Year 1912
Ben-Zion Comes Home
On March 24, 1912, David made a misstep and fell from the high rolling ladder [at the store]. The little finger of his right hand caught on a hook, tearing the flesh clean to the bone. Dr. Lewis amputated his finger. And on the same day, David received a letter from his father informing him that he was coming from Fresno, California.
March 31, Ben-Zion came into the store while David was looking over his morning mail. There entered a thin old man with a deeply lined face. At that moment he looked sullen. He appeared to be more the man of action, his back bent from the habit of stooping under the heavy weight of a peddling pack and apparently reduced from his actual height. His features were keen and regular. He had an aquiline nose and black piercing eyes deeply set. His high forehead was wrinkled and his head covered with dark brown hair tinged with gray. His beard was almost silver. He would have been considered handsome anywhere, except that the furrowed lines of care on his face testified to his suffering. He was quiet mannered and incapable of being surprised.
David was seized with emotion as he greeted his father. He took him home and introduced him to Lena and the children, who received him with open arms. Ben-Zion bent his withered hands over the radiator. Having dispelled his cold he turned eagerly to the breakfast table that Lena had set before him and ate with relish.
After having refreshed himself he spoke with a trembling voice, saying, “It is hard to be alone in the world when your spirit begins to break. I can only say what our forefather Jacob said when he came before Pharaoh who asked him, ‘How old art thou?’ Jacob replied, ‘One hundred thirty, poor and miserable .’ To sojourn with my family over the famine years is why I came.
Ben-Zion is now 72 and has never, I think, met David’s family.
"In science and industry and in the battle of life man must naturally be concerned. But in every man’s history there are recurrent occasions when the best of his tools fails him in his struggle for existence. My venture in the peddling business was a failure, owing to my age. I cannot carry on any longer.
“When your mother refused to remain with me on the farm and help build up a competency [i.e., a business] and a reasonable independence for our old age like thousands of others have been doing, I reasoned with her that little Joe needed care and parental training then more than ever. But she would not listen to my pleading and when she left I became despondent at the thought that my wife, who knew well the struggle I went through to keep the family together, should go back on me.
While David is generally highly critical of his father, this time he seems a bit more compassionate towards his troubles and limitations. He quotes Ben-Zion saying that there are some occasions when even the best “tools” fail a man in his struggle for existence. In this case it was Ben-Zion’s age that limited his capacities for success.
“How hard it is to grow old when we have missed our life, when we have no more the crown of complete manhood nor fatherhood. How sad it is to feel the mind declining before it has done its work, and the body growing weaker before it has seen itself rewarded in those who might close our eyes, honor and name.”
On April 1 Albert went to Minneapolis to inform his aunts Jennie and Freda and his Grandma [Leah, who was living with Freda] that Grandpa had come. In the evening they had Seder.
As Ben-Zion went to bed, a pale moon had risen and crept across the sky. It seemed to pause outside the window and through the bare tree branches to paint a jagged shaft of light on the furniture. David was thinking that tomorrow would be Lag b’Omer, [as well as] his twenty-second wedding anniversary, and Belle’s twenty-first birthday, which ought to have a fitting celebration. But David felt disappointed. It was Lena’s rebellious sickness and Mother’s sorrow at seeing Father come back to the Twin Cities, which created a general consternation with both women. So David decided to pass the matter up entirely, as there was no use making a celebration by force in a discontented family circle.
What does he mean: “close our eyes, honor and name”?
Perhaps he means close our eyes (in death) and honor our name (in posterity)?
Soon came the Shavuot holiday. David went with his father to the synagogue for festival services. When the reader announced “Ya’amod Cohen ,” Ben-Zion went up on the bimah to recite the blessing over the Holy Scroll. When the reader began to recite the holy dialogue “Akdamus ,” Ben-Zion’s emotion rose to a high pitch. He felt as if he were hearing the thunderpeals from Mount Sinai announcing the glorious morning of the birthday of the law and the covenant, which all his life he had been studying. It reflected on his mind the ancient fires that from time to time shone upon the breastplate of the priestly tribe.
Ben-Zion felt very dejected at that moment at the thought that his hereditary privilege [of being a Cohen ] would end with his grandchildren, who would be lost in the great American melting pot. He reflected that his own sons knew not the Torah. It grieved his conscience that he had to be the first in his line to fail to hand down the Torah to his children. He muttered that in all generations the fathers gave the Torah to their sons, until it came to him.
He knew that under the banner of the blessed freedom his children had waxed prosperous and had adopted their neighbors’ customs. They supplant their Hanukah lights with the Christmas tree, and at Passover time the children celebrate with colored eggs. The matzo is no longer considered digestible for their delicate stomachs, for the people are now living in a progressive age, so they say, and the older generation is forced to submit against their will and conscience.
Ben-Zion was a Talmudic student in his youth and was known for his learning. His soul was like a walled garden. He never betrayed a sign of emotion. Were he to hear some unpleasant news or even of some great misfortune, he would display no agitation. He was wrapped in his fatalistic calm and seemed indifferent to many other things.
He felt lonely. Even his smiles were dour, like the smiles of old men who must face an acid attempt at levity. He spindled into manhood under the obsession that everybody in this world was dead and he was left alone to inhabit it.
Nice, a Jewish holiday that is no longer much celebrated, but David notes it; I wonder if they had bonfires? One of the themes here is that the family gathers for all the Jewish holidays, even ones that are rarely celebrated today. Notice that it is Judaism that brings them together. Still there’s that reference to “rebellious sickness”....
This is interesting to me because this is where David explores the profound implications of his family’s emigration to America. This is where the orthodoxy of our family’s faith began to dissipate. If our family’s religious tradition and grounding began to splinter off into different “branches,” it began when both Lena’s and David’s families came to this country. David seems to capture his father’s point of view quite well in this section.
Nice: “under the banner of the blessed freedom”... sometimes David’s phrases are very nice, perhaps they are crude and awkward translations of the Yiddish. By the way, do we have an opinion of what language the family was using among themselves? This is an important social history of language question.
Beth says Yiddish, when they weren’t speaking English.
David’s family has a Xmas tree and eggs!? I doubt it; maybe this is what Ben-Zion thinks, or what other families then did.
The reference to Christmas trees and Easter eggs makes me feel a lot better about my own upbringing! (I’m being mildly facetious). So Sean and I were not the only Blumenfeld descendants to decorate a tree and wait for the Easter bunny! At the same time, we ate matzoh around Passover.
My mom says she doesn’t think Lena “gave a damn” about the Jewish holidays and scoffed at David’s religiosity; Beth remembers art least one occasion where Lena had given the Singer kids Easter baskets! The atheistic Singers themselves adopted the Christian, or at least the commercial, holiday accoutrements in order to fit in with their non-Jewish neighbors.
“Spindled”: I assume he means grow old and (even more) spindly.
A tender melancholy crept into [him]. There were streaks of grief about his temples now. He felt that his Jewishness and its atmosphere were missing. He missed the old world, the synagogue, the cantor on holidays. Everything appeared to him merely a matter of belief.
What did the Sabbath mean when half of the family were desecrating that holy day by working? What pleasure can there be in a holiday when [a man] cannot leave without the business?
Ben-Zion’s coming to Minnesota stirred up Leah’s old wounds. She couldn’t reconcile herself to go back to keeping house with him, as she felt embittered since his luckless homestead venture in Oregon. And besides, she thought that his mind had become beclouded a little during the last few years of his sufferings, while he was alone.
To live and to achieve is a perpetual triumph. It is to assert oneself against destruction, against sickness, against the disposition of one’s physical and moral being. It is the will without causing to stop or rather, to refresh one day by day .
Thereupon a man should set out the remaining years to all his possibilities of happiness along other lines. Otherwise he would be a quitter, a defeated person who has fallen short of his boyhood dreams. He can eliminate some of the things by turning back on the whole tarnished dream and declining to use his next 25 years in making better [money]or playing better golf and rearing a happier family than he has done in the past.
He was aware of a certain inability to control his thoughts or his words. He laid his head against the chair and one baggy cheek humped like mumps. He was going to cry, he was going to pieces.
I’m continually drawn to David’s view of the individual struggling to survive amidst the challenges presented by life — fueled by the inner “will” to be continually refreshed, not becoming a quitter who is defeated and thus falls short of his dreams.
Ben-Zion said one day to David, “My son, every man is a priest, even involuntarily. His conduct is an unspoken sermon. But there are priests of Baal and Moloch and many other false gods. Such is the high importance of an example. There comes the terrible responsibility, which weighs upon us all, and evil examples are spiritual poison. When a man is silent he is forgotten…. He who does not advance falls back. He who stops is overwhelmed by discontent and crushed. He ceases to grow and becomes smaller. He who hides gives up. The stationary condition is the beginning of the end. It is a terrible symptom which precedes man’s downfall.”
One evening while sitting and conversing with Lena about some matters, David heard her, without the slightest provocation, refer to Ben-Zion in very uncomplimentary remarks about his manners and his pecuniary troubles. “He smokes an ill-smelling pipe,” she said. “Wherever he goes he knocks out the ashes from his pipe on the carpet and spills his tobacco crumbs lavishly. [Your mother] said that he was out of his mind. Someone with sense ought to protect him from his own foolishness. She said that the old man was in his second childhood.”
For a moment David’s inflamed face showed a struggling perplexity. He then became stern and said, “At all events the old man is a gentleman.”
Lena burst out, “I positively cannot stand him any more.”
As time went on there appeared to be no other remedy. David made an application to the Board of the Jewish Home for the Aged. He went with his father to Dr. Abrahamson for a medical examination. David paid in $200, the first installment, as entrance fee. Mr. Gus Loevenger drew up the contract for the Board. Ben-Zion took up his home there. He seemed fairly contented with his station for the time being. That at least was what he said.
So poor Ben-Zion pleaded, since… he did not want to impose any burden on his children, he’d rather go into some home and spend his remaining years there.
This is nice. A theme of David’s throughout: character is the most important quality, more important than wealth or religion per se.
Perhaps here is where David gets his self-righteous streak, his tendency to sermonize, and it also describes the drive to succeed that David and Ben-Zion share.
It seems that when David finds Lena agreeing with or quoting Leah, we get a double whammy of his negativity to the two women.
Lena's Mother Arrives
On May 15th Lena received a letter from Chicago from her brother Philip saying that he was sending on their mother, Libshe, who had recently come from Europe.
Libshe was a small rawboned woman. She was shriveled, knotted and dried up, but resilient. Her hands especially were gnarled joints that showed suffering from arthritis. Her face was the color of a withered leaf and seemed crackled with wrinkles. She had dark eyes and skin and the sheitl [wig], without which no virtuous wife was complete, for a married woman must sacrifice her tresses on the altar of the home, lest she snare other men with such sensuous bait.
Libshe had married Moses Laser. They lived in Girtegola [now Girkalnis], a hamlet on the highway about fifteen miles from Kaunas, Lithuania. They owned a roadhouse. They had a large garden patch where they raised their own garden truck. They had a few cows and chickens for their own use.
Libshe was known far and wide among the travelers and military officers for her good cooking and baking, and for the meals she served. She walked in her white apron with the bunch of keys hanging by her side, her small dark eyes close and deep and most of the time half shut, and moving nervously and looking with suspicion at the local Russian revenue officers who were always after her for “hush money” from roadhouses.
Libshe was the manager of the place, as her husband was an easygoing, religiously inclined man. She bore six children, two girls, Yette and Lena, then three boys, Pesach [Philip] and Harry and David [Moshe], and the youngest, a girl, Mary. Her husband died in his fortieth year. She remained a widow with six children to look after.
I like the phrase “sacrifice her tresses on the altar of the home.” Maybe he did have it in him to be a good writer if only he had enjoyed a bigger vocabulary and had mastered more of English literature.
Notice the business wife pattern here, with typical gender reversal. Was the roadhouse illegal? There was some legislation trying to make tavern-keeping illegal ....
What happened to the roadhouse . . .?
Generally a mother is more to her children than a mere being. A child’s life depends on her as much as the life of any fledgling in a nest depends on its parents – and even more so, since she warms its callow mind and soul as well as its body. But Libshe had developed a cold, icy, hard, self-compressed nature.
She married a widower with several children from his former wife. So her [own] children were forced to shift for themselves. Yette went to America, and later Lena went to her. The boys somehow landed in England; later they came to America and to Chicago where they followed the baker’s trade.
Libshe’s second husband died. As he left no will to protect her, the children of her second husband ejected her from the premises out into the cold and she was forced to go to America to her children.
When she arrived in Minneapolis she was met by two of her daughters. She recognized Yette, though hazily, but kept on asking, “Where is Lena?” She could not believe that Lena was her child standing there, for when they left her the girls were two scrawny youngsters, and now they were fully blossomed women.
It was when her youngest son Harry came to meet her that there was a real tragedy to witness. She did not recognize him at all until he recalled to her mind some infantile anecdotes that convinced her that no stranger could have known such. Then she recognized him. All this affected Lena greatly, for she felt bad over her mother’s comparative coldness to her children.
Libshe had a peculiar outlook on life. She always believed that it was a waste of time being nice to people who did not interest her. So with a curt nod she would pass everyone in the room. Whatever anyone had on, whether they had gained weight or lost since last she saw them, whether they looked younger or older than they claimed to be – all this mattered not to Libshe.
In April, David closed the purchase of the Rice Street store from Mr. Dearborn for stock, fixtures, and lease of the building.…
July: A terrific thunder, lightning, and rainstorm during the night caused much destruction... Lena got very sick and kicked up a rumpus because the doctor told her that her liver was out of sorts, as she was too heavy of an eater, and she felt very insulted.... August: David went to the University to find out about Albert’s standing and credits.... David got his first eyeglasses.... October: David went to the Emporium Tearoom to hear Judge Brandeis speak.… December: While at dinner Abe Calmenson asked their consent to the marriage of Belle, which was given with a blessing.
Here we go again with ruminations on motherhood! It’s so interesting that fatherhood is not a matter for philosophizing for David. What did David think a man’s duties consisted of? And here’s yet another relative who seems to fall short of his high standards.
Is this David’s pattern of criticizing women whatever they do?
I am struck again by all that our great grandparents endured. Certainly, David’s childhood featured poverty and persecution, but Lena had a relatively mean existence, too. She relied chiefly, it seems, on her older sister for support and guidance, emigrating to America with her sister Yette when both were still quite young. I can’t get over the feeling that if only David and Lena had lived in a more communicative, less “stoic” age, where the full context of one’s life was duly considered by the other spouse, that both would have felt far more affirmed and fulfilled in their life together.
This description of Libshe sounds like evidence of a snobbism, or perhaps reverse snobbism, that seems to have passed down through Lena.
Maybe Libshe was shocked by the dress and manners of her grown children? I think this is a classic scene of reunification of a family which was separated for a long time and the kids have become Americanized. One point we might make is that the diary really reveals how chaotic family life was in the era of the immigration to the U.S. We might expect an idealized portrait of extended family lives, loyalty to Judaism... but the reality was often bitterness and separation.
Here it is 1912, just shy of thirty years after David arrived in the United States, and he is finally able to buy his own building to house his store. But while he is enjoying the fruits of his own success, he is forced to deal with the failures of Al.
Here the Diary entries begin to become quite pedestrian and brief. I sense that David ran out of steam in extrapolating fuller prose from them. We have included here primarily passages that seem in keeping with the recurring themes.
Yes, here we are switching from memoir with a slight pretense of novel to out-and-out diary.
I’m rather surprised that David’s father was able to locate his family, given everyone’s peregrinations over the last 20-some years! And I don’t think Leah knew where Ben Zion was. Very mysterious.