Back Then (7 page)

CHAPTER 2

When Annie and I moved
from East Nineteenth Street to Riverside Drive in 1957, the Upper West Side had already entered a cycle of decline that lasted for about two decades, during which the city itself nearly went bust. We knew people who claimed as a matter of pride never to have gone to the West Side except to visit their skin doctors and psychoanalysts or—repeating an old quip—to get to Pier 90 on their way to Europe. Riverside Drive was almost as remote as Canarsie from our old apartment. To get there involved a long taxi ride or a combination of subway and crosstown bus. You arrived in what felt like a different city.

Upper Broadway, a gilded ghetto in the years before the end of World War II, had been like a main shopping street in Warsaw, Berlin, or Budapest, its population and collective accent shaped by refugees from Hitler's Europe. On weekends and Jewish holidays family groups in their best, the women in fur coats, promenaded Broadway's golden mile of haberdasheries selling silk ties, “white-on-white” dress shirts, and expensive fedoras, movie houses (about a dozen), bakeries, restaurants, cafeterias, and delicatessens, liquor stores displaying top-of-the-line brands like Johnnie Walker Black Label, Courvoisier, and Hennessey, candy and nut shops, shoe stores enough for a city of centipedes with bunions and fallen arches, and showrooms of vases, lamps, mirrors, overstuffed sofas, and bedroom suites that belonged in a sultan's harem. By 1957 the lights along upper Broadway had begun to darken. Except for the newly arrived Puerto Ricans, the promenaders were less exuberant. This was the sad, lonely, and striving avenue of Saul Bellow's
Seize the Day
and Isaac Bashevis Singer's cafeteria encounters. Popular restaurants like Tiptoe Inn and the relatively down-market C & L (known as the Cheap and Lousy) were about to go under. Other local fixtures—Barney Greengrass, Zabar's, Murray's Sturgeon Shop—hoped to wait out the neighborhood's transformation into streets of bodegas, pizza parlors, and Chinese takeout.

The landmark Ansonia, a seventeen-story Beaux Arts apartment palace once tenanted by celebrities like Babe Ruth and Lily Pons, Enrico Caruso and Igor Stravinsky, had grown shabby. So had the Endicott, on Columbus Avenue at Eighty-first, where decades earlier guests took tea in the palm court to the music of a string and piano ensemble. The side streets were being taken over by junkies, drunks, and prostitutes. They lounged on the stoops of decaying brownstones—passing citizens walked faster and looked straight ahead. By night the open spaces of grass and wooden benches along Broadway became Needle Park. By day elderly men and women still sunned themselves there, aired their medical complaints and offspring problems, and traded neighborhood gossip. “You know who Phil Spitalny—that All-Girl Orchestra he used to lead—is? Well, his mother-in-law slipped on some cabbage leaves in Waldbaum's and broke her arm.”

All the same, despite creeping seediness, the Upper West Side was still a neighborhood, in a way the corresponding area on the other side of Central Park was not. It had kept some of its old character—polyglot street life, joy in food and the senses, legacy of disputation, array of institutions like Columbia and Barnard, Juilliard, City College, and two theological seminaries, and a distinctive population of musicians, psychoanalysts and analysands, students, and refugee intellectuals. I felt as much at home there as I had in the 1930s, when I lived in a ninth-floor apartment at Central Park West and Ninety-sixth Street. This was still the northern boundary of a district of big apartment buildings with canopies, uniformed doormen, bordering privet hedges, and first-floor doctor and dentist offices. Its terminus was the stubby granite steeple of the First Church of Christ, Scientist on the corner, built in 1903, when Mary Baker Eddy's home-brewed religion was growing at such a pace that Mark Twain compared it to Standard Oil. Like Unitarianism, Christian Science offered a moderately comfortable halfway house for Jews willing to go beyond Ethical Culture. They could say (to quote Jonathan Miller's famous comment in the satiric revue
Beyond the Fringe
), “I'm not a Jew. I'm Jew-
ish
. I don't go the whole hog.”

To my mind Riverside Drive was still the city's most beautiful promenade and vista, maybe even the hemisphere's. Coming home after work downtown I emerged from the grimy IRT subway station and walked west toward the dazzling open spaces of the Hudson. From our eleventh-floor apartment at Ninetieth Street and the Drive we looked out at a long stretch of the river to the George Washington Bridge five miles to the north. At night you could see the lights of Palisades Amusement Park and its Cyclone roller coaster. Wintry gusts coming off the Hudson were strong enough to blow pedestrians and baby carriages around the corner. It was hard to understand why so many New Yorkers ignored the visual splendors of Riverside Drive and Central Park West, preferring, it could only be for snobbish and conformist reasons, stodgy Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue apartment houses and East River views of Rikers Island, the largest jail facility in the country, and a commercial wasteland in Astoria, marked by giant illuminated signs advertising Crisco and Pearl-Wick Hampers.

The skyline of Central Park West had always delighted me. From the park's moated Belvedere Castle at Seventy-ninth Street—a delicious Victorian-Gothic anachronism overlooking the Turtle Pond and the Great Lawn—I could see a two-mile stretch of apartment houses, punctuated by the gabled Dakota and the immense, turreted bulk of the American Museum of Natural History. Whatever I knew of medieval Europe had come from Sir Walter Scott's
Ivanhoe,
Mark Twain's
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,
Howard Pyle's novels about Robin Hood and the Knights of the Round Table, and my visits across the park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, mainly the halls of arms and armor. The arrays of bourgeois apartment houses stirred fantasies of castles and fortresses, even though the inhabitants were clearly not lords and ladies, pushed baby carriages instead of riding chargers and palfreys, and sent their cooks out to buy meat, milk, fruit, and vegetables on Columbus Avenue. Still, whether these buildings had authentic grandeur or were merely stage sets and architectural pastiche, it was not too much of a wrench to think, however fleetingly, of Camelot and sometimes Oz.

Dominating the scene were three towered and intricately embellished structures, each a somewhat watered-down example of imitation Renaissance, Baroque, or Art Deco. They had glittering names, each with its own aura of association—San Remo (the Italian Riviera), Beresford (British nobility and military heroes), Eldorado (conquistadors, Sir Walter Raleigh). These three buildings had been put up between 1929 and 1931, a last exhalation of prosperity on the eve of the Great Depression. (For devastated high rollers in the stock market, the motto on the Beresford's heraldic elevator doors was prophetic:
FRONTI NULLA FIDES
—“Don't Trust Appearances.”) The Beresford (the largest apartment house of its day), Eldorado, San Remo, and dozens of other buildings—among them the Normandy (Renaissance towers with an Art Moderne base), the Mayflower Hotel, originally festooned with balconies, and the vaguely Mayan-looking Ardsley—were all the work of one architect, Emery Roth. His buildings on the West Side were as iconic, as expressive of the city's style of grandeur, as Henry Hardenbergh's Dakota Apartments and Plaza Hotel. Roth did most of his important work on the West Side, lived there, and died (in 1948) in one of his buildings, the Alden on West Eighty-sixth Street. The double stigma of immigrant (he was born in Hungary) and Jew had for years excluded him from prize residential commissions on the other side of town.

In point of professional and social disabilities Roth's career differed little from the general situation of Jews in New York who, once they were able to afford it, moved to the West Side from shabbier parts of town. They were discouraged from entering professions like architecture, banking, and, through restrictive quotas, even medicine, despite (perhaps because of) the legendary superior skills of Jewish doctors. Desirable East Side apartments were off limits to them. (According to the joke, current in the 1930s, about Pease and Elliman, one of the city's ritzier rental and management agencies, “Elliman waits on the gentiles and Pease on the Jews.”) The situation was somewhat different for Jews who were of “German” rather than “Russian” origin, well connected, thoroughly Americanized, and invariably discreet in harboring the remaining traces of their Jewishness.

Since 1852 the Harmonie Club, now located in a Stanford White building off Fifth Avenue at Sixtieth Street, had restricted its membership to German Jews. The club excluded “orientals,” Jews of East European origins (whom Henry Adams caricatured as “reeking of the Ghetto” and “snarling a weird Yiddish”). Creakily bending with the times (and with the rise to world eminence of men like Minsk-born General David Sarnoff, of RCA and NBC) the club relented after World War II, the Nuremberg Laws and Hitler's mass executioners having finally demonstrated that distinctions between one kind of Jew and another counted for nothing: a Jew was a Jew, and “German Jew” an oxymoron. I felt a tiny bit sold out when my brother Howard, a lawyer, became a member of the Harmonie Club. A semitophile like my colleague at Simon and Schuster, Joe Barnes, for all his intellectual acuity and wide experience as a newspaper editor and foreign correspondent, denied the existence of this long-standing caste warfare. How could a people collectively scarred by persecution over the centuries and traditionally liberal in sympathies behave like this—like Nazis? “I just don't believe you,” he insisted after Annie and I tried to explain intramural animosities, a degree of which we had to cope with in our engagement and from time to time even in our marriage.

Annie's parents were longtime members of the Harmonie. She says the place was like “a deodorized delicatessen.” The club restaurant, otherwise indistinguishable from other select eateries, featured herring with sour cream and put pickles and sauerkraut on the table, a reminder of German-ness: until World War I the club had a portrait of the Kaiser in the lobby. The Harmonie celebrated Christmas with all the fixings, including a tree in the foyer and a children's party with a magician. Pulpit accent, decorum, and liturgy at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue, five blocks north of the Harmonie, could almost as well have been Episcopalian. Yarmulkes, anything more than a token amount of Hebrew in the service, and the Yiddish word
shul
(instead of
temple
) were as alien there as kreplach and kishkes would have been at the Harmonie.

The Harmonie's East Side and Emery Roth's West Side, the latter typically Orthodox in religion and East European in origins, had different ways, and different degrees, of being Jewish in what had been for half a century and more the largest Jewish city in the world. On both sides of the tribal divide, the Holocaust remained buried in denial, an event to be ashamed of as evidence of Jewish helplessness and long-standing victimhood. And although we were aware of American anti-Semitism before, during, and after the war, we no longer felt marginalized to quite the same extent. Yiddish words like
bagel, chutzpa, kibbitz, maven, schlemiel, momser,
and
zaftig
and even
schmuck
entered the common vocabulary. Jews were conspicuous, even predominant, in music, entertainment, the movies, literature, broadcasting, and book publishing. German Jews owned the
New York Times,
the national paper of record, although they hooded their affiliation, were reluctant to allow page-one bylines, much less editorial command, to reporters with Russian-Jewish names (the excuse being that these names were often too long for the paper's column width). The
Times
covered the liberation of Dachau in 1945 without once using the word
Jew
.

Moving back to the West Side, married now and after years in neutral territories, forced me to examine my own conflicted feelings about being Jewish. I had avoided this for a long time, just as I had avoided thinking about my dead parents. Perhaps psychoanalysis had finally taken hold along with normal maturation and the passage of time.

Tobias
Kaplan, my father, had studied to be a rabbi in Vilna, the Jerusalem of Europe. To escape conscription in the Russian Army, he left for America by way of Hamburg in the 1890s. Whenever I asked him to tell me the story of his escape he pulled up his left trouser leg to show me the dent in his kneecap made by the rifle butt of a tsarist guard who had tried to stop him at the border. Even before he arrived in the United States he had decided that a newcomer rabbi in a golden land already overstocked with rabbis might have to live on charity and handouts in order to survive. He had already learned English, partly from reading
The Last of the Mohicans,
and said he used Cooper's novel as a text in tutoring other immigrants. I wonder how useful they found the idioms and speech patterns of Uncas, Magua, and Natty Bumppo. Tobias went into business for himself, made a success of his Dexter Shirt Company, and was shrewd enough in the management of his affairs to emerge from the crash and Depression a moderately rich man. Shortly before he died in February 1939, having outlived my mother by six years, he was planning to retire from the shirt business and spend the rest of his life growing Washington State apples and reading.

He took financial papers like
Barron's
along with the conservative
Reader's Digest
and the Republican
Herald Tribune
—in 1936 he even voted for the G.O.P. candidate Alfred M. Landon, a midwestern fiscal mossback who called F.D.R. a Communist (Landon carried only Maine and Vermont). Tobias subscribed to the regular offerings of the Book-of-the-Month Club and reread the Russian classics. The Dostoevsky titles alone—
Crime and Punishment, The Insulted and the Injured, The House of the Dead
—gave me an irreversibly bleak view of the old country. Despite his rock-ribbed capitalism and his abhorrence of labor unions and Roosevelt's National Recovery Adminstration, he kept his copy of anarchist prophet P. A. Kropotkin's
Memoirs of a Revolutionist
close to hand. He read Samuel Pepys's
Diary
with amusement and James Boswell's
Life of Johnson
with respect. I came to resent Johnson because my father invariably cited him as an authority in regulating my conduct and composing condolence letters. His gift to me on my seventh birthday was an
Aesop for Children
with wonderful pictures by Milo Winter. On my twelfth he gave me a copy of
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations;
I took it with me when I went away to college. For me it was much more than a reference book: an irresistible anthology of the sort of literary passages that Matthew Arnold called “touchstones.”
Bartlett,
and any other literary collection, for that matter, infected me with a compulsion to play quotation guessing games with almost anyone I could collar.