Monday Oct 13

[no October 13 entry; Papa accidentally wrote his October 20 entry on this page]

--------------

It was long ago when I joined Jack and Julius and Nathan on Broome street, we dipped black bread in salt and sipped tea and talked late into the night of girls and our plans and of days to come. They kept leather everywhere, strips on chairs, bolts on their bed and the floor, it was a factory of their own. Jack and Julius always at work at the table, they passed each other tools and dropped rivets into cans and tea cups. Nathan joked would they give us a job when we got back from the war, he said the men at the registration office meant to send us right back to the old country to our old homes.

So much has happened since those endless days can it be I am still the same? What are these days then? They do not seem to me like memories to come.

----------------

For those of you just joining us, the above passage was not written by my grandfather; on days when he hasn't written in his diary, I often write fictionalized interpretations of what I think might have been on his mind. Try the links below to see what he has to say about some of the major subjects he's covered:

- "The 20th Century Girl"

- The New York Academy of Music

- B'nai zion, a.k.a. Order Sons of Zion, the fraternal order my grandfather belonged to

- Baseball

- The Capitol Theatre, one of New York's great movie palaces

- Cars of the 1920's

- Coney Island

- Calvin Coolidge

- The 1924 Democratic Convention, the longest and most contentious in history and the first to be broadcast live on the radio

- The Brooklyn Dodgers and Ebbets Field

- Fraternal organizations and mutual support societies, a.k.a. landsmanshaftn

- The New York Giants, 1924 pennant winners

- Keren Hayesod

- Silent Movies (1924 was a great year for movie lovers like my grandfather; several monumental films including The Thief of Badgad, The Ten Commandments, Sherlock, Jr., and D.W. Griffith's America were out that year. I'm not sure if he saw any of those, but I do know he saw at least The Song of Love, The Unknown Purple, The White Sister with Lillian Gish, and A Woman of Paris, Charlie Chaplin's first serious directorial effort.)

- The Metropolitan Opera

- Papa's Father's Injury and Death

- Prohibition

- Prospect Park

- Early radio (Papa was an early radio adopter and frequently wrote about what he heard on New York stations like WEAF and WNYC)

- Sniatyn, Papa's Ukrainian home town (part of Austro-Hungary when he left in 1913)

- The New York Subway

- Telephones in 1924

- Tenement life

- Woodrow Wilson

- The New York Yankees

- Yom Kippur

- Zionist Organization of America