A Memoir within a Memoir: My Father’s Story
Introduction: A reconsideration after forty years.
My father, Louis Hyman Rosen, was born in 1900 in a small town, or shtetl, in Tsarist Russia, which he spelled as ‘Olinka’, but which Google Maps calls ‘Halynka’. (It is located now in Belarus.) He came to America in 1910 with his mother and 2 younger sisters to join his family (his father, older sister and brother) who had arrived earlier and were living in Michigan.
In 1945, my father moved to Dallas, Texas with his wife Mildred and 3 children, joining his parents and siblings who moved south during the depression years. He died in 1994 in Shreveport, Louisiana and is buried next to my mother in Dallas. These are the simple bare essentials of his life.
Forty years have passed since those afternoons when I interviewed my father and mother at our dining room table. Sondra and I had only just moved to our house in Teaneck, two years earlier. My parents were doing their duty, visiting the grandchildren. Daniel was three, Kenny was an infant and David had yet to be born. Mother had been brought to America as a small infant and she had no memories of the “old country”. I placed a tape recorder between us and asked my father to reminisce about his childhood: what could he recall of his life in Europe, what could he remember coming to America and what were his impressions of his ’New World’. We had a series of interviews, extending over a number of days, which focused on my father as he had a font of memories. Later, I transcribed the interview and wrote it up, not as a verbatim transcript, but rather as a narrative. In it, as best as I could, I tried to reproduce my father’s voice, to let him tell his story in his own manner. I printed up 2 or 3 dozen copies and passed them out to my parents, my brothers and my cousins. It generated some interest. I got some positive feedback from family, and that was that.
Now, with the passage of forty years, I find myself returning to my father’s story again. Why, I’m not sure. Perhaps, in some dim way, I now recognize that I have reached the age he was, when I did my interview. My father has now been gone 25 years and alas, I no longer have him around to make corrections and provide addendums to his story. My mother and both my older brothers, Jerry and Don, have also gone on (in the English translation of the Yizkor service) to their other worlds. I, alone, am the sole survivor of the family that nourished and protected me on Holland Avenue in Dallas. (And I further recognize that Holland Avenue would seem as strange and as remote to my children and grandchildren now, as Olinka was to me then.)
Whatever my reasons, having decided to revisit my father’s story, I needed to find it in order to read it again. Where had I put it? I looked through all my papers, searched every hard disk in my possession, and to my utter despair, could not find a single copy. I thought it was lost for good, and that thought was profoundly depressing. Then I remembered that someone, a while back, had put it on the internet. A Google search quickly brought it up and I was able to download a complete copy of the 1978 narrative. (My heartfelt thanks go out to Gary Katz in California, my niece Melissa’s husband, for his efforts to preserve my father’s words. It can still be found on the web at https://www.geni.com/people/Louis-Rosen/6000000001910471893.) Part of the reason I am writing this up and publishing it on Substack is because it is so easy to lose things of value over the decades.
Re-reading my earlier rendition of his story in my father’s voice has not been easy. His words, and his experiences, provoke powerful emotions. Maybe it's because the world has changed in forty years and we now see things very differently. Maybe it’s because I’ve changed during that time also. Regardless, I find his story affects me much more deeply now then when I first transcribed it.
The part of my father’s story that has the most powerful effect on me is entitled “Rabbinical Studies and Misfortune”. In it, my father describes four crucial and formative years, between ages 10 and 14, when he lived with strangers, fully apart from family. First he lived in Detroit, over a hundred miles from his family in Battle Creek, and then later on the Lower East Side, thousands of miles away. He describes this period as “tragic” and "a tough life for a ten-year-old”.
Those were terrible years. I rarely got a letter from my father. Out of sight, out of mind, more or less, with them. Now and then my father would send a few dollars, but very seldom... From age ten on, I was like an orphan. I had no home life. I had no childhood that a normal child had: no games, no play. I had too much responsibility beginning at age ten.
I had always known, even as a child myself, that those were difficult years for my father but I never really thought deeply about them. I think he always took pains to leave me with the impression that it was not unique. Many young boys coming from his background found themselves in similar situations.
Despite having set aside my father’s story 40 years ago, nonetheless, through the passing years, I found myself returning to a contemplation of this unhappy period in his life. It was clearly a childhood that Charles Dickens could have written. As time went on, I found myself, more and more, thinking about it.
I think I know why. At one point, back when I was interviewing my parents and inquiring about that period from age 10 to 14, I asked my Dad to describe what it was like, to eat at a different table, depending on the day of the week. Suddenly and unexpectedly, my mother started sobbing, and in a choking voice broke in, “Oh, if you only had any idea of his suffering… the things he told me…”
I was frozen. I didn’t know what to say. My father continued to sit quietly and expressionless. The moment passed, my mother composed herself and for a while no one said a word. Finally, I broke the silence. I continued the topic and asked if he felt he had enough to eat with that system. “Not really", he said evenly. “The children of the family naturally got the choice portions. I considered myself lucky if I did not leave hungry.”
Should I have opened up the topic of abuse? It was clearly in the air. Was it cowardly of me to avoid it? Yes, I’m sure it was. I don’t condemn myself because I have to judge myself against the standards of the times. How the concept of childhood abuse has changed in 40 years! But in the late 1970’s, when I sat at the table with my parents, we never acknowledged what has by now become the common currency of popular culture; and lawyers, specializing in the field, freely advertise their services on TV.
In any event, even now I find that I can not read that section of my father’s life without somehow channelling my mother and choking up.
But let me assure you, my reconsideration of my father’s life is not all pain and tears. For me, the idea of family has taken on new depth and meaning. Many of you reading this can trace your antecedents back to my father’s parents, Morris and Sarah (last name Rogozinsky in Europe but changed to Rosen at Ellis Island). They and their progeny have indeed proven to be fruitful. And they have multiplied to become a great extensive family, in all its complicated and convoluted branches, spreading out across this vast country and farther. (My son Kenny made Aliyah and now lives in Jerusalem. I know my father would have been proud and happy to have a grandson there.) America has been very good to the descendants of Morris and Sarah. They and their descendants, have in turn, been very good to America. From penniless, poorly educated people, they have risen in society to become prosperous and successful, and in some cases, notably so. America has benefitted from their talents and experience as professionals, educators, entrepreneurs and successful businessmen and women.
I have now come to the end of my introduction. I must acknowledge, that in the course of re-transcribing my father’s story from 1978 to today, I have made a few modifications. I have tried to tighten the story and streamline the narrative to some extent. Some people and some events, always more like footnotes in my father’s memory and not central to his story, have not been retained. Some wordings and sentence structures have been altered, but only if I felt certain that I was making my father’s meaning more clear while at the same time maintaining his tone, his outlook. I added a few comments that I felt might assist understanding. Otherwise, nothing of substance has been added, deleted or changed.
So, at this point, I am going to let my father tell his story himself. Since both my father and I are writing this memoir in the first person voice, to avoid any possible confusion, I have put his words into italics.
❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉
My Story
[The life of Louis Rosen, from an interviews transcribed by his son, Arnold, in 1978, and re-edited in 2019.]
OLINKA
The town that I was born in was named Olinka, which around the turn of the century was part of Russia, and located near the German border. It was situated three Russian miles from Grodno, the nearest large city in the area. My parents were running a small grocery business and they used to travel to Grodno to do their buying. When I was about seven or eight, my father took me with him to do his shopping and I considered it a tremendous treat to cross the River Niemen into Grodno. To me it was a marvelous and magical city. In reality, it wasn’t anything to rave about.
In Olinka we lived in a house facing the village square. In front of the square were the better homes for the town officials: the priest of the Russian Church, the teacher and principal of the Russian school. On one side of the square was the church and on the other the synagogue where we used to go to pray. Once a year, during spring, we had a fair where itinerant merchants would set up their wagonloads of merchandise. That was a big day for me because one of the wagons sold a special kind of cake for a groshen (or a penny) apiece. There were no motor cars of any kind. We only had horses and wagons. None of our streets were paved. In the winter it was very cold and full of snow; in the spring it was muddy and in the summer it was sandy. I didn’t mind. That’s the way it was.
There were probably 400 people in Olinka, mostly Jewish, about 100 families. There was no "upper crust" in that town because there were lots of poor Jews, mostly peddlers, scrounging around the countryside, trying to make a buck, a ruble. We had only one man who might be called upper crust. He was looked up to by some, but despised by most of the old timers, because he wore a hat, a shirt and a tie. He subscribed to the Jewish Daily and he was called "der Deutsch" or "the German," a sneering term at that time.* He operated a business and had the only dry goods store in the town. It was like a miniature department store. His son didn’t want to go to cheder (Jewish school) so his father provided a private tutor and he wound up in the gymnasia or public high school. The son wore a uniform and talked Russian. This family was our next door neighbor, but they were aloof. We had nothing to do with them.
[*Note: I always read this little bit of intra-tribal prejudice (going in both directions) with some degree of embarrassment. At this time, very early in the twentieth century, the Jews of Germany had become more integrated in German society. Restrictive barriers were crumbling and they were finding some degree of acceptance in many quarters. My father, on the other hand, was growing up in the Russian Pale of Settlement, where, if anything, Jews were more impoverished and oppressed, and still subjected to periodic pogroms. The only sure thing these Jews had to cling to was their deep religious faith. Thus they tended to spurn the Haskalah movement (or Jewish ‘enlightenment’), then centered in Germany. In my father’s childhood milieu, all things modern and philosophically rational, including ideas like socialism and zionism, were apt to be rejected. Of course, any embarrassment I might feel on this matter is surely leavened by irony. As soon as the first Rogozinsky reached America (probably grandfather’s older brother Max in 1896?) and had an opportunity to ditch their eastern European name, they did. They chose ‘Rosen’, which was a German-Jewish name. Of course, thirty years later, with the rise of Hitler, all these silly quarrels became moot.]
Our house in Olinka was built of logs and there were shingles on the roof. Shingles were not typical as most of the houses in our village had thatched roofs. Our barn in the back had a thatched roof. On the left side of the house was a store where we kept and sold groceries. On the right side was the living area – a front room, a dining room and a large kitchen with a stove and built-in oven. It was a big Russian-type oven, made of brick and ceramic. It had a little opening, like an entrance to a cave, over the top. You could crawl in and take a nap. My grandfather and I used to take siestas on top of the oven. I loved to do that. There were a couple of bedrooms on both sides of the kitchen, an outhouse in the yard, and a barn where we kept a cow and a horse. We didn’t have a wooden floor. The floor of the house was of clay or mud, packed down hard. We used to cover it with fine, yellow sand. Every so often we’d sweep out the old sand and dirt with a "besom" made out of twigs and cover the floor with fresh yellow sand. For furniture we had chairs, tables, chests of drawers and benches. We slept on mattresses made out of packed straw, but our bed coverings were filled with down feathers. In wintertime it could be cold, especially far from the oven. But the house was very well insulated. Between the logs, in the chinks, there was always packed moss or some such material, that kept out the draft.
There was no electricity. We had kerosene lamps most of the time. We also had candles, but they were lighted only on Friday night. On Saturday night only one candle, the havdolah candle, was lighted. We drew our water out of a well on the square. The well was called a "brunnem." It had a bucket and pulley, and everybody drew their water from it. In early fall, the peasants used to bring loads of wood into the square. Whoever needed wood would go and haggle with the peasant and buy a load. It would all be cut up and ready for the oven.
Although we lived near them, we didn’t have any contact with the town officials. We had a policeman. He was an officer by rank. Most of the time, he would be drunk. He’d walk around in his uniform, wearing his saber, and everyone would kowtow to him.
My earliest memory probably occurred when I was about four. I recall being picked up off a muddy street after being run over by a horse and wagon. Someone, I don’t remember who, picked me up and brought me into my parent’s store. They put a wet pack on my face. I must have been beat up and bruised pretty badly. I still carry a broken nose as a result of that accident.
About that same time I remember being brought into the cheder by my father, our local Jewish school. They made a big to-do about showing me the aleph-beth. They gave me "ruhzhinkes and mondle," raisins and almonds. If you learn well, you will eat ruhzhinkes and mondle. Cheder was a terrible drudge. I would be brought there early in the morning and I’d be confined in a big room with other kids until dark. It gets monotonous mighty fast, but we all endured it. That’s the life kids led in the village. The rebbe or teacher was not tainted with modernism or enlightenment. He would wield the stick if you irritated him in the least. He didn’t mind if he whipped you.
Our rebbe in the school was a teacher, or a melamed. He wasn’t the village’s spiritual leader. That was the "Ruv," the Rabbi. I remember him as an aged person with what they called a "hadtlass punim," an imposing face, with a long, flowing white beard. He was constantly at the books. He wasn’t like the modern Rabbi. I only heard him make a sermon on Yom Kippur Eve. He was a very important person. As soon as he arrived in the shul, the davening would start. The Rabbi was seated right next to the oren kodesh, the holy ark, on the mizrach, or eastern, wall. Only important people in the village had seats near the Rabbi. Anyone who had a seat adjoining the eastern wall was somebody. To sit there one had to be wealthy or well educated or elderly, or better yet, a combination of all three.
The Jews of Olinka naturally spoke Yiddish, as did I. Even though the town was officially part of Russia, the gentiles of the area mostly spoke Polish, although a few spoke Lithuanian. My father was fluent in Polish, but I only learned a smattering of the language that I quickly forgot when later I started learning English. As I learned English, I forgot the Polish. At one time an order came down that all the cheder kids would have to spend some time in school learning Russian. I must have been about six. I was taken and introduced to the class, and given a Russian book. I didn’t spend much time there. Why I was able to evade the order, I don’t know. Somebody was probably paid off.
MY PARENTS AND THEIR ORIGINS
My father’s name was Moshe, later Morris in English. He was the youngest, the baby, of his family. He had five older siblings: three sisters (Elke, Rashke and Miriam) and two brothers (Max and Hersh). My father carried through his life a deformity on his right hand that was self-inflicted. When he was approaching military age, I imagine around age 18, he cut and severed the tendon of his index or trigger finger on his right hand and bandaged it in a bent position. He left it that way to heal, so he was never able to straighten out that finger. It wasn’t an uncommon practice for young men facing the Russian Army draft to mutilate themselves. Military service in the Tsar's Army was something that the average Jew dreaded, because the army was anti-Semitic to start with and the time of their servitude was long. They would have to forget about their faith as far as upholding the dietary laws and other aspects of religious life. A lot of them, who didn’t want to serve, did anything they could to avoid it. When my father was called for service, he showed the officers his hand and told them that the trigger finger would not straighten out. They didn’t believe his story, so they had him lay his hand down on the table. They pounded his finger with their fists to try to straighten it out. They didn’t succeed. They hurt it, but that finger never did straighten out. For the rest of his life that finger was frozen and bent upon itself.
My grandfather, his father, was named Yakov Dovid Rogozinsky. (Rogozinsky was our family name in Europe.) His wife was named Yentil. He was quite educated in Hebrew, well respected, with a seat near the eastern wall. My grandfather had what they called a "zocher," which was the privilege of davening shachres every holiday. That was his chore or honor, whichever way you look on it. He considered it a great honor. It would have hurt him terribly if he were denied that privilege. He was very active in the shul, gathering funds for "moyess chitim" or relief for the poor, so that they may have wine, matzohs, and other provisions for Passover.
My grandfather was a pious man and was knowledgable about his religion. He had been trained as a smithy, and was the village blacksmith. While no one in this little town was wealthy, this trade made him better off than most. The peasants came to him to have their wagons repaired and to have their horses shod. He was always busy and made a living that way.
My father was also raised in this type of work, but he drifted away from it and became a storekeeper. My father was always engaged in all sorts of ventures. He ran a dairy, bought and sold grain from the peasants, speculated and gave contracts for selling other provisions. I don’t know if he made much money, although he must have made something. Perhaps this tendency to try out different occupations, to take risks, made him more likely later to leave his family for America. However, many were leaving for America. It was not uncommon for the time.
My mother’s name was Sora, or Sarah in English. She grew up in Shtabin (or Sztabin, now in Poland), about 20 miles away, a shtetl similar to Olinka. She was the oldest daughter of her parents. At the time my mother and father met, in the mid-1890’s, she was living in Shtabin alone with her mother. Already her father had been in America for many years. He had taken with him his two young sons and daughter. His wife couldn’t travel because she was too ill to make the trip, and so my mother stayed behind and took care of her.
My mother’s father, my maternal grandfather was name was Avrum Mayer Meretsky.* Meretsky was my mother’s maiden name. My grandmother was named Rochel Meretsky. She died soon after my mother got married, so I never knew her. (My other grandmother, Yentil Rogozinsky, died when I was maybe five years old. She complained of aches and pains inside. They took her to Grodno, put her in a hospital, and she died.)
[Note: the Jewish tradition of naming children after recently deceased loved ones is clearly apparent in my immediate family. My oldest brother Jerry’s Hebrew name is Pesach. He was named after my father’s oldest brother, Pete (or Pesach), who died of cancer at an early age in the 1920’s. My brother Don was named after my father’s paternal grandfather, Yakov Dovid; while I am named after my father’s maternal grandfather, Avrum Mayer. Why my mother’s family never produced a successful candidate for this namesake honor, I am unable to say.]
My parents met and got married around 1894, six years before I was born. My father’s brother, Uncle Hersh, was living in Shtabin at that time. He had introduced my father to my mother and they decided to make a shiddoch, a match. (She was supposedly an heiress because she had a father in America and, naturally, every man in America was a millionaire!)
Well, it turned out he wasn’t a millionaire. Far from it. He was making a poor living in Detroit, working as a tailor and presser in a second-hand store and pawnshop on Michigan Avenue. He worked for the same man for 50 years and lived to a ripe old age. I remember meeting him when we came to America. At that time, he was living with his fifth wife, having buried two and divorced two! He lived to be about 90 years of age. He was a beautiful looking man. So was my father’s father, my other grandfather. Both had beautiful physiques.
Because of all these circumstances, my mother grew up with very little contact with her father. When he left for America, she was still a child herself. She didn’t see him again until she came to America. Except he did come back for one occasion, to attend my parents’ wedding. There he paid the "nadon," or dowry. Then he went back and they didn’t see one another for many years. I’m sure this separation left an imprint. His other children grew up under his nose. My mother and her father never developed that closeness that you find in fathers and daughters.
My mother was a very pleasant person. She was outgoing and made friends easily. She was bright, smart in her ways, even though she wasn’t educated. My father on the other hand was smart in a lot of ways and "other worldly” to some extent. There was no question he was very religious. Still, he could be surprisingly tolerant and understanding. When I returned from my Yeshiva studies in New York, I told him that I didn’t want to lay tefillin any more and daven every day. I know it hurt him terribly. But he shrugged his shoulders and told me, "Well, you’re past your Bar Mitzvah, and it’s your decision.”
I loved him but we could never see eye to eye because of our religious differences. I was respectful but had stopped being observant. My father, seen from the perspective of today would probably be deemed a fanatic. He believed the Messiah would literally come riding in on an ass. To his dying day he believed it. It’s true that during that period many religious people rejected zionism. But he loved the idea of Israel and at that time, it was only an idea, a dream. He said it must simply come about because the Messiah wants it. He wants to return to the land amongst his own people.
During the entire time we lived in Olinka, my family (parents and siblings) always lived under the same roof with my grandparents. You could say we always lived with my grandparents or they always lived with us. It may seem irrelevant or trivial as to who was living with whom, but it was not. This question created a lot of problems. But I’ll get to that later.
After my father got married and took my mother from Shtabin to Olinka to live with his parents, his older brother Max and his wife came to stay awhile. Max wanted to say goodbye to his parents before leaving for America. After all the goodbye’s were said, my father took them across the "grenitz," or border, into Germany. That’s where they had to go in order to board a ship for America.
My father essentially (and at obvious great risk) smuggled them across the border. He loaded up a wagon with hay and put them in the center of the haystack. He then went across the border to sell the hay to a merchant in Germany. The soldiers examined the wagon carefully, and even stuck bayonets into the hay, but apparently he knew what he was doing. They were protected and well concealed. They all got across safely. I suspect my father’s knowledge of crossing borders was put to use when he himself left for America. I know that’s how my mother, myself and two sisters would later leave, slipping across the border, no papers examined or stamped.
OUR MIGRATION TO AMERICA
My father left for America about 1907 or 1908. I must have been about seven or eight years old. Then about a year later my older sister Rosie and my older brother Pete followed my father to America. Rosie could not have been older than 14, and more likely younger. I think my mother and the rest of the children, including myself, left six months later.
When my father decided to go to America, he arranged to have his father-in-law, Avrum Mayer Meretsky, already living here, send him a ship carte, a passage to America. For economic reasons, family separations were not only common, but more or less expected. My mother wanted him to go. And when he was gone, her main complaint was not about being left behind to care for 3 young children single-handed. She mainly complained he wasn’t sending enough money – never enough.
My father did not travel across the Atlantic, animated by dreams of democracy and freedom. He was not one of “your tired, your poor, yearning to be free.” Liberty might be lifting its lamp "beside the golden door", but he came here seeking the gold, not the door. He expected to stay just long enough to make his fortune, then he would return a rich man. But when he came to America, he found that fortune was hard to come by. Besides, soon after he arrived, my mother wrote that his brother Hersh (who had introduced my parents to one another years before in Shtabin) had appropriated the house in Olinka, along with everything else. There was nothing to come back to. So, my father sent us a little money, and mother sold whatever she could, and we came to America. At the time we came, my mother had three kids under her care: myself, and my two younger sisters, Anna and Marian (Label, Hannah and Mirke in Yiddish).
Before we came to America, my mother had to move out of the house where she had lived since her wedding and where she had borne and raised her children. It came about as follows. It seems that my father’s older brother Hersh had also married a girl from Shtabin. Hersh became Shtabin’s smithy just like his father, (my grandfather), was Olinka’s. Another smithy – a gentile – came in and opened up nearby and my uncle’s business dwindled. So Hersh came to Olinka without my mother’s knowledge and he persuaded his father, my grandfather, to let him take over his smithy business. My grandfather was getting old and he wasn’t doing too much work anyway. One fine day my uncle showed up with two wagonloads filled with his furniture, all his house wares and tools. Everything, along with himself, his wife and children was crowded into the house. They took over the kitchen and the entire house except for one room that was left for my mother and us kids. My father had already gone to America, and we were talking about following him there, so that’s why my grandfather was influenced to do what he did. The whole business left a lot of bitterness between my mother and both her brother-in-law and her father-in-law. Ultimately my mother moved away and rented a little apartment in a vacant house for the remaining five of six months before we actually left for America. My mother thought that my father owned the house because he had helped to maintain it and had built the store himself. My grandfather thought that he had always owned it. Where the truth lies, I don’t know. Chances are they both owned it. In any event, we left Olinka for America that winter. That was the last time I saw my grandfather.
I remember when we crossed the border. We went from Olinka to Yagastov (now Augastow in Poland, 24 miles to the west), which was the closest town near the border. My mother had a friend there. We spent the day there and that night her friends drove us to a farmhouse close to the border. Both my family – my mother and us kids – and another family hid in the barn behind the house. We spent the rest of the night there. Early in the morning, the farmer woke us up and led us to the border. Only a small river, a brook, divided the two countries, Russia from Germany (or Prussia). There was a narrow bridge and Russian soldiers were watching the crossing point, parading back and forth. Early in the morning they changed the guard, and while they were doing that, the farmer slipped us across the bridge into Germany. We came to a village in Germany and there was a wagon waiting for us to take us to a railroad depot.
I don’t know what would have happened if we had been caught. I was a child and was too young to be scared. I guess my mother was frightened, but to me it was exciting. I looked forward to go to "Amerike," the golden country. I felt no regrets leaving Olinka.
We got our train tickets and traveled to Bremen. This was the first time I had seen a train, much less ridden on one. That was exciting. Bremen was a large seaport and we wound up in the immigrant house where we spent a few days waiting for a ship. I think the ocean trip took ten days. I got seasick very badly. I remained in the hold. I was deathly sick. Only on the last couple of days of the voyage did I feel well enough to come up on the deck. I hardly ate anything the whole trip. Towards the end I was able to eat some morsels of dried bread.
I remember seeing the other immigrants. There were Italians, Jews, Russians, Germans, and various other nationalities. I liked to watch the variety of people. We passed the New York harbor, saw the Statue of Liberty. We finally stopped at Castle Garden or Ellis Island. This was the gateway for most immigrants. A lot of people got off the ship but we stayed on and sailed south to Baltimore. When we landed there, they held us for a couple of days and my mother was terribly worried. She didn’t have enough money or something like that. You had to have a certain amount of money with you to show to the immigration authorities, and she didn’t have quite enough. So they held us there, in a kind of detention, until she received a money order. Then they let us go.*
[*Note: At that time, our country had almost no limits to immigration; essentially you only needed to show up at Ellis Island and pass the medical exam. I guess Baltimore also required some indication that you had some means to care for yourself. Nowadays, we might term my father and his family’s passage to America an example of “chain immigration”, but back then, it was immigration on a type of layaway plan. Someone came over, worked and saved, and brought over the rest of the family, sometimes piecemeal.]
We boarded a train in Baltimore and traveled to Pittsburgh on the way to Detroit, where my father was to meet us. At Pittsburgh, we had to change trains. We were very hungry – all of us – but we had to stay in the depot and wait for the train. A stranger, a Yid, came by and got into a conversation with my mother. I heard him tell her, "Sure. Let him come and we’ll buy some baked goods." So, she gave me money and sent me along with that man. I can imagine how difficult it must have been for her, traveling alone in a strange country with 3 young children. I think she never forgave herself for allowing me to go with him, because she didn’t know him, and she didn’t know if I’d ever come back! Anyway, he took me to a nearby bakery and asked what I wanted to buy. He says to me, "Du gleich das?" or "Do you like that?" We didn’t have that expression, "du gleich das?" We said, "Das ist liebe," "Das ist hold." I said, "Gleich? Gleich?" He said, "Du willst das?" or "Do you want that?" I said, "Yeah!" Anything he showed me or pointed to, I said “Yeah!" I bought a big bag of baked goods. My mother was happy to see me come back with it. The baked goods tasted delicious!
Well, we got to Detroit and there was my father to meet us. It was deep in winter and miserably cold. We walked out of the depot, deep in snow and frost. I almost froze. I shivered. I guess I wasn’t dressed too warm. I’ll never forget that arrival. I was finally glad when my father brought us to my Aunt’s house, Gudkin Meretsky. She fixed us the most delicious meal I have ever eaten in my life. There were only hamburgers and potatoes on the plate, but to me it was fantastic. This was the first decent meal we had, since we had boarded the ship in Bremen.
RABBINICAL STUDIES AND MISFORTUNE
What happened to me after we arrived in Detroit was tragic. My father took me to the most prominent rebbe in Detroit, Rabbi Levin*. They had a discussion. I don‘t know what my father told him; I wasn’t a party to it. Then the Rabbi called me in, opened up the gemorrah and said, "Read." I read pretty good. I read one line and another line. When I stumbled at the meaning of a passage, I looked at the Rashi and Tosfos, the commentaries that explained the passage, and told the Rabbi what it meant. He said to my father, "I like that. The boy for his age is quite good." He said, "I’ll arrange for him to stay in Detroit. I’m thinking of starting a Yeshiva, and he’ll be my first pupil." So my father and the family went on to Battle Creek and I was left behind. The Rabbi arranged a place for me to stay and he arranged board for me. That was a tough life for a ten-year-old.
[*Note: My father presumably was referring to Rabbi Judah Leyb Levin (1862-1926). A web page devoted to his life and work, (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/s/sclead/umich-scl-levin?view=text), described him as "a significant figure in the Orthodox Jewish community in Detroit and was active in building Jewish groups and organizations that served the Jewish community. Among his projects were the establishment of a Hebrew education system." He ultimately opened a school in August 1914, which later became Yeshivah Beth Yehudah of Detroit.]
So for 3 years, I stayed with a Mr. Cohen in Detroit and ate every day at a different house. Mondays at this family; Tuesdays at that family. It was a rough life for a kid. I very seldom saw my parents. They lived in Battle Creek, 120 miles away. After my Bar Mitzvah, I was sent from Detroit to a Yeshiva in New York. I stayed there for a year and that was it. I refused to stay any longer. I told the Yeshiva to send me home. I’m tired. I have no interest in learning any more. I want to go home. Even though I had been at it for three years, the older I got, the more homesick I got. I felt I wasn’t cut out to be a Rabbi. By that time I was already reading socialist literature and had lost any deep religious faith.
Those were terrible years. I rarely got a letter from my father. Out of sight, out of mind, more or less, with them. Now and then my father would send a few dollars, but very seldom. The Yeshiva paid for my room but I had to scrounge for food in New York. They had a little dining room where they served one meal for the day; the rest I had to buy on my own.
From age 10 on, I was like an orphan. I had no home life. I had no childhood that a normal child had: no games, no play. I had too much responsibility beginning at age 10.
So at age 14, I had ‘had it’. I left New York and returned home to Michigan. My father had moved to Detroit and had opened a junk shop. While I had been away, three more children had been born: Angie, Nathan and Helen. I moved in with my family. We lived in a small cottage in Detroit. It wasn’t a high-class home, but it was typical of those days. No electricity; we used gas for lights. In the kitchen was a cooking stove and we had a parlor stove for heat. We had running water but you needed to pump it in the sink.
EDUCATION, WORK AND MARRIAGE
I started high school in 1914 and graduated in 1918. My ambitions were varied at that time. I had hoped that maybe I could study medicine. Every Jewish boy wants to be a doctor, or his mother and father wants him to be a doctor. I was no exception in that respect. But I couldn’t see my way clear to finance myself, because around that time my folks had moved out of Detroit to Pontiac, Michigan.
I joined the SATC, Student Army Training Corps (precursor to ROTC), which was organized for high school graduates. They could go to college and prepare themselves to be officers in the Army. I was given food, clothes, a place to sleep and some spending money on top of that. But that program didn’t last too long. The Armistice came in November, and we were mustered out the following month. I went to work at different jobs and studied in night school. I took a law course. I figured that even if I don’t practice law, it wouldn’t hurt to have that legal course. I’m glad I did. It wasn’t a sacrifice, really, because I enjoyed going to law school. And I still managed to play around a bit. I graduated the law and took the bar and passed it in 1923.
During the years between finishing high school and passing the bar, I worked in a variety of jobs, most of them as a machine parts inspector. I didn’t have to operate the machine or do any of the dirty work. My job consisted in measuring and approving the work produced by the machinists. I had gotten into that kind of work while I was still in high school. These were war years and there was a shortage of help in the factories. I used to go and get a job on Friday. I’d work Saturday night and Sunday night on the night shift and then I’d quit. They’d pay me time and a half for Saturday and double time for Sunday, so I’d collect a pretty good chunk of money. At the same time I learned my way around. I learned which jobs paid pretty well and which ones to ask for. I found that my experience alone was enough needed to get a job as an inspector. I didn’t have to lie. I had by then acquired a pretty good education, and I was comfortable with the necessary measuring tools. I learned how to handle a micrometer, how to read a scale, how to read a blueprint, etc.
I had gradually gained experience, but the process wasn’t smooth; I got fired from a couple of jobs. Once I remember they put me on a line of drilling machines, and I had to measure the size of the holes. They gave me a pair of plug gauges, what they called "go" and "no go." "Go" goes into the hole, but "no go" does not. In other words it’s big enough and not too big. One of the guys says to me, "Oh, you don’t have to worry about checking my work. I’m an expert at this." I believed him and paid no attention to his work, and sort of goofed off. Well, he didn’t drill the holes straight down; they went in on a bias. He screwed up but I was held responsible and paid the price. So I learned by experience, some of it hard.
There were good times during those years. I had friends and we’d go places. We’d go to a dance, go out looking for girls and, yes, we’d find them. We went to movies; they were a big thing in those days. I didn’t have a car, but I didn’t feel the need for one. Nowadays a young man without a car would be an oddity. In those days very few fellows had cars. There was all kinds of transit available, buses and streetcars. Transportation was no problem.
I was 23 when I graduated law school and I wondered whether I should try to get a position in a law office, or whether I should wait a while, save some money, and open a practice of my own. I had a good friend by the name of Goldstein. We went to school together. We graduated together. We both took the bar; he didn’t pass. One nice day he gave me a proposition. We would open an office in partnership. His pitch was that we would have a steady source of practice because his brother was an official of Robinson-Cole, a big furniture store. I knew this was true. They had two stores in Detroit, and Goldstein would have a lot of business through his brother. We could have an entry into that big enterprise: contracts, collections, whatever. It sounded good. I knew he had to have me because I was a member of the bar and he wasn’t. We rented an office and I invested all my money, and more, to equip it. He had a desk and I had a desk. He had his private office and I had mine. Well, we were there for two or three months. He was always busy, hardly ever in the office, always on the go, but nothing was coming into the office. I did a little snooping and found out that his sister was working in another law office downtown. His desk contained a couple of abstracts and a typewritten brief with the letterhead from that office. I realized that he wasn’t being fair. He wasn’t a partner; he was just using me as a decoy. So we parted company right there and then.
I still had all this office furniture and equipment, so I looked around for another office. I found one on Hastings Street where a shipping agency had just opened up. They were selling traveling tickets to come to America from different countries through various shipping lines. So I rented part of that office. It wasn’t bad; I did get some legal work. I wasn’t getting rich, but I could eke out enough to make expenses. But even that didn’t hold up because the government passed a law (the Immigration Act of 1924) which dramatically restricted immigration and established quotas for most of the world. The only passages the agency could sell was to Canada or to Cuba, not to the United States. So they went out of business, and I folded up with them. By that time I had been at it for a year and a half. I had gotten my belly full of it. I thought to myself "the hell with the law business; I am going back to my old work." That was the end of my law career.
I met Mildred, your mother, in a funny sort of way. The word had gotten around that the father of a certain girl was determined to advance her chances for marriage. Her name was Harriet Kotinsky. Her father owned a lot of real estate, and he had a store. The story was that he was wealthy, and that the girl had $10,000 cash to go with her upon marriage. It was a real enticing tale. I’d seen the girl once, and she wasn’t bad looking. She was a nice Jewish girl. My father and mother pestered me to call her. I did and visited at her house, and spent time with her, in the presence of her father and mother. Before I left, I had made another date with her for the afternoon of the upcoming Rosh Hashanah holiday.
Being a nice Jewish girl, Harriet naturally didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything on Rosh Hashanah. She suggested that we take a walk to her girlfriend’s house, Mildred Cohn. We went to that house, on Henry Street, and Harriet introduced me to Mildred. I was treated to strudel and coffeecake. Mildred appealed to me, right away.
After taking Harriet home, I went over to my sister Rosie’s house, at that time on Medbury. I told her that I had just met a nice Jewish girl, Mildred Cohn, and I was planning to call her for a date. Rosie had also heard about Harriet and said I was passing up a "schmalz pot.” Nonetheless, I called Mildred but she refused to see me, thinking that I was Harriet’s boyfriend. I persisted and finally she agreed to go out with me. We got along well and often double-dated with my cousin Irving. Irving and his girlfriend decided to get married. That sounded like a good idea, so I asked Mildred. She refused, saying she wasn’t ready to get married. Well, we broke up over this issue, and I didn’t see her for a year. She apparently had moved in the interim and her number no longer worked. I kept calling all the Cohens and Cohns in the phone book. When I finally reached her, I said, "This is Louis." She answered, "When did you get out of jail?" We started dating again and ended up getting married on January 1, 1928.
We went on a honeymoon to Chicago and stayed at the Morrison Hotel. (It’s now been thrown down.) We came back to Detroit and lived with Mildred’s parents for a few years, until Jerry was born. Then we moved to our own apartment. My in-laws were swell people; we got along really good. There was never any friction. I can’t ever recall getting angry with them. Mildred and her mother shared the kitchen, but I wasn’t interested in who cooked what. All I wanted was food, and I got plenty of that. I didn’t care who prepared it or how.
In 1931, in the depths of the depression, my father had developed very bad asthma. He heard that Arizona was a good place for people with asthmatic conditions, so he loaded his family in the car and headed southwest. I’m not sure why they ended up staying in Dallas rather than pushing on to Arizona. One story I heard was that they came into Dallas on Friday and they didn’t want to travel on Saturday, on Shabbos, so they just stopped. My father found the local shul, got acquainted with some of the Jewish people there, liked the place, and decided to stay. Another story was that their car broke down in Dallas, and they had no choice, they had to stop. Which story is more accurate, I could not say. Perhaps both have an element of truth. In any event, Nathan soon found a job and was able to help support the family. My mother opened up a store, a small place, (actually little more than a doorway), on Elm Street. But they survived and even began to make some money.
In 1945, after the war, Nathan called me to come down to Dallas. I came down and liked Dallas, but Mildred didn’t want to leave Detroit. She kept writing letters with alibis: she couldn’t sell the house or the furniture. But the truth was that her mother had died recently and her father was now living with her. She didn’t want to leave her father. Ultimately he went to live with his son Joe, and she came down to Dallas with the three of you, our sons.
I worked awhile for Nathan, and then I got laid off. I saw an advertisement for a curtain laundry for sale. I contacted the owner, Mr. Ashmore, and he told me that he wanted $4500. I told him that I wasn’t experienced in that line of work and I didn’t know if I could make a living at it. I told him that I’m willing to take it off your hands on a lease arrangement with an option to buy. I’ll pay you so much a month, and if I can see my way clear to make a living out of it, then I’ll buy it for the $4500. We went to the lawyer and worked it out. Afterwards, when Mildred and I came into the business, we decided the lease arrangement was too much and we’d be better off buying it. We took an awful chance, but it worked out okay.
So is there a final verdict? All in all, I think my mother and father were good parents. They showed no favoritism. My father recognized that his children were all different, and he loved them all. I think he was proudest of his youngest son, Nathan. My mother loved all of us with a deep love. Why she could have given her last ounce of strength, her very life, for any of us. You could always count on my mother’s open welcome and acceptance, always ready to spread a table for anyone that came to the house. They never regretted coming to America. Maybe deep down my father wished he had never left the old country. But his children grew up here and he took great pride in them.
❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉