The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In the dining rooms were red Turkish carpets and family portraits. After dinner, the families repaired to parlors, or to music rooms, where they stood about the rosewood piano for a little singing—“Under the Daisies,” “Listen to the Mockingbird,” “Hidden in the Valley,” or “The Last Rose of Summer.” An aunt might round out the evening playing the “Anvil Chorus.” Music was considered a boon to the digestive juices. It was a cozy and sentimental era, the 1880’s and 1890’s, and it was hard to believe that it would ever be otherwise, or that the city was changing faster than anyone knew.

  Etiquette was stressed more than what went on or appeared in the newspapers. “Always eat your ice cream with a fork,” the little Nathan children were advised by the governess. “It’s those Germans who use their spoons. Remember, while they were still peddling with packs on their backs, your family was having dinner with kings and queens.” Of course, there were mésalliances. When Rosa Content (of a pre-Revolutionary Sephardic family) married James Seligman (German, of the then international banking house), she always referred to her in-laws as “the peddlers.” As for the Jews of eastern Europe, they were elaborately ignored. Mrs. L. Napoleon Levy (wife of another of Uriah’s nephews, and a Hendricks in her own right), embroidering her family tree on a sampler, put the words “from Europe” next to the name of one of her grandfathers because she could not bring herself to admit—even in such a limited public way as stitchwork—that he had come from Poland. Mrs. Levy liked to remind her children that, at her wedding in 1892, the list of guests had included not only Levys, Hendrickses, Lazaruses, Seixases, and Wolffs, but also Roosevelts, Shackelfords, Rittenhouses, Van Rensselaers, and Kings. The Alfred Tobiases (cousins of Levys) were proud to list among their neighbor and friends the Livingstons, the Barclays, and the Auchinclosses.

  There were other proofs of social acceptance by Christians. The Hendrickses belonged to and sailed at the Larchmont Yacht Club in Westchester (which Jews have difficulty joining today), and when the Sephardic families summered, they not only went to the Jersey shore—which would later become known as a Jewish resort area—but also to Newport, Saratoga, and Bar Harbor (which were not only non-Jewish but a bit anti-Jewish and becoming more so). A Hendricks granddaughter attended Miss Gayler’s School in New York. Invited to a party on a Friday night, she replied that she was sorry, she couldn’t attend, “Because that is our Sabbath.” There was nothing further said, but from that point on it was noticed that parties for girls at Miss Gayler’s School were no longer scheduled for Friday evenings, but were given on Saturday nights instead, out of courtesy to the elegant Sephardim.

  Of course, there were scandals, and cases of people who refused to fit into the mold. There was the shocking case of Aunt Agnes Hendricks Wolff, who, in the 1890’s, had a notorious affair with a non-Jewish gentleman named Townsend. They went off to Paris together and traveled flagrantly through Europe as man and wife, a state of affairs the family found intolerable. The two were written up in Town Topics, the leading scandal sheet of the day, and it all came to a tragic end (as anyone who had read the Maria Edgeworth stories could have predicted) when, one day riding with Mr. Townsend on Long Island, Aunt Agnes was thrown from her mount and killed.

  Then there was cousin Annie Lazarus, sister of the poetess Emma, one of wealthy Moses Lazarus’ six daughters, who was some sort of revolutionary. She was forever crusading for immigrants’ rights, and she married a non-Jewish artist named Johnny Johnston. She favored America’s intervention in World War I, and when the country remained isolationist she threw up her hands, declared herself disillusioned with the United States, and she and her husband sailed off to Italy, where they lived in a Venetian palazzo with a beautiful garden. She refused to communicate with or receive any of her American friends or relatives but, it was pointed out at the time, she seemed perfectly willing to go on receiving her considerable American income. Her picture was turned against the wall, and her name was permanently dropped from family conversations. How she and her husband fared during the Second World War, no one knows.

  And of course there were quarrels. A schism involving a set of Sèvres china of museum quality has long divided the Hendricks family. Years ago, when an estate was being divided, the Sèvres was split between two cousins—a cup here, a saucer there—and its proper ownership has been in dispute ever since. Visiting Mrs. Henry Hendricks, a cousin once remarked, “Ah, I see you have the rest of the Sèvres.” “No,” said Mrs. Hendricks frostily, “you have.”

  But in general the Sephardim of the late nineteenth century did as they were supposed to do. The men decorated the boards of directors of the proper corporations, and the correct hospitals, museums, and charities. Women engaged in daintier pastimes—painting, reading, letter writing, going to concerts, operas, and ballets. Women were not given much in the way of formal education (the educated woman, little girls were told, had a hard time finding a husband). But they were cultivated, trained in the arts of charm and wit and small talk on a wide variety of subjects. A surprising number of women—cousin Emma Lazarus is the most famous example—wrote poetry, for their own enjoyment if not for publication.

  One of this delicate breed of nineteenth-century woman was Great-Aunt Amelia Barnard Tobias Lazarus, who might have stepped out of the pages of an Edith Wharton novel. Indeed, the young Mrs. Wharton was among Aunt Amelia’s circle of friends. Aunt Amelia was not only a Tobias, and therefore connected to the Hendrickses; she was also collaterally descended from Mordecai Gomez, Daniel’s brother, and she was therefore connected as well to the Lopezes, Seixases, de Lucenas, and Levys, to say nothing of the Nathans and Cardozos. She was an encapsulation of the great Sephardic strains. In her house in East Ninth Street, just a few doors away from University Place, Aunt Amelia lived a life that had settled elegantly and comfortably into a pattern: congealed, precise, predictable. Her late husband, Jacob Hart Lazarus, who had died in 1891, had been one of the most popular and respected society portraitists of his day—“a nineteenth-century Copley,” he had been called. Among other great subjects, he had painted four generations of the Astor family. He left Aunt Amelia amply fixed. The Ninth Street house was a large, three-story affair of red brick where Aunt Amelia was cared for by three maids and her maiden sister, Great-Aunt Sophia Tobias, who “kept house” for Aunt Amelia. On most afternoons, Aunt Amelia could be found reclining—she suffered from angina, and did not move around much—on her long red velvet and mahogany couch in the drawing room, where she conducted what amounted to a perpetual salon.

  All the noted personages of the day were her callers: old Mrs. Drexel from Philadelphia, who dropped in on Aunt Amelia whenever she was in New York; Mrs. Delafield; Mrs. Potter; Mrs. Astor, of course. There were also those haughty and rather terrifyingly aristocratic Lazarus cousins known as “the Eleventh Street Lazaruses,” who included the formidable and splendid Sarah, and Emma, the poetess, and Frank Lazarus, famous because for years he was to be seen, every day, seated in the same chair in one of the Fifth Avenue windows of the Union Club. For years after his death, the chair was known as “Mr. Lazarus’ chair.” Another of these Lazaruses was Annie, about whom there had been scandal, and whose name was never mentioned. These Lazaruses kept a summer “cottage” in Newport. Called “The Beeches,” it was a huge, gabled affair on Bellevue Avenue, hard by “Belcourt,” the Oliver H. P. Belmont mansion, and across the street from “Miramar,” built for Mrs. George Widener.

  Aunt Amelia was far from beautiful. In fact, though she was thin and always carried herself erectly—a stern and autocratic bearing—she was actually quite homely, with large, imperiously blazing green eyes. (Her sister, by contrast, was a small, plump, gentle lady with wavy gray hair that was always a bit disarrayed.) Aunt Amelia, however, had learned a secret that has made many a nonbeautiful woman adored by both sexes: she had charm, she had wit, and she had style. Once, when she was shopping for some handkerchiefs, a salesgirl had said to her, “Mrs. Lazarus, those handkerchiefs you’re looking at are
very fine—but these other ones might do for mornings around the house.” Aunt Amelia shot her a lofty, amused look and replied, “My dear young woman, I would have you understand that my nose is just as delicate in the mornings as it is in the afternoons.”

  Her dinner parties, served in a dining room that had walls covered with gold brocade, were celebrated for the high quality of the conversation as well as for the high station of the guests. To encourage good talk, there were never more than six at table. Dinner began with sherry and ended with champagne and fresh fruit out of season—which no one ate—purchased at considerable expense from Hicks, the great Fifth Avenue fruiterer. Though eminently correct, Aunt Amelia was never totally unappreciative of the risqué. Frank Lazarus often tried to shock her with some bit of mauvaise plaisanterie he had picked up in the smoking room at the Union, and, after listening to one of his tales she would cry out, “Frank! You dirty beast!” Then she would lean closer to him and, in a husky stage whisper, ask, “Now what was it you said again?”

  The neighborhood around her was deteriorating. She knew it, but she refused to move or to change her mode of life in any way. The house on one side of her had become a laundry, and the one on the other side had become some sort of nightclub—the less said of what probably went on there, the better. Raucous noises emerged from it night and day. Aunt Amelia let neither presence disturb her in the slightest. Inside, her house ran on noiseless machinery. Each morning, her lawyer, “Little Sam” Riker (his father, “Big Sam” Riker, had been the family lawyer before him), arrived punctually at eight and opened Aunt Amelia’s mail, attending to whatever needed attention. It was then Little Sam’s duty to go downstairs to the kitchen to see to it that the servants were at their posts, and to unsnarl the quarrels that were forever erupting between the Irish maid and the waitress so that Aunt Amelia’s ears might be spared the unpleasant details. The family had repeatedly urged Aunt Amelia to have, in view of her illness, a servant sleep in the room next to hers, but Aunt Amelia would have none of it. That would be lowering the class barrier too far. Servants belonged on a floor of their own. Her servants, nevertheless, were devoted to her. Her personal maid, Josephine, had for years been engaged to marry the coachman for the Alexandre family but, year after year, the wedding date was postponed. It was because Josephine could not bear the thought of leaving Aunt Amelia. Aunt Amelia’s only concession to the shabbiness of her neighborhood was made for her maids’ benefit. She kept a man’s derby hat hung on a hat stand in the entrance vestibule, which was intended to suggest to intruders that there was a man on the premises, whereas in fact hers was a household of women. A man from Tiffany’s came to Ninth Street once a week to wind all the clocks.

  Great-Aunt Amelia was a stickler for etiquette and the Right Thing, not because she was afraid of making a mistake in public but because she believed the Right Thing was one of the obligations and heavy duties of the aristocrat. When writing a social note, she enjoined her nieces and grandnieces, a lady should never moisten the entire flap of the envelope, but only the tip. Young ladies were told to sit quietly, with hands folded in laps, legs crossed at the ankles. They were not to fidget or play with their beads. Young men were instructed to sit with one leg crossed above the other, knee upon knee, never sprawled with knees apart, or with ankle on knee. Aunt Amelia was one of New York’s great authorities on the intricacies of the calling-card ritual—one that has been compared with the Japanese tea ceremony in terms of the years it took a lady of old New York to master it—and even Mrs. Astor sometimes called upon Aunt Amelia, in those days before there was an Emily Post, for social advice and guidance. Though Aunt Amelia’s illness caused her to be in great pain much of the time, she never complained. She believed that complaining indicated ill breeding. Once, before a dinner party, she said quietly to a niece, “If I have to leave the table during dinner, I expect you to carry on as hostess in my place. And of course you must make no point of my absence.” Aunt Amelia also believed that it was one of the moral obligations of the privileged and well-placed to care for the fine things that privilege and high estate provided, that it was as wrong to mistreat a good china plate or piece of furniture as it was to abuse a human being. As a result, every item in her house, from the paintings and the rare books to the heavy linen sheets on the beds, was lovingly attended to.

  Morality, propriety, and responsibility were instilled in children by the Maria Edgeworth stories. In these, two sisters, the wise Laura and the impulsive Rosalind, were contrasted, and the moral clearly drawn. In one tale, for example, Rosalind foolishly uses money given her to have a shoe repaired to buy, instead, a pretty purple vase that she has seen in a shop window. Alas, a hole appears in her shoe, a sharp stone enters the hole, and, after an agonizing limp home, when Rosalind puts water in her vase the pretty color washes off. Laura is helpfully there to say, “I told you so.” For boys, there were stories about a bad youth named Frank who was always made to pay dearly for his naughtinesses. Children were also given copies of the Illustrated London News to read for edification and enlightenment. Anything British was considered uplifting.

  Great-Aunt Amelia Lazarus exuded such an air of social security that one would have thought her incapable of being surprised or impressed by anything. But she was secretly delighted to have been invited to one of the great society “Weddings of the Age,” that of Harry Lehr, the colorful playboy who once, dressed in full fig, waded into a Fifth Avenue fountain, and who had succeeded Ward McAllister as New York Society’s arbiter and Mrs. Astor’s pet. Aunt Amelia also believed that social occasions ought to be combined with a certain amount of self-improvement and, when a niece mentioned that she was going to a reception at the de Forests’, Aunt Amelia reminded her to be sure to note the fine Indian carving that adorned the wall by the de Forests’ staircase. “One must learn first to recognize, then appreciate, beautiful things,” she used to say.

  Perhaps such an extraordinary degree of refinement and high breeding among the Sephardim is an explanation for the fact that they took a far less active part in the Civil War than they had taken in the Revolution and the War of 1812. Nor did they join the band of aggressive, hungry fortune hunters that emerged after the War—the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Guggenheims, Morgans, Mellons, Schiffs, et al. The Sephardim stood politely on the sidelines. The only Sephardic name of any importance to Civil War buffs is that of Judah P. Benjamin, and he had the misfortune to be on the wrong side. One of the great rows in the history of New York’s Union Club was over Mr. Benjamin’s proposed ouster. Those in the club who wanted him out did so not because Benjamin was Jewish but because he was pro-South. The club refused to expel him, and a group of irate members immediately departed and formed a club of their own, the Union League Club.

  Judah Benjamin was a member of a West Indian Sephardic family, distantly connected to the branch of the Lopez family that had settled there, as well as to the Mendes family, and in 1818 his parents moved from the island of Saint Thomas, where he was born, to Charleston, South Carolina. Though he attended Yale (without receiving a degree), his youthful orientation was thoroughly southern. After Yale, he went to New Orleans, where he “read” law in a law office, and he was admitted to the Louisiana bar in 1832. In 1852, he was elected a senator from Louisiana, and here demonstrated that he had a Latin temper every bit as fiery as Uriah Levy’s. In reply to a slur from another senator, Judah Benjamin rose and declaimed: “The gentleman will please remember that when his half-civilized ancestors were hunting wild boar in the forests of Silesia, mine were the princes of the earth!” (Actually, he was paraphrasing Disraeli, who once, in answer to a similar taunt, said: “Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”)

  Benjamin resigned from the Senate in order to assist his friend Jefferson Davis in forming his provisional government. He worked in Davis’ cabinet, first as attorney general and later as Davis’ chief secretary of s
tate, a post he held from 1862 to 1865.

  After the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox, there was a price on Judah Benjamin’s head. He managed to make an escape by boat from the coast of Florida and, many months later, after much hardship and bouncing about on troubled Atlantic waters, Benjamin was able to make his way to England, where he lived in exile. He died in Paris in 1884, a lonely and disenchanted man, a long way from the crackling fires and comfortable chairs of the Union Club.

  17

  “NATHANS DON’T CHEAT”—BUT DO THEY KILL?

  The Nathans were such a proper family, and could nearly always be counted on to do the correct thing, to rise to the occasion in the right manner, to make the suitable gesture. Young Frederick Nathan was barely more than a boy when he was traveling in the South with Griffith, the family’s Negro chauffeur. The two were about to board a steamer when Frederick was told, “He can’t ride with you.” “Very well,” Frederick Nathan said, “I’ll ride with him”—and he did, he rode with Griffith in the ship’s Jim Crow quarters rather than accept the segregation the South imposed. Nathans were always doing things like that. It was no wonder that, for generations, a Nathan had been president of New York’s Shearith Israel congregation.

  The great Nathan family patriarch was Isaac Mendes Seixas Nathan. His uncle had been Gershom Mendes Seixas, called “the patriot rabbi” for refusing to let his congregation pray for George III. Isaac M. S. Nathan’s grandmother had been one of the old New York Levys, and he himself had married another Seixas and, by her, sired a dynastic brood of fifteen children. He ruled his household with a series of bells—a different bell summoned each child into his father’s presence. He also had bells to indicate the various punishments that were to be meted out for whatever misdeed was at hand; one bell meant a birching, another bed without supper, and so on. The combination of children bells and punishment bells made the Nathan house chime like a carillon most of the day. He was a tyrant and a terror, and his children adored him. They all made properly dynastic marriages—one to a Solis, one to a Cardozo, two to Hendrickses, one to a Gomez, a great-grandniece of Daniel’s—and were otherwise a tribute to their father.