On January 27,
1925, George Ehrlich—“Putsy” to his sister—was born at the
family apartment on Division Street, helped along by midwife
Anna Bonus. A week later
Joseph wrote in Martha’s Diary:
1925 February 8. You have a little baby brother,
Mártuka… In the first few days you were disappointed because
you wanted a sister. When you first heard it was a boy, you
cried and said to give it back, you didn’t want a boy, just a
girl. It took three days for you to accept him, after we let
you hold him in your arms, and from then on you loved him and
wanted to play with him all the time. My dear Mártuka, I just
hope you always will be good to your little brother, never have
misunderstandings, and love and take care of him. You will
always be the older, and have to be smart and look after him,
then you both will be very happy. George is a very good-looking big baby,
nearly nine pounds at birth, and looking straight at
you while you hold him; you like to watch him and are happy to
be with him.
Some years later, writing this time in English in George’s
Scrapbook, Joseph would
humorously redescribe his son’s arrival:
The stork arrives! There is a blessed event
this afternoon at 2607 W. Division St. second floor front. The
temperature is low, and Martha is lower—she wanted a sister.
Papa Ehrlich is unemployed, but not for long. Li’l Georgie
brought plenty to do—making soup, cleaning house, and of course
the inevitable “three-cornered
pants” to put the hourly crease in.
Li’l Georgie (Gyuri or Gyurika
in the mother tongue) was himself to unsentimentally state: “I
was born on Division Street in Chicago, on West Division Street,
and even then it was a rather run-down area.”
The birth of her nearly-nine-pound son was difficult for
Mathilda and it took her some time to recuperate. On George’s
birth certificate, her occupation is listed as “housewife” and
Joseph’s as “hat manufacturer”; but about the time George was
born, Joseph began a stretch of unemployment that went on for
months. He’d had a series of odd jobs, none lasting very
long—as a janitor in a theater, cleaning spittoons, or hard
labor when he could get it. One time he was hired to do sewing
at a factory by giving the impression he knew what to do, then
trying to fake it by watching others. But he did not turn the
sewing machine’s light on, thinking he would save electricity,
and this gave him away; he was fired after half a day’s work.
“Without experience, everybody took advantage of him,” Mathilda
would remark, “and several days he came home without getting
paid—they just telling him not to come back tomorrow. His hands
were sore and swollen so he couldn’t hardly hold his spoon to
eat with. I felt terrible to watch him struggle and never
giving up. But he was terribly discouraged and if he’d had the
money he’d have gone back to Europe the next day. Thank God he
didn’t have the money for that at that time…”
Perhaps the worst of Joseph’s odd jobs was sweeper in a
marshmallow factory, where powdered sugar was always drifting
down through the air, getting shoveled up off the filthy
floor—and being used again.
In February Martha began attending “regular school,
kindergarten,” and some cut-out hearts and
colored-dots-pasted-on-paper were tipped into her Diary “for you
to see later on: this is your first handiworks in school.”
After praising them and noting that “up to fifteen,
you can do arithmetic every which way,” Joseph added:
I hope, my dear, that whatever I can help to make easier for you
I’ll be able to do. And all that didn’t come true for me, I can
help to make come true for you in life. Be a good girl and
study hard my dear, and most of all be friendly and helpful to
your fellow man so everyone will like you, it will make you
happy in later life, and never be ashamed that you are a
Hungarian.
When Mathilda had
recuperated and George was old enough to be placed in a daycare
nursery, Mathilda returned to her job at the hat factory.
Joseph did not object to wives working outside the home, but
his wife shouldn’t have to; and “it hurt his ego for me to
be bringing home the money,” Mathilda would say. After about
four months of joblessness Joseph got work at Mathilda’s
factory, stretching hats on forms. To him this must have seemed
only a marginal improvement: his wife had to obtain him the job,
and as a
professional
milliner she of course had the more skilled position.
1925 June 9. Mártuka, I feel guilty because I’ve neglected
you lately. You know darling you are not the only child in our
house anymore. I always thought I could never love a second
child as much as I loved you, but I was mistaken all the time.
I do love Gyurika just as much as I ever did love you.
Sometimes I play a bit more with him than with you, not because
I love you less, but because he is the smallest and more
helpless than you are. At first you felt hurt and it made you a
bit jealous of him, but now you get used to having a little
brother and you too love him just as much as Mama and I do… but
once in awhile you ask me still if I love him better than I love
you. Believe me, my dearest, we both love you just as much as
before, except we can’t play with you as much as we used to when
you were the only one.
I am terribly disappointed in America. I have to work very
hard, and even so I have a lot of worry and haven’t got the
spirit to play much nowadays. For the last four months I was
unemployed, and you overheard when Mother and I talked about
where we could get money to pay the rent for our apartment. You
understood our worry and now every so often ask me if we have
money for the rent. I am sorry dear you have to worry with us,
I never intended for you to know about it, and did not think you
heard and understood what we were
talking of… [Joseph]
Mathilda’s home millinery shop “just didn’t go at all,”
and with it the $300 spent for materials were written off as
wasted. The Ehrlichs had to take a loan to pay the Division
Street rent, and at this grim time the family was near to
completely destitute; but of course there would be no question
of “burdening” their relatives. Even so, they could at least be
nearer friendly faces, and around August the Ehrlichs moved back
to the North Side:
It took quite some time, but finally we did find
a suitable apartment for ourselves and in a very nice
neighborhood, 807 Lakeside Place, close to Lake Michigan, which
is lovely. When we look out of the front window we can see the
beautiful Lake just
across the walk, with a large sandy beach full
of people.
The new apartment was basement-level, but the Kohns and Ruhigs
lived within walking distance and on weekends the family could
get together on the beach and in Lincoln Park. “We had a lot of
fun together.”
Things gradually began to look up for the Ehrlichs. They spent
much of that summer in the park, going out for inexpensive
strolls just as they had in Kolozsvár. According to Martha,
“Our Sunday afternoon entertainment was an endless walk for I
don’t remember how many miles, to a ‘country’ type area where we
sat on grassy knolls and watched the trains go by.” They would
usually pack a lunch for these outings and eat it overlooking
the train tracks.
Around this time things got busy at the Ruhigs’s fur shop, and
Rose and Béla asked Mathilda and Joseph to help them out by
sewing up small furs. As Mathilda was to say, “It was quite a
surprise to everyone” that Joseph took to this, learning “every
kind of fur work and doing a good job on all of them.” The
Ruhigs asked Joseph to stay on and work for them steadily as a
finisher; he agreed, although his pride and determination to not
be a burden doubtless gave him the driving ambition to open his
own fur shop before long.
If not yet content, Joseph was for the time being feeling more
cheerful. In September Martha had become “a real school girl,”
beginning first grade; the Ruhigs’s store on Sheridan Road was
not far from Lakeside Place, and sometimes Mathilda and Martha
would bring George in his buggy there so that the family could
walk home together. “Soon the work started to interest me,”
wrote Joseph, “and it was better than no work at all, and we all
got along pretty good.” He presented Rose Ruhig with a
watercolor he’d painted of three roses, dated September 3, 1925,
and signed Józsitól [“From Joe”]. That same month Martha
turned six years old (“Honey, time sure flies”) and her parents
gave her a colossal party:
1925 October 4. …By the time the party was on, we had
twenty-two kids around the table. Luckily we have a large
living room, and everyone enjoyed the food and games and had a
wonderful time… Mother baked a large birthday cake with pink
frosting, also made lots of fancy cookies. We served ice cream,
and each guest got a paper basket full of candy. Your little
brother was sitting in his high chair right with all the
children at the table, his big eyes wide open watching
everything, and trying so hard to talk… We have lots of fun
with Gyurika, you love each other and play very nicely always.
Sometimes just to tease you I pretend I am angry at him and talk
loudly, but you run to me and beg me to leave him alone.
In a few days we’ll be two years in the U.S.A.
You hardly remember anything or anyone from our old home. Still
talk Hungarian but your English is perfect already, no accent,
which I believe your good ear for sounds and music is to thank
for. I wish I would have more money, I’d love to start to give
you music lessons, but we are quite poor, even a violin seems
too expensive. Mártuka, it is bad to be so poor as we are, but
we all have our
health, and right now that’s the main thing. [Joseph]
At Christmastime Martha “got lots of lovely presents which made
you happy, you still believe in Santa Claus, so we had for you a
nice Christmas tree. You could be happy my dearest while you
believe in such illusions, and we like to prolong it till we
possibly can without harm.”
So Joseph wrote; but for Martha, Christmas posed a considerable
problem. In Europe there had been St. Nicholas filling shoes
with clowns and chocolate, “but that wasn’t a godly
figure. And in America, it’s God. And that’s what
disturbed my father terribly, and that is why he didn’t want me
to have any part of it, and I was so torn between wanting to
take part and be with the other kids, and the loyalty to my
father.”
For Joseph the Neolog rabbi’s fatalistic son, religion was
something educated people did not need as a crutch. However
carefully you might plan and make provision for the future, what
was going to happen was going to happen, and you were inevitably
going to have to cope with it: that was that. “Yes,” Martha
would sum up her father’s philosophy, “reality—everything had to
be reality.”
“Tomorrow will be George’s first birthday,” Joseph wrote on
January 27, 1926. “I can’t tell you much of your little brother
yet, he doesn’t do much.” As for Martha, “at first we worried a
lot about you, my dear. For the first three years of your life
we always were with you, and all of a sudden we landed in
America, and all changed for you and for us too.”
On February 23rd Martha got her “first paper in school with a
100 on it”—an arithmetic exercise in addition, to her father’s
pride and joy, and of course the high-scoring paper got tipped
into the Diary. “Hope many more will follow it,” Joseph added.
That month he was able to buy a used piano, and started teaching
Martha the basics of how to play it: “The first lesson went very
well. You learn quickly and have a very good ear for music.”
Joseph also bought a violin for himself “from a man who needed
the money, he asked only ten dollars for it.” Mathilda had
learned to play the piano in Kolozsvár, and sometimes she and
Joseph “played easy duets together,” thought not often since
Mathilda did not think she was very good. Both thought “it
would be nice if we could recapture some of our old lifestyle
again in our new country.” Moreover, Martha’s piano lessons
were viewed by her parents as being “necessary to a
well-rounded-out education.”
Martha herself was to say: “The remarkable thing is that as
strapped as they were, and as poor as they were, the things that
were listed as priorities to do for the children—there was
always money for this. No matter where they had to scrimp. If
it had to be for the children, it was there… Dad had time to
teach me, but he wouldn’t ‘have time’ to sit down and enjoy
himself, playing for himself.”
For Joseph’s thirty-second birthday on March 17th, Mathilda had
the first portrait photograph taken of Martha and George
together. Martha wore “a lovely new white fur coat and matching
tam made from ermine tails, showing a bit of silver greys.
George has his first knitted wool outfit with cap on his head to
match… Dad was really very happy with this birthday gift.”
By mid-March Joseph had been giving Martha piano lessons for
several weeks, “but now you don’t want to practice anymore. I
have to force you to do it because I can see sometime you will
be a very good pianist. Now we get to the point where I have to
pay one cent to you, to even sit down at the piano.” On the
other hand Martha liked to read all the time, to the point where
her concerned parents sometimes had to take her books away for
fear of eyestrain. (She had started wearing glasses regularly
again a few months earlier.)
1926 June 15. …Mother and I love to read too, but we don’t
have too much time for that, except when you and your little
brother are fast asleep… Good thing we have a library not too
far away, and it has a few Hungarian books on the shelves. Also
we get the newspapers. Wish we could read English more
fluently. There’s so much we must learn, and Mother started to
read your schoolbooks and it seems they help her to understand
and to speak a lot more now. Soon as I find time, I will try to
go to school at night; if only I could get to it, I’d feel so
much better. But so far I am too tired when I get home, and I
like to spend more time
with my family. [Joseph]
He was never to make it to night school, and his skill at
reading and speaking English always lagged behind Mathilda’s.
In the years to come she would use both her library card and
Martha’s to check out ten books at a time, every week or two,
toting them back and forth in a shopping bag. But however
Joseph might feel about life in America, he was always to find
solace in his children. Years later, retrospectively and in
English, he would write in
George’s Scrapbook:
Life carries on at 807 Lakeside Place, where all the children of
the neighborhood fight for the honor of playing with Georgie—”the
darling of the lakefront.” This is the place where I initiated
you into the exciting realm of Little Red Riding Hood, your
favorite bedtime story. No other would do, and it wasn’t long
before you were able to chime in on the list of groceries in her
basket, and explode at the end of—”leves (soup), hús
(meat), főzelék (vegetables), bor (wine), sör
(beer), with an
emphatic palinka (brandy)!”
The Ehrlichs’s
basement apartment on Lakeside Place had windows at sidewalk
level. A streetlamp was outside the bedroom window, and when
the bedroom light was off at night the streetlamp would
illuminate the room. “Those days,” Martha would recall, “were
among our more lean-’n’-hungry ones, and ‘boughten’
entertainment (movies, etc.) few and far between.” But Joseph
would cut from cardboard little silhouettes of people, animals,
birds, trees, buildings, and the like; and at night he would
tell his children stories, illustrating them by having the
shadows of his cardboard props cast upon the bedroom wall.
Notes
