Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  For their trip, Wendy and Sandra hired a driver in Warsaw to take them north along the Vistula River to Wloclawek, where Lola Schleifer was born on March 28, 1918. At least that’s the date recorded on her New York State driver’s license. Her contemporaries weren’t convinced. “No one knows when she was born,” said her first cousin, Jack Schleifer. Her marriage certificate to Morris says 1917. At family functions Morris quietly approached Lola’s relatives and asked them, “Do you know how old Lola is?” He never got a definitive answer, because no one knew for sure. Lola enjoyed the game. At Georgette’s sixtieth-birthday party, Lola asked a guest, “How can my daughter be sixty when I’m only thirty-eight?”

  As it happens, her name wasn’t even Lola. She was born Liska, a variation of Elizabeth, which is how she is listed on U.S. Census records from 1930—a fifteen-year-old girl, indicating that she was born in 1915 or 1916.

  “Lola” came later, another invention.

  In Wloclawek, Wendy and Sandra found a grim and polluted city of 120,000 people, an industrial center known for its hand-painted pottery. Their driver took them to Piekarska Street, where the Schleifers had lived, two blocks from a lovely park surrounding a fourteenth-century Gothic cathedral. For the Wasserstein sisters, the scene was alien but familiar. They recognized the white lace curtains hanging from Polish windows; they were the same kind of curtains that hung in their mother’s bedroom back in New York. When their driver told them, “Poland is a country of churches,” they smiled and nodded without response, struck silent by ancient fears. When he said, “Your mother must have been very well-to-do. Only the very well-to-do lived in corner houses,” they smiled again. “My sister is a formidable banker, and I am a playwright,” Wendy wrote. “But today we are two Jewish girls in Poland. It’s not exactly comfortable to speak.”

  Wloclawek doesn’t occupy much space in history texts. In the twelfth century, it was an outpost for the Roman Catholic Church, as the seat of the local provincial bishop. In the fifteenth century, Copernicus, the legendary Polish astronomer, studied there for a couple of years, giving the city a kind of “Lincoln slept here” academic cachet. In 1815 the kingdom of Poland came under Russian czarist rule, where it would remain until after World War I (which is how Lola managed to be born in Russia but raised in Poland without budging from Wloclawek). Eventually Wloclawek became the Akron of north-central Poland, a sturdy manufacturing center, home of the country’s first paper mill and cellulose plant. The huge kilns that fired its signature pottery were built in the nineteenth century.

  The population expanded accordingly. Simon and Helen Schleifer contributed four children to the growing community, which had reached 35,000 by 1909. Theirs was a relatively small brood; Simon had been one of ten children. Though Jews were prohibited from settling in Wloclawek until the eighteenth century, by the time Lola was born, one-fifth of the population was Jewish. In the city’s all-Jewish enclave, Yiddish was far more likely to be spoken than Polish. Even modern Jews like the Schleifers obeyed the dietary laws, read Yiddish newspapers, and were educated in yeshivas. They lived with a lurking fear of anti-Semitism, a wariness that existed in memories of pogroms and the daily reality of restrictions on where they could work or go to school. They understood they were regarded as interlopers, temporary citizens—no matter how many generations back they could trace their ancestry in Poland. In turn they looked down on “Polacks,” even as they trembled before them. A sign of Jewish prosperity was a Polish maid.

  Superior-inferior.

  For Wendy, Lola’s declarative “I am” became an ongoing question: “Who am I?” Nurture versus nature, the connection between past and future; so many ephemeral unknowns determine a human being’s sense of self: How was she to calibrate the significance of DNA, geographical displacement, societal pressure, birth order, gender, ethnicity, religion, the weight of history? Could Wendy extricate herself from the stories she’d never heard from the grandparents she’d never known?

  Her grandfather Simon Hirsch Schleifer came of age in the late nineteenth century. Simon—Shimon, as he was known then—was an intellectual, a yeshiva bocher and raconteur. He became a teacher in the yeshiva, not because he was religious but because there were few other options available to the Jewish intelligentsia, who were not permitted in the Polish civil service or, with few exceptions, to teach in public schools. (After Wendy won the Pulitzer Prize, “playwright” was added to Simon’s résumé, but none of Lola’s contemporaries remembered him writing plays.)

  Wendy’s grandmother Helen Schleifer was more conventional: She cooked, sewed, and took care of her children. She wore blowsy dresses and spoke Yiddish with Simon’s mother, who didn’t understand Polish. She dealt with the loss of a son, who’d died in childhood from illness. Helen was a beloved mother but never a role model for Lola, their baby, the most pampered of their children. Lola acquired her father’s yearning, his desire for the larger world. Even as a young girl, she had style, a freckle-faced gamine dressed in knickers, aiming a provocative glance at a photographer. When her family summered at the resort town of Ciechocinek, she most likely bathed in the mineral-rich waters. She would have strolled through the manicured gardens in Zdrojowy Park and eaten ice cream at the Bristol Cafe and danced at the band shell, which was then almost new.

  Did they own a villa with tennis courts, as Lola had told her children? Or was the villa rented, or did the Schleifer family stay in a hotel? Did it matter?

  Lola remembered what she remembered, in warm and gauzy recollections.

  “According to my mother, wherever she lived, wherever she danced, wherever she ate, was the best place to live, the best place to dance, and the best place to eat,” wrote Wendy.

  No meek shtetl humbleness for Lola. “I am,” was already on her lips.

  Nice bravado, but Lola and her fellow Jews were about to become part of the past tense—“they were”—footnotes in Polish history. Lola and her parents left the country more than a decade before the Nazi occupation in 1939. By the end of World War II, Poland’s Jewish population was decimated. Fewer than 70,000 of the 3.3 million who lived there before the war survived.

  Wendy noted the absence with sadness. “Today in Ciechocinek there are still the parks and even the famous spa water, but no one looks like my sister or me,” she wrote after her 1993 trip with Sandy through the green Vistula River Valley. “No one even resembles the women from my mother’s faded photo album. Fifty years ago the ethnic cleansing of Ciechocinek was so successful that there is no variety here. Everyone looks pretty much the same.”

  Most of Lola’s immediate family escaped, part of the Great Migration, the karmic explosion of awakened consciousness that drew millions of desperate dreamers to the United States in the thirty years leading up to the First World War. The pattern was for the men to go ahead, try to get established, and then send for their wives and children.

  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 futu
re 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?”

  Why?” 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.