April 17th, 1930 - New York City

--------


April 17, 1930.

Dearest:

I couldn't call you before
6. p.m. so I didn't, knowing that you
would go to the dentist earlier.

But I do wish I could
Call you now but I just won't call
you next door on the phone, I just
want to know whether the dentist
cemented the bridgework and how
you feel in it. ¹

When I left the place I went
downtown immediately to the synagogue
just in time for the evening prayer
to say Kadish.²
2.

Sweetheart: I hope you will go to
bed early tonight so that you may
have rosy cheeks in the morning
after a real good nights rest.

There's nothing doing at the store
tonight which may be due to the
weather.

Tomorrow I will call you earlier
about 12:45 because I have to to to meet
someone (about work) but if you
desire to be down in the sunshine
(if any) don't let the fact that I want
to call you earlier keep you within
the office if you should not be in
I will call you back later in the day.

Beloved: My spirit is high
my courage is great just because
I am inspired by you Dearest
of all Dear ones to whom my life
is dedicated.

There's not a moment when the
sweet thoughts of you should leave
me, your image is always with
me, even in my slumbers I dream
of you my "Beautiful Chippie"³

These lines a written at
the store, and as Archie is
proposing to close the place,⁴ I
will have to close this note with
the sweetest thoughts of you

and countless kisses
to you My Precious

Your own Harry

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

Matt’s Notes

1 - Those fascinated with the minutiae of Papa’s Diary Project will no doubt remember that my grandmother paid a visit to her dentist’s 42nd street offices on February 27th; the bridgework mentioned in this letter was probably related to that appointment. My cousin Ken, who is a dentist (and of whose existence, as you may recall, I was unaware until he discovered this blog and wrote to inform me that we shared the same great-great-grandparents) tells me:

A bridge takes a few visits, the teeth have to be prepared and shaped, an impression taken which is then sent to the dental lab where a technician would make the bridge. If it was a bridge replacing a back tooth it would have been made out of all gold. I'm not sure if they used porcelain to replace front teeth back then but it was very common to have gold front teeth also. If porcelain was used, it was probably very expensive. When the bridge was finished, it is tried in, the bite adjusted and then cemented with a dental cement. The procedure must have been somewhat uncomfortable because they did not have high speed drills and the slow speed drills produced a lot of heat which could cause pain, even if you received Novocain.

Update: My mother says that my grandmother always had trouble with her bridgework and eventually had it removed in favor of a dental plate. She also points out that Papa probably wrote "I just won't call you next door on the phone" because my grandmother may have been sharing a phone with a neighbor at this point due to her family's recent financial reversals.

2 - Observant Jews like Papa say Kadish, the prayer for the dead, at several intervals throughout the year, most notably on Yom Kippur (a.k.a. the Day of Atonement), just after or on the anniversary of a loved one’s death, and on a few other occasions. Papa wrote this letter on the fourth day of the eight-day Passover holiday, which is not normally a day of mourning (correct me if I’m wrong, dear reader) so perhaps he said Kadish for a member of his family, a member of my grandmother’s family, or even a fraternal brother. (Papa was a member of B’nai Zion, a.k.a. Order Sons of Zion, a Zionist fraternal order and mutual support society which, like many organizations of its kind, guaranteed its members a proper Jewish burial and the attendant mourning rituals.)

In any event, Papa did not mention any deaths in the April 17th entry of his 1924 diary, so whomever he prayed for in 1930 almost certainly died in the intervening period.

3 - I assume that Papa, who had an old-fashioned respect for grammatical rules, capitalized and enclosed in quotes the phrase “Beautiful Chippie” because it was in popular circulation in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, but then again he may have just been having fun with a nickname he came up with for my grandmother. I’ve been poking around to see if it might be a reference to a movie, book or celebrity, but so far I haven’t come up with anything. Stay tuned.

4 - Papa wrote many of his 1930 letters from a retail store where he moonlighted as a tailor and attended to his correspondence between jobs. I suppose, had Papa’s co-worker Archie glanced at this letter, he would have thought Papa was freshly captivated and excitedly planning a future with his “beloved.” I’m sure Papa didn’t reveal, even on slow nights when he and Archie had nothing to do but chat and smoke and watch the clock, the difficult six years he’d spent courting my grandmother, his painful efforts to overcome her and her family’s indifference to him, or how reluctantly she’d finally agreed to marry him.

I think Papa would have had more to reveal than appropriate had he tried to explain to Archie his commitment to my grandmother. Would he have mentioned how displaced he felt years before as a young man in America, how attached he remained to his family and memories in Eastern Europe, how hard he found it to meet a woman, fall in love, start a new life if it meant letting go of the old? Would he have even recognized the urgency with which he fell in love with my grandmother in the aftermath of his father’s death, furiously compelled to start a family of his own as if he’d suddenly awoken from a spell? Could he have explained that his own endless wellspring of empathy and self-sacrifice could flow into no more appropriate vessel than my grandmother’s own bottomless dissatisfaction and neediness?

Perhaps Archie once met my grandmother, perhaps he noticed the difference between Papa’s happy glow and her dour expression, perhaps, at a moment when he felt his relationship with Papa was turning from something incidental into a genuine friendship, he tried to find out, without seeming overtly puzzled, why Papa had put so much effort into courting my grandmother and winning her hand. “She’s a lovely girl,” he might have said, “but tell me, Harry, how do you romance such a serious person?”

Papa surely would have understood the confusion behind Archie’s question, but he would have known how to answer because, in fact, there was only one answer he could give, a simple and sincere answer, an expression of a desire he had nursed through his whole youth in exile, through all the years of solitude and cramped quarters and sewing machines and nights alone with his radio, through all the activism and baseball and opera and visits to Coney Island, the synagogues and subway rides and distressed letters from the old country, the dating and disappointment and expectation, the train trips to the mountains and the occasional motor car rides, the diaries and letters, the whole intimate epic of his life in New York.

“Archie,” he would have answered, “I just try to make her happy,” though he would never have known if Archie understood.

March 26th, 1930 - New York City

--------


March 26, 1930.

Dearest

It is 8:30 now and I am writing this
at the store, I chalked up two alts. ¹
there is a lull now, nobody in the store
I hope I am interrupted with a few
more jobs, but it seems that I'll be
able to finish this note without any
interruptions.

Tomorrow at this time we will be
at Mecca Temple ² honoring the memory
of the greatest friend the Jews had in
modern history, you will at the same time
have the opportunity to listen to some
very interesting adresses. ³

I may not be able to call you up
tomorrow (Thursday) at noon as I
expect to be detained settling prices.

At 6:15 P.M. I shall be at the
appointed place to meet you and
to take you in my care until you are
safely home.

God Bless You Beloved
and countless kisses

Your ardently loving

Harry

P.S.

This is the only kind of paper
at the store, Forgive for using
such plain paper to write to you ⁴

-----------

Matt’s Notes

1 -  In a letter he wrote a few days prior, Papa told my grandmother  “it is 7:50 P.M. now I am at the store and already registered job #1”, and now he writes “It is 8:30 now and I am writing this at the store, I chalked up two alts.”   “Alts.” almost certainly means “alterations,” so he must have been working a few nights a week as a tailor in a retail clothing store and getting paid by the job. (As I've mentioned before, I don't think "the store" had anything to do with Papa's longtime employer, the Lion Costume Company.  I've questioned whether it was the same store he intended to buy and run with my grandmother and if he was working there to do some advance scouting of its customers, but if that was the case he would have written about it differently.  I think he just had a straightforward night job, and unfortunately I don't think I'm ever going to find out where it was.)

2 - Mecca Temple, located on 55th Street and 6th Avenue, was originally built and managed by the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, a.k.a. the Shriners, who opened it in 1924 for their own use and for rental income.  The Shriners ran into financial problems shortly thereafter, and New York City eventually took over the building and turned it into City Center, the well-known performing arts venue that's still there today.



3 - When Papa refers to “the greatest friend the Jews had in modern history,” he means Lord Balfour, the statesman whose famous Balfour Declaration articulated British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”  Papa felt genuinely attached to those world leaders he admired (remember how loyal he was to President Wilson) and, considering his powerful belief in the Zionist cause, would have been deeply affected by Balfour’s passing. 

Balfour’s memorial service was organized by the Zionist Organization of America, a group Papa had been involved with for many years. (One of the "interesting addresses" was delivered by the now-famous writer Maurice Samuel, who Papa secured to speak at a Z.O.A. district meeting back in 1924 and thereafter knew as “Maurie”.) When Papa surveyed the 5,000 attendees, he must have seen scores of the comrades with whom he’d campaigned in the streets, laid plans in crowded apartments and offices, and spent countless, coffee-filled nights reflecting on the countries they’d lost and resolving to make a new country of their own. Perhaps, despite the melancholy circumstances, this gathering felt something like a family affair.

4 - This composition on “plain paper” is one of the last of Papa’s letters, and because it comes toward the end of his written narrative it feels to me like it has additional literary weight, as if some unseen author had placed it toward the end of a book for closer examination. But is this book about the American Jewish experience, with Papa standing in for all Eastern European Jews as we watch his progression from emigration to assimilation? Or is it a more intimate work, meant to examine the trade-offs and decisions one man has to make to find his place in the world?

I suppose Papa’s narrative can serve both purposes: When we first meet him, he is a lonely tenement dweller, sleeping on someone’s couch and laboring in a garment factory, longing for the simple confines and the familial comforts of his Eastern European boyhood. He devotes his time to organizations and the landsmanshaftn where he might find safety among others like himself, but glimpses and tests and samples a little more each day the vibrant city, the young country he finds himself in: baseball games in three different stadiums, opera, movies, boxing on the radio, Election Day, the Democratic Convention, automobile rides in the mountains and the boardwalk of Coney Island. Still, when his father dies back home and the old world is finally, clearly lost to him, he learns that without someone else to love as much he cannot make the new world his own.

The story continues and claustrophobic depictions of tenement life and factory work give way to wider vistas and brighter thoughts: Papa meets a woman, falls madly in love, and begins a long campaign to win her affection. (But is he, a devotee of self-sacrifice and hard work, more fascinated with her or with the fortitude he must muster to pursue her?) His boss gives him more responsibility, his co-workers look to him for guidance. He becomes an American citizen and crosses international borders at his leisure. His Zionist work takes him to Atlantic City, where he moves and socializes with surprising ease among its wealthy goyish visitors (and learns that, perhaps, all boardwalks are more alike than he thought).

And so we arrive at this latest milestone, where he joins hundreds of friends and thousands of fellow Jews in the strangely American exercise of paying open tribute to an English lord in a huge Midtown Manhattan auditorium named, oddly enough, for the city of Mecca. All this with his fiancee in tow, as if to announce: I am here, I am going to build my family in this city, I am going to make its vast and varied streets my own because it is, after all, where I live.

---------

References:

• JEWISH LEADERS PAY TRIBUTE TO BALFOUR; 5,000 Bow Heads in Service at Mecca Temple--Plan Palestine Forest to Honor Him. The New York Times, March 28, 1930.
• The Balfour Declaration at Wikipedia
• Streetscapes/City Center; From Shriners' Mecca Temple to Mecca for the Arts.  The New York Times, April 11, 1999.
  

Image source: Mecca Temple postcard at Wikipedia

July 2, 1927 - New York City

--------

[This letter has no envelope]

--------

New York July 2, 1927

My dear Bright Eyes:

I received your letter and was
glad to hear from you.

I was a bit surprised that the
idea of writing letters was not so pleasing,
The end of your letter was like this "The
true fact is that I am too lazy".

Of course my dear I do not doubt
that this is actually the truth, since you
stated it, but I do not agree that is was
at all necessary to mention.

Believe me I was one of the busiest
men in Atlantic City¹ and yet I managed
to find enough time to write to you and
to others. There is no such thing as being
too lazy with me.²

Last night I visited your home
and I am in a position now to write
you a little about every one.

Everybody was there but Rob and
Ben, Rob left Thursday morning with

./.

2

his inseparable companion the other
half of his WE (a la Lindbergh) his
Rolls Royce for the country, and Ben
was absent in business with his own WE.³

The evening was fine and when I came
to the house, Mother, Father, Gertie and
Rose were sitting very comfortably on the
new white bench enjoying an early summer-
nights breeze, Sally was inside the house
during the two and one half hours I was
there, and trying to find out the reason
for her not coming out I found her engaged
in reading a thriller entitled "Secrets"
Well she hat to put the secrets on the table
and join the gang outside.⁴

Your friend Millie came over for a few
minutes to say good bye as she was leaving
for the week-end for a certain camp, where
she will later in the season spend her
vacation.

Rose is all prepared to leave this
coming week with Sally, and by the way
your niece Miss Shirley is getting smarter
and smarter every day.

./.

3.

Imagine at just one mere request to sing
she gave us a nice little concert which
we enjoyed better then a Galli Curci concert
on the radio.⁵

We tried to make merry but your
absence was clearly felt not only by me
but by every one.

It is not my intention my dear to get
sentimental in this letter, so I am trying
to avoid my sentimentation as much as
possible.

Asking everyone what sort of greeting
they have to send you through me so
here it is as much as I can remember:

Father: he is longing for you.
Mother: Take good care of yourself
Rose: Don't let that guy you met on the
train get away from you, the one with the
mustache. (My personal remark: I don't like
this business)⁶
Abe: Sends you his love
And Gertie thanks you for the card you
didn't send but she excuses you at
the same time for you don't know her
address.⁷

./.

I am first planning now to get
away for the Fourth, for around my place
they have already started off the fireworks
and the noise is deafening and I don't
like this sort of noise, if I can get company
I will surely go.

As you see I tried my best to fill
out my letter, for I know that no matter
what I am writing it will be interesting
for you when you are far away from
home.

I expect you in return to make
an effort to write me all about yourself
I am quite sure that you won't be lonesome
there, you have that winning way of making
friends.

Oh yes my dear, remember whenever you
intend to come home I will meet you
at the station, just write the exact time
of your arrival and what station.

And now my dear, wishing you
a most enjoyable Fourth of July.

I am as ever your devoted

Harry


-----------

Matt's Notes

1 - Papa had recently returned from a Zionist Organization of America conference in Atlantic City. While there he had written my my grandmother several letters.

2 - Papa’s letters to my grandmother invariably contain some kind of good-natured entreaty for her to write him longer, more frequent letters, though this is the first time her indifference toward correspondence has resulted in an overt expression of his frustration. What Papa’s really expressing here, of course, is his frustration over her continued indifference toward his two-and-a-half years of courtship efforts. Her attempt to stop his requests for more letters (“I am too lazy to write”) clearly offended him and probably scared him a little, too, because it demonstrated exactly how little effort she was willing to put into their relationship. Perhaps it even made him wonder if he'd wasted his time on her. No wonder why he found her sentiments “not so pleasing” and not “at all necessary to mention.”

3 - This passage quite nicely captures a moment in the American popular culture of 1927. Charles Lindbergh had, on May 20th of that year, completed his monumental solo crossing of the Atlantic in his single-engine monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis. I’m sure it’s hard to overstate how ubiquitous Lindbergh and his image had become in the ensuing weeks; huge crowds, adoring press, and heads of state greeted him wherever he went. On July 2nd, the day Papa wrote this letter, an article in the New York Times reported that Lindbergh was about to finish a well-publicized effort to crank out an autobiography. Its title, "WE", referred to Lindbergh and his plane in the first person plural and must have been a bit of a cultural buzzword.

So, when Papa says my grandmother’s brother Bob’s car is “his inseparable companion the other half of his WE (a la Lindbergh)” he’s making a joking comparison to Lindbergh’s well-documented relationship with The Spirit of St. Louis. (Papa makes another little joke when he calls Bob’s car his “Rolls Royce for the country.” The car wasn’t a Rolls, but Bob must have treated it like it was.) Ben, who “was absent in business with his own WE”, was the husband of my grandmother’s sister Rose, and obviously a car owner himself.

4 - Sally, one of my grandmother’s sisters, was well known to be a grouch who never got along with my grandmother and certainly wasn’t friendly to Papa. Papa had expressed his impatience with her in an earlier letter (he accused her of being too lazy to write letters which, as discussed above, was a serious criticism) and must have felt, thanks to my grandmother's own antipathy toward her, that taking her to task for her antisocial behavior was fair game. (In fairness, we should remember that my grandmother’s family originally tried to set Papa up with Sally, but he fell in love with my grandmother instead. As rude as Sally might have been, I can understand why she wouldn’t have liked to hang around with Papa.)

I can’t find a book from the 1920’s called “Secrets” in the Library of Congress catalog, but perhaps Sally was reading the 1927 novel “House of Secrets,” a thriller by Sydney Horler. (The 1936 film adaptation is now on my Netflix queue.) Maybe the book’s cover emphasized the word “Secrets” in large type, like this...

House of
SECRETS

...so Papa only caught the word “secrets” when he found Sally secreted in her reading nook.

5 - Shirley, my beloved cousin, is the daughter of my grandmother’s sister Rose and her husband Ben (he of the "WE" car). She would have been a baby when Papa compared her cries and giggles to the voice of Amelita Galli-Curci, who was at the time a major star with the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Here's a photo Galli-Curci, improbably posed with a goat and a sheep:



And here's a clip of Galli-Curci singing "Caro None" from Verdi's Rigoletto, via archive.org:



Anyway, Shirley would later serve as a flower girl when Papa and my grandmother got married. Though she did not pursue a singing career, she continues to get smarter every day.


6 - My grandmother’s family didn’t take kindly to it when, as mentioned above, Papa fell in love with my grandmother (a young beauty pursued by an army of wealthy suitors) instead of Sally (who was no great prize and therefore needed to settle for a man of modest means like Papa) and they tried for years to discourage his courtship efforts. It looks like Rose was in on the game, too -- she couldn’t possibly have thought that asking Papa to convey a message about one of my grandmother’s other boyfriends was anything other than an insulting way to marginalize him.

7 - I love the phrase “Gertie thanks you for the card you didn’t send,” an example of Jewish guilt-giving in its purest form. It looks like Papa wasn’t the only one got annoyed with my grandmother for her poor correspondence habits.


-----------

References:

• Dewey, Lindbergh - Time Magazine, June 6, 1927
• Flight - Time Magazine, May 30, 1927
• Charles Lindbergh's biography at Wikipedia
• We by Charles Lindbergh (excerpts at Google Books)
• LINDBERGH WORKS HARD TO COMPLETE HIS BOOK; Shows Same Characteristic Thoroughness as Author as He Does as an Aviator. - The New York Times, July 2, 1927
• Galli-Curci's biography at Wikipedia
• RAPID FIRE MYSTERY; THE HOUSE OF SECRETS. By Sydney Horler. - Book review from The New York Times, April 24th, 1927

-------

Image sources:

The photo of Galli-Curci and her four-legged friends comes from the Library of Congress catalog.

The WE book jacket appears on Wikipedia, which makes a case for its use qualifying as fair use under U.S. copyright law.

May 6, 1925 - Brooklyn

[Note: This is the eighth letter Papa wrote to my grandmother while she was vacationing at her cousin's farm in Connecticut. To see full-sized scans of the letter, click the thumbnail images on the right of this page.]

--------


May 6th 1925

My dear Jeanie:

I am writing this at the post office on my way
home, as I a lot to attend to tonight and it will be
impossible to get home before late, so I am using the
firms stationery. ¹

I saw your folks Monday night Ben, Rose and
Herold were there, and everybody was glad to hear from
you, As I took a walk with mother she gave me
$10.00 to send you, which I am enclosing herein
She would like to have you stay there another week,

My dearest, my thoughts are always with you,
I will get the pictures out tonight² and call at your
home to show your folks in graphic how you are
spending in the country.

Please let me know what train you are
taking home and from what Station, and I will
know when you will arrive, and remember I will
wait for you at the entrance to track 20. You will have
to tell the porter who will carry your valise to take
you to track 20.

Will write you more tomorrow.

Regards to all

Lovingly

Harry

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

Matt's Notes

1 - Indeed, as you'll notice from the thumbnail sketch at right or from the full sized scan of this letter, Papa wrote it on stationery from his workplace, The Lion Costume Company. The text of the stationery header reads:

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

Tel Madison Square 6968 6969

Lion Costume Company
Manufacturers of
Costumes and Dresses
13-15 West 27th Street

David Surdut, Prop.

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

Here's a closer look at the letterhead:



And here's an even closer look at the lion illustration at the top of the page, which deserves closer inspection:



Mr. Surdut, the proprietor of the Lion Costume Company, should be well known to my legions of readers, since he and and his wife appear several times in Papa's diary. On November 3, 1924, Papa wrote about his arrangement to sell ladies' gowns on the side for Mr. Surdut (as I mentioned in an earlier post, this may have led to a job in the Lion Costume Company's showroom) but the Surduts clearly thought of Papa as more than just an employee. He socialized with them on a major Jewish holiday, Rosh Hashana (a.k.a. the Jewish New Year) on September 30, 1924, and on October 22, 1924 Papa wrote about Mrs. Surdut's efforts to marry him off: "Mrs. Surdut introduced me to a girl with $10.000, and her family...But the girl does not appeal to me," Papa wrote. "The day I'd promise to marry her, I'd be on easy street because of her wealth, but my heart says no."

2 - Papa may well have taken the pictures he mentions here with his No. 3A Autographic Kodak Camera (Model C), a high-end consumer camera that was quite popular and enjoyed a production run from 1917 to 1934. I still have the camera and the tripod Papa used with it, pictured below:



According to the Internets, it's not hard to find cameras from this line in good condition (they sell for $50 or less wherever you look) but I'm impressed with how well this one's held up because it was one of my favorite childhood playthings. I remember being particularly fascinated with the various speed settings of the "ball bearing shutter" (which still works perfectly) and the mechanics of the adjustable aperture, which seemed to me like the airlock of a spaceship (no doubt because so many of the science-fiction movies I'd watch on Saturday mornings featured spaceship airlocks modeled on camera apertures).



The camera did suffer a bit for the treatment it received at my hands -- the "red celluloid window" (as the camera's instruction manual called it) through which users could see the film's exposure number fell off at some point, as did one of the levers used to extend the bellows, along with the pin that keeps the bellows in position. I seem to remember the moments when I broke off these parts or lost them, which leads me to wonder if this camera made such a strong impression on me because I knew it belonged to Papa. I think I played with it the most when I was between five and ten, when Papa's death (he died when I was four) was still relatively recent and baffling to me. I don't think I ever consciously thought "this is important to me because it reminds me of Papa," but considering how much I thought about him (as I've mentioned before, I used to believe his ghost was watching over me) I'm sure its relationship to Papa kept me from playing with it quite as roughly as I might have.

(I just realized something as I wrote the above paragraph: whenever I look at the camera's case, I always briefly mistake the engraved letters on its latch for Papa's initials, even though I know by know that it's the Eastman Kodak Company's "EKC" logo. I've been making this mistake for years and did it again yesterday when I was setting up the camera to photograph it.)




Anyway, this camera would have been quite a splurge for Papa when he bought it, but, as his enthusiasm for early radio and radio equipment indicates, he liked to treat himself to good equipment. (I need to look into it more, but it seems like this particular camera, with the ball-bearing shutter and "rapid rectilinear" lens, would have cost around $30, or more than $300 in today's terms, if purchased new.) Though ingeniously designed with a swiveling viewfinder and multiple tripod mounts to facilitate both landscape and portrait photos, it's most innovative feature was its "Autographic" capability, which allowed users to open a metal door in the back of the camera body and, if they were using special A-122 film, scratch notes directly onto the reel.

I'm not sure if I have any examples of photos taken with this camera, though I do have a few early pictures of my mother from the 1930's that are the correct 3 1/2 X 5 1/2 print size for A-122 film and also have notes scratched onto them. That said, the precise placement of these notes in the dark areas of the photos leads me to believe that Papa wrote them on the negatives after they were developed rather than through the camera's "autographic" feature. For example, here's a shot of my grandmother and my mother dated June 15, 1935:



Now that I've said all this about Papa's camera, I'm beginning to wonder if it actually was what he used to document his visit to my grandmother in Connecticut, because any photos I have of their early days together are tiny, 2 1/8 X 1 3/8 photos printed on 3 1/2 X 2 1/2 paper that are too small to be the product of a No. 3A Autographic Kodak Camera using A-122 film. For example:




Perhaps Papa did take these photos with the 3A and had smaller prints made so he could carry them around, but he probably took them with whatever camera he owned before the 3A. (Perhaps he got rid of his original camera and in the late 1920's or early 1930's and bought the 3A when it was no longer the hottest camera on the market, which would have made it more affordable.)

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

References:

• Here's a historical listing of Kodak cameras from the Kodak site.
• Several enthusiasts have posted versions of the the Kodak Autographic 3-A instruction manual to the Web. Large-sized scans of each page are here, while a more readable version with transcribed text is here.
• One of About.com's writers discusses the Kodak 3-A here.
• Here's an Autographic film entry at Wikipedia.

May 4, 1925 - Brooklyn

[Note: This is the sixth letter Papa wrote to my grandmother while she was vacationing at her cousin's farm in Connecticut. To see full-sized scans of the letter, click the thumbnail images on the right of this page.]

--------

May 4th 1925

My dear Jeanie:

Back in the old town writing to my
soul friend.¹

It certainly was a dream in reality
the country, the beautiful natural
surroundings which I love so much
and with you there it was a pleasure
and inspiration, such as only the pen
of an artist can describe.²

My heart was filled with longing as
the train pulled out of the Willimantic
station³, knowing that every second the
train carried me further and further away
from you.

The trip presented an opportunity
to view a fine scenery of towns, villages
and beautiful landscapes, as the train
rushed through the wide open spaces.^3A

I arrived at 10:30 daylight saving
time and immediately at the station
called up your folks, I spoke to Sally
and after I mail this letter I will go
there and tell your folks of what I've seen

(over)

I've put through today an honest day's
work, but all day I've been thinking how
different it was yesterday at this time.

At the noon hour during the great rush
at the restaurant I thought of this very
moment a day before when I sat near you
when you were in the hammock, I sang
for you trying to put you to sleep.
Do you remember? It was so quiet around
that you could hear the telephone wires
humming, and here I am again between
the tall structures and the mass of
humanity.⁴

I guess it will be enough of sentimentality.
Again I wish to thank the Kresewitzes
for the fine treatment, that bargain you
know was a surprise.

In closing I wish to extend my
kindest regards to the Kresewitz family
to Oscar & Barney the Steins and all
all others that are kind to you.

I am as ever

Your devoted

Harry

P.S.

Will write another one tonight.

---------

Matt's Notes

1 - In his previous letter, Papa mentioned his plan to get on an "Express-train" and visit my grandmother at her cousin's farm in Connecticut, and he's obviously just returned from the trip.

I find Papa's use of the expression "back in the old town" sort of charming, but when I looked around to see if it was prohibition-era vernacular I learned it was actually old-fashioned at the time Papa wrote this letter. (To wit, the World War I song "Back in the Old Town Tonight" was around in 1916, and "A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight" had been a standard since the 1880's.) Did Papa write "back in the old town" in a jokey, retro sort of way? Would my grandmother, at nineteen, have understood the irony?

For our own reference, here's Bessie Smith's 1927 recording of "A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight":




2 - Despite the wall-to-wall urban trappings of Papa's life as depicted in his diary and letters (he writes about subways, operas, baseball games, "auto" trips to Coney Island, walks on the Brooklyn Bridge, romantic encounters on trolleys, and on and on) this passage reminds us that, as of the mid- 1920's, he'd still spent the better part of his life in Sniatyn, an Austro-Hungarian hamlet surrounded bordered by the river Prut and surrounded by woodlands. A modern-day satellite view of Sniatyn shows it to be relatively rural still:


View Larger Map

Papa no doubt spent endless boyhood hours in the woods or by the river, lost among the leaves and lichens and frogs and birdsong, feeling comfortable and safe. It could have been among those trees that he played with his friends, had his first kiss, savored the rare chance to walk alone with his father. When he longed for home and family, as he had done for so many years, part of what he missed was the forest and its surrounding hills. (I've often read and heard that Eastern European Jews started vacationing in the Catskill Mountains in part because the terrain is not unlike Eastern Europe's. A Ukrainian friend recently told me, after he hiked in the Catskill region, that the area reminded him of the Carpathian Mountains. I suppose I'll have to go and find out for myself.)

When Papa finally built a family of his own, he did his best to find "beautiful natural surroundings" in the parks and plant beds of Brooklyn. My mother particularly remembers how he would take her out each spring to hunt for nascent plants and flowers and teach her their names.

3 - The Willimantic Train Station:


View Larger Map

3A - Updated 2/12/07 - Papa's Diary Project's Executive Director of Transportation History, a mysterious figure who goes only by the name "Fred," has this to say about Papa's train trip from Willimantic: "Papa probably traveled on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad from Willimantic to New Haven, and thence to New York. I believe you'd have to take a bus from Willimantic these days to connect with Amtrak at New London." There's more on this page at Willimantic's Connecticut Eastern Railroad Museum site (scroll down to the middle right of the page).


4 - When Papa wrote this, he must have still been intoxicated with the memory of singing my grandmother to sleep in the noonday quiet of the country. Did this memory, and the feeling of perfect simplicity it evoked, stay with him throughout his life? Did he drift into a reverie when he thought about it in later years? I also wonder if, when he wrote "do you remember?" to my grandmother, he was referring to a more intimate detail of their time in the hammock (a memorable kiss, perhaps) that he found unnecessary (or maybe improper) to write down.

I'd also like to know what song he chose to put her to sleep. If the setting reminded him of his boyhood home he may have chosen something from his youth, or maybe he selected something more modern with a touch of old-country flavor. My best guess is "The Gypsy Love Song," a.k.a. "Gypsy Serenade (Slumber on My Little Gypsy Sweetheart)", which Papa had heard on the radio a year before and used to sing to my mother in later years. Here it is again, from archive.org:



The Internets have informed me that this song was written by Victor Herbert and Harry B. Smith for the 1898 musical "The Fortune Teller" and became relatively famous thereafter. A number of artists covered it, including Chico Marx (in 1929's The Cocoanuts) and the Isley Brothers. A look at the lyrics shows it to be a good candidate for Papa's serenade to my grandmother on a warm spring Sunday:

The birds of the forest are calling for thee
And the shades and the glades are lonely
Summer is there with her blossoms fair
And you are absent only

No bird that nests in the greenwood tree
But sighs to greet you and kiss you
All the violets yearn, yearn for your safe return
But most of all I miss you

Slumber on, my little gypsy sweetheart
Dream of the field and the grove
Can you hear me, hear me in that dreamland
Where your fancies rove

Slumber on, my little gypsy sweetheart
Wild little woodland dove
Can you hear the love song that tells you
All my heart's true love

The fawn that you tamed has a look in its eyes
That doth say, "We are too long parted"
Songs that are trolled by our comrades old
Are not now as they were light hearted

The wild rose fades in the leafy shades
Its ghost will find you and haunt
All the friends say come, come to your woodland home
And most of all I want you

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

References:

• "Back in the Old Town Tonight" sheet music is available at the University of Indiana Web site.
• Information on "Hot Time In the Old Town", including a scan of the sheet music cover, is available at the University of San Diego Web site.
• A New York Times article from 1898, the year "Hot Time in the Old Town" became the theme song of American soldiers in the Spanish-American war (Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders) says it was written by a "Denver negress" named Amanda Green. Most other sources, like this 1935 Time Magazine article, credit Theodore Metz and Joe Hayden with its composition.
• "Gypsy Love Song" lyrics are available at lyricsplayground.com, and the Duke University Library site has scans of the original sheet music's cover page, lyrics, and music.

April 26, 1925 - Brooklyn

[Note: Papa wrote this letter to my grandmother while she was vacationing at her cousin's farm in Connecticut. To see full-sized scans of the letter, click the thumbnail images on the right of this page.]
--------

April 26, 1925

Dear Jeanie:

I received yesterday your second
letter, and another one was added to
my priceless possession of precious letters. Especially I desire to thank you for the flower, it was really wonderful of you.¹

I went to see your folks last
night and it was just a great pleasure
to be with them. Mother made fine
pancakes, really the best I ever tasted.²

Everything here is fine, your family
is getting along nicely. Of course dearest
we all miss you here, but in a week
or so with God's help you will be with
us again, and so will complete happiness
and the sun will cast her rays again
in their full brilliance.

As a critic I note with
satisfaction your ability as a scribe
in pinning down your impressions.
Didn't I tell you that you are talented.

(over)

Are you progressing in your studies
in farming, milking, plowing, etc.

By the time you will be ready to return
home the proffessor on agriculture I mean
the farmer will have you graduated
with a diploma as a first class farmerette.³

I may come out this Friday for a
week end, don't you think it a good
idea?⁴

Yesterday I mailed you some
magazine and tomorrow morning
goes a package which among other
things will include your black tafeta
dress about which you wrote to your mother.⁵

Tomorrow I will call at your
home again when Rose, Ben and Honey
will be present and write you about it.

In meantime take good care
of yourself and don't overstrain
in whatever you are doing.

With kindest regards to every body
that is kind to you.

I am as ever

Your devoted

Harry

Special
Love and kisses
from you parents
Sally and Bob

The blots
are perfume⁶

-----------

Matt's Notes

1 - As I mentioned in my comments on Papa's previous letter, I had always thought my grandmother didn't return Papa's affections when they first started courting. This obviously wasn't the case if she wrote to him twice in three days and enclosed a flower in her second letter.

What kind of spring flower did my grandmother pick and send to Papa? A cluster of wild asters from the field near her cousin's farmhouse? A tulip from the garden? A blossom from a dogwood tree? What condition was it in when it arrived? I'm sure Papa must have been thrilled by the gesture, anxious as he was for any sign of my grandmother's affection. Did he toy with it as he listened to his radio that night, prop it on his windowsill, or put it in a teacup on his little table? Perhaps he stared at it as he tried to fall asleep that night and dared to imagine, romantic that he was, an end to the years-long season of loneliness he'd known in New York.

2 - I was initially puzzled to see the word "pancakes" in Papa's description of the dinner he had at my great-grandmother's house. It wasn't a Jewish holiday like Passover or Hannukah, so I didn't think she would have made Matzoh meal pancakes or potato latkes, and my grandmother's family wasn't of German descent so she wouldn't have made any kind of rich egg or dense apple pancakes. My initial guess was that she made some sort of blintz, possibly filled with cottage cheese or potatoes as a main course or filled with fruit for dessert.

My mother cleared things up, though:

Very interesting that they already invited him for Shabbos dinner.

Nanyku would never, never have cooked on the Sabbath, so I'm sure all the food was prepared in advance. She did make matzoh meal pancakes throughout the year, but probably not for Friday night dinner. They must have been her famous (in my mind at least) potato latkes, which she prepared earlier in the day and kept warm in the oven---maybe it was kept lit all night and day over Friday night and Saturday---or they may have used the services of a Shabbos goy. [Note - Orthodox Jews aren't allowed to do things like turn on lights or ovens during the Sabbath, so back in they day they'd ask non-Jewish acquaintances, what they called "Shabbos goys", to help them out with such tasks.]

So, potato pancakes they probably were. Nanyku (that was my great-grandmother's nickname) apparently built her reputation as an excellent cook on a foundation of chicken fat, which she used not only in predictable ways (for frying latkes) but in brilliant ways (for spreading on salami sandwiches in lieu of mustard.)

It's interesting to note that Papa refers to Nanyku's potato pancakes as "pancakes" and not as "latkes," the Yiddish term that even unobservant Jews like me typically use. I think this is because he, as a non-native English speaker, translated his thoughts into English wholesale, and hadn't yet developed the habit of peppering his writing or speech with Yiddish terms where appropriate. Evidence of this also shows up in his diary, where he never uses English transliterations of Yiddish words; if nothing but a Yiddish word will do, he writes it in Yiddish with Hebrew letters. I suppose it was up to subsequent generations to choose which Yiddish words would make it into assimilated Jews' English vocabularies.

3 - I was also struck, when I first read this letter, by Papa's change in tone at the end of page one and the beginning of page two. Though his florid ode to my grandmother's anticipated return ("...you will be with us again, and so will complete happiness and the sun will cast her rays again in their full brilliance") is lovely to read, it's the sort of formally romantic writing I'd expect from Papa. But his cheery flattery ("Didn't I tell you that you are talented") and chatty humor ("Are you progressing in your studies in farming, milking, plowing, etc...the farmer will have you graduated with a diploma as a first class farmerette") are quite a departure from Papa's other writings, and strike me almost as the words of someone joking with a child, or perhaps feeling a bit childlike himself.

And that's it, of course. To read this letter and see Papa switch from purplish prose to giddy silliness in the space of a few sentences is to see the crackling, unconstrained enthusiasm of a man falling in love.

4 - As I've mentioned before, Papa would only have known my grandmother for a few months when he wrote this letter, yet he was already going to her family's home on the Sabbath, calling Nanyku "mother" (though he would call her by the informal Yiddishism "Muttah" when he knew her better) and thinking it appropriate to spend the weekend with my grandmother at her cousin's farm. Still, the courtship slowed down and wound up lasting over five years.

5 - She needed her taffeta dress for plowing and milking, no doubt.


6 - I always thought that only women perfumed their letters back in the heyday of letter writing, but it looks like men did it as well. Papa obviously thought his perfume blots (one of which is pictured at right) were unsightly and deserved an explanation, so after he wrote this letter he added "The blots are perfume" in vertical script at the bottom of the second page (pictured at left). I've given the blots a sniff, but of course their scent is long gone.

Papa as I remember him

This site has lots of photos of Papa at various stages of his life, but I only recently got hold of the wallet-sized print below. It shows Papa as I really remember him: a dignified man of 75 with a handkerchief tucked into his coat pocket, his gently smiling face showing a hint of gravity. (I also remember him with glasses and a hat and tie, so I'll see if I can come up with a picture that shows him with all those for our upcoming photo gallery.)

This shot was taken on the Boardwalk in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach, a few blocks from where Papa and my grandmother lived and raised my mother. (Not far, I should point out, from where he saw an outdoor movie on July 6, 1924.) It must be close to 1970 here, somewhere within the last year of Papa's life; he doesn't look quite as robust as he does in slightly earlier photos, but he also doesn't look as thin and tired as he would later.

I suppose I've added this because Papa looks so content and satisfied here, so different from the struggling dreamer we've come to know through his diary, yet still somehow the same man who came here at 18 from Sniatyn, lived in the prohibition-era tenements of the Lower East Side, listened to music on a crude radio, talked all night of changing the world in the Yiddish cafes of Second Avenue, and went to places like baseball games, the opera and Coney Island by trolley, subway and occasionally on the running boards of automobiles. It's a picture of a man who may not have gotten what he always dreamed of, but at the end of his life had exactly what he wanted. That's my grandmother, my sister and me to his right.

Indian Love Lyrics (slide show)

Even though I'll be updating this site in various ways and posting Papa's letters in the coming months, it kind of chokes me up to think I won't be visiting with him every day in quite the same way as I did all last year. After I posted yesterday's entry I started putting a photo gallery together (something I've always planned to do) and wound up making this slide show to the tune of Indian Love Lyrics, one of the songs Papa heard on the radio on April 28, 1924. It's a wistful tune and matches my mood pretty well right now.

Wednesday Dec 31

Its All over,

New Years Eve. this year
at District, and Jewish
Students club, in conversation
with a fascinating girl Miriam,
Later at Jewish Students club.

Going home early in the morning
the streets down town were
still crowded with thousands
going home from festivities.

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

Matt's Notes

"It's all over," indeed. Papa's final diary entry gives us a nice little snapshot of his life at this time: The Zionist organizations and Jewish clubs he was part of; his guarded excitement over yet another intriguing woman; his walk home alone through a crowd of revelers, an echo of the way he started the year. And we know more about him now, too: he was an opera aficionado, a baseball fan, a movie lover, an avid radio listener, a labor activist, a deeply spiritual Jew, a devoted brother, a homesick child, a son who grieved for his father, a romantic soul, an unremarkable immigrant from Eastern Europe, and a remarkable figure to those who knew him.

He died when I was four years old, and, as it turns out, I've missed him every day since then. Still, I feel extraordinarily fortunate to have had the chance to spend this whole year with him in something like an adult conversation. Next year we'll see a conversation of a different sort, or one side of it, anyway, as we look at the letters he wrote to my grandmother during their long courtship. I'm looking forward to it, but right now I want to make sure I cover every word left in his diary, because he did write a couple of of more lines on the last "Memoranda" page, each separated by a little squiggle:

Riches in the heart is content
and not riches in the hand
-
Music is food for the soul
-
Jane Novak my favorite movie actress

Novak was a prolific, well-known actress in her day whose good-girl image probably appealed to Papa. Her career faded with the advent of talkies, though she did pop up in modern movies from time to time and published, in 1974, a cookbook called A Treasury of Chicken Cookery. It's no longer in print.

-----------

Tuesday Dec 30

Home and radio night.

The year is ending
a new book shall be
written.

and may the pages
chronicle only happy
events. Amen

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

Matt's Notes

Papa's had a mixed relationship with "home and radio" nights all year. As we've discussed before, the kit-built radio set he posed with in the photo below indicates an early adopter's love for the medium (by "early" we mean he'd probably built his radio set somewhere around 1922 when commercial radio first became viable) and 1924 was particularly full of breakout developments in broadcasting. Among other things, it was the first year a presidential campaign season, including both national conventions, played out on the airwaves, it was the debut year of New York's venerable public radio station, WNYC, and it was the year AT&T, the biggest corporate player in the industry, made nationwide broadcasts through connected affiliate stations a common practice.



Yet thrilling as it was to listen to the radio in 1924, the isolating effect of Papa's headphones put an unwelcome accent on a year in which his longing for companionship became deeper and less forgiving. Though he had no privacy when he was "living in board," his move to an apartment of his own on Attorney Street left him ill at ease and disconnected. This intensified, as those of you who have been following well know, after he learned of his father's death in the old country, an event that left him bereft, unmoored and, since it fell to him to cover burial expenses, depressingly in debt. (He felt so desperate that he invited his neighbor's son to stay in his apartment for a time.) Later on he got himself a telephone so he could hear some friendly voices in his spare surroundings, but he found as little comfort in it as he did in formerly reliable distractions like movies, baseball, and his radio.

The year was not entirely free of satisfying moments, naturally. Papa enjoyed his visits to Coney Island, the Metropolitan Opera house, and New York's assorted parks; he felt the pangs of love for a couple of different women, and though these episodes were disappointing in the end they were food for his romantic soul; he co-founded the "Maccabean" chapter of the fraternal organization, B'nai Zion (Order Sons of Zion) and became its Master of Ceremonies; he saw speeches by and occasionally met his Zionist heroes; he witnessed the first endorsement of Zionism by organized labor, a spiritually inspiring convergence of his most beloved causes; and he welcomed the arrival of two new nephews.

By the end of the year, Papa had emerged from the shadow of mourning and perhaps grown up a little. As I've mentioned before, I think his father's death allowed him, if in a wrenching, unpleasant way, to give up his attachment to the old country and the long-held dream that he could somehow recapture the idealized comforts of his boyhood. It may, in fact, have helped him stop spending quite so much time with his daydreams in general, prompted him to stop wishing for the life he would like and start working on the life he could have. It was, for Papa, a remarkable year, the sort of year people have when they're twenty-nine.

I wonder, did Papa review his own year in the way I just have when he penned his 1924 diary's last "home and radio" entry? Or did he just think about the coming year and his prayer to fill "a new book" with only "happy events"? If such a book literally exists I don't have it, but I know his future. I know he was about to meet my grandmother, I know he would, at last, have a family of his own. I know he found his happiness and that his happiness included me. And I know I'm here now, and I know he can't hear me, but I swear I'm sitting and whispering the word "Papa" like a spell, whispering Papa, Papa, Papa, please tell me what comes next.

Thursday Dec 25

[no entry today]

--------

Matt's Notes

No entry from Papa today, but we can picture him taking a good, long look at the morning papers on his day off. The Christmas edition of the New York Times has what seems like an unusually large complement of macabre stories, with tales of a crashed plane, a sunken boat, and a wrecked train accompanying more typical accounts of auto accidents and crimes gone awry. So follow me, if you dare, to look at some of the headlines that might have caught Papa's eye:

• SAMARITAN IS ROBBED.; Stoops to Aid Man Feigning Collapse and Faces Pistol.
• EIGHT PERSONS DIE IN LONDON TO PARIS AIR EXPRESS CRASH; Plane Bursts Into Flames as It Dives to Ground After Leaving Croydon.
• CROWD SEES WIFE STABBED TO DEATH; Woman Attacked on Her Way to Work in Upper Broadway Delicatessen Store. SAY HUSBAND CONFESSED Police Doubt His Story That He Used Fountain Pen -- Couple Had Separated.
• GUN GOES OFF; WOMAN DEAD; Casper Schmidt of Middletown, Conn., Charged With Manslaughter.
• HEARSE BURNS AT HOSPITAL; Auto Backed Against Heat Pipe and Gas Tank Explodes.
• SLAYS THE WOMAN HE TWICE MARRIED; Randolph Man Kills Her After Abduction Charge Following Recent Divorce.
• WHOLE FACULTY DIES WHEN STEAMER SINKS; Twenty-nine Russian University Professors and Their Families Drown Off Odessa.
• HOLIDAY SHOPPER KILLED BY A TAXI; Wife of Theatre Treasurer Is Run Down in Broadway at Eighty-first Street.
• Two Are Crushed and Burned under Train When Auto Skids Through Gates at Crossing

Some of the less gruesome stories of interest to Papa might have been:

• BIG PARADE FOR SMITH.; Over 3,500 State Troops to March at Governor's Inauguration. - Papa admired New York Governor Al Smith's pro-labor policies and had rooted for his nomination during the 1924 Democratic Presidential Convention. As an activist in both labor and Zionist causes, Papa took a keen interest in politics even though he was not yet a voting citizen.
• 500,000 GERMAN RADIO FANS.; Only 2,000 a Year Ago -- 100,000 New Ones a Month Now Expected. - Papa was an early radio enthusiast, as we well know by now, so I'm sure he would have have followed any news about the developing broadcast industry with great interest. (This day's paper also carried an account of the first-ever Christmas service broadcast from St. Paul's Chapel in New York over WEAF, one of Papa's favorite stations.) It's odd to think there was a time when I didn't know this about Papa, but it was a real surprise when I discovered it back in January. I suppose it's normal, but I must say I'm getting sentimental about the early days of this project as Papa's diary reaches its final pages.
• NEW YEAR'S WEEK OPERAS.; " Falstaff" Revival and "Meistersinger" Among Ten Performances. - Papa had attended performances at the Met quite frequently toward the end of 1924, and there's no reason to think he didn't keep it up for the rest of the opera season. Some of the productions mentioned in this article that he might have been looking forward to include "Falstaff," "Mesitersinger," "Parsifal," "Fedora" and "Aida."
• RUSH TO SEE 'THE MIRACLE.'; Police Halt Stampede in Cleveland -- Seat Sale Over $250,000. - This article refers to the road tour of a high-profile theatrical extravaganza that Papa caught at the Century Theatre earlier in the year. (He called it "the most stupendous production I've ever seen" at the time.) The Times article likens the "stampede for the box office" to "the scene...which takes place prior to the initial struggle of the baseball world's series."
• UNIONS TO SPEND $1,000,000 ON HOMES; Needle Trade Organizations Plan to Erect Block of Model Apartment Buildings. - Though Papa has written mostly about his Zionist activism in his diary, he was an equally enthusiastic labor activist and would likely have known about this story -- a planned low-rent housing complex in the Bronx for members of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, the Furriers' Union and the Cap Makers' Union -- before it appeared in the paper. In case you're wondering, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. eventually took over this project, and the results was a low-cost cooperative called Thomas Garden Apartments at 840 Mott Avenue (now called Grand Concourse) at 158th Street.
• ROBINSON UNDERGOES A SECOND OPERATION; Manager of Brooklyn Robins Is Reported in Good Condition at Baltimore Hospital. - Papa was a big baseball fan and seemed equally fond of all three New York teams (though I am reluctant to acknowledge the statistical evidence that hints at his preference for the Yankees in 1924). I'm sure any scrap of baseball news would have been welcome on this cold and snowy day, even an account of Wilbert Robinson's pleurisy surgery.

Thursday Dec 18

[no entry today - Papa accidentally wrote his December 20th entry on this page]

----------

"Oh no Harry I think I'm going to upchuck" H. says and she is right, thank goodness for the private bath. Our dance ends she runs and kneels and she is like a sick child and it worries me so until she is finished, with a washcloth I clean the front of her dress her chin and nose and I help her to the bed. I lay a wet cloth on her head and I watch her and she falls asleep, safe. I don't know if I should return the liquor to Thomas but I decide instead to pour it down the drain, I rinse the pitcher and glasses in the sink. I check on H. again, she is still. I hear the radio now, it is too loud and so H. should sleep better I decide to turn it off, then I see the ghost is there, the ghost is there by the radio.

Like a dancer a poor dancer she moves, not in time to the radio music, slowly not like the people in New York she must have lived in a slower time like the old barons in the old country, they moved with such ease such stillness while all around we hurried in the streets. I watch her she reminds me of the dress patterns in the factory, a picture of something to come but not yet there, a shape of a woman. I see her face but I see the radio behind her still, like a trick photograph come to life. I see only her torso, it rises from the floor as if she stands on a floor below, and now I remember what Thomas told me, after the fire the builders remade the hotel remade it with larger rooms, higher rooms and it must be true she must stand where the old floor once was.

I want to be sure H. does not see this does not become frightened, yet I cannot turn to check on her for I feel I must watch the apparition, I must watch her every moment. She holds her arms out, her hands down near her waist, she has a tender smile perhaps she strokes the head of a child and then in a moment just as Thomas described she looks up, she is afraid, her mouth opens she holds one arm above her forehead, she appears to sing a silent aria. Now something Thomas did not tell me, she turns, turns her face to me, for a moment our eyes meet and then she is gone and then I know the room is burning burned by the man who took her life.

I switch off the radio, I take the chair from the desk and sit and watch H., I watch her sleep for a time and she is silent and pale and I think of the forest, in the forest around the little town where I was born it must be snowing, and every snowflake tumbles and every snowflake whispers and I am so far from them, so far I will never see them gather, never see the wet ground after they melt.

Wednesday Dec 17

[no entry today]

----------

We arrive at the room, Thomas finally speaks and he he warns us the door opens on its own sometimes, we must lock it to keep it closed. Inside now H. sits on the bed she leans back on her elbows and I think for some reason I want to sit at the desk, there is a stack of paper on the desk and a pen and I think I might write to my sisters on Rivington Street, or to my brother in Sniatyn that he might read my letter out loud to my mother. How it would puzzle them, a letter from a hotel in my own city, a letter written from a room with a private bathroom. In the corner is a "cabinet" radio of the newer type, built of wood and cloth and shaped like a spire. There will be an opera tonight I tell H. and I switch the radio on, it is so unlike my own radio, its dials are large, raised numbers on the cabinet mark the stations. The controls are stiff and I wonder if I am the first to use it.

Can the ghost hear the radio, does it confuse her because she lived at a time before such inventions? Do the voices and music from this strange pointed box seem to her phantom emanations, sudden and soft from a source unknown? I would certainly relieve her of this fear if I could, if I could I would end the frustration of her eternal wait, stop the terrible drama she performs at night, the repetition of her life's most frightening most disappointing most regrettable moment. Why does she remain in this moment, remain where she no longer belongs, does the very instant of her death, her terrible death, does she prefer it to what unknown future awaits her soul?

Thomas is again at the door, H. lets him in and he enters he bears pitcher and glasses on a tray. Refreshments he calls them and H. claps her hands and says now we can have a party and I am briefly relieved, I am thirsty and then I remember H. and her secret meeting with the clerk. My suspicion proves correct the pitcher conceals not water but instead some kind of clear hooch I have heard hotels do this but I never have seen it myself.

Thomas leaves a moment later the door swings open just as he said it would, I lock it to conceal the little secret the secret H. and I share. H. takes a drink and she pours some more and she holds out a glass to me. I tell her if she drinks much more she won't see the ghost, that's the idea Harry she says. Her face looks strange, shadows across her cheeks and eyes, I did not think it possible but I prefer not to look at her.

Just a few blocks away I might find Blitz at headquarters and we might discuss the ball and I might ask him to assist in the preparation of my speech. I know now what the speech will be, a treatise on patience on hard work I will urge all to remember how long we have wandered how close we are now how some of us, at least some of us may live to see all of Israel come home at last. Like a letter to my beloved father it will be and I would like to sit at the desk and begin but H. of course stands there and she holds a glass out to me.

I take a tiny sip so as not to disappoint her, it is sharp with a poisonous taste and I mention the ghost again, aren't we here to see the ghost I ask surely we will see her if we watch carefully. "Oh Harry what's the difference" she says, and glass still in hand puts her arms on my shoulders, drapes them around my neck. It is what I have wanted yet so unlike what I want, all the same the music on the radio is a sweet sweet song and she smiles, a small smile but full of intention she moves only the corners of her mouth and her eyes darken and she melts against me. Dance with me Harry she says and we sway, I drift with her in a tiny waltz I waltz in miniature with small steps and she notices the steps and follows and then giggles and she smiles the smile again and tilts her head to the side like she has a question, a question for which there is but one answer and I kiss her now I kiss her at last.

Tuesday Dec 9

[no entry today]

----------

Rothstein on the telephone, he tells me H. now lives in Williamsburg and I tell him I know because I have met her at the Dist. He says he knows about the Dist. He tells me again H. is now in Williamsburg with her aunt, an American. I touch the head set for my radio and remember Gigli is in Philadelphia with Serafin and the rest, I must check to see if they are on the air.

And now I picture my father olam haba and how he stood over the row of desks, his crippled arm tucked into his pocket his other arm holding open a book, he turned pages with his thumb and read the lessons and my heart would fill with pride and sadness both, how he struggled yet was the equal to other men, superior in so many ways to other men. I long for his advice, but what he would say I think I know, I am sure I know. Did he ever use a telephone? Did he ever see one?

The father of H's aunt was from Frankfurt or possibly Strasbourg, Rothstein says, and he owned a factory, blouses and dresses and he owned part of a newspaper also. I own a whole newspaper I tell him, I bought it from the boy just this evening, it is a joke but Rothstein has other things to discuss. I agree to have dinner with him at the Parkway on Saturday. We say goodbye and as if by some unseen hand I lift out of my chair all at once and rush out and down the stairs, careful only not to slip on the shiny lip of the last step, the lip of the last step worn smooth, worn shiny. Then I am on the street, no hat, no coat, but others are without coats too, it is so warm it could be May or September but for the naked trees.

I decide to see a movie at the Clinton and I go back upstairs for my hat and the telephone rings. It is H., I breathe hard from my speedy trip up and down the stairs yes it is H. on the telephone, is it not like a girl of her type to ring me up? It is a perfect gesture, just a perfect gesture her voice a sweet trill, a string of notes more lovely than any song the radio affords me. She asks me if I will be at the Dist tomorrow and of course the answer is yes, I remind her of her promise to help me with the circulars and the program in the evening and she laughs and says of course, oh of course, she has just returned from a drive with someone, I do not know him, and she claims she had so much fun she forgot momentarily. "He gave me a nifty tip and now I have an idea," she says in a whisper and says she cannot wait to tell me.

She hangs up and I collect coins and I look at a buffalo, his face down his head pointed forward and I cannot decide does he want to break through the edge of the nickel or is he at rest? I have a few coins only but enough for a movie ticket, yes more than enough for a movie ticket.

Thursday Dec 4

Opera Carmen
at the Metropolitan

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Matt's Notes

It's important to note that movies and radio, while ascendant in 1924, had not yet displaced live performance as the preferred form of entertainment in big American cities. When we see Papa going to the opera almost as much as he goes to the movies, we should remember that, while he was a true opera lover, his frequent visits to the Met were probably less unusual than my own frequent visits to the Film Forum.

Those who crowded in with Papa to see Carmen on December 5th certainly got their money's worth. Though Irving Kolodin, in his The Story of the Metropolitan Opera, describes Ina Bourskaya as "rather dull of voice for leading roles," the New York Times found her a "gay and vivid" as well as an "animated and vital" Carmen. Then again, the reviewer's focus on her energy and appearance, as opposed to her voice, might be something of a veiled criticism, but I'm sure Papa didn't begrudge her the many curtain calls she enjoyed that night.

Opposite her as Don Jose was the great tenor, Giovanni Martinelli, who was a third of the way into a storied 33-year Met career. (Martinelli had been in the unenviable position of overlapping with Caruso, but he made the most of it. "Many tenors were called to the Met" in the Caruso years, wrote the New York Times in his obituary, "but no others were chosen to stay...Only Mr. Martinelli survived the days of Caruso's glory and emerged as an artist and personality in his own right.")

Here's a little snippet of Martinelli singing Don Jose (opposite Geraldine Ferrar) courtesy of YouTube:




And here's a clip of Martinelli singing La fleur que tu m'avais jetee from Carmen, this time from archive.org.

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References:

INA BOURSKAYA AS CARMEN.; Again an Animated and Colorful Heroine of Bizet's Opera. (The New York Times, December 5, 1924.)

Giovanni Martinelli, The Tenor, Is Dead; Giovanni Martinelli, Met Star 33 Years, Dies (The New York Times, February 3, 1969.)

The Story of Carmen at Metoperafamily.org

Monday Dec 1

home - radio

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Matt's Notes

This page of the diary has a printed notation at the bottom that reads:

A SUGGESTION - Time to order your diary for next year.
For duplicate of this book order by number in front.

If Papa took this suggestion, we don't know about it. This is the only diary we've got, and this is the only month we have left.



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Sunday Nov 30

Dist & Bronx
relatives

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Matt's Notes

Once in a while Papa made a trip up to the Bronx to visit his relatives (sometimes catching a baseball game along the way) though I'm not yet sure who they were or where they lived. I am pretty sure that if he started his day at the "Dist," a.k.a. the "District," a.k.a. the Downtown Zionist Centre on St. Marks Place, he most likely took the 2nd Avenue IRT from 8th Street to 149th Street in the Bronx and transferred to another train there.



The more I think about "The Dist," the more it seems like the title or subject of a TV melodrama: a bunch of passionate twentysomethings from different places, all with different problems, priorities and professions, gather each night to work, flirt and find common cause at "The Dist." And here's the twist: It all takes place in the roaring 20's!



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I've been thinking, too, about Papa's Thanksgiving entry, and how, in looking around for something interesting to mention about Thanksgiving that year, I learned that 1924 was the first year of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. It seems like there were so many seminal events that year: It was the first time a Presidential campaign played out on the radio, it was the year Adolph Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in prison, it was the year Jewish Labor got behind Zionism, the year of the Leopold and Loeb trial, the year J. Edgar Hoover became head of the FBI, the year the Washington Senators finally won the Series. I'm not a historian, but it looks like the modern era was a-birthing right in front of Papa's eyes. Does every year seem this important when examined closely? Would I have been as impressed with 1925 if Papa kept his diary that year?

Thursday Nov 27

Thanksgiving Day

Evening with Maccabean
Camp open meeting.

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Matt's Notes

Though he felt deep admiration for his adopted country (the contemplation of free elections had brought him to tears as he listened to the Democratic Convention on the radio earlier in the year) it looks like Papa hadn't developed much attachment to Thanksgiving as of 1924. (This despite the premiere of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in which, according to the New York Times, "a retinue of clowns, freaks, animals and floats" accompanied Santa Claus on a march from 145th Street to the seven-month-old Macy's store on 34th Street.)

Papa had a couple of days off earlier in the week due to slow business at his factory, but I can't tell from this post whether Thanksgiving Day was an official union holiday or whether he worked. It certainly seems like he didn't have a meal with either of his sisters or other relatives, but perhaps the "Maccabean camp" (this was Papa's chapter of B'nai Zion, the fraternal organization to which he belonged) held its open meeting to give its members, most of whom were immigrants, a place to gather for the holiday.

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My mother adds:

Very few Jews, even when I was growing up, celebrated Thanksgiving the way we know it now...We never had turkeys...I think because there weren't any kosher ones. Turkey was what we read about in school...Pilgrims, grandmother's house. etc., mainly consumed by Gentiles. I doubt that Aunt Nettie and Aunt Clara had any clue about the holiday.

Tuesday Nov 4

Election Day

The usual election noise
around my neighborhood more
than in any other part of the city
Stopped half day a union holiday.

Visited Rifke in E.N.Y. with
Clara & Sadie present. I went
there in quest of customers
of Claras friends.

9 P.M. Home & radio
listening to radio returns.

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Matt's Notes

Papa mentioned yesterday his intention to supplement his income by selling womens' gowns on the side (he worked in a garment factory during the day) and today we see his first attempt: A trip to Brooklyn with his cousin Sadie and one of the many women in his life named "Clara." (Papa's sister was named Clara, but so was his cousin Sadie's sister. Papa knew cousins Sadie, Clara their other sister Eva rather intimately, since he stayed in their home and shared a bed with them when he first came to America in 1913.) Papa has stopped by Rifke's house in East New York a couple of times on his way to events sponsored by the Kessler Zion Club, but I don't know if she was a cousin as well or just a close friend.

It seems like Rifke's house became the scene of a little direct sales party, with Papa showing catalogues and fabric swatches or, perhaps, pulling entire gowns out of a sample case and passing them around the room. I'll try to learn more about what someone like him really would have carried on a sales call, but meanwhile it's worth noting that he was able to take his Brooklyn trip because he had half the day off for Election Day, an admirable show of cultural enlightenment we might not expect from a country that had, in the words of President Coolidge's election eve get-out-the-vote speech, only "lately...added to our voting population the womanhood of the nation." (Unfortunately, we don't expect it from 21st century America, either.)

Perhaps a more historically interesting detail from this entry is Papa's account of how he "listened to radio returns in the evening." This seems like an offhand statement, but with the exception of a few early radio enthusiasts who had picked up some experimental coverage of the 1920 Harding-Cox returns from Pittsburgh's pioneering station KDKA, no American could have written such a thing about a national election before 1924. A New York Times article from November 2, 1924 called the 1920 KDKA broadcast as the birth date of modern broadcasting went on to discuss the explosive growth of the industry:

Into these four years has been crowded the most extraordinary progress which has ever followed any of the great scientific discoveries. After the invention of the steam engine, steam-boat, telephone and airplane a generation or more has been required to bring about a similar development.

Today, when radio broadcasting is so much a part of our national life, the crude methods of four years ago and its limited application seem to belong to another century. The pioneers in broadcasting faced a small audience. It was only possible for a few hundred to listen in, and these were grouped for the most part within a narrow radius. Today 530 broadcasting stations are scattered across the United States, and daily teach and entertain an audience estimated at upward of 10,000,000 people.

As sophisticated as modern radio might have seemed to the Times, it still devoted thousands of awestruck words throughout the year, and especially in the days leading up to the elections, to the logistics of nationally broadcast campaign speeches and Election Day coverage. AT&T, by then an innovative and important player in the radio business, led the way by linking its stations and facilitating simultaneous broadcasts via phone lines, an arrangement the Times referred to, in quotes to denote the freshness of the term, as a "hook-up."

I mention all this not to laugh at the quaint technology of the early 20th century, but to better understand the world Papa lived in, and to examine another facet of his personal evolution, in this case the process through which radio makes its way into his life: he is quietly delighted when he hears an early Presidential speech; cheers the broadcasts of his favorite musicians; suffers through the dramatic, epic implosion of the Democratic party at its National Convention; feels lonely when he listens too long by himself.

The 1924 Election Day broadcast lasted until 1:00 AM on New York's WEAF, and I'm sure he listened to every minute, found it a remarkable addition to the traditional, street-level campaign clamor he'd become accustomed to (or at least become accustomed to hating) in recent weeks. Still, I wonder how much longer such broadcasts would strike him as remarkable, how long it would be until, one day without even realizing it, he turned off the radio because he just didn't feel like hearing the President's voice.



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New York Times references for this post:

• RADIO BROADCASTING STARTED AT KDKA FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY; First Program Featured Harding-Cox Election Returns -- Pittsburgh's First Call Was 8ZZ -- Phonograph Records Furnished Music
• Davis and Coolidge on Radio In Same Hook-Up Monday
• TO RADIO ELECTION RETURNS THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY; Election Bulletins to Be Featured Tuesday Night -- WGBS, WWJ and WCAP Assigned Special Wave Lengths for Election Night
• President Urges All to Vote as Only Means of Making Public Opinion Effective.; TEXT OF COOLIDGE TALK BY RADIO