HOW THEY DID IT

My father, Max Abramowitz, begins his diary in January 1933, at the age of sixteen.  Because of good grades, he is already attending the accounting program at City College. To save the nickel carfare he walks three miles to class from his family’s railroad flat on Eldridge Street.  The Great Depression has laid low the nation.  Franklin Roosevelt won’t be inaugurated until March.

        

As the diary opens they are a family of five.  The parents are immigrants with three American born teen-agers. There’s an invalided father, Mayshe, with a diagnosis of “malignant hypertension,” for which the only treatment is inactivity; a strong-willed mother, Chaya,  an older brother Lou and a younger sister Anne. Sometimes they cannot afford heat, but there is always enough food. They keep warm with sweaters, hot soups and bowls of oatmeal. Hot baths help because the landlord pays the water bill.

    

A five pound loaf of Moishe’s pumpernickel can last for a week. Getting harder and harder, my father would tell us, until a cleaver had to be used for slices.  And something to go with it – bologna, salami, or separately, because they keep kosher – farmer cheese, cottage cheese, muenster, swiss.  Always a roast chicken on Shabes, when together they sing zemirot, Sabbath songs, and my father feels comforted and strong.  “It re-awakened,” he writes after one of these evenings,  “my joy in being a Jew."  

          

The family subsists on Lou’s salary as a salesman for Yavaracovsky Paper Products.  Lou is the cheerful son. My father, the diary keeper, is easily discouraged.  In later years, when my grandmother described her two sons, she would say, “When Louie comes to visit, it’s always sunny. When Max comes, it’s always raining.”

 This view of my father is confirmed by the opening statement in his diary on January 2, 1933, “When I look on the five years coming I’m scared to think of what will follow.”

Here, it’s hard to tell if he means this personally or globally or if the two are fused. The planet is full of strife and suffering.  Bread lines are common throughout the Western democracies. In twenty- eight days Hitler will be elected Chancellor of Germany.  At the same time, my father’s face is breaking out with acne and he fears he will never find love.   “Will it ever happen for me?” he mourns to his diary. And later in the year, "During these summer evenings with the stars out I often get more lonely than I would care to say." A sentence whose plaintive tone makes me catch my breath, when I read it decades later.

Big brother Lou is the family’s economic leader. Working for Yavarkovsky, he learns about auction houses that offer quality paper products seized from bankrupt companies.  The merchandise is sold for pennies on the dollar. Lou buys one roll of brown wrapping and sells it to a customer at a price slightly lower than Yavarkovsky would charge.  True, he’s undercutting the boss who feeds the family, but that’s capitalism. And, besides, it didn’t hurt the Yavarkovsky family, who flourish in the paper business to this day.

 

Lou begins with one roll at a time.  After a while, he has made enough profit to purchase several.  Now he has a stock. Then he gets my father involved. “You knock on ten doors, you get two orders,” he tells my father, “you knock on twenty doors you get four.”

But my father is easily daunted.  Cold calls to small shopkeepers do not come easily to him. First you have to get the guy’s attention, then you have to keep it long enough to seal the deal. Say good-bye pleasantly. Do it again, and again. All day.

My father asks his diary why he “can’t seem to conquer that shyness. Yet I would very much like to.”   As the jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins did when he wanted to change his life, my father walks the Williamsburg Bridge late into the night. "It helps me to clear my thoughts. I like it most when it's very cold and there aren't any people there."

Then, some success, a few sales. “Making money is certainly a great rejuvenator, “ he writes at the end of the first month.  “When one gets an order and makes money, the bickering at home ceases and one is regarded with awe and respect, for a day or so.”   In short, when one person succeeds, the whole family benefits and rejoices.  No lone rangers here.

Soon they feel confident enough to rent a room in the basement of their apartment building so they can amass more stock.  Their mother, Chaya Leah, keeps track of their purchases and makes sure the basement door stays locked.

My father always spoke with a special tenderness about his mother. "She loved the business, " he would say. “She could have been a great business woman herself." This latter statement, his highest form of praise.

This grandmother's life had not been easy. Orphaned at sixteen, she journeyed alone from Lithuania or Latvia, we were never sure which and it didn't matter. To us there was no point in distinguishing one insignificant nation of antisemites from another, those were both dark places for Jews. Then piece work in the garment district for several years.  

“She was an anarchist,” my father would say, with pride. "She went on demonstrations in Russia.” (Not that he was ever proud of me when I went on anti-war or feminist demonstrations. About these he was wry, wondering what I had to complain about.)

 She made an unfortunate first marriage to a man who would not ‘have relations’ with her and would not give her a Jewish divorce until she paid him a large sum of money.  When she finally married a second time, she was what my father would call ‘an old girl,’ and had to take what was available. What was available was a presser in the garment district, soft-spoken, kindly, unambitious, but punctilious and absolute in matters of religious observance.  She was a free thinker. They were not well-matched but they managed. 

  My grandmother's three healthy children were her great achievement.  In the years my father chronicles in his diary, 1933-44, she is fiercely directive. To her children, her opinions were commands.

Mayshe and Chaya Abramowitz, her second marriage 

And so, one day in September of 1935 my father goes up to City College to enroll for a fourth semester of night classes. But this is not how it works in the embattled little family in the Great Depression. Even though tuition is free, there are still books to buy, fees to pay and attention and energy to dispense.   He cannot spend what the family's small amount of capital for courses which only lead to more courses.  And as God sent an angel to direct Abraham, so my grandmother “sounded the riot call and sent Annie, aged 15, up to school to stop me” from plunking down money and commitment to further schooling. 

“If you want to make your fortune,” his mother tells him, “You’ll have to do it without a college degree.”

These passages stunned me when first I read them. A Jewish mother who doesn't want her son to continue his education?  Can this be? And my father doesn't object, doesn't stand up for his rights. "Daddy!" I wanted to stamp my foot and yell after him. 

        But as I thought about it I concluded that to my fierce grandmother an individualist vision held no appeal.  Her care was only for a plan that embraced the entire family and kept them close to her and to each other. 

Events proved her correct. The three children worked together, in one business their whole lives. From Eldridge Street the family’s fortunes climbed, slowly at first but steadily, upward.