by Fred Goodman
That didn’t please his paternal grandparents, who, unlike Joe and Anita, were deeply religious. They knew the Browns loved Allen, but they abhorred the thought of having their grandson brought up by nonobservant Jews. The woman can’t go to shul or the mikvah—the ritual bath used by Orthodox Jews —but she can play cards? It wasn’t right.
Everything changed in the summer of 1935 when Philip received an urgent phone call at work. It was the hospital. Seven-year-old Naomi had fallen from a moving car.
“My sister Esther was working and Anna was supposed to be the watchdog,” Naomi said. “She took me on one of her safari rides one day with a bunch of wild Indians. I fell out of a rumble seat and my father had to come get me in the hospital. Anna was always a wild child. She had, what, five husbands?” Clearly, the girls needed more supervision—and Philip’s parents were still carping about their grandson being raised like a goy at the Browns’. That August, Philip solved all his problems by having Anna, Naomi, and four-year-old Allen placed in Newark’s Hebrew Orphanage and Sheltering Home.
Though he didn’t know what was happening, Allen remembered the day vividly. “It was very strange,” he recalled. “My grandmother was dressing me and crying. I was standing on a chair and crying because she was crying. And I got put into a station wagon with two of my sisters.”
The home, a looming stone Victorian with a circular driveway, was across town on Lincoln Avenue in Newark’s north side. It was a quiet residential area and a world away from the bustling Jewish south side. Virtually none of the thirty-odd children living there at any given moment were actually orphans; in almost every case they, like the Kleins, were Jewish children from Depression-battered families that couldn’t care for them. The home took children only up until the age of sixteen, and Allen’s eldest sister, Anna, aged out after just a few weeks. But the four-year-old Allen was the youngest child they had ever accepted.
“We were dropped off at this three-story house and when I turned around, everybody was gone,” said Allen. “I needed to go to the bathroom and I walked around this house but I couldn’t find it. I went back outside; they had a big backyard with swings and stuff. I was upset because I really had to use the bathroom. There were bushes and I went in and I took a crap in the bushes. And I remember, you know, later, walking around there and seeing the flies . . . the horseflies. And being embarrassed and saying, ‘It’s not mine. That’s not mine.’”
Allen and Naomi slept in separate dormitory rooms but were otherwise together every day and attended the nearby Bergen Street public school. Small, Allen was friendly but shy and felt apart from the other kids, who nicknamed him Weasel. (The name stuck. Thirty years later, his nephews and nieces knew him as Uncle Weasel.) “We walked to school every day in line,” he said. “We were the home kids; ‘Those are the kids from the home.’ I tried to straggle behind. I think I just ignored everything.”
Life at the institution was far from cruel. There were chores but there was also time to be a child. “There was a playground,” said Naomi. “Allen fell off a swing and broke his arm, and you had to learn how to climb over the fence if you wanted to get out to get candy and stuff. This wasn’t a jail. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t jail.” During the summer there were two weeks at the YMHA camp in Milford, Pennsylvania, and day trips to a beach on Staten Island.
Weekends were the worst. On Sundays, families could take their children out for the day. Worried that Allen looked frail, his grandmother brought groceries to the home on Sundays and convinced the nurse that he needed a special breakfast of soft-boiled eggs, butter, and bread. But as his grandmother’s health failed, her visits became less and less frequent.
Philip came to the home just once, to take the children on a brief summer trip to visit relatives in Wheeling, West Virginia. The driver from Reinfeld’s, where Philip worked, picked up Naomi and Allen one or two Saturdays a year so they could spend a night at the apartment Philip shared with Anna and Esther or at the one their aunt Helen lived in with her husband, Lenny. Another aunt, Bell, occasionally visited and once even drove them to a Howard Johnson’s for ice cream. But those were rare occasions. Almost every Sunday, Allen and Naomi hung on the orphanage’s gate watching as other children boarded the number 27 bus with their families and headed downtown for Chinese food. “Sundays were bad,” Naomi said. “We used to weep a lot.”
And that was how they passed five years. With a new Hebrew orphanage under construction nearby, Allen looked forward to a time when he wouldn’t have to sleep in a bunk bed and had his own clothes closet. Now, when clothes came back from the laundry, everything was dumped in the middle of the room and it was a mad scrum to dig for what was yours. He hated retrieving his clothes almost as much as he hated the way his old socks, darned at the heels, chafed his feet. Life would be better at the new orphanage.
October 5, 1941, was a legendary day in New York sports. In the bottom of the ninth of Game 4 of the World Series, a game-ending third strike was called on Yankee batter Tommy Henrich. That should have given the Brooklyn Dodgers a victory and tied the series at two games each, but the ball skipped past Brooklyn catcher Mickey Owen, allowing Henrich to reach base and the Yankees to rally to win the game (and, ultimately, the series). Ten-year-old Allen, listening raptly to the radio at the orphanage, didn’t realize it was a big day in his life too. All he knew was that George, his sister Esther’s husband, was coming to get Naomi and him and that the blue wool suit with knickers that he had to wear was itching like crazy.
After a stop at George and Esther’s apartment on Stuyvesant Avenue, the children were driven to a three-story, six-apartment building on Tillinghast Street in Weequahic.
“We walked upstairs and opened the door and there on the left was a brown Philco radio and a color picture of my father sitting on it,” said Allen. “So something lit up in my head.” Indeed, his father was there—as were his grandmother, his aunt Helen, and a woman he didn’t know.
“This is your new home,” Philip announced. “You’ll never have to go back to the Hebrew orphanage home.” The stranger was introduced to Allen and Naomi as Lillian Drucks, their new mother.
Allen was thrilled. “Somebody wants to be my mother?” he recalled years later. “Anybody! You want to be my mother? I’m ready!”
Several years older than Philip, she had been married with grown children when she met and became smitten with the butcher. “He was the man about town and Lilly followed him all around,” said Naomi. When Philip said he’d marry her if she’d make a home for his children, she divorced her husband. Though Philip didn’t explain it to the kids then, he and Lillian had married that morning.
Allen and Naomi were ecstatic as they ran through the apartment, hugging each other when they reached their new bedroom at the other end. “We couldn’t believe this was happening,” said Naomi. Allen was most stunned by what he saw in the kitchen. “There’s no lock on the refrigerator!” he whispered to Naomi. “Do you think we could get a drink?”
Allen now had the run of the neighborhood, and it was liberating. The schoolyard and ball fields around the corner at the Hawthorne Avenue School were the center of his new world—“Allen was Mr. Playground,” said Naomi—and he came to love his stepmother. “I really had no relationship with my father,” he said, “but Lillian was great.”
Saturdays and summers he spent working with Lillian’s two grown sons, who operated a small painting and wallpapering business. Allen was their dollar-a-day helper, cleaning the paintbrushes, wrapping them in newspaper, and folding the tarps. “Then I graduated to painting behind the radiators and in the closets.” Sundays and Jewish holidays were reserved for trips to the Hebrew cemetery on South Orange Avenue. Allen loathed them. Confused and frightened, he wasn’t even sure what death was, and the passing of his maternal grandmother just six months after he came home from the orphanage did nothing to lessen the mystery and fear. Allen told an aunt that he wanted to become a doctor and bring his mother back to life; he listened to th
e weekly show Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons with a mixture of terror and hope that the popular radio detective would find her. “I hated going to the cemetery,” he said. “I was afraid to go. I was afraid of dead people.”
An indifferent student, Allen coasted through school on the strengths of a quick mind and an exceptional memory. At Weequahic High School he was the loud ringleader of a small group of neighborhood boys who shuttled between the movie theaters and the playgrounds. Still, he wasn’t otherwise popular or socially successful and he craved companionship. “I’ll tell you what I got from my father and from being in the home,” he said. “I knew what it was like to be on my own.” His high-school yearbook was signed by just one classmate: Philip Roth, the neighborhood’s future chronicler and literary light. They were not friends, and Roth has no recollection of Klein. Perhaps Allen simply envied or longed to know the gifted classmate who, even then, seemed most likely to succeed.
Work was a different story than school; he embraced it completely. At fourteen Allen began working for a next-door neighbor, Melvin Stein, who was a few years older. Already out of school, Stein had purchased a newspaper route in nearby Short Hills, and he hired Allen to help. “He was a hard-working guy,” Klein said, “and I looked up to him. He was like an older brother I never had.”
At first Allen hoped his new friend and mentor would help him figure out a way to win his father’s affection. “I would talk about my father and he would say, ‘Your father will just keep breaking your heart. Don’t think about it.’” Indeed, Philip Klein seemed incapable of seeing good in his son or taking his part in any argument.
“I got into a fight in front of our house and this guy was bigger than me and I finally got on top of him,” Allen recalled. “My father came and held my hands while this guy hit me. Because I had to be wrong.” In high school, Allen got into a spat with a girlfriend who threw a glass at him, necessitating stitches. “I didn’t say anything—I told them it was an accident—but the girl’s mother found out and she called my father and Lillian.” When the mother blamed Allen and threatened to take action, Philip was apologetic. It was Lillian who stood up for him. “She said, ‘You people talk too much. It takes two to tango.’”
His friend Melvin encouraged Allen to focus on work. Within the year, the two were also employees of a Newark newspaper and magazine distribution company, Essex County News, which dealt with eight hundred accounts, largely candy stores and newsstands. Every month, shipments to each account had to be tallied and billed, after which Essex paid publishers for what had been sold and returned the banners and covers of unsold newspapers and magazines for credit. Allen, who was already demonstrating an affinity for numbers, could add up a bill in his head as rapidly as the boss or the billing clerk could figure it out on an adding machine. He was a quick success at Essex.
Though just a teenager, Klein got an eyeful of some seamy if common business practices, watching as people created false accounts, cheated suppliers, and padded bills. Not only did items “fall off the truck” as van drivers pulled magazines from orders and sold them elsewhere, but the company purposely inverted numbers on invoices to its advantage, hoping that stores wouldn’t notice if they were billed, say, $32.17 when they should have been charged $23.17. If anyone caught the “mistake,” a credit and a quick apology were issued, but often no one did. Allen discovered that outdated and unsold magazines—which Essex was supposed to scrap after returning the front covers for credit—were being sold coverless in the New York subway for a dime each. Despite being repulsed by some of these practices, particularly Essex’s ripping off mom-and-pop candy stores, Allen enjoyed work more than school and he fantasized about having his own business.
In January 1951, Klein graduated high school, six months late, and talked his friend Henry Newfield into enlisting in the army with him. He had two reasons for joining up: first, Allen wanted to go to college and knew his father couldn’t or wouldn’t send him, so he would need the financial assistance provided by the GI Bill; second, and more urgent, the Korean War was under way and he was sure to be drafted. By volunteering, he hoped to gain more control over his training and his chances of remaining stateside. “I figured they were going to get me anyway,” he said. “And that’s what got me interested in going to school.”
Klein’s strategy worked. After basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey, he was shipped to Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana for eighteen weeks of further training; there, he opted to learn shorthand and typing in the hope that office skills would land him a safe assignment. With the exception of West Virginia and Florida, where he had been taken to visit relatives, Indiana was Allen’s first exposure to the world beyond cloistered Jewish Newark. The culture shock was lessened by the discovery of a nearby Jewish country club, Broadmoor, which had an open-door policy for Jewish servicemen.
There, Klein learned to play both golf and tennis, and the latter became a lifelong passion at which he both excelled and cheated. Singer Bobby Vinton, a Klein client in the early sixties who remained friendly with Allen, recalled a doubles match in which they opposed each other. “My partner asked, ‘Who is this guy?’” said Vinton, “and I said, ‘My accountant.’ He says, ‘Well, if he does your books like he keeps score, he’s screwing you bad.’” Klein’s plan for avoiding Korea worked out better than he could have hoped. When his father, Philip, developed fainting spells, the Klein family physician requested that Allen be stationed as close to home as possible, and he became a clerk for a general on Governors Island in New York Harbor. The most lasting impact of Klein’s army hitch, however, came from serving with soldiers who were better educated and worldlier than he. Henry, the friend with whom he’d enlisted, was two years older than Allen and had already spent some time in college, and now Allen found himself serving with young doctors drafted from medical schools.
“The people who were being drafted were all college guys and I would hear them talk and feel embarrassed by my lack of knowledge,” he said. “They read philosophy—I would hear them talking about Nietzsche—and I didn’t know shit. I was really fucking embarrassed.”
It wasn’t just about books; even when he’d been stationed in Indiana, Klein had felt like a bumpkin. What was wrong with him, he wondered, that he didn’t share the tastes of the men he was meeting? It didn’t matter whether the topic was champagne or olives, history or opera, it ate at him that others seemed at home in a world he knew nothing about. “Some of it was petty, but it bothered me.”
In search of answers, Klein became an autodidact. “I spent an enormous amount of my time in the army in the library.” Along with developing a love of opera, he became a voracious reader. Novels with exotic settings were a favorite, and he was particularly devoted to Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, but his biggest influence was Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd novels.
Now rarely read, the then-popular eleven-book romans-fleuves recounted the life and international adventures of Budd, the socialist son of an American munitions manufacturer. Published between 1940 and 1953, the series included the Pulitzer Prize–winning Dragon’s Teeth, a fictionalized account of the rise of Nazism, and painted an epic, left-leaning chronicle of world events and politics from the outbreak of World War I through the aftermath of World War II. “I read every one of those books,” Klein said. “I learned about the war from Upton Sinclair.”
After his years in the orphanage, the death of his mother, and the indifference of his father, Allen could see himself only as an outsider, as less than everyone else and undeserving of affection. But his crash course in self-improvement brought the reassuring epiphany that doubt and the struggle for self-worth were common threads woven through the human experience. Reading had given him a life-altering revelation, lifting an enormous weight. “It was an amazing thing to realize that I’m not the only screwed-up guy,” he said.
Around the same time, Klein made another intriguing discovery, one that would have an equally profound and lifelong impact. Though he’d carried a ch
ip on his shoulder as an orphanage kid, his story actually had a good deal of romantic cachet. The men he met in the army, even the doctors and the Ivy Leaguers, were intrigued to hear the tales from his institutional childhood. However painful his past, he wasn’t a loser or an outcast—he was a Dickensian exotic.
One thing Allen could not overcome was his fear of death. Though he loved his stepmother, Lillian, and was deeply grateful for the way she had always stuck up for him, when she suddenly died, he couldn’t face going home for her funeral. That fearfulness extended to his relationship with her sons; although he liked them and had enjoyed assisting in their wallpapering business, after her death, he never spoke to them again.
Upon his discharge from the army in the spring of 1953, Allen returned to Newark, where his father had quickly remarried. Whether by coincidence or because Philip saw no reason to buck a winning formula, his third wife’s name was also Lillian—and she immediately became known within the family as “Lilly the second.” Allen moved in with them, but his hopes of going to school full-time were short-lived. Philip insisted Allen earn his keep.
“My father said, ‘You have to work,’” he recalled. “So I went out and I got a job at the Sherwood Paint Company doing inventory. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. And I hated it. I hated the smell of the paint.”
Fortunately, it was only for the summer. In the fall, Klein enrolled at Upsala College in nearby East Orange, attending classes in the morning and working afternoons and weekends at his old job with the Essex County News. He picked up a second job with Brainen and Company, a father-and-son accounting firm. His idea was to clerk for them with an eye toward becoming an accountant.
Allen enjoyed Upsala and his courses; a required class on comparative religious ethics offered at the Lutheran college left a lasting impression. But he wasn’t there to expand his mind or continue the rigorous self-examination he’d experienced in the army. A child of the Depression and the only son of a working-class family, Klein was at Upsala to learn accounting and acquire a profession; there was no romance to it. As a soldier, he’d recognized that the army needed clerks and that mastering office skills would earn him a secure berth. He viewed accounting in the same way: there was a demand for it, and he had a gift for numbers.