“Well, here we are again, time sure flies fast,” Joseph wrote in
Martha’s Diary on February 8, 1930. “I am afraid to look how
long it’s been since I wrote in your book last.” He noted that
Martha was now in the fifth grade, and that her most recent
report card had been half Excellent and half Good. “So you are
not the very best, just middle best, so far. Which shows you
could do it if you put your mind to it.” She was also coming
along well with her piano lessons, although she still had to be
prompted and even forced to practice daily.
For special occasions such as Joseph’s birthday when a surprise
present was needed, Martha would secretly learn a new piece of
piano music and practice it on the sly. Each time she wondered
how she managed to practice without her father knowing, until it
finally dawned on her that everybody repeatedly pretended not
to know—Joseph probably appreciating her voluntary practicing as
much as the thought-that-counted. Mathilda would also slip the
children twenty-five cents, and they would buy their father a
couple of two-for-a-quarter cigars for his birthday, one cigar
coming from each of them.
Joseph’s February 1930 Diary entry mentioned that George (who
was beginning his second year in kindergarten, having been
deemed too young at five to enter first grade) had started
taking violin lessons. “I am teaching him to read music. I
asked him what is a half-note and a quarter-note together, he
thought for awhile, then said ‘One dollar.’”
In 1930 the Great Depression gradually made its presence felt
across America, not least in Chicago, which had devoted the late
Twenties to opening vast new public buildings and reeling from a
long spree of unrestrained, heavily-publicized gang warfare.
Now with the Depression deepening and prosperity not
waiting just around the corner, many jobless people were moving
to Chicago in search of work. In September a “Hooverville”
shantytown appeared at the foot of Randolph Street.
There was no shantytown up on Rosemont Avenue; and many of
Joseph and Mathilda’s relatives back in Europe assumed that
since the Ehrlichs lived in America, they must be rich. One
most convinced of this was Joseph’s younger brother Miska, who
played the violin in Athens café orchestras and later lived in
Cairo. From time to time Miska would write “dunning” letters
asking for money, and Joseph would exclaim, “They don’t realize
how poor we are!” Even so, the Ehrlichs occasionally
scraped together ten dollars and sent money orders to Joseph’s
mother Sarolta in Budapest
and Mathilda’s father Móric in Cluj. Since it could not be more
money, the Ehrlichs would say it was “for cigarettes.”
Around 1930 word came that Móric Kohn had died. Martha, who no
longer remembered her grandfather clearly, startled George by
bursting into tears; and Mathilda bought a candle to light in
Móric’s memory, the only such candle that George would ever see
in his parents’s home. Memorial candles were constantly burning
at Aunt Jeni Kohn’s apartment, which “always smelled of melting
wax.” But Jenka néni was the only one in the family
circle to practice all the rites of Judaism, even keeping a
kosher kitchen. Mathilda would have appreciated the comfort of
regular ritual and overt prayer; but such were definitely not
for Joseph, and Mathilda went along without question.
1931 January 3.
Here’s another year gone. We all are well, but I have money
worries again. I don’t think Mother and I ever will forget
these hard years. It doesn’t bother you because we try to keep
it from you and Gyuri. It would have been easier for you if we
had more money to do with. I am just mentioning this so
whenever things look dark for you, dear, never despair, but look
forward in hope like we hope for the better soon for us all.
Hope you won’t ever have to worry about money… Today you both
played music for the
PTA, it was very nice… [Joseph]
The younger Ehrlichs’s debut as an instrumental duet came about
because Mathilda belonged to the PTA, “and naturally we all
talked about our children,” so Martha and George’s progress on
piano and violin was well known. After PTA meetings the parents
“always had socials, coffee and cake and everybody brought
something—and one meeting I brought the children.” Together
they played several of the Merry Widow Waltzes “and got a
big ovation… [A] lot of people for years after asked me about
them, how they were getting along.”
Joseph was proud of his children’s musical prowess, particularly
Martha’s after six years of lessons, although he plaintively
wrote: “If you would practice half as much as you read, it would
be even better. I wonder if that will come true, Mártuka? that
sometime you will say ‘Thank you’ to me for making you learn and
to practice your music? I hope sometime you and Gyuri will even
earn money with your music…” (Ever practical-minded, Joseph was
always on the lookout for professional opportunities that might
be provided by a Well-Rounded-Out Education; Martha, for
instance, would be able to find work as a pianist in a silent
cinema.)
As she completed sixth grade Martha was her class’s best speller
but not so good in geography and history, “which I think is
because you don’t like them well enough to put your mind to
them,” wrote Joseph. “I could let you in on a secret, Mártuka:
I was poor too in these two subjects when I was as young as you
are now.” Martha did like and do well in math, and even better
at reading, both in school and out: one night Joseph had to take
her book away because she was reading in bed at eleven o’clock.
“You enjoy some of your books so much that you laugh right out
loud and startle all of us. But other times I notice tears in
your eyes, evidently the story was sad. But even now you like
best the stories I could tell.”
Joseph would regale his children with tales about the Three
Boys: Pali, Sanyi, and Laci.
Their adventures got the Boys in and out of scrapes at boarding
school, the circus,
and the North Pole:
For years I was telling stories about these three boys, making
up their adventures as I went along. Both you and George were
the happiest when I told these wonderful stories, even I enjoyed
them. I usually sat in our large armchair, Gyurika on my lap,
and you on the footstool facing us. We had countless sessions
like these, and I was happy hearing your laughter ring out when
the three boys did something funny. But sometimes you both
cried when the story got a little sad. These stories have been
going on for the last three years now, and at times I really
have to put my thinking cap on so I could continue them. Other
times I guess I fell back and mixed some of my early childhood
that I vaguely recalled and told as a story. Mother was always
there too, doing something else, but we all were together at
home.
1931 December 19.
Today I took out your diary and browsed over the pages a bit. I
think it is interesting enough even for a stranger. It seems it
is my diary as well as yours. Since we are in the U.S.A. I have
very little time for these sorts of things; I have to work very
hard to make a living for all of us. But at least once a year I
manage to sit down and chat with my girl. There wasn’t much
news to jot down this last year anyhow, you grew a lot and you
are a healthy normal child, have a good appetite. I only wish
George would have half as good.
You are in junior high school
in seventh grade. An average student, although the few latest
report cards show much improvement. The piano lessons are going
on and improving all along; you will be able to play well enough
for your enjoyment. Your most enjoyed recreation still is a
good book, you just started on the Jack London series, and when
you start reading you can’t put it away till it’s finished. You
don’t like housework at all, that’s why I’d like to make a
schoolteacher out of you, which seems a very good profession for
a girl, and positively you show inclination to be a good
teacher. You always loved to play school and you always chose
to be the teacher, which pleases me a lot… Now you are
both waiting for Christmas and naturally the gifts with it… [Joseph]
Christmas 1931 was the first big Christmas-for-kids that the
Ehrlichs celebrated in America. Till then Martha and George had
been given small gifts, toys or books or school things, but this
year Martha asked for a typewriter and George (who still
believed in Santa Claus) wanted a Lionel electric train; and
their parents decided to buy both, “although I have no business
to spend all that money when we are so short.” Having as usual
paid off all his various debts, Joseph had little cash left; but
instead of making his children “partners” in the current hard
times, he splurged all his few spare dollars on Martha and
George. The gifts were exchanged on Christmas Eve, as was the
family custom: Martha got her typewriter and was soon learning
to type her schoolwork; George spent all his time playing with
his electric train; and both children got “a couple of good
books also.” George was “a bookworm already, always reading and
spelling out every thing, we never see him without a book in his
hand.”
As 1931 gave way to 1932, the Depression ground bitterly on.
Things continued getting worse in Chicago, one of the
hardest-hit American cities: wages dropped in economy drives,
schoolteachers went without pay for months, rent payment sagged
drastically and hundreds of families were evicted from their
homes. In January 1932 Edmund Wilson visited old Jane Addams,
still doing social work at Hull-House; she sent him to observe a
Hooverville next to a garbage dump at 31st and Cicero. Wilson
found that rules had been established there so each family would
get a fair turn at the garbage when fresh dumps came in. Banks
were collapsing nationwide, and by September less than a quarter
of Chicago banks were still open; for years to come Joseph would
not trust a bank, choosing to keep his money in the fur shop
safe instead. The economic paralysis made life increasingly
unpleasant and times unrelentingly hard.
Joseph had perhaps six hundred customers at his peak in 1930,
but from then on his clientele was not to grow. A fur coat,
because of its warmth, was almost a necessity in the days before
central heating; purchasing one was a major investment intended
to last fifteen, twenty, even thirty years. Choice was based
less on fashion than on durability: you might buy a muskrat
coat, or a beaver coat if you could afford it, or better yet a
seal coat—that was a good one; it would wear well.
During the Depression, keeping coats in good condition was how
Joseph and other small furriers were able to survive; they did
not sell many new coats, but kept repairing and remodeling old
ones. Besides cleaning and storage, Joseph’s bread-and-butter
business would be fixing a rip in a coat, or replacing its
buttons, or sometimes shortening or lengthening a coat to
restyle it.
In 1932 the landlord of the Ehrlichs’s shop at 1539 Devon
announced he was doubling their rent. Joseph realized they
could no longer maintain both an apartment and a store, so he
made what George would call “a kind of primitive market
analysis,” looking at various areas in north Chicago, and
deciding that one location down the street from the old store
was of significance. The family moved shop and home to 1553
Devon Avenue: up a dark stairwell on the second floor of a
building that faced the Ridge Theatre across Devon. It was just
east of Clark, near two major streetcar line intersections and a
large streetcar barn; there was a lot of traffic, and Joseph was
looking for visibility. He pictured people coming out of the
Ridge Theatre and seeing the “Ehrlich Furs” sign in the upstairs
window, or changing streetcars on Clark and seeing the other
sign projecting from the building wall.
An existing second-story apartment was partially gutted and
transformed: its living room became the fur store’s showroom,
looking out over Devon; the main bedroom and its closet became
the workshop and storage vault. Joseph had his safes brought
from the old store, hauled up on pulleys through the windows at
1553 and installed there. The workshop got a metal door with a
grating, “but any thief could have broken in,” George would
remark; “it gave the semblance of massive security.”
The dining room, behind curtained French doors, became the
Ehrlichs’s living room. The kitchen became the family’s dining
room; the refrigerator remained there, but the stove was moved
into the pantry, which became the family’s kitchen. Joseph and
Mathilda slept in the back bedroom, and for a year or so George
slept there too, on a youth bed; he later moved to a rollaway
bed in the family’s living room. Martha slept on another
rollaway bed in what had been the kitchen, and after a couple of
years would write: “I have to drop everything to help open my
bed. I hope the darn bed caves in. I would rather sleep on the
floor.”
The apartment tended to be very crowded. From the
kitchen/dining room one could go out onto a back porch which
Joseph enclosed and used as an additional working area,
especially for cleaning furs in a “drum.” A wooden stairway led
from the porch to ground level; this was the children’s usual
entryway. Lake Michigan was only five blocks or so to the east,
and up on the second story the Ehrlichs were able to get lake
breezes.
Martha and George would grow up living at 1553 Devon, in a
neighborhood where traditions stretching back to the 19th
Century were still present: there was a blacksmith down the
street, and icemen and greengrocers and ragpickers. The icemen
and milkmen still got about on horsedrawn vehicles, while others
went up and down the alleys carrying their apparatus on their
backs, as Markus Temmer had once delivered laundry. Several
empty lots and abandoned excavations were nearby, since the
Depression had ended all construction, but George was to say,
“It was not a bad neighborhood to live in. [Although] it was
not integrated, not racially, but ethnically it was; there were
all kinds of people. It was not a bad place to grow up in…”
Joseph and Mathilda’s fur business would remain at 1553 Devon
for many years. As time went by they were fully aware their
clientele was dwindling, particularly as the spread of central
heating allowed cloth coats to dominate the market. Depression
or no Depression, it was never an easy way to make money and the
Ehrlichs always had to be very cautious about expenditures;
Martha and George were brought up with frugality and both would
make it a lifelong style of living (often out of necessity).
Weeks would go by with no contact at all from customers,
especially in the spring and summer. During a couple of these
dry spells George helped his father make a canvas banner to hang
under the showroom windows, saying (in carefully-drawn block
letters) SPECIAL—on cleaning or the like. Joseph strung out his
work and took his time doing it, maybe spending two hours
mending a coat, then reading the newspaper for the next three
hours. On average he probably worked no more than twenty hours
a week, but had to be “on call” all day in case the phone might
ring, or the bell that sounded when the store door opened.
Joseph could pretty accurately gauge just how well business was
(or was not) doing by going into his “wault” and looking at how
many fur coats were stored there, recalling the better times
when all his racks had been filled.
Sometimes during Depression summers the only income was from
Mathilda’s work
on her hemstitching machine. “Times were hard for everybody,”
she was to say:
Even though we paid twenty-five cents for a pound of butter and
ten cents for a loaf of bread, also a quart of milk, it still
was hard to live it through until Thanksgiving when the
customers started to call for their fur coats. Then we had
plenty of money to pay for all the materials we bought during
the summer. Then about six months’s rent we owed to our lovely
landlady, Mrs. Haney, who trusted us each year… Fur business
is, or was, funny. No one knows that better than the furrier’s
family. We had plenty of work all summer, but no one paid for
it until they called for their coats… Boy oh boy were we happy
then to see money after about six months of moneyless waiting.
Soon as we got it, just as fast we started to pay our bills to
everybody. But we were happy to do it and had big celebrations
over the holidays.
Joseph had been terribly disappointed in America, but a decade
after his and Mathilda’s arrival they had established a business
and a home and a life for their children that held as much
promise as anyone on their economic plateau had in the 1930s.
With this accomplished, Joseph built himself a protective shell.
For entertainment he would go to the parks, enjoying free Sunday
concerts at the Grant Park bandshell; occasionally to the
movies; or to the homes of relatives in Chicago and Racine.
Unrelated Hungarians, friends of the Ruhigs or the Hoyers, were
often included in the family group, and when everybody got
together they played a great deal of cards. The women played
gin rummy or canasta; the men—usually the foursome of Joseph,
Béla Ruhig, Markus Temmer, and Steve Hoyer—would play máriás,
a Hungarian game much like pinochle, where cards were trumped
with tremendous snapping flourishes.
Sometimes the Ehrlichs would accompany the Ruhigs to
Hungarian-American picnics which featured Gypsy orchestras and
Old Country dancing, but Joseph did not feel truly in his
element there. Yet he never attempted to find his
element, not even after the Depression when there was more
leisure time and fewer financial worries. He never made it to
night school, never got involved with clubs and organizations as
did the outgoing Mathilda or Béla Ruhig. (In German ruhig
means “quiet,” but Béla was always “involved in these intense
political discussions” about what was wrong with The System and
how it should be corrected.)
Joseph could not overcome his dread of being perceived by the
New World as an ignorant unlettered “bohunk.” After being
buffeted by adversity most of his life, he had found haven in
the calmer waters of the routine and the comfortable. So (as
Joseph saw it) what sense could there be in seeking out the
unknown? In having to deal with further change? It was simply
looking for trouble. So he no longer willingly ventured beyond
the
familiar circle of Family and Home. To his children in January
1931 he had written:
My ambition is to make you both love your home, and I try to do
everything possible for you to like being at home always. I
want you to remember how nice it was to be at home together.
Don’t forget my dears, your home is always open for you, and
never will fail you. Think of your home as your church.
Notes
