My Immigrant Parents #2

Martin arrived in this country when he was 11 years old. I have a copy of his steerage papers from Ellis Island. My older sister tells me he had his bar mitzvah in New York City around 1915. He attended Stuyvesant High School, but when his father died in the second half of his senior year, he left school to help support the family.

He worked six days a week making orthopedic shoe supports in his shop near Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. Almost every weekend of the year he went to Orchard Beach in the northeast section of the Bronx, low-budget entertainment for families who swam in Long Island Sound and walked along the boardwalk.  On weekends we patrolled the beach for empty beer bottles, getting ten cents on each return, the smell of super-heated beer like ammonia.

My father traveled to Orchard Beach by taking the IRT subway to the last stop at Pelham Bay Parkway and then waited for a bus that ran every half hour. I’d heard stories of how he and my mother walked to Orchard Beach (and everywhere else) during the Depression to save money. Sometimes on Sunday morning I would take the subway with him to the beach. He didn’t talk much. Instead he showed me patches of wild violets and told me how they grew larger in Hungary.

I had heard stories about how he and the other “Mordecai” (wolf) brothers protected younger boys in Hungary from getting beat up because they were Jewish.  Once in this country, he tossed aside the yarmulke and became active in Hungarian-American social clubs, which during the thirties were hotbeds of radicalism. He was an outstanding amateur gymnast who also served as the “bottom man” for his family and friends. He understood balance, talked to me about the “Golden Mean,” the midway point between two extremes. He strived for that in his relationships.

What impressed me the most about my father was that he knew how to listen. I could talk to him about anything and did so after he returned from work, scanned the news headlines, and refreshed himself with a shower. I can remember him telling one of his friends who had asked how he felt about having three girls, “Girls require more of you emotionally.” Of course my sisters and I had heard the story of how after each one of my mother’s births, he waited to hear the sex of his new child only to be confounded by the arrival of yet another girl child who was not going to play soccer with him. But he had come to embrace and love his role. He taught all of us how to do shoulder stands at Orchard Beach.

My mother told the story of how they met.  “Girls followed him constantly. But not me. Men can’t stand it if you don’t pay them any attention! So what do you think? He asked his friends who I was. Then he asked me out.”  Their first date was spent looking at each other over a Formica table drinking coffee and eating kiflis, a Hungarian horn-shaped pastry. They were in neutral territory, a small restaurant housed in the Hungarian-American Social Club where they were both members and had met.  There were people around playing cards and chess. After they polished off the kiflis, they had a second and then a third cup of coffee. They continued to meet, going roller-skating at a Bronx rink or taking walks in my mother’s Brooklyn neighborhood. My father thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever met and told her so throughout the thirty years of their marriage. “She was the one for me,” he said, and the feeling was mutual.

…to be continued