Dream Catcher: A Memoir (76 page)

She corresponds regularly with the family throughout the country. Her handwriting is as firm as it was at twenty-one. When she spots something she considers wrong in the body politic, she fires off
a letter to the offender, be he a Cincinnati judge or the president of the United States. Conversely, when she sees a good deed done, she writes or calls the person involved so he will know the act is appreciated. She has voted in every election since women were granted suffrage. She not only votes regularly, but studies the issues and candidates with a microscope. If something bothers her about a man running for office, she doesn’t hesitate to write or call him for clarification. She was the first recording secretary of the Louisville chapter of Hadassah in 1912; one of a handful of young Jewish women who had the foresight sixty-eighty years ago to form this organization dedicated to the re-birth of the State of Israel. She is grateful that after all those years, the dream became a reality. “People thought we were strange back then to work for a Jewish state, to be formed in what was then called Palestine,” Birdie recalls. “I guess we were too young to realize how few we were and how arduous the task would be.” She was a highly gifted artist and was offered a scholarship at the Chicago Art Institute, but her parents refused to let her attend, fearful that her fragile health wouldn’t permit it. She also had an excellent singing voice. Many felt she could have become a top-flight professional singer, but she did not pursue it—again due to parental objections. At age eighty-six she wrote in her diary: “This inability to take advantage of such fine offers remained for many years as a deep hurt. In my more adult years, as I turned to elevating the mind and filling my being with as much knowledge as possible, and with an appreciation of many worthwhile things offered—music, art, religion—my deep hurt was softened, then put to rest. . . . One thing I have found is that if you begin to get sour and start complaining, it works on you. First thing you know, you are not well anymore, and it can affect your mind, too.” She married my dad, Lee L. Goldberg in 1912 and, despite doctor’s warnings, had two children. The young girl about whom her parents agonized because of ill health is still going strong at ninety-one.

Sonny’s and my aunts, Birdie’s sisters Stella and Gertie, were going to school and acquiring clerical skills in stenography and bookkeeping. Later, both got very good jobs making $35 a week, which was a lot of money in those days. Their mother, Fannie, contracted Parkinson’s disease
at age forty and became an invalid. Birdie recalls, “My mother’s disposition was a gift from God. Despite her affliction, and constant pain, I never heard her talk against anyone. She didn’t bemoan her fate. She always kept a teapot in the kitchen into which she put what little change she could manage. In those days, Jewish people who were down on their luck would come for help, for money. There was always something in that teapot for them.”

In 1907, Dr. Salinger took his ailing wife and five children to Chicago. Fannie’s six brothers and sisters lived there, as did her father, Rabbi Copland. Simon and Fannie took an apartment upstairs from Rabbi Copland on the teeming west side, where many Jewish people lived. I can still remember as a boy how proud I was of the shingle on the window: “Dr. Simon F. Salinger.”

He left the rabbinate for good, to devote himself to medicine and to his wife and family. He practiced from his home and, in this era before specialization, he did everything from delivering babies, to performing surgery, to counseling troubled patients. Often he wasn’t paid, as many of his patients were too poor, yet he never dunned anyone. Once a carpenter came to him with three dollars that had been owed for fourteen years. It wasn’t unusual for someone to bring him a chicken in lieu of cash. My mother once told me that Grandpa Salinger said to her very often, “I won’t leave you any money, but I will leave you a good name.” And so he did.

Downstairs, Rabbi Copland, Sonny’s and my great-grandfather, enjoyed life to the fullest. Like Uncle Sol, he was a man who savored every moment. Morris Copland had a small synagogue, and every Saturday morning he would sit in the kitchen, no matter how hot and humid, and sip hot tea from a glass. I can still see him in my mind’s eye, sitting there with his skullcap on (he never removed it, I suspect, even when he went to sleep!) And
schvitzing
(sweating) with a smile of the utmost satisfaction on his bearded face.

Then he would bathe and put on this Sabbath attire, complete with frock coat and top hat. He would walk majestically several blocks to the synagogue, his wife at his side. She would be dressed in black, very elegant, and she walked
with
him not behind, as was still common for many years to come in Orthodox Jewry.

The Salingers and Coplands were very close. In the early 1900s there wasn’t any radio, or TV. Entertainment was mostly of the home variety. The family had a ritual on every Thursday night. They would gather in the spacious Salinger apartment and everyone would do his “act.”

Stella and Gertie played the piano. Birdie and Sol sang. Sam fiddled. Mother said, “The children would sprawl on the floor and the older people would sit on chairs all around the room. This was a big family, but we had double parlors with sliding doors between that opened up.”

Dave played the banjo and he and his sister Annie used to do the popular dance of the period, the Cakewalk, which included some great strutting. Joe played the violin and Will performed on the mandolin. Uncle Joe Copland not only was a fine violinist, but he also taught the instrument and made violins and cellos. Many of the string players in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra bought their violins and cellos from this gifted man.

“We had marvelous times those Thursday evenings,” my mother recalls. “Even Aunt Sarah and Uncle Max performed, and they were deaf mutes. My uncle was a fine magician and Aunt Sarah was his assistant. . . . Then there was Abe Copland. He changed his name to Al. He was the only one who didn’t come around very often on those Thursday nights. He was a professional musician and many people considered him to be the best ragtime pianist of his generation. We used to call him ‘the genius,’ and he played in the leading jazz bands of those days. . . . Abe ended sadly because he was wild.”

Dave, the banjo player, proved to be another interesting person in the Salinger-Copland family. Dave met a man named Max Epstein in Chicago. Between them they had $400 dollars. They bought some discarded freight cars and remodeled them and sold the cars for a small profit. They began acquiring more and more cars and soon found themselves in the freight business. After a few years, they accumulated enough money to obtain new cars. These carried oil supplies and other liquid materiel. They called their company General American Tank Car Corp. And today it’s General American Transportation. Uncle
Dave, the banjo player, became a multimillionaire. As Harry Golden says, “Only in America.”

It was in Chicago that Simon’s son Sol met a pretty young Gentile lady from a small town in Iowa called Atlantic (in Cass County). After all this time the entire county today is just sixteen thousand strong. Her name was Marie Jillich and she had come to Chicago, at age seventeen, with only the dress she wore on her back. Her father’s name was Frank and her mother’s maiden name was Jennie Vincent. My mother remembers cousin Sonny’s mother very clearly. “She was a slender seventeen-year-old of extremely modest means when she married my brother Sol. At that time, not long after the turn of the century, it was impossible for the groom to tell his parents about the marriage. How could Sol break the news to his father, a former rabbi? How could he tell his mother, a very devout woman? Then there was Sol’s grandfather, Rabbi Copland, who led an Orthodox synagogue.”

Sol and Marie kept their marriage a secret. He continued to live at home for two years. One day, after Marie suffered a miscarriage, Sol’s brother Sam told him in no uncertain terms that he could no longer keep up the charade, and must tell their parents the truth, come what may.

It was a tense moment when Sol divulged his secret. To his surprise, his mother and father did not cast out the couple, although they were far from being joyful. The young pair could now live openly as man and wife, but first they were married in a Jewish ceremony. (The first time had been with a justice of the peace.) Marie changed her name to Miriam as a placating gesture toward the Salingers, and very few of the family of my generation ever knew that her name hadn’t always been Miriam. She went through the conversion ceremony to become officially Jewish, including the
mikvah,
or ritual cleansing bath.

Sam delivered Sol and Miram’s first child, Doris, in 1912. The following year, while Sol managed several nickelodeons, Sam went to Vienna for further medical training. Once home, he began to specialize in ear, nose, and throat. He became the first chairman of the Department of Otolaryngology at the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University
in Chicago. He served as chairman for forty-one years; at the same time he was on the consulting staff at Cook County Hospital and senior attending staff at Michael Reese Hospital. By the end of the First World War he began to work in the new field of plastic surgery. “On Mondays, I noticed any number of people coming in with broken noses from weekend fights and accidents. So, I started fixing those noses. Then I went into plastic surgery of the face—pinning back ears, shortening noses, taking bags out of eyelids, face-lifting, removing scars.” He was also instrumental in bringing about many of the techniques that were used in succeeding wars to repair facial wounds suffered by our soldiers in battle.

My parents, Birdie and Lee Goldberg, were close to Uncle Sol and Aunt Miriam. When they moved to New York we often visited throughout my childhood. I recall pillow fights with Sonny in his bedroom while the adults played cards in the living room. My mother remembers Sonny as a child: “He had large brown eyes and he was a very friendly boy and he read, read, read all the time. He always had a book at hand, Sonny was a natural, nice youngster and approachable. He was really a very nice boy.”

Sonny, to my recollection, was a normal kid and we got along fine. Also, he used to go in the summer to Sharon, Pennsylvania, when he was a teenager, to stay with our aunt Stella, her husband, Leo Federber, and their three girls. Uncle Leo was an executive with a tank-car company and Sonny was often at their home. In other words, until Sonny grew into manhood, he and his family were quite close to the rest of the Salingers. During the war Uncle Sol came to Cincinnati to celebrate Passover with us. He rose during the seder and offered a toast to me, his sister’s son, as I was fighting with the 13th Armored Division in Germany. My father, not to be outdone, stood and toasted Sonny who, unbeknownst to me, was with the 12th Infantry in the same area. My sister remembers my father saying, “Here’s to our sons who are fighting Hitler!”

But when Sonny returned from the war, none of us heard from him again, with rare exceptions. Nothing could be clearer than the fact that J. D. Salinger decided to eliminate contact with all of us—grandparents, cousins, uncles, aunts. That was certainly his prerogative. As the old saying goes, You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family.

It would become the standard family “gag” anytime any of the Salinger family met to say, “What do you hear from Sonny?” This ancient wheeze would inevitably be followed by laughter. No one had heard from him.

At a deeper level, it wasn’t funny at all, however. I think that the one who was most hurt by Sonny’s ignoring the family was Uncle Sam. Sam was always very close to his brother Sol (Sonny’s father). He delivered the writer’s sister into the world. He was a highly articulate and educated individual. He wrote witty and pungent letters (one of which, to his close friend Groucho Marx, is included in the comedian’s book
Letters to Groucho
). Yet his letters to Sonny weren’t acknowledged, and it was as though Sam didn’t exist. I, too, wrote Sonny five times during the past forty years . . . no reply. Perhaps I didn’t have the correct address; I didn’t ask Doris or Aunt Miriam or Uncle Sol because the subject of Sonny so clearly made them uncomfortable, but the letters were never returned marked undelivered.

Uncle Sol often visited us in Cincinnati throughout his long life, usually alone. He was always a joy. He had a wonderful sense of humor and was as down to earth as a millionaire as he had been as a boy making one dollar a week. The only times I remember his getting nervous and irritable were when we would ask about Sonny. This was a natural question because the normal thing is to ask about one’s family, as to their health and how and what they’re doing. Uncle Sol would redden and invariably blurt out, “Oh, he’s ok,” and hastily change the subject. After some years, I came to realize that this was obviously a painful subject for him. Instead of being able to talk about his son and his son’s wife and two children and how they were growing and all the details that doting parents and grandparents love to relate, Uncle Sol was rendered mute—and this from a highly gregarious and family-oriented man. My mother recalls, “Uncle Sol, the complete extrovert, was entirely different when he was by himself than with his own family. He would be at the dining room table (in New York) and hardly utter a word. He was much more reserved than when he was on his own, visiting us in Cincinnati.”