MASTERY

The Christmas rush begins in early October for Lower East Side retailers and small wholesalers and lasts through the first week in January.  Let’s say it’s one of those darkening months in 1958. My father leaves home early and arrives back late.  All the customers want their deliveries of wrapping paper and gift bags yesterday, he tells my mother, with a grumble and a laugh. This is his backward way of announcing that business is good.  He removes his dark grey fedora and starts to take off his light tweed wool coat.

         We, the three children, have deserted the television in the center of the living room and are prancing from foot to foot, hoping for some surprise – a book of wrapping paper samples, a roll of ribbon. “What do you have for us, Daddy? What do you have?”

         Not that we need more books of wrapping paper or more ribbon. We already own a stack of these and a jumble of toys and games. It’s just the idea of a present, the thrill of the unexpected.  It’s the climax of our ordinary domestic day: Daddy’s arrival.  Our steamship of a parent coming in from the great waters of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

         We didn’t know then that it had been a struggle for him “to go out for business,” his words, which meant finding new customers by making cold calls. We didn’t know that each of his steps toward adulthood came hard. 

         His older, easygoing brother Louis brought in all the orders for the first years of their small company with the grand name, Atlantic Paper Products.  My father did the deliveries. You didn’t need to talk much if you did deliveries.  Just enter the store, find the boss and say “Order from Atlantic Paper.”  Then lift, carry and place the boxes, then nod and hand over the invoice and wait for a check.

         “I wish I could sell,” he writes in the second volume of his diary, age twenty-three, 1939.  “It would help my personality immensely. But I can’t seem to get started."

         He takes long walks in order to think, but finds his thoughts are only repetitions. “If I could go out selling – If I met someone I liked. But you know where that goes, always on the same lines.”

         Sometimes he wishes to be drafted, so that all these yearnings will cease. But as the oldest unmarried son of a widowed mother he would have had to enlist. 

         In the Spring of 1940, he is still afraid. "May try to break into selling, just around here. but am almost certain I won't be able to."   They are prospering, even with only Louis making the sales.  My father can afford to return to City College at night.  And perhaps it is prosperity that finally gives him confidence to join a club at school and even start writing for the YMHA newsletter.

         Triumph comes the next winter:  “Huzzah, Huzzah etcetera and all that goes with it. I started out for orders without being afraid. My heart was in my mouth at the beginning, but that soon subsided. I got some too (11 of them). Hereafter we’re keeping the kid steady and I’ll go out for business. If I could conquer that, I could do anything or so I think --- am interested in movies, the production an distribution end of it – but it’s probably part of my daydreaming…”

         A few days later he notes that “my dancing has also improved immensely.”

         ---

In the last year of my father’s life, when he was already frail, he tripped on a crack in the sidewalk right outside their apartment building in Queens and suffered a hairline fracture of the pelvis. At the hospital, after several shots of morphine he was still moaning.

     Said my brother, “Dad, it shouldn’t hurt anymore. Does it still hurt?"

     “No,” said my father, who moaned again,“but it really hurt so much.”

     “Max,” said my brother, “Think of something good. Something positive.”

     And he did, finally, and calmed down.

     Later that afternoon, one of us asked him what he chose to think about.

     “Getting orders,” he said, “Going out for orders.”

     His royal road. His Everest.

Max at his desk. 

           

Your Presence Is Requested

In the early years of his diary, beginning at age sixteen, from 1933 to 1937, my father castigates himself for his paralyzing shyness.  “At my present stage meeting people, especially girls, it is a bit embarrassing due to my lack of conversation. Can’t seem to conquer that shyness – yet I would very much like to.”

The loneliness speaks to his one reader, his older daughter, who wishes to put her arms around this downhearted adolescent and tell him it will get better. Forlorn in July 1936, he writes, “During these summer evenings with the stars out – I often get more lonely than I would care to say.”

Days there is the family business.  Evenings, he studies accounting at City College. This teen-age son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants wants an answer to the question: What is wrong with me?  Like a Talmud scholar, he searches for guidance in books. Volumes in psychology are mentioned, Karl Menninger’s The Human Mind, then Albert Adler’s The Neurotic Constitution.   He even goes so far as to outline the entire five hundred pages of Menninger’s text. What does he find there? An analysis of the human condition, that as children we feel inferior and vulnerable and that some of us never outgrow it.   Scarcely a comfort or a guide.  “I read and read and I know practically all about psychoses and phobias and yet I am powerless in my own case – where it is most important.”

Then he tries a behavioral approach, though behavioral theorists were not part of his private studies. He prescribes himself a tonic.  “I believe the first thing I should do is join some clubs – mostly social. I don’t know how to start. But I’ll inquire and look around and maybe I’ll pick up something.

The Young Men’s Hebrew Association on East 92^nd Street appears the obvious destination.  He kept his expectations low,  “The first few times I’ll probably be a deadly bore – But after they get used to me…”

         

         The 3^rd Avenue Elevated would have taken him there, more than 100 city streets from home. He must have been apprehensive. The YMHA was and is an imposing art deco ziggurat that dominates its corner.  My father arrived at the entry, two massive institutional doors and then, “It looked like a hotel, so I departed.” 

While his daughter reading the diary seventy-five years later, wants to scream, “Daddy, go in!”

         

         Another year passes. He is asked to join a fraternity at the college. Someone asking seems to be the key.  But, “it is a big expense.”

A semester later he has saved the money. First he attends a smoker and reports that he had “a very nice time.” Then there is a varsity show rehearsal and he discovers he is “getting imbued with college spirit.” 

My father has cheered up.  He is on his way. “Sports and books and school are occupying most of my time.”

Another year and he is off to Florida with some fraternity fellows on Spring break. The next year, a best friend appears, Georgie Strassberg, another son of impoverished immigrant parents, on his way up. They play handball in the evenings and on Sundays at that very same, formerly forbidding 92^nd Street Y.

             Fast forward to the late nineteen-nineties when my seventy-eight year old father Max Abramowitz, long-time supporter of the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights, father of three, grandfather of seven, has been sidelined by a weak heart. 

“Walk,” his doctor says. But he doesn’t. “Walking is the best thing. Max, choose life.” But he doesn’t

Long months pass as he sits on one end of the living room couch in front of the television. When we, the three grown children, visit he is usually watching re-runs of The Wonder Years or Golden Girls.  This passivity is driving our mother into a simmering resentment, an unusual attitude for her.  She wants the return of her capable partner. We have rarely seen them at odds.

           Our nagging increases, “Daddy, do something. Take a walk. Go to the morning minyan.*  They need people at the morning minyan,” we insist. But he won’t.

Then it transpires, the ordinary social miracle that happened once before:  Somebody from the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights telephones to request he attend. There is a need.  Will he come?  And as our great ancestor Abraham replied to God, so my father answers, “Here I am.” 

     

The morning minyan is near enough to what the doctor ordered.  To get there it’s a half mile walk every Monday, Thursday and Sunday morning.   He must be up and out early.  Sometimes one of the minyan-aires as they call themselves, stops by the house and they stroll over together.  My father has rescued his life once again.  

****

*The morning minyan referred to here is the ten men ritually required three times a week to correctly and fully complete the week-day service.

A Cycle In Manhattan

A widow and her two grown sons walk into an empty stable. The horses that once lived here were some of the last transport animals in Manhattan, stolid, humble beasts leased out with a wagon to carry goods from one place to another.  It is 1943, the middle of World War II.   Neither son has been drafted. My uncle Louis because he is married with a small child, my father because he is the “sole support of a widowed mother.” Just a few years earlier the brothers would sometimes appear at this stable to rent a horse and wagon. It was the least expensive way to convey a large load of paper products uptown. 

Now they own a truck and a van. They are prospering. But their stock remains in a padlocked basement storage room beneath the family apartment which is located one city block south at 139 Eldridge.  And they still make phone calls to customers and keep the business’s books at their mother’s kitchen table.

The widow and her sons stand among the empty wooden stalls, imagining further prosperity.  Ancient wisps of straw poke out between the slats.  They consider the property. Asking price is five thousand dollars.  This is their cumulative savings from ten years of labor. It is 25 feet wide, 80 feet deep. There are two floors above.  It is enough space to shelter a lot more paper products.

The door to the empty tack room swings open on the right.  They peer in.  A space heater, stucco yellow walls, a few shelves, one window with bars facing the street, two mahogany roll top desks. Years later, in the nineteen-seventies, during an economic recession when business is slow, they will joke to each other that the roll top desks are worth more than the building. 

            

On this concrete slab floor they will build their good life. Where breathing and pawing horses once stood there will be inanimate rolls of brown paper, taller than a tall man. These rolls, which are the first thing one sees upon entering, are half-lit by a low-watt bulb and are almost Rembrandtian in the shadows they cast.  I never did find out who purchased them, or what they were for.   The business sold many things I understood: envelopes of every size in packages of fifty and in cases, industrial balls of twine, small rolls of wrapping or tissue paper, brown bags in sizes from one to twenty.  But those totem rolls just seemed to sit among the dust motes, ever the same, a kind of paper Stonehenge.  Which is how the building and the family business it housed, Atlantic Paper Products, seemed to us, the children: ancient and eternal.  

When my father and Uncle Louis moved their stock and the business into the former stable at 170 Eldridge Street, they did not change a thing.   During the winter months, in the former tack room that still looked like a tack room, the two of them, and later their sister, took orders over the phone wearing gloves without finger tips (the better to dial), and several sweaters over  woolen pants and long underwear.  When we, their children, would chide them for this: Get better lighting,  put in some decent heat, they would just mumble something that sounded like language but was really just a sigh of exasperation.  

From 1944 when they purchased the building to 1996 when it was sold, they changed nothing, not even the DC current.  Frugality was their North Star.  How else had they done so well? “We were like dust,” my father wrote in his diary more than once in the middle of the Great Depression.

Yet with us, their chiding children and with their wives, our mothers, they were open handed: clothes from Saks or B. Altman, summer camps, expensive colleges if that’s what we wanted.  What else was it all for?

 ***                      

The man who purchased the building from Atlantic Paper Products was also an immigrant.  George Forgeois came to New York in 1979 with $500, a backpack and little English.  He worked as a dishwasher for many years while he learned the restaurant trade. Now he is a man of note in the city, incorporated and owning four fashionable Paris-like bistros.  When he purchased the former stable, former paper emporium, he had already achieved prosperity and so he transformed it into an elegant  one family townhouse with a roof garden. Something no one in our family could have imagined.  Mr. Forgeois's Jaguar, I am told, takes pride of place on the concrete floor.  

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.