by Anne Edwards
Emanuel’s father, Isaac Streisand, a tailor, emigrated from a small Jewish shetl in the village of Bryezany in Galicia, a section of Austria on the Hungarian border, in 1898. On marrying Anna Kessler Streisand, who also came from Bryezany, in 1907, Isaac sold the sewing machine he had carried on his back going from door to door to do small tailoring jobs, and used the money to set up a fish stand in the lower East Side ghetto where they lived. On S February 1908, Emanuel, their first child, was born. Three more sons, Murray, Hy and Phil, and a daughter, Molly, followed, and in 1920 Isaac opened a proper fish store on Summer Avenue in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Emanuel, called Manny by friends and relatives, lived with his family in a crowded two-bedroom tenement apartment walking distance from his father’s fish store. Manny, being the oldest son, helped his father more than his siblings.
Dealing in such perishable merchandise presented great difficulties for the family. The fish was bought in Manhattan from the Fulton Fish Market where Isaac had to drive at three in the morning in his erratic, worn-out truck bought from the former owner of his fish store. When not in school, Manny would help his father lift the fish in their large, heavy boxes layered in ice on and off the vehicle. When his mother was with his father in the store, he watched over his younger siblings at home and on Thursday evenings helped to chop and cut the fish to be sold the next day, the busiest they had, as Jewish households prepared for the Sabbath. After school Manny wrapped fish in newspapers and delivered it to houses in the neighbourhood. A work ethic was developed that would follow him through his life and in the long distant years be inherited by his future daughter.
As his business improved, Isaac moved his brood to more commodious accommodations in the Summer Avenue Housing Project a few streets down from his fish store where his oldest son, an exceptionally gifted student, had no intention of following in his father’s footsteps. Yiddish was the first language in his home as well, but Manny was proud of his own mastery of English and had dreams of perhaps one day becoming a writer. With whatever extra money he received as tips, he bought books. When he finished his course of studies at the local yeshiva, which in the United States was a secondary Hebrew school, often with elementary classes as well, he knew that education was the only way he would one day be able to satisfy his ambition.
After graduating from Boys’ High School in the summer of 1924, he entered City College of New York that autumn, supported by a small scholarship and part-time jobs as a lifeguard and a Good Humor Ice Cream truck driver. Learning, he believed, was the most saleable merchandise in the world. That lesson he learned from his mother, who went back to school after her children were in their teens to perfect her English and be able to read books that would open up the world to her. Her first-born resembled her in looks as well, inheriting her lively hazel eyes and wavy dark hair.
Manny received a Bachelor of Science degree from City College of New York in 1928. An all-round and well-liked young man, he was active in the Dramatist, Math, Boxing, Fencing and Debating Clubs. ‘Manny is one of those fortunate few who can graduate and say that college work has been easy,’ it says beside his earnest photograph in the college year book. One is struck by the strength of his jaw bone and the exceptional intelligence in his eyes. His forehead is high, his cheekbones broad, his expression keen.
‘There was something about Manny,’ a fellow student recalled. ‘It was not just that he was a genius, which everyone thought he was, he had a special quality. We all looked up to him, came to him for counsel.’ With the help of night classes, he earned a Master’s degree in Education in two years’ time. He and Diana had just married and spent a weekend honeymoon in Manhattan. On their return they were in an automobile accident. Manny suffered a slight concussion. For a few weeks, he had severe headaches. They eased in intensity and he learned to cope with their frequent return. Manny was not a complainer. His attention was directed on positive action and his current goal to make something of his life.
After the Great Crash, jobs and money were scarce. Determined that he would not start a family until they could have a small place of their own in a more upwardly mobile neighbourhood, Manny accepted a position as an English teacher at Brooklyn High School for Specialty Trades. Diana, who had taken secretarial courses, managed to find office work. They were married by Rabbi Isaac Boomis on 24 December 1930, and moved into a three-room apartment in Flatbush, which was where many first- and second-generation European Jews aspired to live once they had achieved some measure of education and advancement. In 1930, 50 per cent of Flatbush’s 85,000 residents were Jewish.
The newly married Streisands lived frugally, saving their money. In 1935, their son Sheldon Jay Streisand was born. His new responsibility inflamed Manny’s ambition. He had a plan. One day soon he would go back to school and work for his doctoral. With a PhD he could teach at a university, which would be more lucrative and prestigious and he could eventually write – not novels, since he knew he didn’t have the imagination that was necessary – but scholarly books. Diana never doubted that Manny had the intelligence and drive to do exactly that.
The students at Brooklyn High School for Specialty Trades tended to be truants, on the verge of dropping out, or general problem-makers. If they were over the age of sixteen, their required classes were strictly non-academic trades and skills, such as woodworking, or automotive work. But younger students had to take general classes – English, mathematics and social studies – as well for half a day. There were two sets of teachers, the technical staff and classroom instructors like Manny Streisand.
A fellow teacher, Nathan Clark, has retained warm memories of the time when he and Manny were associated. ‘Many of his students,’ said his former colleague, ‘were rough, from bad homes and bad neighbourhoods, but they all respected Manny Streisand. He treated them with understanding and kindness, and they weren’t used to that. He had no trouble from any student. They revered him, and if there was a student who caused a little trouble, Manny didn’t march him down to see the principal; he handled it himself.’
Although the emphasis of the school was on vocational arts, Manny seemed determined that the young boys he taught would have an understanding of their language and be able to write it well enough to enhance their chances of a good life. He was a born educator, Clark recalled, a dedicated teacher, who was especially endowed with the ability to communicate his thirst for knowledge. He was a man who loved children and who was ambitious not only for himself, but to give his son and when Barbara was born, his baby daughter, a good life and a solid education. ‘He was, I think,’ Nathan Clark says, ‘the finest man I ever worked with. Everyone loved him.’
When Sheldon Jay (Shelley) was a year old, Manny enrolled in the doctorate programme in education at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, taking night classes while holding on to his job at the vocational high school. The commute was time-consuming. Columbia is all the way over on the west side of Manhattan on 116th Street, a long journey by IRT subway from Flatbush. The young couple did not have an easy time of it. Diana had to return to work to supplement their income. Shelley was left in the care of a close neighbour while she was employed as a file clerk. Manny would leave the house just about the time that Diana was coming home. When he returned Shelley was asleep. Weekends he graded his high-school class papers, prepared his lectures and then settled down to study for his doctorate which would take him years with the limited amount of credits he could manage each semester.
Diana’s dreams were far more modest than Manny’s. Not an intellectual, she did not understand what he was studying nor why he was unhappy with just being a high school teacher where the salary of $1,800 a year was low-paying but steady and the job genteel and respected. There were many things about Manny that she did not comprehend, but she loved him deeply and was awed by the wealth of his knowledge. She still liked to sing, although she had long ago put aside her faint aspirations to a vocal career. Times were hard. Her daily life went on as it had for years to rhy
thms set by a Depression whose grip remained unbroken. Manny and Diana were the lucky ones. They had weekly pay cheques, however small, while jobless men still haunted the streets, pleading for handouts. Neighbours did what they could to help each other by watching children and sharing a soup pot when they knew a relative, neighbour or friend might go hungry otherwise. The building the Streisands lived in was now half empty as families, unable to pay the rent, moved into already crowded rooms to live with relatives.
The war came as a feared surprise. For months the stage had been set for a distant but dangerous war. Yet, America was not prepared for Pearl Harbor. Manny was correcting papers on the kitchen table that Sunday afternoon, 7 December 1941 when it was announced over the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Doors were thrown open in neighbours’ apartments as the occupants gathered in the hallways stunned, but united against ‘those dirty yellow bastards’. Then everybody was screaming. It was bitterly cold that day, but people ran out into the already crowded street. Diana was four months’ pregnant, grateful that her condition, Shelley, Manny’s job as a teacher and a predisposition to migraines would most probably conspire to keep him out of uniform.
Over 300,000 men left their homes in Brooklyn to fight in the war. A day or two after Pearl Harbor there were air-raid scares that sent people scurrying to shelter areas. More than 400 sirens were installed at strategic stations throughout the New York area, nearly half of these in Brooklyn, and their wail was eerie and piercingly loud enough to place terror in any heart. None but the most necessary lights were kept burning behind blackout shades at night in order to eliminate the sky glow against which ships might be silhouetted and made easier prey for submarines. Manny’s subway trips were conducted in near darkness. Windows of trains were painted black and even then only dim light was used inside the cars. It was all but impossible to read or do homework. Blackouts brought into action more than 150,000 air-raid wardens. Manny took a six-week training course based on the experience of wardens in Britain and was certified by the precinct warden commander before being assigned to a post. Two nights a week when he returned from Columbia he would put on a hard white helmet and an arm-band and patrol the dark streets of the neighbourhood with a protected flashlight before joining his small family.
The onset of Diana’s labour came in the midst of an air-raid drill. Manny hailed an emergency taxi driver, one of the few vehicles allowed on the roads at such a time. Barbara Joan Streisand (after Anna Streisand’s late sister, Berthe) was born at Israel Zion Hospital on 24 April 1942, healthy and strong-lunged. Family legend has it that her first cries were so loud they startled the delivery room staff. Until she was six months old she slept in a crib in her parents’ room, then Shelley was moved to a cot in the living room and she occupied his former room. With a baby and a seven-year-old son, Diana could no longer work. Money was tight but she was against Manny abandoning his work on his doctorate to take a high-paying job at the shipyards, which were now going full steam. However difficult it was, the Streisands survived by living on a rigidly frugal budget. But the strain was hard on both of them.
As the summer of 1943 approached, Manny was offered a chance to help his friend, Nathan Spiro, an industrial arts teacher, as a counsellor at Camp Cascade in Highmount, New York, in the Catskills just east of the village of Fleischmanns adjoining New York State’s richest farmlands. Camp Cascade was set in a protected glade in the foothills of the mountains and boasted a small waterfall and a natural swimming hole. The Streisands’ Flatbush apartment, which was at the rear of the building, was stiflingly hot in the summer. In upper New York State there would be the mountains, cool fresh air, space and a chance for Manny to relax and be with his family.
A man gifted with entrepreneurial skills, Nate Spiro had rented the camp, which consisted of five large cabins, and a main building with a kitchen, dining room, lounge and staff quarters, for the season. There was no heat or hot water. Campers took cold showers, but Diana heated water for Barbara’s bath on the huge wood cooking stove in the kitchen which also contained an old-fashioned, commodious ice box amply filled with vegetables and dairy products that came from a nearby farm.
Nate had made a good job of recruiting campers, mostly from Brooklyn’s immigrant families. There would be room for both men and their wives (each of whom had a young baby) and space with the campers for Nate’s four other children and for Shelley. Nate would teach the campers arts and crafts while Manny would organise a drama group. A camp cook qualified to cook kosher food was hired to join a staff which also inducted two cleaners and three more counsellors. Diana, Mrs Spiro and her teenage daughter, Helene, were to take care of the various other housekeeping chores while both men would supervise the sports with the help of the oldest of the 110 co-ed campers. Manny would be a great asset to the camp. An excellent swimmer, having once been a lifeguard, he was also proficient in squash and tennis.
Both families set off with great enthusiasm in three rather ancient, dilapidated, hired buses crowded with wide-eyed youngsters, most of whom had never before been in the country. Suitcases and equipment were tied on to the top of the vehicles. The small caravan moved sluggishly towards it destination, the children led in song by the adults while the older campers comforted the younger members who already were experiencing the first pangs of homesickness.
Manny was in particularly high spirits, happy that he could spend the summer in the country with his family. A proud father, he wanted to see Shelley develop athletic skills. He doted on Barbara, and although she was not a beautiful child, being almost bald as an infant, she had a merry laugh and quick responses that made him certain she was intellectually gifted.
Manny lacked only one year’s study for his doctorate in education at Columbia. During that summer he needed to think about his final thesis. The wooded camp setting, removed as it was from the heat and stress of summer in Brooklyn, would be a much better writing environment. The nearest town, Fleischmanns, normally a six-hour drive from Manhattan, but nearly a day’s journey with the numerous stops along the way to accommodate weak bladders and the buses’ leaky water pipes which caused them to hiss and overheat, had its heyday before World War One. The wealthy Fleischmann family, famous for their yeast product, had constructed a summer home there in the 1860s. A number of rich Austrian-Hungarian Jews followed, building grand estates with elegant verandas, magnificent gardens and rooms large enough for lavish entertaining. By the end of the century, something like fifty hotels crowded Fleischmanns’ borders. The town, however, lost its cachet between the wars as the affluent summer people, whose large homes were generally outside the village, moved to newer more popular communities closer to New York.
When Manny Streisand came to work at Camp Cascade, Fleischmanns was still suffering from the economic depression. The grand old Fleischmann house had burned to the ground years before and remained a charred ruin. Dotting the surrounding wooded areas were dozens of independent camps like the one that Nate had organised – all very primitive and catering for children of poor, foreign-born families.
The Streisands arrived at the end of June and were contracted for an eight-week stay. Within two weeks it began to look like their work would be more difficult than they had anticipated. After two of the counsellors quit, Manny doubled his duties and the number of campers in his care. The exercise was vigorous – hiking through the mountains, swimming in icy water, always having to be alert to danger from wild animals, brambles, insects or simply the rambunctiousness of his young group. Many campers did not speak English, having recently fled the Nazis. Nights were difficult as those scarred by what they had witnessed awoke with nightmares and had to be reassured that they were safe.
During his fifth week at Camp Cascade, Manny tripped over a rock while out hiking alone, hitting his head in the fall. Dazed, but noting there was no cut, he continued on his way back to camp. The following day he developed a paralysing migraine and went back to his cabin to lie down. Diana looked in on him a short time lat
er and found him sleeping fitfully. When she returned in an hour, she could not rouse him. Alarmed, she ran to get Nate Spiro. Manny was unconscious, his pulse barely perceptible.
‘It was terrible,’ she recalled. ‘We were so removed from everything. I suppose that made me ... frantic.’
The nearest hospital was in Margaretville, several miles further away than Fleischmanns. With the aid of some of the older campers, Nate got Manny into the one car they had at the camp. Diana accompanied them, leaving Barbara in the care of the Spiros’ daughter Helene. The child cried loudly when the car drove off in a cloud of dust, down the dirt trail to Margaretville. Barbara was never to see her father again.
Twenty-four hours later, on 4 August, Emanuel Streisand was pronounced dead. He had never regained consciousness. Respiratory failure was cited on the death certificate as the cause of death. Theories were to circulate in the family for years: Manny had been the victim of hospital misdiagnosis, he had suffered an epileptic fit, he had died from concussion or a tumor on the brain, he had contracted an infectious disease which, because of his close association with so many young people, it was thought better not to disclose. The result of a concussion, complicated by his earlier injury and not treated fast enough or with the right drugs, is the more likely explanation. Diana remembered pacing the floor back in their room at the camp, trying as best she could to remain in control for the sake of the children. She had no idea what they were going to do.
She was in shock, unable to believe that she was now a widow and her two children fatherless. Nate Spiro took over immediate arrangements and through the local Jewish funeral home, contacted the Jewish Burial Organisation for assistance in paying for and transporting his friend’s body back to Brooklyn. Carrying Barbara in her arms and holding on tightly to Shelley’s hand, Diana left Fleischmanns the next morning on the same train as the coffin. Manny was buried almost immediately upon arrival at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens.
