Thursday Jan 24

by


Again meetings

Right from work one
meeting attended at the
Biosy Central Hotel by
the East Side K.H. Executors
and the 2nd meeting
of the Maccabean Camp
at 50 Delancey St,

I notice that our new
camp is gradually
improving.

——————

Papa worked in a garment factory, but he doesn’t write much about it. Perhaps, after so many years of factory work, his routine didn’t surprise him enough to warrant much attention in his diary, or maybe he just considered his Zionist activities to be his “real”work.

In any event, knowing he went right from the factory to a series of meetings gives us another small hint as to what the atmosphere in those meetings was like. I’m not sure yet whether they convened in smoky, crowded social club basements, in private apartments where boxes of Zionist flyers stood in for chairs, or in little rented offices papered with Yiddish posters. Maybe Papa and his compadres pressed around the corner table of a kosher restaurant in a tight ring, craning their necks to see whatever papers or materials their leader spread out before them, urgently pointing and gesturing.

We do know, though, that they were all probably dirty and tired, their clothes and hair and nails carrying with them whatever traces of grease or thread or dust or blood their professions exposed them to. I wonder, too, how many of them were like Papa — clever, articulate people who couldn’t wait to rush from work to these gatherings where their ideas and powers of reason and most serious thoughts, having been suppressed all day, could finally burst forth and collide in the air. Maybe the American Zionist and labor movements benefited, in some way, from the way this pent-up intellectual energy fueled the urgency of meetings like the ones Papa attended.

By the way, for those of you just joining us, “K.H” refers to Keren Hayesod, a Zionist fundraising organization that’s still around today. “The Maccabean Camp” refers to Papa’s chapter of the Order Sons of Zion (a.k.a. B’nai Zion) a charitable fraternal organization I’ve mentioned before. Here are some stats about them from the 1924-1925 American Jewish Year Book:

ORDER SONS OF ZION
Org. Apl. 19, 1908. OFFICE: 44 E. 23rd, New York City
Fourteenth Annual Convention, July 1923, New Haven, Conn.
Camps, 101. Members 7,000.
PURPOSE: Fraternal and Zionistic

And here’s a little more background from the 1917-1918 Jewish Communal Register:

PURPOSE: “Aims to improve the condition of the whole Jewish people at large and to help the Zionist Congress create for the Jewish people a publicly owned, legally secured home in Palestine.”

BENEFITS: Graded insurance against death ranging from $100.00 to $2000.00. Health and accident insurance.

ACTIVITIES: Supports Jewish and Zionist Educational Institutions. Encourages the study of the Hebrew language

An essay in the Register also has some interesting things to say about the importance of fraternal orders like B’nai Zion:

In their present form the Jewish Orders constitute a valuable and important factor in our communal life. The interests of about a million Jews are involved in their existence and welfare. Their influence for good is of inestimable value to our social activities. In his lodge and order, the Jew, who is a member, finds an agency which affords to him and his family a certain measure of protection in the event of death, illness or distress, and at the same time, a ready means to aid and assist others when in similar circumstances.

But:

With all the good features these organizations possess, and the good work they actually do, their existence as a whole, with very few exceptions, is uncertain and insecure.

As mentioned before, the Jewish fraternal system did indeed become far less important to Jewish life as Jews found other means to organize and Americanize. Still, greatly transformed descendants of fraternal organizations — including B’Nai Brith and B’Nai Zion — still carry on.

Friday Jan 25

by

A pleasant evening
home with my family

————-

Matt’s Notes

By “home with my family,” Papa must mean he visited or hung out with his sister Clara or his sister Nettie and her daughter Rosie.

Papa must have been an unequivocally adoring uncle to Rosie. I wonder if she picked up on his vibe, if her early childhood memories of him are as soothing and important as mine. Check out how blissed out I am in this picture of me and him in 1971:

My wife says this is probably as relaxed as I’ve ever looked in my life, which may well be true. Papa was sick here, struggling with a combination of leukemia and Parkinson’s. Maybe he knew he wouldn’t be around for the next summer’s crop of photos, or maybe he still remembered the lonely winter of ’24; whatever the reason, he enjoyed this moment as much as I. A sunny little memory for us both to take along, for however long we had.

Saturday Jan 26

by


In a cold night my helper
refused to distribute the
circulars for the mass meeting
that I am calling. I stood
alone in the terrible weather
distributing them doing it
lovingly knowing the respons-
ibility that rests on my shoulders
when Dr. Bernstein passed
me on his way to lecture for
the Zeire Zion.

He did not feel like speaking
but seeing my sacrifice he
got inspired and delivered
his best, he told me.

Later I joined him at the
Z.Z. So I unconsciously
served some purpose
I saw there a girl
that is good.

——————

Matt’s Notes

It got down to 7° on the night of January 26, 1924 (oddly, we’ve had the same kind of sudden temperature drop on January 26, 2007) so I can understand why Papa’s helper left him in the lurch. Understanding is not forgiving, though, so I hate the old bastard, wherever he is. I think Papa, who had been worried about the prospects for his January 28th meeting for a while, wasn’t in a forgiving mood, either — he notes how he “lovingly” continued to shoulder his responsibilities, contrasting himself rather pointedly with certain would-be helpers who weren’t quite so loving and responsible.

I’m sure Papa didn’t distribute many fliers on that biting, snowy night. Any people on the street must have rushed by, chins tucked to their chests, hardly inclined to stop for the earnest young man who waved papers at them and said something about something coming up on Monday. Such young men were all over the place. Who could tell them apart?

I can’t keep the Zionist varieties straight myself, but I think Zeire-Zion, Dr. Bernstein’s organization, had a Zionist-Socialist agenda. I’m not clear on whether they thought the Jewish state would be a nice little place for socialist experiment or a glorious staging ground for a global socialist victory (the Zionist-Socialist movement was, not surprisingly, factional as well) and I may well have the whole movement entirely wrong, so please correct me if you know better.

As a labor activist himself Papa would have had some affinity for the Zionist-Socialists, but he wouldn’t have stood out in the cold for them. Papa worked for the Zionist Organization of America and its related organizations, which concentrated on organized fundraising for business investment and land purchases in Palestine. The ZOA had its own internal philosophical clashes, but socialism wasn’t in the mix.

Anyway, Papa gave Dr. Bernstein a boost and met a “girl that is good” at the Zeire-Zion meeting, so the night, as they say, wasn’t a total loss.

Sunday Jan 27

by


Busy here and there
jumped in to [both] my sisters
for a moment.

I met again the good
girl at Malicks’s Rest.
and escorted her home

Certainly there are more
good ones but so rare

———

Matt’s Notes

I imagine the “good girl” is the same one Papa met at the Zeire Zion meeting the previous night, though whether he made a date with her or simply ran into her at Malick’s Restaurant is unclear. To escort her home was, I think, a gesture of intimacy for Papa (in a previous entry, he had unkind words for women who left a party with un-“gentlemanlike” men they’d just met) but he hardly seems smitten since barely mentions her before turning to speculation on what other women are out there.

I’m trying to figure out what Malick’s restaurant might have been like and what Papa would have eaten there. According to “New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern” by Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine, Jewish restaurants never got much fancier than the “gourmet delicatessen with formica tables” (an ambivalence toward Diaspora food could be one reason why Lower East Side Jews wandered into nearby Chinatown for culinary solace) so Malick’s was probably a crowded little ground-floor eatery with pickles on its tiny tables and blintzes on its menu. More to come about this, I hope.

————–

Updates

2/6 – My mother adds:

Our family wasn’t very big on eating out very often, mainly, as the article you referred to states, because in our neighborhood, the only kosher restaurants were delis and my grandmother could cook everything better herself, except for pastrami, corned beef, etc, which Papa preferred to bring home. There was one horrible looking Chinese restaurant, which our parents shunned. Reba [my mother’s friend] and I used to eat lunch there and then smoke loose cigarettes. (Bold)!

As far as I know, Papa didn’t enter a Chinese restaurant until I was in my late teens, and then only ate sub gum chow mein (all veggies). My grandmother never would eat Chinese food, since she was convinced they used cats and mice as their staples.
Getting hungry?

Monday Jan 28

by

I’ve tried to make the
mass meeting a success
my efforts brought a big
crowd, the speakers were
brilliant and the Cantor was
wonderful but got only
a handfull of members.
I have worked it all single-
handed, but — I am not
discouraged, I will carry on

After the meeting I
spend a pleasant hour
at Shulem’s in the company
of Ab. Goldberg, Dr. Schechter
and Mr. Graf.

——————

Papa had been worried about the success of this meeting, which was meant to revive a flagging chapter of the Zionist Organization of America, for a while. He’d considered giving up on his efforts if the meeting wasn’t well attended, but I’m sure only the sight of a completely empty room would have punctured his idealism that decisively. (To chase a dream in New York is to deny its folly. So it always was, so it shall ever be.)

Papa passed his “pleasant hour” at Sholem’s with Abraham Goldberg who, as mentioned before, was a prominent member of the Z.O.A. I don’t know who Dr. Schechter and Mr. Graf were (for a brief moment I wondered if Dr. Schechter could have been Solomon Schechter himself, but since Solomon died in 1909 it would have been decidedly unpleasant, not to mention illegal, to spend an hour in his company).

It surprised me to read about the cantor’s presence at Papa’s meeting, but I know I really shouldn’t be. I also know I’m going to be surprised by this kind of thing again and again in the course of this project. I think it’s due to my own lack of spiritual attachment to Judaism (or anything else). While I’m aware of religion’s effects on people’s politics and daily lives, I know no more about what it’s like to be a person guided by spiritualism than I know what it’s like to be a dolphin guided by sonar. Papa was an observant, learned Jew, he saw himself as one of the Children of Israel and, accordingly, saw Zionism as a way home for himself and for everyone he loved. Zionism was an extension of his Judaism, so why wouldn’t he arrange for a cantor to sing at a Zionist meeting? But still…

If I seem to be struggling with something obvious, it’s because I’m so different from Papa in this way. It’s food for thought: Part of the reason I’m doing this project is to comprehend, as an adult, those qualities in Papa that seemed so transcendent to me as a child. But certainly Papa’s spiritual beliefs were greatly responsible for that transcendence, for the warmth he exuded, for keeping him intact throughout the trials of his youth. Whatever I find of him in myself, then, has at least some of its roots in spiritualism. Yet I’ve inherited only the effects, not the cause; spiritualism created what psychology perpetuated. Maybe it’s just another face of assimilation.

Update 1/28

I think there’s a parallel between the process of religious tradition giving way to inherited behavior and the evolution of the Jewish fraternal system, which I’ve talked about in other posts. The fraternal system provided a formal way to let immigrants cement their relationships, through ritual, on American soil with people from their original countries; they could take comfort in their old traditions while starting to build new ones. As the immigrant communities developed more home-grown support systems and found support in their new country’s agencies (labor unions, government services, etc.) the importance of ritual and fraternal bonding lessened. What older generations sought through the fraternal system — security, a sense of responsibility to others, a feeling of mutual support — remained, but in another form. Subsequent generations still pursued the qualitative equivalent of what their forbears taught them to value, only in different ways; what one generation pursued through ritual, another perpetuated through more secular means. Isn’t this a bit like what I was saying above about how my grandfather’s admirable qualities — his diligence, his respectful nature, his generosity — inspired by the spiritual side of Judaism, might make it to subsequent generations in the absence of religious belief?

Tuesday Jan 29

by


Reported to Blitz the result
of the meeting.

On my way home I bumped
into Mr. Novack of Coney Island,
he held me back for more then
an hour, trying to induce me
to join the P.D.C. and
telling me the whole story
(his version) of the Weitzman
Brandeis-Mack break.

I listened to all impatiently as
I was hungry and anxious
to get into some eating place.
However it was interesting
He certainly is an interesting
type, he found the wrong
customer for the P.D.C. I sympathize
with them but physical
and financial ability to join
them also.

————

Again the mysterious “Blitz” materializes. And then, poof, he’s gone.

The P.D.C. is, I think, the Palestinian Land Development Company, another Zionist organization devoted to purchasing land in Palestine. I like how Papa admits to being too hungry to listen to Novack’s speil. Did he shift around from foot to foot, glance down the street as if something caught his eye, remark on how crowded the sidewalk was, or say things like “well, anyway…” hoping that Novack would pick up on his impatience?

Novack probably couldn’t have been distracted if he was talking about the “Weizman Brandeis-Mack break.” (Chaim Weizman and Judge Louis Brandeis, the respective leaders of the European and American Zionist movements, differed on the management of investment in Palestine and fell out over Weizman’s establishment of Keren Hayesod in 1921.) It must have been a subject of passionate debate, so I’m sure the conversation would have lasted more than an hour if Papa hadn’t been so hungry.

Wednesday Jan 30

by

Am happier today with
the $5.00 raise to my salary
which I got today.

Enjoyed immensely the
lecture given by Dr. Arthur
Ruppin at the meeting of
the Zionist Sustaining members
at the Hotel Pennsylvania.
The lecture was of great
educational value to me.

[the rest of this page contains a
continuation of the next day’s entry]

—————

Matt’s Notes

Arthur Ruppin was one of the biggies of the Zionist movement, a promoter and facilitator of land purchases and settlement in Palestine and also a founder of Tel Aviv. The World Zionist Organization Web site discusses the origins of certain Israeli street names, and its explanation of Ruppin Boulevard has a good biography of Ruppin (as do many other Web sites and books) so I won’t talk much about him here other than to say he would have been a major celebrity to Papa. The Ruppin lecture was clearly a W.Z.O. or Z.O.A. benefit for contributors at the Sustaining member level (“sustaining member” is a typical organizational membership term, but I’m not sure what it signified in this case).

The setting was certainly commensurate with Ruppin’s status: The Pennsylvania Hotel, which stood, as it still does, at 32nd Street and 7th Avenue. If you’re familiar with the Pennsylvania, you certainly don’t think of it as an impressive spot; nowadays it’s known more for being the official hotel of the Westminster Dog Show than for being the “The Largest Hotel in the World,” as its brochure accurately claimed when its 2,200 rooms opened in 1919. It was managed in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company by E.M. Statler, who was known for tricking out his hotels with quirky innovations. Besides describing the “ingenious ‘servidor’ device which enables a guest to send out his laundry, or clothes to be pressed, without any contact with servants” the Pennsylvania brochure also brags:

In the Pennsylvania, every bed-room has its private bath-room (with either tub or shower bath); and pure, fresh drinking water (iced) flows in every guest-room upon pressure of a button.

Apparently all in line with the American dream, since “The United States is, as everyone knows, a land of bathtubs and iced drinking water.” I’m not sure Papa thought of America that way, though he was certainly no stranger to cold water — and only cold water — running from his tenement taps and into the toilet he shared with everyone else on his floor. But anyway:

The convenient location of the Pennsylvania is one of its most-appreciated features. The finest of New York’s shops are just nearby, the theatre district is immediately to the north, and the business and financial sections (“down-town”) are within easy reach by the “subway” (underground electric railway), which has a station in the hotel. Bus lines and surface cars (electric) pass the door, and an elevated railway is but a block away. Landing-stages of the steamer-lines are nearby.

I quote this not because it’s fun to read, though it is, but because it gives us another look at Papa’s New York. Think about it: only five years prior to the Ruppin lecture, tourist brochures still felt the need to define “subway” and “down-town” and point out that one could lead to the other. In fact, the West 30’s hadn’t been well served by underground electric rail for long, so on his way to the lecture Papa was probably giddy over all the ways he could get there. If I were him, I would have taken the BMT from from Essex to Canal and switched to an uptown train to Penn Station. Then again, he might have gone out of his way to take the IRT just for novelty’s sake — memories of the days before 1918, when it finally started running from Chambers Street to Times Square, were probably still fresh in his mind.

Regardless of which train he took, Papa would have emerged into a landscape dominated by the old Penn Station, an architectural marvel that was demolished in 1964 to make room for Madison Square Garden. (nyc-architecture.com has an appropriately disgusted write-up on this heartbreaking travesty).

Papa probably headed to one of the Pennsylvania’s ornate second-floor banquet rooms or ballrooms for his meeting. I haven’t yet learned what Ruppin lectured about; in 1924 he was still a proponent of bi-nationalism in Palestine (as he would be until violent riots in 1929 changed his mind) so perhaps he had something to say about that, or maybe he presented new ideas about land development and settlement.

All in all, between his $5.00 raise and a stimulating lecture, a good day for Papa.

——————

Additional notes:

  • While the Pennsylvania Hotel was still under construction, a dynamo inside caught fire, resulting in a huge explosion that damaged a number of neighboring buildings and caused a few women to faint, though according the the Times they “were revived in nearby drug stores.” The whole article, entitled “Explosions Rock Big New Hotel” is in the April 9, 1918 edition of The New York Times (subscription required).
  • “Times Sq. Grows As Subway Centre“, The New York Times, July 1, 1918
  • “World’s Biggest Hotel Opens Today”, The New York Times, January 25th, 1919
  • Wikipedia’s Penn Station entry
  • The New York Observer had an article by Chris Shott in its August, 2006 issue about the sorry state of the Pennsylvania Hotel. The Observer makes it way too hard to link to articles in their archive, so I won’t bother, but I did learn one fun fact from it: “the phone number immortalized by Glenn Miller, Pennsylvania 65000, still rings at the front desk.”

————-

Image credits: Penn Station circa 1920, Library of Congress # LC-USZ62-74598

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