One American Dream

by Bernard Beck

  Still, it was my only hope, and, I reasoned, it was a start. I practiced dancing with my mother, and bought an appropriate suit for the occasion.

  The night of the big dance was really special. The hotel was nearly a block long, and there were crowds of young people standing outside waiting to show their tickets at the door. I pushed my way through the door, but, once inside, I was floored. The place was all red velvet and crystal chandeliers. To me, it was the most beautiful place I had ever been. There were girls everywhere, millions of them it seemed, and I was overwhelmed. But as I walked slowly around the room I realized that the girls were all standing in groups in the middle of the room while the boys were all standing, pretty much alone, along the wall. The orchestra was playing, but no one was dancing.

  Fortunately for me, Rose happened to be at this dance. She wasn’t part of a group, and, although she was standing alone, she seemed to be more confident than the other girls. I spotted her almost immediately, but I wasn’t sure how to approach her, so I stood a little off to the side watching her.

  But then she looked me straight in the eyes and started walking over to me.

  “Are you going to ask me to dance?” she asked. “Or are you just going to stand there all night staring?”

  She didn’t seem to be particularly wealthy, although I wasn’t sure how I would be able to tell, and she wasn’t an especially good dancer, but she was very beautiful. And extremely confident and tall. Taller than me. I was smitten. She had an aura of confidence, power, and disdain which, I’m sure, must have repelled or frightened most of the boys at the dance but attracted me. I danced with her nearly the whole night, and I took her home to Brooklyn on the subway. For Rose, this was her first real romantic attachment. For me, it was love at first sight, and, when we arrived at her stoop, I told her.

  “I’m going to marry you,” I said as I kissed her tentatively at her front door.

  “I know,” she answered.

  Chapter 3

  I was surprised when he said that, and I was even more surprised by my response. But, when I had a chance to think it over, I was kind of pleased. I had been afraid throughout the evening that I had not been handling things well, and that he was dancing with me just to look sophisticated.

  This was long before anyone had a telephone so there was no quick way for us to communicate. At that time, people had to communicate by mail, and he wrote me the most beautiful letter thanking me for dancing with him, telling me how much he had enjoyed the evening and repeating his desire to get married. I wrote back, and we set a date to meet and discuss it.

  As far as I was concerned, he was nice, reasonably good looking, and it was time for me to get married—I didn’t have the time or energy to spend on a long courtship. So I asked him when we met if he was serious about getting married. He said he was, and he didn’t seem at all surprised by my question. So we set a date, and we got married. My father was there, along with his mother, and the Rabbi.

  I wasn’t sure, not even on our wedding day, if I really loved him, or if he loved me. Our love, I believed, would come later and didn’t really matter at the moment.

  Jack has always said that one of the main things that he had found attractive about me that first time we met was that I was born in the United States. It is true that I was physically born in this country, but, for all intents and purposes, I was actually an immigrant. My mother, Rivka, who had somehow managed to cross the Atlantic pregnant, gave birth to me in the hospital on Ellis Island barely hours after her arrival in the United States. Unfortunately, she never recovered from the strains of childbirth and passed away a few months later. My father, Ben-Zion Perlman, who was an intellectual and not much more, ended up with the sole responsibility of raising me.

  Back in Lomza, the town in the Pale of Settlement that they had come from, my father had been recognized as a brilliant young scholar. He had expected to be the next Chief Rabbi of Lomza because the current Chief Rabbi had no sons, and it stood to reason that he, the most brilliant young scholar in the town, would marry the Rabbi’s oldest daughter and succeed to the title. But the Rabbi’s oldest daughter chose to marry the younger son of the Chief Rabbi of a neighboring community, and this “interloper” was then designated as the heir apparent. My grandmother, Ben-Zion’s mother, in a face-saving effort, arranged for him to marry the daughter of a wealthy merchant instead.

  This merchant arranged for my father and his new wife to travel to America. He expected that, in the “New World,” my father would be welcomed as a scholar, and that his daughter would be an important person in the community. So, still in their early twenties, my father and his pregnant young wife set off for America. But his wife didn’t survive the trip, and Ben-Zion, lacking credentials and ambition, was welcomed in America with less than open arms.

  That was in 1884, when there had been a great exodus of Jews from Poland as a result of the Cossack rampages in the Jewish community, and the Lower East Side was filled with authentic and not so authentic Jewish scholars; all of whom were vying for the few legitimate teaching opportunities available. My father, although he looked the role with a full, dark beard and piercing eyes, was not sufficiently aggressive or persuasive. And so my father, the brilliant young scholar, eventually settled into life as a not very skilled shoemaker.

  We lived, my father and I, along with a wet-nurse for as long as she was needed, in a railroad flat on the Lower East Side, and my father got a job as a factory worker for a fellow immigrant. Although he did not have much skill and even less ambition, he was able to support our family, pay rent, and put a little aside for my education. He never remarried.

  When I was old enough, my father sent me to a Jewish religious school for girls. Although they said I was bright, I was not, as he had hoped and expected, a good student. I was a difficult, aggressive child who fought frequently with the teachers and the other immigrant children. I managed, one way or another, to make it through the eighth grade at the religious school, but then my teachers recommended that I be sent to a public high school, rather than continue my religious education.

  My formal schooling ended two years later when I was suspended from high school for fighting. My father was desperate. Even though he had been working for the same company for more than a decade, he was barely making a living, and the idea of having to worry about his daughter being home all day in the slums and poverty of the Lower East Side was overwhelming. He appealed to his boss, who had an outlet store in Macy’s, to do whatever he could to help me find a job.

  Fortunately, this man was having an affair with the head of the millinery department, and he was able to get me a job there. I had always been good at sewing and had made most of my own clothing, so I had no difficulty qualifying for the job. Two years later, when Macy’s moved uptown to Herald Square, my boss went out on her own, and took me with her.

  For the first time in my life, I was doing something I liked. The same aggressive and challenging personality characteristics that had gotten me into trouble in school served me well in the business world. I had enormous energy, and I was both curious and creative. The world had opened for me.

  One of our customers was a young and very beautiful movie star named Linda Henderson who was married to a famous movie director. She was about my age or maybe a few years older. I liked making her hats because she didn’t seem to have any inhibitions, and I could just let my imagination go wild. She was very creative, and she used to like to sit at my workbench and make crazy and silly suggestions. In some ways, she was the closest thing I had ever had to a girlfriend. Of course, she wasn’t Jewish so she never would have been my friend outside of the shop. But in the shop, and in the coffee shop across the street, we were like sisters.

  “You’re so talented,” she said to me one day. “Why don’t you go out on your own?”

  “I wish I could,” I replied, “but I don’t have any savings, and I have to support my fath
er.”

  “What if I loaned you the money? What then?”

  “I couldn’t afford a store in New York,” I said as gratefully as I could, “but I probably could find a cheap store to rent in a nice section of Brooklyn.”

  “Why don’t you figure out what it would cost you to run the store for one year, and I’ll ask my husband to lend you the money.”

  And so, at the age of nineteen, I opened my own millinery shop in the trendy Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Linda, of course, was my first customer, and she sent all her uptown friends to shop in my store.

  I was young and tall and exotic looking, with high, prominent cheekbones, broad shoulders, and a thin waist. After all, I was still a teenager with a teenager’s body, but Linda was an actress, and she taught me to walk and talk in a way that greatly impressed my customers. My hats were extravagant fantasies: very expensive and very exclusive. I personally designed each hat for each customer, and no two were ever alike. I did all the designing, all the sewing, and all the sales.

  The year was 1906 and a new look in women’s fashion was sweeping the country. The unnatural women’s figures of the nineteenth century that had been pushed and pulled with bustles and corsets were replaced with a straight, natural figure. The waist was loosened, and a straight line was adopted. The frills and flounces were gone, and large hats with wide, face-shadowing brims were becoming the height of fashion. As skirts were narrowing, hats were becoming the major fashion statement. My hats were quite large, often exceeding the width of the shoulders. I built them with towering masses of flowers and feathers, and they were quite expensive and appealed mostly to the snobbiest of the well-to-do.

  The talk about my shop and the kind of hats that I was creating traveled rapidly through wealthy New York society, and my shop was successful. Very successful. The fancy society ladies loved the idea of having their chauffeur bring them to my shop in Brooklyn, which they all claimed to have “discovered.”

  Within a year, my father and I were able to move from the slums of the Lower East Side to the front portion of a parlor-level apartment in a brownstone, right across the street from my store.

  My father gave up his job in the shoe factory and began teaching adult classes in the local synagogue. He was now becoming the scholar he had always dreamed of becoming, and I got my own bedroom and a parlor.

  Although I had had no time for social matters, I discovered that I had natural social skills and presence, and I focused these social skills intensely and exclusively on building my millinery business. I understood that the sale of my hats had as much to do with my personality as with my millinery skills, and that the greater and more exotic my reputation was, the more hats I would sell.

  Because I did all the sales, designing, and manufacturing, I spent nearly all my waking hours in the shop. My only day off was the Sabbath, which I spent with my father. I always went back to the shop in the evening, at the end of the Sabbath, to prepare for the Sunday rush of customers.

  My free time was limited to the hours I spent studying with my father. My business was growing, and, although my father encouraged me to “get out and meet people,” I felt that I was riding the crest of a trend, and that this very lucrative time would not last forever. I simply did not have time to spend meeting men. But, as my father kept telling me, I was getting older, and I needed to think about getting married.

  The young, fashionable women who frequented my shop often asked me about my family and my social life, who I was seeing and when I planned to settle down and raise a family. It was inconceivable to them that I could be so focused on success that I hadn’t given much thought to family matters. One of my customers, a woman not much older than me, suggested that I consult with a marriage broker, which sounded like a good idea. But, when I mentioned this possibility to my father, he told me that everyone has a bashert—a soul mate who was chosen for them by the angels in heaven. He said it was possible for a matchmaker to suggest a good match, but only through intervention from heaven would I find my bashert.

  “It doesn’t have to take long for it to happen,” he said. “After all, Rachel and Jacob fell in love after just one meeting.”

  My father urged me to at least try to meet a man, but I argued that I didn’t have time, and that the courting process was slow and time consuming and usually unproductive. But he insisted.

  So, reluctantly, I agreed to attend one dance: the city-wide Jewish dance that was soon to be held at the Broadway-Central Hotel. And that’s where I met Jack.

  I spotted him within seconds after he entered the hall, and I sized him up correctly. He was a dandy, although he wasn’t comfortable in that role yet. I could tell that he was a hard worker, and, from the cocky way he walked, I guessed that had just been promoted. He seemed to be more concerned with how he looked than with actual achievement, but I got the feeling that he hoped that this community dance would open a new window of opportunity for him. He was young and Jewish and reasonably attractive, and, for some unknown reason, I immediately decided that this was my big chance.

  I watched him swagger across the hall to where I was standing. He was obviously hoping that he appeared confident, although it was clear to me that he was very nervous. “May I have the next dance?” he asked with a slight bow.

  I looked him straight in the eye—this was the do or die moment. “Why?” I asked.

  “Because you are the most attractive woman in this place, and I would like to dance with you.”

  I looked at the girl nearest me and rolled my eyes.

  “I’m not a very good dancer,” I said.

  “Neither am I,” he replied with growing confidence, “but let’s try.”

  We danced, and we talked, and we had a snack and some punch, and then we danced and talked some more, and, by the end of the evening, that first evening together, I knew.

  (You might notice that this is somewhat different from the way my husband remembers it. Men always seem to picture themselves as more macho than they actually are.)

  I felt that I was finally able to put the match making process behind me. I recognized that Jack would be a true partner with whom I could share my aspirations and anxieties, and I felt comfortable in his arms; not for what he was, but for what I knew he, and we, would be.

  Jack had spent his entire young life doing whatever was necessary to survive and prosper in the new world, while I, who had equally great ambition, had spent my adult life until that fateful moment, building my business. We each needed a partner who shared our ambition and single mindedness. We both had come from immigrant roots, and we both had the dream of becoming authentic Americans.

  We were married in the local synagogue; the reception was held in the synagogue basement with just our families present. Jack’s mother, having, in her eyes, raised her only son successfully, returned to Poland within a month after we were married. Mercifully, she passed away before the Holocaust. Jack moved into my apartment, which created a tension with my father that dominated our relationship from that day on.

  __________

  Mein Liebe Rivka,

  Well, our daughter Rose is married. I don’t know why she chose this man. He has no education and he works as a janitor in the Settlement House. He doesn’t even speak Yiddish.

  He has moved into our apartment with us, and now I have to sleep in the parlor because he is sleeping with Rose in the bedroom. I do not like him, and I will not make him welcome in our house. I hope he changes his mind and moves out.

  Young people today are so foolish. I wish you were here to help me deal with this ignoramus.

  May God protect you and bless you.

  Chapter 4

  As a result of my desire to be an authentic American, I was always very aware of the impression that I made on others, especially those who were on a higher social level. When I had decided, on that first day in America, to be a one hundred percent A
merican, I had believed that being an American involved looking, behaving, and speaking like an American. As the assistant manager at the Henry Street Settlement House, for example, I always wore a suit and a tie to work. So based on my often repeated credo that “first impressions last,” I encouraged Rose to improve the first impression that she and her shop made.

  I quit my job at the Henry Street Settlement House and devoted all my time to Rose’s business. I began by rebuilding the shop. After all, I had all those years of construction and maintenance experience, and, as a result of a lifetime of self-reinvention, I had a highly developed marketing sense. Although I had no retail experience, I knew that it was important that the shop itself make a good impression.

  Rose’s shop was a basic storefront that was not much changed from the way it had been when she had first rented it. It had two display windows on either side of a glass entry door, a sales counter on one side toward the front of the store, and display shelves on the other walls. She had a couple of portable folding screens in the middle of the shop that separated her work area in the back of the store from the sales area in the front.

  I decided to redesign Rose’s store into what they called in those days, “a salon.” I put tie-back drapes on the front windows, flocked wallpaper on the side walls, and built a new partition right across the middle of the store that separated the sales area in the front from Rose’s work area in the back. I wanted the store to look like an elegant living room, so I furnished it with plush velvet easy chairs and a loveseat. I found a huge, ornate, gold, three-panel, Victorian-style mirror that I hung right in the middle of the back wall so that it was the first thing that customers saw when they entered the store. I hung original artwork by local artists on the other walls, and I laid a Persian rug on the floor. The shop was like a really beautiful living room with an unmistakable atmosphere of elegance. Rose did all her designing in the workroom in the back of the shop, but she kept a small, special work area in the front so that she could do some last minute “customizing” for her customers, right then and there.