by Aaron Lansky
By the time we reached Howard Beach we were old friends. Marjorie directed us down a narrow, seaside street to the small, one-story house where she and Woody had lived and raised their family. Their daughter Nora lived there now: Not much older than we and the spitting image of Woody, she greeted us warmly and led us downstairs to a small finished basement. Only in America! Against one wall was a pile of cardboard boxes containing Woody’s books and manuscripts, which Marjorie was preparing to ship to an archive in Oklahoma. Against the other wall, waiting for us, were boxes jammed full of Aliza Greenblatt’s Yiddish books and papers.
A bit in awe, we loaded the boxes onto the truck. Many of the books had been written by Aliza’s friends and were personally inscribed. At least several hundred were by women writers. Some boxes contained unsold copies of Aliza’s own books, and others contained her personal letters and manuscripts, which, since we maintained no archive of our own, we agreed to pass on to the American Jewish Historical Society.
After the boxes were safely loaded we sat down with Nora and Marjorie at the kitchen table. Nora served up fresh coffee and homemade cookies, and Marjorie began to speak about her own childhood and her lifelong relation to Yiddishkeit. Although Woody was not Jewish, she said, he always struck her as having a yidishe neshome, a Jewish soul. For one thing, he was a voracious reader: “One time my father gave him a copy of a tractate of the Talmud in English translation, and he read it over and over, highlighting the passages he liked with different colored inks.” He was also unusually helpful around the house. “Our Jewish neighbor used to watch Woody as he wheeled the carriage or helped with the chores. She was so impressed with his domesticity that one morning, while he was carrying out the garbage, she came up to him and said, ‘Woody, you’re a regular Jew.’ Woody said it was the nicest compliment he ever received.”
Although Woody’s relationship with his father-in-law, Izzy, had been stiff, he and his more literary mother-in-law had gotten along famously. They were, of course, very different writers: Woody was folksy, vernacular, and political, while Aliza tended to be lyrical and refined, writing more about nature than about people. But they shared a love of words, and they both wrote a great deal for children. According to Marjorie, Woody enjoyed Aliza’s work and actually learned the Yiddish words to “Fort a fisher” and other songs, which he performed in public. But he never stopped chiding her for not being more political. “‘Enough flowers and butterflies!’ he would say, ‘What about the working masses?’ My mother just laughed, but one day she surprised him. She presented him with a political poem she had written—in English, no less! Woody loved it and praised her to the sky, although later they both had to admit it really wasn’t very good.”
Sitting there at the kitchen table, Nora as transfixed as Roger and I, Marjorie went on to explain how she had tried to give her children a good Jewish education.
“When the children got older I decided it was time for them to learn Hebrew. I didn’t want anything halfway. I figured, better to expose the children to the real thing and let them decide for themselves. So I phoned the orthodox shul in Howard Beach and asked them to please send over a tutor. They sent a very intense young man with a beard and yarmulke. One afternoon a week the three children sat down right here at the kitchen table and that young man taught them Hebrew. I could see that he was very, how shall I say, earnest about his work. Frankly, I don’t think the children paid too much attention. Whenever I looked I could see Arlo and Nora kicking each other under the table. But the tutor didn’t seem to notice; he just went on with his lesson, pacing back and forth and reciting the Torah while the children squirmed and watched the clock.
“The weekly lessons went on for a year or two. Then one day I got a call from the rabbi at the shul. He told me that we had to fire the tutor.
“‘Fire the tutor?’ I said, ‘but why?’
“‘Because we’ve found out he’s too fanatical,’ said the rabbi.
“‘Oh, posh,’ I told him. ‘The Guthrie children are not afraid of ideas. They’ll listen to whatever this young man has to say and then they’ll make up their own minds.’
“So the teacher remained with us until he decided to move to Israel. That was the last I heard of him until one night fifteen years later, when I was watching the news on television. There was a big demonstration somewhere, and there on the screen was a young man with a beard and yarmulke giving a most impassioned speech. I looked closely and sure enough, it was the children’s Hebrew teacher. Of course, he was older now, he was a rabbi, but he was just as earnest as when he stood here in our kitchen. I can still remember his name: Meir Kahane. How’s that for a Hebrew teacher for the Guthrie children?”
We talked for another hour at the kitchen table, and continued talking the whole way back to Manhattan. Before she left the truck Marjorie asked us how our organization was supported. Not very well, we conceded. A week later we received a $1,000 check in the mail from the Woody Guthrie Foundation. When we told Sidney Berg about this godsend, he decided to go see Marjorie in person. They didn’t exactly travel in the same circles, but they found enough to talk about for two hours, and by the time he left she had agreed to become a member of our board. By spring she and I were traveling together, speaking at synagogues, cultural centers, and fund-raising events. We developed a regular routine. Marjorie would kick it off, telling stories about Aliza and Woody—“who,” she was always quick to remind her audience, “was not ‘Yiddish.’” I followed with a “good news, bad news” talk: “The good news is that more young people are studying Yiddish than ever before; the bad news is that Yiddish books are being destroyed, and unless we act now a whole literature will be lost forever.” Then Marjorie concluded with an eloquent appeal for membership. Five hundred people, including Nora and Arlo, turned up to hear us at the Center’s first-anniversary celebration in the fall of 1981. The event was held in a softball field beneath a green and white tent, and after we finished the Klezmer Conservatory Band played a Yiddish version of “This Land Is Your Land.” We raised some money—and, perhaps more important, a week later Arlo’s secretary called: He had decided to learn Yiddish and was looking for a good primer.
Still, for all her enthusiasm and hard work, I always felt that Marjorie retained a certain ambivalence about her Jewishness. After all, she had rebelled against Jewish provincialism when she set out to become a dancer, and again when she married Woody. Meir Kahane notwithstanding, she had little formal Jewish affiliation. So I was surprised when Sidney Berg phoned me one day to tell me that he and Marjorie had just returned from a Yiddish banquet held in memory of Aliza Greenblatt at an old Labor Zionist Center in Brighton Beach. “It was beautiful!” Sidney enthused. “There were a hundred people and the whole program was in Yiddish. As soon as Marjorie walked into the room she was surrounded. Many of her mother’s friends hadn’t seen her since she was a child! They came up to her, hugged her, kissed her . . . I’m telling you, it was a sight to behold. Then we sat down at round tables and the program began. They made speeches, read Aliza Greenblatt’s poems, sang her songs, and served refreshments. Marjorie was so touched she cried.”
A few days later Marjorie called and offered her version of the same event. “Oh, it was very lovely,” she said, “there were so many people I hadn’t seen for years, they still remembered my mother and sang her songs. And of course Sidney was a dear to take me. But I’ll tell you the truth, the longer I stayed the more upset I became. Suddenly my whole childhood came back to me. I remembered how I used to go to these events with my mother, and how I always found everything so, well, so aesthetically displeasing. One thing I remembered about those banquets was that they always sat at tables covered with dirty oilcloths. Why couldn’t they use a nice piece of linen? No, always the same dirty oilcloth. Well, there I was with Sidney, forty years later, and when it came time for refreshments they brought us to the tables and they were still covered with the same dirty oilcloths. I took one look and I couldn’t help myself, I just broke dow
n and cried.”
12. “Ostroff! Sea Gate!”
Excuse me, Mrs. Ostroff, but is this whipped cream you’re serving with the strawberries?”
“Whipped cream? God forbid—whipped cream is too fettening. That’s sour cream!”
We were in the home of Sam and Leah Ostroff, sitting down to yet another twelve-course breakfast. In the six months since Marjorie Guthrie had introduced us to her late mother’s best friends, they had joined the ranks of our most active zamlers—and our favorite hosts. For us, they represented everything that was good about the old Yiddish world: humor, generosity, intelligence, kindness, social consciousness, and an almost preternatural sense of Yiddishkeit.
Actually, the Ostroffs found us even before Marjorie did. On June 13, 1980, less than two weeks after I mailed the first press release, Sam wrote to me in Yiddish:
Tayere fraynt,
Mir, dos heyst mayn froy un ikh, hobn gehat shoyn a por mol shverikaytn tsu bazorgn a heym far undzer tayerer yerushe.
Dear Friends,
We, that is to say my wife and myself, have already encountered many difficulties in securing a home for our precious inheritance.
I assumed that their precious inheritance meant their books, but when I wrote back suggesting they mail them to us, as I usually did in those early days, he responded immediately, saying he and his wife had no intention of giving up their own books biz a hundert un tsvantsig, until they were both 120 years old (the number of years Moses lived and the traditional Jewish wish for longevity). Instead, what they wanted was for us to visit them, so we could get to know one another better and discuss what they could do to help.
They weren’t the only people who wanted just “to talk,” and given the urgency of collecting actual books I put the letter aside, in a Shmooze Pile, for a less hectic time. It might have remained there indefinitely had it not been for Marjorie. When she returned from the Yiddish banquet she told me that, despite the oilcloths, there was one couple whom she had been thrilled to see. “Sam and Leah Ostroff were my mother’s next-door neighbors and her closest friends. They are the most wonderful, generous people I have ever known, and I didn’t even realize they were still alive until I saw them at the banquet. They were so happy to hear about my involvement with the Book Center. They said they already wrote to you and are waiting for you to come. Really, it’s an experience not to be missed. I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of telling them to expect you soon.”
Pat Myerson was working on an oral history project at the time, and she agreed to go as the Book Center’s emissary. She set off one morning with a professional tape recorder and five hours of blank tape. When she returned the next day she told us that she had not only used up all her tape, but had remained talking and eating at the Ostroffs’ table for another four hours after that. Like Marjorie, Pat assured us that a visit to the Ostroffs was an experience not to be missed.
So a month later, while collecting books on Coney Island, Fran, Roger, and I decided to pay the Ostroffs a visit. They lived in Sea Gate, a fenced-off community at the very tip of Coney Island. Founded in the late nineteenth century, it was originally a summer colony for the Yankee yachting set, but during the 1930s, when money was tight and housing in short supply, large numbers of Jews began moving in, buying up summer cottages and converting them into year-round homes. By 1980, 80 percent of Sea Gate’s seven thousand inhabitants were Jewish. The community maintained it own police force, its own community center, its own beach, even its own lighthouse—the last civilian-manned lighthouse in the country.
The Ostroffs lived in a small apartment on the first floor of a converted hotel. We rang the doorbell and were greeted by an effusive couple in their eighties, neither of whom was much over five feet tall. Mrs. Ostroff had white hair and a beatific face with high cheekbones. She was dressed in an old-fashioned but still elegant wool skirt with a white shirtwaist and a matching wool jacket. Mr. Ostroff, a bald, stocky man with powerful shoulders and mischievous eyes, wore a red plaid flannel work shirt buttoned to the collar, with a sweater and tie.
“Nu, sholem aleykhem, kumt arayn, kumt arayn, s’iz genug vos tsu esn! (Hello, come in, come in, there’s plenty to eat!)”
Each Ostroff kissed each of us at least twice, they inquired about “Petty” (whom I took to be Pat), and then sat us down in the living room at a folding metal card table piled so high with food it was literally sagging under the weight. I looked around. Every square inch of their two-bedroom apartment was crammed full: tottering piles of books and papers on the floor, sculptures portraying Jewish themes atop overflowing bookcases and cabinets. The wallpaper was barely visible between all the paintings, collages, photographs, awards, testimonials, and framed certificates announcing the planting of trees in Israel.
“You like mayn krefts?” asked Mr. Ostroff.
“Your what?”
“Mayn krefts!”
He meant his crafts. As Mrs. Ostroff served up the first course, homemade gefilte fish, Mr. Ostroff explained that he had been a plumber until he suffered a heart attack twenty years ago and was forced to retire. He’d had five heart attacks since, as attested by the four-foot-tall green metal oxygen tank visible in his bedroom. But he wasn’t about to let his health slow him down. To the contrary, once it became clear that he couldn’t go back to work, he went to the Coney Island Community Center and decided to become an artist instead. His first medium was oil on canvas, and his subject—visible on the walls around us—was the Old Country: his mother at the family seder, a bearded rabbi, a train billowing smoke and steam across a snowy plain. In more recent years he had ventured into other media: sculptures carved from markh (marrow) bones, jewelry fashioned from old silver spoons, miniatures painted on the lenses of old eyeglasses. On one wall was a replica of the famous wooden synagogue in his home town of Zabludow, Poland, rendered in lokshn, sticks of spaghetti, with rice for grass and cantaloupe seeds for shingles. On another wall was a Hasidic rabbi composed entirely of beans: navy beans for his face, pintos for his eyes, turtles for his yarmulke, and limas for his long white beard. Mr. Ostroff jokingly referred to him as the “Beanzer Rebbe.” His workshop, a small room at the back of the apartment, was crammed full of tools, paintbrushes, scraps of cloth, paper, leather, lengths of pipe, wood, sheet metal, soup bones, egg cartons, coat hangers—whatever his krefts required.
“You see, it’s like this,” he explained, speaking in an inimitable mixture of English and Yiddish, both leavened with a heavy Litvak accent. “When I came home from the hospital for the first time, the doctor told me I had had enough excitement already in mayn life, now I should just sit home and do nothing. But I think to myself, What, I’m going to sit here in the apartment and wait for the Malekhamoves, the Angel of Death, to come take me away? The Malekhamoves will come when he’s ready; in the meantime, I don’t have to sit still and wait for him. Instead, I make things for myself, and I go to the senior-citizen center, I teach other old people, they should make, too, instead of sitting around waiting for You-Know-Who to come calling.”
During all this monologue neither Sam nor Leah—we were already on a first-name basis—ever stopped moving. They walked back and forth to the tiny kitchen, returning each time with another heaping platter of Jewish food: matzo brie, herring in cream sauce, lokshn kugl, latkes, blintzes. When we protested, Mrs. Ostroff assured us it was no trouble: “Mir zenen shoyn tsugevoynt. We’re used to it already.” She explained that Sea Gate was once the summer home of many of New York’s greatest Yiddish writers: I. J. Singer, Peretz Hirschbein, Avrom Reisen, Moyshe Nadir, Itzik Manger. Even the young Isaac Bashevis Singer lived there when he first came to America. (He later wrote, “Sea Gate was a quiet little village of retired people, Jews, intelligentsia. And Coney Island was Coney Island. When I went out from Sea Gate to Coney Island I went from paradise into hell. I couldn’t believe that such a quiet place and such a loud place could exist next to each other.”)
The Ostroffs’ next-door neighbor was M
arjorie Guthrie’s mother, Aliza Greenblatt, who wrote a book called Si Geyt afn yam (Sea Gate by the Sea). Two doors down lived Israel Zetser, a scholar of Jewish mysticism. “Zetser, he was a little strange,” Mrs. Ostroff confided. “Most people didn’t know, but he was a polar bear. Every morning he went down to the beach to swim in the ocean, even on the coldest days. We used to see him when he walked home in the wintertime, the icicles were hanging off his trunks.”
Another neighbor and close friend was the Yiddish actress Bella Ballerina. As Roger, Fran, and I progressed from the matzo brie to the kugl, Mrs. Ostroff told us that Bella Ballerina had once been in a play on Second Avenue where she portrayed a Jewish woman who abandoned her children to run off with another man. “For years after that she couldn’t walk down the street without people yelling at her and spitting. ‘Feh!’ they would say, ‘leaving three little children like that. How could you do such a thing?’”
Of course, none of these Yiddish writers, actors, and intellectuals made much of a living. Where did they congregate when they came to Sea Gate? “In our home!” Sam said proudly. Since Sam and Lea actually worked for a living, he as a plumber and she as a pattern maker and seamstress, and since they only had one child, they could afford to keep a huge apartment, occupying the whole second floor of a big house across the street from the main hotel where they lived now. At night they would cook great feasts, and all the writers and intellectuals would come over to eat and talk.
“Oy, what talking!” Mrs. Ostroff remembered, clapping her hands to her cheeks. “We had a big balcony where we set up chairs. The writers would come and they’d talk about literature, politics, Jewish culture. And what arguments! My non-Jewish neighbors, they used to wonder, ‘What do you do over there? People come over, you don’t play cards, you don’t listen to the radio, all you do is talk. Talk, talk, talk, night after night. What is there so much to talk about?’”
