Ben Finler's Reminiscences

Ben Finler’s Reminiscences

My Family

They came to the US in the 1890s with 4 boys and 2 girls. Pop was born in 1885 and died in 1970. He learned English at the Educational Alliance on East Broadway a kind of settlement school.

Names were Americanized. My father’s parents were Sholem and Yenta from Plotsk in Poland. He was Haim Mordecai, changed to Harold. My mother’s parents were Joel and Rahel (Swirsky) Liberchein from Odessa via Moscow. They never talked about life in the old country, except for an occasional reminiscence about living far back on a farm.

My father’s jewelry shop was at 35 Graham Ave [Williamsburg section of Brooklyn]. We lived at 52 across the street in 8 room cold water flat. I recall the kitchen lit by gas mantles and then the change over to electric. Few people had phones. The phone would ring in the corner drugstore and some kid would skip over to the building where someone was wanted on the phone (in exchange for a 3 cent tip). Our phone number was Pulaski 5814.

Our apartment:

None of us did household chores but Sid & I took turns after school in the store where we would do homework. This is where I lived age 5 to 14 – in a cold-water flat, typical of that time—with plenty of space. When the area turned Black after World War II, it most likely housed 4-5 Black families but I can’t recall the first time I saw a Black family in Brooklyn – maybe never

When pop needed one of us in the store, he’d hurry across the street and ring twice on the doorbell at the street entrance. This bell was a new thing on our block. It so fascinated the little kids that they’d sneak over, push the bell and dash away as though they’d played a Halloween trick.

My pop was bright enough to have studied law or some other profession--standards then being much less stringent. Instead he worked in a jewelry factory where he met my Zayde, who introduced him to his daughter Bessie. They married around 1906. Zayde set up pop in a jewelry shop in Williamsburg: Liberchein and Finkelstein. Pop had a gift of gab but no skill for merchandise. Zayde and Baba lived with us. His pay envelope kept the business going until he was shot by a holdup man who tried to rob the shop in 1924.

This was a boom time and pop moved into larger quarters with a watchmaker partner in the building housing our biggest local vaudeville film house, Fox Folly – also on Graham Ave, our central commercial street. My parents were more literate than most of our neighbors. In the local hierarchy, my friends were generally the sons of other tradesmen. Economic improvement created a constant cycle of relocation: from Williamsburg to more genteel areas like Flatbush, Bensonhurst, Boro Park - as we did in 1925 when we bought a two family in a shabby block of East New York.

This was an area where streets tapered off into dirt roads, where one recognized Italian settlers by the grapevines and tomato plants, often below street level as though they’d gotten there before the street. They held an annual festival for Saint Joseph or San Gennaro—as in GODFATHER II.

Childhood Days

All my teachers were Irish spinsters. Williamsburg had been respectable Irish-German; was now invaded, (after 1900), by Jews and Italians crossing the Williamsburg Bridge from the East Side. Williamsburg bordered on Bushwick and Greenpoint where Italians and Germs were jostled by Italians (Puzo country) and Poles. I guess our teachers had not been prepared for this invasion by a strange tribe hungry for knowledge - neat, clean, well-behaved and no discipline cases. The report card each month was formed for “effort, proficiency, and deportment”—A to D. Not as repressive as it sounds. Nor more than the Boy Scout’s Law: “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal…clean and reverent.” Jewish ma’s suspected the Scouts of militarism and there were no Girl Scouts.

None of us talked Yiddish. Its survival assured however by the colorful language that slowly crept into the spoken and printed text, literature, theatre, press. The memoirs and fiction of Jews growing up, say, in Boston (Theodore White) or Montreal (Richler) show many similarities – such as passion for education and the upward mobility—group as well as individual. But NY and New Yorkers are different to this day. The proof is that NY still draws and absorbs into its Jewish mores the best talent of the nation—for better or worse.

We did nothing for Halloween. But for some odd reason, on Thanksgiving, kids would arm themselves with slats from egg crates, chalk them up and go around slapping each other and any other kids with the chalking. You may recall that Til always said that Thanksgiving meant more to her than Christmas.

New clothes were bought, of course, for the Jewish New Year, which was close to the reopening of school – or for Passover. We stayed home for Jewish holidays. But I can’t recall whether there was such a thing as winter or spring vacation. And when fall term ended, Jan 31, spring term began the next day, Feb 1.

When Sid was about 5, Zayde took him down into a dark dismal basement, where an old rebbeh aught him the aleph-bet and Torah and prayers by rote. It didn’t take. Next pop took him (very likely two or three years later) to a mostly girls school where Hebrew and Torah were taught in English translation. Seymour and I also went there later on. Not much of it stuck with us because, as I see it now, to learn a foreign language it is essential early on to engage in constant conversation—dealing with everyday topics—a weakness here in Israel. I’d learn the language fast enough if no one talked English.

We gradually stopped observing Jewish tradition – the most people still called a rabbi was to marry or bury them and the Brit-mailah and Bar Mitzvah persist as family ceremonials. We took no interest in Palestine – until Hitler came along.

The Nazi & Fascist explosions reminded us, if we’d forgotten, that for 2,000 years we’d had to protect ourselves from hostile hosts and neighbors; forbidden to own land and to practice crafts dominated by the guilds. Enforced self-sufficiency made survival possible. Liberation from the ghetto and political and economic revolutions motivated intellectual, artistic, and academic achievements – always paralleled by dissent and rebellion, from Marx to Trotsky. There is no such thing as a typical Jew – whether banker, Zionist or revolutionary. And though we voted Socialist, a Jew knew that he had to work for a living and educate himself – you got nothing for nothing.

We were allowed sacramental wine under Prohibition and my Zayde enjoyed a jigger of schnapps after dinner. But the rum-running and racketeering that rocked the world of politics, night clubs and made material for films – came and went without our blinking any eye. (However my Uncle Sam in Mt. Vernon, married to my father’s sister Eva, was caught boot-legging and ended in a mental home.)

Zayde bought us a phonograph around 1922 on which we played old favorites like Volga Boatman, Humoresque, Toreador, Poet and Peasant Overture; and comics like Gallagher & Shean, Cohn on the Telephone. I think we stopped playing it when radio came along. Until Sid started buying records around 1930 and replaced it with a better machine

Language is memory. It links people over time and space. From the cradle to the grave; from prehistoric, biblical times (the tower of Babel) to Broadway and Hollywood. Anyone reading or writing a script who did not know a piece of dreck when he saw one was a schlemiel.

Passing into high school, age 12 to 15, I left behind the street group; religious observance; fears and superstitions (one childhood trauma I recall is lying in bed and listening to the voices in the kitchen as plotting against me). Yet we still did not mix milk and meat in the same meal. That was how the vegetarian restaurant was invented – paralleled by the one serving meat, but no butter, milk or cheese. Most Jews got to like Chinese and Italian restaurants – but many found pork and shell fish repugnant. Til’s pork roast (with potato kugel) made my neighbor Abe Miller turn away in disgust (Banneckburn around 1960).

Movies rated low in our spectrum of entertainment, public image and news—except when a Chaplin or Fatty Arbuckle made headlines. Sunday supplements made hay from the Standford Whtie-Evelyn Nesbit-Harry K. Thaw story for years as did murder trials: Leopold-Loeb, Hall-Mills. Houdini was a bigger name than Barrymore. I recall going to The Kid on a Saturday afternoon. I recall serials: Pearl White, Nick Carter, Sessue Hayaskawa and comics: Harold Lloyd, Mack Sennet, and Our Gang. The only sex object I recall giving me a thrill was Betty Blythe as the Queen of Sheba.

Our diet was meat and potatoes; bread and cheese; milk and butter; a little fresh vegetables but fresh fruit in season. Mama had a collection of medications, but I recall no illness keeping any of us home from school. My parents ignored fads –like advertisements for laxatives (Ex-lax, Bolls-rolls, Castoria).

Pop bought a complete Dickens but he read little of it. Mama read the books Sid brought home from the library but I can’t say what they were. I do recall her reading to me from a book of Greek myths: Pandora, Bauois and Philemon. It may be those strange names that struck in my head. In later years, I was fascinated by the Norse legends; my earliest sex interest being roused by the Valkyries. I also read about the invasions of Rome by the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals and Huns.

I read the Andrew Lang fairy books: Blue, Red, Yellow, and Green. Sports series by Barbour, Helinger. Scouting books by Walter Prichard Earton and comic strips: Mutt & Jeff, the Katzenjammer Kids, Toonerville Trolley, Boob McNutt, and Little Orphan Annie.

As a family we went Sunday evening to the movies but not very often. The first time I went alone to a Saturday matinee was to see Chaplin’s “The Kid.” I also recall Soldier Arms. You’d think that an older sister would take an interest in me. Not that I recall. Except much late when she took me once to Prospect Park – when she was already in the flirting stage and used me for some sort of protection, I guess.

Mother Goose always fascinated me but it is impossible to separate early from later sophisticated interest. My reading got complicated when we acquired the 20 volume set of the Book of Knowledge. This gave simplified versions of every art and science, of history and literature of poems and puzzles. Since I was never a fast reader, I guess it was just as well for me to read Jules Verne condensed. (Years later Readers’ Digest builds an empire on the same idea.)

Not that we Jews had ever stopped reading and writing and studying – so we were ready for the Enlightenment when it came. Especially in the New World—so that the explosions into Broadway, Hollywood, the campuses, book and news writing and publishing seemed to some spontaneous.

We sometimes used an Italian watchmaker named Anzalone who was a member of the Met Opera clique and once took Sid to see Carmen.

The primary need for an immigrant group to fit in is mastery of the language. (The Italians and now the Puerto Ricans et al) lagged far behind. The amazing thing is that Yiddish continued to flourish—as literature as well as in speech and the press.

It fascinates me to see Yiddish getting into our modern vernacular; not just kosher and zaftig and chutzpah – but schmuck , meshugenah, shiska (the male is shagetz), momser (bastard) and a favorite of mine: tzatzkele (darling – a tzatzke is literally a toy). Many Yiddish words are of Polish (or Russian) origin – or bastardizations: noodnik, paskudnyak. Yiddish was despised or demeaned as a doomed jargon. Now it is revived by scholars and by sects that refuse to talk Hebrew, which is the language of Torah and God.

Kid’s street games today have to contend which auto traffic and TV. Yet popular dramas in TV films are faithful to our genres of cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, heroes and villains, boy meets girl. Our street gangs were a nebulous affair mainly for choosing up sides. There was an occasional individual fistfight. But the boy who once carried a pocket knife was ostracized. Girls lived in their own world with jump rope and jacks their only street games that I can recall. Hero worship for us meant professional sports. I devoured the daily sports pages. I can name not only the champion 1920 Dodger team, but also the Davis Cup team. Sid took me once to Ebbetts Field to see the Dodgers lose and to the Polo Grounds to see Red Grange in the first pro football game in NY. Sid in adolescence must have been slowly transitioning to new worlds and heroes. For me, nostalgia is a better film script than the usual memoir. The Times Book Review of Books runs a long narrative on the 100^th anniversary of “Casey at the Bat’. The concluding moral: “With Casey we all strike out.”

My only schoolmate to achieve notoriety was Sidney Stemmer, arrested for fixing the odds in the basketball wins of Nat Homan’s whiz kids who swept the 1955 collegiate circuit. Of my father’s contemporaries, the only one to achieve such notoriety was his detective friend, Charley Hemmendinger, involved with Murder Inc. One day he drove out to the beach and put a bullet in his head. Of Murder Inc., the Brooklyn racketeers (Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Louise (Lepke) Buchalter), I recall my surprise when the New York Times front page reported the arrest of “Maxie the Jerk” Such language.

My friends were mostly from petty bourgeois families: the son of the corner pharmacist; two sons of the lawyer across the street; and two of Florence’s boy friends were sons of the dress-suit-to-hire shop around the corner. (Remember “West Side Story” making a big thing of the fancy evening dress shop.)

About my illness, I only remember my mother taking me in to an ear clinic—my perforated ear drum being one result – on the lower East Side. Then we visited pop’s parents, Zayde Sholem and Baba Yenta.

We boys wore dark knee pants, high black shoes, jacket and necktie, black cotton stockings. A photo of about 1917 shows Sidney, however, the only boy wearing white stockings. He is about eight. His teachers and mother thought him very smart

Neighborhood Life

The kids were all Jewish. The Italians lived nearby but had to send their kids to parochial school, so that I recall only one Italian boy – right up through college classes.

Growing up in the Yiddish speaking milieu, we rejected at the same time as we absorbed the aura and cultural uniqueness of the Yiddish culture—which leads in a direct line to Broadway, tin pan alley, and Hollywood. Fifty years later the Anglo-Saxon culture absorbs like kosher, chutzpah, schlep, momzer (bastard), shvitz (sweat), svitzer (boaster)

Our ghetto had no social services except what were self-organized. My father and grandfather belonged to a fraternal lodge: a sick-and-burial society - each had its sisterhood and a co-op credit union. Yet no one went hungry or barefoot. If there was suffering, it was out of sight.

. Education and literacy were ingrained in the Jewish ghetto. In its very heart’s blood—without conditions. There must have been half dozen Yiddish dailies, plus any number of other awareness publications: literary or regional. The neighborhood public library always had a long queue of kids waiting for its 3 O’clock opening. (Today those jam packed refuges of ours empty shells.)

Language and sex fit a pattern like Hollywood’s We used 4 letter words in the street – never in home or school, on books or the press. I recall my surprise when the New York Times reported the arrest of a mobster called “Maxie the Jerk.” A member of Brooklyn’s Murder Inc—the true story of which was more dynamic than Sergio Leone’s . I caused shock waves in the Hay ménage when I said “shit”. The Aldus Huxley novel, “Point Counterpoint” inspired me with what I thought was a philosophy of hedonism – callow adolescent as I still was. He was my archetype of decadent intellectual cynic.

It’s told how an old Jew in court was called to the witness stand and asked to his age. He says”Kinnehora” (Yiddish for “kein ayin ha’rah” – meaning against the evil eye) “I’m 81” The judge says” Just answer the question: How old are you?” He replies “Kinnehora, 81”. The judge gets angry whereupon counsel intervenes, says ”Mr. Feldman, how old are you, kinnehora?” “81”

“Kinnehora” was lip service. The ghetto did not have palm readers, psychics, astrologers, horoscopes, witches. (I remember one visitation of gypsies in Brownsville where Til & I lived in 1933.) Not only graven images are forbidden in Torah, but also magicians, wizards, witchcraft, communion with the dead or with ghosts.

The Orthodox (then as now) doesn’t strike a match or hold money on Shabbat; which is the busiest day for shopping. (Israeli hotel elevators work automatically so that the orthodox don’t have to push the button.) It still seems the case that Kosher butchers shut from Fri AM to Sun AM but that is the influence of the all powerful rabbinical control of the kashruth certificate, I guess. Babba paid an Italian boy 10-15 cents to light the fire Shabbat.

Jerusalem recreates my early scene: small shops; street markets; shuls; “old clothes’ shouted in Yiddish by an old man on a horse-drawn wagon; silence of the Sabbath (Williamsburg shops shut Friday evening but Saturday was the busy day. I wonder how it is now on Yom Kippur; remember “lost Weekend”?) and the small movie house. Our school yards (for ‘recess’} were cold, gray, empty of any such things as swings or basketball hoops; very like those seen in French films. Even at high school, we had no playing field, not even a basketball hoop just an indoor gym. In the lower grades, I recall only patriotic marching songs, some from the Civil War. At high School, our principal admired the English system. We used a Harrow songbook. (I recall one: “Sing tangent, co tangent, co-secant, co-sine.’)

Our Neighborhood:

There weren’t any political rallies that I can recall – though the Sacco-Vanzetti case was then heating up. Vaguely I remember some mention of socialists and mama saying that “they’re not nice.” Maybe she called them “common.” Pop once took me to a Democratic precinct club. He was probably a registered Democrat..

Daniel Fuchs wrote a trilogy about his Williamsburg neighborhood. Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” captures the atmosphere of the time and place. Puzo and Pietro di Don to Jerre Mangione for the Italians.

Rockaway Beach

Every penny pinching mother above the poverty level escaped with her kids to beach or country resorts on the 30^th of June when school let out. We rented a bungalow at Rockaway Beach – an hour or so on the Long Island RR—close to the beach. There were also tent colonies where rents were low. One boarding house where a dozen housewives crowded the single kitchen was known as “The Bump.” Its kids were teased with the label of “Hester Street.”

No one we knew had a car there. I vaguely recall my father’s younger brother, Louie, a cloak-and-suiter, visiting us in a Franklin—air cooled engine.

An older brother, Morris, made a fortune in Texas oil. He escaped the Houston heat by renting rooms in a classier boarding house in Rockaway where I saw my first tennis court.

He’d sometimes hand us each a twenty dollar bill.

The literature and films (borscht circuit; Bright Beach Memoirs, Having A Wonderful Time) dramatize and glamorize but don’t capture the social ambiance of this experience—which is the other side of the socio-economic coin: career & business & school. The ghetto always had its happy side.

In the early thirties, Til’s parents bought a farm about 2-3 miles from Swan Lake—a major center of summer life in the Catskills. A small one story house was supplemented by two tents—each occupied by Sid and Ninna. Mrs. Hay died shortly before Joel arrived. Mr. Hay offered it to Sid. He turned it down with scorn. In the subsequent land boom, I think it sold for $500,000.

Growing up years were measured more by the summers than by the school year. (When you get to NY, try to trace Florence’s photo album of those years, the only record.) Besides bathing, softball and tennis on the sand in a primitive form; evenings at the fun fairs, I recall early sex education – finding condoms on the beach (what are they?); Peeping Toms; Roasting potatoes (“mickies” –a mean term for the poor Irish refugees from the potato famine) in beach fires, where older boys told smutty jokes. Once Sidney was there. I was embarrassed by his being embarrassed—conscious when I was only 12 of a weakness in his sexual development. Florence, 2 years older than Sid, and her friends were engaging in sex play, but I don’t think they went out on dates. It was more of group activity. This is the Jazz Age. But our nice Jewish girls and boys had no flippers or hip flasks. They studied hard, went to Hunter and City College, became teachers and lawyers – with variations for those who went into create arts or theatre.

Growing Up

Florence and Sid were upper classmen at the same school but never talked to me. There were no school dances. But at one gymnasium entertainment, four girls did what their gym teacher had taught them as some sort of Isadora Duncan dance in Greek costume with bare legs which caused a minor scandal.

In 1925 Sid entered CCNY. At 18 he scored high and became a substitute Postal Clerk, par for working one’s way through professional school. But when he joined the army in 1941, he was still a postal clerk.

I made the mistake of following Sid into CCNY in 1927 (age 15) not getting one word of advice from anyone at home or school. I should have gone to Cooper Union to study art, design, graphics – tuition free. There were no raccoon coats at CCNY. Even after I was at college, I don’t recall seeing anyone with a cigarette.

Now I see we had an unwritten unspoken code of conduct. A kid did not talk back – to parents, teachers, librarians or any adult. No dirty talk. But after dark, older boys would tell dirty jokes and sex doggerel. I recall playing handball with a fat girl—maybe I was growing up. I used to peep when Florence and her friends entertained boy friends. High school was co-ed, but I don’t recall ever talking to a girl—though I still can name three pretty girls in my class---plus the one who got the Latin medal. To my surprise I was awarded the French medal at graduation.

Sid reviewed books for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, started a record collection, had music sessions with his crowd. I did likewise – those old 78s rousing fascinated response, opening up new worlds. With burgeoning sex appetites, as we began to pair off – Minna married Sid Isaacs in 1932 and left him for Aaron in 1936. Til and I married in 1933. Lou and Clara in 1935. Florence and Ted in 1936.

Enlightened Jewish parents, like mine, were usually ambitious for their kids –but not mine, as far as I was concerned. I knew Florence would be a teacher. Sid wanted to be a writer but no one at home or school ever said a word to me about a career. One classmate went off to the University of Wisconsin. If I had any guts I’d at least have thought of going with him. Later I heard he was a Communist and went off to the Spanish Civil War. But by that time I was a married man and a respectable employee of the SEC.+

Florence around 1930 got a job with the Educational Alliance shepherding 20-30 gamins around city parks. Her colleague was Ted Tarlau, a law student. Florence spoke of him with awe: his father was a rabbi of the Educational Alliance and his mother came of French Jewish stock. You know that the French Jews looked down on German Jews as the Germans despised the Ostjuden. Ted’s older brother spelled his named Tarleau and “passed”. Some ears later he was counsel to Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury. My dear friend Sam Blitman could not believe he was Jewish. He later joined Wendell Wilkie’s law farm settled in restricted Scarsdale. Do you think the next generation – Liz, Jill, et al know any of this?

Roosevelt’s government (e.g. SEC) drew the best brains from academic, business, and the professions. As for me, I’d created shock waves in East New York, first marrying Til, then by getting a classy job with SEC, then by having a child, then by removing myself to Washington, DC – Navy Dept – 1954 and a PhD in 1957!