by Anne Edwards
Barbara, just fifteen months old, could not understand why her mother was crying. But the child’s grief for her lost father would very soon undermine her stability, form her character and breed within her such corrosive anger and sense of self-deprivation – why me? why my father? – that her future happiness would always be compromised.
Footnote
1 The word shul is derived from the Greek schola, via the German Schule. The Hebrew word for a house of prayer is bet-haknesset, a house of assembly. Similarly, the Greek word synagogue means ‘assembly’. The two words are interchangeable, but often shul is used to describe a synagogue with a small congregation.
4
WITH NO INSURANCE money and very little in savings, Diana was forced to leave the middle-class apartment in Flatbush and move into her parents’ three-room apartment at 365 Pulaski Street, a four-storey building in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, named after New York State’s first Governor – old peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant. The Bed-Stuy area, as it was called, embraced a mixture of religions reflected in the spires, campaniles and domes that rose above its skyline of converted brownstones and small apartment houses. A huge black ghetto burgeoned in the northern reaches where a direct train, which had inspired the Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn classic, ‘Take the A Train’, linked it to Harlem. The Polaski Street area was predominantly old-world Jewish and Irish Catholic, most of the first-generation offspring having left for more elite addresses in recent years.
To Barbara the area was fascinating. Pushcarts brimmed with a cornucopia of items – ripening fruits, enticing candies, bright fabrics, buttons, threads, mops and brooms and used clothing. Women in aprons and men in alpaca skull caps and silkoline coats bargained emotionally with the peddlers. Bed linen billowed out of windows and on warm days people sat on stoops and fire escapes or by the kerb in stiff, wooden chairs in the hot sunshine while children in minimal attire played on the sidewalks or on luckier days ran through the gushing cool water of an opened fire hydrant. These were impressions that would colour her life. Still, the move to Pulaski Street was not a happy one.
Bubbe and Zayde Rosen, as their grandchildren called them, occupied one room of the apartment, Diana and Barbara shared a bed in another and Sheldon slept on a folding cot in the third room which was furnished with a dark-wood dining table, chairs and a china cabinet. There was no living room: the ‘family’ room was the dining room with no space for a couch. (‘Couches to me were like what rich people had,’ Streisand would later say.)
The Rosens were decent, hardworking people, but there was scant love in the house. Zayde Rosen was a cold man, bitter at his failure to succeed in America and at his unfulfilled cantonal ambitions. Bubbe was asthmatic and the apartment was filled with the acrid smell of the camphor that she inhaled and the strong lye soap she used as she hunched bent over the deep white enamel sink in the kitchen and scrubbed the family’s wash on a ridged metal board while her sprawling breasts shook beneath her cotton housedress and flowered apron.
Diana, a victim of depression, cried a lot. With two young children and a mother who was not well, she felt guilty to be living on the meagre army allotment cheques her bachelor brother had signed over to her, when it rightly should have gone to her parents. As a widow at thirty-four, with no money and two children, she feared she had no future marriage prospects, that her life was over. Her own trauma was so all-encompassing that she was unaware, or perhaps insensitive, to what Shelley and Barbara were suffering.
Shelley had lost his father at a crucial time in his childhood. Manny had always been able to communicate with young boys and help them with their problems. Shelley was artistic and Manny had encouraged his creativity. Never too busy to talk or listen to his son, a great bond had formed. Unable to relate to Diana in her state of depression and never at ease with his grandparents, Shelley felt the loss of his father keenly and during this time drew closer to his little sister, of whom he was protective.
Bubbe Rosen had not been prepared for young children to re-enter her household. The tumult they created jarred on her nerves and made her irritable. Shelley would run in and out of the apartment banging doors after himself. Barbara was all over the place, impossible to keep still, prone to knock things over as she played. Once she broke a piece of her grandmother’s cut glass, Bubbe’s most prized possessions carried with her so many years before on the boat from Russia. Shelley remembers that he and Barbara would scuttle under the dining-room table to avoid a beating whenever their mischievousness caused breakages or disruption. He was more fearful of his grandmother than Barbara, who treated both her grandparents with measured defiance. She seemed to know just how far to go before Zayde would get out his strap, and although he never hit either one of them with it, would crack the leather into a frightening sound that threatened he would.
Barbara simply could not relate to this elderly couple. Bubbe, a short, stout, full-breasted woman with wispy grey fly-away hair, would sit at the dining table and sip a glass of tea through a sugar lump she held between her teeth. She would sigh as she sat there, mumble things to herself. She seldom had a conversation with either of her grandchildren except to insist that they eat the food she always seemed to be preparing – cabbage soup, gribinens (the hard pieces that were left after chicken fat was rendered), tsimmis and honey cakes. She treated her frequent headaches by wrapping a vinegar-soaked cloth around her head. At those times Barbara knew she had to be especially quiet.
Of her two grandparents, Barbara was drawn more to Zayde. There was something mystical about his appearance, grey-blue eyes that seemed always to be seeing things in the distance that she could not, the movement of his oddly graceful stubby hands as he talked and the sing-song cadences of his chanting. Wearing a yarmulkah on his head, his tallis over his shoulders and his phylacteries (which were strips of parchment inscribed with words from the Torah) strapped to his forehead and left arm, Zayde would daven almost as soon as he awoke, facing east as he said his prayers for that is where Eritz Yisroel is. This intrigued Barbara and she would ask him questions about what he was doing and he would answer her unpatronisingly. It is doubtful that she understood what he was saying but she liked being spoken to as if he thought she could.
She and Shelley went to Zayde’s small modest shul on special holidays like Succoth and Simcath Torah when children were given apples to eat. She was envious of the grand appearance of the nearby Catholic Church but could well have been proud of the sight of her Zayde as he stood on the bima before the Torah scrolls wrapped in crimson velvet embroidered with gold thread and containing the five books of Moses. A short, wiry man, Zayde suddenly took on stature as he held the holy scriptures in his arms.
Diana finally went back to work as a book-keeper, which aided her strained financial situation but created more responsibility for her ailing mother. Barbara was sent to the neighbourhood yeshiva pre-school when she was three. During that summer she was shipped off for several weeks to Diana’s sister Anna and her husband who had a small house in western Connecticut. These experiences backfired. Parted from her mother, Barbara feared she would never see her again and clung to Diana even more when they were together.
Shelley was something of a surrogate parent during this period and when he was in school Barbara played on the stoop of the apartment building or in the hallways, cadging snacks from compassionate neighbours who believed her made-up stories that she had not been given lunch. When her brother came home, to his annoyance, she would follow him around until he went off to play stickball or other games with his friends. The building was not entirely occupied by Jewish families. There were Irish and Italian neighbours – non-kosher homes and had Diana or Bubbe Rosen known that she had eaten from these kitchens, they would have been furious. As it was, they never understood why she ate so little at mealtimes and worried that she would grow to be a sickly skinny-marink, considered a terrible fate for a Jewish girl, for what man would want to marry a scrawny woman? As a child, it took two years b
efore her hair began to grow; later she said she looked like a martian. A slight cast in one eye made her eyes turn in at certain times, but their sheer blueness compensated for this distraction. Possessing extraordinary energy, she seemed to be a small Vesuvius about to erupt. As a child of three or four, Bubbe called her farbrent, which in Yiddish means ‘on fire’. She refused to take no for an answer and always had an arsenal of arguments ready to win her point.
One stifling hot day in June when she was four and recovering from the chicken pox, she asked Bubbe if she could go out to play with some of the children from the building. ‘What kind of farchadat idea is that?’ Bubbe answered, and told her she was to remain exactly where she was. That happened to be on a cot near the fire escape. When Bubbe disappeared into the kitchen, Barbara dressed, climbed out of the window on to the fire escape and descended the treacherous iron staircase several steep flights to the courtyard below. She knew she would be disciplined when she returned. Her actions took a certain amount of bravery and audacity, not caring what the consequences were for herself or Bubbe, who was in a state of shock when she returned to find Barbara gone and the window by the fire escape wide open.
Everyone in these project buildings knew everyone else’s business despite the ethnic clannishness of the residents. Pity was generated for the Rosens who now had their daughter and two grandchildren to take care of, one – the girl – impossible, her mother should be ashamed. Unsure of what she could do to change her situation, Diana found herself increasingly impatient with Barbara, for as soon as she came in from work, Bubbe would greet her with a list of her daughter’s infractions that day. The beginning of the resentment that Barbara would always have toward her mother had its roots here. Thrilled to see her after being parted all day, she was greeted by a tearful, angry Diana. ‘Why do you always make trouble?’ Diana would cry, disappear into her room and shut the door between them.
Never feeling quite at home on Pulaski Street, Barbara liked to fantasise, often imagining her father was alive and that they lived in a grand house with a wide porch and a beautiful garden. She hated the ugliness, the smallness, the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Rosens’ apartment. When the windows were open you could hear voices in anger strained to an ear-piercing pitch, doors slamming, toilets flushing, radios blasting. The daytime soap operas were popular with all nationalities – Portia Faces Life, Myrt and Marge, the kindly Papa David on Life Can Be Beautiful and the very popular My Gal Sunday that posed the question: ‘Can a girl from a small mining town out West find happiness married to a rich and titled English Lord?’ At night there were The Goldbergs, One Man’s Family and the comedy programmes: Duffy’s Tavern, Jack Benny, Bob Hope. Kids liked listening to the adventure and suspense stories like The Shadow and The Green Hornet, and with only one radio in most families, squabbles arose over who had priority. There was no question about the six o’clock evening news. Everyone gathered around their set to listen. It brought the war into their homes, their absent family members and friends closer. Many still had relatives in Europe whose fate remained uncertain.
Brooklyn lost over 3,000 men in the war, with many more suffering serious injury, but its end in 1945 heralded the safe return of Diana’s brother Larry. Families were now reunited. Barbara could not understand why she did not have a daddy when the fathers of the other youngsters on Pulaski Street had returned from the services. She would ask Diana questions about her father and refused to accept the truth that she was never to see him again. In the intervening years since Manny’s death, Diana had gained hope that she would meet a man who could provide for her two children and be a father to them. She felt inadequate to deal with her strong-willed daughter and never did understand what it was that made her so difficult to handle. She was certain that she was to blame for her daughter’s unorthodox behaviour, her obstinacy and her lack of friends.
Very much of a loner, Barbara did have one comrade in the building, Irving Berakow. Irving’s parents had a seven-and-a-half inch television set, one of the first in the Streisands’ building. While Mrs Berakow, a generously built woman named Toby, cooked stuffed cabbage or knitted, the two youngsters would watch Laurel and Hardy through a magnifying window placed in front of the minuscule picture screen. This was Barbara’s introduction to actors on film. She was entranced, quickly learned the comedians’ routines and attempted imitations. She was able to make Irving and his mother laugh, but the same downing had no effect on the members of her own family, who found such antics unfeminine and unbecoming.
At five, she entered kindergarten in her yeshiva. Never able to become part of a group, she tried to win the children over by acting crazy or doing something ‘shocking’. When the rabbi would go out of the room, she would yell, ‘Christmas! Christmas!’ a word not spoken in a Hebrew school. But such actions only angered the rabbi and made her look foolish to her classmates.
Thoughts about religion and God aroused her curiosity. She remembers humid summer afternoons and evenings sitting on the iron-railed fire escape of her grandparents’ apartment with two other children from the building, one a Catholic girl and one an atheist. ‘It was so strange being so young, but we used to have debates about God,’ she recalled. ‘One night we were sitting there, with out blankets, and I said, “I’m going to show you there is a God. See that man walking down the street? I’m going to pray that he steps down off the kerb.” I never prayed so hard in my life, yuh know what I mean? Just, “Please show me!” And the man stepped off the kerb. That experience was like ... there must be a God. The guy stepped off the kerb!’
She claims she had no toys, only a hot-water bottle which she dressed as a doll. Diana insists this isn’t true but that the toys she had were not to her liking. She had dreydls (a top engraved with Hebrew letters that spins) and picture books. ‘The children on the street played hopscotch and jump rope. She had stuffed animals when she was little,’ Diana maintained. The hot-water bottle was used once when she had a chill and she had refused to relinquish it, filling it every night thereafter with warm water to give it shape and ‘life’, wrapping it in one of her outgrown sweaters and sleeping with it hugged tightly against her body.
The possessor of a vivid imagination, she made up stories where she was someone else or fantasised that her father would come to rescue her and they would go off together. To Bubbe’s irritation, she would smear Diana’s makeup on her face with the edge of a towel or streak it with Shelley’s school crayons in grotesque Indian signs which took a lot of scrubbing to remove. Shelley was artistic and loved stories and games about American Indians. He collected feathers from chickens, from pillows and bedcovers, from the street whenever pigeons were moulting, and turned them into Indian headdresses. These were sacrosanct, but Barbara would sneak them from his ‘hiding’ place when she knew he was going to be away for a while and wear them as she whooped through the apartment. She liked to play colourful characters, be someone other than who she was.
The summer she was five, painfully underweight and prone to bronchitis and ear infections, she was sent to a health camp in upper New York State sponsored by a Jewish organisation. ‘I remember their taking off my clothes and dumping me into this bath like I was a piece of dirt,’ she recalled. ‘They scrubbed me and washed me and put this lice disinfectant in my hair, then they put me into their ugly uniform.’ She found the idea of dressing like everyone else intolerable. After nearly drowning in the camp pool she refused to go into it. The camp session was six weeks. Parents were allowed to visit twice during this period. With no means of transportation, Diana was unable to get there. Although Barbara was not the only child who had no visitors, the sense of rejection was no less painful.
When she returned home she found Diana changed, ‘dressing up’ more, wearing new make-up, and having even less time for Shelley and Barbara than before. Diana had finally come out of her depression and was dating. ‘I hated those men,’ Streisand admits. ‘Once I saw a man kissing my mother. I thought he was killing her. Except she was lau
ghing.’ Diana had met Louis Kind, attractive – well built, a distinguished profile, thick, dark hair flecked with grey and a certain dash in the way he dressed – fifteen years her senior.
Kind had emigrated from Russia with his family as a child of five and learned tailoring in the small pants’ factory his father eventually established in Brooklyn. It was a career he detested and he ventured out on his own as a real-estate and used-car salesman. At one point, he took over the mortgages of several old rooming houses. A heavy gambler, he soon lost them and the rent money they had engendered. Recently separated from his wife Ida, with whom he had three grown children, he seemed genuinely taken with Diana. She was forewarned by friends of his instability and poor reputation. There were stories about the various loose women he had run around with and his gambling. Still, he was willing to take on the responsibility of another man’s family and Diana found him to her liking.
Barbara was sent back to the detested health camp the following summer and hated it even more, although she was to remember with lingering fondness the sponge cake the children were served on Friday nights. When Diana drove up with Kind in his car to see how she was doing at the end of her second week, Barbara cried and carried on, insisting on going back to Brooklyn with them. Nothing would stop her. She put together her possessions and crawled into the back of the car and refused to be ejected. ‘You are not leaving here without me!’ she screamed. And they were forced to give in.
Diana became pregnant in the spring of 1951. Kind’s divorce was not yet final and the atmosphere in the Rosen apartment was explosive. To have an unmarried daughter in such a condition was a chanda, a disgrace, a terrible thing. Kind was not allowed to come to the apartment. Diana was distraught, crying all the time. Finally, Kind came to her aid and rented a three-room apartment in a middle-class building, pretentiously named Vandemeer Estates, at 3102 Newkirk Street near the corner of Nostrand Street, a block away from the bustle of Flatbush Avenue and moved in with Diana and her two children. Diana quit her job and her neighbours were led to believe that she was married to Kind. He received his final divorce decree on 19 December 1951. Four days later, he and Diana were married in New Jersey by a Justice of the Peace and on 9 January 1952 their child, Rosalind, was born. Things appeared to be on the upturn for the little girl who had always wanted a father. The problem was that Barbara loathed Louis Kind from the very beginning.