The ‘Ur-Bornstein’

Nathan was the first and the original Bornstein in the New World.  With the exception of a few sepia photos and an old postcard there are few artifacts from his past. All I have are some stories and whatever I’ve conjured up based on them. I have often wondered what went through the mind of the young teenager from Maciejow when he saw the Statue of Liberty in New

York Harbor for the first time. I suspect as he stood on the steerage deck he wasn’t thinking that he would be married a few years hence, father five children, be the forebear of 15 grandchildren, and 48 great and great, great grandchildren.  And over a century later, I want to think that a tiny bit of him and my grandmother is hardwired into each of us.

Welcome to the New World

My grandparents were part of the millions of immigrants fleeing the poverty, ignorance and prejudice of Eastern Europe.  The story is that his mother was fearful of him being conscripted into the Tsar’s army and sent him to America where he had three married sisters living in Boston.  He spent his first few years there working under the tutelage of a dominant brother-in-law, but left and went back to New York City.

He became a citizen in about 1917 and was promptly drafted into World War I where he was shipped out to an army base in Chillicothe, Illinois and was assigned as a cook. It was there that he learned the culinary skills that served him well much later in life. This was during the 1918 Pandemic.  His officers could not let the cooks get sick – they were the ‘essential workers’ of their day – so he was ordered to sleep outside in the fresh air, no matter how cold.  Nathan told the story that not one cook came down with the flu.  This year in his honor – and believing there are benefits to fresh air – I flung our windows wide open each morning, no matter how cold.

Bertha

I know this story can’t be true but I love it anyway: when asked how Nathan met Bertha the tale was told that he was walking by a bathhouse on the Lower East Side – which people used to bathe as their tenement apartments lacked proper tubs – and a woman rushed out shrieking “Help me, help me! My daughter is the baths and she just fainted. Help!”  My grandfather ran in and helped revive her. As he said, ‘”I saw her naked, so I had to marry her.”

Bertha Fuchs was born in Kamin-Korzcirsk (located in the Polesia marshlands and noted for pogroms and mosquitoes) and came here as a young child.  Her father worked in the garment business and bought a brownstone in Brooklyn that would remain in the family for over 50 years.  In the 1980’s New York City published directories of homes that had been abandoned and for sale at auction. I saw the listing for 808 Lafayette Avenue with an upset price of $2000.  For a fleeting moment I thought about buying it, but when I inspected it I found just a shell of a building.  I used the money to travel to Europe instead (which was a much better life decision).

It was at 808 Lafayette Avenue where the first generation of American Bornsteins began. My father Jack, Uncles Murray, Lenny and Aunt Rhoda were born there between 1921 and 1931. Eddie came along in 1938.  As with any large family, children have different memories and viewpoints of their parents. Jack, as anyone who knows him, looks at the world through rose-colored glasses (which at 99 still serves him well). As the oldest – and possibly the most indulged, Jack has wonderful and sweet memories. Though in recalling stories from my aunts and uncles there were difficulties: the Depression, family arguments, in-laws and money. Nathan was always sending funds back to his family in Russia much to the consternation of Bertha.

An All-American Family

As the Twenties were roaring all around them, Nathan and Bertha were creating their variation of the American Dream and the old world grew distant.  Here in Brooklyn, was the future.  Though observant Jews, they did not make religion the main focus of their life.  Their Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood was one of the most diverse communities at that time with Jewish, Gentile, Black and White families on the same block. They lived across the street from a school.  Nathan may have had a few years of shtetl cheder, and Bertha left high school in her late teens to get married. Because they both lacked education, it became the most important thing to give their children. It wasn’t only education, but sports and cultural opportunities that were encouraged.  Nathan was clueless about baseball but took his children to Yankee Stadium and all their children played on sports teams.  And though I am sure they never set foot into Carnegie Hall or the Metropolitan Opera, music lessons were part of the program.  They succeeded.  All four sons, like their father, served in the armed forces, but unlike him they then went on to graduate college: two lawyers, a social worker and a teacher.  My aunt did not go to college until later in life. My cousin Linda recalls her saying she wanted to go out in the world, get a job and make money.  In one of her early jobs she worked for a lawyer, who in lieu of paying her wanted to give her a painting done by his brother – an up and coming artist. Nathan, ever practical, reminded her that paintings don’t put food on the table and advised to take the cash instead.  Hence a Ben Shahn painting never hung in their home.

The Streets Weren’t Paved With Gold, But Rather Flooded With Seltzer

I am not sure how Nathan ended up in the seltzer delivery business – possibly through a family connection. He joined the brotherhood of ‘seltzermen.’  This entailed having a truck and delivering seltzer on a specific route in New York City.  While not exactly the nectar of the gods, seltzer was the elixir of the immigrants. It was a hands-on, rigorous business – going to the depot, schlepping cases of heavy bottles up tenement steps and keeping the accounts straight.  I don’t know if he ever thought about it in today’s terms of a ‘fulfilling career’   but he was his own man and it supported his family.

As a toddler I have a vague memory of being hoisted onto Nathan’s lap in the seltzer truck and tooting the horn  In 1960 he had a heart attack and had to sell the business – which was basically the route, a truck, and a few thousand bottles. In the months between when he took ill and the sale, my father and uncle managed the route – lawyers by day, seltzermen by night.  When I backpacked through Europe as a young man I was in a café in Paris where I met two haughty French sisters who spoke of the family vineyard in Champagne. I noted that my family was also in “sparkling beverages.” I omitted that it was based in Canarsie. 

Brighton Beach Years

It was the early 1960’s that my memories of Nathan and Bertha – Poppy and Babba to me and all their grandchildren – really kick in.  The first eight grandchildren were born in the 1950’s. I was the midpoint in 1956.  They had sold the brownstone by then and moved to an apartment in a two family house in Brighton Beach.  2730 Brighton 7th Street was literally on the exit ramp of the Belt Parkway.  Their home looked just like the set of the TV show, “The Honeymooners.”  The living room windows faced an alley. The furniture consisted of a scratchy sofa, a well-used club chair, and a bookcase that held the 100 volume Harvard Classics. There was a TV that seemed to be set to a continuous loop of Meet the Press, It’s Academic or wrestling, though no one ever really watched anyway, at least when the grandchildren were there.

Most visits were en masse – aunts, uncles, cousins.  The highlight of the year was always Passover which meant a minimum of 35 people crammed into the living room jammed with folding tables and bridge chairs.  Though we weren’t a formal crowd, we did wear jackets, ties and dresses.  It was chaos and we always started late.  Poppy was the focal point. Eventually everyone sat down after many refrains of “Sha, Sha we need to get started or we’ll never eat!” We used dogeared  Maxwell House Coffee or Jewish Welfare Board Haggadah’s from the year of the flood, so literally no one was on the same page and someone would always remark that we needed to buy “35 of the same ones for next year!” (which would never happen). Finally we’d all pay attention to Poppy. Babba would come out from the kitchen with the aunts (this was still the era when just the women were in the kitchen) and Poppy would commence the Seder with prayers over the wine and matzoh. Next up was the Four Questions, traditionally asked by the youngest grandchild who could read.  It was the main event.  I know I practiced for weeks prior to my debut.  All eyes were on that year’s designated wunderkind with grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins paying rapt attention.  Then the Seder dissolved back into chaos. Poppy would speed read in Hebrew through the entire Haggadah, there’d be lots of “Amens,” followed by “Let’s eat!”  By the end of evening the uncles would be telling jokes that inevitably ended with Yiddish punchlines so the kids never knew what was so funny.

But it was those the times when I got to be alone with Babba and Poppy that bring back the best memories.  I would stay overnight, sometimes on a Friday.  I’d watch Babba light the Sabbath candles.  She’d say the blessing in Hebrew and ask God to bless each child and grandchild by name. No matter how early I awoke Poppy was up before me.  I’d watch him lay tefillin and pray. He would take me to shul a few blocks away at the Hebrew Alliance of Brighton Beach off Neptune Avenue. It was always packed – and completely disorganized with hundreds of men davening at different times in no particular order all the while presided over by Rabbi Scheinberg – an extremely stern and frightening presence to a small child.  He had a long beard, what seemed like x-ray eyes and was the one person who was able to command the congregation.  As a very young child I actually thought he was God.

In the afternoon I’d watch Poppy drink tea Russian style – from a glass with a sugar cube between his teeth.  Then he’d read the Yiddish Forward and ‘teach’ me how to read Yiddish from its pages.  Sometimes I would sit on the sofa, snuggle into him and he’d rub my back.  A treat would be going down to Brighton Beach Avenue late on a Saturday night with my older cousins and picking up the early editions of the Sunday papers.

After his heart attack he ‘retired’ for a few months but got bored quickly (and possibly made Babba crazy). My Uncle Marty – Aunt Rhoda’s husband – got him a job with Mobilization for Youth.  MFY was a 1960’s anti-poverty program that set up small businesses and taught skills to low income kids in poor neighborhoods.  One of the businesses was a deli on the Lower East Side.  Poppy became the manager/instructor and trained a generation of mostly Puerto Rican teenagers how to slice meats and make salads. I like to think there are a generation of older Puerto Rican men with families who think chopped liver is a Latino specialty. The skills he learned in the army were finally put to good use 50 years later.  And no one made egg salad better than him.

As Poppy and Babba got older I think they became closer. They lived modestly, didn’t seem to want for material things, and never ceased to enjoy being with their family. They didn’t eat out but I do recall them taking us all for lunch for their 45th anniversary to Rappaport’s Dairy Restaurant on the Lower East Side (Rappaport’s was the low-end Ratner’s – and not even close to the glamorous French-Romanian Restaurant on Delancey St. that my upscale maternal grandparents frequented).  Around that same time Babba completed Erasmus Hall Night Hight School to get the diploma she never received after leaving high school to get married.  Years later I found some of her school papers.  She loved words and had lists of them with definitions and examples of their uses in sentences.  Babba taught me how to play cards, first Go Fish, then Hearts and then Gin Rummy.  And of course she always let me win. She had a great sense of humor and a joyous laugh. I recall when I was very young sitting at the kitchen table with her as she wiped it down with a sponge. She was so engaged in talking to me she took a butter knife and instead of picking up a piece of rye bread from the bread basket, she sliced a piece of butter from the stick in front of her and started buttering the sponge instead.  Thinking it was weird adult treat, I asked her in all seriousness if she liked buttered sponges. She broke out into hysterics and remembered it the rest of her life.

Poppy and Babba never took vacations.  They’d sit on beach chairs in front of the house and schmooze with the neighbors. And even though they lived a short walk from the ocean in Brighton Beach I never recall going there with them. When my Uncle Eddie started traveling around the world – especially to Europe – they probably couldn’t understand why. 

Rarely did they talk about the past.  I was in sixth grade when my father told me how Poppy’s mother and siblings were killed in World War II.  I never recall the words ‘holocaust’ or ‘Shoah’ being used.  It was referred to as ‘the war ’ and his mother and youngest siblings, twins Hinda and Yankel, perished.  I know he’d be overwhelmed with happiness if he knew that in the third and fourth generations, 4 sets of twins – including Madeline and Kerry – entered the world.

Old in the New World

Poppy’s MFY job ended in the late 1960s’s. He still wasn’t ready to stay home so he helped a friend who had a news stand at Penn Station.  Though he went to shul daily he never demanded that his children or grandchildren observe the way he did. I think he had his own approach to religion. When I was very young I recall coloring at kitchen table. It must have been the Sabbath and one of my older cousins told me that we weren’t allowed to draw on the Sabbath. Poppy came in and saw what I had been doing and encouraged me to keep making beautiful things.  He was certainly not going to stifle my nascent creativity for the sake of a rule.  When each grandson made their Bar Mitzvah he purchased their tallis on the Lower East Side.  I still have mine – though the only time I ever wore it was at my Bar Mitzvah in 1969. Many years later I remember asking my Aunt Rhoda what Poppy would think about his family, me included, who had married outside the faith. She reminded me that Poppy was realistic about life in America and ultimately judged a person by who they were, not by their religion.

My last memory of Poppy was a few days before he died.  He was tired and lay in the hospital bed, his eyes closed most of the time. Babba leaned over, held his hand and told him she’d bring him clean pajamas the next day. I turned back to say good bye. His eyes remained closed but I remember he smiled as I spoke.

The last two summers of Babba’s life she was convinced by her friend Lena to rent a little bungalow at Abel’s Colony – a ‘kockelein’ in the Catskills. She was lonely and missed Poppy so it was a good idea.  The first few weeks of both summers my cousin Richie and I accompanied her.  The place was pretty dumpy: a pool with green algae, a cracked basketball court and a ramshackle building called the ‘casino.’ Bertha enjoyed being there and would spend her days sitting and chatting with the other women under the trees, strolling the nearby lanes or sometimes picking berries (Lena made great pies).  Richie and I usually spent our time exploring the nearby hotels or walking into town to buy hot dogs at the deli or black light posters at the one hippie head shop in South Fallsburg.

In the afternoon we’d come back and help Babba make dinner.  Unlike many Jewish grandmothers, Babba wasn’t known for cooking – with a big family quantity counted more than quality. But she did make great blintzes which we had at least three times a week in the country.  Richie and I cooked sometimes and she even let me make her a cheeseburger once.  After dinner we’d talk and it was then that I learned a little more about her growing up, raising a family and life with Poppy.  She didn’t have any regrets, though she did say how Poppy had always wanted to pray at the Western Wall.  It made her wistful when she talked about it. Though my observance is minimal, on my first visit to Israel in 1979 I went to the Western Wall. I was overcome with emotion and the knowledge that I was a poor surrogate for the man that deserved to be there.

Legacies

My cousin Richie and  I would call Babba and demand to know which one of  us was her favorite – and she’d break out in laughter.  The fact is I am sure every grandchild ‘knew’ they were the favorite. Nathan and Bertha had an ability to make each of us feel that way.

Today my father, Uncles Lenny, Eddie and Marty are the senior members of the tribe – and all still going strong: Jack is busy adjudicating problems over parking spaces at Discovery Village in Florida; Lenny is Maine’s resident Jewish socialist happily ranting and raving over politics; Marty still enjoys summers at his lake house, and Eddie, who inspired many of his nephews and nieces to travel when he took us on trips abroad, hasn’t left Staten Island in decades.  My oldest cousin Eric, is a grandfather of five and my youngest cousin Beth, has a ten-month old. And every so often I will see a post with a picture of new member of the latest generation.  

In 2020 the family is a reflection of our country – diverse in ethnicity, race, religion, careers, and politics.  With the exception of a few seltzer bottles and Kennedy Half Dollars there are no heirlooms: no summer cottage full of memories, no art collection or case of monogrammed family silver. But for those us who knew them, and for those that only did through stories and photographs, we can be assured that Nathan and Bertha’s legacy of kindness, tolerance, strength and love is their inheritance – and those values are embedded in each of us. And we should always remember that, especially now.