Sometimes he is confident, sometimes
not. Sometimes he knows his anguished days are just “the throes of an
adolescent.” Sometimes he has no perspective. Contented teen-agers, after all, do not keep
diaries. When my father begins his daily record in 1933 his face has broken out
in pimples, he has failed the first half of his college accounting exam and he
is desperately looking for love: “Will it ever happen for me? Saturday evening
is the hardest, when I see everyone else walking and myself just a bystander.”
The Great Depression grinds on.
Brother Lou’s salary is cut two dollars, down to sixteen a week. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is sworn-in on
Saturday, March 4th and immediately declares a one week bank holiday
to stabilize the economy. Those caught with
little cash are stranded, which means the small downtown businesses have a few
bad days. The fledgling wholesale operation of the
Abramowitz family scrapes to a halt.
On a Sunday of this same month, my
father meets Marie. She is standing
behind the bakery counter and smiles when she hands him the family’s usual five
pound loaf of Moishe’s Pumpernickel. The five pound loaf is the bargain loaf, the
most bread for your money. The one I’ve told you about before that slowly
dried out as the week progressed, so that by Friday morning a meat cleaver was
required to make slices.
When my father is doing something
forbidden he frequently writes his diary using his high school French. So, a week
after he meets Marie, he sighs into his diary: “Voyez Marie et elle est plus beau que
jamais.” I saw Marie and she is more
beautiful than ever. But she is not
Jewish.
Is she
interested in him? Just flirting? Not even flirting? Reading through the pages of 1933, I
can’t tell. For Christmas he sends her a
bottle of perfume, “avec small hope for a return jamais.” Even though he doesn’t believe in Christmas.
Even though a few days later he writes that he is “ashamed of the many Jewish
people celebrating this day.” Such is
the power of his crush.
Perhaps she responds to his gift
because by April they seem to have something going. But, again, the diary does
not give me enough information. He loves
“to watch her beautiful smile, all for me. If only she was Jewish, how much
gladder I would be.” Does she give him
this smile when he enters the bakery every Sunday? When they go for a walk
together?
His mother says he must give her
up. Then, in a Jewish immigrant mother’s
form of a curse, she says, “It will serve you right if you marry an Italian.” What about it will serve him right? I don’t know exactly, but nothing favorable.
My father could regret marrying an
Italian girl like Marie, but not all Jews are acceptable to the family either. Oldest brother Lou is dating a Romanian. Jewish mind you, but from Romania originally,
or her parents are from Romania.
Romanians, writes my father “are two-faced and unfaithful.” What will satisfy? Galitzianyers
- girls from the Southern Poland are
out. They are morally shifty. Poor Lou tries to get something going with one of
those as well, but is dissuaded. Only a
Litvak girl, from the northern areas of Poland, Lithuania or Latvia will
do. Someone as much like themselves as
possible.
Marie disappears from the diary, except
once, a year later when my father writes, forlornly, “Thinking about Marie is
like thinking about the millions I’ll probably never have.” Besides pining for love, he pines for money, wishes
he could be a player on the stock market. “J’aime to daydream about fortunes and saving
pretty girls. I wonder if I’ll ever grow up. Ambitions of adolescence to be a
second J.P. Morgan.”
The aristocracy of my father’s world
is the successful small storekeeper. So he starts dating Lillian Spieler whose
father has moved his dry goods business into new, larger quarters, meaning he’s
doing well. But Lillian is too temperamental.
Through the nineteen-thirties he searches
for his “one and only.”
Janet Nelson? First
yes, then no. Someone referred to as
E.B. Yes, then no. His mother thinks he
can do better. Mom prefers “the Smirnoff
girl or Ruthie Block.”
“The allies
seem to be on the losing side,” he writes in May of 1940. “I will enlist.” France
has fallen but the U.S. economy is improved, gearing up for the war most people
know is coming. European Jews are being harassed and
persecuted. My father notes this and cries into his diary in relation to
something he’s read in the newspaper, “Jews are usually so kind and intelligent.
Why should they be tortured? Is it
because they’re the Chosen People? We really are chosen.” This last line, I
think, is sarcastic.
But despite the terrible tidings
around the world, a personal life goes on. Nineteen-forty is a good year for my
father and he knows it. “Have about
broken out of my shell,” he writes. “I’m still emerging.”
In July he meets Betty: “A very nice girl. Will be seeing more of
her, I hope. She is very sweet and compatible.”
Later that month he records that
Betty is “the nicest person I’ve ever met.”
He asks her to go steady and offers an
expensive marcasite pin to seal their attachment. Betty is delighted.
The pressure at home increases. Anne,
his younger sister, “isn’t satisfied.
Not that she dislikes BP but says she isn’t my equal mentally and that I
deserve someone better, more learned.” Mother agrees.
Their harangues continue each
evening, until my father loses confidence: “At home they keep on at me about Betty - until I don’t feel sure anymore.”
Poor Daddy.
Uncle Louis has managed to find a
girlfriend who must be Litvak because no one says a word against her. But it also appears that my uncle has learned
not to talk about his romances at home. Good for him!
It’s a brisk, bright, cold day in New
York City on Sunday, December 7, 1941.
On Oahu Island, people are drinking their morning coffee or tea or juice.
The sky is clear there as well, and the breeze makes it a pleasant 73 degrees
on the day that will live in infamy.
.
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