Dumped...

Driving east on a mid-town street in the mid-1980s, my acquaintance Andy W. spotted a bronze plaque in a pile of demolition debris.  Intrigued by the shiny item, he stopped and rescued this memorial plaque, dumped on the street at the start of renovation of a former union headquarters of the millinery trade. How in heaven’s name could the crew have been so heartless? The memory of a tzadik, a righteous man named Szaja Rotblatt, was thrown without ceremony into the trash.

























In this simple metallic scroll lies a story of proportions yet unmeasured. Perhaps they never truly will be. Through my search, its outline emerges. One day soon, this plaque will be mounted again in a place of honor. ‘Til then, the internet marks the spot for it to be.

Szaja David Rotblatt was not famous or well-known, except to his comrades in the hatters’ trade. As I learned from his US citizenship naturalization papers, filed in New York County Supreme Court in 1914, Szaja was born in 1873 in Warsaw, and found work there as a blocker, the craftsman who places a cut and partially-formed hat on a mold and shapes it into a finished item.

It’s hard to conceive how important hats once were. JFK ended that for men mid-century, with an uncovered head at his snowy January inauguration, 1961. Jackie actually extended the life of ladies’ headwear, her signature pillbox numbers, re-defining classic style for the shrinking number of women who went about hat-adorned. Four decades before, Mary Pickford’s classic short “The Hat,” epitomized the role that Szaja’s craft played in American society. Take a gander at this tasty depiction.
A woman’s hat was worth sacrifices so she could be beautiful and feel wanted; take another gander at this 1912 Mary Pickford silent short, The New York Hat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk8Pd3VbYiI


Life in Poland was no picnic for a Jew, and poor economic conditions as well as rampant anti-Semitism sent Szaja, his wife Helen, and their three children to Paris where they booked passage in 1908 aboard the steamship La Provence that sailed from Le Havre on December 12, 1908. "Russia" is listed as the family's native country as was the custom in the day (Poland being then still dominated by the Czar). Isaac, age 8, Herman, age 4, and Eleanora, age 2, (whose name was shortened to Eleanor in the USA), accompanied their mother, whose Yiddish name was Chaye, and their father, listed as David (Schaye) Rothblatt. Left behind in Paris was the family's friend, Mendel Relmann, of 14 Rue Eugene Sue in the center of Montmartre in the 18th Arrondissement, hard by the Metro Marcadet Poisonniers, downhill and north of Sacre Coeur. Relmann's 26-year old son Isidore, a tailor, was also aboard. Apparently the Rotblatt family had resided in France for some time before their departure for the Golden Land, at least long enough to form a friendship with the Relmann family.

By 1910, the Rotblatt family had landed in East Harlem, a mecca for Eastern European Jews. Slightly less crowded than the Lower East Side, and with a housing stock, albeit also dilapidated, in general many decades younger than that downtown, the Rotblatts rented in the neighborhood at 117 East 115th Street, where they are listed on the 1910 census. The family spoke Yiddish at home as did most of their Jewish neighbors. Szaja found work in the millinery shops downtown, where the shop-floor language as well as the fiery rhetoric at union meetings was the same.

By 1917, the United Cap and Hatmakers Union of North America was in the forefront of radical socialist labor struggles in the US. Its monthly organ, The Headgear Worker, was published in Yiddish and English.

The December 1917 issue wishes its readers a happy New Year, and then launches into a frequently heard rallying cry for the increasingly leftist group which had just seen a year filled with the Bolshevik uprising in Russia and major outbreaks of anti-capitalist furor all over the Western world.

In boldface caps, Szaja and his comrades were exhorted:

THE PASSED YEAR WAS RICH IN EVENTS MAKING IT AN EPOCH IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND. STRUGGLING IN SEAS OF BLOOD AND UNDER THE THUNDER OF CANNONS, THE HUMAN FAMILY IS PROGRESSING TO ITS FULL EMANCIPATION FROM ALL FORMS OF POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SLAVERY. TOGETHER WITH THE THRONE OF THE CZAR WAS [sic] ALSO SHATTERED THE THRONES OF THE CAPITALIST AUTOCRATS, AND EVEN IN GERMANY THERE ARE SIGNS OF THE AWAKENING OF THE PEOPLE AND ITS READINESS TO CAST OFF THE YOKE OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS AND ALL THEIR CAPITALIST COTERIE. LET THE COMING NEW YEAR ACCOMPLISH YOUR AND OUR FULL HEARTS DESIRE...

Thus ended a year that had devastated Szaja's homeland and the rest of Europe. The end of the next would throw both Europe and the United States into a financial tail-spin, as the bubble of war work and munitions production ended with Armistice Day 1918. Military contracts for headgear disappeared from the New York shops and with that came reduced wages and hours for hatters across the board. During the mid-decade, struggles over affiliation with the more conservative United Hatters of North America had grown. The December 1916 issue of the The Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers Journal included articles such as "Does it Pay to be a Union Member," and two by the prominent hatter's union activist Max Zaritsky about the internal workings of the union and its participation in the "Joint Council," even though the United Hatters were a conservative group who refused to be classed as a needle trade (unlike their comrades in the cloth hat trade). The United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers of North America was a radical bund, its monthly journal packed with articles spewing Socialist flames, railing against the bosses and capitalist greed. The two groups included as their members almost 100% of the hatters, who comprised 32,000 members by 1921, mostly in New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

Some men are born to lead, and others not; Some choose a small pond in which to be big fish. In America, everyone could count. In the sweatshop, Szaja was likely a nobody, poorly paid and exploited to the bone. Out the door, though, he could be someone. The Union Hatters Sick and Benevolent Society was his standing stone. "Founder and Leader" reads the bronze tablet. “Recording Secretary:” his name is proclaimed, incised on the grey granite gates of its burial field. These gates and graves and the discarded tablet are the only palpable remainders of the UHSBS, its records lost to the wind after its liquidation in 1990. Neither the YIVO archives at the Center for Jewish History, nor the UHSBS custodian, Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, nor the New York State Insurance Department Liquidation Bureau know the whereabouts of the files that would shed light on Szaja's deeds, those that caused the tablet's fashioners to sing his praises for his efforts during the group's "darkest hours." The stench of red-baiting filled my nostrils as I read the raised letters on my newest find. I imagined more was at hand than a testimonial to a burial society well-run.

The spaghetti twists of interchanges near the north side of Flushing Meadow Park bollix the mind, winding in and out of the park's borders and carefully avoiding the consecrated ground of Mt. Hebron cemetery, named after the hill from which the patriarch Moses was condemned to watch as his people entered the land of milk and honey without him. What a strange name for the site of over 1,000,000 Jewish burials! There I’d found Szaja listed in the cemetery’s website.


Thousands of gravestones stood like pine trees in a forest as I drove the paths, searching for his grave. Was Szaja really there? Did it matter to anyone? Perhaps I and my acquaintance Andy are in a club of our own. We want to know everything about this man, and resurrect him memory best as we can. Though Szaja’s wife of many years is buried next to him, I know through census records that they lived apart in the Bronx in 1930, and that at her death in June 1946 in Monticello, NY, the informant was a man named Charles Roth of Mosholu Parkway, not Szaja, her husband, who perhaps was spending June back in New York.


Szaja and Helen Rotblatt indeed lie side by side in the UHSBS plot near Mt. Hebron’s eastern gates.
Though well-tended, the plot is the worse for wear; no burials have been done there since 2008 and little, if any, room remains. The list of officers inscribed on the gates is a long one. America meant equality and opportunity for all. You didn't need yikhes or a fancy degree to serve as an officer of burial society. Nonetheless, doing so furnished a modicum of self-respect. Szaja was revered, though his wife may not have loved him. His memory isn’t dumped yet. I intend it never be.

Batya in the Heart of Darkness

The title of Joseph Conrad's novel has always intrigued me, though I’ve never cracked a page. I understand the scenes to be strange and frightful; you never know what's coming next. New York City is a jungle, too, of cultures and races, living at each other’s edges, and so it is at Bedford and Nostrand, down at the southern end of Flatbush, where the 2 and 5 trains end their runs, disgorging their loads of hoi polloi. Just to the east lies Brooklyn College, a melange if ever there was one, every people that Brooklyn holds. The stew pot simmers: in three directions the lilt of Island accents fills the air, some gentle, others rough. Jamaicans predominate for vast dozens of blocks north, as well as east and west, even a bit south, having replaced the white folks, many Jewish, who fled in the early 60s during the epidemic of racist block busting that spread like cholera, just as immigration policies loosened in the States. South on Bedford, perhaps ten blocks, the next generation of bourgeois Jewish culture flourishes, its population of all-rightniks morphed into one of the many Orthodox communities that cover Midwood and many other non-Hasidic Brooklyn enclaves.

Over the years, drugs have overwhelmed countless Flatbush blocks, Rasta devils careening though the streets in SUVs with tints, making U turns and doing doughnuts in the middle of Flatbush Avenue as pedestrians scatter. Where Yiddish was once heard day-in day-out, from the subway junction all the way north to Martense Street and beyond, pistol shots now ring out in the middle of the day when deals go bad. Even the $1.00 van drivers who swoop up and down Flatbush, stealing fares from the MTA, know to beware. Their CB radio aerials suddenly stand still as the gang vans screech by. Stand and watch anywhere at the junction: white kids from Brooklyn college who traipse to the subway from the west on their way home stand out like so many sore thumbs.

Several weeks ago on my way to the beach, I emerged from the subway in the middle of the bubbling stew, my bike in hand to complete my journey to Rockapulco after the train ride out. Out of the corner of my eye, though, I spotted a mermaid, her bright form beckoning to me, calling my name. In the sea of Black faces, the figure of a short, elderly white woman with a shopping cart caught my attention. She was troubling herself, assessing how to the safely cross the street. It was hot and humid and she was obviously disoriented. I came up to her and asked her if I could help.

Batya, indeed, might as well have sported a fish-tail, her presence in the intersection so strange that hot summer day. Dressed in matching bright red-accented clothing, her color scheme matched her little metal cart, packed to the gills with her earthly possessions. She was looking for an address on Bedford Avenue. After we safely crossed the Red Sea and she could talk safely, it turned out that Batya, though clean and presentable, was homeless. She’d walked all the way from Crown Heights, a sizable hike, seeking shelter at a government office that might provide subsidized apartment to replace the one from which she claimed she'd been driven by her neighbors, due to her past career as a “private eye.” Hmm, I thought, perhaps even one percent of this is true....

All this came out as we tottered down Bedford, after I managed to help her cross the street, gripping my bike frame in one hand and taking her arm with the other. Mermaids are notorious for their powers of persuasion. But it wasn’t Batya’s ample breasts that summoned me thither. A more powerful tool was at her command: I detected an accent once commonly heard on the corner where we met. Yiddish is gone from Bedford and Nostrand, dead as the white buffalo, its melodies extinct. I had to pinch myself to make sure it was real. Batya's Yiddish was more than serviceable. I was tempted to call the Natural History Museum with my sighting. Rara avis flew in my face.

Her story poured out as we moved down the sidewalk. Once a cherished Roumanian Jewish daughter, her parents had fled east with her during the Holocaust, ending up in a transit camp in Siberia. Along the way, shrapnel from a Wehrmacht shell injured her right hand. The scars were proudly displayed as she told me her childhood name in Italian: Beatrice, how her parents loved her so. Then the War came. All that tender youth is long gone, murdered by Hitler, then Stalin, then life. Who knows how she came to the shores of America? Close relatives live here, but her homelessness is not a bit their concern.

What does one do when confronted with misery, a human soul wandering in the dark, obviously nuts? How to put one’s arms around the situation (or them), what to do, what is ethical, beyond the knee-jerk reaction to not get involved. I was genuinely concerned, despite her obvious mental illness, that Batya come to no harm in the middle of the day. She formed an obvious target for those up to no good. I turned instead to selfish concerns, though, wanting a photo to save of this moment, that of juxtaposition and language, so strange. “No,” came her answer when I asked her permission. $1000 was her price to capture her face. Crazy she might be, but Batya had seykhl, the street smarts to handl with what was in play. I came up to $20 but that was my limit. We parted, my mermaid and I come to nothing. The odor of fishy intentions lingered about. Still it was special: Yiddish at the Junction. I’ll turn to learning Jamaican patios now, and get up to date.

More on Peaches and Daddy

Peaches Browning may have failed in her bid for wealth when her suit for divorce, a property settlement, and alimony against Daddy Browning failed in March, 1926, but all was not lost. Her fame was nationwide now, and her teenage dreams of a stage career on solid ground. Caroline Heenan, Peaches’ mother, who had encouraged her daughter’s relationship with the old goat so as to prevent Peaches from pursuing a questionable stage career, changed her tune fast now that marriage to the elderly Browning had failed to deliver its original, ostensible rewards for the Heenans. An about-face was warranted for the budding performer, now that something of value could apparently be salvaged from Peaches’ acquaintance with Daddy B.
Here’s a pub shot of peroxided Peaches, circa 1927 just when her vaudeville act took off.

Clad in dark velvet, expertly draped to conceal the zaftig nature of her major gams, the now 17-year old Peaches struck a demure a pose on a sawhorse that was surely cropped out of the shot before distribution.

While waiting for the trial court’s decision in her marital battle, Peaches and her Momma took a breather from the intense spotlight in which they had bathed since her April, 1926 nuptials. A cruise to Bermuda was just the thing. Here they are in early February, 1927 on the deck of S.S. Fort Victoria. She must have gotten something from the old geezer even though her divorce claim was foundering: perhaps the sale of some of the contents of the 20 or so trunks of finery carted away by her as she and her mom removed from the Kew Gardens Hotel in October, 1926 paid for the undoubtedly expensive passage. Six months of co-habitation with Daddy B. and his puerile antics had been more than enough. Temporary support was substantially denied to Peaches when Browning anticipated his teenage wife’s legal strategy and sued for a separation soon after she walked out.

During the pendency of the outlandish legal battle, fought in Carmel and White Plains, New York, wags paved the way for Peaches ’incipient stage career as a flaming chanteuse. Here’s Lon Mooney’s Tin Pan Alley hit, I’m All Alone in a Palace of Stone, with a morose Daddy staring at the tabloic headlines announcing his beloved’s flight. A winsome Peaches, clad in an unusually matronly frock, looks off into the distance, her grown-up visage belying her sum total of 16 years.

Peaches made quite a stir once she started appearing on the regional vaudeville stage. Despite a field crowded with Ziegfeld girls and Busby Berkeley wannabes, Cinderella Wannabe mattered enough for celebrity photographer Cheney Johnston to capture her inflammable essence in this smoking hot studio shot, her sizeable pins again gamely disguised, as she looks off-stage.
Peaches had earned her fame the hard way, battling competition at every turn. Browning was no easy catch during their short courtship, having solicited over 12,000 girls in his infamous 1925 newspaper ad that ended with a Czech girl, Mary Louise Spas, supposedly 16, being legally adopted until her true age was smoked out. Here he is in the same season of his and Peaches’ initial acquaintance, clad in what was reported as a gold vest.
The satyr is seated next to Miss Ethelinda Cooley, beaming at having brought down the house with his skill as her Charleston partner before a crowd of 1000 at the Commodore Hotel in late February 1926. Check out Mama Cooley’s stern smile behind her daughter’s smiling bee-stung lipped puss, an iron matron’s firm grasp on the white-haired so-called gentleman’s shoulder. Where is sweet Ethelinda’s mother’s other hand? Ready, aim, FIRE, just in case. Even old Daddy wouldn’t have dared fondle Ethelinda’s tight thigh. At least ‘til a bit later….

15 months later, a lot of water, under the bridge. Here is poor old Daddy again, May, 1928, kneeling on the ceiling of a glass vault in his real estate office, where 2,200,000 letters to him from young women all over the world were hoarded and savored by the old Terah. His appetite was never sated, even after Mary Louise Spas and Peaches were long gone.



Imagine my surprise when the phone rang this past March, and an old man calling from Florida inquired. “Is this Benjamin Feldman? I’m Warren Lee, and you’re gonna WANT to talk to me. I read your book. I’m in the know.” Warren’s father, Henry Lee f/k/a Hyman Levy, knew Daddy Browning more than well. Back in 1919, Hy was discharged from the Army. An orthodox Jewish boy from Brooklyn was ready to go to work, and his training in the service as a stenographer and typist would come in to play. Edward West Browning ran a large realty empire by that time, but his proclivity for members of the distaff side made it inadvisable for him to have women in his office as employees. Male secretaries were on the outs already in much of this country, but Browning preferred them, and when Hy Levy answered the newspaper ad placed by WASP-extraordinaire Browning, he was hired for the job. Browning may have been anti-Semitic, but he recognized select male members of the tribe as extraordinarily capable. Perhaps Browning’s career as a black sheep in the staid and pedigreed Browning family made him sympathetic to the Jews as social outcasts.
Daddy Browning knew smarts and ambition when he saw them, and how to employ them in others for his own uses and aid. By 1926, when Warren was born, Browning had made Hy Levy wealthy, giving him pieces of deals and a healthy salary, advancing him from clerk to appraiser as Edbro Realty Corp. grew. Chartered day-boats up the Hudson River for company parties, lavish presents for children of favored employees, access arranged for Hy Levy to “restricted” uptown clubs were all Browning’s pleasure, his largesse as an employer matching the mis-directed efforts he made with young women. The secret of what possessed his twisted soul would follow Daddy to the other world, as children who benefitted from one of the Browning charities sprinkled white orchids into his grave.

With the onset of the Great Depression, Edbro Realty suffered, and Hy Levy left to strike out on his own. Leaving his race-horses at the Belmont track his New York Jockey club membership behind and his wife and two children at their home on 169th Street in Jamaica, Queens, Levy hied himself down to Dallas, Texas, where he was hired as a car salesman by the C.S. Hamilton Chrysler dealership. There was one hitch before starting day, though. Hyman Levy was required to deracinate his last name turning non-Hebrew: H.L. Lee. Gertrude Levy and her sons must joined Hy there, and Warren graduated from a Dallas High School. Lee’s sales acumen was probably considerable: Chrysler took Hy Lee away, making Warren’s father manager of its West Texas Mopar parts division. After being moved for that post to tiny Kermit, Texas, Hy Lee was rejoined by his wife, Gertrude in 1934. Warren and his older brother Robert, both over 18 by then, elected to return to New York, their last names also by then changed to Lee.

Warren was born on February 2, 1926 at Eastern Parkway Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn, so it’s likely that the family lived not far away then. The Levys were itinerant, just like Daddy Browning, who rented his many homes despite massive real estate holdings of his own. One of Hy Levy’s perks during his tenure with Edbro was to occupy apartments for short periods in his boss’ holdings. He also took advantage of the liberal free rent periods that were customary in apartment rentals in those days. While Warren was a small child, the Levy family even lived around the corner from Caroline and Peaches, at 654 West 170th Street, and Warren told me that his older brother Robert remembered visiting the Heenan apartment back in the days of Daddy’s courting there. Warren also remembers living in the same Washington Heights neighborhood when he was a grammar school student at P.S. 173, a fortress that still stands on Fort Washington Avenue and West 173rd Street. Warren’s his apartment house neighbor, Neil “Doc” Simon, was teased mercilessly by his older classmates when he brought a new toy doctor kit downstairs to play.

Before or after the Levys’ residence at Browning’s typical needle-like apartment house that Edbro built at 42 West 72nd Street, Warren also remembers living at The Majestic, on the southwest corner of Central Park West and 72nd Street. Hy Levy must have been doing quite well! Today, apartments at the Majestic cost $2000 per square foot and UP; even in the Depression they weren’t too cheap. Little Warren, 7 or 8 years old, remembers well the gift one Christmas from Browning of a miniature coal-fired locomotive and tender hitched behind, which his mother would take him in to Central Park, across the street from the Majestic. Warren had to be the envy of even the richest kid on the street, trundling about in this contraption after he visited Browning in his West 61st Street office to thank him personally, with his Mom.

Stories fade and collective memory fails us; even a fellow as well-known as Daddy Browning, the laughing stock of America in the Roaring Twenties, is now barely a cipher on the screen. I feel special having heard from Warren Lee. He’s quite possibly the only human being on the face of the earth who shook the hand that petted Peaches’ sweet hide.

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All images, except the Cheney Johnston portrrait of Peaches) are the property of and presented through the courtesy of The Green-Wood Historic Fund