The Book of Baum:
Lazar Baum was the eldest, and apparently went West, probably during the Gold Rush of 1848. He was never heard of again. The Family Book of 1964 suggests that he could have been scalped by Indians, or perhaps went on to Australia He does not appear in US census records.
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braham (Abbe) Baum was born in 1827 and married Goldie Webster in 1853; together they had ten children. He died in 1902. The following is some of his story, as it appeared in the 1964 Family Book:
After California, Abbe Baum returned to New York City. He married in 1853 and bought a house at 41 East Broadway. Alas, so much of this tale is missing! The Baums were middle-class folk living in a fast-growing community. Abbe was a well-known figure in the old East Side ghetto Where virtually all the Jews resided. East Broadway was the main thoroughfare, and the center of population was around Essex and Rivington Streets. Abbe had to earn a living. He abandoned his early vocation of miniature hand painting. Nor did he follow his sacred scribal tasks for long. He started to deal in real estate.
Many of the family legends about Abbe Baum's real estate deals are highly amusing. At one time, so it is said, he could have bought the land now occupied by Carnegie Hall. Instead, he purchased the other offering: Jersey Heights! Another story is that he owned some of the property which is now the site of R. H. Macy & Co. He is said to have boasted about making a $500 profit on this deal. (Such vision!) However, he managed to bring up a large family and send most of his children to college. The majority of them became professionals. Although he didn't accumulate a fortune of gold in California, or oil in Pennsylvania, he must have met with a fair measure of success. His sons and daughters worked to help pay their own way, especially their education, and they later supported the household. Many of his friends became immensely wealthy, so it must be concluded that he didn't have the acquisitive nature or business acumen of his contemporaries. In the census of 1870, he declared his assets at $110,000, so he was far from poor.
If life in the old ghetto was difficult and forbidding, there were brave spirits who very early.
Hamidrash' (House of Study). But on June 4, 1852, a new synagogue was opened, which was to be known as the Beth Hamidrash Hagadol, or Great Synagogue. In a historical document of this place of worship, there is the following statement: "The first Russian American Congregation was founded June 4, 1852, by the following members: Benjamin Schlesinger, Judah Middleman, Abraham Benjamin, Abraham Joseph Ash, Israel Cohen, Abbe Baum, Joshua Rothstein, Samuel Isaacs, lsidor Raphael, Wolf Cohen and Jack Levy. Several non-Russian Jews who were dissatisfied with the reform movement of their congregations joined the orthodox Russian congregation. Of these members, only Abbe Baum and Samuel Isaacs survive." (1900)
According to an article which appeared in a publication of the American Jewish Historical Society, the first place of worship (1852) was in the garret of No. 83 Bayard Street. The synagogue moved to Pearl Street, corner of Center Street, and in 1855 it purchased a Welsh chapel at 78 Allen Street. In 1855, after other moves and membership splits, the synagogue found a permanent home at 172 Norfolk Street. This synagogue still exists. Abbe Baum's name is not mentioned again in the annals of the synagogue so we can assume that after he moved 'uptown', he severed his official ties.
The year 1852 was also the date of the founding of the Jews' Hospital on West 28th Street, later renamed Mount Sinai Hospital. At that time there were 12,000 Jews living in New York. The hospital was established by the Sephardic (Jews of Spanish origin) and German Jews living in the city and was housed in a brownstone house which was rented for nine months at a cost of $125.
Abbe Baum did not remain on the East Side. He was one of the first to move uptown, then 42nd Street. My mother used to tell us about her trips to that neighborhood on Passover to secure fresh milk from the cattle on some remaining farms. We do know that the Baums had a house at 183rd Street and Southern Boulevard near the Bronx Zoo. I believe it was called West Farms-Tremont. This was a white stone structure with Southern-style colonial architecture. It was always known as The White House'. As children we frequently visited our grandparents there. This required taking the Third Avenue elevated train which burned sooty, soft coal. Its terminus was at 177th Street. There, Grandpa's horse-driven carriage called for us, or we walked across the open country fields, the streets not yet even laid out, to Southern Boulevard. There were few Jews in the Bronx at that time. Whenever Grandpa wanted a minyan (ten men) for prayer for Sabbath or holidays, he had to walk to Lebanon Hospital on East 149th Street to find a few of his co-religionists.
(Since both Lawrence Crohn (b. 1892) in the Family Book of 1964 and Esther Crohn (b. 1882) in her memoirs remember the house on 183rd Street in the Bronx so vividly, Abbe Baum and his family probably didn’t live there before 1870, when they moved to Park Avenue (probably developed between 1890-1910). It is more likely that from 42nd Steet they moved to Harlem, where there was already a Jewish presence, and from there to Park Avenue. According to an article written by Burrill Crohn (the discoverer of Crohn’s disease), it was in 1892. EK.)
Abbe Baum and family lived in Harlem for a long period. Most of the children, after my mother Leah, were born either in the Bronx or in Harlem. The youngest child, David, was born at 1021 Park Avenue at 85th Street, which later became the home of Reginald de Koven, composer of 'Robin Hood' and other American musical classics. New York's population was then around one million with approximately 65,000 Jews.
According to Corsicana cemetery records, he married Bettie Shwarts (who is also buried there) and she was the mother of his six children. The fact that their son David's middle name was Lasker might have been the cause of the confusion as to Bettie's maiden name. There are no Laskers mentioned in the Corsicana cemetery records.
Bettie (Shwarts) Baum was born in Texas in 1859. Her father, Aron, had immigrated directly to Galveston, then moved to Brenham and later to Corsicana. He married Caroline Zander of New York on October 30, 1856. The family was well-established and wealthy; Aron was a founder of the Corsicana Hebrew Cemetery.
Bettie died at the age of 31.
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melia Baum (Zeman) had a brilliant mind and a sparkling personality: she was outspoken, outgoing and outstanding. She married Nathan Zeman (Zemansky) and survived him by many years.
Later, Amelia moved to Manhattan from Brooklyn where her grandnieces and nephews loved to visit her - she would describe the New York City of her childhood and sing the songs of a bygone era which she remembered word for word. Her stories fascinated us, and one of them was particularly memorable. When her father was a small boy in Poland, she told us, the village got news that the French Army was coming. All the village's young men were at the front, for this was 1812, so the boys and old men, armed with pickaxes, went to the town's border to defend it. But Napoleon and his army never arrived; they were on their way to Moscow.
Another wonderful true story was about her childhood in New York, where she attended a school that overlooked the old Tombs Prison. The children were told to stay home from School whenever a prisoner was going to be hung in the prison yard. We used to love to hear her talk about the day that Central Park was officially opened (1869). She kept us spellbound.
She was a great 'mixer'. Her grandson, Fred, * recalls their four-month Grand Tour of Europe: she talked with all and sundry, but especially with men in uniform - any kind of uniform. She loved them!
*Father’s memories of this trip were not so golden and included having to lace up her corset! But see p. 75, an amazing woman.
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melia Baum married Nathan Zeman (Zemansky) and they had three handsome, personable sons: Joseph, Victor and David.
Amelia was Nathan Zeman’s second wife. According to her great-grandchild, Amelia’s three children* were born before she and Nathan were married, since they had to wait until Nathan’s first wife had passed away. A real 1800s soap opera.
*Until she married NZ, their surname was Baum. These were still in books in which DB signed himself as DB.
Joseph Zeman, like his mother, was good looking and had a colorful, fascinating personality with an innate love of adventure. He was outstanding in every form of athletics, especially horsemanship. A founding member of US Cavalry C, the Brooklyn counterpart of Manhattan's exclusive Cavalry A, he served in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War, where he contracted typhoid fever. During World War One he bought and operated four-masted schooners, one of which he named the Amelia Zeman. His business ventures were varied, and one of them nearly made him a millionaire. He and a Frenchman owned the patent rights for neon lights. But the Fire Department set up obstacles, and Joe sold his share of the rights six months before the patent was implemented.
Another 'nearly made it' story is equally amusing. Joe had a beautiful lady friend (not unusual for him) who had been on the stage. One evening she told Joe she needed $5000, because the producer of a new play had offered her the lead, provided she raised that sum to help get the play 'off the ground'. Joe read the script but wasn’t a bit impressed. He refused to give her the $5000. The play's title was Rain*.
*FDZ liked to enumerate the missed fortunes including the Fl land before the RR was built. See p.78 Abraham & Straus!
Joe later went into the molasses business and for a few years was associated with George Roseman, Naomi Crohn's husband, in Philadelphia. He was a devoted son, attentive and generous. He bought his mother a Renault to bring pleasure to her aging years and helped his nephew Frederic through college and medical school.
He married Miss Benedict, and they had a son, Oscar Benedict, who became a New York securities broker and analyst. Joe is said to have spent his last years in Hawaii*. Although Oscar apparently married and had two children, we have no further information on them. It is this Joseph who vanished with some family money, not Joseph Beatman as is wrongly said on p.80.
THE SAGA OF AN AMERICAN JEWISH FAMILY
Victor Zeman, like his brothers, was very handsome and charming. As a child, he was very close to Burrill Crohn and Cecil Ruskay. He was the astute businessman of the family; a wholesale dress manufacturer, he was a partner in Charles Solomon & Company, and was the proud owner of a Rolls Royce. Victor left the mercantile field to become a broker on Wall Street, and in 1929 his fortune collapsed. He was only nineteen when he married Rosalie Abraham, aged seventeen, a veritable fashion plate who is remembered as a stunning woman.
Victor's only child Mary Ann was an exquisite young woman. She married Colin Melhado, scion of an old Portuguese Jewish family which had settled in Jamaica in the late 1700s. Victor and Rosalie moved to Jamaica to join Mary Ann in the early 1950s. He was known as 'Bumpy' by his children and grandchildren. (Our Claim to Sephardim).
Mary Ann and Colin had two daughters, Rosemary and Coleen. Rosemary and her husband Gerald Richardson divide their time between England and Florida. While we have a detailed tree, we unfortunately lack biographical information.
David Zeman was Nathan and Amelia's youngest son. He spent most of his spare
time reading poetry and the classics. He was very artistic, a lover of rare antiques
and objets d'art. He loved Walter Pater, which says it all, but was the intellectual of the sons. He attended Columbia University for two years, then married Rachel (Ratie) Samuels. They lived in Brooklyn until his death from Lou Gehrig’s disease. He ran a business that made “ladies shirtwaists” at 12th St / Broadway: Zeman Bros
David and his brother Joe (Zeman Bros) opened a factory which produced shirt waists, dresses and infants' wear, and was one of the first to use an electric cutting machine. One 'black Friday' they lost their best customer. Here's how it happened: Joe was an outstanding athlete and had helped found the exclusive Crescent Athletic Club in Brooklyn. He was the only Jewish member. One of his customers, whose name was Larry Abraham, asked Joe to help him join the Club, but Joe replied that this was impossible because of his religion. Furious, he withdrew his account from Zeman Brothers. Larry Abraham was the Abraham of Abraham & Straus!
David was a member of and later became active in Temple Israel (later known as Union Temple) of Brooklyn. He was a close friend of Rabbi Nathan Krass of the Central Synagogue in Manhattan. Krass married my parents later chief Rabbi at Emanuel (NYC). Ratie was born in Port Jervis where she attended the Dutch Reform Sunday School, since the town had no Jewish community. In Brooklyn, Ratie was active in communal affairs and was one of the first presidents of the Council of Jewish Women. They had three children: Frederic, Dorothy and Evelyn (The baby). David was ill with Lou Gehrig’s disease for a longish time and died when still young. His death meant FDZ, DVZ & E all went to college in NYC for mother’s sake.
Frederic Zeman* was a prominent doctor. His academic achievements and medical testimonials are impressive. But first there was Freddy, our cousin: a powerfully built man with an animated visage and a contagious smile and lots of thick grey hair. He had the Baum warmth and geniality. Like his parents, he loved fine books, porcelain and the graphic arts. He had a lovely home, where he kept, among other beautiful objects, a large jade collection.
He obtained his BA from Columbia College in 1913 and his MD from Columbia's
College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1917. He was elected as a member of Phi Beta Kappa
and Alpha Omega Alpha (the science honor society). He was an attending staff member of New York's Mount Sinai Hospital where he has interned as well as Bellevue.
Frederic took an active interest in geriatrics, the medical and social study of the elderly. He lectured frequently and published many articles. He was a contributor to the Gerontology section in an edition of Collier's Encyclopedia. He was Chief of Medical Services at The Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged, (The Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews) which has been in existence for more than 125 years, where he founded The Zeman Center for Instruction in the Care of the Aged and was a highly regarded executive member of the National Committee on Aging.
Fred enjoyed recounting the story of his first surgical operation. in 1912, while travelling in Germany with his grandmother, they met the Cantor of a synagogue in Hanover. The Cantor was also a mohel, and Fred was invited to witness a circumcision. This was his first encounter with surgery. Circumcision and geriatrics - poles apart!
Fred married Edythe Madeleine Arnold who had coincidentally briefly been Dr. Burrill Crohn's secretary. She was a member of the Board of the Jewish Family Services for many years and was extremely active in community affairs. She was also on the Board of Cancer Care, Inc. and the Yorkville Neighborhood Center at the YMHA in New York. They had one daughter, Carol.
Carol (Zeman) Rothkopf received a master’s degree in Contemporary British Literature from Columbia University. She has been an editor and a writer and is currently finishing A Flawless Friendship: Selected Letters of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden (2012). She has been the editor of the Grolier Club Gazette (a journal for book collectors and supporters of the book arts in New York) for the past five years. Her husband Ernst is Dodge Professor of Telecommunications and Education at Columbia University. He was head of Learning and Instructional Research Laboratory at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey from 1958 to 1984. Carol and Ernst Rothkopf have three children: David, Paul and Marissa.
David Rothkopf received his BA from Columbia University (the fourth generation of his family to attend Columbia) and attended its graduate school of journalism. He founded the New York City Stage Company, an Off-Broadway repertory company. He was Under Secretary of
Commerce in the Clinton Administration, President and Publisher of Foreign Policy and now heads his own company, The Rothkopf Group. He and his wife Jane were divorced in 1999. They have two children, Joanna (b.1989) who is married to Brad Becker-Parton and have a son Julius (b 2023) and Laura (b 1991) and is married to Aaron Nemo . David married Adrean Scheide in 2001. They divorced in 2015.He is married to Carla Dirlikov Canales, an opera singer, a US State Department cultural envoy, and a professor of practice at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Paul Rothkopf is a graduate of Syracuse University. He was a digital pioneer founding The Sporting News Online in 1996 and working for several other companies within the industry. He currently runs his own consulting business, The Pi Collective. Paul married Elaine Vieira Ferreira in 2013 and they split their time between Chatham, N.J. and Rio De Janiero, Brazil.
Marissa (Rothkopf) Bates is a freelance writer. She has a BA from Mount Holyoke College and an MA from Cambridge University. (See Newsweek, New York Times Etc.) Her husband Mark Bates also attended Cambridge University where he earned his MA degree. He is vice president of Marsh Private Client Services. They have two children Cate (2002) and Oliver (2006)
Dorothy (Zeman) Luther married in 1930, never divorced but also never used a married name. She received her BS and MS in Nutrition from Teachers College, Columbia University, although her first job (1937-1941) put her in charge of tenant selection for nascent public housing in New York City. Only later did she work in nutrition, her chosen field. For the next 23 years she was second in command at the Bureau of School Luncheons for Public and Parochial Schools in greater New York. The Bureau was responsible for 150,000 luncheons daily in 650 schools. Dorothy supervised the purchase, preparation and distribution of these meals, which meant being there at 5:30am to oversee the loading. In later years she worked at an antique shop, The House of Hite. She travelled widely, visiting Europe, South America, Central America and North Africa. She was married to Holton Luther.
Evelyn (Zeman) Beatman was the youngest of David and Ratie's children. She attended Teachers College where she received her BS in Fine Arts. She too taught for a year in Millicent Baum's school. Evelyn inherited her father's artistic sense, designing clothes and decorating homes. After her marriage, she and Joseph lived in Hartford, Connecticut, where she raised Norwegian elk hounds. Their dogs won ribbons on several occasions. The Beatmans moved to 360E 55 (Murqie’s home) during World War II. While Joseph helped to train dogs for the navy. In due course (peace) he returned to the family business – dealing in scraps metal and became wealthy. It was a “telephone” business that could be run from NYC, Hartford, or suburban ET where he settled after his 2nd marriage. He famously disliked children. So, I didn’t see much of him growing up and he had no interest in my children.
THE DECENDENTS OF VICTOR ZEMAN
Memoir Notes
At the same season the Dalton School had a series of Christmas festivals.
Note: There were then no minorities in the school. It was white, middle - upper class mainly protestant and the parents, by self- definition were eager to have their children learn under a more flexible system than they had known. More on set up later (and a bow in the late 1930s to emigres from Europe and China - notably the author Lin Yutang's three daughters and the Yangs Fleeing Japanese rule or threatened rule (check).
In any case the indisputable highlight of the year was the Christians pageant - a series of tableaux with narration of the Christmas story - the nativity. In the third grade, I somehow made it to the exalted role of the Angle Gabriel and got to spread my Golden Oilcloth wings under haloed head over Mary while someone narrated. Scary and exciting for me - clearly have not gotten over it yet! Since boys were still in the school up to 8th grade - three of the oldest were, of course, the three Wise men (bearing gifts they travel so far...). In my memory the Virgin Mary was almost always played by some soppy do-gooder and do-weller and/or one of the three theater teachers’ pets, Mrs. Geiger was the teacher and one of her pets, Marian Seldes, did in fact go on to a career as an actress (Imitating her once at a dinner at Goucher). I dramatically moved my head, and my string of pearls popped all over (pearls-faux of course - standard schoolgirl were in 1948-49).
The Christmas tableaux were followed, I think, by the singing of Christmas carols and as you might imagine by now, our music teacher, Miss Hinteye later Mrs. Portes maintained the Dalton tradition by having us learn some carols that remains fairly obscurely "Adeste Fidelis" - in Latin of course, assorted in French (names/words elude me) and Se On but it was a joyful noise.
Either as a part of this mega event or on a separate event, we had the candle service - each of as being gives lit candles to put on the theater stage while some adult put lit candles in every window of the school that faced 89th St. Hard to imagine any of that being allowed now but it went off without a hitch back then. It was fun and I do recall my parents enjoying hearing me sing carols at home which were so clear of them.
Marissa's neighbor, Hilary, a Dalton grad of a later date says the pageant was banished when student body was more mixed.
I believe the pageant is now a footnote to Dalton history as not quite ecumenical enough; not "growing up Episcopalian" was fine with me.
The founder and the principal of the school was a woman named Helen Parkhurst who had become convinced kids could learn more better in a more open environment than was then prevalent. On each floor, every morning, there was a mini assembly with the customary announcements, reading from obscure (to as) oriental texts, and so on. We were mixed ages in home rooms run by a teacher from which we went forth to different classrooms for instruction in different things - math, biology, English, History etc.
We never sat in rows facing the teacher but in circle around him/her or at table facing the board.
Beginning in high school we wore "Smocks" over clothing - Dalton blue - long sleeved garments that buttoned on the left shoulder, this to discourage competition on the clothing front. It also helped set us apart from the lower classes in the school.
The Dalton plan as it was known involved monthly assignments in each course, broken down by weeks and for which cents were earned from the teacher that were then filled in on a cardboard Y graph like sheet by course, filling in the graph was a major preoccupation and when complete led to delight within the teacher's initials at the top of the bar. Incompleteness was not desirable.
While most subjects were treated as they were elsewhere - differences occurred in biology where seniors in small groups were rotated through the nursery to learn how to care for infants (usually these of the teachers) so we none of us later quaked at making formula, changing diapers etc.
Does anyone make formula now, in history, it seems to me there was much more breadth than in other schools.
In history it seems to me there was much more breadth than in other schools. Miss Parkhurst had a penchant for Asian history – a large stone Buddha sat rather terrifyingly on the second floor where her office was and had a supremely able teacher in Miss Seeger (Pete's cousin, I believe), the author of the pageant of Chinese history, etc. A lovely woman named Mrs. Mukherjee (Amer, M. to Indian) taught Greek - Roman history. Of course, there were "festivals" for such courses, including a medieval festival for Europe with a "market" etc. Miss Seeger's roommate was Dora Mabel Downes, a formidable English woman, and teacher of everything from grammar to T.S. Eliot one's reward in its. She seems, I recall, to have moved from middle school to high school with us - to our eternal benefit.
But this leaves out Helen Parkhurst. She seemed to me as a child terrifying; 10-feet tall, 300lbs etc. I never really know her and by the time I was in middle school, she was a footnote to history having somehow run through the money from the crane's (paper - hence Dalton, MA) tuition whereupon the school went bankrupt only to be saved by a coalition of bankers and businessmen including Buttenweiser and Paul Mazur (my friend's Nancy’s father) and others. Charlotte Durham was brought in as headmistress and was still in charge when I graduated after 13 years at the school - receiving my diploma first at graduation became longest tenure to date!
Miss Durham later hired me as a student teacher of English for a year while I was in graduate school, but we never became friends. I think she lacked humor but that may not have been in the curriculum at Connecticut College for women in her days. She was number one guidance/advisor on college choices/applications/test and in my view chooses badly for me, “a small school because you would be last at a big state school.” Hence Goucher Pech. Most famously, when she was prepping the class of 47 for the actual graduation ceremony, she said, "Now girls, when you dress remember, don't fall into the rogue pots." Quaint what's a rogue pot, moppa?
A number of things have not been stressed so will now be underlined; I lived on 89th St. between Madison fifth and I went to school on 84th St. between Lexington Park. My favorite 5 and 10 store was at 86th third. My favorite lunch/soda place was Schrafft's at the SE corner of 88th Madison Ave. Most of the friends I played with/visited were in this small universe. The furthest afield I went to was to Margie and Louis’ house of books - in various locations and/near Madison in the 50s. There were movies on 86th St. bet Lex, third and a trans-lux, news reel theatre (which later showed full - length films at the corner of 85th Madison). In this village were stationers, drug stores, grocery shops that sold things like undergarments, chitting supplies, and florist. While most of the shopkeepers knew me by name (kept right on calling me Carol after I was married - shocking my mother).
There was a landing library called Wamrath's ( one of a chain) bet 85th- 86th on the side of mad - to which I went to get away from "good" books. Next door, almost, was Meyerowitz, opticians whence my first classes in the 8th grade onwards.
Did this quite small universe enhance my natural timidity, food for thought? It was a fairly stable universe and not especially threatening, especially given the care my parents expanded one way or the other. Father, for example, after the end of WW II warned me against walking on the park side of the fifth as there were supposedly hoodlums who jumped off the walls to attack the innocent.
I was never to take taxis at night alone and etc. I think but don't exactly recall going to the metropolitan Museum with friends (once we were old enough to be allowed in) the Guggenheim when it was still in a private house - about where the big museum is now; and the thrill at 12 of being allowed to go to the Frick without an adult.
A Few penser a l'escalier:
We were taught French from Kindergarten onward - starting with games of lotto! The first teacher was a tall, gaunt women named Mlle Frey; our first French teacher was Mune de Gallaix who, I recall, liked to talk about sex- how deprived of men French women were because of World War I and such sage advice as "take a cold shower" if one had urges with "men". My conversational French reflects this approach, although I can/could read it easily, even translate well enough to get pass the exam in French for admission to the Graduate School of Arts and Science at Columbia.
From the grad school my view (almost entirely favorable) at Daltons began to undergo a change as my pupils as an asst. were becoming representative of a much wealthier class than ours had been. They - or same - moored a sense of entitlement. One, for example, got quite ticked with me for recognizing her paper as a verbatim plagiarism from the Columbia Encyclopedia. She was CBS - Chief Paley's daughter (step daughter). A probably more representative student of that era was Alger Hiss's son - a sweet, shy, very bright boy who I think ended up at the New Yorker (and no doubt haunted by his father's history). Anyways back in my time, someone had a bright idea that classes should shipped for week(s) to a camp - like place called Buck's Rock (outside of Danbury). What were they thinking of? We were scarcely candidate for "fresh air" but it was here Nancy Mazur (Salk in) took me under her wings away from Snarky, Suzanne Susan Jacoby and Marjorie Rosenblatt who were "mean" to me. Years later Susan apologized to me. Marjorie transformed away to a more ordinary school. My mother, a holder of grudges, never forgave Suzanne! Even when she, then husband of E and I had dinner together. And (S'S) her mother a much divorced pretty creature and world class hypochondria was a patient of fathers.
Of Bruck's Rocks I remember little but I believe the concept died the death without too much lamentation. Most of us, anyways, had experiences that were vaster, more summer - Y, Paul is always enraged when he is reminded me of that I was shipped off to camp at age of 6. Robinson Crusoe it was called in - Mom. It still exists. My memories of it and my two summers there are rather quaint. We wore a kind of uniform - white shirts, blue shorts, had to take naps every day, presumably taught how to swim. Can recall having to write a letter home every week - and once asking if I was to have a baby bro or sister – anxiety? Or wishful thinking.
A change for the vastly better was made when I was 6 and sent (until I was almost 13) to camp Killoleet in Hancock, VT. It also still exists. I really liked it there - a very low-pressure place run by Miss Bartlett, a shop teacher from Dalton and Toni Taylor (an ed at Red Book LHJ or the like) - her "partner". The counselors were to pare from Dalton nice. No uniform. We did tough work for the Red Cross certifying our increasing skills i.e. swimming and boating. One interlude in the infirmary being treated for poison or sumac treatment involved soaking old fashioned sanitary "pads" with aulomine and laying them on the afflicted pants - rather mortifying: learned to play Baseball, to ride ponies then horses there, climbed Mount Mansfield (highest in MT in VT! - With horrible peanut butter sandwiches as sustenance) visited tiny Hancock and secondhand clothes store and had happy hours making things in shop out of wood and thin and nicest of all singing around campfires and eating Marshmallows. Camp had a library with books for all ages and I recall reading the life Of the Three Soong sisters (Mrs. Chiang Kai - wife of the director of Bank of China and #3 - think they all ended up at one point at Oak knoll in summit). Sad to say can recall names of only a few fellow campers - among them Richard Rodgers, Jody Joiner, a nice someone named patsy Marth, and one summer Ellen Blume from my class at Dalton - a funny, brilliant, talented girl - later painted "Icon" to sell at Bergdorf Goodman - and also moved to California and out of sight. Her mother was German-born beauty and think was seen by Ellen and her sister Mary, as a tough act to follow). Ellen once entertained me by drawing a picture of a poor man who lost his hair to a terrible fever - surely have demonstrated how it is done with an eraser and how they when cured, grows his hair back then.
Speaking of fever, fear of polio was very intense and of greatest anxiety in the summer, we had to lie naked in the sun (presume but cannot remember that boy campers lied this elsewhere but really, we, girls were concerned, and the next summer allowed to wear bathing suits when sopping up rays.
In the winter, there were camp recensions- a day/afternoon in the city - with films shown of our summer adventures. Suspect there were also "recruiting" parties.
All the end of camp Killoleet each summer, we were each given a piece of wood with a candle affixed to it, then lit, and put in the lake while singing "a golden day is dying among the purple hills, the lark that sang at dawning in dusky woods is still...."
A good place run by decent people (including at one point John Seeger, taught at Dalton?).
In those prehistoric times letters were the chief way to communicate (telephones were reserved for emergencies). We were required to write once a week - not a particularly strenuous activity. Remember particularly that Margie sent especially engaging letters - one especially illustrating a dress (not forte) colored cucumber green. She and Louis visited camp at least once. Recall Louis finding Vermont in so cold that the water froze in the pitcher in his room. Margie sent candy for the 4th of July - to share of course. The last return from the camp featured my mother as a just - hatched car driver - leaving the camp road to make an L - shaped turn. She forgot to straighten the wheel and we rolled gently on our side. Father was strong enough to ride the car and forbid me from saying anything. In fact, mother drove very little, given low opportunities but I do remember her at the wheel in the traffic in downtown Indianapolis - At some point when I had a license, we took the wheel in three hours alternating shifts on long trips, but it was really only comfortable when father drove (which of course he did daily at home in NYC).
He rented/leased his cars and one - a true Temon - left us stranded so totally that we spent the night in the car in a garage/service station in sands point, Idaho enroute back from Canada. All of this diversion from early youth incomplete without mentioning that (a) I really did not like being relegated to the back seat and (b) was often complimented on not getting "car sick"- a disorder more common than now. Bear in mind also cars in pre ac days; Windows operated on cranks; there were no radio early on, but father later always ruined into pop music that I can recall, etc. Very primitive by today’s standards but remember that when Eliot Pinson brought a car in the 1960's with a-c, we thought he was being affected, although we soon followed suit. In earlier days, can door lock froze up in the winter and I would be sent to boiling water to pour over these locks, not quiet Frontier leaving but probably typical NY scene back when one could park on the street.
Cars must have been easier to break into as remember parents coming home from a trip apologizing those gifts for me had been stolen off seat while they ate a final on-the-road meal at the Tiptoe Inn (86th St. Broadway) a Jewish delicatessen. No sirens went off in the car! No Sirens!
One of the most memorable trips home from camp was being picked up by neighbors (on the 89th St.), Harry and Jean Heiman and their twin daughters; Joan and Jill, to go to Lake Placid.
Curiously remember their big beef dinners but more importantly being there with them - thus Sept 1, 1939, when World War II began. Impossible to explain to kids but a great depressed silence descended on the holiday, adults being hushed and serious.
To return quickly to Paul's concern about shipping a six – year - old off for six weeks in camp - indeed a camp where she knew no one, there were reasons, of course, such as the extreme discomfort of NYC in summer (from which my mother particularly suffered) and clearly, I would not be put on the street like kids in less blessed neighborhoods. I did not like being away particularly (but no one asked me) and especially disliked the departure assemblage at grand central station with my mother urging me not to fuss. The trip to Sturbridge must have been grim but cannot remember anything but sitting in shifting train with people/kids I did not know.
I attribute being freed from that 2 - year detour by a great error. We were told to pack off belongings at the end of the camp for Homecoming and me, with infinite care, just put a bottle of ink unwrapped in the trunk. Recall buying the ink at the camp "store" to feel grow up - but was, of course, reduce to recall size by discovery of the mess in the trunk. End of the camp Robinson Crusoe.
Actually was (in my view even now) luckier than many contemporaries who went to camps based on competitiveness - teams/colors assigned from day one. Some of the survivors loved it but I readily thank my parents for sparing me that!
On "Downtown Abbey" the other night, it came to me that our maid(s) dressed exactly as the serving maids did at the Abbey - Life copying art - not the lower orders copying what they had learned from above. It adds to the shows strange appeal that, it is getting closer in time to a world, I can dimly recall.
One of the health rituals of the day was the first visit to the dentist. Strangely both my parents took me to the Dr. Henry Horvath (whom I came subsequently to love) - a friend of father's.
I had apparently worked myself into a high state of anxiety - slid out of the chair and ran into the waiting room. Cajolery did not get me back. What terrorized me? The machinery? "The Open Wide...." Who knows? Another health ritual was inescapable as that time - a tonsilled to my - in - hospital with anesthesia and a hospital stay at the time. Was treated very "modernly" by my parents but not by a surgeon who epitomizes for me now as he did them - EVIL. A sadist who got his jollies by wielding his knife (or also as I later learned, allowing his son to run around the house with scissors - in training as a mass murderer). Recall little of the episode asking the wizard if I could have chocolate, ice cream, after the surgery and the kind of cackled and who said, "of course, if you really want it." Need I add that it did not stay down and brought on uncharming bloody mess up with it? So much for that SOB, Dr. Kramer (whose name just dislodged itself from my attic), the staff otherwise were kind surely in parts due to affection for father - an “attending" at Mount Sinai, Nurses then dressed like nurse, not as for a day at the beach which I still prefer and the caps.
Saving the "best" of the era for the last – Dr. Alfred Fischer - a pediatrician, I have long suspected because it was a farty, unvarying, and tolerable specialty for someone who did not like to talk about to his patents and can't be said to have really given co- thinker's damn about us little ones. Dimly recall his father had been a pediatrician before him. He married a quite beautiful woman - and they had 2 children - one of whom Ellen I met years later at a dinner, the Builes gave at the university club. She was pretty like her fish like (to us) like Pa. At some point I swore I would not go back to him, so my parents came up with a nice alternative curiously. Dr. F.S associate in the practice by then and peace was resorted until I said, "I am too old for all this..." and father, Arthur Davids (Ob, Gyn.) and Arthur Bendick x-ray expert were recruited. Arthur B and his wife became quite good friend to my folks - he had served in France in WW I where he wed Marcelle, his wife. She had a kind of Gallic charm. I was always riveted by a small, stuffed white dog she had at the door of her living room. It had once been real.... the BS also had a cottage - Y kind of place at outside of etc - rustic - KY, varnished wood, etc. but we seem always to have gone there for a few days in summer. It hurts to think about them now because after they moved to CA, AB drove his car into his garage and did not stop - so he is never far from me when I came home in the car.
Arthur was the Jr, x- ray md to Dr. Jaches, the much older father of my early friend Hallie at Dalton. He died of leukemia. Then said to have been a hazard of his specialty. Hallie stayed with us during this bad time but was so good I can still recall it with awe. Not so forbearing when they skipped her grade - think she lived near up NJ, but neither side made a move stupid in retrospect.
Sickness was much more a part of our daily lives back then; or so it seems to me now. Rich people – like Mazur took Nancy & Peter to Florida for a month in winter because Nancy’s older brother Peter supposedly had some weakness (lungs) cannot imagine this in the post-antibiotic, vitamin – crazed world of today. Penicillin, first, changed the game (My father, while bowled over by its “magic” advised us/anyone not to take shots in case of an allergic reaction while pills could be stopped, and one hazard avoided). Anyway, up to that time, if you got sick – fever, cough, runny nose etc. you went to bed – took your meds, slept are of bad ways, listened to soap operas etc. Once as I got better, a repeated treat was a cup of ice cream brought home from Schrafft’s to me by my mother. (The longest disquisition on refrigeration in prehistory is for another day – for this moment it is sufficient to point out again that my father could recall the switch from oil – to gas light to – much later electricity in his home in Brooklyn. He never got over a health respect for electrical wires – not under carpets, not used if covering frayed, etc.)
Among many things that are different now than they were on the way back – food preservation is prime. You might guess from my mother bringing me ice cream from Schrafft’s when I was sick that iceboxes (as they were still erroneously called) were primitive by today’s standards. The most advanced ones were capable of making one or two trays of ice cubes – slowly.
The first fridge (derived from the trade name Frigidaire I think) I remember was not very big – certainly not floor to ceiling and had a coil (of refrigerant?) on top. The interior was similarly small by today’s standards and could hold only a few days food at a time. As a result, my mother called the grocer every day with her list, as well as the butcher – and they delivered. (Note: the grocery was at the corner across the street but still a bit more stylish than what most people did which was to buy and carry home on a daily basis (as Margie did) Seldes billed mother, Margie paid cash every time she shopped. Supermarkets were still in the future.
The refrigerators with which I grew up were replaced one after the other with increasingly more capacious ones but as late as my wedding you still could not store very many (bird’s Eye) frozen foods in the ice cube compartment – by now as I recall accessed by a separate door.
At the Mazur’s farm on the other hand fairly capacious, separate freezers were already in place by the mid – forties – so between raising a small herd of cattle, butchering and freezing – the Mazur’s had on hand what seemed like an awesome amount of beef – and unaffected by wartime beef and meat rationing. I seem to remember being given a gift of meat to take home at, say, the end of summer. Nancy and I also prepared fruits (peaches, for example) for freezing – which seemed very advanced to me at the time, although it was probably far more widespread than I guessed.
In the city at least, and with gas rationing for cars during the war, it is obvious that the idea, let alone the reality, of super market shopping for a week’s groceries was remote, I am still occasionally amazed that I can buy everything from pot holders to over the – counter pharmaceuticals – and meat and food and frozen everything in one place (and now I can do it by having the goodies delivered to my house).
In retrospect, the technology for larger (& longer) refrigerators might have been developed faster were it not for the greater technological needs of the “war effort.” Alone more look back is needed though. Elsie and millions like her had true ice boxes. The top compartment held a great block of ice, which was brought up several flights of stairs by a very strong man who had a cloth over his shoulder and carried the ice block in a large pincer like tool. As I reached the ice dripped away into pan under the icebox and emptying it without spilling it all was a challenge of its own.
The kind of refrigerators we used to have been not “self-defrosting” either and made emptying the “fridge” for its weekly clean out a big and sometimes messy job too. (My mother used to say during the early days of our marriage when we moved a lot that we moved every time the refrigerator needed defrosting!)
Memories of the Zemans – (Addenda)
Frederic D. Zeman
My father was an extraordinary man - a true intellectual with all-encompassing curiosity and tireless ambitions to educate himself - in sum, not all an extraordinary physician but a man of broad interests, curiosity, and relentless drive to learn. As late as his last year he decided to learn a new language Gaelic, I think - indeed. One of his insomnia cures was to count to 100 in as many languages as he knew which definitely included German, French, Italian, Spanish, some Latin, when I took Angelo - Saxon for my graduate degree at Columbia. He would sneak off with my textbook and read a lesson ahead to guide me and to teach himself! There was no getting ahead of him.
A true bookman, he was a founder of the Friends of the New York Academy of Medicine Library with Dr. Saul Jarcho, fascinated by the history of science, especially medicine, he wrote a number of articles on the branch of history, including a memorable one on Queen Elizabeth’s Jewish doctor who was, as I recall, murdered as traitor.
Most of father's papers on these topics went to the Academy library then under the guidance of his great friend, Gertrude Annas (another set is, I think, at the Jewish Home and Hospital for aged).
His personal library at home, built with my mother, was far more eclectic than this suggests and include such now all - but forgotten as Walter Edmonds and Marsh complete run of the WPA guides, a Jewish Encyclopedia, the Britannica and constantly growing collection of books on his early favorite hobby: geology, and of course, history - notably of Europe and the Americas.
Consequently, he could "hold his own" to almost any group. Add to this, a great sense of humor, not a joke maker, simply a very quick and witty man (who despised puns!)
An example: when he and mother came to Champaign when DJR was born, the infant in the midst of our meal set up a hue and cry (to put in mildly) and father said, he would go and talk to him, which he did. DJR quieted down and father returned to the table saying, "he told me a great joke...." Earlier, when we were once travelling to the Estes Park, Colorado along a nasty, twisty road, he distracted my mother and me by describing her hyper compulsive mode of travel, the abundant use of tissue paper when packing, the inflatable ironing board, etc. far funnier in the telling than retelling, but it served to distract us from the darkness and roar of the river beside the road. Add this kind of talent to his medical wisdom and generous use of this time with his patients; it is not surprising that when he died, a patient called to say they did not know where to run for anything approaching his kind of care.
It is of course, noteworthy in this day of visits to MDs that last precisely 8.5 metered minutes that father saw patients in his office without a clock ticking in the room. More astonishing in this day and age, he paid house calls, which until his last years of practice involved driving his car from place to place. He allowed himself to be called out at night as well and so never got into "casual" clothes until he could put on his pajamas and go to sleep.
He did not like the trend of being dressed for "summer sports" in the city and scolded me rather severely for sending him one of my co-workers who arrived wearing shorts - a shirt - and sneakers. Perhaps he thought it lowered the "tone" of his office - otherwise a very subdued place III East 88th St.
Father was always well-dressed - 3-piece suits, Sulka neckties, suspenders, spotless shirts (some, I recall, with detachable stiff collars, cuff links, and well - polished shoes, overcoats, hats, if needed an umbrella- never a raincoat that I remember). In his finicky dressing, he was matched and then some by mother, who saw to it that his wardrobe was always in perfect order. This involved daily pick - ups by the dry cleaners to press his suits those were the days. She did have a world class hissy fit when a patient sent him from Goldwater's in Phoenix a pair of boxer shorts with red ants printed on them. Not a slang user herself she did get "ants in your pants" and threw that Xmas gift from a GP (grateful patient) in the trash quickly.
Linking the Samuels branch of the family, father loved popular music (even polkas, which he said cheered him as he drove around with the radio on) and sang well, as well as being a good dancers and able to do a respectable limitation of a 'soft shoe' routine. Always overweight, he was nevertheless notably ' light on his feet'. He did not especially share my mother's passion for Wagner or classical music in general - having a riff on not knowing the difference between Manon and Mignon, in college and I believe even medical school he acted in plays with some of the enthusiasm we only heard when he sang - notably ' to me + D + P while he was having a lyric that went " Krambamboli das is der lied..."
He had associated intellectual snobberies, including a belief that people who did not "get" the jokes in New Yorker cartoons were generally dullards.
A frustrated naval architect (not a many earner esp. involved years of apprenticeship) he especially enjoy talking to Donald Morris - another historian Manqué while he was at Naval academy and for the same years thereafter and to the widow of a friend (who have been killed in a convertible top down- that flipped on a western road - leading to a ban on such vehicles in the family) of his who worked for worldwide shipping line.
My mother thought that the Zeman clan that she knew looked down on her for not having a college degree, which is probably not so as she was fairly awe-inspiring in other ways. They may all, like FDZ, been intellectual snobs but as the first born and only male, was made much of for all kinds of reasons including his brains and wit. None of them, save perhaps his mother Ratie, were likely to compete in a beauty contest.
Dorothy, the next sibling after FDZ, was no beauty and increasingly overweight. It is my impression that she did not got along very well with her mother Ratie and moved out as soon as she could decently do so she once told me that she thought of her mother as a complainer (how not given her husband's long illness which entailed having a care giver in her house 24 hours a day for him and his early death leaving her with three children- albeit almost 'grown up") in 1928 or 1929 DVZ suddenly married a man named Luther Holt and they set sail on their wedding trip, which ended at the port in England from which DVZ promptly set sail for home. It must be family lore, but Luther was likely "gay." FDZ, years later could still get worked up recalling that DVZ had made him tell their mother of the separation. DVZ went on to work at a charitable institution called Lavenberg House before going to work as chief of school lunches in NYC. I scarcely saw her during the first ten or so years of my life but on those occasions recall my father addressing her as "Sis."
A further not totally happy recollection of the siblings is that when Evelyn was dying of Leukemia, she begged my mother to keep DVZ away from her as much as possible because of her "business" while DVZ always seemed to her baby sister.
Evelyn also got out of Brooklyn rather speedily by marring Joseph Beatman and moving to West Hartford (Asylum Avenue) where I gather, she became part of the public of that town and in due course, started to raise and train dogs like my "famous first cousin" Marco Polo, one of the first Norwegian Elkhounds in the U.S. In time they switched to a Welsh corgi whom I did not like so well, definitely not as much as their most famous admirer, Queen Elizabeth II. Two footnotes to this:
1) Hartford is the first place I ever travelled alone by train - not quite Paddington but surely the conductors had been told me where to put me off.
2) Years after Evelyn died, DVZ told me that she had an affair with Golf Pro in Palm Springs, CA hoped to divorce Joe to marry him. DVZ's fevered romantic dream or nor, Evelyn had by then had rather crooked her nose improved by plastic surgery and may well have been a bit more inclined to kick over the traces. There was a child between Dorothy and Evelyn who must have died very young as it was scarcely spoken of.
Cannot recall much interaction between my parents and the Beatman until they moved to 360 E, 55th (Margie’s and Louis’s bldg. too) during World War II. Until her illness, my memory of father and Evelyn's interactions is of a kind of jocularity.
I personally never took to Joe so cannot see what she saw in him except as a kind of "get out of Dodge" vehicle. But it was in Hartford on what seems to have been regular visits that Grandma Ratie died of a heart attack in 1936. I can recall telling my father how sorry I was – hoping, I suppose, to sound like a grown up 6.
It was I who was home alone one night in June 1948 when Evelyn called to talk to father because she was concerned that she had turned “yellow". I told her he would call as soon as he could, doubtless with his evergreen refrain or “Take two aspirins and call me in the morning...." which of course we found funny but did not suffice. She was buried the September week when I had met EZR (he came to NYC to sit with me as I could not go out).
Dorothy lived on until 1991 having held a number of jobs after retiring from the school lunch program. The most important job was a kind of sales persons/receptionist at an antique shop called the House of Hite, located NE corner 57th St. 3rd floor, run by a very generous (gay) man, Dick Logan, who took very good care of her until his own decline and death from HIV in the early 1980s. She also traveled a fair amount.
After Margie Cohn was struck and killed by a dustman's truck in London in summer of 1984 DVZ never went out alone again. We set her up with the newly founded Elder care that saw to her needs very well until her health began to fail seriously in the late 1980s and she went (ironically) to the Jewish Home and Hospital for the aged where her brother was still generously remembered. Her irritability did not diminish and when Marissa and I would go to visit her she would occasionally send me from the room so they could talk privately! Her lifelong absorption with cockery and skill as needlewoman formed a bond between them beyond family.
The Droll Summary
The droll summary is, of course, only a fraction of the whole, although it does extend into the twenty first century. Turn to David Zeman’s wife, my grandmother, Rachel (Ratie) Samuels Zeman. She had two brothers, Maurice and Sydney [EN 1881-1947], and three sisters as well: Birdy (Bertha) Katz, Flora and Stella (who was only ten years older than my father and who to his irritation, he was told to take to dances). I have scarcely any memories of Maurice who was married to a woman named Lulu whom I met memorably once at Sydney’s Masonic funeral. But I do know that Maurice worked for a big food company, Seaman Brothers, and had a son named William who followed in his footsteps to what became White Rose Foods. I dimly recall meeting Wiliam but have warm memories of his first wife, Doris Salinger (J.D.’s older sister) whom he later divorced. I recall liking her because she talked to me like a grown up long before I was. After Sydney’s funeral, Lulu advised me to have lots of children, which she had not (a heart murmur, she said) and her William had only a son by his second marriage, but I have lost track of them completely.
Sydney Samuels saw himself as the family historians and traced the Samuels’s history in America to the late eighteenth century. His notebook was lost. Alas! His wife Maud was a shadow and I only remember him as a rather amiable salesman type and being the only person, I ever knew who wore spats over his shoes. When Maud died, Sydney brought my mother a chased silver cream pitcher which my mother later said must have held Maud’s ashes.
Curiously, I have very few memories of the Samuels brothers and suspect that they may not have had much contact with us after Ratie died in 1936 – don’t know when Maurice died and Sydney, as I noted was around but not much in the picture.
Ratie’s sisters on the other hand were around at least in my lifetime until they removed to Port Jervis. Birtie (Birdy) [1886] married in Port Jervis to Lawrence Katz and moved to Honesdale, PA and bore him a son Lawrence. The family business was pajama making, hence, the big laugh when one spoke of “the katz pajama.”
Flora (the eldest of the two remaining sisters) and Stella lived in the East 80s as I recall where my grandmother sometimes gave me lunch of hamburger, peas, mashed potatoes and chocolates, pudding or a Charlotte Russe from Cushman’s Bakery (about which I can do an entire Proustite number, the paper cups, the lady fingers, the creamy filling). My grandmother knew my taste and catered to them.
While Stella was still working at the New York City Board of Education and after my grandmother’s death, moved with Flora to 76th and Columbus Avenue – an apartment whose most memorable feature to me was the wedding photograph of their mother Dora in a lavish somewhat hoop-skirted dress. Stella entertained me by allowing me to do her nails. A treat! Meanwhile, she finally was able to retire from her job with a full pension (having literally counted the days) and the New York. Samuel’s sisters moved to Honesdale, PA (near Port Jervis where they had lived as children), and where their sister Bertha/Birdie (really a tiny bird like creature) had married. Honesdale is near where the Samuels had lived as children in Port Jervis before moving to New York. My father was singularly sarcastic about the cousins _ William and Lawrence Katz, the later, an idiot, in his snobbish view. Their descendants live on, I expect, but nobody kept track that I know of.
From a genetic point of view, it is worth noting that Flora lived into her deep 80s and Birdie and Stella into their late 90s with Stella the last to go. My grandmother on the other hand died in late 60s of heart disease brought on, I suspect, by terrible problems – her husband’s death is her late 40s from ALS, and on-going money problems, being not much helped by her husband’s brothers and the need to put her children through college. I never knew this until much later as my parents were not much for family history and my memories of grandma Zeman are of her as rather Jolly and singing such ditties to me as “Here Comes Cookie Again” (The curious will find the lyrics as I just did via Google – “Looke looke here comes cookie, I am so delighted…”)
Not a surprise to recall too, that the Samuels – Zemans were Broadway mad and as I recall went to “shows” often when one could still do that without beggaring oneself and loved vaudeville too. Stella and Flora took me to the Paramount Theatre, and I like to imagine that with them I once saw Gene Krupa and Benny Goodman on that stage. One imagines Honesdale as a bit flat after the bright lights, but it seemed to suit them. After Flora died, Stella needed an apartment (up a steep flight of stairs that she explained to me. She “ski plowed” up and down for safety). Her landlord was a lawyer whom I think of as a shyster but, in fact, was only a semi – crook who had Stella sign a will leaving him the accumulated GE shares (bought by a surprisingly prescient Sydney when issued), her savings account, and all artifacts including the “famous” picture of her mother as a bride. We were given some postcards albums by him, but we had done little for her except visit once with Dorothy and Dick Logan. Dorothy was enraged – after all hadn’t, she sent Stella chocolate – covered marshmallows from time to time – wasn’t she the nearest surviving relative etc. But we had no grounds for a suit and the landlord had graciously allowed us to have her buried with the family in Brooklyn.
That said, Stella had lived long enough to attend with Flora, my wedding, David and Paul’s bat mitzvahs (staying at a hotel in Summit under Dorothy’s watchful eye), and to meet Marissa who charmed her, or course. And while she lived, David, Paul and Marissa received birthday cards with dimes stuck in slots – along with greetings. Not exactly GE shares but well – intentioned.
All told, I have only the most pleasant memories of these Samules sisters. They seemed to have just liked me, enjoyed our occasional days together and were singularly undemanding – not for them curtseying, memorizing appropriate German poems (from the Staats Zeitung! Vicle MAC), or anything but being their indulged child for a day, how nice it was.
A part of Samuels’s family story that was never made clear was the move from NYC to Port Jervis and back again. One guess (from Dorothy?) was that they wanted the benefits of country living up to the time when it was necessary to find Jewish husbands for their daughters. Perhaps but I am not entirely persuaded, especially considering that only one of the four girls of this generation married in the city. Flora, it may be guessed, was reserved to be her mother’s companion and Stella seems never encountered or attracted a suitable spouse. This left Rachel and a brand-new branch of the family tree.
But first another branch – the Bernheimer – Arnolds
My mother’s mother, Carrie Bernheimer Arnold, residence and her birth in the United States also occurred around the time of the Civil war.[EN: 1868] Thekla Trautman, Carrie’s mother lived in Philadelphia where she was introduced and married Gabriel Bernheimer, 9/10/1822-July 4, 1887]- a German immigrant, who travelled in the Indian territories selling tobacco and whiskey (almost incredible, I think, but true). His letters to Thekla are in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. They are written in a challenging copperplate script in German. He died of a ruptured appendix on visit to his family Schmieheim (have a book with photo of cemetery in Schmieheim) leaving Thekla an apparently a distraught widow, to return with the young Carrie to Philadelphia. Carrie was farmed out to a leader of the then young (1876) Ethical Culture Society in New York City (a German offshoot founded in NY as beyond Reform Judaism) for an unknown length of time, of course she did return to Philadelphia, I assume to live with and take care of her mother. The Trautman clan, like so much else, was not discussed, although it is, I believe, large and my mother thought for example, the CBS newsman, Robert Traut, was a cousin.
I am guessing but I suspect the German Jews of Philadelphia were clannish in the extreme (as I found the Baltimore variety to be in the late 1940s and early 1950s). That is the Germans looked down on the Russian and other “uncouth” types. It is likely that Carrie Bernheimer was already considered on the edge of spinsterhood when Sigfried Arnold appeared on the scene. He came from Munich and his birth surname was Guttman (His family owned a large linen goods store rights outside the Munich city gates). Linens with Carrie’s initials are from the ancestral store and MRB has some still. Siegfried’s brother had come to the United States and settled in Chicago where he changed his name to Arnold and suggested Sigfried to do the same. Both brothers had escaped conscription in the Kaiser’s army and avoided travelling in Germany for fear of arrest. (Once I was told, Sigfried locked himself in the train bathroom while they traversed Germany!)
So, while there is not legitimate stew of Arnolds to seek out, there are Guttmans galore and Bernheimers too – a few of whom survived Hitler as French citizens. One, a physician visited Margie in 1981. He lived in Paris and must, I guess, have been about my age. Margie had been in love with his uncle, Max, for years and all his letters (up to his death in a concentration camp) were still saved and hidden on her death. One imagines Margie and Max did not marry because of cousinship concerns.
Before turning to my parents, a return to New York in the late 1890s when my grandfather David Zeman went to Columbia College but dropped out to marry “Ratie” (Rachel), As Kroll’s summary shows, David Zeman’s father Nathan Zeman had three children by Amelia Baum (1850-1929), but could not give them his name until his wife died, which was before David Zeman married Rachel Samules. The three Zeman brothers; David, Victor and Joseph [1874] went on to found a ladies shirtwaist manufacturing business (on Broadway in the teens or twenties streets). But I must digress to say that my father’s sister, Dorothy, maintained variously that the original Zemans came from what was the Czechoslovakia (Habsburg Galicia is more likely) and that they were Sephardim. Possible but never established. The forests are not full of Zemans that are Jewish, although apparently, they abound as Catholic especially in the Midwest.
All that is an aside as the Zeman brothers seemed to have prospered. David owned a brownstone on Stuyvesant place in Brooklyn’s now not - so salubrious Bedford – Stuyvesant area. It was newly settled in 1980s. My father did remember the gaslight coming to that house and less happily, his long subway rides to and from Columbia (which he attended although accepted at Harvard -a result of his father’s long decline). It did give hi ample time for homework. It is believed that my father got some financial help from his Uncle Joe, but Joe was considered, as droll supposes, a bit of scoundrel who invested badly in Florida real estate, missed the boat on neon lights as an investment and missed the opportunity at investing in the Broadway play “Rain.” Joe was married before he vanished to Hawaii [EN From what I can glean from Ancestry.com, he left for 1936 with his wife Alyce, thirty years his junior, on the SS Pershing and appeared in the 1950 census living in Los Angeles ] and had a son named Oscar Benedict, who was a securities analyst and had two children.
Victor Zeman (d. 1954) who was apparently as successful at dress manufacturing and stock brokerage (until 1929) as he was handsome married to Rosaline Abraham (d. 1964). Their only child Marry Ann m. Colin Melhado, the descendant of Portuguese Jews who settled in Jamaica in the 1700s and remained there. One of their two daughters, my contemporary, Rosemary, was married three times and when last heard from, to Gerald Richardson. The descendants of the Makhado’s are innumerable at this point, although I was amused to learn that William Bradford Warren IV (a past president of the Grolier etc.) was proud that his Baltimore grandmother was a Melhado – proving yet again that if you dig long enough, everyone is related to everyone else.
My grandfather David Zeman (1868-1913) was Amelia and Nathan’s youngest son. All three sons born to Amelia and Nathan out of wedlock because Nathan did not/could not divorce his wife. When she died, the three Baum boys finally became Zemans. Apparently, a dandy (from his photographs), he was a book lover (including the rather purple prose of Walter Pater) and “appreciator” of art, and these traits were carried forward by my father. He and Ratie had three children. The eldest, my father, was named Frederic Dewitt but changed his middle name to David after his father died. He married my mother Madeleine Edythe Arnold (1895-1981) in 1928 by which time he was a well-established physician in New York City. He was first in practice with Dr Leopold Stieglitz, the brother of the new famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz (n. b. Steeglitz not Stie) and brother in – law of the even more famous Georgia O’Keeffe (Leopold himself was rather elegant and to me off-putting man – trained in Germany when that was the thing to do – wearer of a goatee; and lover of a woman, I think Josie Marks. She did double duty as his secretary). As another aside it should be noted that my mother had worked for a while for Dr Burrill Crohn (Crohn’s Disease) so was in a funny way a “relative of the Baum – Crohn – Webster clan” even before she married my father – really a snob, I suppose – never talked about the Baum’s connection (Dorothy and my mother told be about them) and did not attend a huge clan reunion in the 1940s (to which I went with my mother and Baum - Zeman Aunts, Evelyn and Dorothy).
That said, the author of We Remember: The Baum – Crohn – Webster Family 1842 – 2000 reports that Father had “the Baum warmth and geniality” – loved books and arts, received his B.A in 1913 and his M.D from Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1917 followed by the Army Medical Corps and so onto my David, Paul, and Marissa in the “We Remember” with various types and errors thrown in for good measure.
Back to Brooklyn and father’s sisters: Dororthy Virginia Zeman (1895-1991) took a B.S. and M.A. in Nutrition from Teachers College, Columbia. An early job in NY (1937-1941) was tenant selection for public housing in New York City and then she was second – in – command of the Bureau of School Lunches for the public elementary schools in New York – said to have been responsible for 150,000 lunches in 650 schools, from 1937 until her removal to the Jewish Home and fire escape and hospital in 1988/9. She lived in a “studio” with kitchen – apartment at the 350 East 54th St. The money she saved by staying, put, went into travel. I have scarcely any memories of her before about 1942. She and my father were not close, although he called her “Sis.” He remained permanently provoked that she married a man named Holton Luther in 1929 or 1930 (they never divorced) and came back from their wedding trip, sea voyage which was manifestly a disaster (He was almost certainly “gay”) and she asked my father to tell their mother Ratie (with whom she did not get along very well) the news. In any event, after Dorothy retired from the school system, she went to work for a food company exhibiting at the world’s fair of 1964-65. When that ended, she got a job as a cashier at Lord and Taylor’s restaurant (having lied about her age). (Food fetish. It should be noted that Dorothy’s nightly dinner was hamburger and potatoes, told me scornfully that she got her vitamin C from the lemon in her breakfast Tea. Ah! For a degree in Nutrition). In her 80s she went to work – doing who knows exactly what at the House of the Hite run by an antique dealer, her friend Dick Logan, very gay and kind and generous man. The shop was at the second floor of the northeast corner of the third Avenue and 57th St. I do recall Dorothy’s well written price tags she made but do not know what she did at the reception desk. By the late 1980s, Dick was dying of AIDS a relatively unspoken disease then and rather than share the news with Dorothy, who was truly a second mother to him, abruptly fired her. He told me, she was, of course, puzzled and devastated just as she had been when Stella Samuels died leaving not so much as a tea cosy to her, the only surviving child of her sister Ratie.
Dorothy was a bit of puzzle, a big, not really pretty woman, loved to cook certain things (her sublime lemon pie), was fond of the Rothkopf young (e.g., gave David ballet lessons), but just only got on with my father, mother, her sister and me because everyone tippy toed around everyone else. She was given a “dictum” e.g., you must never use soap and water on a salad bowl, which made my mother hiss, and once on a Christmas day made my mother cry (don’t know who said what to whom). She accused me after the fact of not having been good enough to my mother. Really?!) But when my father had his first heart attack, DVZ blurted out, “why doesn’t he just die?”
Dorothy had, of course been the middle child and sadly the middle child before the one who died in infancy (never spoken off) and ten years older than Evelyn (1905-1948). Evelyn was pretty but had panache and a kind of esprit. Soon after her graduation from Teachers College, she married Joseph Beatman of Hartford, who gradually made a young fortune in scrap metals. He did not like children, so they raised dogs – first Norwegian elkhounds and then corgis. (Hence my first “cousin” Marco Polo the elkhound). I was allowed to visit them – my famous solo train trip to Hartford at 6 – 7 or 8 – and to play, supervised, with whatever dogs they had or whenever Janet Glotzer (can that be?) was not over to play with me. Eventually the Beatmans moved to New York into the same building – 360 East 55th Street – where Margie and Louis Cohen lived.
My mother definitely liked Evelyn best of the sisters and was undone when Evelyn died of Leukaemia in the summer of 1948, simultaneously with my meeting your father EZR. (Joe subsequently “flirted” with his sister – in – law Dorothy and, after she was widowed in 1953, with Margie. He was indirectly the cause of another disappointment for DVZ as he married Frances, a social worker at the Jewish Family Service, whom I truly did not like either – but when Joe died, DVZ did not get books and lusterware of Evelyn’s that she thought rightly hers, the books – certainly the Andrew Lang’s – having been her father David’s.
My mother claim that she kept this ill-assorted group together cannot be disputed. She gave the holiday/birthday/special event parties calm although, not without murmurs of disconnect. My favourite being when my mother put on a genuine feast for Flora and Stella – all cooked by her, by now a very good cook. Stella, never a homemaker or Queen of tact said to mother, “where did you get this food from?”
Before turning to the Bernheimer – Arnold connection, a few more pieces of background on the Zemans. As I mentioned, they had a tremendous delight in popular music, saw Broadway shows regularly, knew the lyrics of Lord knows, how many songs. They were easy to get along with on a superficial level and could be extremely funny (ha-ha funny). They loved food and up to a point were enthusiastic travellers. When David and Ratie’s family was still young, they summered near the Jersey shore on an inlet – a remarkable journey by two ferries (Brooklyn to Manhattan to NJ) and then by primitive auto perhaps. As with much else, there are photos in the attic to embellish all this but it was not much spoken of that I can recall.
As far as I know, neither the Samuels nor the heritage, the Zeman children, Fred, Dorothy and Evelyn – went to a reform Sunday school and were “confirmed.” Yiddish was absolutely a foreign language, Hebrew perhaps only a little less so. Years and years later when my father died, his funeral service at Campbell’s was led by the ultra – reformed Jewish Rabi Perelman of Temple Emanu – El who barely or not at all could say “Bar Mitzvah” as we asked, although that was the last time Father saw Paul – a scant three days before he died – a source of strange joy to the Rothkopf’s of Summit! My mother was speechless at Rabbi P’s ineptitude and almost laughed.
Many years earlier, Carrie Bernheimer, and Sigfried Arnold had two daughters, Madeleine Edythe (1895) and Marguerite Thekla (1897). Madeleine, my mother was a beauty from earlier childhood, which forever intimidated (and sometimes angered) her baby sister Margie, who weighed only about two pounds at birth and was cross – eyed until she had that corrected surgically when she was in her early 20s. If it is possible to reconstruct family life about which nothing was ever said directly, Madeleine was like her mother – stylish, compulsive, careful, determinedly self – educating, and sociable. Margie inherited her considerable artistic skills – both in school writing and design from her father whose occupation at home was painting near miniatures under a magnifying glass with a fine enamel’s hairbrush. All of the surviving examples of his work are comic some were copied from German humour magazines. Sigfried was a cotton broker and so travelled much in south – a pretty sad place in post-civil war years. Letters and cards to his daughters when he travelled were filled with humorous drawings. I particularly remember one of a black boy (then known as a pick - aninny), sitting on a club eating water - melon and spitting out the seeds.
By 1900, the Arnolds (with, I believe, Grandma Thekla Bernheimer) had moved to New York City to an apartment in Hortense Court – a building still standing on 96 (7th?) Street on the north side of the street between Madison and the fifth avenues. North of the street was not yet built up and my mother bought fresh vegetables at a marker where Mount Sinai Hospital was later built.
The apartment must have been reasonably large with at least three and possibly four bedrooms, a dining room, salon, kitchen, at least two bathrooms and probably a maid’s room. In my imagination, it is filled rather dark furnishings but nothing in the later homes of Madeleine and Margie really bears that out. I do know they had at least one Tiffany lamp with “multi-coloured” glass shade that the sisters got rid of when they moved out after their parents died – making me wonder what else later – to – be precise went. They did keep photographs and linens from the Munich store, as well as German books. “The piano,” which my mother disliked playing, also went in the big clean – out.
Before that, of course, they went to school – one of which, Miss Sach’s they attended till they were 17 or 18, forming along the way lifelong friendships and acquiring a pretty through grounding in literature and the arts (but no classical languages at science). The family were always patrons as in attendees of the Metropolitans Opera, (in MMA, I saw an early crowd photography taken there, including what I swear was Grandma Carrie.
Interestingly there was none of or little of popular culture as at the Zemans. It is not that they (the Arnolds) were necessarily culture snobs, but musical comedy and vaudeville were not in. My mother had a crush instead on the violinist Frits Kreisler and Margie collected among other things photographic cartes de vsiste of opera singers like Adelina Patti.
There must have been a streak of obsessive – compulsiveness in my grandmother and strongly in her daughter Madeleine but Margie slightly less so. Linen closets for example had towels folded in a certain way and aligned so a plumb line would not waver.
Every lingerie drawer had bags to hold garments and ribbons to hold other things in their place. Lovely flannel like covers went over it all. Sounds over the top but bear in mind that the city was sootier than it is now. Shelf-edging special hangers, shoe trees, velveteen – covered pillows for other show tips etc. were de rigour. It was one of Margie’s earliest paying jobs to make such accoutrements for women’s homes. She was fantastic needle woman and never could believe my impatient klutziness (separating silk threads – the mere though makes me quake), as Dorothy Zeman, a demon tapestry worker, found me also a disappointment. My mother’s triumph was to teach me how to knit (but it wasn’t easy for either of us). Meanwhile Margie could make lampshades and taught herself to upholster and make slip covers.
It came as a big surprise to me when Margie told me she had a such fierce night fears or “anxiety attacks” that they had to call in a physician to give her a shot to calm her down. Unusually, I understand, it was Dr Leopold Stieglitz and even om at least one occasion, the revered Dr A. A. Berg, who with his brother left money for the Berg Rare Book Library. (Later, it was A. A. Berg who took care of my grandmother Arnold when she had intestinal cancer).
Unlike the Zeman sisters, the Arnold sisters had no “higher” education. Margie, apparently, went to the Parsons and mother to secretarial school, although it was never clear aside from her stint at Dr Burrill office how much she really worked.
There were after all the trips to Europe every other year from time that they were very young to visit family and take assorted tours as family. The result was to make them extremely skilled linguists in German, French and to a lesser degree Italian. They knew the museums, opera houses, restaurants and landmarks very well by the time they were adults.
Famously (in Family Lore), at the outset of World War I, they were forced to flee via Rotterdam where they sorted their steamer trunks for some four years and found them unscathed at the end. Unimaginable now, I suspect.
There is a blank in my knowledge of the sisters’ lives in the early 1920s. My mother had met my father at Mt. Sinai (where she volunteered) in 1920 or thereabouts. He met her mother, Carrie, at least once before she died and found her “formidable” but as we know; my parents did not until June 14, 1928. The Ceremony was small, M&M’s apt (by now in the East 70s off Madison) and by the standards of the day, informal. (Remember, too, Prohibition was the law then).
Besides there was not a lot of money to throw at a wedding as my grandfather Arnold’s partner in the cotton factoring business was apparently somewhat crooked in his dealings with M&M and my father was not just getting established as a practitioner (and already on the staff of the Jewish Home and Hospital for the aged, and an adjunct at Mt. Sinai). They did manage a rather splendid wedding trip across Canada by train to Banff and Lake Lousie – to which impressive locales in Canadian Rockies they took me years later – by auto!
Margie sent my parents a telegram to Banff telling them that she had met a new and fascinating man, Captain Louis Henry Cohn, at a bridge party. A widower, the captain had born in 1888 in Brooklyn to a French mother (from Alsace originally) and American father. He grew up in Cleveland and worked at who knows what until he joined the Foreign Legion at the outset of world War I (later switching to regular French army and serving on general Margin’s staff). They did not marry until 1930 but he was clearly a hero to Margie – tall, handsome, a veteran who had lived in Paris until Annie, his wealthy first wife died, and was a certified Francophile. His ambition was to go into the book business. The House of Books, ltd came into being in October 1930 just as the Great Depression became deeper and deeper and they scarcely hung on – but that is another story.
When I was born and given the middle name Louise, Louis claimed it was a tribute to him. Not quite, especially as my parents view of him was always fraught. Father maintained that Louis’ best days were past (in the war) and that for all his Frenchified elegance he had boorish and unhealthy tendencies. In our Democratic household, the fact that he was a republican (even on the party’s city committee at one point), and did not switch his alliance until 1940, was decidedly not a plus. Years later, I heard that he was unkind and abusive to Margie – and occasionally walked out on her. In addition, he was a big eater, smoker (Gauloises), and drinker, thirteen heart attacks between 1940 ( the Scuttling of the French fleet at Toulon) and 1953 when he died, did little to alter his habits (which, of course, I scarcely knew then as he doted on me so I did not see all this clearly). The Cohn’s relative poverty and the sluggishness of the book business at first was mitigated in 1940s when Louis’ wife’s son (by her first marriage) died, leaving his estate to Louis. Now they (Cohns) became viveurs eating in tiptop restaurants (Brussels among others), travelling to Europe by ship in 1948, and so on. Even helping my family pay for my college. But that is truly getting ahead of the story.
My parents’ first apartment was at 38 East 85th Street. Mother was helping father set up his office at 111 Est. 88th Street when she went into labour with me. I was born at Park East hospital (on East 7th? St. later an apartment house) on 16 September 1929. Motherhood was a trifle different then as my mother was allowed to stay in the hospital for two weeks and had a baby nurse and cook – housekeeper – (Elsie Loch) to care for her and all of us.
A Motherly Missive
My first home was 38 East 85th Street (still standing the last time I looked). Have scarcely any memories of the apartment as we moved to 17 East 89th Street (Apt. 3C) in 32(?). Although I was exceedingly young, I had started at The Dalton School to which Elsie Loch (our housekeeper, my nanny, meine leibe Elsie) walked me (89th between Park & Lex) and from which she brough me home. Legend has it that for my first weeks at school, I would not take off my hat and coat (ready for flight), which did not keep the doorman at 38 E. 85 from calling me “The Little Scholar” (As the twig is bent?). Perhaps as importantly, when I first went to school, I spoke only German (resulting in an early report card averting that “Carol is beginning to mix English with her German). This linguistic flight was prompted, I believe, that my parents thought it was easier to learn a second language when very young. Neither of my parents was German – born but both spoke the language fluently (my mother because her father had been born in Germany and probably because it was a natural second language for her mother, came, born in Philadelphia to Thekla & Bernheimer, both German – born – and my father took German or Columbia College – when this was still considered a language of science and (culture untainted by later history). Leaving that aside for the moment, suffice it to say that I still think I know German – oh hilarity – and all but flunked in college. Not to mention my in-laws to be for whom my infantile Platt Deutsch was not quite the thing although your Pa thought I had a remarkable “verstand.”
Language hurdles aside, we moved to 89th Street “between Madison and fifth” – as my mother liked to say in 1932 or 1933. The apartment had seven rooms and three baths – a Depression era steal rent wise; I imagine. Anyway, it grieves me to this day that my parents bought it when it went to coop and sold it in the 1960s for Ca $30,000 and moved to 1036 Park Avenue. A strange early memory of the treat that I was given when the Madison Avenue trolley tracks were being torn up! As this shows, they would have made a big racket for little me!
Aside the large size of master bedroom, my bedroom, dining room, living room, kitchen – a sign of the times was the maid’s room, which had room for a single bed & bureau, a small window to a bathroom with ludicrous bathtubs in which ever – larger Elsie could scarcely have sat comfortably – if at all. It was used at our wedding to store bags of ice.
Anyway, before the war – life was comfortable and elegant. My mother called the grocer (Seldes) with her list, and they delivered. I have no memory of her ever carrying a bag of groceries. (This annoyed Margie – a perennial bag carrier – as can be imagined). Even the linen merchant (handkerchiefs, lingerie) came to the house with his wares. Needless to add, knife sharpness came to the space between 17 East and other buildings forming a dark interior square – as did the occasional hurdy gurdy players to whom I was permitted to throw carefully newspaper wrapped pennies from the window. I loved the sound of the Hurdy Gurdies.
Back to elegance, my parents had breakfast in bed on trays that had foldable legs. I had breakfast on a small table in my room. Father, of course, went to work, mother to board meetings, lunch with friends, and I of course, to school. The Elsie of that era prepared dinner which was eaten quite good style in the dining room with the uniformed maid serving – no bowls on the table. Candles lit, etc. I was not allowed to participate until I was at least six and then at first only with oil cloth under my chair for when I (invariably) dropped titbits. My participation was presumably designed to groom me for the adult world of adult conversations and eating nicely.
Sundays Margie to Louis came to supper – maid’s night off – of cold cuts, cheese etc. It was obviously far more relaxed, although in earlier days Louis was still violently anti – Roosevelt and huge fights were waged between him and my father. (LHC came round in 1940). I dimly recall being allowed to talk a bit and of being told allowed what “SOB” meant but never to use the expression (as LHC had). In the 1930s there were all family gatherings including grandma Ratie Samuels Zeman, great aunts Flora and Stella and Evelyn (Zeman) + Joe Beatman on a rare pre-war visit from Hartford where they lived. I have no recollection of seeing Dorothy (Zeman) until much later, but it is a fair guess as I have said earlier that she & mother did not get along very well and her hours at work may have interfered. These all – family events must have a focus – a birthday or Xmas but I don’t recall it exactly. After grandma Zeman died in 1936 they were much fewer and further between.
My mother’s gift for elegant parties was reserved for dinner parties and, of course, Christmas – her holiday – an annual triumph. We always had a ceiling – scratching Christmas tree with multi-coloured lights, German tree ornaments, and tinsel and angel hair. Before we opened our presents, mother put on a recording of “O, Tannenbaum.” The menu was fairly well fixed as well; champagne cocktails, beet ring filled with crabmeat (EZR’s favourite), followed by goose (or duck), red cabbage, potatoes, and some kind of Christmassy torte, fruits and nuts. The table was set perfectly (viz “Downtown Abbey”) and somehow there were women waiting in the kitchen and serving – on the holiday! (Remember it was the depression). This altered ever so slightly and gradually as time passed and the family shrank and grew – but mother always had a tree albeit increasingly small, the house always smelled wonderfully of pine and good food – and everyone dressed in their best – including latterly Paul and David in blue blazers! All this changed, of course, when the celebration moved to NJ and EZR forbade the Tree! – But the tradition of dressing up and gift exchanging went on – and the by then three older women – mother, Margie and Dorothy came and went by limo in their minks and sealskin coats. They scarcely spoke to one another – ah family! But all of us remember being hugged by women in deliciously scented fur, as well as we do their taking up their positions in different corners of the living room! But from stollen for Xmas morning breakfast to Buche de Noel, some traditions totter on.
But you’re Jewish, someone will say, German Jews, I must reply and almost fully “assimilated” in the vocabulary of sociologists- Americans, first, last and foremost. It was not until I went to “Sunday” School at Temple Emanu-El than I saw a menorah, then learned the blessing, and sometimes observed the tradition. (During the same “Sunday” school years, my mother gave several Seders – correct down to the last mitzvah but that was in retrospect – intended as a bow to heritage rather than through religious conviction. Indeed, when it came time for me to be “confirmed” note the reformed word, not Bar Mitzvah, my parents permitted me not to have a party (which in my view were vulgar and unseemly – the young social critic). Instead, we went to Scarsdale and had lunch with Dr Bill Harris, classmate of my father at Columbia and his girlfriend. Much better!
Be it noted that our origins – German – was never in doubt. German Jewish philanthropies were supported, e.g., Mount Sinai Hospital for the aged etc.
One knew that people with names like Buttenweiser, Sulzberger, and Lebenthal were ok but people with “skys” and “Jeck” were not quite ok. This just was how it was, and it was not until I went to college in Baltimore that it was spelled out for me by my “college mother” – a surrogate for each Jewish student because Jews had no opportunities to join sororities (they were banned entirely a few years later). My “mother,” Myra Good, was of course, of German origin and a fierce discriminator between the origins of Jews of German, Russian, Polish descent etc. When I started dating EZR, she inquired about his background minutely – Austrian being ok as German speaking to begin with. In Baltimore, the Goods took me to their German Jewish temple for the high Holy days. The hope of the house, Henry, was at Penn then in a German Jewish fraternity filled with bros from Baltimore. The seals were pretty tight and seemed to cut across the country as in Cincinnati, Birmingham etc.
I want really at this point to say a heartfelt “oy” but cannot quite leave the subject just yet.
The Zemans went to a temple – Sunday school in Brooklyn – without much of an impact. It seems to have been on a par with grand ME’s bowling league. My grandmother Arnold was virtually a founding member of the Ethical Culture Society as she had been formed out at NY when her father died, so in due course my mother took course in Judaism.
And while my mother was not enamoured of German relatives – she despised Hitler and rigorously assisted some of her Bernheimer relatives to come to the U.S in 1930s. They settled in Vermont as I recall and one son, horribly died in the battle of the Bulge under Patton. I met him once – a sweet guy. His mom and dad not so much as when seen they would say, “Bei uns war alles besser.” Probably as true as it was ungracious.
I can remember listening to the thriller on my radio but without much understanding – I was young! – And it really was not until the war was over that I and I guess countless other understood the Holocaust in all its ghast.
An aside here on my “wires” to the world: a wind – up alarm clock, a radio, my father and mother’s phonograph (which father liked to replace regularly with better models, which MAC thought techless as they kept their original 1930 radio forever). In other words – no TV (until DJR born), no computer, no phone or the like (as DJR says all those wires in the world and more are in the 1 phone). Instead, the radio was my companion – on which at age 10, I heard about the bombing at Pearl Harbor (father thought I was delirious when I told him as I had pneumonia) or alternatively listened to soap operas when sick and home from school – and later to popular music (all my mother’s bane). Small wonder the constant stimulator of today’s folk strikes me as a tad excessive (Just as my father scolded adult mother – wife – me for talking about the Ed Sullivan show in say, 1958). I did spend hours in high school to the point that I was given my own phone and number so father’s patients could reach him at SA – 2 – 7743! Which they did - around the clock. There was even one of our telephone extensions next to the dining room table – just in case. To E’s astonishment FDZ never took off his suit before nine to go to the bed. Scarcely surprising then to recall that he made house calls until his last day, save for several hours daily, see ambulatory patients in his office hours (111 East 88 St.)
What did we electronically deprived children do? We read & read and read, and we sledded in the park, roller skated. We took the usual lesson.
I had been given my own phonograph- wind up device in a kind of a box. Legend has it that at an early age I put two goldfish I had on the phonograph to give them a ride. Needless to say, I think someone made this story up and I am well and truly fed up with this bit of apocrypha.
What is true I have vivid memories (as David and Paul may) of hearing my father singing vigorously and well a song called “Krambombuli” when he shaved. [EN: It is a German student song and whose tune is being used to support troops in Ukraine] In a recent Google search I find there is a drink to go with it. My search revealed that it dated to Gdansk and is a drinking song. A cheerful song with which to begin the day.
One the earliest recordings I had was “The music goes round and round and comes out here.” Which I find dates to 1935 and what the adults in my family would have perceived as a hugely funny commentary on my photograph.
Another record was “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” More hilarity and also at “Bei Mir bist Du Schon.” which seems to have from a Yiddish musical comedy dating to well before the Andrew Sister’s version of the 1940’s. There follows a long history of listening to popular music on the radio, juke boxes and at dances. Or, hearing it played from sheet music by nimble fingered pianists like Dolph Mazur. Over time I must have had a decent record collection especially musical comedy.
The other less intellectual Zemans!
My mother tried to counteract all this by sending me on Saturday mornings to the Young People’s Concert of the Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. Of course, we heard “Peter and the Wolf” but surely were taught lessons so thoroughly absorbed I cannot evoke them singly save that. I am a music lover up to just post Presley – no rap, no thank you. Curious how lyrics stick in the brain and with appropriate prompting whole songs come back and operettas but not much that is terribly worthy as my mother may have hoped. But I once told her that Itzhak Perlman’s violin playing made me cry (almost unconsciously) and she confessed that Fritz Keisler’s playing had the same effect on her.
Meanwhile the star at “Krambambuli” listened to the radio in his car going from patient to patient but somewhere along the way learned whole chunks of Gilbert and Sullivan, and inevitably show tunes of which a favorite he broadly hinted was Mary Martin singing, “My heart belongs to Daddy” (in “Leave it to me,” 1938 and then “Love thy Neighbor” a 1940 movie or God Bless Wikipedia (which see for bawdy lyrics).
Swimming in the gene Pool
Thinking about this topic suggested by DJR, it is amazing who little I really know but on the something-is-better-than-nothing theory here goes.
Unsurprisingly the least information exists about the Rothkopf's two sisters were killed in the Holocaust [Editor’s note: There were three sisters. One may have survived and raised a family on Long Island. Max may have found out about this after he stopped talking to us.] They never left Grodzisko [EN: Two of the sisters married cattle brokers and settled in a market town not from Grodzisko called Oswiecim in Polish and Auschwitz by the Germans. The other, who may have survived was a haberdasher and may have employed Marcus at some point before the first world war.], presumably married there, had children, made a living as a farmer of some sort. Max, the younger of the two brothers Rothkopf of the grandfather generation, somehow got educated enough to read and write, know Hebrew enough to participate at temple, and got "the hell out of Dodge" before world war I [EN: He arrived on August 1, 1913 on the SS Patricia ]and settled in the metro NYC area where he met his wife-to-be, Sarah, and at some point moved to Danbury, CT where he established the Italian Importing Co. presumably for olive oil but almost certainly a cover for liquor in the prohibition era. This brought him into contact with some dubious types, but a native toughness protected him, and he prospered, building a house that Sarah contrived to fill with excesses of large dark velvet couches, drapes etc. Quite hideous, I thought, and it always smelled to me like chicken soup and brisket was being slowly cooked on the stove. Unappetizing in the extreme as was Sarah who was stupendously impressed with herself for a native-born (Oyster Bay, she claimed) English speaker as contrasted with her husband, brother-in-law et al, who spoke with accents. No issue from this marriage (thank God) as Sarah was almost certainly certifiably crazy and Max for all his money-making skills had his own problems - including such things as being phobic about driving across bridges. [ EN: It is almost certain that Sarah was infertile as according to 23 and me Max almost certainly had an illegitimate daughter with one of the workers in his liquor store. Speculation, is this is what Sarah held over Max for the rest of his life]
Sarah was evil, purely and simply. When she had nothing better to rave about, she would accuse Max of infidelity (with hindsight, I say, I hope so). She yearned to be all sorts of things she was not and would pull in facts to support her self-esteem, importance, from all over the place - thus when she heard FDZ was “attending" at Mt. Sinai, she offered up a sister (Dorothy?) a nurse there.
It will never be forgotten that she and Max arrived the night before David's Bar Mitzvah with a doll for Marissa bigger than that toddler she then was. She was in an absolute rage that she and Max were not staying at the house with us and could not believe no other family members were doing so. The Summit Hotel for all. She and Max must have had a huge fight before the Bar Mitzvah, but they did attend with Max doing responses too loudly. Her theme throughout was addressed to EZR was “You would not be here if it weren't for Max," which was true, of course, as he pulled strings (we were told) with same congressperson to get them in from Austria at the 11th hour in December 6, 1939. [EN: Max returned to Europe in 1936 and saw all of his siblings. My speculation is that he begged them all to come to the US. As a citizen he could sponsor them. However, the immigration quota for Poles was 12,000 per year and the waiting time was years. Marcus no doubt applied for the visa after his visit. There is no record of any other help from Max, but it is true without his sponsorship they would not have received a green card.]. In any case, they left after the ceremony - a relief to the rest of us - including Max's sainted sister-in-law, EZR's mom, Jenni.
My personal "war" with Sarah had started years earlier when E and I went to the "store" to invite them to our wedding. She immediately went ballistic - how could you get married on a Thursday, do you expect us to close the shop to come? Ranting for a long time from behind a barricade of liquor bottle mixes - repeatedly reminding EZR what he owned her (& Max). It was awful but I always remember the extraordinary kindness of Jenni and especially Markus - who knew full well what Sarah was. Vividly recall grandpa R going out to buy some ice cream to cheer me up (actually, alas, gave me a stomachache). Anyways, we were spared having the Max - cs at the wedding which really suited us all very well. How to explain her with her dirty diamonds, Mamie Eisenhower bangs, ugliness of looks and behavior.
Grandpa R did not come to the U.S with Max but perhaps stayed behind to help with the farm. He had, I suspect, no schooling - was illiterate (not unique then) but made up for it with a kind of native intelligence and shrewdness. He was conscripted in the Austrian army [EN; At the beginning of WW1 Marcus was 26 years old. He had no doubt about being conscripted when he turned 18 as military service was mandatory. However, it is unlikely that he was conscripted in the early stages of the war. I believe it is far more likely that he took his brother Max’s place who would have been nineteen at the start of the war], was taken captive by the Russians and imprisoned until 1919 [EN. 1921]subsisting chiefly according to his story, on onions. He returned to Vienna by a circuitous route out of Vladivostok through the Suez Canal to London (where I believe he almost stayed)[ EN Not sure of the origin of this story. I do know that he landed in Trieste, not London, and returned to Vienna. He may have made it to London at another time but that is lost in the ether.] and at last back to Vienna where in due course he found work in a bristle factory and was briefly married to a woman name Ema (hence Ernst) who died untimely. He met Grandma Jenni, impregnated her and they were somehow married in June 1925 - making EZR "legitimate" [EN: EZR birthdate was 12/28/25]
While EZR was almost from the first seen as very clever, a neat prodigy, the economic and then the political stresses of the time were heavily burdens EZR's early addiction to reading (if not equally to school work) apparently occasionally enraged his father who would come home from work (where I believe he often had to stand in water) [EN: Marcus worked in an abattoir, a slaughter house that was four miles away from where they lived. When the Nazi’s arrived he was no longer allowed to take the tram and had to walk each way everyday.] and (according to E's cousin Lizzi) would take his hand and sweep E's books onto the floor.
Conditions in the third floor walk-up Ottakringerstrasse 48 were cramped to put it mildly. Bathroom for 3rd floor tenants were communal at the end of the hall. A honeypot was kept in the kitchen for overnight issues. One large room with stove top, icebox, a curtained off bed for M & J and two chairs pushed together for EZ to sleep on. At one-point EZ was so malnourished he had to be put in the hospital (shared a bed with a relative who had typhoid fever) - but clearly recovered and always had a very healthy respect for food.
I believe they had been trying for some time to get out of Austria when EZ had the excellent idea of immigrating to Israel for which he had developed a passion, his father would have none of it, decreeing "when we go, we all go together." They did it but it was a close-ness thing, up to and including the fact that Jews were prohibited from attending school in E's last year in Vienna. [EN: No Jewish children were allowed to go to High School. The Nazi’s had told all the Jews in Austria, get out or bear the consequences. EZR and his friends who had no school went from embassy to embassy whenever they heard of visa applications being offered. EZR was also a Zionist (Zaki ben Mordecai) and applied to them for an immigration to Israel to be a Kibutznik. He was ready to go when his father put a kibosh on it. In 1987 when he and I went to Israel together he told me that one his life regrets was not being a kibbutzim. From then on whenever I wanted to touch his soul, I called him Zaki.]
All this overlooks the sainted Jenni Hess Rothkopf who said truly and often "Gott was wir haben durchgemacht in meinem leben." [EN: God what we've been through in my life.] An understatement actually as she was the child of Leopold Hess's third wife (thus one of total 13] along with her beloved sister Sidi and three brothers [EN: Karl who died during WW1, Heinrich who was murdered in camp, Ede who survived the war but whose wife was murdered] They were born in a town in Hungary set aside for Jews called Sopron. Jenni did go to school, could read and write, and was taught some skills at a "technical" school in Vienna. When her mother followed her father into the hereafter, Jenni was sent to live with some members of this very large family in Vienna where in due course she got some kind of needle work job and obviously, met Marcus. [ EN: CZR has this completely wrong. Jeni was sent off because her mother could not afford to care for all five of her children. She went to live with Rosa’s sister Josephine (Pepi) who lived in Farafheld and EZR always considered his grandmother. She went to the orphan’s school when she became old enough to learn a skill. Moved back to Sopron during WW1 and lived there until Rosa’s death in 1920. Following that she moved to Vienna to live with her half-brother Robert. (Her sister Sidi married and moved to Säo Paulo - had twin sons and then grandchildren who Paul and Marissa have met on visit to Brazil).
Sad aside: EZ offered Jenni a trip to Brazil for a reunion with Sidi with whom she had been corresponding by then for about a half-century. J said, "No, I could not bear to be separated from her again" - which, for me, just about sums up the whole damnable history (including the chapter about the Horthy revolution in Hungary, which she recalled vividly).
When they moved to the U.S (8 Delay St. Danbury - the downstairs half) with two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and large bathroom, she must have wondered at the change in her life. But it was not EZ street (aside from the pun). J went to work at a dress factory and zealously to night school to learn English. As soon as EZ finished high school, he went to the summer session at Syracuse, then the Army, UCONN, Marriage etc. So, her beloved son was not much more than a visitor there (upon, when she could, she would lavish great care - even ironing his pajamas, as I recall).
Offsetting the presence of the evil Sarah (now as Guide to All things American) was the fact that her cousin Mizzi and husband Alfred moved into the top floor of 8 Delay Street. In due course, came her Mizzi is Walter Kurth, a little older than Dad, but who had been a guiding light in Vienna. Walter and his wife, tiredly moved to a suburb of Chicago where they become quite rapidly Americanized, joining a bridge club, buying a dryer that played "How dry I am" at the appropriate time and in the fullness of real time had a daughter, who in her turn married an African-American of whom little or I guess, known was said.[EN: The daughter, Sylvia Billups, lives in Florida, has a son and is a diehard Cleveland Browns fan.]
Aside, Walter was a victim of Hitler in many ways - not least that he put a period to Walter's ambition to become a doctor. Instead he joined (if memory serves) the British Army and at war's end went back to Vienna to get married to Trudy (a gentile) - and as we have seen, came to the USA, his mother Mitzi and step father (Albert) moved out of Illinois to be near Walter and Trudy - a sort of sunset moment (although personally found Walter a truly nice person - wise and witty, at least from what I could see, utterly accepting of what life dealt him, which clearly was not how it seemed in his youth when he was going to become a physician and EZR and lucky, some kind of scientist).[ EN: Walter was arrested on Kristallnacht and was sent to Dachau. He was pardoned and told to get out of Greater Germany. He went back to Vienna to collect his mother who had already fled. He eventually made it to Italy and from there, somehow to Egypt, where he enlisted in the British Army. I believe he was then captured by the German’s and lived in a number of Stalags eventually ending up in the Italian Alps. There he met Trudy and according to family lore happened to run into EZR who recognized his bottom. We have pictures of that meeting]
Looking back at EZ's parents I see stoicism and sturdiness. Jenni did piecework at the dress factory until she was well up in her 60s, not least because it brought in some money (social security and pension eligibility) but also a way out of the house and provided the sociability of the workplace. Markus, on the other hand, retired happily right on schedule and aside from a short-lived job as a parking lot cleaner (the lot was next door to 8 Delay St.) could usually be found pottering in their behind they have garden, sitting on the porch, or by the radio in the kitchen and staring out of the back door thinking about God knows what. JFK's assassination hit him very hard. Literally wept over it - perhaps because it was a sign that America was not quite paradise.
When Jenni finally retired, she kept herself diverted (unto her last day) with two soap operas she followed daily for years and reading paperbound romances in German.
It seems to me looking back that their happiest hours were visiting us at our various locales - Champaign - Urbana, Denver, Poestenkill, and the first Berkeley Heights - Jersey address while there were not exactly my dreams of visitors. Jenni was really helpful and within her limits a good cook (she did not like housekeeping) her standards Wiener Schnitzel, fried potatoes, and a really good cucumber salad - may still bring a tear to the then young was who ate them. As long as he was able, Markus pottered in our gardens too - once cutting back my Mother’s Day lilac to such a degree it had a real struggle to come back the next year.
After Markus died in July 1966 quite suddenly of some kind of respiratory disorder (he had smoked cigarettes from boyhood, I think), we asked Jenni to move down either with us or near us. She did not want that, although she continued her extended visits. Sarah, for once usefully benevolent found her an apt, in a kind of 'seniors' development near a lake in Danbury - quite an improvement over 8 Delay Street, except that she was lonely - dass allien sein isx furchtbahc - despite friendships of a sort with some neighbors.
Her feet always troubled her, and she had very bad varicose veins in her legs (which my father forecast would kill her - as indeed a thrombosis took her silently one night - (10 Feb 1979) apparently enroute to the loo as she was found on the floor of her apartment. At her funeral service Sarah, ever entrancing, screamed out "Jenni, O Jenni."
My mother hearing of J's death like something out of a Greek melodrama said, un-self - "I will be next" - she was despite my protest.
A brand of warfare broke out because every time on a visit to Danbury would place the traditional stones on his parents’ gravestones, Max or Sarah would sweep them off, leading E finally to glue them in place!
It seems to me in retrospect that Markus was an amazing survivor, suggesting that a lot of fresh air, low to no cal. diet and exercise (without it being so-called) are as beneficial as advertised. His only real vice was tobacco, and the one shot of schnapps a day surely did no harm. Jenni, similarly, aside from being a little overweight, was the inadvertent beneficiary of what is today touted as ideal - leaving aside the difficulties of speaking a second language learned at night school in her 90s and all that went with being "a stranger in a strange land." The Rs marriage most assuredly was no valentine, but they stood together through dreadful and decent times. They absolutely doted on David and Paul, and then Jenni, alone D & P and Marissa. Grandpa R loved it when he could still take DJR out in the stroller (this chiefly in Denver and to a local bakery where I was told he had a "flirt" with the lady behind the counter.
It should be added that Jenni, unlike my mother, liked little kids and was always able to lend a hand as once in Denver when the washing machine broke down leaving me with few clean diapers for DJR, J scraped and then baled them clean (Disposables were still undreamt of or at least marketed).
Jenni was not (nor wad Markus for that matter) an especially "up" kind of person (nor why would one expect them to be) but Jenni surpassed herself the day before Marissa was born by telling me of women who died in childbirth that she personally had seen in their caskets.
Aside from Max, Markus had no family in the U.S but a fair number of Jenni's relatives did come, aside the Kurths, the most notable were Benno F Lini Hacker, parents of Elisabeth (Lizzi) Cook, while D & P did not enjoy the Hackers' baby-sitting once we took a long overdue vacation, their story is quite remarkable.
Benno, (a cheerful man, a gambler, may be a bit of boozer) worked for a relative with a furniture store in Vienna before being carried off to a concentration camp from which he escaped and somehow attached himself in some capacity to the British army in Italy (thus mysteriously being able to wave (take with the Rs on their train enroute to Genoa).[EN: Similarly to Walter he was paroled from Dachau and told to leave Greater German.] Lizzi had been sent (age 12-13) to stay with a family in Brussels and with them walked across Europe to Spain and embarkation to Jamaica where were interned until the end of the war, gradually making their way to NYC where Lizzi met and married Alfred (Freddy) Cook, a Dutch émigré and together they produced three girls - Lizzi's mother, Lini, spent the war in Vienna using borrowed papers proclaiming her to be gentile - and, according to her telling, sleeping somewhere different every night, including in the 'red light' district (now a haven for antiquarians booksellers as I recall).
My first visit to Vienna was in 19 - was not the gilded and glitzy city of today. The Viennese we saw including family and Markus's purported "mistress" were in a fury still at the four - part occupational of the city that had lasted well into the 1950s and fearing such outrages as peasant Russian soldiers washing their feet in bidets etc. They did not seem to "get" the connection between Hitler and what came after. All now seemingly truly forgotten as the fountains burble schlagobers to a 3/4-time melody.
It remains only to note that E's best friend in his youth, Paul Grosz, also stayed in Vienna during the war as was only half Jewish. Then, aside from continuing on with his father's fur business, Paul ascended to become a leader of the Viennese Jewish community. He married Henni (who had somehow gotten to Israel and back after serving in the Israeli army). Their daughter (husband, child) shares the parental home on the Obersteinergasse in Dobling (Vienna) and as I recall has a career in computing. Their son became a "real" Jew, moved to Israel, married some kind of a Rothschild connection and became so ultra-orthodox as to send his mother, Henni, off into fits. She especially hated how her then little granddaughters were totally covered by clothing - long sleeves, stockings etc. Paul did not seem as upset by this, but it was hard to tell as Parkinson's disease finally overtook him. Amazingly though E & Paul remain friends to the end (2009/2012) - calling on one another's birthday, visiting when possible, and only occasionally writing to each other.
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Further recollections:
E only learned of Max's death when he went to pick a headstone for his mother and the mason asked him if he was related to Max . . . [EN: Max died in April 1979, Jenni in February]
By the time he went to check that the stone for his mother had been put in place, he saw that Sarah had been buried as well. He called me singing, "The witch is dead, the wicked witch is dead." He learned somehow that she had become obviously demented, drove her car through the garage and had to spend her last days at a home for the aged.
It should be noted that she had long believed that she had been destined for a career as a lawyer and spent some of her last years as a head of the Danbury Taxpayers Association - a kind of early incarnation of the Tea Party. Strangers who knew us and had some family in Danbury sometimes asked if we were related - yes but, thank God, not in the gene pool!
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Sometime in this century, I saw one of those horrible stories on the TV about a family of say eight being killed in a ghastly accident with only one baby surviving. I asked EZR how she could live on knowing that she was the only one who had escaped, and he replied, "She will always believe herself to be a survivor" - as he himself must have done - having come out of Austria, surviving the Army in wartime unscathed, and paying as little as possible attention to his health (save for exercising) as possible. This despite the fact that he had a pretty severe of psoriasis most of his adult life, was increasingly deaf (a family disorder on the Hess side), lost the sight to one eye in a butchered cataract operation, and latterly was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (1999-2000) and then with the one set of renal failure. At one low point in the lymphoma treatment, he said to me, "Am I going to die?" And I replied, "of course not" and he didn't go on to teach, research and write (chiefly on learning) for almost another decade. He got himself to TC/Columbia graduations somehow to 2009, I recall, he despised any hint of weakness or dependency which made his last years of confinement particularly difficult. He also carried on a kind of running war with the medical profession (including my father) as he felt himself to be a scientist and they, largely practitioners of an art - thus he stayed informed about his afflictions by use of computer searches and was accordingly disposed to feel he & the MDs were on equal footing.
They were not, of course, but his judgment was often sound. After he fell in the bedroom in the middle of the night in 2010 and could not get up, even with my help, EMS came and took him to Overlook where he was poked, prodded, X rayed, tested and treated. It was concluded that his fall was related to his known condition-spinal stenosis-and he should have surgery to repair his upper spine. Shortly thereafter, a neurosurgeon appeared, and surgery was scheduled and performed. The surgeon, Dr. Knightly, assured Me that within six months he would be walking as easily as a young man. This turned out to be one of the great medical mis-prognostications. When at the end of six months, E visited Dr. K’s office it could be a year because of his age, but it would happen. It did not. And E spent the rest of his life calling Knightly all kind of things like Kingly (sneering) and regretting that he had not followed his own usually cautions inclinations. (If all surgeons think they are demigods, neurosurgeons do not think in such half measures-and, considering their line of work how else could they not and function at all.)
Aside here: After the fall in 2010 and various related and not clearly related problems, E was hospitalized at Overlook in Summit, for rehab in what I shall always call Berkely Hardware…a horrible place, and the Kessler Institute, a great facility that ultimately felt they could do more for him. Finally, he was at Runnells, a Union County facility, until it was decided being at home was the best therapy. Then, after his kidney failure diagnosis, he cycled between the third floor of our home and the dialysis facility in Cranford .
E’s belief in his own judgement over physicians, bolstered by the Knightly misadventure, played a role in his decision in late June 2012 to stop dialysis. Dialysis involved not only tubes and fresh “liquids” but being schlepped by ambulance to dialysis center and home again,-which might take half a day depending the availability of ambulances and the willingness of nurses to nag for drivers to come on his behalf. He tried not to look at the other patients being treated- a truly bleak and disheartening scene. Mostly he went by himself and tried to sleep through the porceedure. Towards the end, he was sometimes so exhausted by the time he got home that the aides and I could hardly get him to eat. But he never really complained except to protest when the ambulance drivers bounced him up and down the stairs from the bedroom and back again. Almost to the end he read the NY Times and watched CNN and other TV. A survivor indeed until he decided not to be after one too many trips to the hospital and dialysis.
He lived by what I think he perceived as a Hemingway-esque code of manliness.
It is best exemplified by his determination not to “spoil” a trip we took to London and Paris in the early 2000s. He discovered a sore on his great toes while we were still in London but flatly refused to go to an ER in the hospital near our hotel in Bloomsbury. On to Paris, more swelling, soaking but still adamant about going to the hospital. When we got home it looked discolored, but he would not go to the doctor until next AM. Once there he was operated on immediately and the gangrenous great too removed. An ounce of prevention might - well never mind. This story really indicative of a strong belief in being a survivor.
In terms of his education, the early parts were pretty well messed up and he taught himself a lot of things so that when he got to Danbury, they did know quite what to make of him as his English was learned at double features (as two movies for the price of one were once offered) and he clearly had genuine math skills. (There is the almost apocryphal story of having a teacher call him to do a problem on the blackboard to which he responded silently doing the sum in his head. Just as the teacher was about to lunge at him with the answer, he said it aloud. The teacher was flummoxed of course.)
Finally settled in high school, he seems to have done well but had what now seems exceptionally little guidance. According to his telling, he applied to Syracuse because he liked the color of their catalogue, noting later that by the criterion he could have applied to Harvard. By starting in August, he got the best part of (?) Years completed when he was drafted into the army. He was deployed in the European Theater of Operations seeing actions with the 88th infantry division with the north artillery of Rome and as far as Trieste (where the bitter fighting between Communists and non-Communist mobs left a lasting impression - about the danger of mobs. Once when in NYC opposite the Waldorf, where Pres. Nixon was staying, D, P, I and E were threading our way opposite on Park through a demi-mob of anti Nixonians. E alarmed enough to pull us away from the glass-fronted banks/stores - for fear of our being shoved into the glass. [ EN: EZR finished his freshman year in college by the time of his 18th birthday in December of 1944. He applied for a deferment to complete his sophomore year and entered the Army in September 1944. He completed basic training in January 1945 and from there the story gets fuzzy. He may or may not have been involved in the recovery of the Crown of St. Stephen from May-July 1945. He graduated OCS August 4, 1945 and was sent to Italy in late November 1945]
He completed his service in 1947 and went back to Syracuse to finish work for his B.S degree (1948). He went directly from Syracuse to University of Connecticut at Storrs to work towards his degree in Psychology, chiefly under David Zeaman & Albert Liebermann. In those far-off times Storrs was not getting started - or rather becoming more than a school. Quonset huts were abundant, dorms and classrooms not so much. The simplest way to describe the kind of psychology E studied is to stress how un-Freudian/Jungian it was. Stimulus - response theory and more scientific/mathematics based proofs were the more rigorous order of the day, summed up forthrightly as Experimental Psychology. A highlight for E at Storrs was having his own rat lab - his own experimental animals which gave him the feeling that he was truly contributing directly to science.
It was at Syracuse that rather surprisingly joined a fraternity, Tau Epsilon Phi, and made a great many friends - chief among them Norty Speck, the son of a suit manufacturer in NY who helped clothe E. Norty went on to work at Dixie and gradually disappeared from our lives despite having been best man at our wedding.
When he got his PhD in 1952, the job market for experimental psychologists (perhaps also from less “Ivy” Ed schools) was not good - which was too bad as E & I were to be married at the end of August. At almost the last moment the Air Research Development Command of the U.S Air Force came through with a job in Belleville Illinois but almost immediately changed that to Chanute Air Force Base outside of Champaign Urbana, Illinois. On the way after a two day "honeymoon" in Bermuda, we went to the Annual American Psychological Association meeting in Washington, DC to meet E's boss-to-be, Wilbur Ray, a nice enough man who I recall as a kind of professional government employee/Psychologist (Had a terrifically nice wife, Dorothy - together you felt you could put them down anywhere & they would warmly "fit in".)
Aside - one night in Belleville revealed that the excitement downtown was a jewelry store with a lit display that went round and round. But the food on the Air Force base was great, esp. the doughnuts. Moving almost without needing to unpack to Champaign, we discovered the existence of one - movie theater, one (terrible gooey sweet - sauced) Chinese restaurants, and sidewalks that surely were rolled up at night, which we could tell as we moved from one furnished place to another (More of my giant career firsts elsewhere). He commuted at least ten miles to work at Chanute Air Force Base each day and years later told me he had disliked his job so much he would have quit if he had not become the breadwinner. Fellow psychologists are not to his standard as I recall (one who had written his doctoral dissertation on learning to typewrite) but we did acquire a great many friends through my work and best of all in 1955 became parents of David!
No sooner had this highlight of our lives Illinois taken place than E was transferred in May 1956 to ARDC (Air Research and Development Command) at Denver, specifically Lowry AFB (Air Force Base) at Aurora, then outside the city. It was a technical training center therefore close to E's interests. While most of his fellow civilians lived in Aurora, E found a house for us on what was then almost the edge of Denver, so he had once again a car commute. (Denver then, not now, was still a “frontier" itself, no smog, gorgeous views of the Rockies, etc.) E was content at Lowry - and productive, including in 1957 becoming a father again - to Paul.
Perfection until "Engine" Charlie Wilson uttered the immortal words, "Basic research is the bunk." As Secretary of Defense under Eisenhower he was heeded by the Budget-minded and E had once again to look for a job, which he got at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY on the strength of his professor at UCONN of Dave Zeaman's link to George Bousfield (...of UCONN) at RPI. Just as Denver was then on the fringes of paradise, RPI and Troy barely recovered from the Depression. RPI was the distinguished school, and it did provide E with a professorship and students - and the lowest annual salary upon which we ever subsisted. One of E's entertainments was measuring a fissure in his building (Proud Hall?) that was visibly growing - leading him to expect the buildings collapse imminently. He was also not best pleased to find a bar in the men's room or to watch the overhead lights in his lecture hall shimmy (they crashed one night, thankfully not on a student or the professor).
Our home there was in Poestenkill, outside Troy, so once again E's home and work were separate, requiring daily car commutes. No memorable students (they were at RPI to learn to be engineers after all) and no great inducement to hang around if something better could be found.
Cannot remember how it happened but, in the summer of 1958, E was invited to apply for a job at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. He got the job, and our entire lives underwent a change for the better. The labs were then and until 1984 (and the Judge's Greene injudicious decision to break up the telephone system) was a major center of innovative science (the being the most often cited example then).
There was always some perplexity about why BTL would support basic psychological research - but the answer was quite simple - the aim was to improve and expand training of telephone personnel who numbered what amounted to a large size university system in "enrollment," halcyon days in a totally inspiring environment. E liked being able to go down the hall and walk into, say, a physicist’s office and talk; indeed, the caliber of the men and women at the labs then was high and easily on a par with any good university. E got a staff, a lab of his own (Human Learning - Property Learning and Instructional Development) and was for years highly productive (never forgetting that it was here that he coined the word "mathemagenic" as in mathemagenic behaviors or behaviors that conduce to learning). By the end of these highly productive years E must have published nearly eighty percent of his "learned papers" in highly respected Journals, traveled to and spoken to learned (mainly psychological) associations and societies all over the world (save Africa), was an adjunct prof at NYU and Rutgers, participated in such excursions as "programmed instruction" and continued to make his kind of psychology as rigorously scientific as possible. Except in his unabashed adoration of Marissa who "joined" the home team in March 1967 to universal delight, it is impossible to summarize just over a quarter of a century's labors in psychology without reference to the published work, but lists exist for the curious. And, even to this day I am seen as a little more worthy because I was married to a man who was so long at BTL. Way, way back when he first accepted the job at BTL, my father was especially chuffed because his lawyer and best friend's son-in-law already worked there. E was now Ok!
Note: He could walk from home to work - an ideal set up at last. This ended abruptly in 1984 with the Judge's decision and one of the first things higher management curtailed was "soft science" research.
His appointment as Dodge Professor of Telecommunications and Education is a "chair" in the psychology department at Teachers College, Columbia University was, in fact, a happy outcome of a bad situation because E now had students - and students who were working for MAs and PhDs as TC was a postgraduate institution. Because the students and Professor R met only after normal day school hours (many students were already teachers looking to improve their situations) the academic life turned out to be less collegial than E hoped - and had experienced at BTL. But at TC he also had a lab where he could continue actual learning research with real students and degree candidates - and, in due course, a number of PhDs that he had guided (this disappointment with those who fell by the wayside, quit, and was palpable). While collegiality and conviviality were not great, the NJ - NY commute made this final job perhaps the most tiring, leading to only a few days a week in situ. When he reluctantly accepted Emeritus Status in 2005, he continued to see dawdling PhD students of his and, of course, to pursue his own research. He never stopped working in reality.
When he was not working as a scientist, he wrote poetry and fiction - notably his endlessly reworked saga of the adventures of Hughie and Tad who built a raft to escape Vienna in wartime by going down the Danube. Alas, only one of his poems was ever accepted by Bernard Stone as a Turret Books broadside for publication. The Danube saga survives only in revisions - one of which did get the heroes as far as the Black Sea after innumerable adventures. E also liked to draw and paint at which he became quite good. Not quite but almost a Renaissance man. [EN: The basis of PDR’s book Tomahawk and Crown was the Hugie and Tad tale embellished to lean into EZR’s real part in the recovery of the Crown of St. Stephen that he only revealed after he had stopped dialysis. And then, reluctantly claiming that it was classified which in fact it was]
As an all - rounder, he was something of an athlete beginning as a competitive runner in high school; second string at Syracuse football (in wartime as he always pointed out); good amateur tennis player, and a scuba diver (with PDR) and snorkeler mainly in warm Caribbean waters.
While he enjoyed music, his success was blighted at the outset when a gymnasium (Viennese school) teacher said he could stand with the chorus but must not sing. In the same vein, his mother was told she should not waste money on violin lessons.
An undervalued talent was an ability to sleep anywhere anyhow which he attributed to time spent next to artillery and a hereditary disorder he called "the Hungarian disease."
Addena EZR
Smoking:
In his 20s - 30s E smoked Craven A cigarettes, which came in a cardboard box unlike such run of the mill cigarettes as Camels and were, if memory serves, harder to find at ordinary shops and were more expensive.
At some point he gave up cigarettes and switched to small cigars called Schimmelpenninck that also came in a small looking container of beige tin.
When he gave these up, he smoked the occasional pipe - rather professionally or Sherlock Holmes like - but it required a fair amount of equipment and fussing and pipes faded from use rather quickly as I recall, to be replaced by the rare small cigar. Besides, smoking was increasingly under attack and restricted to certain areas. The "smokes" he seemed to like/want the most were after dinners and when all else failed he would take one of my or someone's cigarette but almost immediately said the equivalent of "ban" - just as well for me when I stopped smoking and especially pleasing to Marissa who had long waged as an anti-smoking campaign (refusing, for example, to come in the kitchen when smoking was in progress).
In any event, E's choice of tobacco products seemed always to be consciously image-related - a bit more "le" end out of the ordinary.
In a similar vein, he was an early investor in Burberry trench raincoats of which he ultimately owned, successively, three. And there were escorts on his tie rack and Clark shoes in his closet. Curiously, the Viennese upper classes fancied such British things, so the trend is possibly clear.
His enthusiasms for Arab Jalabas were quite simple - they were comfortable at home wear and could be put on/off in one swoop.
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Marissa remarked that it was strange that E never used his training as an animal experimentalist with our cats. But he did - starting with a cat we were asked to keep one summer in Champaign - Urbana who E trained to respond to the command "Find Ulysses" by placing a piece of bologna on the top of the book on the shelf with other books. Cannot now recall if that cat managed to do this ever without the "bait" but he did very well in the bologna - inspired hunt.
Blame it on Rio 