Fall 2014

by Elaine Greene Weisburg

Rummaging recently through an overstuffed file drawer, I found a packet of snapshots taken on a cross-country motor trip from Forest Hills, Queens, to Los Angeles, California. The year was 1946; the month was June. The travelers were my mother, the excellent and only licensed driver aboard, her mother, my kid sister, and I, holder of a learner’s permit. The plan was for me to drive a little to relieve my mother. It was legal and I really knew how.

One of the rediscovered black-and-white snapshots showed me in a printed cotton dress posing beside a shield-shaped road sign saying Route 66, which, as the popular song said, “winds from Chicago to L.A.” A mildly interesting fact is that I remember the colors of the dress. A more interesting and actually astonishing fact is that Route 66, a major highway between the middle west and far west of our country—in other words, an interstate— was two lanes wide, one in each direction! Some of the cities and towns we went through were St. Louis, Joplin, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Gallup, Flagstaff, and San Bernardino—place names I recall easily through the words of the song.

We were traveling to see the country and to visit my mother’s kid sister, Sylvia, who with her husband, Irving, and her in-laws, was operating a chicken farm in the San Fernando Valley. The four adults, native New Yorkers, had moved there during the Depression and were assisted in becoming farmers by California’s department of agriculture. My cousin Joan, thirteen at the time of our visit, was a toddler when they moved. Tall and lanky Uncle Irving was my only low-key uncle and my favorite out of four. He took us to the track at Santa Anita during our visit and taught me how to read the Daily Racing Form. I was prouder of that than of reading poetry in French. None of us bet more than four dollars for the day; breaking even was considered a win, although Uncle Irving, as usual, came out ahead. I haven’t been to a track since, but I keep up with racehorse movies and they always remind me of him.

When my aunt, a trained light-opera singer, wasn’t cleaning, sizing, and packing eggs, she took us sightseeing. One destination was Knott’s Berry Farm, a farmers’ market and souvenir shop; another was a museum of ancient natural prehistory, La Brea Tar Pits. We also attended a fashion show luncheon at Bullock’s Wilshire department store, which I remember vividly because a fat, inch-long leaf-green caterpillar was creeping through my salad. I considered myself a hero when I did not mention this to my companions. Or scream.

My mother had planned the trip with the help of the travel department at the American Automobile Association, the Triple A. She had pages of maps with the route marked in pale purple ink plus confirmed room reservations for every night. The cross-country drive, which my husband and son made in five days a few years ago, took us twice as long because my mother limited us to 250-300 miles a day. She gave driving her full attention, only asking me to spell her now and then, and she wanted to be in the shower by four every afternoon. She felt this was all Grandma could take, but Grandma proved to be a good road traveler.

My sister and I complained more than our grandmother did and what we complained about was the heat. I don’t know who chose the southern route for driving in June when there was a northern route in existence. Cars were not air-conditioned then, nor were most accommodations. I picked up athlete’s foot along the way and cured it in one day by sticking the afflicted bare foot out the car window in the hot sun. Toward the end of our trip we began to notice that numerous other cars had damp-looking canvas bags hanging on their front bumpers. At the next gas station we asked the attendant what they were. He said they carried a gallon of water in case the radiator boiled over. “Oh, we should have one,” Mother told him, “for when we get to the desert.” He peered into the car to see who else was there. Nobody smart, obviously. “Ladies,” he said, “where did you come from?” Mother told him. “Ladies,” he said, “You have been in the desert for two days.”

We bought a water bag, although we never had to use it. You can’t blame us Easterners for not recognizing a desert terrain: we all thought the desert would look like an endless sandy beach and there were lots of plants growing here.

Our accommodations matched our car–this was the first post-war year after all, the first year civilians were permitted to buy unrationed gas and resume such travel. You might even say we were traveling to celebrate peace. Our car was a pre-war second-hand black Plymouth with a temperamental fuel pump. Every hotel and motel along the way was pre-war and patched up, which didn’t bother us. I don’t remember most of them, other than one in the Southwest consisting of individual teepee-shaped, teepee-decorated units sleeping two. My sister and I addressed each other in Lone Ranger-Indian style during our overnight stay: “How, sister. Got-um toothpaste?”

It was out in this barren country–maybe the next day–that the stuttering fuel pump finally gave out at the top of a steep rise. We had no choice but to let gravity take us downhill where there stood a gas station in the middle of nowhere. The well-spoken Indian mechanic on duty happened to have a new fuel pump that would work in the Plymouth and he fixed us up with minimal delay. Thinking about this trip now and the problems and even dangers we might have faced, I feel a guardian angel was watching over this carload of innocents. I sometimes wonder how my father let us go. Another innocent, I guess.

Along the way we made a few major tourist detours to see Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas. I recognize in pictures of today’s Las Vegas the place I saw in 1946 when it was far, far smaller but just as glitzy. What really showed us our country’s vast complexity was the day-to-day panorama we drove through, revealing remarkable geographical and cultural differences.

When we got to L.A., Grandma was a guest on the farm while Mother, my sister, and I stayed at the Hotel Miramar overlooking the Pacific in Santa Monica. It is a luxurious place now, compete with bungalows; during our stay it was modest and pleasant. I learned an important lesson about California one day sunbathing at the nearby beach. The locals bragged so much about their state that I didn’t believe them when they said the sun was stronger there than in New York. I was wearing a two-piece swimsuit and my midriff got so burned that it looked like raw meat. I had to lie in bed on my back for two days, thinking the locals were right about one thing anyway.

We were all glad to be seeing the West Coast, but none of us wanted to move there. Just the slow-motion tempo of simple transactions like buying shampoo drove me crazy. The original idea had been to drive back but we all agreed that crossing the country once was glorious and crossing the country once was enough. At the end of her stay, Mother put the car on a ship that took it back east through the Panama Canal and my sister and I left two weeks early on the train. A letter from my boyfriend about going to Jones Beach with a former Chief Petty Officer (a girl) and about how she awarded him her Good Conduct ribbon had the desired effect on my peace of mind. Back I went.

From L.A. to Chicago we were on El Capitan, famous for its beautiful “Big Dome” lounge car from which you could watch the scenery going by. Here in a few sessions a college boy taught us how to play poker. We loved going to the dining car with its little lamps on each table and far better food than we’d found on the road. Late one night we stopped for a long time in a station—Omaha I think—and I looked through the window in my berth at a mysterious scene devoid of any people or color until we pulled out.

I believe every American should drive across the country once and not just on major highways. I am grateful we traveled on the song-worthy Route 66. And I was thrilled to discover only recently that John Steinbeck, who knew it as the Dust Bowl farmers’ escape route to California, called this highway the Mother Road.

Elaine Greene Weisburg spent about twenty years each at House & Garden (Conde Nast) and House Beautiful (Hearst) as design reporter and features editor, eventually editing a memoir column and two memoir anthologies.

by Walter Weglein

Arthur J. Kolatch died in 2011. His obituary was in the papers. AP from the West Coast. I’d forgotten all about him, I was surprised that he’d become such a big deal. But then my daughter, the wife of a strict Orthodox Jew, knew he’d written many learned books about Judaism. She’d read some of them.

From the obit I learned that he was 11 years older than I was. When I was 12 years old I’d thought of him as much older. As the newly appointed assistant rabbi of Anshe Emeth Temple and Hebrew School principal in Youngtown, Ohio, one of his tasks was to prepare sons of congregation members for their Bar Mitzvahs. That’s how I first met him and how he helped me turn my unhappy young life around.

I was born in 1930 in Nuremberg, Germany, the son of moderately prosperous parents. Even in 1930, before Hitler became Reich chancellor, my parents sensed the tensions of being Jews in the waning years of the Weimar Republic and its extreme anti-Semitism, and so, like many of them, they decided to have only one child.

I loved my young life in Nuremberg. I lived across the street from the moat and hilltop castle that divided the modern city with its art deco houses from the walled old city. Cobblestoned streets wound among ancient leaning stone houses in the town center. As a 5-year-old I was never aware of danger as I walked among the marching Nazi soldiers to the center of town, where my mother’s parents and brother owned the city’s largest luggage store. The store was on the ground floor of the main shopping street. My grandparents lived on the floor above, while the top floor housed the workshop where the large steamer trunks were manufactured.

I went to a Jewish school outside the city walls, which was still isolated from the turmoil in the city, a city that would ultimately become famous for the dreaded Nuremberg Laws. Most of my family—uncles, aunts, cousins—lived in nearby Fuerth. We visited them almost every weekend, where, as the ‘baby’ in the family, on Chanukah I always got a new piece for my electric train from an uncle who was ‘king’ of the world-renowned Nuremberg toy business.

I only became tense and unhappy when my parents and I emigrated late in 1939, among the last of Nuremberg’s Jews to flee Hitler. Most of my relatives would later die in concentration camps.

A few months after our arrival in New York with its large Washington Heights concentration of “refs,’’ as the German Jews were called, my unhappiness grew. The Hebrew Immigration and Sheltering Service (HIAS) relocated us to Ohio where HIAS believed my unemployed father would be able to find work.

My mother, who had never worked, put to good use her girlhood training as a baby nurse, tending to the needs of large Jewish American families. It took awhile, but my father finally found a job in a factory that prepared heavy leather hides, very different from the office work he was used to as the comptroller for his uncles’ large chain of shoe stores throughout Germany. The heavy labor contributed to the heart attack he would suffer when I was in high school.

My own life in Youngstown was painful too. Though we lived among the few Jewish families who had fled the Nazis and had settled on Youngstown’s pleasant Northside, I went to a grade school where no Jewish students attended and plenty of young hecklers called me a “Nazi” because of my German accent, which I tried rapidly to lose, although apparently not fast enough. The girls by and large ignored me, except one who followed me around. She had a clubfoot.

I took refuge after school in the Youngstown Public Library, where I lost myself among English and American books, all new to me. I also loved Hebrew School at Temple Anshe Emeth. Shortly after Mr. Kolatch arrived, he started giving me Bar Mitzvah instruction. Sensing my unhappiness, he appointed me ‘director’ of the temple’s small library. He turned my Bar Mitzvah preparation into fun. He told me what books to read for pleasure and urged me to develop my writing skills. I guess today you’d call him my mentor. He was still a bachelor and must have roomed with one of the congregation members. Later he would have a large family with many children on the West Coast.

One of the loves we shared was New York City. After my Bar Mitzvah, I spent part of each of my summer vacations there with my uncle, aunt and two cousins who had arrived from Germany a year ahead of us. I constantly roamed the city streets with the $2 a week unlimited ride subway pass. Kolatch would tell me where to go and what to see. It was obvious from the way he spoke that his love for New York—his home town—was as great as mine. Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, to Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Washington Square, the Battery and the farmlands in outer Brooklyn and the beaches of Coney Island and Rockaway—I loved it all. Each summer I yearned for those two weeks, which began with the fifteen hour Greyhound bus ride to the city. A round trip cost $15 in 1943.

Ultimately it was Kolatch who made me a man, not in the Bar Mitzvah sense but by helping me find my self-confidence. By the time I entered junior high school I had started to make friends. Some of those friendships have lasted a lifetime.

I’d forgotten all about my childhood mentor until I saw that Times article in 2011. It reminded me that my long life has been filled with people who’ve helped me smooth out some pretty rough patches. I’m grateful for all of them and for the self-confidence they instilled in me, and for my long-forgotten mentor, Arthur J. Kolatch.

Walter Weglein is a former editor of the Voices print edition, along with Judith Fried.  His writing has been in journalism, public affairs,government affairs and speech writing …never a published author, his most appreciative audience has been his wife, Phyllis, his son, David, and his daughter, Jessica, a superb writer…

by Charles Troob

My father’s friend Ben–a writer of documentaries and one hilariously bad play–was a schnorrer, a Yiddish word that means “freeloader,” or sponger. Like much of Yiddish, it comes with a smile. We admire the chutzpah of the schnorrer at the same time that we deplore it.

Ben once visited my family on a fine September day. After lunch–Ben always came before lunch and stayed for dinner–he and I went out to the back terrace. I’d just returned from a year in swinging London, and I had on a broad-brimmed cap from Carnaby Street, royal blue with large black polka dots.

Natty Ben admired the cap. Then he asked me to get him one like it. I was startled but amused. “Gee, Ben,” I said, “I’m not going there any time soon. I’ll give you the name of the shop. You can order it.”

A half hour later he solemnly took me aside. “Charles, don’t take this personally, but I have an interesting story I think you should hear. I once told a friend how much I liked his shirt, and you know what he did? He took it right off and gave it to me.”

“Ben,” I said, “that is very interesting. I’m really glad you told me.” And I was. I repeated the story for years, long after I tossed away that hideous cap.

When Dad died, Ben—now well over 90–phoned from Connecticut, where he lived with his third and wealthiest wife. After heartfelt condolences, he said that Dad had promised him his tuxedo, and would I send it on? It gave me much pleasure to pack up the tux and ship it. Ben called to thank me, and then asked about the formal shirt that went with it.

A shirt? A perfect ending for this story! But we had already taken Dad’s shirts to Housing Works.

Charles Troob wrote this for the study group on The Art of Writing. Each week the IRP prods me into flexing my writerly muscles. It’s hard work–but if we do it well, it looks easy.