The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  By 1950, however, the Radio Corporation of America was not for sale.

  A television set and a home in the suburbs—these were the two things Americans seemed to want the most in the years immediately following the war, and a forest of television antennas would become one of the symbols of suburbia. Historically, after a war, real estate values become depressed, and a number of economists had predicted that this would happen after World War II. But—helped in part by GI loans—the real estate market boomed, particularly in the suburbs of large cities, and new houses went up by the hundreds of thousands.

  The war had also changed the demography of such cities as New York. As had happened following the first war, a new influx of poor blacks was moving up from the rural South, and another wave of immigrants was arriving from the island of Puerto Rico. The pale, pinched faces of New Yorkers that Helena Rubinstein had noticed a number of years earlier were now less in evidence, and the city had taken on a decidedly swarthy cast. The new metropolitan black population had expanded the traditional boundaries of Harlem—to the north, south, and west—and now practically all the Manhattan real estate north of Ninety-sixth Street, between the East River and Washington Heights, fell under the designation of “Harlem.” Harlem now even extended into the South and East Bronx, and the once-proud Grand Concourse and its crowning jewel, the Concourse Plaza Hotel, wore a sad and seedy look as middle-class Jews moved out in the face of the advancing black population. It was a pattern that would be observed in a number of American cities, as a neighborhood first “went Jewish,” and then, making way for the next ethnic group that was struggling up from poverty, “went black.” And since Jews frequently retained their properties in their former neighborhoods, becoming absentee landlords, a social problem between blacks and Jews would be created that is evident to this day.

  From the South and central Bronx, some Jewish families moved westward, to the bosky and pleasant reaches of the West Bronx and Riverdale, overlooking the Hudson River. Still more moved northward, into suburban Westchester County, and owning a house in Westchester would become the newest Jewish status symbol. In Westchester, moneyed Christian families had already taken dibs on the most desirable waterfront properties, along the Hudson and Long Island Sound, but pleasantly rural stretches in the interior of the county, in Scarsdale, Harrison, Purchase, and White Plains, were still available for development. To be sure, some inland communities—most notably Bronxville—remained restricted against Jews by gentlemen’s agreements. (Bronxville’s Jewish merchants could not live in Bronxville.) And longtime Christian residents of Westchester County would complain that the postwar movement into the county was responsible for a “Bronxification” of Westchester, as more suburban shopping centers, restaurants, bars, motels, and high-rise apartment houses went up.

  Still, Westchester was a country club place. Most of its social life revolved around its clubs, and golf and tennis were its symbols—the first golf course in America had been laid out there. Though there were many clubs that would not take Jewish members, there were nearly as many Jewish clubs, many of them quite luxurious. Even the huge, glossy Westchester Country Club, where the tone was predominantly Roman Catholic, had, during the hard financial times of the Depression, taken in a few Jewish families, and once the barrier had gone down, it was difficult to put it back up again. One of the appeals of Westchester was the fact that it appeared to be an area where Jews and Christians could live pleasantly and comfortably side by side. The town of Scarsdale, for example, by the early 1950s had a population that was roughly evenly divided between Jews and Christians, and Scarsdale was considered the prototype upscale New York suburb.

  Another appeal of Westchester was its reputation for an excellent public school system. Scarsdale High School boasted of an academic record equal to such top New England boarding schools as Exeter and Andover, and regularly sent its graduates to the leading Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges.

  There was also a postwar Jewish movement to the near suburbs of Long Island. Here again, the North Shore “Gold Coast” of Nassau County, with its high bluffs commanding views of Long Island Sound, had been preempted by the Christian rich (though Otto Kahn, a German Jew, had a large estate at Cold Spring Harbor). But attractive real estate was available on the flatter land of the South Shore, particularly around Hewlett Harbor. Here the Five Towns—Hewlett, Cedarhurst, Woodmere, Lawrence, and Inwood—became a snug enclave of new-made Jewish money. Lives that had begun on the Lower East Side and had passed through the Grand Concourse tended to continue a northward trek into Westchester County. Others from the Lower East Side, who had graduated to Brooklyn, gravitated farther east on the island to the Five Towns.

  Many American Jews today, who have since moved on to even more prestigious addresses, recall the cozy postwar days of the Five Towns with bittersweet nostalgia. For children, growing up in the Five Towns was a rather special experience. Everyone, it seemed, knew almost everyone else, and children’s parents all visited one another. The neighborliness and closeness was like that of the Lower East Side, but with trees, lawns, gardens, an occasional swimming pool, clean sidewalks, and quiet, well-policed streets. In place of the fire escape there was the backyard patio. Some people in the Five Towns lived in apartments, but every family who could afford one wanted its own home, its own piece of America.

  The architectural styles of the Five Towns were all carefully in keeping with those favored by the Christian majority—tidy Colonials, red-brick Georgians, exposed-beam Tudors—a touch of Mount Vernon here, a dash of Nantucket there, and a bit of Olde England for good measure. Little in the Five Towns was built in the Spanish, Italian, or French style, nor was anything Oriental or Moorish or, Lord knew, Russian. And yet there was something about life in the Five Towns that was confining and insular, a sense of physical and emotional separation—of being right in the mainstream of New York life, on a main commuting stem of the Long Island Rail Road, and yet somehow cut off from it. Though the area was not set apart by walls, the invisible barrier of the ghetto could be felt beyond the manicured shrubbery, the well-dressed windows, and the shiny new tricycles. Not on the main line of the Long Island Rail Road, but on the Rockaway Branch, the area was called “the Peninsula,” because it was a dead end—not on the way to anywhere, but a destination. The writer Sue Kaufman, who grew up in Lawrence, used to clench her fists in angry frustration whenever she was reminded of the Five Towns. For her, it had been a stifling experience. She called the towns “a golden ghetto.”

  But others recall the special privacy of the towns. “Be civil, but strange, with the neighbors,” one mother advised her children. And mere was also the beachfront, Atlantic Ocean closeness to nature, and what were considered the salubrious effects of “good sea air.” Not that the Five Towns comprised a completely homogeneous community. On the contrary, there were marked differences among the various villages. In Hewlett, for instance, Jews were in the minority, and at least one area of Lawrence was restricted. In Woodmere, there was as sizable German-Jewish population, and it was difficult for an Eastern European to become a member of such German-Jewish clubs as the Inwood Beach Club. And yet, of the five communities, Woodmere had the most status.

  In Cedarhurst and Lawrence, the balance between Germans and Russians was more equal, and, though census figures do not reveal such distinctions, there were probably more Russians in Lawrence than Germans—at least those who recall the situation felt that way. And yet both the Lawrence Beach Club and the Atlantic Beach Club were restricted against Jews.

  Inwood had the least social status of the five communities. It was in Inwood, as well as in parts of Cedarhurst and Lawrence—literally on the other side of the Long Island Rail Road tracks—that the schwartzes, or blacks, who provided household help for the better-off lived. Also in Inwood lived a number of Italian families and a smattering of Irish—many of whom had originally come to help build the railroad, and who had stayed on to work as domestics, gardeners, construction workers, carpe
nters, and house painters. There were parts of Inwood that were actually considered dangerous, and Jewish children were warned not to walk through the black “Sugar Hill” section after dark. Still, Inwood was an essential fifth to the other four towns. It was the servants’ quarters.

  Binding the little clutch of townships together, giving them a sense of specialness and clubbiness, was Woodmere Academy, a private day school. Though the Five Towns boasted excellent public schools, in its academic heyday in the late 1940s, Woodmere Academy was rated equal to the New England prep schools, and its school spirit was considered remarkable. Woodmere graduates went sailing on to Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, where the sons of tailors-turned–garment manufacturers studied to be lawyers, doctors, and engineers. If the ethnic cast of Woodmere Academy seemed to be more Eastern European than German, it was perhaps because immigrant parents were particularly ambitious for their children, and would not settle for less than an academy education. What City College meant in the 1920s, Woodmere Academy meant in the 1940s. Acceptance at Woodmere carried great cachet, and as a result the school was snobbish and clannish, and added in no small measure to that curiously insular Five Towns feeling. At Woodmere, they became we, and the others were simply the others.

  Best of all, when one moved out of one of the five boroughs of New York City into one of the Five Towns on Long Island, it seemed like the American dream come true—because what symbolized the American dream after the war better than the suburbs? A house of one’s own, unheard-of in the old country, with that marvelous capitalist invention, a mortgage; an automobile; a maid; a fine private school; a country club—what was missing? Only, perhaps, a sense of history. The Five Towns businessmen who gathered each morning on the commuter platforms of the Long Island Rail Road worked at various occupations, but the principal endeavor of the Five Towns seemed to be the erasure of memory. The Five Towns were places to forget the pushcart past, and though it might not really be forgotten, the past was diverted as far back into the consciousness as possible. It was the ordinariness, the everydayness, of the place that seemed to be in such sharp contrast with the struggle it had taken to get there. Only the old grandparents, living in guest rooms with pretty wallpaper and comfortable chairs and radios, could tell what it had been like and what it all meant, but the children were too busy to listen. Or, when the children asked their grandparents what it had been like growing up on the Lower East Side, or in Russia, the reply would be, “Don’t ask!”

  Years later, in the 1980s, when the area south of Houston Street in Manhattan called SoHo became actually fashionable, and when young people were converting Lower East Side lofts into roomy studios and apartments, the granddaughter of a Five Towns woman told her grandmother that she was moving into a SoHo loft. The older woman looked at her granddaughter with shocked disbelief. “And your grandfather and I worked so hard to get out of Hester Street!” she cried.

  *That the automobile pioneer’s estate should have hired Weinberg to shelter it from taxes was in itself remarkable, considering the senior Ford’s unabashed anti-Semitism.

  Part Three

  HERE WE ARE: 1951–

  16

  CROWN PRINCES

  An obituary notice in the New York Times in the late 1960s told an interesting story to those who make a hobby of reading between the lines. It announced the death of MRS. ROBERT LEVY, CIVIC WORKER, 69. “Mrs. Levy,” the account began, “who was active in civic and philanthropic affairs,… was born in New York September 27, 1897, the daughter of Jesse Isador Straus and Irma Nathan Straus.” The Strauses were a proud old New York German-Jewish family, but Mrs. Levy’s mother was descended from even prouder Jewish stock—the Sephardic Nathans, who could trace their ancestry back to the first Jewish settlers in America in 1654, and, according to at least one Nathan family genealogist, even farther, to a union between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. For Jesse Isador Straus, therefore, the marriage had represented a social step up. “Her father,” the account continued, “was president of R. H. Macy & Company, Inc., and served as United States Ambassador to France from 1933 to 1936.” The account did not include the fact that Mrs. Levy’s grandfather was the Isador Straus who had gone down with the Titanic, and that Mrs. Levy’s father had been one of the privileged few New Yorkers permitted to enter David Sarnoff’s radio studio atop Wanamaker’s to await word of survivors. The obituary continued with a few words about the career of Beatrice Nathan Straus Levy’s husband, a prominent cardiologist, and their surviving children, and concluded with the words, “A memorial service for Mrs. Levy will be held … at St. James Episcopal Church, Madison Avenue and 71st Street.”

  Thus three great Jewish strains had been brought together in America—the Sephardic Nathans, the German Strauses, and the humble Russian Levys—only to earn interment from Saint James’s, Manhattan’s most fashionable Protestant church. It was a story, one might say, of total assimilation. And it added a bittersweet postscript to the assertion kol Yisrael hem chaverim—all of Israel are brethren.

  Still, the Christianizing saga of Nathan/Straus/Levy told only a part of the story of what was happening to Jews in America in the second half of the twentieth century. Not many years later, in Cincinnati, young Calman Levine II was bar mitzvahed in an elaborate ceremony in that city’s fashionable Plum Street Temple, the Reform congregation founded by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise. Though young Levine was the only one of five brothers to have chosen the rite, it, too, represented another form of assimilation—from the Orthodoxy of his namesake grandfather into the “liberal enlightenment” of American Reform Judaism. This rite of passage might, to an older generation, have been seen as a kind of obituary. And if various Nathans and Strauses—not to mention Levys!—might have been spinning in their graves at the news of the Episcopalian memorial, so might the original Calman Levine’s father at the news of his great-grandson’s conversion to Reform.

  Calman Levine had died a bitter man, the victim, as he would always see it, of Sam Bronfman’s long struggle for respectability, for admission—assimilation—into the society of rich and cultivated and philanthropic men and women in the United States and Canada of which he so desperately longed to be a part, to rid himself of the “goddamn bootlegger” label that seemed to have attached itself to his name. He had tried high-class advertising. He had even tried the pious approach of urging Americans to drink less. Keying this theme to the leading Christian holiday, the Christmas season of tippling and jollity, he had started, as early as 1934, an annual Seagram’s advertising campaign in hundreds of newspapers across the United States that proclaimed, WE WHO MAKE WHISKEY SAY: DRINK MODERATELY. The high moral tone of these advertisements and Seagram’s stand against drunkenness drew praise from Wets and Drys alike, from the clergy and from the judiciary, but they did not get Mr. Sam into the Mount Royal Club. It began to seem as though nothing would.

  Mr. Sam had also tried to polish his tarnished image by hiring prominent Christians, and placing them in high positions in his company. Brigadier General Frank Schwengel of the United States Army Reserve was hired and placed in charge of U.S. sales for Seagram’s. Fred Willkie was brought in to oversee Seagram’s production at the company’s distillery in Louisville. Mr. Willkie’s chief qualifications for the post seemed to be that his brother, Wendell L. Willkie, had been a Republican candidate for the United States presidency, and that the Willkies were blue-blooded descendants of the old New York Wendell family, and were in the Social Register.

  It was Fred Willkie’s arrival at Seagram’s that spelled the end of Calman Levine’s career with the company. The two men did not see eye to eye from the beginning. It was Mr. Willkie’s notion, furthermore, to hire scientists to supervise the blending of Seagram’s products. Mr. Levine’s celebrated nose and palate, he implied, were not enough to assure the blends’ scientific uniformity. Mr. Levine, understandably, vociferously defended his ancient master-blender’s craft. But Mr. Willkie disagreed, and, despite Mr. Sam’s often-repeated maxim that “distilling
is a science, but blending is an art,” he apparently got Mr. Sam on his side. Mr. Levine wrote a number of memorandums to Mr. Sam, complaining about the new order of things under the Willkie regime in Louisville. Typically, these went unanswered, as did any expressions of disagreement with company policy. (Mr. Sam had explained unequivocally enough what that was: “I am company policy!”) Finally, Levine wrote what amounted to an ultimatum: either he or Fred Willkie would have to go. The response from above was that Mr. Levine would be relieved of his duties in Louisville, and would be sent on a speaking tour around the country to extol the superiority of Seagram’s blends.

  For the man who had created Seagram’s best-selling brand, this situation rankled, and soon the word of Calman Levine’s unhappiness reached the ear of one of Lewis Rosenstiel’s informants. Rosenstiel responded by making Levine a handsome offer at Schenley’s, and Levine decided to accept it. He brought the news of his decision to Mr. Sam.

  Mr. Sam sprang from his chair in his Chrysler Building office, screaming, “You go to my enemy!” He then proceeded to hurl one of his most explosive strings of curses, threats, imprecations, and verbal abuse at his longtime employee. The tirade lasted fully half an hour, and at the close of it Levine was close to tears. Then Mr. Sam ordered Levine bodily removed from his office.

  Though the Schenley job offered a much better salary—Lew Rosenstiel was less miserly than Mr. Sam—Calman Levine never really recovered from the emotional wringer he had been put through that afternoon, and remained resentful about his Seagram experience to the end of his days.

  In addition to having developed Seagram’s flagship whiskey, Levine had performed many extra services for Mr. Sam far beyond the regular line of duty. Once, when a Polish scientist in Italy had claimed to have invented a liquor that produced a pleasant high, but was not intoxicating—“elation without inebriation,” the scientist called it—Mr. Sam asked Levine to check on it. Levine made a special trip to Italy and Vienna to meet with the man, but was not impressed with his concoction, which, among other traits, left an unpleasant film on the inside of a glass. Levine recommended against acquiring the patent. (The scientist was later declared insane.) Levine had also been instrumental in curbing some of Mr. Sam’s more harebrained notions. No one at Seagram really knew how the popular vogue of ordering “Seven and Seven”—a jigger of Seven Crown mixed with Seven-Up—began, though the trend seemed to have started in the Midwest. Widespread as this bar order became, it irked Mr. Sam that his whiskey was giving a free word-of-mouth-advertising ride to a soft-drink company. He had asked Calman Levine to look into the feasibility of a sparkling whiskey—a Seven Crown with Seven-Up flavor and sparkle built right into the bottle. Using an ordinary siphon with a carbon dioxide cartridge, Levine was able to demonstrate that the carbonation of whiskey worked havoc on its flavor.