A memoir of Woodridge, N. Y.
My great grandfather Abraham Wenglinsky, who died from natural causes in Czestochowa, Poland a few months after the German occupation in 1939, was called “Black Abraham'' because of his being so mean spirited. My father’s siblings jokingly claimed that he was so mean not even the Germans would kill him. My grandfather Louis, who I met many times, also was given the sobriquet “Black” because he was also so mean spirited. He bullied his wife and children. He threw a knife at my father because my father wanted to continue doing his elementary school homework rather than go down to work at the bakery he owned and that was on the property. Louis had his youngest daughter wash his feet. It wasn’t sexual, as far as I can tell, just a service, but she felt humiliated, not what proper people did, and she was aspiring to be more. She became what Adam Sandler called “a wedding singer”, Sandler just having eliminated its Jewish identification, thanks to my own father sending her money so she could get voice lessons and then, later on, working as an optician. Louis calmed down somewhat when his wife got a bit elderly, not knowing how to handle her when abuse no longer worked and when she became diminished because the youngest child had been killed when a truck backed up over him and she, Rose, would tell people not to sit next to her on a bench because that child was sitting next to her. When I was a child, Rose would give me raisins and cinnamon from the barrels in the bakery.
Louis was proud of having been a corporal in the Russian army before the First World War, a major accomplishment for a Jew, but bakers were a necessity in armies and, I suppose, still are. He was even more proud of gaining his American citizenship papers, hanging it in a picture frame, and saying in his broken English that he was a “shitizen”, an honorable title I still think a number of congresspeople should emulate in its combination of high office combined with modesty. But Louis was a terrible financial manager. He had owned a number of other properties including a red brick modern house just opposite the road from his present property but which had to be sold to meet his debts. He would saunter into the local bank when he could still get loans and ask whether the bank manager was collecting enough interest. When a telephone operator could not understand his English, he would shout to her in Yiddish, “Wash out your bloomers”, and I think they appreciated his remarks as an insult.. My own father drove to Miami Beach to get work as a baker so as to meet some of his father's debts. But Louis was incorrigible. At my Bar Mitzvah dinner, he gave big tips to the musicians so as to show his generosity even if my parents had already covered that.
Running a bakery wasn’t always easy. I remember as a child sitting up all night with the women--my mother, her mother in law, and three of my father’s sisters-- when a catastrophe had struck. “The sour”, as it was called, which meant the dough to which the yeast had been added, had for no a[pparent reason not risen and so could not be formed into loaves of bread. So the men in the bakery down the hill from their house worked all night to start over again fresh. The women thought of carrying down coffee to support them but decided the men would find that an annoyance and so just sat and fidgeted until my father and grandfather and a hired man finished the job at about dawn and so could send the rye bread to the small hotels they supplied. A lot of money was at stake. When there was a crisis, men ruled the roost.
Legend has it that when my mother first came to Woodridge and met her family, she and the sisters of her expected husband bathed together in a big metal cistern and that experience cemented them as sisters. I remember when the three younger sisters would come home to Woodridge on some occasion and one of them cried because she didn't have the glibness I had as a pre-teen. The oldest sister was something of a recluse living in Lakewood, New Jersey and said she couldn’t go to my bar mitzvah which offended my mother who insisted I return her cash wedding present. I did because I had no dog in this fight. I eventually met her in my late teens, the youngest of my father’s sisters driving me down with her latest boyfriend. She was concerned that I would order properly at a fancy restaurant he took us to. Esther was quite friendly when we arrived, asking me what college was like, her comfortable house appointed in what had been the fashionable late Forties style with cross curtain thin white material underneath colorful drapes and a combination radio and record player as the centerpiece of the room. She never mailed back a prize possession of mine, which was my only copy of a paper I had written to Mark Van Doren about my being a Jew that Van Doren had read aloud to our class. Maybe an oversight but maybe what she would have done a generation later, she having done so well at Woodridge High School, and so my paper was her own property. She died of cancer a few years later. Towards the end of his life, my grandfather bought a single cow which he kept in a corral for a few years, for reasons I never understood. He called it “Mary the cow” in honor of my mother. She never thought it flattering.
Woodridge seemed to me a prosperous place to me in the Forties and Fifties when I visited there and it hit its peak population, about a thousand people, at that time. There were three roads, spokes from a dusty declination centered on the Lackawanna train station. Facing the station nearby was a movie house, a haberdashery store, a drug store, a luncheonette, a druggist, a shoe store and all the other goods and services to supply the needs of the population as that number was supplemented by the summer folk. No store seemed boarded up and there were no vehicles from elsewhere sending packages other than the post office which mainly sent mail. Everybody knew what was going on in the world because everyone had radio and telephone and movies that covered pretty recent current events and the early editions of the New York City tabloid newspapers were available at the drugstore the next morning, the copies having been trucked north.. That is how I learned the full front page headline on The Daily News that Babe Ruth had died. But there was no bookstore in Woodridge, just a rack of thriller paperbacks in the drugstore.
One spoke of Woodridge was up the street where halfway to its end my grandfather's house and bakery were sited and then further to where the street ended at the property of a summer camp where an obese man wearing something of a scout uniform barked orders to the campers whose field were ample enough for letting them live the outdoors. Another spoke went up a hill past the laundry factory with two big smoke stacks that I suppose supported the hotels in the area and went to South Fallsburg, another village about ten miles away from Woodridge, where there were also shops and a movie theater where people from the surrounding hotels and bungalow colonies came to shop and eat and get away from their own properties for part of a day. There were towns like that all over what were called “the Borscht Belt '', catering to the resorts but with year long populations, even if the winters were cold even though less than a hundred miles from the big city. I saw in South Fallsburg a re-release of “Gone With the Wind'' where, despite the benevolent intentions of David O. Selznick, the movie could not but present itself as one in which the separation between the castes of white and Black seemed inevitable and all the heroes and heroines were white and the Civil War a great tragedy rather than a way to free the slaves or at least limit the expansion of slavery..
The third spoke of Woodridge went past the high school, which was a modern two story building on a little hill that was modern in that it was built in the Twenties in Collegiate Tudor Gothic style and so seemed and was majestic. That county road went up and down in the hills, having to drive slowly, until it reached Castle Hill, where there was a bus depot and entrance to Route 17, which was the state highway whereby you drove back to the city. When I was young, I thought every time I went over the George Washington Bridge that the city was a now strange place because, beside its tall buildings, there were sidewalks of concrete arranged on streets laid out mostly in a grid, and I came to formulate the thought many years later that if God had wanted people to walk on paths and grass, He wouldn't have invented concrete sidewalks. My apartment house in the Bronx was in my neighborhood, which meant that I knew, was familiar with, the incline and the width of the street in front of my house and I knew where all the cracks on the pavement were. The air did not smell as sweet as it was in Woodridge but I knew that the city was my home and the place in which I would make my mark.
When I knew my grandfather, from my earliest memory, he was living in a shambles of rooms, the entrance to which included big cans of peaches purchased no doubt at a sale but never used. Rose would get up while everyone was still in bed to warm up the stove by filling it with wood to raise the flames from their nightly embers. There were many rooms including old metal framed beds without mattresses left over from when the six children lived there. When I forewarned my bride to be that the house Louis lived in was a hovel, she dismissed that as ridiculous, but when we arrived there, she looked at it and said “This is a hovel!”. Sometimes when we visited the ancestral manor, Rose would forget when we would arrive and so had her chicken dinner on the stove for a week and my mother would give us money to go down to the village and eat at a luncheonette. After reading Dostoevsky and going through its religious and existentialist meanings, I later on realized that the Russian soul was in my relatives and in myself, a description of reality rather than philosophy. My mother-in-law said that I did not understand the Russian soul as perverse when the truth was I was just trying to avoid having one.
After the War, which is what the Second World War always is for me, however many wars have succeeded it, my grandfather rented a storefront near the village center where his bakery goods, made just a mile away, could be sold in town. The three younger girls worked the store, but discouraged their father to come there lest he insult the customers. The shop seemed to be doing well but the three girls graduated from high school and moved to an apartment they shared in the Bronx, and so the shop had to close. The girls married and settled either in the upper Bronx or northern Manhattan and lived out their lives there. Noone ever wanted to go back to Woodridge except to visit, even if I had fond memories of that little village.
Two other brothers of Louis Wenglinsky came to America at about the same time, also bakers, and both of those settled in the Bronx. Benjamin became quite wealthy and was important in the lives of my mother and father. I remember that I had never seen an en suite bathroom, one inside the master bathroom, before I had first visited what I thought of as his very grand house that included a living room large enough to include multiple couches and chairs set into separate conversation areas. I liked going there to play with his youngest son Marvin, just a few years older than me, and thought how lucky it was to play with toys rather than do what the adults did, which was just sit around and talk. I think the two of us, however, found things to talk about, such as why cities settled in places where there were earthquakes and volcanoes. Wouldn’t people try to avoid those? Marvin went off to college in Arizona to join one of his older sisters who had settled there and when I met him years later in that same large home at the time of his father’s death, he had become a lawyer and wondered why I hadn’t become one because schooling was easy for me but hard for him. I was studying English and he remembered a poem by Chaucer in a required literature course that he thought was silly, about animals talking to one another. Marvin also said that the professors he met in Arizona had to work in the fields during summer breaks so as to eke out their living wage. I did consulting work to supplement my salary but not never worked at manual labor.
My family and I saw Uncle Morris, the third brother, much less frequently, memorably the relatives gathering in his apartment while he labored through his last days of heart failure when twenty years later he and FDR would have medications that could considerably extend their lives. I remember his oldest daughter Esther as a busybody who criticized my mother while I was in the room for staying inside a cottage in Woodridge reading books rather than being outside and running around. But Esther was very sympathetic about the travails her son Sheldon went through learning to become an architect. So much in my life was already set by that-- female intrusions, occupational mobility-- before facing so many other situations and dramas that seem to me commonplace, such as young love and career successes and failures.
My various aunts and uncles changed their names so as to become more American. They changed it to “Wenglin'' or to “Linsky” or went all out and changed it to “Wayne”, but I, the next generation, kept the old name, perhaps out of stubbornly refusing to separate myself from my forebears however much I may have changed myself--or didn’t. When I asked my girlfriend to be my wife I asked her whether she could deal with such a foreign name and she said which name people used was a superficial issue and so hardly a bar to marriage. She subsequently used her maiden name for work life and used her married name when dealing with the children.
Names are important, especially when they are used to label a transition from one state of being to another. My son thought of changing his name but decided not to because, I think, he thought I would have been offended. My daughter changed her name through marriage but gave “Wenglinsky” to her own daughter’s middle name lest the name die out and Emma doesn’t like that because the name is ugly. My son’s son remains as “Wenglinsky” and thinks nothing of that. When my name was found difficult to pronounce, I said the person shouldn’t worry about it because I was ten years old before I could spell it and I thought of Adam Yarmalinsky, who was high up in the State Department in the Kennedy Administration. I didn’t mind that my name conjured me up as a Jew, given my accent and demeanor anyway, at least once I got to college, even if it led one person to ask me about divided loyalty and I did not make the usual rejoinder that the Irish and briefly the Italians and other groups are subject to divided loyalty and no one cares.
The classic description of the sequence of immigrant generations is that the first generation, the immigrants themselves accommodate, in that they keep their own ways of life and language at home while trying as best they can to adjust to the now native environment. The second generation, which are the children of the immigrants, are assimilated into the new society in that they pick up its goals and customs, becoming fully American, while the grandchildren of the immigrants, the third generation, return to some aspects of their grandparents traditions, such as reclaiming religious or ethnic identity. Since individual life is complex, each having his or her own peculiarities, the overall principle has to be modified by circumstances. My grandfather was clearly an immigrant and my father had been brought to this country when he was less than a year old and so dropped religious identity and became first a working class baker and then moved up to owning a small supermarket, fully American, just not very engaged in it, while my mother had left Poland for America because of the impending war, but she quickly learned English and never wanted to return to Europe or even Israel. But I myself, Abraham’s grandchild, was second generation not third generation. I was ardently American , always with Fourth of July sentiments, and I clearly identified myself by the time I was in college as cosmopolitan, which meant assimilating all cultures, thinking tolerance and diversity the basis of American life. I never adopted the third generation stance and neither did my children, however much my daughter remains the tag of Jewish without having any substance to that, and my son has become Episcopalian, which is not a return to religion but a way of moving further into the American mainstream. So I am left as a bridge between the identities of the past, which are Jews, immigration and Woodridge, and my own life as a minor American academic, just as anyone is a bridge between past and present, the past never eradicated so long as memory lasts.