From Beyond the Pale to Park Avenue Continued...

Of the four sisters, my mother was the most beautiful. Freda, on her right, the next. Belle, on the left, was hit by a bicycle when she was about 7 years old, and the family did not have enough money for any sort of treatment. Belle was left with a permanent limp.She was married twice, the first time when she was very young, and her husband's parents were not happy that their son married a cripple, as one could say in those days. They had the marriage annulled. The second marriage was many years later, to Henpecked Harry as we called him. He divorced Belle and married a good friend of hers with an identical limp. Belle and Lottie always lived in Brooklyn, though not in the tenement. My grandmother lived with Belle and never really spoke very good english. She referred to the Poles and Germans as "Chazzers", and she walked around their apartment with a rag under her foot  constantly polishing the floors. We used to visit them in Brooklyn, but more about that later.

From Beyond the Pale to Park Avenue

Here is my mother's family. From left to right, Milton, Lottie, Freda,(the youngest) my mother Molly and Belle. They lived in Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn. You can  see a facsimile of their apartment  at the tenement museum in Chinatown New York. Both Parents worked, he as a  shoemaker and she as a seamstress. From  work she brought material home and made the family's clothes.
They had no bathroom in the building and went down the street to the public baths. 5 cents for a shower if you brought your own soap. 10 cents if you had to buy some.  My grandfather died at 47 of  a heart attack, and the children left school to find jobs. My mother's first job  was in a drugstore  demonstrating a toothpaste called "opalescent pearlescent". She sat in the window brushing her teeth, but was fired because all her friends came by and spit on the window. Eventually she got a job as a model on 7th Avenue which is where she met my father.

They changed Their names but not Their noses

America, the mother of reinvention. How did they do it? In one generation they went from the slums of Brooklyn and Hell's Kitchen to Park Avenue. They stopped being Kosher, they went from a shared bathroom down the hall with 5 other families to 5 bathrooms in their apartment. It's true the wall paper in the foyer was flocked, and one sofa in the living room was covered in plastic, but otherwise they had pretty much integrated themselves into what was then called "cafe society." The books from "Limited Editions"  and the records from "Record of the Month" lined the library, unread and unlistened to (except by me), artifacts of culture were part of the decor.

My mother's parents, the Rogatskys from Russia/Poland

My father's parents, the Bernfelds from Austria

My mother Molly     My father Charlie

Marriage Certificate

Name Change

After Name Change

halloween

 what were they thinking when they put these up at the edenton senior center?

it's a miracle.