses and trying not to trip over their skirts. It’s not absurd at all, of course, since assholes like the “school man,” as Papa called him, were (and still are) all too common in the lives of immigrants. I’m sure they didn’t go a day without someone trying to exploit, intimidate or quietly cheat them in some way.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to picture how Papa sent 20 pounds of Matzoh back to the old country. There must have been dozens of shipping companies around, and probably plenty geared toward specific immigrant groups. Did he just walk over to one of their offices with two ten-pound boxes? Did the landsmanshaftn have special services to help transport perishables around the holidays? In my dream, I answer my questions when I find a 1924 photo of a shipping company storefront with Yiddish signs in the window. I would have to read Yiddish to know what I was looking at, of course, but since it’s a dream I can do that, too. While I’m dreaming, I’ll also throw in some way of doing nothing all day but working on this diary project. Maybe I’m a pitcher for the Mets and have a lot of free time in the off-season.

Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if Papa bought his Matzoh at the fabled Streit factory, or if he even knew and admired the Streits. They opened their shop only three years after he arrived in New York and only two blocks from his first apartment, so he would have watched them grow, found encouragement in their success, and admired the mix of old-world tradition (matzhoh making) and American-scale ambition (a matzoh factory!) in their example. I really can’t remember the last time I bought Matzoh, but this year I’m definitely going to pick up a box of Streit’s, which still has a factory on the Lower East Side.

————

Additional references for this post:

  • Here’s a page on koshertoday.com that discusses the history of Matzoh in the U.S.
  • This piece in wirednewyork.com discusses the changing Lower East Side and mentions Streit’s

(Thanks to Beth at Jewcy.com for the pointers)

—————-

Updates:

My mother adds:

It just occurred to me that Mr. Breindel was the man who met Papa and Nettie when they disembarked at Ellis Island. I think this is correct, but I’m hazy about it. Could he be the one that brought them to his apartment to sleep in the same bed as his three daughters? They were distant cousins –this may be why Mrs. Breindel was so helpful to Nettie.

Also, I learned earlier today that Beth at Jewcy.com, who pointed me to the links above, also wrote a nice little post about this project on her blog.

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