Thursday July 10

by


C.I.

Sent home $15
5 for Mother, 5 Gittel,
3 Ettel, and 2 for Fule

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Matt’s Notes

Papa has been spending a lot of time at Coney Island since he and his friends took a locker for the season at Hahn’s Baths on the Boardwalk at 31st Street. I don’t have any photos of Hahn’s, but I do have this picture of what a Boardwalk bath house (in this case the Washington Baths at 21st street1) would have looked like in the 20’s:

Here it is a little closer:

And closer still:

As nice as it was for him to spend his days at the beach, Papa would have preferred to be at work. He was on a forced vacation due to his factory’s slack season, but he disliked idleness and, especially in the aftermath of his father’s death, dreaded free time, saw each unoccupied moment as a hazardous, risky invitation to depressing, worried thoughts.

He had also vowed to give more support to his family in the old country now that his father was gone, but working less obviously made this more difficult. I think that accounts for the careful distribution, and this entry’s careful accounting, of the $15 he sent home. I’m sure he gave to each person according to his perception of her needs, with his newly-widowed mother and his sister Gitel, who recently let him know she and her family were starving, getting the most and Ettel and Fule, the oldest and youngest sisters respectively, getting the least.

Regardless of Papa’s financial constraints, his siblings surely analyzed and discussed whatever messages, preferences and signs of failing generosity his disbursement described. If his previous descriptions of their attitudes are accurate, they thought the streets of New York were paved with gold and were sure he held out on them. Papa has described of both his guilt over not having the means to do more and, in one unusually dark moment, his resentment of their demands, and I can’t help but find some signs of related tension in this entry. He has never described who got what in such detail, and he also leaves out his brother Isaac, who has been the most vocal about his dissatisfaction with Papa’s support. Did Papa not name Isaac for this reason, or did he feel that Isaac, as a man, did not need as much help?

In any event, the women Papa mentions above are pictured below. They are, clockwise from the bottom right: Gittel (in a photo from 1938) Ettel (in a photo from 1895) his mother, Fagale (from an undated photo, but probably taken in the 1910’s) and Fule (in the photo with Gittel from 1938).

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References

1 – According to a 1930’s Coney Island directory archived at the Coney Island History Project, the Washington Baths were a place “Where young and old enjoy the swimming pool, handball courts, athletic fields, and tennis courts” and also “nude sun bathing.” The same brochure also touts “Baby Incubators,” “where premature infants first see the light of day. An educational journey through a miniature hospital.” If that grabs your interest, do yourself a favor and check out the Coney Island History Project’s collections.

Friday July 11

by


C.I.

Attended funeral this
morning of Prof. I.S. Hurwich
and for the first time have
I seen how dead human
bodies are being cremated.

The gruelling process of
cremation is certainly
touching.

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Matt’s Notes

I must say I’m a bit baffled by this entry. I think Papa says he went to the funeral of a Professor named “I.S. Hurwich,” though his handwriting bunches up a little and makes it hard to tell:

I haven’t yet learned who Professor Hurwich was or how Papa know him, though I’m more intrigued by the circumstances under which Papa watched the good Professor’s cremation. Did the funeral take place while Papa was out on Coney Island? Hurwich was no Viking — he was more likely a Zionist leader or, perhaps, a luminary of Yiddish-language criticism — so I don’t think he was set afire and launched out past the breakers. I suppose a public crematorium could have been one of Luna Park’s sideshow attractions — there was, after all, an “Incubator Baby” hospital right on the Boardwalk — but I don’t think Papa would have paid to see such a thing.

So, the question remains: Who was Professor Hurwich, and in what kind of facility did his cremation take place? Also, were open cremations an established tradition in the 1920’s? And what does Papa mean when he says the cremation process was “touching?” I usually think “touching” describes the invocation of gentle or wistful emotions, but maybe Papa, who also found the affair “grueling,” used it as a polite way to say “grotesque” or “frightening.” In any event, gentle reader, please send an e-mail or drop a comment if you have any ideas.

Saturday July 12

by


Coney Island again
until a late hour

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Matt’s Notes

With a lot of time to kill and little money to spend during his factory’s slack season, Papa has become a Coney Island regular over the summer (especially during the last week of 80-plus degree weather, when he visited five times).

As previously indicated, Papa liked to get there via the ferry that ran from the Battery in Manhattan (a good walk or short ride on the elevated train from his apartment on Attorney Street) to Seagate, where he and his friends had rented a locker for the season. (Alas, the Battery-Seagate ferry no longer runs, and had in fact been falling out of favor since the advent of subway service to Coney).

I’m trying to learn more about what he might have done there every day, but in the meantime we can at least be sure that his swimsuit was a full-body ensemble, to wit:

Sunday July 13

by

Empty

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Matt’s Notes

The words Papa chooses for his dismissive diary entries — whether he writes “dull” or “not important” or “unimportant” or “empty,” as he does today — always strike me as pointed and loaded with hidden emotion. To sit down, take pen in hand, and write “empty,” as opposed to one of a thousand other ways he could have described his nondescript day, recalls his earlier, anxious discussions of his life’s “emptiness” and the loneliness he’s struggled with all year.

Papa is idle, on a long, forced break from work. He lacks the money to do much more than ride out to Coney Island every day and wander, by himself, among the happy, thronging couples. He remains without romantic companionship. But perhaps his most difficult struggle is with a new form of homesickness grown thick and tangled since his father’s death. He no longer experiences ordinary longing for the old country, but instead faces the yawning absence of what he hoped to recapture one day with his family. He is awakened, after eleven years, from the sweet dream of safety and belonging and ease made possible by the prospect, however remote, that he might see them all in one place again.

For those of us following Papa’s diary, the word “empty” is anything but empty. It is a one-word poem written in longing for some relief. It is really true, can we really believe, that what came later would make him forget what it meant to him in 1924?

It seems that way. Papa, this is you:

Monday July 14

by


Saw Clara this evening,
It seems that I lost my
interest in her as far as love
is concerned.

I visited today the new
place where I am going
to work, it’s a fine place
as long as I have still to work
for others this is not a bad
place, if the employer would
only realize my value and
raise my salary, I’d be more
content.

—————–

Matt’s Notes

Papa seems to be well-acquainted with “Clara,” or at least he’s known her long enough to compare his past and present feelings about her, but I’m not sure who she is. She’s obviously not his sister Clara, nor do I think she’s the distressingly skinny woman he ran into back in April (“…on my way to work I met C. How different she looks now, She lost weight and looks bad”).

If Clara is a character from Papa’s diary, she could be the woman he met through a matchmaker on July 2nd and deemed “worthy of love.” If so, his lack of interest in her now doesn’t surprise me, since from the outset he saw her as an abstraction, an applicant with the right “qualifications” through whom he might end his “bachelor days,” but also an inaccessibly ideal representation of womanhood who might be too good-looking and refined for “a man of [his] nature.” Papa’s tendency to idealize women, only to be disappointed when they turned out to be flawed humans, is well-known to us by now. We also know this tendency toward idealization would, as Papa matured, mellow into a more useful capacity to see good things in people. I think this helped him cultivate the forgiving, gentle and comforting nature those of us who knew him found so striking.

Meanwhile, Papa has revealed for the first time that he’s going to be starting a new job shortly, which surprises me since he just got a $5 raise few months ago. Perhaps he’s just starting in a new factory owned by the same boss, or maybe his factory has moved to a new location. In any event, I’m trying to figure out how much Papa would have earned as a machine operator in the 1920’s; we know, thanks to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, that the going rate was around $15 a week in the in the early 1900’s and 1910’s. Even if Papa’s experience and labor affiliation had him earning a bit more than that, we get a good sense of how hard it must have been for him to live in New York and still send money back to the old country.

Tuesday July 15

by


Went with Jack Z. to arrange
with a lawyer about the
camp credit union.

I am alarmed not having
received any call yet
about my naturalization.

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Matt’s Notes

“Jack Z.” is, as we’ve noted before, the august Jack Zichlinsky, one of Papa’s best friends and a brother in the Zionist fraternal organization Order Sons of Zion (B’nai Zion). Immigrants like Papa were used to getting a number of financial, medical and legal services through private, dues-supported organizations like B’nai Zion, which was already a burial society and a reseller of life insurance for its members. As an officer of his local chapter Papa was obviously responsible for organizing its credit union as well.

Though he’s discussed B’nai Zion many times before, this entry has the first mention of Papa’s naturalization status. According to The National Archives and Ancestry.com Web sites, naturalization would have been a two-step process for Papa: after living in the U.S. for at least two years, he would have filed a Declaration of Intention to naturalize (a.k.a. “First Papers”) and after a waiting period of another three to five years he would have filed a Petition for Naturalization.

Ancestry.com’s New York County Supreme Court Naturalization Petition Index shows that Papa probably filed his petition in June of 1920. He’d been waiting a while for his naturalization, but I wonder why he picked July 15th, 1924 to feel especially worried about it. Maybe Jack Z.’s own naturalization has just come through and he’d discussed it with Papa while they were out and about, or maybe naturalization chatter had increased in the local community, in the newspapers, or on the radio for some reason. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, a bill that imposed heavy immigration restrictions on Eastern Europeans (among other groups) had also become law couple of months earlier — maybe Papa had just gotten around to worrying about it now since it happened around the time of his father’s death. In any event, I have to look into this more.

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Additional References

Wednesday July 16

by


Had just a little outing
tonight with friends in C.I.

————–

Matt’s Notes

Papa and his friends probably didn’t go swimming on this casual evening excursion to Coney Island. They probably hopped on the ferry or a series of subways from Essex Street to the Brighton Beach line (temperatures were in the high 80’s during the day, so I bet they took the ferry to cool off) hit the Boardwalk, and spent the rest of the evening strolling, chatting, and perhaps noticing women, like these fellows on the left:

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Audio Source: “Coming Home From Coney Isle,” a 1906 recording by Jones and Spencer via archive.org.

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