Wendy and the Lost Boys (3 page)

Simon, Lola’s father, had an abrupt and dramatic departure from Poland, according to family lore. In his exodus story, the Polish police suspected him of conspiring with Bolsheviks, sometime in the mid-1920s. Wendy had heard the legend. “He was at a café on the town square in Wloclawek with his intelligentsia friends, discussing all the latest isms—socialism, atheism, Zionism—when a pal arrived to say the police were on their way. It seems the Polish police were not as impressed with the ideologies of the twentieth century as Shimon Schleifer was. My grandfather never went home again.”

He made his way to Greece, where he obtained a false passport identifying him as Greek. Passenger-boat records confirm that he arrived in New York on August 30, 1927, from Cherbourg, France, on a ship called the
Majestic.
His birth place is listed as Salonika, Greece, his age as forty-two, and his ethnicity as Hebrew.

His wife, Helen, followed in 1928, with Lola; her brother, Henry; and her sister, Gucci, who became Gertrude in the United States. Another sister, Hela, had recently married and stayed behind with her husband and children. They were doing well; they felt they could build a future in Poland. The illusion of prosperity would be their downfall.

In the United States, Simon would fall into a life not so different from the one he’d left behind. He became a Hebrew-school principal, at Paterson Talmud Torah in New Jersey—not a full-time occupation, but he’d never had one. He continued to hang out with his friends, smoking English Oval cigarettes while playing cards, debating, and discussing politics, philosophy, and history. He was as much of a bon vivant as a responsible greenhorn could be.

“He was a Hebrew-school principal, but that didn’t keep him from visiting the racetrack occasionally,” said Jack Schleifer, Lola’s cousin. “I know one or two times he took me to Coney Island when Coney Island was something to visit. Simon had a lust for life, he had joie de vivre.”

So did his daughter. Lola would transform the dislocation and loss into yet another spirited story.

“She had this reel of stories,” said one granddaughter. “She didn’t go to Ellis Island, she came over on the
Île de France,
they were wealthy, and she had a Polish maid. When she arrived in New York, they were picked up by her uncle’s chauffeur, and he was the first black man she ever met, and she said, ‘You must be dirty; wash your face.’ She told this story over and over again. Why?”

W
hy?” was not a question Lola cared—or dared—to ask. Pondering why would be a luxury granted to future generations. She had no patience for introspection or angst. “My mother always presented her life as a very happy life. She was very loved, very admired by her father,” said Georgette, the middle daughter.

Lola taught by example: she understood intuitively that power comes through control of the narrative. She had nothing to say about any insecurity she might have felt as an adolescent, newly arrived in a strange country whose language she didn’t speak. (How did she tell that black chauffeur to wash his face, since she hadn’t yet learned English?) Instead she told her children what she wore to high school in Paterson (a short, stylish camel-hair coat, saddle shoes), how she walked (with a seductive wiggle), and why she couldn’t pronounce
l
’s (because of her Polish accent). Even this difficulty with language became a triumph, not an embarrassment. When she called a high-school friend “Wooie” instead of Louis, she only remembered that the mispronunciation had cracked Wooie up.

But Lola couldn’t work her anecdotal sleight of hand on the next chapter of her life. She couldn’t manufacture a plausible comic twist on the events that transpired in the years after she finished high school and that would shape the trajectory of Wasserstein family life. The scenario that began as a romantic comedy ended as tragedy, so she simply deposited those years into the file marked “Secrets That Aren’t Secrets.”

Her children would learn these secrets piecemeal. The older siblings knew more, but Wendy and Bruce had only vague awareness of a phantom brother, Abner, who was alive but was kept apart. They were adults before they understood that Abner and Sandra had a different father from theirs and Georgette’s. The fact itself was far less disturbing than the cover-up, which deeply influenced Wendy and Bruce throughout their lives.

Georgette was caught in the no-man’s-land of the middle child, not part of the experiences that formed the older children, yet more aware than the little ones. She had grown up knowing that she’d been named for her Uncle George. But she didn’t discover until she was a teenager that her uncle was also her mother’s first husband.

The secret was uncovered by accident, with Georgette rummaging through her mother’s drawers, looking for a scarf to wear to school. A side panel loosened to reveal a hidden drawer. There she found a newspaper article about her uncle’s death notice, listing his survivors. George, not Morris, was the father of her two older siblings. Lola had been his wife.

Shocked, Georgette stuffed the article back in the drawer and replaced the panel. “My parents had gone out for a walk, and when they came back, my mother asked me, ‘Why are you so pale?’ ” Georgette said. “I didn’t tell her I knew.”

Eventually to Lola she confessed what she’d found, but they didn’t discuss George until Georgette was fifty years old. One of her daughters, a young woman by then, had written a play, being performed at a theater in New York’s East Village. Georgette and Lola took a bus downtown to see the show.

They got off the bus at Fourteenth Street, and Lola, somewhat mysteriously, told Georgette to come with her to Union Square.

When they arrived, Lola said, “This is where I met George.”

It was a strange moment for Georgette. She was his namesake. But for most of her childhood, he’d been nothing more than that, a sentimental link to the past.

Lola offered a Broadway-musical version of how she’d met her first husband: George had gone to a political rally at Union Square; Lola was meeting her father at a coffee shop after a dance lesson. George was handing out leaflets; Lola threw hers in a trash can. Lola remembered being irresistible; George succumbed immediately. He trailed after her until she turned and asked, “Why are you following me?” As if she didn’t know.

She continued toward her destination.

George joined her and her father, put his bundle of leaflets on the table, and began to talk to Simon. The match was made.

Or something like that.

Lola had street smarts and ambition. When she heard George’s business plans, and that he wanted to have a family, she could see a promising future unfold. With her shrewd intuition, Lola wasn’t likely to overlook George’s unusual maturity. He wasn’t much older than she was, maybe twenty when they met, but he was clearly a man. Like her, he was a Polish refugee. He had arrived in New York, however, under very different circumstances than the ones that had brought Lola there.

The Wassersteins were from Wizna, a village in northeastern Poland, around thirty miles from Bialystok. The landscape of their youth was bucolic; the children played near the banks of the Biebrza River, where they watched logs cut from the vast northern forests float by.

But, as old men would say over glasses of tea, you can’t eat beauty. Like Simon Schleifer, George’s father, Jacob, left for America, with vague plans for self-improvement and the promise he would send for his wife and five sons. Herman, the eldest, joined him in New York, and so did Jacob’s only daughter. Herman worked for a while and then returned to Europe to bring the rest of the family to the United States.

In the spring of 1928, the five Wasserstein boys boarded the SS
Laconia
with their mother, Charlotte. Herman was followed by seventeen-year-old George. Morris was the baby, only six years old. In between came Joseph and Teddy, ages twelve and nine. The passenger list recorded them by their Hebrew names.

The crowded boat had limited facilities. Charlotte stood in a long line to reach the single water faucet, clutching the bottle she planned to fill for her children. From this small maternal act came disaster. The bottle broke and cut her hand. The wound became infected. By the time the boat docked in Liverpool, Charlotte was so ill she required hospitalization. Her two oldest sons, Herman and George, disembarked to take her to the hospital, where Charlotte remained, too sick to get back on the boat. Herman and George told their little brothers to continue on to New York. They would follow when their mother got better.

Herman and George’s sojourn in Liverpool quickly became a deathwatch. Charlotte died as her three youngest sons traveled toward America, to be greeted by a father they barely knew. Jacob Wasserstein took his sons to his apartment on the Lower East Side, where they would learn their first English sentence from children on a neighborhood playground, who snarled at the greenhorns, “Get outta here!”

The early details of this immigrant saga are sketchy, but family members generally agreed that Jacob Wasserstein didn’t keep his end of the bargain. In America he had found another woman. Not long after the older brothers arrived, their father told them he had a girlfriend. Or, in Morris’s unsentimental recollection, “Ma passed away. For a while we lived with
her husband,
and then he married again.

“Finally the older ones said, ‘Let’s move out.’ ”

The boys found a one-room apartment a few blocks away on Rivington Street. Theirs was a classic Depression-era story, filled with tales of grim scrounging and small triumphs. The older brothers found odd jobs; the younger ones went to school. The brothers sold newspapers in front of Ratner’s, the famous dairy restaurant on Delancey Street, occasionally treating themselves to the luxury of a pickle sandwich. As the designated cook, Morris scavenged for supplies. He made the rounds of restaurants, using his ragamuffin charm to collect leftover bones to use for soup. When he looked in the windows of those restaurants and saw people having a meal, putting food in their mouths without noticing what they were eating, he was left with a particular kind of hunger.

MORRIS WAS ALWAYS ON THE MOVE, EVEN AS A BOY.

Morris told these stories with gratitude, not bitterness. He saw hopeful significance in the fact that the SS
Laconia
landed on July 3, the day before Independence Day. He took enormous pride in being accepted to Stuyvesant High School, the city’s premier public high school. When he died in 2003, Wendy said at his memorial service, “My father and his brothers in many ways are the epitome of American optimism and opportunity in the twentieth century.”

This was not an exaggeration. By the time George bumped into Lola near Union Square in the mid-1930s, the hardest days were behind him. He was already working his way toward the establishment of Wasserstein Brothers, a ribbon-manufacturing company. The Wasserstein boys survived their wrenching childhood by adapting, learning to figure things out. They would turn this skill to business, becoming inventors, managers, and investors.

Lola knew potential when she saw it. On January 16, 1937, she and George were married in Bayonne, New Jersey. Their wedding photograph shows a fairy-tale couple, a groom with fine, intelligent features and the bride a striking young woman with elegant cheekbones; she is wearing a traditional white gown.

LOLA AND GEORGE, THE FAIRY-TALE COUPLE.

They plunged into creating their future. Seven months after their marriage, on August 20, 1937, Sandra was born; three years later they had a son, Abner. Life was full. Besides their own children, the young couple took in George’s younger brothers, Teddy and Morris. They, too, joined the family business. After graduating from Stuyvesant High in 1939, Morris took night courses in mechanical engineering at City College of New York. The brothers kept late hours, always refining better ways to make ribbons; frequently they slept at Wasserstein Brothers on cots.

The misery overwhelming Poland and Europe seemed distant at times, immediate at others, but the young immigrants were too busy to dwell. The Atlantic Ocean stood between them and the war. The business was growing, and so were the children. Lola and George found a more spacious apartment in Brooklyn when Sandra was small; Lola’s parents moved to Brooklyn from New Jersey, to be close by Lola’s family as well as to numerous other relatives. They had re-created a better version of Poland—still living among Jews, surrounded by family—but there was a crucial difference. In the United States they saw attainable opportunity, a chance to become part of the larger community.