by Elisa New
Shrinking turns out to be the solution to an ancient besetting problem of civilization: the fact that almost all cloth materials, when first subjected to a hot or cold liquid, contract and become smaller. They shrink. Once I began to understand that shrinking can be both bad and good, I learned that shrinking is an ancient trade, first developed to help sailing ships stay afloat. Imagine what would happen if the sails, great flapping, snapping yards of cloth, that were carrying you from the port of Riga to Germany, had not been shrunk. What if the fibers of the sails on which your life depended absorbed, rather than repelled water? What if they decided when to shrink and expand on their own, going slack when expanded, stiff when shrunken? Good luck getting across the gulf.
After my aunts explained to me the importance of shrinking, I went through a period when I began to see its glories everywhere, and to this day I peer curiously at the garments I wear to determine whether they have been shrunk and if so, also sponged.
Why did Jacob go into the shrinking business, and how did he succeed so rapidly in it that he could buy two large houses on West Lombard for his family in the late 1890s (only ten years after arriving) and go on, despite setbacks, to “expand from shrinking” (his business motto), managing a company that still flourishes today and is run by his great-grandchildren?
My theory is that problems of shrinking were not new to him, that patents he filed just a few years after arriving (at twenty-five and twenty-six years old) bore parallels to the Baltic leather trade, which offers all the challenges of cloth shrinking and more. Growing up in the backyard of the Frankel Leatherworks, his own brother sent to Germany to learn the most modern methods, Jacob had been exposed to the most advanced technology being developed. The rendering processes would have been quite familiar, since the problems in curing leather are even more challenging than those with any large textile.
Thus it happened that in the waterproofing capital of the world between 1885 and 1900 my great-grandfather experimented with variations in shrinking and lofting, and with extracts such as Frankel was using at the same time. In the first years he learned his trade as a shrinker or sponger working out of his brother’s pants store, but eventually his own business offered “shrinking, sponging, and inspecting of cloth.” The great bolts of material arrived at Lombard Street early in the morning to be dunked in cold or hot baths, depending on use, and then hung on rods suspended from the ceiling. By 1900 he had opened a factory comprising three floors of workshop and drying space in a house adjoining his own. Yet he did not hesitate to call his business Levy’s International Shrinking Company. The “international” had, I’m sure, many meanings, quietly proclaiming his “internationalist” sensibilities. But it was also, perhaps, a subtle way of showing himself the equal of the prodigy Bernhard Baron. Coming from more modest antecedents than Jacob, Baron already outpaced him as an inventor, a socialist, and an internationalist.
A while back in these pages I mentioned that two artifacts symbolize for me the era when beautiful machines were beginning to populate the world. The first artifact was Paul’s letterhead. The second is a truly beautiful machine, if a small one, and it is now my own. I found it in a leather case in Aunt Myrtle’s closet.
Since I was the only young person in our family who didn’t possess what we called a “breakfront” for the display of collectibles, I had already been promised the great rosewood china cabinet, along with random salt cellars, some bits of chinoiserie, and various floral sprigged dessert dishes. Though they were items I’d never have chosen for myself, I knew I’d love them since they’d been hers.
Now, on my last tour of Aunt Myrtle’s apartment, I peeked into the closet that had once held the children’s toys, and I noticed a compact black case, leather bound.
Flipping open its square lid and lifting off a roomy compartment still containing an ancient instruction booklet, I looked down at what seemed to me the most beautiful of all Aunt Myrtle’s possessions. Still brilliant in black lacquer, glints of its gold detailing winking in the light, the writing on its side a proud flourish that said “Featherweight,” what I discovered in the closet was Aunt Myrtle’s own precious pride and joy, her beautiful Singer sewing machine.
Joan New (the author’s mother, with Ronald New, the author’s father) in 1955, dressed for a dance. Joan’s frock was made by Myrtle Levy Rosenstein on the author’s own Featherweight Singer sewing machine.
During my mother’s teenage years, this square black-gold thing had been the tidy, lovely factory from which mother’s splendid wardrobe issued, and of which I still had a few samples: a beaded ball gown stiffened with bone, a pale blue cashmere sweater with sheer white muslin appliqués, a camel’s hair coat, silk lined. Later my mother purchased her own machine during my parents’ impecunious era and made some beautiful things, dressing me in them on visits to the aunts. Eventually I learned to sew on it too. But my mother’s machine was a big sedan of a thing, gunmetal gray, with an ungainly flywheel and a way of finding every unevenness in a fabric’s weave.
Aunt Myrtle’s beautiful machine was different. It represented the high point of Singer technology. On its debut in the 1940s it was advertised as the machine a woman could pass on to her daughters and granddaughters. This delicate thing, about the size of a toaster or percolator and powered by an electric foot pedal, enameled as glossy black as a tea tray and detailed in gold, was not a tool but an instrument.
I held my breath as I asked Aunt Myrtle’s son Fred, so full of grief it was a bother to him to answer, if I could have Aunt Myrtle’s Featherweight. “Of course,” he replied, and I cradled the case carefully as I carried it to the car.
The week after I took it home, I found a place that refurbished old sewing machines. I had been afraid to turn it on lest it seize up in my hands. The man in the store reminded me of Aunt Myrtle’s doorman—grizzled, middle-aged, black. He lifted the machine out of its box and shot me a significant look. Drawing a piece of fabric under the foot, he reached around to drop the little lever, flicked the light on, and then set sail across a scrap of material.
“Man!” he said. “That is one . . . [and he drew out the sound, just as my Aunt Fanny would have done] beoooteeeful machine.”
Such beautiful machines remind me of the various construction projects detailed in the Old Testament of the Bible—the building of the ark, the tabernacle, and then the temple, and of a timeless love of making things as an intimation of godliness. My machine, on the other hand, seems made for the operator and preserved out of some era with a different respect for machinery. My machine is not only a handsomely made thing in itself, but its use instantly summons up in me a delicacy, refinement, and artistry we accord the finest mechanical constructions such as an exquisite, tiny watch.
In my life today there are periods—after classes end, or when my children are away at school—when I spend a meditative hour with Aunt Myrtle’s beautiful machine, eager to be worthy in my craft of its fineness. Turning and reading the pages of the booklet she kept so snugly in its little compartment makes me more careful than I would usually be in using a machine.
Rather than turn down edges of a hem hurriedly, I measure; rather than improvise the color of thread, rationalizing that no one really looks that closely, even at topstitching, I trim small swatches of cloth and carry them with me to the fabric store. There I marvel at the industry that brought so many colors and weaves so far, at the machines that wind the yardage on the bolts, and at the hundreds of colors of thread, facing, seam binding, hem binding, elastic, cording, and then all the fabrics, their names lushly sprouting from every letter of the alphabet, as if to mark, somehow, the marvels of technology that give each fabric its own stiffness or drape, its own intensity or delicacy of hue, its own particular set of appropriate uses—a merino and not a muslin, the moiré or the mousseline de soie. I get lost in these places, buy sets of scissors, pins with pearl heads, packages of pin cushions. Though my life requires me to sew little more than pillow covers or the occasional hallway
drapery panel, I long to make truly worthy items on my beautiful machine.
To me, using such a machine is to experience the true wonder of the industrial age, not in its dirtiness or cruelty but in its power to improve human wellbeing.
I run a seam on my beautiful machine whenever I want to experience what my great-grandfather and my great-great-uncle Baron may have meant when they used the word so important to them: civilization.
EIGHT
What She Wears, What He Wears
There was a feature in the Baltimore Jewish Comment that ran from the late 1880s and into the first decades of the twentieth century. Called “What She Wears, What He Wears,” the full-page feature offered the latest in fashion developments of interest to the consumers and producers of Jewish Baltimore. Like all Jewish weeklies (including those issued to this day), the Comment arrived on Friday afternoon in time for Sabbath day reading, and it addressed itself to women as tastemakers and purchasers. But unlike today’s fashion columns, “What She Wears, What He Wears” gave its readers weekly proof of their own leading role in making and keeping their city current. The column made clear that whatever Baltimore had been in the past, it was now, courtesy of its newest citizens, a fashion town.
In Baltimore, buckboard serviceable was out and city style was in! Out with canvas, calico, and denim and in with notions, beads, and haberdashery! Antebellum Baltimore had been a place where new Americans outfitted themselves for rural life. Postbellum Baltimore was a destination in itself, and, what’s more, a city that advanced America’s culture, placing it on a par with leading cities of Europe.
From the Baltimore Jewish Comment. Collection of the Jewish Museum of Maryland.
News in the Comment was substantive and copious, its coverage heavily tilted toward the doings in European capitals; the paper’s Jewish, liberal readers gave close attention to such events as the first Zionist Congress, the Second International, the Dreyfus trial, and the fascinating activities of the rising industrialists and financiers. This cosmopolitan flavor carried over to the fashion pages. Written in English (not a Hebrew, Russian, or Yiddish word to be found), the Comment put Baltimore at the center of the world’s marketplace, encouraging its readers to shop the international emporium. After all, now they could afford it.
“What She Wears, What He Wears” was a weekly witness to advances in precision, speed, saved labor, and variety that brought manifold objects of refinement within reach of many. Once, only the most fortunate could afford complex stitchery or garments constructed out of ten, twelve, or fifteen separate materials. Now any woman might have a garment in which the whole history of fashion was compressed, and, at the season’s end, she might have another.
In lieu of buying such a garment, there was always imagining, poring over a page rendered in the finest detail. Lavishly produced, each week’s feature showing the work of several commercial artists, the text descriptions in “What She Wears, What He Wears” offered readers something no longer available except in museum exhibitions or fabric stores: a fully dimensional, imaginative experience of dress, with every detail of adornment assigned a particular name and function. The language of this fin de siècle fashion is pitched at a level of technical understanding lost to modern fashionistas. For who is now versed, as readers of the Comment were, in the differences between glace, guipure, surrah? Who today would not goggle at a sentence describing a “capote” of “black spangles embroidered with black chenille with a torsade of white mechline tulle placed at the right side”? Who today has the visual and cognitive patience to appreciate, in an artist’s drawing, the bonnet whose “black and white ostrich plume springs from a bow of peau de soie of an ibis pink shade.”
No one I know, woman or man, can recognize peau de soie.
But the young girl who became my great-grandmother Amelia (daughter of Deborah, Bernhard Baron’s sister, and later the wife of Jacob Levy), plus her sisters Fanny, Lily, and Lena did.
Amelia and Fanny were experts in the stuffs, the tricks and nomenclatures, of the art of dress. Their mother, dark browed, shapeless even in her best black silk, stood hours behind the counter in her fabric shop, measuring guipure or moiré, counting pearly buttons, and measuring out feet of narrow ribbon and embroidery floss along her arm. The brilliant narrowest edged ribbon—sea green, pale lavender, tulip pink, shell pink, cream—was priced at ten cents a yard, but of course the girls who bought it wanted no more than a couple of inches, suitable to trim a hat. Five cents a foot, their mother Deborah glowers at the girls, unwilling to sell less and not unaware that her arm measures only ten inches.
Say it is nine o’clock on a bright September morning. The young Amelia pours a morning drink from the kettle set on the dented sheet of tin (lukewarm, she fumes, like the poorest Jews from Zagare drink; and tea not coffee, as one gets in town). She takes two thick slices of challah, butters them, and plucks the Comment from the hallway carpet, holding her cup of tea, and gently lifts the kitchen latch that connects to her mother’s store.
Opening the paper to “What She Wears, What He Wears,” Amelia turns and faces the wall of laces, grosgrains, linens, and removes from her pocket another slip of paper, headed “Novel Effects in Decoration.” It will be a mere ten minutes work with her mother’s machine but it will have to be done quietly, aided by just a small scissors and a basting needle.
First, remove the turquoise-blue grosgrain (suitable for May but not late September) in the moiré bell skirt. She could rethread through the slashes at the skirt’s bottom something more handsome and heavier, more appropriate to the season.
Her hat? Long since secured. The hat, in fact, was her inspiration for this morning’s whole venture into the closed-up shop. Upstairs in her reticule was the cleverest chocolate straw—with a russet plume and a tartan ribbon of gray, wine, and brown.
When the little clerk turned her back at Hutzler’s, it was nothing for Amelia to crook her wrist and quickly slide her hand inside her poplin cloak—then out with the crowd into the thunderstorm. She found that shopping late afternoons in August—many crowding the stores to be off the sultry streets, but everyone then exiting in a rush when the skies opened—allowed her the coverage she needed. And now with her dress retrimmed, her new hat, plus a flower plucked from the neighbor’s garden, she would not look less put together than her sister Fanny. Fanny always looked just so.
For all I know, my great-grandmother Amelia Elfant Levy may already have been showing signs of illness when she married my great-grandfather Jacob in 1891; twelve years later she was sent to what my own Aunt Fanny, her daughter, called the inst-ee-tution.
It was easy to see, even when I was just a little girl, that the subject brought shame to my aunts Jean, Fanny, and Myrtle. And so the details about how and why their mother—and then their mother’s last child, their brother Emil—lived out their lives in a mental institution not far from Uncle Paul’s farm, was a topic each handled in her own way.
By 1913, when her mother was hospitalized, Jean (born in 1894) was married to her first husband, Percy Adler; already she was becoming her father Jacob’s trusted right hand at the factory. As the eldest daughter, Jean exploited the freedom her mother’s absence provided and enjoyed the esteem that went with being elevated to the position of her father’s confidante and partner. In her later years Jean was the sister with the greatest narrative sense and the one most invested in communicating how “fine” her family was. She always stressed her mother’s elegance. A “real society lady” Jean called mad Amelia, raising her voice to emphasize that her version brooked no contradictions.
Far be it for my Aunt Myrtle to contradict indomitable Jean. Still, I remember distinctly the look she had once when she mentioned how it had been hard for her father, and for them all, when her mother was “taken sick.” Remember—she looked at me keenly—there were three little boys in Amelia and Jacob’s house: Emil, 6, Theo, no more than 8, and Paul, 10. Who would take care of them while their father was at the plant? While they all liv
ed in Balt-ee-mewer, Amelia’s three sisters had helped with the boys. But then Jacob opened the second Levy’s Shrinking plant and moved his family to Philadelphia, and things became more difficult.
In later years, brother Theo—Aunt Myrtle made sure that I understood this—took good care of Emil, sending money for his care from England. But one mustn’t forget that Theo too had been just a boy when his mother left, and took most of his badness out on little Emil, who seemed to suffer most because of their mother’s illness. Think of it. One day he was a little boy pampered, petted, taken everywhere with her—on shopping expeditions and to his aunt’s fine new house where the fountains twirled, and where sometimes a boy might watch the bigger fellows guide horses down the Gentleman’s Riding Trail. Next day, his mother was gone. The pathos of it, the children’s lonely bewilderment—Myrtle made this clear.
I would not have expected the information to come from Aunt Fanny, but it was she who once let something slip that gave me my only glimpse into what life might really have been like for Amelia’s children. At a certain point (no one knew quite when) it became clear that Amelia had developed a habit of shopping—without money. On pronouncing this very odd fact, Fanny had looked at Myrtle, guiltily perhaps but not to be silenced, for then she turned to me and burst out that she was the one who knew, for she had been the one who was sent when they called from the dee-partment store to go and fetch her mother home.
