Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  In addition to their son Arnold Meyer Spielberg, who was born on February 6, 1917, Rebecca and Sam had a younger son, Irvin (called Buddy or Bud), who became an aeronautical engineer and worked on NASA’s space program, and a daughter, Natalie, who married Jacob (Jack) Guttman and with him ran a family business that manufactures cake decorations (Natalie died in 1992).

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  STEVEN’S mother’s side of the family, the Posners, originated in Poland. “Posner” means “a person from Poznań,” the name of a city and province in western Poland (also spelled Posnań or Poseń). Poznań was taken over by Prussia in the late eighteenth century, and as the late Dr. Jacob Rader Marcus, dean of American Jewish historiography, noted in a 1994 interview, “Germans despised Posners. If a German says, ‘He’s a Posner,’ it means he’s held in contempt.” But the Posner ancestors of Steven Spielberg had a more worldly background in Russia than the Spielbergs, for the Posners’ cosmopolitan hometown of Odessa, a bustling port on the Black Sea, was known as “The Paris of Russia.”

  In the end, however, Jews were scarcely more welcome in Odessa than they were anywhere else in Russia. Odessa was the site of regular anti-Jewish riots, and an unusually severe pogrom occurred there in 1905, the year of the attempted revolution and the mutiny by sailors on the battleship Potemkin (later the subject of Sergei Eisenstein’s silent film classic Potemkin, which includes the famous Odessa Steps sequence). When Odessa’s Jews celebrated the czar’s promise of reforms, four hundred Jews were killed in retaliation during four days of mayhem. Such attacks—which also occurred in several other parts of Russia during 1905—were provoked by the authorities and executed by local ruffians with the help of policemen and Cossacks.

  That year of turmoil was the year Philip Posner, born in Odessa in 1884, came to Cincinnati to make a new life for himself and his family, one he hoped would be safer from persecution and tyranny. He would remain devoutly Orthodox, resisting the modernizing influences of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement that flourished in Odessa, and the Reform movement in America. But Odessa’s cultural ferment would leave an imprint on his consciousness, despite the deficiencies of his formal education. An artist manqué, Philip Posner would pass along his artistic inclinations to his daughter and his famous grandson.

  Philip’s parents, Simon Posner (son of Ezekiel Posner and Anna Fildman) and Miriam (Mary) Rasinsky (daughter of Benjamin Rasinsky), emigrated soon after him to Cincinnati, where Simon Posner, like Samuel Spielberg, became a jobber. The oldest of six children, Philip followed the same profession, selling schmatte (clothing) and other merchandise to support his wife, the former Jennie Fridman, and their two children, Leah and Bernard (Bernie).

  Philip Posner was “a very emotional man,” his son-in-law Arnold Spielberg recalls. “A religious, very observant man. He used to go to the synagogue in the morning, in the evening, any time. He was at one time quite well-to-do, and then the Depression took him under, along with many other people.”

  One time, Leah recalled, her family did not have enough to eat for several days until her father made ten dollars buying and selling old jewelry. He used the money to take them on a holiday. “We were poor, but there was no depression in our house.”

  Philip worked mostly out of his home, and Steven loved to play in his grandfather’s attic, which was crowded with his merchandise—shoes and socks and shoelaces, belt buckles and tie clips. Norman Cummins, a fellow Jewish merchant who ran a discount clothing store, would buy Philip’s discontinued stock “as a mitzvah—a blessing,” Cummins’s wife, Edith, remembered. “Mr. Posner was a little, slight, sweet sort of man. He had a very nice, pleasant little house. I would go there with my husband, and I’d talk to Steven. He was a real skinny tyke, very lively. Who knew he was going to be this big man? He’d sit there and eat a cookie and dip it in a glass of milk. When he had finished his glass of milk, his grandmother would strain the cookie out of the milk and put the milk back. I was very impressed by that. I don’t know if it was poverty or just frugality.”

  Like the violin-playing Papa Mousekewitz in An American Tail, Steven’s Grandpa Fievel poured his heart not into his business but into his music, playing the guitar and dancing ballet. Leah, who inherited her father’s love for music, felt his creativity was sidetracked by his struggle to make a living. Fievel’s brother Boris was the first known relative of Steven Spielberg to enter show business. He was a Shakespearean actor in the thriving Yiddish theater of the period; Leah remembers Boris declaiming Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy in their living room, in Yiddish. Boris was also a vaudevillian, singing and dancing with a straw hat and a cane, and he later became a lion tamer in the circus. (In Spielberg’s 1995 animated film Balto, set in Alaska during the 1920s, there is a Russian Jewish refugee goose named Uncle Boris.)

  Leah’s mother, Jennie, born in 1882, was a native Cincinnatian. She was the second oldest of ten children born to Russian émigrés Louis Fridman, who had come to the United States by way of London in 1870, and Sarah Leah Nathan. Louis Fridman’s father, a cigarmaker named Israel Fridman, was born in Poland in 1830—the earliest date of birth that can be traced for any of Steven’s ancestors—and died of emphysema in Cincinnati in 1883. Louis practiced his father’s profession for a while, but he also worked as a horse cart driver and a traveling salesman.

  Steven’s Grandma Jennie was a lively, hardworking, and self-reliant “American lady,” as family friend Millie Tieger described her. “Both of [Steven’s] grandmas were more assertive than the grandpas.” Immigrant men often found that to be the case, for their traditionally dominant role in the old country tended to wither away in the face of the harsh economic realities and more liberal mores they encountered in America.

  Before her marriage to Philip Posner in 1915, Jennie briefly ran a millinery shop with her sister Bertha. Jennie also majored in English at the University of Cincinnati, and Arnold Spielberg remembers her as “a very bright woman and a cultured, gentle woman.” She called everyone she liked “Dolly,” including her daughter Leah, who was born on January 12, 1920, and inherited her effervescent, outspoken personality from her mother.

  Jennie “was never too domestic,” Leah admiringly recalled. Jennie worked as a milliner and clerk for a while after her marriage. Later she taught English in her home to German Jewish immigrants, many of whom were refugees from Nazism and had their tuition paid by local Jewish charities to help them acclimate to life in America and to prepare for citizenship applications. And yet the husband of this thoroughly modern American lady never lost his old-world ways.

  Fievel Posner had a long white beard and wore the traditional Orthodox garb of black coat and hat. While growing up, Steven became so embarrassed by his grandfather’s appearance and frequent davening (praying) that he tried to keep his gentile friends away from the house when Grandpa Fievel came to visit. One day when Steven was eight years old and living in Haddon Township, New Jersey, he was playing football with some friends in the street, “and suddenly my grandfather, with the yarmulke, comes out of our house, two houses down, and yells: ‘Shmuel! Shmuel! [Steven’s Hebrew name]. I’m not answering him. I’m pretending I don’t know him. I’m denying that name. My friend is saying, ‘He’s looking your way. Does he mean you?’ They point at me, and I’m saying ‘No, it’s not me,’ and I’m denying the existence of my own grandfather.”

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  IF not quite the “paradise for the Hebrews” extolled by a nineteenth-century Ohio historian, what the Spielbergs and Posners found in the Queen City of the West was a stolid, largely German-American burg where Jews and gentiles lived in relative harmony and prosperity.

  Arnold Spielberg had only “a little” trouble with anti-Semitism when he was growing up, such as an incident when a man wearing a Ku Klux Klan insignia on his belt called him a “Jewboy.” “But my street was the best street in the world,” he nostalgically recalls. “During the wintertime, the city would block it off and we had sled riding. The street
went right down into a park. We had a ballfield there. We had a woods to go play in. It was a wonderful place for a kid to grow up. You couldn’t have asked for a better place.”

  Even though its Jewish population has always been modest compared to those of cities on the East Coast—Jews made up only about 5 percent, or 22,000, of Cincinnati’s 475,000 citizens when Steven Spielberg was born—Cincinnati was long regarded as “a Jewish version of the American dream,” Jonathan D. Sarna wrote in his and Nancy H. Klein’s 1989 history, The Jews of Cincinnati.

  The roots of the city’s Jewish community date back as early as 1814. As the birthplace of the Reform movement, founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise to liberalize and Americanize traditional Judaism, Cincinnati is home to such renowned Reform institutions as Hebrew Union College, The American Israelite newspaper, and the American Jewish Archives. Spielberg’s birthplace, the nonsectarian Jewish Hospital in Avondale, is the oldest Jewish hospital in the United States. Partly because of its strong German influence, Cincinnati has never been immune to anti-Semitism, and Sarna concludes that “in many ways, the Jewish vision of Cincinnati was simply too good to be true.” But Jews arrived early enough in Cincinnati to have won the status of pioneers, and they have long been seen as an integral part of the city’s social, political, and cultural establishment, even if they were not always as readily accepted in all parts of the business community.

  Among the many hurdles Russian Jews, such as Spielberg’s grandparents, faced when they began pouring into America in the late nineteenth century was the hostility of many German Jews who had preceded them. German Jews who had settled in America viewed themselves as far more educated, more solvent, and more cultured than the hordes of newcomers seeking their help and kinship. For much of Spielberg’s grandparents’ and parents’ lives in Cincinnati, their German Jewish neighbors “held Eastern Europeans in utter contempt,” Jacob Marcus said. “The German Jews were predominant socially, culturally, and financially, but for every German Jew there were at least five or six Eastern Europeans, which included Russians, Poles, Rumanians, and Eastern Hungarians. It was only around the 1930s or the 1940s that a few individuals of Germanic origin began to marry into the families of Eastern Europeans.” In housing, too, the German Jews were “always a street ahead [of the Eastern Europeans] and ne’er the twain shall meet,” he observed. “The lines were drawn very sharply until about 1950.”

  With the coming of the automobile around the turn of the century, Cincinnati, like the midwestern city of The Magnificent Ambersons, found itself “heaving up in the middle incredibly.” And as Cincinnati heaved and spread by annexing the outlying suburbs of the horse-and-buggy days, the old inner city was left a slum, occupied by Negroes and the poorest whites. Avondale, the genteel suburb of first remove for Jews leaving the West End, by the 1920s became the city’s largely Jewish enclave. It was there Spielberg’s grandparents and parents lived, where Steven was born and where he spent his first two and a half years.‡

  The more fashionable streets north of Rockdale Avenue in Avondale initially were the domain of German Jews. As the WPA’s guide to the city put it, “The Orthodox Jews infiltrated the southern part of the suburb and gradually moved north, establishing a lively shopping district along Reading Road near Rockdale Avenue.” Beginning less than a block from Arnold and Leah Spielberg’s apartment at 817 Lexington Avenue, across the street from the Conservative Adath Israel synagogue on Reading Road, that district included the neighborhood movie house, the Forest Theatre. When Arnold was a boy, “Every Saturday we used to get a nickel and go to the Forest Theatre. I used to like to watch most adventure movies, all the Douglas Fairbanks movies, all the serials.”

  South Avondale was a haimish—warm and unpretentious—Jewish neighborhood of extended families and landsleit—people from the old country—who all pulled together to survive. Although his grandfather Samuel Spielberg died a year before he was born, Steven grew up with an advantage few of today’s children share, that of having three grandparents living in the same neighborhood.

  Leah’s parents, Philip and Jennie Posner, had rented a white frame house at 819 Glenwood Avenue since 1939, the fifth home they had lived in since their marriage. Arnold Spielberg remembers it as “a very nice home. When I was going to school at the University of Cincinnati, they lived just one block over. Leah would go over to their house, I’d come back after school, and we’d sit down and have a Sabbath lunch. Then we’d pray after lunch and sing songs. I learned all their songs.”

  Sam and Rebecca Spielberg had lived in ten homes before the family settled in 1935 into half of a red-brick duplex they rented at 3560 Van Antwerp Place. “Our street was ninety-five percent Jewish,” Arnold recalls. “And all of them were successful people, doctors, dentists, or lawyers. It was very education-oriented. My brother and I were the only engineers that came out of that street. We used to brag to each other as to how religious the families were. My friends were almost all Orthodox. We were one of the few Conservative families on the street.” After Sam’s death, Rebecca continued to live there, supported by her children. Although Sam’s grandson would amass a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine in 1996 at $1 billion, Sam’s estate amounted to only $1,728.57, of which Rebecca received $1,182.15 after the costs of his final illness, burial, and probate.

  By the time of Steven’s birth, many of Avondale’s old homes had been cut into duplexes or subdivided into three or four apartments, with the former maid’s quarters on the top floor often serving as the tiny apartment of an elderly or unmarried family member. After Arnold’s discharge from the U.S. Army Air Forces in September 1945, he and Leah rented their modest first-floor apartment on Lexington Avenue from Mrs. Bella Pritz, who lived upstairs with her daughter (the apartment occupied by the Spielbergs was one of two on the first floor). Though Avondale was already being vacated by German Jews, who kept moving northward into fresher and more rustic suburban acreage, it still was only “lower middle-class at worst” in those years, historian Jacob Marcus recalled. With housing growing scarcer as veterans began coming back from the war, the newlywed Spielbergs were lucky to find a decent apartment.

  “It was a lovely neighborhood,” recalls their neighbor Peggie Hibbert Singerman. The houses had “big backyards, huge porches on the front, swings. They were elegant houses, with wonderful woodwork in some of them.” Many of those beautiful old homes remain well preserved today, long after the white flight of the 1950s that saw the Jewish population abandon Avondale to blacks climbing the economic ladder behind them. The house where Steven lived as a young child is still standing; it is a rental property owned by the Southern Baptist church, which in 1967 bought the Adath Israel building across the street, now a national historic landmark.

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  IN their growing restlessness with the comfortable but limiting environment of Cincinnati’s Jewish enclave, Arnold and Leah Spielberg were typical of many second-generation American Jews whose postwar ambitions for themselves and their children would lead them to turn their backs on their aging hometowns and depart for the brave new world of suburbia.

  Arnold Spielberg, his sister Natalie Guttman recalled, “was always a questioning, exploring, and highly intelligent youngster whose quest for learning was and has never really been quenched.” But when Arnold was attending Avondale Grade School, he was regarded as “a nerd,” according to a schoolmate, Dr. Bernard Goldman. “He didn’t fit into the group. Other kids played ball, but he never seemed to join in that. He wasn’t a spectator. He probably had his own interests.”

  From early boyhood, Arnold’s primary interests were scientific: “The earliest influence was the son of the man who lived upstairs [in my building]. His son used to tinker around with radios. I was a little kid then, about six or seven years old, and I used to go down to the basement, watching him build stuff. Then another guy moved into the house next door—he was a radio repairman, and he gave me parts. And I was going to Avondale School one day—I’ll n
ever forget this—I was walking up the street on Windham Avenue, and I looked in the wastebasket. There was a bunch of radio stuff. I picked up that radio stuff, ran home, and opened the door—‘Mom, don’t throw this out!’ I went to school, barely made it to class, came home—it was a crystal set that somebody had tried to fix. I just put the wires to the nearest connection and I got it to work. This was in 1927 or ’28; I was ten years old at that time.

  “I’ll never forget putting the earphones on my uncle’s ears when he came over from Manchuria to America. It was the first time he ever heard a radio. The family thought I was nuts, you know, a ‘crazy-head scientist.’ I was always into magnetics and electrical stuff. Making magnets, burning up batteries, making shocking machines out of batteries from the old battery-radio sets. I used to go around to people’s houses and say, ‘Have you got any used-up batteries?’ They’d give ’em to me, I’d get some power out of ’em, connect ’em all in series, make sparks. Typical kid stuff.”

  Arnie and his brother Buddy, who was only a year younger, shared the same hobby. “They were into electrocuting rats in the attic,” their nephew, Samuel Guttman, relates. “Arnold was a ham operator [from the age of fifteen], and somehow he had an antenna system that ruined the radio reception in the neighborhood. The two terrorized the neighborhood. My mother once got so crazy she threw a punch at ’em through a glass door.” Arnold “was remarkably intelligent in school, and he would fool around at home—he did all kinds of smart scientific things,” recalls family friend Millie Tieger. “He built a television set in the 1930s, before anybody else did, before anybody knew what a television was. Everybody said, ‘Arnold, what are you doing?’”