Notes from Seymour Finler:
[Seymour was born in 1915]
We lived at 52 Graham Ave in Brooklyn, on the edge of Williamsburg. The street floor was occupied by a store selling ladies garments, the next floor by some kind of floor covering operation and our family occupied the top (third) floor. The first long banister was wide and friendly – just the thing for riding down. We occupied nine or ten rooms all together. Heating came from gas burners and the coal burning black stove in the kitchen, but the kitchen was also equipped with gas burning equipment. Light came from gas - a few fixtures came equipped with gas mantles and indeed a few of the rooms actually had electricity.
I know very little about my father’s background. It was generally assumed that he came over with his parents who had been in the Polish part of Russia. On my mother’s side they came from Moscow. The chances are that their marriage was ‘arranged’. My father did not hang out in the same clubs as my maternal grandfather. His only lodge was the “United Friends” – not much more than a burial society but helped pay some of the death benefits when he died.
The jewelry store, directly across the street at 35 Graham Ave was named “Lieberchein & Finkelstein”. The Zayde (our maternal grandfather [Jewel]) was a jeweler who worked by day in a shop somewhere in the area manufacturing the jewelry. My father also had some training in manufacturing because on more than one occasion I watched him casting a gold ring from to start to finish and I seem to remember he also could size a ring when necessary. There certainly was a bench in the back of the store with all kinds of tools. When a customer wanted engraving, it was contracted out to the engraver on the next block. When the Zayde got home from his shop he spelled my father off and/or helped in the store in the evening.
I was on my way home – probably from a violin lesson - late in the afternoon. I was stopped by police lines at the corner of Varick and Graham. Pretty soon someone recognized me and had the cops let me through to go upstairs where I got the news that Zayde was shot dead.
There were three members of our family in the store when the holdup men came in. Zayde had arrived from his day job and was in the store along with my father, who was behind the counter and my brother Sidney, in the customer area. When the crooks made their demands my father offered some resistance and was “pistol whipped.” (His head was still bloody when I got to see him maybe an hour after the event.) I think the crooks changed their minds and started to leave but Zayde grabbed hold of one of them who then shot him trying to get loose. And that was all! I doubt there were more than thirty seconds elapsed from time to finish. The crooks were never identified.
After Zayde was shot my father found himself another partner, Mr. Protas, a watchmaker. He moved the store a block closer to Broadway (in Brooklyn) occupying a street facing space in a building on Graham Ave that showed movies and vaudeville, called the Fox Follies. After a year or two the store folded. Meanwhile the family moved from the roomy 9 or 10 rooms in Williamsburg to 631 Crescent St. in East New York where my father had bought a half interest in a house – partners with one of his lodge brothers (named Ingher) and where all seven of us squeezed into five and a half rooms on the top floor of a two family house.
My father tried a store again in a movie house on Jamaica Ave. This was after my mother died [1930]. He tried to get me to quit high school and help him at the store. I was not crazy about the idea and he was talked out of it.
Florence meets Ted
It was during this Crescent St. period that Florence met your father. Florence was active in the Educational Alliance, a settlement house on East Broadway in Manhattan She was supervising children’s daily trips to various public parks. Ted’s father was active in the Educational Alliance. Ted was also working there that summer of 1931. They were partners supervising the same bunch of kids.
I met Ted once during that period. Florence dragged me along one of their trips to Canarsie Beach. My most vivid recollection of Ted was in the summer of 1932 when Florence went with a girl friend on a trip to Europe. Ted was there when the ship brought her back. It was still prohibition those days and she was able to slip him some contraband strong drink before going through customs.
I never knew my paternal grandparents. My father had four siblings.
My rich Uncle Morris (my grandfather’s brother) lived in Texas. He had at least three children – Hotense, Selma and Jack.
There was a second Texas brother – Uncle Sol who at some time moved from Texas to Missouri. It was probably before WW II because they sent me a fruit cake when I was in Italy that came from St. Louis.
There was also Uncle Louis who lived here on West End Ave in one of the fancy apartments and who was in ladies cloaks and suits business. He was a fancy dresser himself, smoked cigars, had nice fur lined gloves to go the blue Franklin that he drove and always pulled my ears when he fished up a quarter to give me as a present. They had one daughter – Gertrude – who was Florence’s age.
Aunt Eva was the youngest. During my childhood she lived with Uncle Sam (Singer) in Mount Vernon. We did visit them on several occasions, shlepping all the way up there by trolley car to Park Row, subway north to the end of the line, and another trolley car to Mount Vernon. I have a clear recollection of visiting there on the day of a Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Hansel and Gretel – by that time I was already listening to music. Uncle Sam had a delicatessen. He was also once picked up on a bootlegging charge and ended up serving a year in the pen. Any visiting we had to Mount Vernon had to have been before that event.
Eva eventually moved to the Miami Beach area. Eva had four children: Dorothy, who was Florence’s age and lived in Atlanta; Sidney, who repaired and dealt in used typewriters and was Ben’s age and Selma, just one month older than me. The youngest daughter was Janet Winneck who was quite a bit younger and born after my grandfather was killed. So my feeling is that her name, Janet, was named in Zayde’s memory as was my third cousin Jewel – the youngest of my mother’s first cousin, Edith. I think Aunt Eva had gotten some kind of support from Uncles Morris in Houston. I did hear about the problem of ‘squeezing anything out of Jack (who was one of Morris’ sons.)
My mother’s side of the family
My mother was an only child. Her father, the Zayde, was active in one of the lodges that were popular in those days. I remember pictures of his wearing a sash and wielding a mallet. He had one sister who we called “the Tuttie”. Her husband, who we called “the Ftter” (apparently derived from a Germanic word meaning “kinsman” was named Eleskowitz and rand a small tobacco shop selling his own made cigarettes. They had two girls, Elsie and Edith. There may have been a third but I am not sure of that.
Elsie had two daughters – Joan the oldest and a few years younger than me and another one whose name I forget. They had a full time live-in German ’maid’ and lived in a fancy apartment building opposite the Eastern Parkway entrance to the Brooklyn Museum (the building is still there). Joan’s husband, Phil Weintraub worked on Wall Street in the brokerage business. Joan married Dr Steinberg and went to live with him in Charleston, SC. I saw them once when I was stationed in Ft. Jackson in South Carolina and years later met a couple from Charleston who indeed knew Doctor Steinberg.
Edith’s husband, Harry, ran a men’s clothing store on Brooklyn’s Fulton St. They had Helen, a few years younger than me, who married Sandy Slade during the war and who then became an early home owner in Levittown; Sherwood (a year younger than Helen) who also moved to Levvittown and Jewel, who had bright red hair which was the talk of the family when she was born.
My maternal grandmother, Rachel, had one sister – Aunty Jenny. Their family lived in Newark, NJ. Jenny’s husband was Lazar Elkind. They had four daughters. On that side of the family they were all tall. Although grandma was illiterate, did not even read the Yiddish that she spoke, Jenny actually new Russian. (As indeed did Zayde - he used to buy lots of ‘green label’ Russian records to play on our hand-winding Victrola.) The Newark family lived on Belmont Ave and had a large collie called Rover, a very patient animal who put up with me trying to ride on his back but always managed to make me slide off. The Newark people also did a lot of card playing. They used so many new decks of cards that I always had bags full of decks of cards to take back home with me to Brooklyn.
Religion
I was the smallest and most likely candidate for my father to drag off to his own – never in the neighborhood – shul. The tickets he’d get for Yom Kippur were never at Zayde’s shul. By 1928 nobody in my family was observant. I was the only one of the three boys that said kadish for my mother. (I don’t remember Florence’s position on the matter.) The general family position was not anti-religion but “we just can’t be bothered talking about it.” I think the only use my father had for Judaism was giving him one more thing to argue about. When in his final years he was at the Hebrew Home for the Aged he fancied himself learned in religious matters.
Music & Theatre
I took violin lessons for about six months and had to stop abruptly when our grandfather died. It was Sidney who noodged me into taking clarinet lessons – he really wanted me to take violin lessons along with him so we could pay duets together but I was too stupid to take him up on it. When we were younger, before my grandfather died, we all used to act in Shakespeare plays with each of us taking parts. My father was quite literate.