The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  He looked briefly startled, and said, “Once.” Then, adroitly, he changed the subject. He never revealed any more than that.

  It is possible that Cardozo saw himself as a kind of missionary, not only to redeem the Cardozo name but also to restore prestige and authority to Sephardic Jewry in general—to help this tiny band (“We few,” he used to say) retain its place in history. Because certainly the spunk and individuality that characterized the earlier generations in America seemed to be disappearing as the world moved into the twentieth century. After two hundred fifty years, the fabric of Sephardic life seemed to be shredding, flying apart, no longer a knit thing and all of a piece. Cardozo had always been fiercely proud of his forebears, the ancestors who had fought as officers in the Revolution, who had founded banks and captained vessels, who had sat at the right hand of Presidents from Washington on down. And yet the tragic fact was that the importance—economic, political, and social—of the oldest Jewish families was diminishing. They were being eclipsed by Jews from other lands and, at the same time, the old standards were disappearing. Suddenly, in the finest and oldest families, there were suicides, divorces (his cousin, the writer Robert Nathan, had already been divorced three times), alcoholics, wastrels, and people who had to be locked away with custodians. Did Cardozo see his father’s troubles as symptomatic of a larger trouble—a trouble reflected also in his sister Emily’s marriage to a Christian, and his sister Lizzie’s unhappy state? Was the end of the line at hand for “we few”? He may have sensed this, and spent much of his life attempting to reverse the trend.

  The year 1868 was a shattering one for all the Sephardim. It was the year that the splendid new Reform Temple Emanu-El opened its doors, with a cluster of the wealthiest German Jews in New York on its committees and board of directors. Not only was the new edifice splendid, and obviously expensive, and not only was it right on Fifth Avenue at Forty-third Street, far north of Nineteenth Street, where Shearith Israel then more modestly reposed (inherent in Emanu-El’s choice of site was the statement that the forties were now more fashionable than the area around Thirty-third Street), but it represented—on a national scale—a triumph for the Reform movement, which the Sephardim had so long opposed. When the temple was dedicated, the New York Times editorialized that Emanu-El’s congregation was “the first to stand forward before the world and proclaim the dominion of reason over blind and bigoted faith.” The Judaism of Emanu-El was praised as “the Judaism of the heart, the Judaism which proclaims the spirit of religion as being of more importance than the letter.” The farsighted Germans behind Emanu-El were extolled for having “become one with progress.”

  Immediately there was a great deal of grumbling within the Shearith Israel congregation, and it wasn’t long before a faction had formed that talked of the need for a new building and of “modernization” and “improvements” in the service. One group wanted to introduce family pews—eliminating segregated seating—and to install an organ. Another urged that the fixed prayers should be fewer in number, with less repetition, so that “in these modern, busy times,” the service would be shorter. Still another group thought that the ancient Spanish music had outlived its usefulness and meaning. By 1895, the debate had reached such a point of ill feeling and crossed purposes that a meeting of the elders of the synagogue was held.

  The meeting started off stormily. Then Ben Cardozo, still a young lawyer, got to his feet. Nothing, he said, must be allowed to change the Sephardic ritual of the synagogue, the oldest in America. Its very name, meaning “Remnant of Israel,” indicated that there were values here worth clinging to at all costs. Perhaps the weight of his Nathan-Seixas-Levy-Hart ancestors added strength to his words, for he was certainly effective. After his speech, a vote was taken, and the proposed changes and updatings were defeated by a count of seventy-three to seven. Thus Sephardic tradition stepped into another century of imperturbability.

  He may not consciously have meant to, but as Mr. Justice Cardozo he became Sephardic Jewry’s proudest figure, restoring the old families’ oldest pride, a pride of history, of heritage, of race—which was the way he felt it.

  Cardozo watched with dismay as his beloved Nell grew old and frail. They continued their old routine: winters in Albany, then home to New York, then to the house at Allenhurst, on the Jersey shore, for summers, and the quiet evenings of cards and four-handed piano. Then Nell became paralyzed and could no longer play. He wrote: “Our rides along Ocean Avenue have lost the point and tang that they had in former years. Sea Bright has lost its brightness.” As the summer drew to a close: “I have been worried again about Nell. She hasn’t been so well for the last week—a slight temperature in the afternoon, a quicker pulse at times, and speech more incoherent. Dr. Woolley has visited her daily.… So the summer creeps its weary length along.”

  Then an improvement: “There has been no recurrence of the alarming seizure of a fortnight ago, but I cannot tell when one may come.” And, a few weeks later: “I am sending you some snapshots of Nell that were taken a few weeks ago while she was sitting on the porch. I think she looks sweet, and remarkably well, all things considered.” But by the following summer he was despondent again. “She seems to have lost strength,” he wrote in August, 1928, “and her power of speech has not at all improved. The effect of these long silences, when once she was so full of animation, is something that I do not need to describe.…” A few months later, Nell died. This woman who had been so possessive of him and ambitious for him did not live to see the capstone of his career, his elevation to the United States Supreme Court three years later. And without her the achievement seemed empty to him.

  He was even reluctant to accept the appointment. To a cousin he wrote: “Indeed I don’t want to go to Washington. Please telegraph the President not to name me.” Two days later, he wrote: “I’m trying to stave off the appointment.… Most of all, I don’t want to live in utter loneliness … away from all my relatives and friends here whom I love.” At last, he accepted the post, but with a deep sigh. And he hated Washington.

  A few days after Nell’s funeral, Judge Cardozo paid a call on a cousin, Sarah Lyons, who lived in a large and somewhat disheveled apartment not far from his own now-empty house on West Seventy-fifth Street. Miss Lyons, a peppery spinster in her eighties, never at a loss for a quick opinion, admonition, or piece of her mind, and whose bombazine was always stiff with family pride (her mother was a Nathan), poured tea for them both. As they talked, some mention was inevitably made of Nell, and Judge Cardozo’s eyes misted over. “Now, Ben Cardozo,” said Miss Sarah sternly, “you’re not to cry!”

  The judge answered quickly, like the dutiful little boy he had always been, “I’m not crying, Aunt Sally.”

  A few years later, at his funeral, someone said, “If only his father had been strong enough, had had the grit enough, to resist Boss Tweed, Ben would have had a happy life.”

  True, but then we might not have had the Supreme Court justice.

  19

  THE EMBATTLED SISTERS

  If the Sephardim of New York needed more Nathans to gossip about, there were suddenly the two fighting Nathan sisters, Annie and Maud. Everyone knew that the two girls did not “get on,” and that there had been “troubles” within that branch of the Nathan family—the girls were daughters of Robert Weeks Nathan, Benjamin Nathan’s brother—but nothing had ever erupted in any sort of public way. Then, in 1933, Maud Nathan wrote and had published an autobiography called Once Upon a Time and Today, which, among other careful glossings-over, painted an idyllic picture of a happy girlhood in New York and, later, in Green Bay, Wisconsin. When, several years later, her sister Annie countered with her own book, called It’s Been Fun, her version of the Nathan story sounded like no fun at all.

  Robert Weeks Nathan was a handsome and cheerful man with a fondness, in the phrase of his day, for a well-turned ankle. In her book, Annie told of how, as a little girl, she was out walking in New York one afternoon with her nurse when who should s
he see coming from the opposite direction but her father, with an elegantly turned-out young lady on his arm. Annie rushed up and hugged her father, who did not seem particularly pleased to see her. In fact, he actually pushed her off, and back into the nurse’s clutches. As she and the nurse proceeded, the nurse explained that the man they had met was not Annie’s father, though there was “some slight resemblance.” Annie Nathan was bewildered. Certainly she knew her own father. But the nurse was very firm, and for years Annie believed that the man she had encountered on the street that afternoon was not her parent but his exact double.

  Then she told of the beautiful and mysterious Lazarus cousin whom no one in the family was supposed to “receive.” Annie’s mother, though, did secretly receive the lady, and the two whispered together over teacups. What was the scandal? Annie could never get to the bottom of it because no one would ever tell her. But it all had to do, she gathered, from “the way of life” the beautiful cousin had chosen to live.

  Annie’s mother had been a Florance, an old Sephardic family from the South. Florences had first come to Charleston, South Carolina, in the eighteenth century, and from there had migrated to New Orleans and Philadelphia. The Florance men, Annie Nathan revealed in her memoir, were said to have a weakness for hard liquor. That was said to be Uncle Ted’s problem. Nonetheless, some Florances were very grand. One of Philadelphia’s noted hostesses in the nineteenth century was “Mrs. William Florance of Rittenhouse Square”—she was always so identified except at such times when she was simply “Mrs. Florance,” as though there could not be two of her elevated rank. Mrs. Florance was a formidable woman. Looking down her Rittenhouse Square dinner table one evening, she noticed a guest whose gown revealed somewhat more décolletage than Mrs. Florance thought proper. Without a word, she rose from the table, left the room, and returned a moment later with a shawl, which she draped carefully around her guest’s shoulders. “You look chilly, my dear,” she murmured, and the dinner party proceeded.

  Uncle Ted was something else again, and his reputation in Philadelphia left something to be desired. He, too, had married a Nathan—Benjamin Nathan’s daughter Rosalie—but he had left her to live openly with another woman. By this woman he had gone so far as to have a daughter—or so “everybody” said. He insisted that his lady friend had been a widow, with a daughter, and that the daughter was not his. Naturally, nobody believed Ted Florance’s trumped-up explanation. When the lady friend died, the daughter—quite naturally, it seemed—went to live with her father. It can be imagined what consternation greeted the news that Ted Florance was going to marry this young woman. He was going to marry his own daughter. Tea tables in New York rocked with the news for weeks. Whether or not she really was his daughter will, of course, never be known, but the feathers flew so high in the Nathan and Florance families that the marriage was called off.

  His wife, meanwhile, Aunt Rosalie, was not to be outdone by her husband’s flamboyant ways. In the 1880’s, a “mature” woman with grown children, she suddenly took off for an extended tour of Europe with another man. She was accused of “flying in the face of decency,” but despite the criticism she continued on her travels, explaining that a man made a more useful and entertaining travel companion than another woman. It saved her no end of trouble and being “put upon,” she said. The man was an oculist—he and Aunt Rosalie had first met “on a professional basis”—and, she explained, he also tended to her eye needs while they traveled. (Like Ben Nathan, she was extremely nearsighted.) It seemed, at best, a little incongruous; they were both well past middle age—“Old enough to know better,” the Nathans muttered—but the arrangement continued pleasurably for both. Aunt Rosalie’s oculist was with her when she died in Switzerland. She was cremated, which was a scandal in itself.

  Annie Nathan’s father had been a prosperous stockbroker, but he had got caught in the stock market crash of 1875 and had lost everything. It was the beginning of another tragic episode in the Nathan family. A friend, David Kelly—“a devoted admirer of my mother,” Annie wrote obliquely in her book—offered Mr. Nathan the unlikely job of general passenger agent for the Green Bay and Minnesota Railroad in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was a moment of great upheaval for the family, and its impact was not helped by the fact that when the Nathans had established themselves in a house in Green Bay, Mr. Kelly moved in with them. It was an odd ménage—Mr. Nathan seldom spoke to Mr. Kelly, and made no secret of his dislike for him, though both he and an older son worked for Kelly’s railroad—and it grew even odder when Mr. Nathan began entertaining his own group of lady friends in the house. Before long, however, Mr. Nathan grew tired of the Middle West and returned to his old Wall Street haunts, leaving his wife, children, and Mr. Kelly in Green Bay.

  Annette Florance Nathan was, as they said, “delicate.” Feminine and woundable, she had been born in the South and raised by attentive nurses and servants, and she knew nothing of housekeeping before her marriage. (After she was married, her first maid asked her how she wished her potatoes cooked for dinner and she knew so little of cooking that she couldn’t answer.) She would have inherited a share of a large fortune, but her father, an unreconstructed Southerner, cut her off without a penny for marrying a Yankee. Though she had no business experience whatever, she hit on the idea, in Green Bay, of trying singlehandedly to recoup the family fortunes. “She had been told wonderful tales of profitable returns from running rooming houses in Chicago,” her daughter wrote, and so she set off for Chicago to acquire such an establishment. Several days later, she returned to Green Bay, ecstatic. She had met “a kindly and lovely blue-eyed woman” who had helped her find a house—a place somewhat larger than she had originally thought of buying—and her new friend had helped her spend a great deal of money on furniture and redecoration.

  The Chicago venture was a disaster from the beginning. The charming blue-eyed friend had helped Mrs. Nathan buy far too large a house for far too much money, in a neighborhood unsuited for rooming houses, and the friend had also required a sizable cut of the cost of the proceedings. It wasn’t long before the house and Mrs. Nathan’s investment in it were lost, and the family staggered under another heavy blow.

  It was one from which the poor lady never recovered. Her “nervousness” had already become pronounced, and now there were terrible temper tantrums followed by tears and long periods of depression. She had trouble sleeping, and doctors had prescribed both morphine and chloral for her—which she took alternately, or together, and in increasing doses—and by the time the family realized her addiction it was too late. There followed awful scenes, with the children struggling to keep the “medicine” out of their mother’s hands, with the arrival of relatives who tried to help, with—ultimately—the tortured woman’s confinement in a hospital, her children shipped back East to grandparents, and Mrs. Nathan’s death. Robert Weeks Nathan returned to his wife’s side for that. Mr. Kelly had, in the meantime, vanished.

  All this—her father’s philanderings, his financial ineptitude, her mother’s relationship to Mr. Kelly—was in Annie’s book. She even pointed out the “Florance family drinking habit.” What was not explained in the book was how, out of these shambles of unhappy lives, two women as effective and successful as Annie Nathan and her sister Maud could have emerged. Strong-minded and opinionated, they were too much alike, and too competitive, to get along. But between them they managed to lift the Nathan name out of its Victorian doldrums into twentieth-century prominence.

  Maud Nathan, the older of the two, became a double Nathan when, at the age of sixteen, she married a first cousin, Frederick Nathan. She was a great crusader for women’s rights. She became a leading suffragist, and marched alongside such doughty women as Harriet May Mills, Mary Garrett Hay, Mrs. Clarence Mackay, and Carrie Chapman Catt. Her name is engraved on a plaque in the New York State Capitol at Albany as one of those responsible for women receiving the vote. She was also a founder of the New York Consumers’ League, a welfare group devoted to improving working
conditions for women in shops and factories. Though small and soft-spoken, with large dark eyes, she loved nothing better than a fight. Once she became so incensed about what she considered rude treatment by a Manhattan taxicab driver, and the subsequent handling of the matter by the police, that she wrote a stinging letter about it to Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. Her letter so impressed Mr. Roosevelt that he sent for her, and she converted him to the cause of the Consumers’ League by taking him on a tour of sweatshops. The future President remained an admirer for life. Once, when foot traffic was being diverted from a street where a luncheon was being given for Prince Henry of Prussia, Mrs. Nathan—on her way to a social welfare meeting—refused to be diverted, and challenged police officers to arrest her. They didn’t dare, and she passed through. At one point, the list of organizations on whose boards she sat, international conferences she had attended, and delegations before which she had spoken gave her the longest biographical sketch of any woman listed in Who’s Who in America.

  Longer, even, than her sister Annie’s, which was a painful thorn in Annie’s side. The sisters’ first important falling out was over the issue of women’s suffrage. Annie Nathan, who had been the first woman in New York to ride a bicycle—in a day when that sort of thing shocked society and made the newspapers—and who seemed to stand for everything connected with progress and enlightenment for her sex, took the astonishing step of joining the antisuffragists. “She did it mostly to spite Maud,” one of her cousins wrote, but whatever the reason, it was the end of peace in the family. On the occasion of one of their rare confrontations, Annie said to Maud, “How would you like your cook to vote?” Maud replied coolly, “He does!” Needless to say, the girls’ two brothers took Annie’s side, as did most men (Judge Cardozo was an important exception; he favored women’s voting). And Annie Nathan, meanwhile, had undertaken a separate battle: education for women.