Measure of a Man (14 page)

I stepped off the train and saw a smiling Kalvin Mermelstein. “Welcome home to New York!” he said with his arms stretched wide. I gave him a big hug, and we headed for a small rental home on Thirteenth Street in Brooklyn. We rented one of the house’s
three tiny bedrooms. There was one small bed to share, a community bathroom, and a monthly rent of $6.50 each. It was perfect.

My first goal was to master English. Learning the language was, for me, a matter of respect. I lived here now; I was an American; I needed to speak English. In my experience, the best way to pick up a new language was to plunge right in. Shortly after arriving in Brooklyn, I signed up for night classes at Erasmus High School. My teacher there was a wonderfully patient and compassionate woman who used American traditions and customs as linguistic examples to excite our minds and encourage our studies. Few American customs piqued my curiosity more than baseball.

I wanted to understand baseball from the minute I saw that massive line of fans outside Yankee Stadium hoping against hope to get World Series tickets. Any sport that could make that many people stand for hours to buy a ticket must be spectacular, I figured. One of our early homework assignments was to bring a picture of something in America we wanted to learn more about. People brought pictures of movie stars, historical figures, and U.S. landmarks. I brought a baseball picture.

“You’re interested in a sport called baseball,” she said. “The best way for you to understand baseball is to see where it’s played.” She took a small scrap of paper and jotted something on it and handed it to me. “That’s the address for Ebbets Field,” she said. “That’s where the Brooklyn Dodgers play baseball.”

That weekend I found my way to Ebbets. No one was there.
If there’s no game today, maybe I can at least see the playing field
, I thought. I walked around the massive building and jangled every gate, but they were all locked.

I approached my teacher after the next class. “I went to the address you gave me. It’s locked up. I couldn’t get in. Why would they lock up baseball?” I asked.

“Oh, no, you see, it’s not baseball season right now!” she explained. “You have to wait until they begin playing games again during baseball season.”

I didn’t understand what she meant. In Pavlovo we played soccer whenever we wanted. Why we had to wait for the weather to change to see baseball I wasn’t sure. But I could hardly wait.

Meanwhile, I was less excited about my work situation. Kalvin came through and got me a job at GGG making thirty-five dollars a week. I had no tailoring experience, so they started me as a floor boy running items around the wood plank floors. Hundreds of employees at dozens of stations worked inside the factory, which had opened in 1917. The whole operation confused the hell out of me. Had it not been for the racks of finished suits, I would have never been able to guess what product we were manufacturing.

The only experience I’d had with the tailoring of a suit was with the man in Prague who made my two suits. He was one person, and he made all the parts of the suit. But GGG was a massive operation with hundreds of workers creating suits in a piece-by-piece assembly line. The complexity confounded me. The initial language barrier didn’t help either. Worse, there was one particularly nasty worker who, for whatever reason, enjoyed confusing me by refusing to speak Yiddish, even though he knew how.

By the end of my first week, I was ready to quit. I marched up to the GGG manager, Adolph Rosenberg. “I’m not sure this job is for me,” I told him.

“You’re doing fine. What’s the problem?” he asked.

“This whole thing is stupid to me. I don’t understand what I’m doing and how it makes a suit,” I said. He chuckled. “I need this job and I’m grateful for it. But I cannot work unless something makes sense to me. I have to understand what I’m doing. Because when I do, I will do it better than anyone else.”

Adolph Rosenberg understood me. He realized I had to understand the entire suit-making process to perform at my peak capacity. He was one of the best managers I’ve ever worked with. His brother, Sam, also worked at GGG and was in charge of pressing. The Rosenbergs were American born but also spoke Yiddish and Hungarian in addition to English. Were it not for Adolph Rosenberg’s managerial instincts and patience, I might have exited the suit business altogether. He took me from station to station and explained the 108 operations that went into every GGG suit. Each worker specialized in making just one section of a suit, so he became an expert at it. The system also ensured consistency. The GGG manufacturing process was a breakthrough in the hand-tailoring industry. By the time Mr. Rosenberg was finished, I understood how all the pieces fit together to make something beautiful.

If the Nazis taught me anything, it was that a laborer with indispensable skills is less likely to be discarded. I was determined to learn every single task at GGG. I wanted to be the best, to stand out. Hand basting, darting, piping, facing and lining, blind stitching, pressing, armhole work, joker tags, fell stitching, preparing besoms, finishing—I would learn how to execute every procedure better than the person who taught me.

I also learned the importance of strong and open communication. You can learn from people at all levels. I have a grade-school
education. Yet for decades I’ve made the finest men’s suits in the world. I didn’t need an expensive education. I watched, listened, asked questions, remained teachable, and devised ways to beat the best. I never aimed for mere excellence. Perfection was always my passion. Who wants to be second best? What’s the point? If I was going to invest years learning the painstaking craft of hand tailoring, I would not stop practicing until I could make garments that danced.

No person at GGG was a better tailor than the firm’s designer, Frank Perchacio. Barely over five feet tall, Frank was one of the best designers and tailors I’ve ever met, a legend. He’d been trained in Italy at a time when a tailoring apprenticeship could run seven or eight years. But Frank had also gone to design school in Chicago. His dual background gave him the rare ability both to dream up a design and to make it a reality through fine hand-crafted tailoring. He loved to innovate. In fact, Frank made the first “extra short” jacket that became a big seller with shorter customers.

Still, not all my interactions with GGG workers were as cordial and beneficial as those with Rosenberg and Perchacio. Ironically, it was my American Jewish colleagues I differed with most. We read from the same Torah and attended
schul
(synagogue) but had vastly different experiences. Many of them were Socialists or Communists, and I couldn’t believe their ignorant embrace of failed ideologies. “You were born here,” I told them. “You’ve never had the Russian Communists come in and seize everything. I have. Communism is not what you say it is. It is theft and murder. It’s a lie. You don’t know what you’re talking about! How do you believe these ideas without investigating the reality?” I asked them.

Debate was futile. Their minds were made up. They stuck to their political theories without evidence or experience. I was sad, because many of them were sincere and hard workers. I decided it was best only to talk about suits, not society. There was no way for me to make them understand. They had been hoodwinked. I had seen the face of tyranny. They had not. They had the luxury of believing ideas whose consequences they never felt. I didn’t.

Despite my differences with my colleagues and the annoyances they sparked, I could not have asked for a better place to hone my craft. Hand tailoring is a painstaking skill passed down from master tailors to apprentices over generations. At GGG, I stumbled into a treasure trove of knowledge and technical expertise. William P. Goldman, Frank Perchacio, Adolph Rosenberg—these men imparted wisdom and opportunities rare in the fashion industry. Looking back, my path to hand-tailoring perfection began that day at GGG when Mr. Rosenberg took me from station to station to learn the scores of steps that go into crafting world-class, flawless wares.

After a hard day of work at the GGG factory, Kalvin and I would hit the town at night after my English class. Nightclubs, Danny’s Hideaway on Forty-Fifth Street, Thursday night dinners at the Doral Hotel, movies, double dates—we were living a young man’s dream. We did it all.

After nearly three months in New York, I wanted to experience Washington, DC, for the first time. “If I don’t see Washington, then I’m not an American,” I said.

“Great. We’ll go in the week between Christmas and New Year’s,” Kalvin said.

We took the train to Washington and stayed with one of Kalvin’s aunts. Her husband was born in Pavlovo on the same day as my father, and the two became great friends. He owned a supermarket and had two daughters. It quickly became apparent that the family was trying to fix me up with the eldest daughter, who was in college. Her father suggested that she accompany Kalvin and me on our capital tour to help us navigate the city and assist with any English translation needs we may encounter.

My love affair with America only deepened. The Capitol, the White House—I never dreamed that decades later I would make suits for the men inside those buildings. All I knew was that there was nothing I did not love about my nation’s capital. Kalvin and I wanted to see and experience everything. We toured the museums with free admission. When I arrived in America, I was told that in five years I could take a test on American history and become a citizen. I had to study Washington. President Abraham Lincoln and the Constitution joined General Dwight Eisenhower as my favorite symbols of America. Like Eisenhower, Lincoln had freed the slaves. When we went to the Lincoln Memorial and stood before that austere marble statue, I smiled. The men who put this country together made me proud. The Constitution—the radical idea that people should control the government, not the other way around—astounded me. I loved it all the more because I knew how revolutionary and rare an idea that truly was.

Unrepentant tourists, we made our way over to the U.S. Senate. With our host’s daughter at the ready to translate, we struck up conversations with anyone who looked like he would talk to us.
An older, important-looking man walked up to us and asked if we were enjoying our time in the nation’s capital.

“It’s incredible. I never dreamed it would be this beautiful,” I said in broken English.

“Where are you visiting from?” he asked.

“Brooklyn, New York,” I said.

“Our neighbors to the north,” he said. “That’s wonderful.”

“My name is Martin Greenfield. This is my friend Kalvin Mermelstein,” I said.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Alben Barkley. I’m a United States senator from Kentucky,” he said.

“A senator?! Such an honor to meet you, sir,” I said.

“Yes, such an honor to meet you,” said Kalvin.

“The honor is all mine,” he said. “Where are you from originally?”

“We come from Pavlovo, Czechoslovakia,” I said. “We came to America after the liberation.” Senator Barkley paused and stepped closer.

“Were you in the concentration camps?” he asked in a hushed tone.

“Yes, sir.”

“Where?” he asked.

“Auschwitz and Buchenwald,” I said. Senator Barkley looked stunned.

“Do you have time for lunch today?” he asked. “It would be my privilege to take you to lunch. After we won the war I went to Germany and toured the camps myself. Saw the bodies. Saw it all. It was horrific, the most horrible thing I’ve seen in all my life. I would be most interested in hearing about your experiences.”

Kalvin and I shot wide-eyed glances at each other. “Yes, sir!” we said at the same time.

While we sat and ate, Barkley peppered us with questions. Anything we didn’t understand, our female friend translated. He wanted to know everything. I was struck by how knowledgeable he was about Hitler, the Nazis, and the concentration camps. As it turned out, Barkley had visited Buchenwald on April 24, 1945, when I was still there. Here is how Barkley remembered the experience in his 1954 memoir,
That Reminds Me
:

         
Another experience, the horror of which shall be engraved on my memory as long as I live, was my trip to Germany early in 1945 as chairman of a joint Congressional committee to inspect Nazi extermination centers. As the American Army began to drive into Germany, General Eisenhower, then the Allied commander, recommended to General Marshall, Chief of Staff in Washington, that Congress be asked to send a committee to view these camps, because they were so atrocious and horrible that it was hard to believe, without seeing them, that such things existed. . . . We visited Buchenwald, Nordhausen and Dachau, names that will remain forever infamous. What we saw was loathsome beyond description: looking at the starved, dead bodies, piled in courtyards like cordwood, even hung on hooks like cattle in a slaughterhouse, made one want to reach out and seize a club or a gun and start punishing the guilty parties.