Sonny’s and my aunts, Birdie’s sisters Stella and Gertie, were going to school and acquiring clerical skills in stenography and bookkeeping. Later, both got very good jobs making $35 a week, which was a lot of money in those days. Their mother, Fannie, contracted Parkinson’s disease at age forty and became an invalid. Birdie recalls, “My mother’s disposition was a gift from God. Despite her affliction, and constant pain, I never heard her talk against anyone. She didn’t bemoan her fate. She always kept a teapot in the kitchen into which she put what little change she could manage. In those days, Jewish people who were down on their luck would come for help, for money. There was always something in that teapot for them.”
In 1907, Dr. Salinger took his ailing wife and five children to Chicago. Fannie’s six brothers and sisters lived there, as did her father, Rabbi Copland. Simon and Fannie took an apartment upstairs from Rabbi Copland on the teeming west side, where many Jewish people lived. I can still remember as a boy how proud I was of the shingle on the window: “Dr. Simon F. Salinger.”
He left the rabbinate for good, to devote himself to medicine and to his wife and family. He practiced from his home and, in this era before specialization, he did everything from delivering babies, to performing surgery, to counseling troubled patients. Often he wasn’t paid, as many of his patients were too poor, yet he never dunned anyone. Once a carpenter came to him with three dollars that had been owed for fourteen years. It wasn’t unusual for someone to bring him a chicken in lieu of cash. My mother once told me that Grandpa Salinger said to her very often, “I won’t leave you any money, but I will leave you a good name.” And so he did.
Downstairs, Rabbi Copland, Sonny’s and my great-grandfather, enjoyed life to the fullest. Like Uncle Sol, he was a man who savored every moment. Morris Copland had a small synagogue, and every Saturday morning he would sit in the kitchen, no matter how hot and humid, and sip hot tea from a glass. I can still see him in my mind’s eye, sitting there with his skullcap on (he never removed it, I suspect, even when he went to sleep!) And schvitzing (sweating) with a smile of the utmost satisfaction on his bearded face.
Then he would bathe and put on this Sabbath attire, complete with frock coat and top hat. He would walk majestically several blocks to the synagogue, his wife at his side. She would be dressed in black, very elegant, and she walked with him not behind, as was still common for many years to come in Orthodox Jewry.
The Salingers and Coplands were very close. In the early 1900s there wasn’t any radio, or TV. Entertainment was mostly of the home variety. The family had a ritual on every Thursday night. They would gather in the spacious Salinger apartment and everyone would do his “act.”
Stella and Gertie played the piano. Birdie and Sol sang. Sam fiddled. Mother said, “The children would sprawl on the floor and the older people would sit on chairs all around the room. This was a big family, but we had double parlors with sliding doors between that opened up.”
Dave played the banjo and he and his sister Annie used to do the popular dance of the period, the Cakewalk, which included some great strutting. Joe played the violin and Will performed on the mandolin. Uncle Joe Copland not only was a fine violinist, but he also taught the instrument and made violins and cellos. Many of the string players in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra bought their violins and cellos from this gifted man.
“We had marvelous times those Thursday evenings,” my mother recalls. “Even Aunt Sarah and Uncle Max performed, and they were deaf mutes. My uncle was a fine magician and Aunt Sarah was his assistant. . . . Then there was Abe Copland. He changed his name to Al. He was the only one who didn’t come around very often on those Thursday nights. He was a professional musician and many people considered him to be the best ragtime pianist of his generation. We used to call him ‘the genius,’ and he played in the leading jazz bands of those days. . . . Abe ended sadly because he was wild.”
Dave, the banjo player, proved to be another interesting person in the Salinger-Copland family. Dave met a man named Max Epstein in Chicago. Between them they had $400 dollars. They bought some discarded freight cars and remodeled them and sold the cars for a small profit. They began acquiring more and more cars and soon found themselves in the freight business. After a few years, they accumulated enough money to obtain new cars. These carried oil supplies and other liquid materiel. They called their company General American Tank Car Corp. And today it’s General American Transportation. Uncle Dave, the banjo player, became a multimillionaire. As Harry Golden says, “Only in America.”
It was in Chicago that Simon’s son Sol met a pretty young Gentile lady from a small town in Iowa called Atlantic (in Cass County). After all this time the entire county today is just sixteen thousand strong. Her name was Marie Jillich and she had come to Chicago, at age seventeen, with only the dress she wore on her back. Her father’s name was Frank and her mother’s maiden name was Jennie Vincent. My mother remembers cousin Sonny’s mother very clearly. “She was a slender seventeen-year-old of extremely modest means when she married my brother Sol. At that time, not long after the turn of the century, it was impossible for the groom to tell his parents about the marriage. How could Sol break the news to his father, a former rabbi? How could he tell his mother, a very devout woman? Then there was Sol’s grandfather, Rabbi Copland, who led an Orthodox synagogue.”
Sol and Marie kept their marriage a secret. He continued to live at home for two years. One day, after Marie suffered a miscarriage, Sol’s brother Sam told him in no uncertain terms that he could no longer keep up the charade, and must tell their parents the truth, come what may.
It was a tense moment when Sol divulged his secret. To his surprise, his mother and father did not cast out the couple, although they were far from being joyful. The young pair could now live openly as man and wife, but first they were married in a Jewish ceremony. (The first time had been with a justice of the peace.) Marie changed her name to Miriam as a placating gesture toward the Salingers, and very few of the family of my generation ever knew that her name hadn’t always been Miriam. She went through the conversion ceremony to become officially Jewish, including the mikvah, or ritual cleansing bath.
Sam delivered Sol and Miram’s first child, Doris, in 1912. The following year, while Sol managed several nickelodeons, Sam went to Vienna for further medical training. Once home, he began to specialize in ear, nose, and throat. He became the first chairman of the Department of Otolaryngology at the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University in Chicago. He served as chairman for forty-one years; at the same time he was on the consulting staff at Cook County Hospital and senior attending staff at Michael Reese Hospital. By the end of the First World War he began to work in the new field of plastic surgery. “On Mondays, I noticed any number of people coming in with broken noses from weekend fights and accidents. So, I started fixing those noses. Then I went into plastic surgery of the face—pinning back ears, shortening noses, taking bags out of eyelids, face-lifting, removing scars.” He was also instrumental in bringing about many of the techniques that were used in succeeding wars to repair facial wounds suffered by our soldiers in battle.
My parents, Birdie and Lee Goldberg, were close to Uncle Sol and Aunt Miriam. When they moved to New York we often visited throughout my childhood. I recall pillow fights with Sonny in his bedroom while the adults played cards in the living room. My mother remembers Sonny as a child: “He had large brown eyes and he was a very friendly boy and he read, read, read all the time. He always had a book at hand, Sonny was a natural, nice youngster and approachable. He was really a very nice boy.”
Sonny, to my recollection, was a normal kid and we got along fine. Also, he used to go in the summer to Sharon, Pennsylvania, when he was a teenager, to stay with our aunt Stella, her husband, Leo Federber, and their three girls. Uncle Leo was an executive with a tank-car company and Sonny was often at their home. In other words, until Sonny grew into manhood, he and his family were quite close to the rest of the Salingers. Du
ring the war Uncle Sol came to Cincinnati to celebrate Passover with us. He rose during the seder and offered a toast to me, his sister’s son, as I was fighting with the 13th Armored Division in Germany. My father, not to be outdone, stood and toasted Sonny who, unbeknownst to me, was with the 12th Infantry in the same area. My sister remembers my father saying, “Here’s to our sons who are fighting Hitler!”
But when Sonny returned from the war, none of us heard from him again, with rare exceptions. Nothing could be clearer than the fact that J. D. Salinger decided to eliminate contact with all of us—grandparents, cousins, uncles, aunts. That was certainly his prerogative. As the old saying goes, You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family.
It would become the standard family “gag” anytime any of the Salinger family met to say, “What do you hear from Sonny?” This ancient wheeze would inevitably be followed by laughter. No one had heard from him.
At a deeper level, it wasn’t funny at all, however. I think that the one who was most hurt by Sonny’s ignoring the family was Uncle Sam. Sam was always very close to his brother Sol (Sonny’s father). He delivered the writer’s sister into the world. He was a highly articulate and educated individual. He wrote witty and pungent letters (one of which, to his close friend Groucho Marx, is included in the comedian’s book Letters to Groucho). Yet his letters to Sonny weren’t acknowledged, and it was as though Sam didn’t exist. I, too, wrote Sonny five times during the past forty years . . . no reply. Perhaps I didn’t have the correct address; I didn’t ask Doris or Aunt Miriam or Uncle Sol because the subject of Sonny so clearly made them uncomfortable, but the letters were never returned marked undelivered.
Uncle Sol often visited us in Cincinnati throughout his long life, usually alone. He was always a joy. He had a wonderful sense of humor and was as down to earth as a millionaire as he had been as a boy making one dollar a week. The only times I remember his getting nervous and irritable were when we would ask about Sonny. This was a natural question because the normal thing is to ask about one’s family, as to their health and how and what they’re doing. Uncle Sol would redden and invariably blurt out, “Oh, he’s ok,” and hastily change the subject. After some years, I came to realize that this was obviously a painful subject for him. Instead of being able to talk about his son and his son’s wife and two children and how they were growing and all the details that doting parents and grandparents love to relate, Uncle Sol was rendered mute—and this from a highly gregarious and family-oriented man. My mother recalls, “Uncle Sol, the complete extrovert, was entirely different when he was by himself than with his own family. He would be at the dining room table (in New York) and hardly utter a word. He was much more reserved than when he was on his own, visiting us in Cincinnati.”
It was obvious to us all that the relationship between father and son, and indeed between Uncle Sol and the rest of his family, was strained. “I get the feeling,” Birdie says, “that Sonny didn’t know that his mother was a convert to Judaism until he was in his middle teens. I think something about learning this traumatized him. My theory, which I can’t prove, is that this knowledge changed his attitude. Perhaps he reacted badly because of some twisted attitude concerning his father’s part in this. Someday, I think in Sonny’s writings, when he dies, it will be revealed why in the world he had this animosity toward his father. As far as I can see, Sol was a good father and meant only good for his son, and I know how proud he was of him. My brother Sol was dear to me, but he never really opened up about this. It was sad. . . . But maybe we will never find out.”
Since hearing from Jay, I have had the pleasure of receiving letters from many more Salingers as well as an invitation to a family reunion this summer. As it happens, it falls a few days after Larry’s annual family reunion, and it’s being held just a couple of hours away in the big Midwest.
This year, for the first time, I, too, get to say to my son, “Have fun. Go play with your cousins.” Imagine that.
Acknowledgments
One of the hardest things, for me, about writing a memoir, was the number of people in my life who deserved volumes and received scant mention, or worse yet, were not included at all. This in no way is a reflection of their importance to me—the shape of the book somehow took on a life of its own. I’d like to use this opportunity to acknowledge my love and gratitude for some friends who are unnamed or unmentioned, for reasons of structure rather than of the heart.
Becky, there was no way to do justice to our childhood adventures, and how much your friendship has meant to me without writing another book entirely. Ava, the same thing about our teenage years. Louise Barraclough, the same starting in our twenties. . . . “It’s just an illusion.” My friends at Cambridge School: Allison and Sara, Revson, Kent, Tremmie and softly falling snow, McCabes all, Brian M., Penny and Tom, Jonathan R., Jane, Ethan, Jocko, Paul B., Larry and his Harley, the late Peter Thompson, Freddy, Aubrey, all the girls in White Farm Dorm who held the walls for me when I thought they were closing in, and Mr. Peirce. My friends at NEC; especially Jay and Amy. My friends at Boston Edison, Local 369 and my boss, the late Kenny Muir. To Ian Frazier and Barbados, “I had the time of my life,” I really did. From Brandeis: Professor Jeffrey Abramson, I learned so much from your classes that has stayed with me, and Susan Hardwicke. My friends from Oxford and London: Barbara and Jonson, Penny Stokes, Daniella Israelachwilli, Stephen P., Joyleen, HJWS, Gregor, Rob London, and classmates Elspeth, Terry, and Adrian. My friends from Harvard: Mary Greer, Henry Klumpenhouwer and Liz Pereboom, Mia and Tys, the Music Lounge gang, Lansing, Gabriel, Dean Guy Martin, and John—“If you hear a song in blue.” My “godfather” Alan Trustman, who always seems to appear just when I need him.
Dr. Peter Gombosi, my love and thanks.
Dr. Richard L. Goldstein, my general physician, you have made bearable the times I was disabled, and made me feel secure in the knowledge that I always can count on your integrity and skill, and your thoughtful, insightful, honest, human care. I am truly grateful.
Dr. Bob Blatman, after five miscarriages, I still like to see your face. I wish we’d had better luck, but your kindness and humanity made all the difference.
David Hirson and family, I love you dearly.
Special thanks to Gracia Trosman and Angella Brunelle.
Here I’d like to thank friends who supported me, morally, critically, and/or financially in writing this book: Mary Greer, Drew Ryce, Phyllis Teiko, Peter Gombosi, Matthew Guerreiro, Kevin Starrs, Marilyn Ross, Jill Hooley, my in-laws, Sig Roos and Ruthie Rhode, Brad Bellows and Jacqueline Berthet, Christine Hemp and Badger, Margery Chaikin, Alex Sheers, Holly and Ric Browde, Ted Lowenkopf, Liza Prior Lucy, Wayne and Adrienne Edisis, Mr. and Mrs. Roos, Lou and Eileen York, Linda Morgan, David Hirson, Henry Klumpenhouwer, and Alan Trustman.
I’d like to thank my agent, Robert Gottlieb of the William Morris Agency. I’d also like to thank his former assistant Amy Ziff and current assistant Lauren Sheftell for their thoughtful and intelligent support. My publicist, the elegant Lynn Goldberg, is beyond compare.
The entire team at Washington Square Press has been phenomenal: Judith Curr, publisher and person extraordinaire; Nancy Miller, I couldn’t wish for a more sensitive and intelligent editor, I’m so lucky to have you. May I add that any faults in this book are those I’m sure Nancy tried to talk me out of. Like Nancy, her assistant, Anika Streitfeld, has been a joy to work with and her help has been immeasurable. Linda Dingler, the book looks beautiful inside and out.
Many thanks to my lawyers, Phil Cowan and Stephen Sheppard (at Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard). For keeping body and soul together, thanks to J.S.N., consummate professional, of Hill & Assoc., and the staff of Gavin de Becker, Inc.
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