Streisand: Her Life (2 page)

To Laura Van Wormer and Glen Sookiazian...
very special friends

“What a mieskeit!”

—Barbra Streisand,
reacting to a picture of herself at thirteen

M
R
.
AND
M
RS
.
E
MANUEL
S
TREISAND
take much pleasure in announcing
the rather expected and hoped-for arrival of
B
ARBARA
J
OAN

(a cute little trick even if they must say so, weighing 7 lbs. 5 ozs. net)
at
5: 04
A. M.,
Friday, April 24, 1942
After 10 days at her original residence,

The Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn,
she moved to 451 Schenectady Ave., Brooklyn, N. Y., where she is
living with her proud parents and her especially proud brother,
Sheldon Jay

O
utside, the world was on the cusp of catastrophe. Five months earlier the United States had gone to war against Germany, Italy, and Japan, and American boys were being carried off to battle by the tens of thousands. Austria, from which Emanuel Streisand’s father had emigrated in 1898, had been overrun by Hitler’s Nazis in 1938, and its Jews, some of them Streisand family members who had stayed behind, were being systematically slaughtered in concentration camps. Russia, the homeland of Mrs. Streisand’s parents, had been under siege by the Nazis for months.

But inside their well-kept apartment on a quiet residential street in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, Manny and Diana Streisand lived a separate peace, and most was right with their insular world. Thirty-four when his daughter was born, Manny hadn’t been called up for service because of his age, his fatherhood, and the fact that he had carved out an extraordinary career as a teacher of troubled young men. The firstborn son of a man who still barely spoke English, in 1941 he had been included in the Science Press directory
Leaders in Education.
He made a decent living as a teacher of truants and delinquents at the Brooklyn High School for Specialty Trades, and supplemented his $4, 500 annual salary by tutoring at a yeshiva in the late afternoon during the school year and at educational camps every summer.

Manny Streisand worked hard—too hard, his wife often thought—but in Thoreau’s words, he loved turning the “free meandering brook” of an errant teenager’s life into a “straight cut ditch” of education, discipline, and prospects for a future. And he was determined to give his wife, his seven-year-old son, and his new baby girl the best possible life, one free from the terrible hardships his own parents, Isaak and Anna Streisand, had endured over the past half century.

I
SAAK
STREISAND STOOD
on the train station platform at Lvov, surrounded by his sisters and parents, covered in layers of sheepskin against the frigid Baltic air. It was the first day of January 1898, and the strapping seventeen-year-old was on the verge of a new life. He was leaving the harsh world of the Jewish
shtetl
in the village of Brzezany in eastern Galicia, a principality under the control of Austria-Hungary and bordered by Poland on the northwest, Russia on the east, and Austria-Hungary on the south. He was going to America, a land of seemingly endless opportunity: in the prior twenty years in the United States a former newsboy from Ohio named Thomas Alva Edison had become rich and famous by inventing, among many other things, the light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera and projector.

The
konduktor
blew the train’s shrill whistle to signal the
schnellzug’s
departure, and a series of thick noises rumbled from the engine as it struggled to start. Isaak picked up his three bulky bundles and said his final farewells. His mother’s stoicism dissolved into tears as she hugged her only son, whom she would never see again. Mali Feldman Streisand and her husband, Kesriel, had been born in Brzezany, and they would stay there. It was for the young to seek a better world.

Conditions in Galicia demanded that Isaak leave. One of the most destitute spots in eastern Europe, the country barely provided sustenance for its people, most of them farmers with only primitive skills and no outlet outside the village in which to sell what they produced. Villages consisted of two rows of thatched huts along either side of a muddy dirt path; next to each hut lay a great heap of manure, which every summer Isaak and his sisters kneaded with earth to form bricks that were then baked hard in the sun and used the following winter as fuel against the often thirty-below-zero cold.

The Streisands had two rooms, the “hot room” and the “cold room.” In the first the entire family, which included Kesriel’s parents, ate, slept, and worked in a twelve-by-sixteen-foot space. The cramped quarters contained just two pieces of furniture, a table and a narrow wooden bench, and the
pripitshik,
a huge brick stove-fireplace in the middle of the room from which a seven-foot-long wooden shelf extended. The parents and grandparents slept on this shelf, the warmest spot in the hut, while the children slept on the wooden bench, which extended along the side and back walls. The manure that fueled the fire turned the indoor air caustic.

For Galicia’s 10 percent Jewish minority, persecution and hopelessness joined poverty. Two years before Isaak Streisand left Brzezany, a series of nighttime rape-and-plunder raids against the people of the
shtetlach
by their Slavic neighbors had left the Jews terrorized, their spirit dashed. The plight of the Galician Jew became a worldwide cause célèbre, but not much help ever came, and thousands of Galicians were among the one-third of eastern Europe’s Jewish population that emigrated to America between 1880 and 1930, a group that included over a dozen Streisands from Brzezany and its neighboring villages. Now Isaak was among them.

Kesriel Streisand helped his son onto the train, then stood and watched as the long black clattering hulk chugged slowly out of the depot. The rail journey lasted nearly a week as the
schnellzug
made its way northwest at barely fifteen miles an hour through Poland and Germany to the port city of Bremen. There, on Saturday, January 8, Isaak hauled his bags onto the S.S.
H. H. Meier
, a mid-sized ship of the North German Lloyd Company, along with three hundred sixty other mostly Jewish emigres who were pressed together into cramped steerage quarters.

The ship wended its way up the Weser River to the North Sea, then veered westward into the Atlantic for an arduous two-week crossing. Illness caused by damp and cold, poor sanitation, and spoiled food claimed several lives; the bodies were tossed overboard. By the time the ship approached Ellis Island, many of the huddled masses on board were weak and dispirited. But the sight of the Statue of Liberty renewed the hope that had propelled them westward.

Isaak was processed through Ellis Island on Friday, January 21. A doctor checked his health, and a German-speaking translator recorded his responses to the standard questions. Then, along with hundreds of others, he shuffled aboard one of the boats that ferried immigrants from Ellis Island to Manhattan around the clock. At a dock on the Lower East Side, he stepped off the gangplank to face an uncertain future.

O
VER THE NEXT
nine years, Isaak was assimilated into the teeming immigrant neighborhoods of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He worked as a common laborer, doing odd jobs for his German-speaking neighbors. He had little need to learn English, and he never spoke it more than haltingly. By 1905 his three sisters had come through Ellis Island as well.

Late in 1906 Rachel Streisand introduced her twenty-seven-year-old brother to a pretty, vivacious blue-eyed fifteen-year-old girl named Annie Kesten, who had come to America the year before from Galicia with her father, Max, her mother, the former Dreijzie (Daisy) Cohen, and her sister, Berthe. On May 1, 1907, Isaak and Annie were married in Manhattan by magistrate Elias Friedman.

The newlyweds settled into a small tenement apartment at 248 East Seventh Street at a rent of $15 a month. Almost exactly nine months later, on February 5, 1908, their first child, Emanuel, was born. At more or less regular two-year intervals afterward, Annie gave birth to Maurice (nicknamed Murray), Herman (Hy), and Philip. In 1916 a daughter, Daisy, named after Annie’s mother, was born, but she died in infancy. In 1918 the Streisands’ last child, Molly, was born.

Slowly, Isaak Streisand made his way up in the world. Molly Streisand, now Mrs. Nat Parker and Isaak’s only surviving child, recalled that her father “used to carry a sewing machine around on his back” as he went from house to house doing odd tailoring jobs. “He made I guess eleven dollars a week. He didn’t have much, but we ate pretty good.”

Annie’s cooking skills helped. She kept a kosher home, and Molly recalled that “my mother was a marvelous cook, a great baker. She would make huge cheesecakes, and sponge cakes with a dozen eggs. She’d stay up all night when it came a holiday and she’d make five cakes and gefiite fish and pickled herring and cherries with plums and peaches, and matzo balls. Her matzo balls were perfect, they weren’t hard—like some of them that you can bounce off the wall!”

The Streisand brood remained in the cramped Seventh Street apartment until 1919, when Annie fell and injured herself on the building’s rickety and debris-strewn inside stairs. She sued the landlord, Henry R. Stern, for the $166 medical bill. On December 8 a judge ruled that Stern should pay the medical bill, but granted his request that the Streisands be ordered to vacate the premises by the end of the month.