I grew up in a kosher home during the 50’s in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, mostly a Jewish garden apartment town, four rooms for 5 of us. When my sister entered adolescence, she got the second bedroom and my parents slept on a Castro Convertible in the living room. By today’s standards we were poor, but we always had enough to eat and we actually had very nice clothes; a priority for my mother, whose father came out of the garment center, where “clothes make the man.” My grandfather owned a sweater factory and, while he had the money, was a local benefactor of his shul. He was typically President of the congregation. According to my mother’s ga ga memory of him he was a great orator. Other synagogues often asked him to speak, He helped found a Yeshiva. That was while he had the money.
So Kew Gardens Hills was a step down in my mother’s eyes. She was forever on guard that one of us not pick up the speech patterns of our neighbors, recent arrivals from the Bronx and Brooklyn, particularly Shoilee (Shirley) actually a lovely woman who loved us and watched over us while my mother was at work.
It was a step down for my father as well. He was kind of a waspy type like his brother Cecil. Both went away to college and law school in the middle of the depression, although my father managed to fail out of Harvard Law, (the story goes) playing too much bridge instead of studying. He was brought home to finish at Rutgers. Two other of his first cousins went to Harvard Law, and one of them, Roy Schotland became dean of Georgetown Law School. He was the son of my father’s aunt, a Sobo who married a Schotland. Or so said my mother.
Compared to my mother’s side of the family, the Baitlers, the Sobo’s were a step up. They had arrived earlier to America and had already begun to leave Jewish neighborhoods and join the Christian world. There were 5 Sobo siblings. Practically none of them spoke to each other. So much so that I knew none of the Sobos other than my father’s brother’s family. Ripley Sobo who played Mathilda on Broadway is a relative but I never knew of her existence until we saw her in a movie. The father of the tribe was a successful immigrant whole sale grocer who lived to see his grandchildren go to Harvard. So my family weren’t all losers. Indeed on my mother’s side of the family, one of her cousins was a famous pediatric researcher and academician. Abraham Rudolph. The main pediatrics text used in America is called Rudolphs. That is him. He edited it. He was awarded 10,000 honors. He was actually a soft unassuming man. Anyway I like to assume I share a gene or two with Dr. Rudolph. My slef esteem needs all the help I can give it.
But back to my childhood and father. I was confronted by a depressed defeated father. To be charitable he was broken by the depression. He got out of law school in 1933, not a propitious time to try to make your way into the cruel world. Although he secured a job at Milton Unger a Tony law firm in Newark (Also in the family mythology: he knew William Brennan another young Newark lawyer at the time, who went on to become a justice in the Supreme Court.) Unfortunately, while Unger was a well known prestigious law firm they paid junior lawyers close to nothing. With the arrival of my brother my father had to find a real job, meaning make money.
A partnership with his brother, Cecil became the game plan. Sobo and Sobo. My Uncle Cecil’s brother-in- law was a builder and it was thought he would bring a nice supply of real estate clients. That didn’t happen. So things were grim. My mother’s girlfriend’s husband, Abe, was making a nice living doing liability law. When my mother suggested this to my father, she heard in no uncertain from his mother. “Dovey become an ambulance chaser?” To her mother-in-law, one of the Ehrlichs from Vienna, it was like my mother was suggesting that my father become a garbage man.
In those early days my mother was easily intimidated. Her mother didn’t speak with an accent but she was a Russian Babushka. My mother and her brothers didn’t go to college let alone law school. Her two brothers didn’t finish high school (but both ended up owning companies). After her father died she went through some rough times. She and her mother were evicted from Riverside Drive. That’s how they landed up in New Jersey, with her mother’s sister.
Compared to the Sobos and Ehrlichs my mother was Russian trash. Not that my mother was lowly. She had a geat deal of pride and determination that carried her forever forward. She eagerly went to Hunter High and Jewish High School simultaneously spending hours and hours and hours on the subway, studying, learning to speak coherent Hebrew and considering herself lucky to be living the life she was leading. That’s the only parent I knew. She somehow always thought of herself as lucky. Didn’t matter what happened. She expected to own the future.
Although my mother was of obvious intelligence, learning for the love of it was not a priority for her. She didn’t have time to read, but I don’t think that was her thing. There were no books in the house. And no trips to the library. I was not aware of any intellectual heroes. As child I never heard of Abraham Rudolph. It wasn’t until medical school that I met him. He convinced me to come to Einstein where he was then teaching there.. Other than her father who she made sound like Johhny Appleseed, so involved was he in the founding of Yeshivas, learning itself wasn’t mentioned. Love of learning? She had enormous respect for being smart but learning? She was about getting good grades. That was very important. But knowledge per se.Not her thing. I have since learned that kind of respect is a particular quality of Lithuanian Jews. Anyway, in my mind my mother was a winner and my father was a loser. My father had background but had long ago lost it. Other than her father I had no appreciation of anything about my family. Neither parent spoke much about family. There was my mother’s giant of a father and this guy I was supposed to think of as Dad
While I was a child my father was a salesman for Decca Records (before records became a hot commodity) and then he worked as a manufacturer’s representative for Gold Brothers, a very Jewey 47th street jewelry outfit that needed my waspy father to visit Tiffany’s, Cartier and other places where 47th street jewelers didn’t feel comfortable. He did very poorly moneywise. The one interesting thing about his job was that celebrities would go to Gold Brothers to get their jewelry wholesale. The list was long, the Ford family shopped there. So did Leonard Bernstein, Elizabeth Arden, Betty Furness, and all kinds of movie stars, and owners of companies throughout the New York area. The only other interesting thing was how (if I remember correctly) Van Cleef and Arpels never paid their bills, which was bad luck for my father since when that happened he wouldn’t get paid. He would leave for his job at 10 AM and be back at 3 PM. And then would do house work and in theory look after us kids but basically he was a grouch and I always thought of him as lazy. He’d lose it a lot while he vacuumed, slamming it into furniture. He didn’t like living very much
Not that back then there was a pattern to any of it, Nothing that I could conceptualize. It was day to day. And whatever it was, it was. Fortunately for me I was handsome, smart, and a terrific athlete. Which should have made me a very happy fellow.
I wish that were true. I’d add up all my good qualities trying to convince myself that I was terrific. But as it is to this day I want, unfortunately I always want to be more than I am. Having ferocious ambition I felt my share of fear of failure. I measured up sometimes, but it was never enough to to reach anything resembling confidence and complacency. More than enough for me to keep going and try try try and to imagine future triumphs. I guess it is lucky to able to dream big (but as you get older and closer to the end this feeds a temptation to become bitter).
I can’t really remember very much of my childhood before adolescence but I think it was pretty good. Later, I was ashamed of where I grew up, but not then. AS for my shame, my assumption is that my mother’s view of how farshehad fallen gave it to me. Although she would never admit it, or talk about things like this, I knew. My mother would talk about her rich childhood friends, the Manishewitz family etc(when her father was doing well) and where they are today. She could not exactly invite them to tea in Kew Gardens Hills (though my parents still polished the silver in case that day might come).
My father also knew. We were the poor cousins. As I noted as a result of the depression, my mother’s two brothers didn’t finish high school, but both now owned factories. One of my mother’s brothers had 2 sweater factories, one in Mineola, Long Island and one in Puerto Rico, running in three shifts, 24 hours a day. He supplied knitwear for Penney’s and Damon and other national bands. Her other brother, my Uncle Herbert had a cardboard box factory in what is now Soho. Both owned their own homes, although Herbert eventually lost his home as did my sweater factory tycoon, late in his career.
My father was a lot like the character I created as Commodore’s father. A broken man. When I read Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Willy Loman in that play left me, like many others sons like me bowled over. S lot of men in the audience could understand the disillusionment and desperation of a Willy Loman. They had seen it first hand in their own fathers. Arthur Miller manages to grab it and turn it into a great play
People like to glop on to the successful father imago, the Warren Buffetts, the Cornelius Vanderbilts. Having a career is the way to go in terms of meaningful things to do with your life. But countless fathers have been smashed to smithereens by the ferocity of the countervailing forces that stood between them and success. I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone, except for most people there is no choice, other than having your wife go out and have the success.
Fortunately for me, before I became an adolescent and ashamed of being a resident of Kew Gardens Hills, I thought it was the greatest place in the world to grow up. There were tons of kids, nice kids, living in our court, the arrangement of garden apartments around a “courtyard” (really a huge area for us to play punchball, stickball, and stoop ball (there were a million stoops), hit the penny, touch football, and basketball). We had perfect walls to flip our baseball cards at (the closest card won the other cards). The only books I read, that weren’t required by school, were baseball books. I knew all about Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, baseball’s greatest. And then there were the grand debates I used to engage in (long before politics occupied my mind). Who was the best centerfielder, Duke Snider, Willy Mays, or Mickey Mantle?
I had no doubts about my future. I was going to play shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers. I oiled my Rawlings PM endlessly with linseed oil to make it soft and pliable. I played catch hour after hour after hour, grounders to my left, to my right, fly balls in front of me (I loved Snider’s shoestring catches- he would do a somersault as he caught the ball). Then there was climbing the Ebbett’s Field wall, saving the Dodgers from a home run. We’d play catch to the sound of Vin Scully, the Dodger announcer, who I had learned to imitate. I would catch pop-ups exactly like Pee Wee Reese- a graceful, almost ballet movement, where he seemed to embrace the ball high above his head, bringing it down into the bosom of his chest, as a continuation of its arc.
I practiced so much that I actually thought I had a shot at the majors. My coach in the Queens-Nassau League was going to bring me to a Philadelphia Phillies try out (but that was actually because when I pitched I could throw the ball very very fast). I was also the starting All Queens shortstop in the Kiwanis League. My manager took that all star team and that’s how we competed in the Queens Nassau League team, just as the Forest Hills Babe Ruth All Star team had become my Kiwanis League team. My coach loved pulling that off.
Only problem was that like most shortstops, I couldn’t hit. I’d feast on lousy pitchers but when a good one came along forget it. There were very few lousy pitchers in the Queens Nassau League. One of the pitchers, Howard Kitt, on a different team from Cedarhurst, Long Island, had been offered $$60,000 dollars by the Yankees. My lousy batting average in the Queens Nassau League League put an end to my baseball career. I realized I didn’t have it. Probably because of my fear of getting beaned by a pitcher with a blazing fastball. Fear interferes with total concentration in your swing. Actually, the eye hand coordination was there. I was a thousand times better hitter in stick ball (we used a Spalding not a hard ball). But fear did me in. The alternative theory was I was always swinging for the fences. If I had a good coach he would have counseled me to cut down on my swing, have ashort swing, make contact. Don’t try to outdo yourself. Settle in. Having power will take care of itself. But I didn’t get any coaching. He just liked assembling all star teams. Taht was it. The Queens Nassau League ended my career at 15.
The funny thing is, only now, decades later, do I remember a different Kew Gardens Hills. Actually, it was a cool place. Simon and Garfunkel came from there. Art Garfunkel used to sing at our synagogue, as part of Cantor Koussevistky ‘s Rosh Hashanah program. The same voice as Bridge over Troubled Water crying out in Hebrew in a chapel with perfect reverberating acoustics. Every note. I can still almost hear it. Cantor Koussevitsky was a relative of Sergei Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony. (Interestingly Art Garfunkel in various biographical sites says he came from Forest Hills not Kew Garden Hills. Since like him I went to Forest Hills High, I used to do the same thing out of embarrassment until I reached 70 and my coming clean mode. It’s just ironic that they sang (with his neighbor Paul Simon) “And ev’ry stranger’s face I see reminds me that I long to be, Homeward Bound,” but can’t come clean about where his home really was.) Believe me I understand.
Not just the music was high end. Judy Thurman, today a regular at the New Yorker, was my sister’s friend. She described where she grew up as a slum (which it wasn’t– just lower middle class.) My mother wouldn’t forgive Judy Thurman for that. Those aren’t the only two notables from the neighborhood. Next door Howard Shulman went on to write musicals in London, and practically everyone I knew went on to careers in law, medicine, academia and the like. And the strange thing, when I think about it, was that the other Jews in our court even then, weren’t exactly from the bottom rungs of society. One guy owned a Chrysler dealership. Sidney, who played ball with us, owned a gas station and two car washes. Teachers and former lawyers (like my dad) lived there, as did small businessmen. Shoily ‘s husband was a middle man for nylon stockings. Howard Shulman’s father used to go all the time to Japan where they manufactured cheap toys for his company. Just shows you how much shame can distort perspective.
Later when the counterculture came to America I went to Berkeley, first in the summer of 1965 where I started off staying with Abe Rudolph (he had left Einstein for Cal in San Francisco) and later, in 1968 for my internship year at Herrick Hospital. It was the year of the People’s Park. Governor Ronald Reagan sent the National Guard, including tanks. The Alameda Sheriff’s men used 00 shotgun shells. They killed a student on the roof, James Rector, who I spoke to before he died in the ICU. I called all the newspapers (including the New York Times and national magazines, Time, Newsweek (trying to let it be known that they had shot 00 shotgun shells at the students). No one would accept the story (They weren’t yet left wing and antiwar at that point.
This was before Kent State. The only media outlet that would listen was the Oakland Tribune, a right leaning paper who ran a big story, quoting me. It got me in trouble with the president of the hospital who was ready to kick me out should I open my mouth again. Although I was starting to be disillusioned by the Left, (it was starting to get very crazy)at the time I identified with the best sides of 60’s Berkeley. Not with the radicals, or macrobiotic food freaks, but the rest of it. I thought, at the time, it was the politics I loved, C Wright Mills, the rightness of our cause, the great music, Zen, the exciting culture that was exploding everywhere. Now I am not so sure. I think far more important was the mindset it gave me, the opportunity to make money and class irrelevant in my (our?) minds. It was a way to leave behind the shame of my background. Thinking about it now, I honestly believe that. So reconnecting to money and all of its reverberations for self esteem in my novel Commodore has been a way to reconnect to the dynamics of my true background.
One other thought. Linda, my wife, is surprised that I am not including as “my background” my entire career as a psychiatrist. That will have to wait until After Lisa which is all about psychiatry (written with the freedom given to me by retirement) a tell all novel about the business.
Here is a link to other writing by me, mostly not psychiatric.
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