Stan Lee

by Bob Batchelor

  To their credit, however, Celia and Jack raised the boy to believe that he could expect a bright future despite the hardships he experienced firsthand and the countless harsh arguments his parents had about money. Stanley Lieber emerged an optimist, bedeviling the clouds that filled the sky the day he was born and the dark times brought on by the Depression and its aftermath for his little family.

  This is how superheroes are born.

  Young Stanley Lieber’s parents were among the millions of immigrants to enter America in the early years of the twentieth century. Born in Romania in 1886, Stanley’s father docked in the New York City harbor in 1905. Hyman, who later went by Jacob or the Americanized “Jack,” was a mere nineteen years old. His relative (possibly brother) Abraham, then just fourteen, accompanied him on the voyage. The teens joined the wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern European countries flooding into the United States at the beginning of the new century. After decades of pogroms (terror campaigns against Jews) across Europe and Russia that left countless thousands of Jews murdered, immigration to the United States skyrocketed from 5,000 in 1880 to 258,000 in 1907. In total, some 2.7 million from all over Europe migrated to America between 1875 and 1924.

  Hyman left behind life in gritty Romania, a country in southeastern Europe, at that time sandwiched between Austria-Hungary to the north, Serbia to the west, Bulgaria to the south, and Russia and the Black Sea to the east. Young Hyman Lieber set off during the reign of monarch Carol I, who took control of the nation in 1881 and ruled until his death in 1914. It would have cost Hyman and Abraham about 179 rubles each—about $90, an enormous sum at the time—to make the trip to the United States. Of that sum, 50 rubles were shown to the Ellis Island immigration staff to demonstrate that they could subsist and make a fresh start in the new country.1

  Hyman and Abraham were among the first large surge of Romanians to leave for America, a wave of one hundred forty-five thousand that left between the mid-1890s and 1920. For most Romanians considering the move, the United States promised economic stability and religious freedom. Like so many Eastern Europeans, the first groups went to America in search of steady wages and the ability to save money, which would enable them to return to their homelands and buy land. The total number of Romanian immigrants paled in comparison to other nationalities. In contrast, some three million Poles immigrated to America between 1870 and 1920.

  For Jewish Romanians, the immigration tale is dramatically different, and more typical of the European Jewish immigration that took place during that era. Widespread discrimination meant that Romanian Jews usually stayed in America. Young Jewish men in Romania had few opportunities for meaningful careers. The monarchy forbade Jews to become lawyers, outlawed rabbinical seminaries, and made entrance into medicine almost impossible. The state considered Romanian Jews “aliens” or “foreigners” regardless of how long one’s ancestors had lived in the country. According to others who left Romania at that time for the United States, being a minority meant permanent subservience and subsequent discrimination based on religion and ethnicity.2

  The abuses of power were frequent and pervasive. According to one writer, “Romanians used veiled anti-Jewish legislation while avoiding outward use of barbarous acts and brutality that would draw the attention and disapproval of the civilized world.”3 Yet the psychological terror had significant consequences. Several laws passed in the 1890s outlawed education for Jews, while anti-Semitism was openly taught in Romanian high schools.

  The semi-secret pogroms in Romania led to countless anti-Jewish riots and widespread pillaging, which the police and army either did not stop or actively participated in as the rampaging continued. Violence became a constant way of life for Romanian Jews. As one historian explains, “The economic depression that became dire in Romania towards the close of the nineteenth century was accompanied by an increased level of violence, starting with the anti-Jewish riots from Bârlad (1867), Buzău (1871), Botoşani (1890), Bucharest (1897) and Iaşi (1898).”4 With so few Romanians in the United States, much of this news never reached the states, and thus did not face media scrutiny.

  While the teenaged Hyman stayed in New York City, some sixty thousand of the first groups eventually returned to Romania. Other Eastern Europeans moved somewhat fluidly back and forth between America and their native countries. The hardships they endured in getting to the United States and the potential dangers in the manufacturing economy were deemed worthwhile, since the money they earned had transformative consequences for themselves and their families back home. After the initial burst that ended at the dawn of the Jazz Age, however, few Romanians would immigrate to the United States for the next twenty-five years. The numbers remained small and did not really pick up again until the nation faced the threat of Nazi occupation during World War II.

  Once they arrived in the United States, the earliest Romanian immigrants faced hardships that transformed the traditional strong family values that they carried with them from their homeland. Most were unskilled laborers, so life in the mills and factories in American industrial cities proved dangerous and difficult. Workplace injuries and deaths occurred frequently among immigrant workers of all ethnicities. For Jewish immigrants from Romania, however, the hardships of life in New York City paled in comparison with what they potentially faced. The American Dream offered them a chance at a better life, despite the challenges of poverty and finding adequate housing. If nothing else, these new Americans gained religious freedom and safety from the wanton violence that took place against Jews in Romania.

  Many single men, like the teenage Hyman, left home and the core of their family nucleus behind to scrape out a meager existence. Frequently, these single laborers grouped together in boarding homes or lived with other Romanian immigrant families. For such young men, cultural life, as it existed at the time, meant a revolving set of meeting places, including local restaurants and saloons and church services.

  Jewish immigrants also faced potential anti-Semitism, so grouping together with their countrymen provided some insulation from these prejudices. Relatively few of the new immigrants could speak or read English, adding to the kinship ties among countrymen and solidarity when they faced the English-speaking world. Remembering a Romanian-Jewish restaurant on the Lower East Side, Maurice Samuel recalled that people gathered there “to eat karnatzlech, beigalech, mămăligă, and kashkaval, to drink . . . and to play six-six and tablanette,” all while speaking in Romanian Yiddish and telling nostalgic stories about Jewish locales in Bucharest. Yet, the stories were also tinged with regret as the storytellers mentioned the anti-Semitic pogroms designed to drive them from the nation.5

  Hyman Lieber and Abraham both entered the clothing industry in turn-of-the-century New York at a time when the garment district clamored for workers. Many Jewish immigrants were skilled craftsmen (about 65 percent of the total), but there is no way to determine if Hyman had worked in the industry or received any kind of advanced training in Romania. The anti-Semitic education legislation and unfair business practices make this possibility seem improbable. One historian notes, “Upon arrival in the United States, the immigrants became tailors, even if they had not been tailors before, because this trade was in demand in Manhattan.”6

  Like many first-generation families who lived during that era, the Liebers did not talk much about their own pasts or the paths they took to get to America. Although many immigrants brought aspects of their culture with them and continued to hold to those norms as much as possible, often immigrant families focused on adapting to American culture and creating new lives and opportunities for their families. Discussions centered on what the future might hold, not the years of hardships or struggles that it took to get to the United States.7

  A clearer picture emerges about Lee’s parents and his extended family if they are examined within the broader wave of Jewish and European immigrants who moved to New York City in the early twentieth century. The struggles his immediate family faced and the consequences on
the youngster were similar to the countless other Jewish families and individuals attempting to assimilate.8

  In 1910, both Jacob and Abraham lived with Gershen Moshkowitz, a fifty-two-year-old Russian, and his Romanian wife Meintz, on Avenue A in Manhattan. The family had two children, Rosie and Joseph. Both Joseph and Abraham are listed in the census as operators in pocket books, suggesting that the two teens worked together in the same shop. Jacob had already begun his career as a cutter in a coat shop. Like the Moshkowitz children, the census worker listed that both Liebers attended school and could read and write English, but supplied no further details. They almost certainly spoke Romanian Yiddish at home and in the neighborhood.9

  Ten years later, in 1920, the thirty-four-year old Jacob was still living as a boarder, at this time with the family of David and Beckie Schwartz and their three young children, in an apartment on 114th Street in Manhattan. The Schwartzes immigrated to America in 1914 from Romania. Unlike Jacob, they could not speak, read, or write in English. The connection for immigrants at this time always seemed to center on work lives intermingling with private lives. Both Jacob and David worked in the dressmaking industry. The 114th Street apartment building and surrounding neighborhood was predominantly Jewish immigrants from Russia and Romania, so Yiddish was much more common than English. Both Schwartzes were also considerably younger than Jacob (David at 26 and Beckie 25).

  Events would change quickly for Jacob over the next two years. In 1920, he was living with the Schwartz family, but by the end of 1922 he had married Celia Solomon, and newborn Stanley Martin arrived just before the New Year.10

  As sparse as the Lieber line seems, the family tree does not really straighten out on the Solomon side either. We do know that the Solomon clan consisted of a large family and that they immigrated to America in 1901. The Solomons represent a more typical Jewish immigrant experience at the turn of the twentieth century: they immigrated as a family, a costly endeavor for Jews struggling to save enough money to escape Romania, but important in keeping the family together.

  Nine years later, by 1910, the family occupied an apartment building on Fourth Street along with many other Romanian families. Various documents list Celia’s father and mother with different first names, his either “Sanfir” or “Zanfer,” while her mother’s is the more common “Sophia” or “Sophie.” Sanfir, born in 1865, and Sophia, born a year later, had eight children. In 1903, Robbie, their youngest child, was the first born in the United States.

  Celia’s birth year is alternately listed as either 1892 or 1894. In 1910, she worked as a salesperson in a five and dime store. She and her older brother Louis, employed as a salesman at a trimming store, did not attend school, but her four younger siblings living with the family—Frieda, Isidor, Minnie, and Robbie—all did. With the older children working to help support the family and the young members going to school, the Solomon children embodied the typical path to success for immigrants. Similarly to many of their Romanian kinsmen, the family settled into life in the United States, aspiring for a higher standard of living, taking advantage of educational opportunities, and many more readily embracing American popular culture. While Sanfir and Sophia spoke Yiddish, their children gained fluency in English, a significant step toward adapting to their new home. The Solomon family later moved to West 152nd Street.11

  Lee remembers that the family moved from the apartment on West Ninety-Eighth and West End Avenue to Washington Heights around this time, when his younger brother Larry was born (October 26, 1931).12 The move definitely signaled a downsizing in the family’s fortunes and neighborhood. Like so many others, the Great Depression cut the heart out of the Lieber family and its progress toward fulfilling the American Dream.

  Standing outside an Episcopal church on Twenty-Ninth Street in Manhattan, some two thousand men turned up their collars and burrowed their hands deep in their coat pockets against a bone-chilling wind whipping through the city. In the early days of the Great Depression, such lines were commonplace, snaking and twisting up Fifth Avenue. These men heard that the church dispensed food to the poor and assembled in hopes that they might get enough to feed their families. A quarter of them were turned away when the rations ran out. Desperation mixed with fear and many people would go hungry that night.

  The sight of these needy New Yorkers and the countless others just like them unnerved the city’s residents. Many of those waiting for food were clearly in anguish over accepting charity to survive. Those filling bread lines and taking handouts carried a deep psychological burden as unwilling participants in the country’s economic ruin. They did not want to take aid. Americans prided themselves on a strong work ethic and believed that they would be rewarded for this attitude. Most who received welfare, from clothing and rent money to food and medical supplies, did so reluctantly.

  The collapse of the national economy at the hands of Wall Street corruption left the country angry and despondent. Money resided at the heart of American culture in the 1920s. The era’s brokers and investment bankers rose up and reigned as society’s new heroes and celebrities—the kind of men that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby might have become if the fictional character were real. Wall Street fluctuations, hot stocks, and trading exploits served as juicy gossip. The overheated economy put the kindling in place; Wall Street greed provided the spark.

  The soup line of broken men weaving through Manhattan creates a riveting picture of national despair. Yet, each one of those individuals also represented a defeated family left crippled by the financial collapse. After decades in the United States, falling in love, and starting a family, the Depression devastated the Liebers. Stanley, still too young to comprehend the magnitude of what had happened, did hear the fallout, the anger, and the anguish in his parents’ voices. “My earliest recollections were of my parents talking about what they would do if they didn’t have the rent money,” he said. “Luckily we were never evicted.”13 The struggle for day-to-day essentials forced families into constant alert mode.

  When the stock market crashed in late 1929, Jacob had been in the United States for more than two decades. However, nothing could insulate him or his coworkers during such disorder. His work in the garment district simply dried up and went away. According to Lee, his father also attempted to run a diner, but the operation failed, which cost the older Lieber his life’s savings.14

  The chronic unemployment took a toll on Jacob and Celia’s marriage. As the daily struggles compounded, the pressure was too much to stand. Stanley, not yet seven, witnessed his parents “arguing, quarreling incessantly.” Like a bad record doomed to play over and over again, “it was over money, or the lack of it.”15

  Historically, Romanian families were known for possessing incredibly close ties. Even during the Depression, some patriarchs refused to let their children work, realizing that education still created the path to achievement, regardless of the money woes they faced. For the Liebers, Stanley was too young to contribute. He spent the most difficult years of the Great Depression watching and listening to his parents fight to keep the family afloat.

  The constant bickering between Jacob and Celia only halted on Sunday nights, when the boy and his parents gathered around the radio.16 Young Stanley liked listening to the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen on NBC’s The Chase and Sanborn Hour, which aired from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Sunday nights for decades. Bergen’s wooden sidekick was Charlie McCarthy, a wisecracking, often slyly suggestive mouthpiece for the comedian’s humorous skits. Since radio listeners could not actually see that Charlie was a dummy, the real joy was in Bergen’s comedic patter and skill in creating compelling characters.

  While Celia cleaned the apartment or cooked in the cramped space, Jacob scoured the want ads, but could not mask his increasing desolation. As a young boy, Stanley watched his father venture out into the city each day to look for work. Exhausted and mentally beaten, the man then returned each evening, more despondent and desperate than before. Jacob, according to his s
on, just sat at the kitchen table, staring out at nothing, growing ever more depressed as the family balanced on the edge of collapse.17 Sometimes, Jacob would try to goad his wife into going out to the park for a walk with him and their son. She “hated it,” Lee recalled. “They never got along.”18

  Cash-strapped, Celia often had to turn to her sisters for money. In an attempt to save their meager funds, the Liebers moved into a smaller apartment in the Bronx after Stanley’s younger brother Larry came into the family. The older boy slept on the couch in the living room, situated—like so many low-rent apartments in the city—in the back of the building. The window looked directly into another building beside it. The cramped confines and additional mouth to feed merely amped up the despair the Liebers faced.19 Stanley remembered, “All we could see was the brick wall of the building across the alley. I could never look and see if the other kids were out in the street playing stickball or doing anything that I might join in.”20

  Dressed in a dark replica of a sailor outfit, complete with a felt Tam O’Shanter hat perched at an angle atop his head, young Stanley Lieber sits on an antique desk, leaning on his tiny right arm. This is the kind of popular posed photograph that parents forced their kids to endure in the 1920s. Although only a youngster, the boy reveals dark, mesmerizing eyes and a faraway look that seems to hide the key to some distant mystery.

  Too young to fully understand his family’s plight, Stanley bounced along, relying on his mother’s love to overcome his father’s anxiety and demanding rules. Celia’s sister Jean recalled that Jack was “exacting with his boys.” He watched over them and demanded that they do daily routines as he outlined: “brush your teeth a certain way, wash your tongue, and so on.”21 Celia, though, was different. She filled young Stanley with her own hopes and dreams. She bolstered the child at every turn. When he learned to read, his mother realized the importance of education in overcoming their dire straits. “She often asked me to read aloud to her,” Stanley remembered. “I enjoyed doing that, imagining I was on some Broadway stage reading for a vast, entranced audience.”22 Celia and Jack might struggle through the harsh realities brought on by the Depression, but Celia attempted to isolate Stanley from its severity.