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. 

        

        

        

Choices

Moving to Jackson Heights, Queens in 1949 meant that my father Max Abramowitz was released from his in-laws watchful, Jewishly observant eyes.  Some men take a stand against domestic conventions by drinking too much or staying out late or buying a motorcycle. My father’s rebellion was characteristically modest. He stopped attending synagogue.  Instead, he spent his Saturday mornings at the Jackson Heights Public Library.

He was thirty-three and had lived his first twenty-eight years in a three room, five story walk -up on Eldridge Street with his widowed mother, a sister and a brother.  His bed  was a metal frame and a mattress that folded in half and was stored during the day against a wall in the kitchen.  When he married my mother and they moved into her parents’ six room apartment, he acquired his first stable berth.  

My father was an unassuming man.  Sometimes  playful and funny, in daily life he was mostly dutiful and dogged. Workday mornings he rose at five and departed before six for his business selling paper products – brown bags of all sizes, wrapping paper, tape and twine. He sold to the small retail liquor, dry-cleaning and grocery stores that line the neighborhoods of the five boroughs. “The smallest of the small,” was how he described his customers. Then he would laugh, thinking of himself in that same way – small, modest but prosperous, safe.  He owned the business he worked for, with his mother and brother and sister. Six in the evening was his homegoing hour, Friday afternoon and Saturday his days of rest.

I’m not really sure if the decision not to attend synagogue was one of light defiance or a reluctance to choose.  Maybe it was a little of both. Jackson Heights offered two options.  One was the Young Israel, a modern Orthodox congregation which met in a storefront.  It was a newcomer to the area.  Members were like us, recent emigrants from more crowded Jewish neighborhoods. But they were newcomers who wanted to abide in the traditional.  Here the services resembled the ones downtown, all in Hebrew, with traditional davening where no one announces the page number because everybody knows, and the men sway back and forth as they pray. The congregation was led by a Rabbi plus a group of learned men who stood on a bimah which is a slightly elevated platform in the center of the room. 

In the opposite direction ten blocks west and up a steep hill was the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights, an imposing three-story structure of brick with fake turrets or crenellations on the top.  Established in 1920, the Jewish Center was part of the all-American Conservative movement.  Here men and women sat together, the services were sedate and decorous. No one would rock back and forth in this imposing sanctuary which was as big as a school auditorium. Not that it was forbidden. It just wouldn’t happen.  Prayer alternated between responsive reading in English and some traditional Hebrew liturgy.  The Rabbi spoke down to his congregation from a proscenium stage.

My father didn't go alone to the library on those Saturday mornings. He took me with him. Hand in hand we walked the length of Seventy-Eighth Street to Thirty-Seventh Avenue. Hand in hand we entered through the second door where the children’s librarian, who already knew us, was setting up the low benches for story hour.

The Jackson Heights library was at that time composed of two adjacent storefronts connected by an inner set of folding doors. By the librarian I was deposited, near the  picture book section.  My father passed through to the adult section with its heavy wooden chairs and high oak tables.

At the end of story hour, my father claimed me. We walked home side by side, each clutching treasure  – four books apiece, the library limit.  At that moment we would have agreed with Jorge Luis Borges when he remarked, "I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library." 

Challah, salad and cold chicken awaited us, laid out on the kitchen table. The same meal my mother would have created if we were returning from synagogue. And, it did feel that way, as if we had spent the morning in a hushed house of prayer. 

  

My mother was accustomed to home being a woman’s place on Saturday mornings. That had been the way it was downtown on Shabes– the women stayed home with the children and prepared lunch. They didn’t mind. Prayer was what men did. It was important, absolutely, but tedious. Of course they would never have said that out loud. 

Then, in 1952, my mother was pregnant again and this time she had a boy. And what a boy! Blonde!  Blue-eyed! Chubby – when chubby was desirable. A golden child. But if he had been bald or brunette it would not have mattered, maleness was what mattered.

   

Within a few months we were paid-in-full members of The Jewish Center of Jackson Heights. A choice had been made. I was enrolled in the Hebrew School Sunday mornings and one afternoon during the week.  No more library dates, just my father and me.  My mother needed him at home. Or, if she didn’t, he went to synagogue because now he had a son and had to set a Jewish example.

Oedipally speaking, it must have been a blow for me, though I don’t remember feeling loss.  Except for this ploy: When visitors arrived to coo over my new baby brother I would close the door to his room and say, with as much authority as I could muster,  “The nurse says you can’t come in.”

A son was a momentous responsibility. He might join my father in business (he didn’t), or ask for guidance (sometimes). And so the mild-mannered outlaw days of Max Abramowitz were ended.

 Max and his first granddaughter,  1984

Jackson Heights, Queens: A Foreign Country

Slowly and then suddenly and completely there was prosperity. I’m talking about the late nineteen forties when post-World War II industrial abundance cranked up slowly and then spread wildly and widely in the early nineteen-fifties.  When everybody loved us, the U S of A, the saviors of Europe.  Slowly and then suddenly and completely the quotas on Jews in public school teaching or allowed entrance into Ivy League colleges were erased and it was as if they had never been.  An apology for the Holocaust?  Maybe.  We’re nothing like those Nazis.

But restricted neighborhoods like Jackson Heights, Queens, were still controlled by the private Queensboro Corporation. Restricted meant no Jews, no blacks allowed.  They didn’t think they owed an atonement to anyone. The state courts, after all, had upheld their right to restrict.   But the Queensboro Corporation couldn’t buy all the land.  New construction was everywhere the Queensboro Corporation wasn't,  plowing under farm fields and vacant lots. 

Into one of these newer buildings moved our Aunt Natalie, her two young sons and our Uncle Murray, four rooms on the fourth floor, apartment B40, next to the elevator.  She was done with the Lower East Side, she said. Done with railroad flat walk- ups. Aunt Natalie was the enterprising one, the one who couldn’t be stopped. One year passed as she watched and waited until she heard of an opening on the third floor, A35 to be exact. And, figuratively speaking, because in 1949 there was still a housing shortage, she lay down in front of the door to A35 and would not let anyone pass through until it was secured for my mother and father, my baby sister, Jayne and me.

            

And so we moved, my mother initially excited about being modern and leaving her parents’ home where the four of us had only the front two bedrooms.  

But Queens was so quiet, nobody on the street. Even though that’s what everyone said you moved for – the trees and the quiet.  Early on she sent me to the back garden that belonged to our building, assuming I’d meet some other kids there. Instead, both she and I were yelled at by the superintendent of the complex.  No children allowed alone in the garden. And during the ten years or so that we lived there no one – adult or child – ever sat or stood or in any way used that tree and bush crammed space.

Why did we come to “this god-forsaken Queens”? She asked herself each morning and wept. And every Friday bundled up my baby sister and I to take us forty minutes by E and then D train back to Rivington Street, to those two, now dear, front rooms, where our father met us and we remained until Sunday afternoon, fed and fussed over by Schmulka and Chinke who were delighted to have us back.

My mother didn’t know a down payment was required in order to become a modern family.  Her fee was this early loneliness. She didn’t know she was gifting me with a hunger for the honks and shouts of the narrow, crowded, treeless streets downtown that would stay with me until I made it back there as a young adult, to the Lower East Side, my true home.