Homeward Bound (2 page)

Recorded in June 1967, “Fakin' It” was released as a single in early July 1968 and became a moderate hit, peaking at No. 23 on
Billboard
's Hot 100. Paul said later that he was astonished to learn that he was in fact the descendant of a tailor, a tailor who was also named Paul Simon. Simon the elder learned his trade back in the Old World, and brought it with him to the new one at the dawn of the twentieth century, working first in New York City and then crossing the Hudson River to start his own business in Newark, New Jersey. There he made a home and raised his family to be real Americans—smart, ambitious, and hardworking, their eyes locked so securely on the future that it took only two generations for his descendants to forget, or at least pretend not to remember, that he ever existed.

 

CHAPTER 2

THE TAILOR

Paul Simon the tailor was born in Galicia, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, in 1888.
*
He grew up in the tight embrace of Jewish family and tradition, supported by his faith, his people, his handed-down trade. The Jews had thrived in eastern Europe for centuries, but more than five hundred years since they brought their families and their faith to the region, the nativist tribes there were again focusing their hatred on the synagogues and shtetls. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the occasional attacks had grown into pogroms. The ancient black cloaks, the long beards, and the furred hats that had signified their belief for so long now marked them for torment and death. The traditions that had sustained them, the tribal identity that had knit their communities into extended families, had become ruinous. Individuals, then families, and then entire communities abandoned their homes and fled.

So Paul Simon had gone. It was the spring of 1903, the year of his fifteenth birthday. Already schooled in the ways of the thread, the cloth, the pins, and the numbered ribbon, he packed his things and climbed aboard the train that would take him to the seat of his future. The journey seemed unfathomable: first to Le Havre, home port for the fleet of steamships owned by the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. There he'd board the steerage deck of
La Gascogne
for the long journey away from the past and to the threshold of the New World—to the United States, and to the modern city at the foot of that great welcoming torch. A whisper of its name was enough to ignite the weariest of Old World eyes. New York City, the global capital of freedom, democracy, culture, and industry; home to peace, brotherhood, and a million Jews already, all of them free to practice their faith and pursue their ambitions.
La Gascogne
carried the young tailor past Liberty's fire and to the immigrants' clearinghouse on Ellis Island. Here some subterfuge occurred: the immigration records describe the Austrian boy as a married forty-year-old farmer who would be met by a Jacob Aushorn, whose only known address was a post office box. That was good enough for the immigration agent on duty, and soon Paul Simon was standing at the foot of Manhattan, which was surprisingly grimy for a promised land, and noisy. But the streets were lit up at night, and the gas-powered cars were already shoving the horse and buggy to the curb—and there he was, an ambitious young man set free in the electrified modern world.

Paul Simon moved quickly. He found a place to live, and then got tailoring work. Soon he married Trieda, a spirited if stubborn Austrian immigrant who preferred to be known as Frieda. The couple moved across the Hudson River to Newark, New Jersey, and by the time the U.S. Federal Census caught up with them in 1920, Paul was thirty-two years old and living in a rented apartment on Somerset Street in Newark's heavily Jewish Ward 3. Their first child, a son named Louis, was four and a half years old, and little Rosie was just a few months short of her third birthday. The census taker noted that the primary language in the home was still “Jewish,” meaning Yiddish, but Paul had already submitted his application for citizenship. The application was a formality, given that the enterprising Austrian émigré had built himself a foothold in the American economy, owning a small tailor shop that specialized in European-style wool cloaks. It had taken just ten years for Paul Simon to get from the immigration desk at Ellis Island to owning a business and, as the census noted approvingly, employing other Americans.

Paul and Frieda were happy to stay close to the pickle barrels and black-cloaked merchants of Newark's Third Ward, who had essentially re-created their old lives in a new locale. Most of their neighbors spoke enough English to get by outside the neighborhood, but the old language prevailed, as did the dedication to the synagogue and the wisdom of the ages. Then came the kids: good, obedient children, but American-born and quickly steeped in the lights and the music, the crowds, the five-cent matinees and the American pastime, the sport of baseball.

The school-age Louis became a fan of the sport, then a fiercely partisan fan of the New York Yankees. In the New York of the 1920s the sport was inescapable: the dirt-and-grass fields next to the schools, the boys playing catch in the streets and sawing off broom handles to whack balls in every direction. Baseball was on the front page of the newspaper, on the radio, on everyone's minds. It was a heavily symbolic American bonding ritual that happened to strike immediate and overwhelming terror into the hearts of old-school Jewish parents. They were thinkers, intellectuals, tea drinkers. Baseball was lawless and wild: grown men waving bats and hurling hard balls at one another's heads.

Like other kids, Louis also fell under the spell of the radio and the stomping, sloppy popular music of the day. He couldn't resist the lights and sound calling from the city on the other side of the Hudson. Not that Louis had to cross the river to hear the music. By the mid-1920s it was nearly everywhere: the scratchy signal from the radio speaker, the variety show at the neighborhood theater, the jitterbug rattle shaking the windows of the street corner dance hall. Take the Old World waltz of klezmer and add lights, streamers, and fireworks. To the adults, nothing sounded crazier. To the kids, nothing could be so heady, so alive with the heartbeat of the moment. To be the first true American in your family, to have emerged from a murky and painful past and feel the current in your vertebrae—it changed you.

And Louis could play. He had a feeling for rhythm and for melody, and when they handed out instruments in the classroom, his fingers reached for the right notes and hit them at the right time. Eventually settling on the stand-up bass, the teenager studied and practiced with the diligence of the top student he already was, and earned his first paying gigs when he was still a high school student, filling in for dance bands and orchestras that needed a last-minute player, and then getting enough regular work to become a dues-paying member of the American Federation of Musicians, Northern New Jersey Local 16-248. If Paul and Frieda Simon objected to the sound of hot jazz their boy had taken up, they couldn't complain about how he'd turned his hobby into a profitable venture.

He'd always been a studious boy, the immigrant's dream child, with the brains and fortitude to really make something of himself. Louis never diverged from his path to college. Playing music, he told his parents, was just the trade he'd found to pay his way through school. Accepted into New York University for the fall of 1935, he transferred his union membership to New York's Local 802 and lined up a slate of regular engagements on the weekends and occasional weeknight gigs. He majored in music, grounding his talents with a thorough knowledge of the internal mechanics of melody, harmony, and rhythm.

Living in the university hub of Greenwich Village, Louis met Bella Schulman and fell in love. She was trained as a schoolteacher, the youngest of the four children born to Suniel “Sam” Schulman and his wife, Ettie, a petite young woman with a sunny smile and an easygoing warmth that didn't exist in the Simons' rooms in Newark. Married in 1935, the couple lived at first near Louis's family in Newark, and then relocated to an apartment at 1748 West First Street, in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, until the arrival of their first child coaxed them back to Newark to raise the dark-eyed bundle they named Paul. The boy was small but healthy, born with his grandfather Paul's dark hair and deep brown eyes. Younger brother Eddie followed in 1944, and Louis and Belle realized they needed to find something larger than the one-bedroom apartment. They turned their eyes to the borough of Queens and the just-developing neighborhood of Kew Gardens Hills.

Rising from what had once been the greens of the Queens Valley Golf and Country Club on the edge of Flushing and Forest Hills, the mostly semidetached houses of Kew Gardens Hills popped up like an urban fantasy of suburban life: curving streets and rustling trees; freshly stamped curbs, sidewalks, and driveways; steady jobs, good schools, and playgrounds; jump ropes flashing and jacks skittering across immaculate concrete. There were people of all ethnic varieties, streets for Italians and Irish, for Poles and Asians, and even a few WASPs, though they were mostly set apart in the stone piles beneath the elms of Forest Hills. And there were even more Jews: the sons and daughters of the immigrants, still working and rising and making a place for themselves defined less by the ethnic and religious ideals of the past than by the American faith in financial and social transcendence.

To be a Jew, but not only a Jew, to be whoever or whatever you chose to become—this was the dream. As the Jewish title character in Saul Bellow's landmark 1953 novel
The Adventures of Augie March
introduces himself in its opening line, he is “an American, Chicago born.” Get the picture? “I go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.” So it was for Louis Simon, as it was for millions of the American-born children of the Jewish exodus—because the journey couldn't end on Manhattan's Lower East Side, or in the modern shtetls in Newark and Brooklyn. The American promised land had never really been a particular place; instead, it was an idea, a spinning wheel, a vision of the next horizon. In the mid-twentieth century it looked a lot like the suburbs, the grander and WASPy-er, the better. And if you couldn't get all the way to Westchester County just yet, there was always Queens.

It took the Simons a few years to find the perfect home. In 1944 they lived for a time with one of Belle's brothers in a semidetached brick house at 136-63 Seventy-Second Avenue, across the street from where Jack and Rose Garfunkel had just settled in with the first two of their three boys, though the families didn't know each other then. A few months later the Simons relocated a block away, to an apartment at 141-04 Seventy-First Road, and less than two years later they moved for the final time, settling into 137-62 Seventieth Road, the right half of a compact, two-story redbrick row house on a gently sloping, tree-shaded street. It was a nice, cozy home, but surrounded for blocks with houses so identical that after a long night of work, Louis would sometimes pull his car into a neighbor's driveway and be halfway up the steps before realizing he was at the threshold of someone else's house.

Nevertheless, there they forged their version of postwar middle-class life. For Louis, tradition held little interest, religion even less. Belle felt very differently; she was a regular at the synagogue and happily enmeshed in the community and familiar rituals. Still, Louis set the tone for the boys, and when they felt the need to worship they made the pilgrimage to Yankee Stadium, where they could stand, sit, sing, and pray according to the rituals of American baseball. When Paul was well known enough for people to care about his thoughts on such things, he made it into a joke for the sports pages. Why should anyone focus on religion when there was a pennant to win? “I never saw the point,” he said. “Though Al Rosen, the Cleveland third baseman, is Jewish. But I was a Yankee fan so he never really excited me.”

Louis was too pragmatic to worship anything, including the romantic ideal of the musician as artist. He didn't need to waltz among the gods to draw the right sounds from his bass. He was a
professional
, sight-reading his parts with perfect rhythm and inflection the moment the music was put in front of him. Always neatly combed and dressed, his tuxedo and instrument rarely beyond an arm's reach, Louis built a diverse set of regular clients, slipping as easily into orchestral performances as he did into society dance bands. He served as a staff bassist with the orchestras of several New York–area radio stations, including WCBS, WAAT, and WOR, and played for the Ballets Russes and with the Alfred Wallenstein Orchestra. Later in his career Louis earned a staff position with the CBS Radio and Television Orchestra, helping provide music to nationally broadcast variety shows by Jackie Gleason, Art Linkletter, and Arthur Godfrey. And he did it all as Lee Simms, a man who could claim every talent, skill, and virtue Louis Simon had developed or been born with, but without the name that immediately identified him as a Jew.

You had to do it; all the big stars already had. The Russian-born Al Jolson lived the first part of his life as Asa Yoelson. Star clarinetist Artie Shaw shortened his name from the original Arthur Arshawsky. Even the songwriters did it. Irving Berlin, another child of Russia, came to America as Israel Beilin. George Gershwin started life as Jacob Gershowitz. And it wasn't just a Jewish thing. The great movie star Rudolph Valentino came out of Italy with the marquee-busting name of Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla. Tough and burly man's man John Wayne had to ditch the womanly Marion Morrison to establish his cowboy bona fides, while the Missouri actress-dancer Virginia McMath projected her natural elegance so much more clearly when she started calling herself Ginger Rogers.

Showbiz folk from all kinds of backgrounds and disciplines could find reasons to alter or jazz up their names. Yet more Jewish performers found it necessary for the same reason that Jews working in business, the law, or any trade that put them in daily contact with gentiles changed their names: America, as it turned out, wasn't entirely free of anti-Semites. It was a more nuanced kind of prejudice than Jews had encountered in Europe. Physical attacks were rare, and most Americans didn't stoop to insults—not very often anyway. Still, some colleges, including the Ivy League schools, kept their quota of Jewish students to a minimum. Major companies, particularly in the financial and legal trades, refused entry to Jewish professionals, no matter how finely educated or skilled. And even the companies that did welcome Jews weren't likely to give them the opportunities or promotions their gentile workers received. Also, Jews, no matter how wealthy, were often barred from the tonier city and country clubs where so many of their gentile colleagues gathered to raise their glasses, trade stories, and, in the way drink and elaborate food make so easy, cut their deals. Slicing a few syllables from an obviously ethnic name wasn't an automatic pass into the convivial gentile world, but it was, at least, a start.