Read East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's Online
Authors: Sidney Weissman
East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's
EAST SIDE STORIES
Tales of Jewish Life in the
Lower East Side of New York
in the 1930s
Sidney Weissman
Copyright © 2000 by Sidney Weissman.
Softcover | 0-7388-4618-X |
eBook | 978-1-4628-3156-2 |
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Contents
SHOOTING DICE ON CANNON STREET
THE ENTREPRENEUR OF CROTONA PARK
ALL THE MONEY I NEVER DID MAKE
This book is dedicated to my wife, Inez,
whose idea this book was,
to my children, Nancy, Richard and Paul,
and to my grandchildren, Lexi, Rebecca,
Jesse and Madeline.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deepest thanks to Rick Grossman for his computer expertise, and to Michael Peters for his help in production and editing.
Special thanks to Mims Strauss for her help, too.
Sidney Weissman, the author,
can be reached via email
PROLOGUE
“East Side Stories” are the fictional accounts of the lives of Jewish immigrants, their sons and daughters, their families, who lived in the Lower East Side of New York City in the time of the Great Depression during the 1930’s. It has been estimated that a half million Jews lived packed together in an area of approximately nine blocks by eleven blocks which also included schools, businesses of all kinds, synagogues, theaters, libraries, dispensaries, some institutional buildings among which were the Educational Alliance and the Henry Street Settlement, a few small parks. And, of course, the tenements rising five stories high, two toilets on each floor servicing six flats.
The original older immigrants spoke Yiddish, their young sons and daughters who had come over to America with their parents or grandparents knew Yiddish yet spoke English. Those born in America spoke primarily English, some knew little of Yiddish because speaking English was the thing to do, it signified being a “Yankee” and that was what they greatly desired—to leave the traces of that foreign Old Country behind. The younger children spoke to their grandparents in broken Yiddish and English.
Education was the goal. To be a somebody, to seek personal freedom, to rise above what their families had been and encountered back there in Europe, to remove that trace of Old World oppression, of being beaten down, of being caged in ghettoes or designated areas by Russian, Polish, East European governments. And free education was what these sons and daughters received in New York City—in the night schools which taught English, in the public schools and high schools, in the free city colleges.
But life was harsh, desperate, during those times. Living was a constant battle, nothing was easy. There were no jobs, banks had failed. They lived in America where there was everything, and they had nothing. They lived from day to day, hoping for a better day. A job, any job, was a prize to hold and keep.
Yet they laughed. At the Charlie Chaplin comedies. At the Marx Brothers movies, in the times when they had saved up enough money to attend the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue where they laughed and cried. But laughter they sought, to escape the world.
They observed the Jewish holidays, some more than others. The older people were more observant; for the younger, more Americanized, there was Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the days of awe, where it was decided, on high, who was to live and who was to die. And there was Passover when the ancient exodus from Egypt was celebrated and every boy was bought a new suit and shoes, every girl a new dress and shoes, and mama and poppa wore their best finery. But purchasing new clothing had been in the good times, before the Depression, when there had been money.
This, then, is the background of the East Side Stories.
THE ACTOR
He showed us the old photograph taken by a professional photographer many years ago, forty years or so, when he had been in his late thirties. He passed the framed picture to my mother who looked at it, marveled silently as she shook her head and said to him, “Velvel, you were so young, so handsome!” and Velvel, the actor, smiled, the kitchen light splashed gleams on the top of his bald head, on the gray fringe of hair below the baldness circling his head. His round face, apple-cheeked, had grown wider with the smile.
My mother passed the framed picture to my father who as he held it, stared at it and said, “A regular Rudolph Valentino, a movie star.”
Velvel’s smile slowly disappeared. A faraway look came into his eyes and he began to sing, “
Voos iz gevayn iz givayn und schoin nishtoo,
What was, was, and is no more.” My mother said to him,
“Ai,
Velvel, you’re still a good-looking man.”
“No,” he replied. “Seventy-six. An old man.”
My father had finished with the framed picture and I reached for it. My father handed it to me and holding it carefully I looked at the posed eight by ten sepia-colored photograph. I could see someone much younger than the Velvel who now sat near me. In the picture someone sat posed theatrically, his chin on his hand, a full head of dark wavy hair, staring into the camera. I looked from the photograph to Velvel who sat across from me at the kitchen table in our tenement flat. There, somewhere beneath the pile of sagging flesh that time had plastered on his face, beneath the drooping jowls, maybe, perhaps, I could imagine that younger man. At least there seemed to be a trace of it there, somewhere. Most of the hair was gone, lost to baldness, and what remained had long ago lost its color. Age had been layered again and again on his face, his body had gone to fat. Now he was short and round all over, round face, round body. Time had scratched its wounds into the flesh of his face, had furrowed his brow, put deep lines down from the corners of his mouth, had gnarled his hands.
‘AAi,”
my father said. “We all grow old.” Then as an afterthought, “It’s a heavy life, heavy.”
Velvel was a neighbor who lived on the floor above us in a small flat in the tenement on the Lower East Side of New York. He lived alone, his wife had died years ago. Now and then, when he was lonely I suppose, he came to visit us, to spend a few evening hours with us. He had very little family left, there was a daughter who lived far away in a place called Cleveland.
Cleveland? I had thought to myself when I had first heard Velvel mention it, Cleveland? That’s far, far away. What Jew lives outside of New York City? I knew the general direction of Cleveland, somewhere in Ohio, but Ohio was far away, almost as far as Europe as far as I was concerned, what did I know? I was almost fourteen, I had only been to Connecticut twice, during two summers before the Crash and the Depression, when we had rented a room in Silberstein’s farm somewhere in that state and even Connecticut then and now was far away, a different country, and I had always wondered how Mr. Silberstein had come to Connecticut.
My mother served tea and some cake. Velvel had taken a cube of sugar, vised it between his upper and lower false front teeth and noisily sipped his tea through it. The steamy liquid had sent visible swirls of heat into the air and around his face. He held the glass as all the Russian Jews I knew, with his thumb on the rim of the g1ass, his other fingers of his right hand tightly holding up bottom of the hot glass.
Velvel had told us of those other days in the Jewish theater. Among others, he had played with Boris Thomashefsky, with Molly Picon, Aaron Lebedeff, Ludwig Satz, Maurice Schwartz. I had once gone to one of the theaters on Second Avenue where I had seen Molly Picon in the role of a knickered boy, or tomboy, I forget which, she was wearing a cap and had done a cartwheel on the stage. Velvel had played practically all the Jewish theaters that lined Second Avenue from above East Houston Street to 12th Street as well as outlying theaters in some of the other boroughs of the city. He had played serious roles, comedy roles, he had played young men, old men, at times he had played old women, his voice even now imitated them perfectly. Moisheh, he would say in a tremulous high-pitched voice,
Derlohng, mir iss teppel,
Give me the pot. He had sung in musicals, he had gone on tour with the best of them, even to South America where there were Jewish communities.
He could sing. And when he did, he entranced us. After he had had his tea and cake, to entertain us, he would sing old Yiddish songs, some in a strong voice, other songs in other voices than his own.
He had told us about Cafe Royale on Second Avenue where all the Jewish actors congregated. The men came in their wide-brimmed fedora hats, the brim turned down on one side of the hat, turned up on the other side, when the usual custom was to have the brim down at front of the hat. Some of the actors would wear their topcoats or overcoats draped across their shoulders. One or two wore flowing capes, a few came clutching beautiful canes.
They came to the cafe, sat at the tables, boasted to each other, embellished the boasts. They lied to each other about their roles, the applause of their audiences, the raves they had gotten, the packed theaters. Everybody there knew that everybody else was lying but everybody listened to those lies as if they were truths, everybody played the game.
Velvel would tell us about the times, on festive occasions, when they went to dine at Moscowitz and Lupowitz, the meat restaurant on lower Second Avenue, or to Gluckstern’s on Delancey Street near the approach to the bridge where only seltzer was served instead of water, or when they went to Ratner’s, also on Delancey
Street, for dairy foods. Velvel’s face would light up when he spoke of those gone, past days.
My mother would occasionally invite Velvel to our flat, sometimes when someone, a relative perhaps, would also be visiting us. Velvel would put on his performance, reciting roles from years ago as if they were yesterday, becoming the part, shrinking into himself with old age, seeming to become taller as he played a youth. He was a magician with words, with tones, with inflections, with the movement of his face, the flick of his hands.
That night, sitting at the table, hunched, with a large towel draped over his head and shoulders like a shawl, he regaled us with his women’s roles. An animation suddenly came into Velvel’s face, his body, his gestures, he became lost in his parts. I understood Yiddish too and I laughed along with my mother and father.
When he left, after the tea and cake, after the performance he had put on for us, my mother said to my father, “A shame, he’s all alone. His daughter lives so far away.”
“Nu,” my father replied philosophically. “What can you do? That’s the way it is.”
Although it was never mentioned my parents knew that Velvel was on Home Relief, the city’s welfare program, where he received a voucher that was never enough for his food. The voucher was brought to the neighborhood grocery store and he would draw against it. Although it was not allowed, he would sometimes ask the grocer, whom he knew, for some small amount of cash so that he could buy a few penny cigarettes at the candy store. My mother always felt that Velvel was not getting enough to eat and at times, when she had some surplus food, she would put it in a paper bag and give it surreptitiously to him. He would always pretend not to want to take the bag but in the end he did.
Our cousin, Yonkel, came to visit us one early evening. He was a thin man, not too tall with a handsome handlebar mustache, pure white, except across the bottom above the lip, where the mustache had become stained with nicotine. He was a ferocious smoker, he had learned it when he had been caught in a round-up in his
shtetl
in Russia by the Cossacks and impressed in the Russian army for many years. He smoked like a fiend, one cigarette after another and he held the stub of a cigarette in a peculiar fashion, cupping it in his hand, lit end near his palm, held by his thumb and two middle fingers, smoking it down until it was practically ash. He too drank tea like Velvel, Russian-style, the cube of sugar between his teeth. Almost immediately he and Velvel got along famously.
“Do me a favor. Please sing,” my mother said to Velvel, pronouncing the Russian words,
“Ochi Tchornaya,
Dark Eyes.”
“Ah!” Velvel said. He put down his glass of tea, and began to sing the song. Yonkel, my mother and father, all began swaying to its rhythm, my mother’s eyes closed in some old remembrance of a distant place.
When Velvel was finished the three of them applauded him loudly. Velvel smiled, nodded his head a few times to acknowledge the applause.
“Ai, the Old Country,” my mother said. “Sometimes it was good.”
“It never was good,” Yonkel said vehemently. “What was so good about it? They hated us, they rounded us up like cattle for the army, you call that good? No,” he said emphatically. “It was bad, terrible. You like that song, you think it’s a nice song? Good. So it’s a song, just that. They got plenty of songs here, believe me. You think some things were nice back then, they never were. Never. You liked the
shtetl?
Me, I never liked it. You know what? It’s just that you were younger, we all were younger, we want to be young again. Tell me, who doesn’t?”
My mother sighed. “The song... the song . . .” she said wistfully.
“Songs I got plenty,” Velvel said and he began to sing,
“Ich Chub Dir Tzoo Feel Lieb,
I Love You Much Too Much.” My mother began to listen attentively, she lost her wistfulness, finally near the end of the song she joined in with Velvel and when they finished we all applauded.
“Another glass tea?” my mother asked. Without waiting for a reply she went to the stove, took the boiling kettle of water in her right hand, picked up the small teapot with the tea essence in her other hand, and approached the table.
As she poured, my father asked Velvel, “And how are things going? Did you find some work?”
Velvel shrugged. “Nothing yet,” he replied. “Maybe soon. Who knows?” He put on a smile and said in a happy voice that was an actor’s, “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Maybe,” my mother said. “I hope so.”
“We’ll see,” Velvel said, picking up a cube of sugar from the dish in the center of the table.
“To find something today is like finding diamonds.” Yonkel said as he sipped his tea.
After our cousin Yonkel and Velvel had both gone, my father said to my mother, “Yonkel, he looks all right. But Velvel, well, I don’t think he looks so good.”
My mother, at the sink, said, “He’s sick. His stomach, I think. He goes to the dispensary, they give him some medicine. Maybe they can cure him.”
“Maybe,” my father said.
And I said, “He’s a good actor, he can make you think he’s anybody, he can make you think he’s okay when he’s not.”
“Yeah, yeah,” my mother said as she finished wiping the dishes. Pointing to me, she said, “Go to bed, it’s getting late. You got school tomorrow.”
We didn’t see Velvel for over two weeks. Several times my mother knocked on the door of his flat, hoping to invite him to our house for tea, but he wasn’t in. My mother was worried about him, was he sick? Had he been taken to the hospital? She asked some of the other neighbors if they had heard anything about Velvel. Nobody had. It was as if he had moved away during the night.
One evening we heard a knocking at the door. When my mother went to answer it, there stood Velvel. He entered into the kitchen and blurted out, almost boyishly, “I’ll be on the radio, that program, the
shpiel,
the play, you listen to it. So they called me. I went there, and they took me.”
“Oh, I’m so glad!” my mother said. “Sit down, sit down,” she motioned toward a chair in the kitchen and asked, “Some tea?”
“Yeah,” he said grinning. To my father and me he said, “I play four parts. They needed somebody to play four parts. One of them is a lawyer.”
“A lawyer?” I said.
“Sure. There has to be a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant in it. There has to be a no-goodnick and somebody who has made something out of himself. And, of course, there’s love,” Velvel said.
“Ai,
die lieber,
love,” my mother said.
“The girl who wants to marry the wrong man, or who wants to marry the good man but he’s too poor and her parents want her to marry a rich man, an old man. It’s a
gantzeh megillah,
a whole long story.”
“You signed a contract?” my father asked. “How many plays are you going to do?”
“Well,” Velvel replied. “It’s just for this one, right now. We’ll see how things work themselves out.”
“Where have you been?” my mother asked as she poured the tea. “I tried at your door but there was no answer.”
“Out,” Velvel said. “Busy. To the radio station. To here, to there. You know.”
He had his tea, his piece of cake. Several times he stopped sipping his tea or eating his cake to put his hand to his stomach, they were small hidden gestures, noticed by nobody but me. He said nothing about what was apparently his pain, the normal conversation went on, he sang a song for us, then he left.