The Pincus Legacy

By Sidney L. Dornfest

This is a love story of two young people, Pincus and Yetta, caught In the undercurrents of life and the quirks of fate. Pincus is the son of German-Jewish immigrants and Yetta is the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants. There has always been conflict between the two Since the German Jews thought the Russian Jews inferior to them. The theme of "The Pincus Legacy" is father versus son, brother against brother and, finally, culture versus culture. Although the pattern of the story comes from real life, the cloth that clothes the book is fiction and the thread taht weaves everything together is fate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 22, 2005
• ISBN: 9781477166826

Sidney L. Dornfest

Sidney L. Dornfest was born December 21, 1919, in a tenement on the lower East Side of New York City. He survived the Great Depression. Served in the United States Army During World War II. After the war, worked in the United States Postal Service and attended Brooklyn College at night. A slipped disc in his back ended his college career. Thirty years later he retired from the Postal Service and then attended Cerritos College where he received an AA degree in the Humanities. His final goal was to attend a university and obtain a degree in English but poor health prevented him from achieving that goal. The author was married for 52 years and had one son. Sidney L. Dornfest died June 23, 1997.

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Copyright © 2005 by Sidney L. Dornfest.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

EPILOGUE

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my mother,

Ethel

And to my father,

Harry.

This book is also dedicated to the Fifth Commandment:

Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother

Too late.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people have lent a hand, have given a thought to dredge up the past in the preparation of this book. Notable among them have been Rabbi Wayne Allan, Dr. Leonard Lazarus, and Jack Katz. Also the late Betty Federoff and Lou Federoff. Special mention must be given to my English professor, C. Weigel (Cerritos College) for her aid and encouragement during the times of ceiling zero when thoughts were dormant. Gail Ross, Arthur Kellner and David Thompson for their typing and editing. And finally, my loving thanks to Hilda, my wife, for without her help this book may never have been written. The task is now done and to all I say: Thank you.

FOREWORD

This book was written for the elucidation and edification of myself alone. However, if you wish to learn how one segment of a slum family lived through the Great Depression, then welcome to my world, Also, if you wonder how the heartbeat of a family overcame the palpitations of hard times, then again, welcome to my world.

Despite the deprivations of the Depression Era; it was a softer world and life moved at a slower pace. It was also the transitional time between the decline of the horse and buggy and the rise of the motor vehicle.

It was a sweet time for living and a bitter time for working. Rolls were three for a nickel, a pound of bread seven cents. My weekly wage was six dollars for a six day week, The basic workweek was seventy-five hours and no overtime. Three dollars went home and the other three made me king.

Not everybody escaped from the slums. However, many did. Some took longer than others, and a few never did. This is the fictional story of one family engulfed in an ocean of squalor.

Whatever your reasons for reading this book, welcome to my world of yesterday.

Sidney L. Dornfest

CHAPTER 1

Why, Pincus, Why?

Thursday evening February 8, 1939, in New York City was clear and bitterly cold. The temperature had fallen into the low twenties. The weather forecaster had predicted a polar front for this evening. I had just left the comparatively warm subway to step out into that front of arctic air. My thin, fall suit jacket, which was one step away from the rag-picker, wasn’t much protection from the biting wind. The turned-up collar of my jacket was only psychological.

Fortunately, the restaurant to which I was headed was on the corner of Delancey Street in downtown Manhattan, just a few feet away from the BMT Essex Street subway exit. Quickly, I dodged through the exiting mob and made it through the door into the warm restaurant. Actually, it consisted of one long counter and a line of grills that had frankfurters smoking away, filling the air with the pungent aroma of garlic, beef, and spices. Two huge, wooden root beer kegs were set up at each end of the counter. Glasses clinking, bodies moving, voices shouting, feet shuffling all made it seem like a football game. There was always a man in motion somewhere. There weren’t any tables or chairs or counter stools. It was a business of hurry in—hurry out, with five countermen serving the public. I found an empty space at Mike’s section of the counter and squeezed myself in. At that moment, the counterman glanced up. Hello, I greeted him. Could I have a frankfurter on a roll and a root beer, a-la-cuff?

Sure, Mike smiled, How’s everything? never stopping from what he was doing.

Oh, pretty good. Boy, it’s freezing outside.’ For the past two months this restaurant was my first stop after work. I had come to know Mike pretty well, and my credit rating with him was excellent. Frankly, though, the first time we spoke I honestly thought was going to be our last. It was midweek and I had stopped there for my usual nightly frankfurter and root beer. The counterman gave it to me but, since he was swamped with orders, he started to wait on the next customer. A few minutes later, he turned to me and said, Pay up!"

I had just finished eating. Wiping my hands on a paper napkin, I started going through my pockets looking for a dime that I knew I had.

Hurry kid, he barked at me.

Gee, I answered him, I can’t seem to find it. I’ve got a lot of holes in my jacket pocket.

The next instant his hand shot out and grabbed my jacket and shirt in his powerful clutch, lifting all 120 pounds of me six inches off the ground up to his eye level, nose to nose.

Honestly, I told him, I had a dime on me. I don’t beg or steal. Look, if I had a watch I’d let you hold it till payday this Friday. Won’t you trust me?

He burst out laughing, and the hard look went out of his eyes. He put me down slowly. I’m sorry kid, I didn’t mean nuthin’. I trust you.

That’s how I met Mike, and that’s how he made me a regular customer.

When I finished my meager supper, I half saluted Mike a silent farewell and started out for the cellar club. Pulling my jacket collar tightly together I held it closed with my left hand in anticipation of the ice box awaiting me outside, I then left the restaurant to brave the arctic blast. My destination now was the cellar club on Broome Street. Here, every evening the club members gathered for a few hours of forgetfulness and social companionship. We were like the gleanings of harvested wheat clustered together into a wind-swept corner of a field. Here, for a few all-too-short hours the struggle for existence, the stress of the times, the floundering of the ship of state ceased to exist. Here, for the moment, we were a world within a world.

Finally, the signal light changed and the stream of traffic stopped. I half ran, half walked, almost bent double to escape the blowing north wind, across Delancey Street. Then I headed towards Clinton Street, half glancing into the warmly lit Hungarian restaurants with their steam-frosted windows that kept out prying eyes. I turned the corner into Clinton Street, now running past the police station and past the movie theater, as my breath sent up smoke signals. The cheery, soft lights of the storefronts along the way softened somewhat the cold harshness of the night.

Meanwhile, my thoughts were pelting me like jarring snowballs. ‘‘A man’s home is his castle," I thought, but not for me. Home to me was not a home; it was an intolerable situation.

Home was not an island of sanctuary in a stormy sea. It was not a place of baby tears and children laughing. It was not a cheery place of friends and toys and love.

The cold reality of home was the opposite. My family consisted of my parents, an elder brother, and two younger sisters. We lived on the second floor of a four-story, cold-water flat on Suffolk Street. It was a walk-up that boasted two, three-room railroad apartments, front and back, on each floor. Within the stark walls of the flat were the salvaged remnants of constant moving. The kitchen contained a rickety table and two battered hard-backed chairs. A Ben Franklin stove squatted near one windowless wall, as cold as the walls were bare. A sink stood in an alcove alongside the door, with one faucet and one handle, looking like a midget cyclops watching us. The toilet was in the hallway. To me, the only thing less luxurious would be an Indian tent at the North Pole.

My poor, misunderstood father I saw only infrequently or accidentally when our paths converged. In order for him to maintain a tattered remnant of dignity, he traveled four hours daily to and from Newark, New Jersey, to a new job he had ferreted out. He worked for a pittance but at least he salvaged a modicum of self-respect—even if it meant home was only a place to sleep. Still, the few times we were at home together, he always lectured me on the value of an education, always ending with the cry: Go back to school! He was asking the impossible of me. My tattered clothes and poor scholastic record in both attendance and intelligence made it seem purposeless. Besides, I hated the system with a passion. With all my teachers, there wasn’t one who had ever asked me, What’s wrong? or truly cared. I was just another seat warmer to them. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any way to explain to my father that school was not for me.

My perpetual-motion mother hardly knew she had a home or children. She was a breath away from being an angel. During the day she worked at the pushcart where everyone came to her with his or her sad tales of woe. In the evenings, like the will-o-the-wisp she was gone on her errands of mercy. It’s a blessing from Heaven to do good, she always told us. Unsung and unknown, she heeded the cries of those less fortunate. Yet, while she was worrying about the starving hordes, no one worried about her parentless children.

I rarely saw my brother. My two sisters were integrated into Grandma’s apartment where they had steam heat, hot water, and food. At the very least, they had half-a-life. We were drifting farther apart like wind-blown grains of sand in an empty desert.

Inevitably, our family was disintegrating, like a loose thread that unravels a garment. There weren’t many pulls left to separate the family. This was our family life: six people on diverting paths meeting occasionally like ships on the high seas. All in all, we were trapped in a bottomless pit, and our mode of living controlled by the moving pendulum of time.

My reveries vanished once I turned the corner onto Broome Street. There, just a few doors away from the corner was my sanctuary. I hastened my pace and soon descended the steps leading down into our cellar clubhouse.

The first click of the door latch to the cellar club was like the starting signal of the evening’s Bolero. As quietly as the first evening stars twinkling into sight, the snare drums started their rhythm. The pulsating, soft rising and falling of the flute gently pierced the consciousness of mind. The counter melody coming out of nowhere and picking up the theme, fading into the melodic fluted notes, softly repeating and repeating and repeating. And around and around the melody whispered.

It felt good to be indoors now, even though it seemed that I stepped out of winter and into autumn. With a sigh of relief, I stood inside the door for a moment, letting the warmth of the place unshackle the frosty chains that enveloped me. I glanced around the room. Our cellar club contained only the barest of necessities. Along one wall stood, in silent majesty, a forlorn King Louis XIV high divan covered with royal blue mohair, a faded, unkempt relic with sagging springs. Flanking it on both sides, like a sergeant-at-arms were two, high wing-back armchairs that had been recalled from retirement, from the garbage heaps that lined the streets nightly. In the far corner stood a three-legged bridge table that precariously supported a chipped, half broken table lamp with a battered gray shade, once snow-white, its small, forty-watt bulb half chasing the darkness from its nook. A few relics, metal bridge chairs and a salvaged Tiffany lamp, were placed around the room and comprised the bulk of our furniture. Our nightly band consisted of an old electric phonograph, while our pride and joy was a small electric heater that had the dubious honor of being the club’s central heating system. Needless to say, it was a lifesaver—especially now in the dead of winter. Granted, our possessions were practically nil, but to the club members it was their Castle on the Rhine.

Each evening, the group came straggling in after supper, singly or in pairs. Before long, the room became a select mass, some seniors from Seward Park High School, some from Townsend High School, and the dropouts, all past schoolmates, some employed, most unemployed. The next few hours belonged to us: we were now within our sanctuary.

Soon the pattering of many feet on concrete, mixed with the clicking of high heels, joined by the clarinets’ shrill notes mingling with the deep bassoons intertwined with the joining groups of brass horns and stringed instruments playing their merry-go-round melodic theme of no beginning and no end, louder and louder and over and over.

A cold blast filled the room each time the door was opened. The nightly war chant of close the door rebounded off the walls. Even before everyone was assembled, the little electric Emerson portable phonograph was plugged in and spinning away at its 78 RPM speed with Artie Shaw and Begin the Beguine. In another moment, the jitterbugs had the center of the floor, doing the Lindy. The laughing voices, the hum of intermingled conversations, and the magic carpet was unfolded. Besides making contact with the opposite sex, dancing for some was an exhilarating way to keep warm. Partly away from the whirling figures, some of the girls would be trying to teach their boyfriends the Bunny Hop. Their voices could be heard intermingled and drifting over the music. Louie stood in the corner with Rosie and she taught him the Bunny Hop Step, step, hop! hop! hop! Step, step, no! no! no! It’s not hop, step! The babble of voices, music and dancing, bloodless chess battles and now the evening hours were off and flying.

The nightly Bolero swept on in its majestic ring of flutes, clarinets, and bassoons. By subtle degrees, the rhythm droned on louder and louder and louder. The dancing shadows on the walls ran faster to the compelling, unvarying beat repeated and repeated and repeated. The magic of the night ends. The lateness of the hour brings the realization that tomorrow for some is school, for others work, and for some hope. In reverse now, singly and in pairs the boys and girls slithered into their overcoats and out of the clubroom, up the few steps, back into the cold world of reality and home and tomorrow.

While the good-nights rebounded around the lateness of the hour, my little group was impervious to it all. We were called the chess fiends because every evening we set up in a small corner of the room our own little games of chess. The checkerboard was placed upon a salvaged wooden seltzer box standing on end, and a few rickety bridge chairs were placed around it. The chess pieces were a cheaply-made wooden set but it served its purpose gallantly. For light, we appropriated the Tiffany lamp. The reddish glow of our little heater over the battlefield lent realism to the deadly serious game.

In my group, I was considered the retarded one. Most of my friends were A students, while I had become a dropout. I loved to read and use large words. Unfortunately, never having heard them spoken, I soon gained the name of Mrs. Malaprop. Hy and Matty were two of my friends in the algebra class. We sat in back of the room in a corner. Hy was of medium build, with a cherubic face and twinkling brown eyes. He had a joke for every occasion. Matty, on the other hand, was tall and lanky, with straw-colored hair covering a thin, serious face. He looked like a scholar, he spoke like a professor, and his solid A marks in school reflected his intelligence. One Friday, our algebra teacher hung fifteen test questions on top of the front blackboard and continued along the side wall blackboard near where I sat. Unfortunately, needing eyeglasses, since I had lost my last pair, I started working the questions backward from the last test question. A half-hour later, the teacher asked if anyone still needed the first math exercise. I raised my hand. Fifteen more minutes passed, same question, same hand. One minute before the bell rang he asked the question again. This time, besides raising my hand, I self-consciously said, I’m working on it now. The class roared, the bell rang, and he just shook his head. No one ever believed my reason and ever since then my friends considered me slow.

Except in the game of chess. There I was king. Every night the brightest students met with me over the checkerboard battlefield. To them it was unbelievable that a D and F student was invincible in the art of chess. Yet, the answer was so simple it was unbelievable.

About a year before, I was watching some friends playing chess. After the second question, my friend condescendingly told me that this was an exceedingly difficult game and I ought to stick to checkers. Somehow his remarks touched a sensitive nerve. Later on during the summer months, I’d go to the roof garden of the Educational Alliance. There I would check out a chess set. With me I’d have a book on chess by the grand master, Capablanca. After studying the rules of chess, I became a devoted student of Capablanca. Every day of the summer months was spent on the roof garden studying his chess openings and his most-used winning techniques over and over again.

In a way, chess was my greatest victory. I had proven to myself that if I desired something strongly enough, I had the capability of accomplishing it—and the proof was chess. Tonight was no exception because I was three moves away from a checkmate. While watching my opponent mull over my last move, my mind slipped back into the not too-distant past.

Frankly speaking, I was the worst scholar of the group. Besides not being any room at home in which to study, electricity in our home was practically non-existent. All in all, the situation as it existed was simply too impossible to be conducive to a scholarly career. The school goal of preparation for college I knew was a dead-end.

In the tenth grade I simply walked into the school office one late morning, plunked my few books down on the desk and flatly stated, I’m quitting school. Not an eyebrow was raised, not a question asked. In that time and place, misfits were too common. The realization that jobs for survival was an established fact in the year 1937 covered a lot of mistakes.

My reverie was shattered by my opponent, Matty, throwing his hands up and admitting defeat. After a hasty glance around the deserted room, and a quick look at a watch, my group quickly called it a night. In a few more moments they were headed for the door and home.

When the last straggler finally said good night, I locked the door. Now the cold and damp clubroom became my bedroom. There was hardly any reason for going home—except on payday when I gave my mother half my weekly salary, two dollars and fifty cents. I had found a job as a buttonhole driller. When the plastic buttons were taken from the kiln, my job was to sit at a small drill press and drill eyes in the buttons. I was grateful that I had a job, even though it was menial and dull.

Now that the club was deserted, I carried the portable heater into the deepest recess of the basement, trying to escape the penetrating coldness of the deepening night. I plugged in the heater and watched its metal grid become cherry red. I turned the collar of my jacket up as far as it would go and made sure the collar was as tight as possible around my neck.

Pushing the largest soft armchair I could find as close to the heater as I could get, I plunked down into the chair. Outside the half-arc of the heater, the room was dark and by now quite chilly. Here, in its warm light, the humming blower fan of the heater softly lulled me into sleep.

I didn’t know what time it was, when in my sleep I heard my father’s voice calling my name: Sammy! Sammy! I awoke from my slumber with a start and a dreadful premonition that something was terribly wrong at home. There was no question in my mind that my father was calling me. I turned off the heater and, groping my way to the door with the aid of the street light, left the basement. Everything was so bitterly cold and dark. The biting wind blew all the sleep from my eyes in a hurry. With my head lowered between my shoulder blades and my chin half buried inside my lapel collar, I half walked, half ran through the deserted streets. My parents’ apartment was only a few blocks away from the club.

It wasn’t long before I reached the corner of Suffolk Street. The whistling, icy wind swirled through my thin clothes, penetrating right down to my skin. I glanced down the dark, deserted street. The shoemaker’s yardarm sign two houses down the block was swinging and groaning in the wind. Occasionally, the tin frame banged against the metal support bar, creating little explosions of sound that crackled through the air. When I looked up at the silent shade-drawn windows of the tenements that stood like frozen sentinels, they seemed to be a hundred darkened eyes in sleeping monsters, leaning one on the other, side by side. The dark, blurry roofs of the tenements silently and stoutly held up the lowered sky of winter clouds. I crossed the wind-swept corner and the whistling wind sounded like the uneasy breathing of the sleeping dragon. Involuntarily, I shivered and quickened my pace.

The tenement house I lived in was at 17 Suffolk Street, halfway down the street. In a few more moments of half-running, half-walking, I reached it and opened the vestibule door that opened into the hallway. There was a dim light in the middle of the long hallway creating its own shadowy world. In the lateness of the hour and the stillness of the hall my fast, shallow breathing seemed to bounce off ‘the walls like a rubber ball. It was only my imagination but as I kept walking down the hall to the stairwell I had the feeling that I was going deeper and deeper into a dungeon. Quickly, I raced up the two flights of stairs and practically burst into the apartment where I lived.

The door from the hallway opened into the kitchen. Opposite the door was the Ben Franklin coal burner, now cold. To the right of the stove was a doorway without a door that was the entrance to the main bedroom. As I stepped into the kitchen I noticed the spring-driven alarm clock on top of the ice box. The time was 3:40 A.M. At that moment my mother, her long, black, disheveled hair falling to her waist, came out of the living room, which at nighttime was turned into the master bedroom by opening two folding cots. Without looking at me, and with a voice drained of all emotion, she said, Your father’s calling for you.

What’s the matter with him? I asked.

He’s very sick, was all she said.

Looking into the shadowy living room I could see the large formal dining room table pushed to the windows. The two large armchairs of the set were practically crushed against the wall. On the wall toward the kitchen was the space created for the folding cots, one of which my father lay upon. I took one step into the crowded room and was at my father’s bedside. The only light in the room was the feeble reflected light of a twenty-five-watt bulb from the kitchen. When I looked at his wan and haggard face, my eyes filled with tears. I kneeled down to him. He opened his eyes. He saw me and a light momentarily came into his eyes. He reached out and held