Three generations later...

My son, Max, is currently acting in Neil Simon's somewhat autobiographical play, Brighton Beach Memoirs. In the voice of the main character, Simon's fictional counterpart, he announces that the play consists of the "true... memoirs of I, Eugene Morris Jerome in his fifteenth year...1937...in Brooklyn".

The playwright, born in New York City in 1927, devotes more than two hours to portraying a Jewish family living in Brooklyn, struggling to support a seven member household with a variety of jobs including: cutting fabric for ladies' raincoats, selling noisemakers, setting bowling pins, running back and forth in a hat factory, and mending and dressmaking at home. Not only is money tight, but their home is cramped: the two fatherless sisters must move into a bedroom already shared by their cousins Eugene and Stanley. At the end of the play, though, the family momentarily forgets their troubles and celebrates the news that their cousins have "gotten out" of Poland. They agree that the two girls will share a bed with their widowed mother, and that they'll get rid of the dining room set in order to create another bedroom..."it's so much easier to eat in the kitchen." They are simply jubilant that more of their family has escaped the terror that is plowing through Europe.

The play reminds me of my tour, exactly one week earlier, of the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. While actors in a Neil Simon play can bring a family vividly to life on the stage, it is also powerfully moving to stand in a family's actual home and hear the story, the known facts, of how they lived. If you really want to imagine it, there is no better way that I know. Accordingly, my father, sister and I visited the former Lower East Side apartment, last Sunday, of a young Jewish family who immigrated from Russia in 1897. This was the same year that construction of the Eldridge Street synagogue was completed (for a total cost of $19,000), and the same year the Yiddush Forverts, the daily newpaper, was founded. It was also the year just before Harry Illman, my first-born grandparent, began his life, in Russia.

When Jacob and Fanny arrived in New York, they were 22 and 14 year old newlyweds, respectively. At the time, lower Manhattan was the most densely populous place on Earth. There were more people living below 14th street then (1.8 million) than there are today on the entire island of Manhattan. The couple moved into a three room flat on the second floor of an 1850's building on Orchard Street. Their home measured a total of 325 square feet, and consisted of a small bedroom, central kitchen, and a small front room known euphemistically as the parlor. (You can do the math to figure out exactly how cramped each of these rooms was.)

Seven years later, at the age of 21, Fanny would deliver her third child, a son, named Max, in the apartment's single small bedroom. At which point in the story, standing in her kitchen, tears sprang into my eyes, imagining Fanny's difficult life. My sister, quite used to me by now, whispered in my ear, reassuringly, "Nan, Fanny loved her kids, and all her friends were doing the same thing. She had support in that." She also must have believed in G-d, I thought, and been very grateful not to have to fear for their lives every day, as she surely had in Russia.

Our museum guide explained that to make ends meet, Jacob ran a factory, manufacturing ladies' dresses, there in the apartment. So, in addition to caring for three children in this tight, nearly windowless apartment, carrying water up the stairs from the outhouse for cooking and washing and every other reason modern housewives blithely turn on the tap or flush water throughout the day, Fanny also had to accomodate the needs of the four employees sharing the space with the five members of her family.

Jacob and Fanny's apartment was one of the original sweatshops. Comfortable, twenty-first century tourists, students and descendants of immigrants, we stand now and look at the places where Jacob's four employees sat or stood, for six long days a week, to do their work. A young girl, known as a baster, sat on the stool by a parlor window, sewing layers of fabric together with tiny hand stitching. She passed these pieces to the man seated opposite her at the sewing machine in the other window. He ran them through the machine and then passed them in turn to the kitchen, where a man stood before an ironing board. This man, the presser, would sip from a glass of water, filling his mouth, then spray the water across the fabric before pressing it with a hot iron. Then, he passed the fabric back to the parlor where a young woman, called a finisher, used a mannekin to put the pieces together and adorn them with lace medallions, turning out 14 dresses a day to be sold to middle class ladies.

As I sit in the theatre, Sunday, hearing the audience gasp at the news that more cousins were possibly going to move in with the Eugene and six of his relatives, already rather strained in their small townhome, I think of how relatively vast and luxurious their home was, how easy their lives were, not only compared to Jacob and Fanny's on the Lower East Side, but also when compared to that of the playwright's.

I calculate that the play probably took place about three or four decades after Simon's grandparents, people not unlike like Fanny and Jacob, might have first arrived on American soil. Marvin Neil Simon grew up in Washington Heights with windows that opened to the dark crawl space behind the apartment building. Neil's father had only a grade school education and worked in the garment industry, often leaving his wife and two sons alone for long periods of time. His mother not only worked at Gimbel's department store in the daytime, but also ran poker games in their home in the evenings, taking a cut of every pot. His grandfather, whom Simon portrays in a later play, Broadway Bound, as a gruff, stubborn socialist, probably read the Yiddush Forverts daily newpaper, or listened to the news on WEVD, the Yiddush radio station. In real life, it had been Neil and his mother who boarded with kindly relatives at their hardest times, a situation Simon gently reverses in Brighton Beach Memoirs.

Three generations after most of his own great-grandparents were born in Poland, Latvia and Russia, my 16 year old son, Max, stands on the stage, acting out a story from our collective past. After taking his bows, Max returns home in his very own car, takes a hot shower and then, sleeps undisturbed in a queen sized bed in his own room, with its southern and western exposures onto a quiet, snow covered acre of his family's own property, on a beautiful, leafy street in this Midwestern suburb. How very far we have come; how much we have to be grateful for.