Wednesday Nov 19

by


Fitted out my nephew Josale
with his first pair of shoes, how
cute he is.

home & movies

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Matt’s Notes

Interestingly, this is the first time Papa has written a cheerful entry about his nephew, Josale, because it’s the first time circumstances have allowed him to. As you’ll recall, Papa’s sister, Nettie, gave birth to Josale a little over six months ago and just a day before Papa learned of his own father’s death. Papa and his other sister, Clara, decided to keep the bad news from Nettie while she convalesced, though Nettie became suspicious when the family insisted on naming the baby after Papa’s father, Joseph. (Jews normally don’t name their children after the living.) Papa then entered a long period of self-reflective mourning and only wrote about Josale to describe his chronic, worrisome cough, so it’s a relief to see Papa at last write something as unexceptional about him as “how cute he is.” I suppose it was a relief for Papa, too.

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Josele’s birth and Papa’s father’s death were so closely tied that I often wonder if Papa found it hard to be around Josele without really knowing why. Is this happy entry about Josele a sign that Papa has gotten over his grief a bit more?

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Papa’s been going to the movies a lot lately, but he hasn’t said which ones he’s seen. According to the New York Times, there are a couple of new choices in town since he last went a couple of days ago:

  • Married Flirts, a light shipboard comedy based on the novel Mrs. Paramor
  • The Midnight Express, a thriller shown with Charlie Chaplin’s The Pilgrim

Thursday Nov 20

by


home

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In my dream I lose count of my fingers and I am sure I’ve lost one. I look down at the ground and I tilt forward and my feet rise into the air and I float head first through the crowd on the sidewalk. My hair is long and reaches to the ground, I can make it move as it sweeps along. I cannot make a rope of it, I can only make the end curl and turn and dance, my hair cannot feel the pavement as a frozen fingertip cannot feel a key.

“Your pal Esther will help” says the strange woman. She stands in front of me and her face is gray and beautiful, I can only see her if I look from the corner of my eye, if I look at her she turns, her face becomes jagged. I have not met her but I know her voice, high and fast, the night voice of the lady downstairs.

I must tell her I have no friend named Esther but I see now the ground is covered in coins. I try to put my feet on the ground so I can pick them up but I float still, I try to grab the coins with my hair but I can only touch them lightly and the coins do not move. “Perhaps your pal can help you grow coins” says the lady downstairs and I know she is right and I also know she does not know how.

Friday Nov 21

by


visited Arin Schneiderman
taking her afterward to the
camp ex. meeting at Jacks
house.

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Matt’s Notes

Most of this entry will make sense to those of us following Papa’s diary: “the camp” refers to “The Maccabean” chapter of B’nai Zion (a.k.a. Order Sons of Zion) the fraternal order to which Papa belonged; “ex. meeting” must be a meeting of the The Maccabean’s executive committee, which Papa was part of in his capacity as Master of Ceremonies; “Jack” is none other than the storied personage Jack Zichlinsky, who lived on Hart Street in Brooklyn (and, as I scarcely need to add, would later move to Sheepshead Bay).

Ms. Scheiderman, the woman Papa brought to the meeting, is a bit more mysterious, not only because we haven’t met her before but because I can’t read her first name. Papa’s handwriting is normally exceptional, but it looks like he wrote this entry quickly and I don’t think the pencil he’d been using lately was at its sharpest. (I like to think that his meeting went late but, intrigued by his encounter with Ms. Schneiderman, he felt like he had to jot something down before turning in, dull pencil be damned.)

In any event, here’s a closer look at how he wrote Ms. Scheiderman’s name. It looks a little like “Arin,” but while that seems like the first name of a modern person with hippie parents, it doesn’t seem like an old-fashioned first name. It also looks a little like “Unis,” which could be a misspelling of “Eunice,” though that’s a stretch. Take a look at see what you think:

Saturday Nov 22

by


awful slushy day today
Went to opera
(Madame Butterfly)
and then to district.

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Matt’s Notes

I know that Papa’s diary isn’t a novel, but it’s sometimes hard for me not to look at it critically, as if the episodes he reports on and the details he reveals aren’t planted there by an author for dissection, debate and interpretation. Madame Butterfly, for example, is the story of someone who would rather live in fantasy and memory than construct real life for herself with what’s available to her.

(A quick review if you don’t remember the story: It’s 1904 and Lieutenant Pinkerton, a rakish American naval office on tour in Japan, marries a 15-year-old Geisha named Cho-Cho San — a.k.a. Butterfly — and then leaves for America with no intention of returning. Cho-Cho San, meanwhile, gives birth to his child and spends the next three years convinced he will keep his promise to return, obsessively reliving the few heady days she spent with him before his departure. Though another suitor offers to marry her and make her a rich woman, her heart lies with Pinkerton. When Pinkerton finally returns, he is accompanied by his new, American wife, who offers to adopt Cho-Cho San’s child and raise it as her own. Humiliated and crushed, Cho-Cho San gives up her child and kills herself.)

Already idealistic and predisposed toward sentimental art, Papa must have been doubly absorbed by such a story, for he had struggled all year with is own attachment to the past, his own tendency to prefer the poetry of longing to the practicality of living. He had, for years, believed he might see his family again and experience the simplicity, the sense of belonging, he knew as a boy in the old country. This belief grew so strong he began to think of his life in America, where he was already considered an alien, just a temporary stopover on the way to some unspecified but more perfect place. His thoughts of romance followed a similar path, in which the idealized woman of his dreams overshadowed the real women of his world. Is it too much of a stretch to compare him to Madame Butterfly, a figure living for a lost time and pining for a love who never really existed?

Papa’s ending was happier, of course, but how could he have known it would be, as he sat and watched Cho-Cho San succumb to the folly of her stasis, the shocking death of her dream? Hadn’t Papa’s own dream died with his father six months earlier, ending any thought of his family’s restoration? Did he compare the profundity of Butterfly’s disappointment to his own? Could he have held back his tears as Butterfly surrendered to the emotions he felt so keenly? Could he have felt any better as he slogged off through the slushy mess of New York’s streets when the opera was over?

I recently went to see Madama Butterfly for myself, hoping to see what Papa saw and join him in some way (I hoped to reproduce, in fact, the feeling of having him with me that I experienced when I saw Pagliacci, also mentioned in his diary, a few months ago.) It didn’t quite happen that way, though. I’m entirely sure my viewing of Madame Butterfly was quite different from his, unless he saw a high-tech production with 21st Century lighting and special effects, and unless there was a nutcase sitting behind him who talked the whole evening in a Rip Taylor voice and who decided, for some reason, that Madame Butterfly’s suicide wasn’t dramatic enough and would benefit from him screaming, at the top of his lungs, “Oh my God, it’s so beautiful!!!” just as Butterfly plunged the knife into her neck.

Then again, perhaps Papa was distracted in his way because the “small voiced” Thalia Sabanieeva sang the title role, certainly in disappointing contrast to her beloved co-stars, Beniamino Gigli and and Antonio Scotti (then in his twenty-sixth season with the Met). Here’s a clip of Gigli, who could be found singing in films until the early 1950’s, belting out “O Solo Mio”:

And here’s a clip of Scotti singing “Tosca” (from a fantastic YouTube series featuring a Victrola playing old opera recordings):

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References:

Sunday Nov 23

by


Saw for the first time how
they a big statue is put
together, part by part
was raised up and placed
accordingly.

It was at the 7th St. Park
very interesting
and it all was done in the dark

Wound up the Eve at the dist.

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Matt’s Notes

Back in the early 1990’s, I lived half a block away from Tompkins Square Park, which sits between Avenues A and B and 7th and 10th Streets in the East Village. At the time, it was lined with snaking, unbroken rows of makeshift cardboard shelters built atop its benches, a source of constant tension between the people who lived in them and the cops who occasionally tried to kick them out. This tent city is long gone, but its image, no matter how many times I’ve revisited the neighborhood since then, remains my overriding memory of the park. It therefore took me a while, after I transcribed this entry last year, to realize that Papa’s “7th St. Park” was, in fact, Tompkins Square, and that I did, in fact, remember the statue of “The Pointing Guy” on the corner of 7th and A.

About a week ago, in anticipation of writing this post, I went down there with my wife, Stephanie, to check out The Pointing Guy and take a few pictures. I think I was smiling when we walked up to him, not only because our cab ride through Friday night traffic had blessedly concluded a few moments earlier, but because I was about to see one of the few landmarks mentioned in Papa’s diary that still exists. And there he was. The Pointing Guy.

Stephanie read about him from the plaque on the statue’s base while I fiddled with my camera and tried to get a decent picture in the dark. His name was Samuel Cox, and he was “a United States Congressman honored for having spearheaded the legislation which lead [sic] to paid benefits for postal workers. Letter carriers received a 40 hour work week and two weeks of yearly vacation as a result of congressman Cox’s initiative.”

The statue struck me as a little crude — Cox’s face looks half finished, and he stares forward and points at the sky like he wants to tell us, without looking back up, about a flying monster he just spotted — but I figured Papa, as a labor activist, would have admired Cox. Stephanie continued to read about how “the letter carriers of 188 cities” commissioned the statue in Cox’s honor, and how it originally stood at the intersection of Fourth Avenue, Lafayette Street and Astor Place near Cox’s former home on East 12th Street. Then her voice rose a little when she read the next bit: “In November 1924 it was relocated due to a street widening project to the south-west corner of Tompkins Square Park.”

I wouldn’t say I was stunned, exactly, when she read this, because I was still able to talk and move, but I did need to remind myself to breathe. I’d been writing for the whole year about Papa’s life in 1924, and I’d researched some things and confirmed the details of others and speculated on his thoughts and feelings, but this was the first time I’d had this sensation, the first time I’d been in same place he stood at the same time of year, the first time I’d looked at the same thing he saw and thought: It’s true. This really happened. Papa was here and it was just like this. Papa was alive.

But why did Papa write about it? As I mentioned yesterday, it’s sometimes hard not to think about what moments like this would mean if Papa’s diary were a novel, if the scene’s inclusion had some intended significance. Why was Papa so fascinated with the image of a man coming together in the dark, becoming rooted to the earth, making a permanent home just blocks from where Papa lived? Did Papa, after years of missing the family he’d left in the old country, after years of feeling unmoored, after years of feeling like he would never belong in one place, see in this statue something he longed for? Did this image of a man coming together in the dark remind Papa of the hidden changes he was experiencing, changes wrought by his attempts to put away childish things in the wake of his father’s death?

Stephanie and I went to a karaoke bar after we visited the statue. She likes to sing and I like to watch her and see the way she gives herself over to it, content and smiling through each note. I was a little distracted, though, still thinking of the statue. I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down something I figured I’d hold onto for when I wrote this post. Here it is, edited slightly to correct for mild drunkenness:

For all his worries and for all he had been through, Papa forgot everything for a moment. He simply stood, with childlike fascination, so intrigued and absorbed that he later felt the need to write it down in his diary. And there I just was, in the same place, in the same place where my Papa, my beautiful Papa, stood and smiled, his face upturned, watching the statue go up as if there was nothing else to think about in the world.

We got home late that night and I fell asleep and dreamed of a time machine, a simple stone slab that would send me to the past when I stretched out on it. And I went back to visit myself when I was four years old and Papa was with me, and I was playing baseball, and I ran back to sit with him after I made an out, and I watched myself and worried, sure that at any moment I would become upset, or that someone would say something to upset me, about how I didn’t get a hit. I watched and watched but my young self just kept smiling, sitting next to Papa, who took me on his lap so we could enjoy the game together. And in the dream I thought: This really happened. Papa was here and it was just like this. Papa was alive.

Monday Nov 24

by


Heard Mefistofele
with Chaliapin in the
title role at the Metropolitan
Opera House very good

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Matt’s Notes

If Papa had told an opera fan in later years that he saw Chaliapin in Mefistofele, it would have been like telling a baseball fan that he saw Babe Ruth swing a bat. Feodor Chaliapin was the most famous bass of his day, and he’d earned living legend status not only for the quality of his voice and his rise from humble Russian roots, but because he set new standards for stage presence and acting style. He “would have been an actor of world-wide reputation if he had been unable to sing,” read a New York Times editorial tribute to Chaliapin after his death in 1938, “he linked together, as few singers of any era, the potencies of drama with song.”

The Times reviewer Olin Downes was complementary toward the Mefistofele production Papa saw, though only grudgingly so; he seems to have disliked Arrigo Boito, the composer who based Mefistofele on Goethe’s Faust. “That it is the work of a dilettante need not be denied,” wrote Downes. “It is even questionable whether Boito was responsible for the orchestration.” Still, he did find much to admire about the opera and thought it “well suited to Chaliapin’s powers.” I imagine that Chaliapin’s portrayal of Mefistofele was, in fact, the best imaginable, no doubt a welcome relief to Papa, who had seen an unremarkable performer in the title role of Madame Butterfly a couple of days earlier.

Let’s go back to the YouTube well once again for this recording of Chaliapin singing “Ave Signori (Hail, Sovereign Lord)” from Mefistofele.

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References for this post:

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Image Sources:

Top: Chaliapin in Mefistofele (1924). Library of Congress # LC-USZ62-53994

Bottom: Chaliapin in Mefistofele (1895). From Wikimedia Commons.

Tuesday Nov 25

by


Not worked yesterday
& today business slow
home & dist

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Matt’s Notes

Papa worked in a garment factory and occasionally had extra days off during slack periods. He never much enjoyed these days off, both because he needed money (he worked in a union shop but probably didn’t get full pay or even any pay on days like this) and because he was prone to feeling blue when he wasn’t around people. Lately, though, he’s been frequenting the “dist.” or “district,” which most likely means the Downtown Zionist Centre at 52 St. Marks Place. (I think he called it the “district” because the Zionist Organization of America’s downtown district meetings took place there.)

Though he did have some business to take care of at the “District” — he’d recently joined the organizing committee for some kind of Zionist ball — I think he was also just hanging out there a lot more than he used to because it beat being home alone. It wasn’t exactly around the corner from his apartment on Attorney Street, but with late November temperatures in the high 30’s and low 40’s (the recent slush storm notwithstanding) it was a relatively pleasant walk. (I wonder if his walk always took him past Tompkins Square Park, where, on the way to the District a couple of days earlier, he’d seen some workers putting a statue together at night.)

I recently paid a visit to the Lower East Side to map Papa’s routes and take some photos of the places he mentions in his diary, but both his apartment and the District are long gone. Here’s what Attorney Street looks like today, looking South from Rivington:

Papa’s apartment building at number 94 would have been on the left, where a circular school building now stands. That two-tone building in the middle of the block on the right is the back of the old Clinton Theatre, another of Papa’s favorite haunts.

The former site of the District at 52 St. Marks is ten blocks north and about three blocks west of Attorney Street, but whatever used to be there has been replaced by a new brick building:

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