April 8, 2006--Saturday Story: "The Bloombergers"
The Bloombergers
There were the Mooneys, an immigrant family who left Poland in the second decade of the Twentieth Century to escape the relentless pogroms and to seek the opportunities that America represented. Then there were the Zwerlings, a proud, self-made Austrian-American family who emigrated to America during the 1880s, also to seek a better life, but trailing no residual feelings of persecution and thus in all ways feeling superior to and resentful of those later comers whose shtetl-minded Jewishness elicited a taint of nativist American anti-Semitism that covered all from that faith, even though, as with the Zwerlings, they had rejected it, along with their Austro-German language, as soon as they stepped off Ellis Island, racing to neighborhoods of their own, as far away as possible from the Lower Eastside where the shtetl had been reproduced.
Being the product of both of these families, an incongruous mix (my father the Zwerling; my mother the Mooney), when I finally began to strike a responsive note with a girl, I was usually as interested in the parents as in the daughter, particularly if they were alluringly different than either of my own. I was so good at finding these surrogate families that I often was embraced considerably more warmly by them than by the daughters, where anything resembling physical embracing was not in the picture.
What I looked for in girls, beyond the fantasies that attracted me to those who were totally unattainable, even the possibility of a date to see a movie at the Rugby Theater, these truly desirable girls would not want to be on the same side of the street with me much less walking together along Church Avenue to the Rugby, what I looked for in a girl was almost anyone willing to go out with me. Especially if they came from a family which allowed me to imagine, by association, that I was also entering into a world different from the ones I had grown up in—between the poles of the Mooneys and Zwerlings.
Thus the Bloombergers.
I have previously mentioned daughter Dorothy, of my feeble walks home from the movies with her where all that might be considered thrilling was the opportunity to sense beneath her blooming blouse, where it tucked into her well-below-the knees skirt, further armored with crinolines, where that blouse hem suggested the adult delights that lay within.
Contrary to the ways of meeting at the time, Dorothy took the first step. We found ourselves in the country, up in a Catskill Mountain village called Tannersville, named for the leather tanneries situated there during the 19th century that passed into oblivion before the 20th began, only to be supplanted by rundown hotels that catered to Eastern European immigrants and World war Two refugees who there sought respite from the heat and humidity of New York City and the threat of polio, which was said to strike with particular virulence during the summer months. So any family that could scrape together the few dollars needed to check into hotels with hopeful names such as The Rose Garden, where there were never any flowers much less roses, more typically just an invasion of thistle and burrs, for those families there was at least a chance to feel expansive and safe. Though these displaced Jews were never fully capable of feeling safe, especially in a place so dark and full of threat since most light at night came from the stars. Our native habitat had become by then places with noise and congestion.
The Bloombergers, with Dorothy and older sister Eve, came to Tannersville regularly since they owned a home there, a rambling place with broad porches that previously had been inhabited by the only member of the town gentry, it was that small and impoverished a place, who when the Jews began to arrive packed up and left, selling at a below market price, as if there was a market for such a white elephant, heading for a santuary further north in the mountains that had the good sense still to be restricted—with lawn signs proclaiming, “No Jews. No dogs.”
Owning this house, rather than needing to pack four or five family members into two beds stuffed into an airless room at the Rose Garden set them so far apart from the rest of us that they, if they had so chosen, could have considered themselves gentiles. This of course would have required a change in surname and considerable plastic surgery, the latter at the time was still a rarity.
They were so assimilated that Dorothy played tennis. The rest of us, stoop and punch ball. So when the grocer’s wife, Mrs. Greenstein, who know about Dorothy’s tennis and that there were no other Jews who knew the game much less had a backhand, thought that since I was tall for my age, was rumored to be “a natural athlete.” and from the look of me was fully genetically Jewish, for all of these good reasons Mrs. Greenstein encouraged Dorothy to ask me if I played.
Which she did one day when we were both in the store shopping for our mothers. Dorothy had a basket full of Birdseye frozen foods, so new to the market that they sold for a premium and thereby demarked her status more than the fact that she was going to college, a private college, in September; while in mine there was a loaf of Bond white bread and a half-pound box of Philadelphia Cream Cheese. All of which Dorothy was generous enough not to notice when she came up to me in the canned vegetable aisle, “Mrs. Greenstein tells me you play tennis. I do too. At the high school. How would you like to meet me there one morning?”
I had never held a racket in my hand and had not even ever witnessed a match, but I was so smitten by her and her offer and so desperate to meet any girl, much less one as round and apparently pert as Dorothy, that I said, in the first of what would turn out to be a series of ruinous deceptions, I was that desperate, “Sure, I play, but I left my racket in the City” (deception number two, since I of course didn’t own one).
That will be no problem I was told since her sister Eve was taking summer courses at her college and I could therefore use hers. This caused an immediate surge of panic because, in my total tennis ignorance, I assumed I would be stigmatized by playing with a girl’s racket, if anyone was there to witness, just as I would be if I had shown up on a girl’s bicycle. But before I could back out of the date, Dorothy skipped off with her bag of now defrosting frozen peas, saying over her shoulder, “See you there tomorrow at 10:30.”
I was thinking, how would I learn to play tennis before tomorrow morning?
To be continued . . . .
There were the Mooneys, an immigrant family who left Poland in the second decade of the Twentieth Century to escape the relentless pogroms and to seek the opportunities that America represented. Then there were the Zwerlings, a proud, self-made Austrian-American family who emigrated to America during the 1880s, also to seek a better life, but trailing no residual feelings of persecution and thus in all ways feeling superior to and resentful of those later comers whose shtetl-minded Jewishness elicited a taint of nativist American anti-Semitism that covered all from that faith, even though, as with the Zwerlings, they had rejected it, along with their Austro-German language, as soon as they stepped off Ellis Island, racing to neighborhoods of their own, as far away as possible from the Lower Eastside where the shtetl had been reproduced.
Being the product of both of these families, an incongruous mix (my father the Zwerling; my mother the Mooney), when I finally began to strike a responsive note with a girl, I was usually as interested in the parents as in the daughter, particularly if they were alluringly different than either of my own. I was so good at finding these surrogate families that I often was embraced considerably more warmly by them than by the daughters, where anything resembling physical embracing was not in the picture.
What I looked for in girls, beyond the fantasies that attracted me to those who were totally unattainable, even the possibility of a date to see a movie at the Rugby Theater, these truly desirable girls would not want to be on the same side of the street with me much less walking together along Church Avenue to the Rugby, what I looked for in a girl was almost anyone willing to go out with me. Especially if they came from a family which allowed me to imagine, by association, that I was also entering into a world different from the ones I had grown up in—between the poles of the Mooneys and Zwerlings.
Thus the Bloombergers.
I have previously mentioned daughter Dorothy, of my feeble walks home from the movies with her where all that might be considered thrilling was the opportunity to sense beneath her blooming blouse, where it tucked into her well-below-the knees skirt, further armored with crinolines, where that blouse hem suggested the adult delights that lay within.
Contrary to the ways of meeting at the time, Dorothy took the first step. We found ourselves in the country, up in a Catskill Mountain village called Tannersville, named for the leather tanneries situated there during the 19th century that passed into oblivion before the 20th began, only to be supplanted by rundown hotels that catered to Eastern European immigrants and World war Two refugees who there sought respite from the heat and humidity of New York City and the threat of polio, which was said to strike with particular virulence during the summer months. So any family that could scrape together the few dollars needed to check into hotels with hopeful names such as The Rose Garden, where there were never any flowers much less roses, more typically just an invasion of thistle and burrs, for those families there was at least a chance to feel expansive and safe. Though these displaced Jews were never fully capable of feeling safe, especially in a place so dark and full of threat since most light at night came from the stars. Our native habitat had become by then places with noise and congestion.
The Bloombergers, with Dorothy and older sister Eve, came to Tannersville regularly since they owned a home there, a rambling place with broad porches that previously had been inhabited by the only member of the town gentry, it was that small and impoverished a place, who when the Jews began to arrive packed up and left, selling at a below market price, as if there was a market for such a white elephant, heading for a santuary further north in the mountains that had the good sense still to be restricted—with lawn signs proclaiming, “No Jews. No dogs.”
Owning this house, rather than needing to pack four or five family members into two beds stuffed into an airless room at the Rose Garden set them so far apart from the rest of us that they, if they had so chosen, could have considered themselves gentiles. This of course would have required a change in surname and considerable plastic surgery, the latter at the time was still a rarity.
They were so assimilated that Dorothy played tennis. The rest of us, stoop and punch ball. So when the grocer’s wife, Mrs. Greenstein, who know about Dorothy’s tennis and that there were no other Jews who knew the game much less had a backhand, thought that since I was tall for my age, was rumored to be “a natural athlete.” and from the look of me was fully genetically Jewish, for all of these good reasons Mrs. Greenstein encouraged Dorothy to ask me if I played.
Which she did one day when we were both in the store shopping for our mothers. Dorothy had a basket full of Birdseye frozen foods, so new to the market that they sold for a premium and thereby demarked her status more than the fact that she was going to college, a private college, in September; while in mine there was a loaf of Bond white bread and a half-pound box of Philadelphia Cream Cheese. All of which Dorothy was generous enough not to notice when she came up to me in the canned vegetable aisle, “Mrs. Greenstein tells me you play tennis. I do too. At the high school. How would you like to meet me there one morning?”
I had never held a racket in my hand and had not even ever witnessed a match, but I was so smitten by her and her offer and so desperate to meet any girl, much less one as round and apparently pert as Dorothy, that I said, in the first of what would turn out to be a series of ruinous deceptions, I was that desperate, “Sure, I play, but I left my racket in the City” (deception number two, since I of course didn’t own one).
That will be no problem I was told since her sister Eve was taking summer courses at her college and I could therefore use hers. This caused an immediate surge of panic because, in my total tennis ignorance, I assumed I would be stigmatized by playing with a girl’s racket, if anyone was there to witness, just as I would be if I had shown up on a girl’s bicycle. But before I could back out of the date, Dorothy skipped off with her bag of now defrosting frozen peas, saying over her shoulder, “See you there tomorrow at 10:30.”
I was thinking, how would I learn to play tennis before tomorrow morning?
To be continued . . . .
posted by Steven Zwerling at
12:15 PM
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