Molly and Me: The Memoirs of Gertrude Berg

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Text originally published in 1961 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

Molly and Me

By

Gertrude Berg

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

A FOREWORD TO THE WISE 5

PART ONE — THE CITY 6

1 Ah, Columbus! 6

2 The Retired Gentleman 14

3 Forget the Logic 20

4 The Transatlantic Tailor 24

5 Friday Nights 27

6 Claire, My Anti-School Friend 31

7 The Dumbwaiter and the Laundress 34

8 A Tailor He’ll Never Be 40

9 Of Men and Restaurants 44

PART TWO — THE COUNTRY 49

1 Our Own Hotel 49

2 Fleischmanns 52

3 Credit 55

4 Country Confessions 57

5 The Bellboy 60

6 One Headwaiter + One Cook = Trouble 63

7 Conrad 66

8 Music Hath Charms—But Food Is Better 69

9 Guests Are Named, Not Born 72

10 The Triple Standard 76

11 The Philosopher’s Store 79

12 Where Is It Written? 85

13 Portrait of the Actress as a Young Palm Reader 89

14 The Gentleman Caller 95

PART THREE — THE STUDIO 101

1 Down on the Levee 101

2 The Goldbergs Are Born 107

3 Radio Family 120

PART FOUR — TILLIE BRANCHES OUT 134

1 Broadway 134

2 Life Among the Electrons 141

3 Bedford 151

4 A Majority of One 160

5 Through a Glass, Brightly 167

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 169

DEDICATION

To Lewis

A FOREWORD TO THE WISE

I have lived and am still living a very happy life. Such a remark, I know, is a hopelessly unfashionable beginning for a modern autobiography, and I apologize.

But in my life there are all kinds of things that haven’t happened to me. I have absolutely no scarlet admissions to make about a weekend on a movie star’s yacht in the Bay of Naples. I can’t write about how I divorced three husbands, became a drug addict, and finally, after years of searching, found the real meaning of Life in a spoonful of mescalin. And, if all those things and more had happened to me, I’m not so sure I’d want to write about them. Even when I go to a doctor, I don’t tell him everything, because it seems to me that there are some things—my weight and age, if you want a for-instance—that should remain personal.

The reason I’m not the confessing type is probably my parents’ fault. My mother and father brought me up to feel that there were some things you talked about and some you didn’t. And, as a child, whenever I had a story to tell about a friend my father would always say, Don’t be a monitor! This advice left an impression, but not a scar.

Sometimes I get the feeling that Dr. Freud invented mothers and fathers for their children to hate. If I had ever met the gentleman, I’m afraid psychoanalysis would have been set back fifty years. I adored my parents. On the other hand, I don’t feel I have to make a production of it.

Certainly I have faults, but why should I torture myself? I know that I’m addicted to soda water, that I try every new diet I hear about, that department stores are my downfall, and that I’m very weak when it comes to noodle soup (with lots of noodles). I also like to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations and I have a total recall for everybody else’s mistakes. Aside from that I’m normal—normal enough not to want to write a confession. Anyway, it would be on the dull side; you’re not missing a thing.

The best I can do is start at the beginning and hope. But starting at the beginning isn’t always that easy. People don’t just appear, they come from someplace. Everybody has ancestors and everybody is descended. I must have come from a long line but the furthest back I can remember is my father’s father, Mordecai Edelstein. So I start with Grandpa for two reasons: because he would have liked it and because he was the first one of us all to come to America. He started us here in the New World. It was his discovery and he was our link to the past on the other side. And he was the one who could always say Before your time this was when he told stories. So, for me, in the beginning there was Grandpa....

PART ONE — THE CITY

1 Ah, Columbus!

Grandpa Mordecai was a man I could talk to—if he felt like talking. If he didn’t, I could sit with him in a room for hours, and he wouldn’t say a word. But when he did talk he had something to say. He came from Lublin, Poland, and I liked to talk to him about the Old Country, and if it was a good day he would answer my questions. The Old Country fascinated me, and I wanted to know all about it. But Grandpa didn’t like to talk about the old days. When I asked him why, he would just say, Because! And the Because was that he wanted to talk about New York.

To Grandpa New York was more than a city. It wasn’t that the United States ended where Yonkers began. He knew the names of all the states, their capitals, their chief products. To him the compass was divided into three points—uptown, downtown, and crosstown. Uptown took you to Chicagy, downtown went to Angelnd in Eurp, and if you wanted to go to Californy, you had to go crosstown.

Grandpa acted about the city as if he was one of the original settlers, an Indian. And as far as the family was concerned, he was the pioneer, the man who went west and found the New World. He wouldn’t accept the honor. It belonged to Christopher Columbus—the greatest man who ever lived. He felt so close to Columbus that sometimes he called him by his first name. Every once in a while when he was thinking quietly about America and New York City he would sigh and say, Columbus! Ah, Columbus!

Let anyone say a word against America and Grandpa would get insulted. He took it as a personal reflection on his hero and he would say A klug zu Columbus! which can be translated roughly as What a curse on Columbus—that such a pimple should insult such a man! The Yiddish is shorter and the words have to be said to the accompaniment of a glare in the eye, a look to heaven for justice, then a long, sad shake of the head.

Grandpa’s memories always started with Castle Garden at the foot of the Battery, where he met and fell in love with the New World at first sight. This great hall packed with arriving immigrants was to him the seven wonders of the world under one roof. When I asked him what it actually looked like, he could only say, with a faraway look in his eyes, Big! big!; and when I asked him what happened there, he would say, Questions.; and when I asked him what kind of questions, he would shrug, smooth out his mustache, and rattle off what he could remember: Who am I? I’m Mordecai Edelstein. Where was I born? In Lublin. What kind of work do I do? Tinsmith. Then he was quiet, turned his hands palm up, looked at his long, strong, calloused fingers, repeat Tinsmith! and start talking again: Such a lot of people came off the boat; laughing ones, crying ones, hugging ones. I was alone, and I could watch them. I told myself, ‘It won’t be long; I’ll have my own family coming off the boat; we’ll be crying, laughing, hugging. Why not?’ I told myself. ‘Look where I am. Me! Mordecai Edelstein from Lublin. I am in America! And not only in America, I am off that boat!’

A boat! Grandpa added, shaking his head at me. He seemed to look somewhere beyond me, not even seeing me. "They gave it a name, Atlantic. A boat! a captain! Only my enemies should go on such a boat. But, listen, for fifteen dollars who expected a palace? But, also, who expected a barn? In every room—room? A closet. They put twelve men, one on top of another, like wood. A window? A little hole. If you opened it, God forbid, the ocean came in for company. Food? If you were hungry and you were strong, they put a pot upstairs on deck two times a day. For what they cooked two times was plenty. But why complain? I wouldn’t be on it forever. Two weeks. How many people in steerage? Every place there was a person. It looked like the boat was made of people, and if somebody wanted to take a deep breath, everybody else had to stop and take turns, so crowded it was.

And it wasn’t only people; they took their beds with them. Everybody brought a feather bed. In America you want a bed, you buy a bed. In Lublin you wanted a bed, you made it or you waited for somebody to die. You weren’t a person until you had a feather bed—that’s why everybody took theirs along when they left. Who knew you could buy a bed in New York? So the boat was crowded with people, imagine what it was with mattresses. A mattress came from a father, and where did he get it, from his father, and where did he get it, from his father. Where else? A store? Ay, in America, but how could you know?

I asked Grandpa how he felt when he saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time from the boat. You don’t read books in school? When I came there wasn’t a statue, he said impressively. Did Columbus see a statue? he went on. "Did I see a statue? Did I need a statue? I wasn’t in Poland, I wasn’t in Russia, the Tsar wasn’t chasing me around any longer, I didn’t live in a ghetto—that was my Statue of Liberty. When the people got off the boat, you know they kissed the ground. You, an American girl, don’t know, and I don’t want you should ever have to know, God forbid! Ah, Columbus! A smart man you were!"

Grandpa Mordecai was very concerned with progress. When his friends talked about the Good Old Days, Grandpa didn’t want to hear. He had no use for the Good Old Days—it was tomorrow that interested him. Sometimes taking a walk with him and listening to his remarks was like a tour of Old New York the way it used to be. As we went along Houston Street, he pointed out a fire hydrant and told me he remembered when they first put it in, how water was sold from wagons or drawn from wells. Walking up Third Avenue, he would talk about the El and how they used to have steam engines pulling the cars. He would point out food markets and tell me all about the prices they used to charge when he first came over—beef was ten cents a pound, twenty cents for the better cuts. There were free lunch counters for those who had the price of a glass of beer—five cents. A man could make ten dollars a week if he worked hard. There were traffic jams with horses and wagons and it was just as hard to cross Broadway then as it is today. But Grandpa did not resent time passing. There had to be changes, according to him, and he looked at change like a philosopher. It’s like it always was, he would say, only today people are wearing different hats, that’s all, that’s the whole thing. He took things as they came. If he liked what was happening, he called it progress. If he didn’t he would call on Columbus to see what a mess was being made out of his discovery.

What bothered Grandpa most was that people didn’t seem to be as friendly as they used to be. He was always talking about how it used to be on the Lower East Side, and to hear him you’d think there was a party going on every night of the week. As he got older and a little crankier, the number of parties seemed to increase but it was always the same story and the same party and it was always summertime on the roof. Everybody in the building he lived in would congregate on the roof where it was also hot but where there was, at least, a breeze. Some of the neighbors would bring up accordions, maybe a harmonica or two; there was a man who played the violin, and on a hot summer’s night everyone would sit around enjoying what little breeze there was and singing songs from The Old Countries. The German of Muss I’Denn mixed with the Russian Fireflies, the French J’ai du bon Tabac, and the Yiddish Auf dem Pripichek—and if the songs didn’t always mingle in the New York air above the roof, the singers mingled below. Grandpa would tell about the youngsters who sat behind the chimneys and held hands and he could even name some that got married later on. Since his apartment was on the top floor he supplied the water for drinking and a little fruit for a pitnik.

It was always the same party in these stories about a happier New York, but he would argue all night just to prove it was not. He’d even change the address of the building but it was the exact same party every time. It was fun for me to argue with him because that was one of the ways to get him to tell me stories.

It’s your America, Grandpa would say to me. What he meant was, I was lucky and didn’t know it, and he’d prove it to me with another story.

Grandpa had the right kind of voice for telling stories. It was deep, it was soft, and in a room full of people, all talking, it played bass. Grandpa was the kind of man to go with his voice. He had a big head with hair that curled down over the back like pictures of Buffalo Bill. He had blue eyes that would turn black when he got mad. And when I looked at him from the side he had the look of an American eagle just about to tell a joke. Grandpa was a tall man. So tall that when I was a very little girl I thought he was a giant come for a visit. I called him Mr. Grandpa or Uncle Grandpa until one day it dawned on me that Grandpa wasn’t a name. And when I found out that Grandpa was my father’s father he stopped being a piece of furniture with knees for me to sit on and became a great big toy that told stories.

Grandma Rudisel, Grandpa’s wife, died young and I never knew her. My image of her comes from a single story I heard more than once when I was a child. With five boys, two girls, and a husband like Grandpa in a small apartment, Grandma Rudisel didn’t have to worry about what to do with her leisure time. More than once Grandpa came back to the apartment with what he considered his special treat for his wife—a fancy dress covered with spangles. But Rudisel had nowhere to wear it—except between the stove and the dishpan and the washtub. Yet she would receive the dress with tears of appreciation in her eyes and wear it around the apartment when she could. His children used to laugh in later years when the story was told. Grandpa would nod at whoever recounted the story, look at the laughers, and say, You have a lot to learn—a whole lot—believe me!

Grandpa spoke with an accent. In my parents’ home that wasn’t unusual. Almost every grownup I knew spoke not the King’s English but the Tsar’s or the Kaiser’s. Grandpa could speak Russian, Polish, and German. But he insisted on speaking English all the time because he was an American and Americans spoke only English. Grandpa also spoke Yiddish but only when he had something to say that a child shouldn’t hear. Russian or Polish, the languages he was born into, were used only when he couldn’t help himself: when he had to add or measure or find out how many square feet of tin he’d need to make a new roof. He excused this lapse by saying that English had hard numbers.

Grandpa was too stubborn to be beaten by English numbers. He memorized what he needed. Sometimes, I remember, I would hear him mumbling over a boiling pot of solder. It sounded like he was saying an incantation: Twelve inches makes a foots. Three foots is a yard. So if there’s thirty-six inches into one yard, what good’ll it do me? And then what good’ll it do me would start him off: He’d say it faster and faster until it made no sense at all and became a song. The song would have a slightly Russian lilt and before he even knew it, he’d be reciting a table of lengths in his native language—and then he’d be happy until he remembered he was now an American and he’d have to think in twelve inches makes a foots.

How Grandpa ever got to America he never said. All I knew was that as a young man he got into trouble in Lublin, then a part of Russian Poland. He was already working as a tinsmith, and he was tall, powerfully built, and beneath his good nature and kindness there was a terrible temper. The Jews in Poland were taxed way beyond their means. Things were always bad and only got worse—never better. One day young Mordecai, Mordche for short and Max in English, heard the Tsar’s tax collector read a proclamation that taxes were being raised again and if they weren’t paid, everybody’s household goods would be confiscated. The people were scared but Grandpa was furious. He ran out of the crowd and hit the tax collector. There was a saying in the Lublin ghetto: Where Mordche hits, the grass never grows again.

The people hid Mordche from the police, and next day there was no trace of him. For six months his family thought he was dead. The next thing his family heard from him was through a letter he wrote a friend saying he was in America. He had been afraid to write his family because the police opened letters, and he wanted to protect them. He asked his friend to tell them he was going to send for them as soon as he could.

All I know of his route to freedom was that he walked to Hamburg, worked there long enough to earn his fare, and took a boat to America. Whenever he spoke about it, it sounded like an overnight trip to Chicago on the Twentieth Century.

A tinsmith in New York was a master mechanic, and Grandpa quickly got a job at nine dollars a week making tin cans for tea, coffee, and cookies. He found a flat at 166 Norfolk Street on the Lower East Side. It didn’t have heat, and it didn’t have running water. There was a pump in the hall and the toilet was in the backyard. But soon Mordecai had built himself a galvanized tin bathtub and little by little bought furniture for the day when he could send for his family.

By 1891 Mordecai had enough money saved to buy seven steerage tickets at fifteen dollars a head, and sent them to Lublin and waited. At three o’clock one morning the boat with Mordecai’s family arrived at Castle Garden. Grandpa’s family, frightened, alone, confused, waited for their names to be called. When Edelstein was called, they looked around for Mordche. When he came over to the little knot of relatives, they didn’t recognize him. They saw a well-dressed man with a hat, no beard, but a mustache. The only way they recognized him was by his voice, the only thing about him that hadn’t been Americanized. He had brought along a banana for each of the children. They had never seen one before, and he had to show them how to peel and eat it. As his own English was largely confined to the word Pickles, a word he knew from making pickle barrels, Mordecai brought a few landsmen along to help him to get his family through immigration. My father always said that every time he ate a banana he remembered Castle Garden—he was four years old at the time.

At 166 Norfolk Street, on the top floor, a party was waiting for Grandpa’s family. For once there was enough of everything—meat, bread, drink. If you wanted you could have as much every day—this was the way Americans lived!

One of Mordche’s friends who could speak English almost like a native welcomed the family with a speech. This is a New World, he said. You’ll all be citizens, Americans! But first you have to have American names. He lined the children up and gave each one a hundred per cent American name. Sura became Sarah, Yussel turned into Joe, Gitell became Mary, Selig was Jake, Yankov was called Johnny, and Lieble got to be Louie. All this was done by pointing a finger and announcing the new name, while Grandpa looked on watching a dream come true. This was what he had brought them over for—to become Americans.

The family liked Norfolk Street. It was like a little town, everybody knew everybody, one man’s family was everyone’s business, and whenever Mordecai talked about moving away from Norfolk Street, the children would set up a howl. Grandpa compromised—in five years they moved four times, from 166 to 184, from 184 to 175 and then to 171, all Norfolk Street. Each move was to another apartment on the top floor. Mordecai said the air was better up there. Besides, in summer all the neighbors would come up to the roof to sleep, and that meant a party every night. He loved company.

Mordecai had lots of friends, some he had made in America and some from Lublin. A friend from Lublin who was very important to him was a man who had renamed himself Mr. Petersburg. He worked for the Erie Railroad in New Jersey. He convinced Grandpa that working for a railroad was a good thing, and he said he could arrange for a job if Grandpa wanted it. But he would have to call himself Petersburg and make believe he was a brother. Grandpa agreed, and he got a job as a metalsmith in the North Patterson shops of the Erie.

The job was good—both for Mordecai and the railroad. He could fix anything made of metal, and soon he was a trouble shooter for the Erie. He was sent up and down the line fixing passenger cars. He became indispensable, so much so that during the summer when everyone in the shop was laid off, he was kept on. They didn’t want to lose him.

Mordecai prospered, and in spite of his family’s objections he moved them to Jersey City. He was a railroad man now, and it was the kind of life that suited him. He liked the people he worked with and he liked the work. He was an American among Americans, and he took on their habits, with little added touches of his own. When he saw that the men brought their lunch to the shop, he did the same. But he brought his raw and cooked it in a solder pot over a blowtorch. He liked a hot meal. His favorite lunch was mushrooms and barley, and as soon as he came to work he would put it on to simmer. Nobody minded. To be different then wasn’t such a sin.

One day the head of the division dropped in for an inspection. He got a whiff of the cooking food. The foremen tried not to notice the smell and to steer the man away from Grandpa. But the inspector followed his nose and ended up at Mordecai’s bench. When he wanted to know what was going on, Mordecai took the lid off the pot and showed him. He invited the head of the division to have lunch with him, and he did. Grandpa told me he was a very nice man, but he ate like a bird.

A few months later, during the summer layoff period, the Erie hired an efficiency expert. The expert took a look at the payrolls and when he came to Mordecai’s name—he was still Mr. Petersburg—he wanted to know why that man was being kept on when everyone else was being laid off. The explanation that he was a valuable man wasn’t enough, so Mordecai was laid off.

Grandpa never said whether or not he was annoyed. He just opened his own shop. To hear him tell it, it was as simple as that. But one thing he took pride in telling was that when the shops reopened, the foreman came to him and asked him to come back to work. Grandpa’s version of his answer was told with a theatrical flourish. Sir, he said, I am not for hire. And if you should wish to inquire, I happen to be a businessman.

Grandpa’s shop was in the front room of his house in Jersey City. He liked it that way. He wanted to be near his family because, after all, what’s a family for if not to be near? And if any of them didn’t like the noises he made banging on