Joe and Pearl Lerner recall...
One of my earliest recollections goes back to when we lived with my grandmother, Bubby Nessa, back in Russia. I remember she lived below street level in a basement-like place, I can still see it in my mind today, with a little grocery above. My grandfather was a "rebbe"- teaching boys. I don't think he was forty years old when he passed away (some discrepancy with Sol's information), and she raised the four children. There was my Aunt Ruchileah who married a Schecter and was Sol Schecter's mother, my Uncle Sol Chaim, who was my mother's oldest brother. His wife was my father's sister. That is, a sister (Alta Lerner) and a brother (Chaim Lerner, married a sister (Rose Sirota) and a brother (Sol Chaim Sirota). Their daughter Esther, was my age and we went to "chedar" together. My mother was the third living child and Uncle David (Aunt Laura's father) was the baby. My mother's marriage to my father was her second marriage. It wasn't until I was grownup that I even found out about the first marriage. In those days, divorce was very unusual and you didn't talk about it.
I know that my father was drafted into the Russian army and was a drummer boy. (Czar Nicholas said he was going to kill the Jews three ways. One of the ways was that he was going to take the little children away at age twelve and send them away for twenty-five years into the army and they would forget they were Jews.) But somehow he got out of the army eventually. I remember when he would sit Friday night, Shabbos, and he would go with his fingers drumming away.
Among my early memories is that we had boarders who lived with us from as far back as I can remember. We used coal in the stoves back east. We bought it in the summer time when it was less expensive. It was hard for my father to make ends meet, and he was always paying for last year's coal.
My mother was a hypochondriac; she'd have nervousness and sickness and think she was dying. She'd say, "Hold my hand, it's my heart." We had a doctor, Dr. Varner, who became the top man at General Hospital in Montreal. He came out for $1.00 a call. Her theory was that a doctor who gave three medicines was better than one who gave two. She would say, "Give me some medicine, a tonic maybe, for my nerves." He would give her some sugar water or something. One day he came in with a big smile to see her, took her hand and said "Hello darling...." then he would listen very patiently and she would tell him everything that she felt. Finally she would ask, "What about the prescriptions?" "I don't think you need any." "One prescription?" "I didn't want to give you that. Do you know what that's got in it - rat blood!" But she would take it still. She believed in medicines. Actually, she was getting therapy. He knew how to handle her. So, all her life it was boarders, medicine, and children.
In Montreal, I went to school and Talmud Torah. Before my Bar Mitzvah, I had a tutor. My Bar Mitzvah was in a small temple. Then all the Congregation (about fifteen to twenty people) was all invited to the house where we had a big party. The Bar Mitzvah didn't say a speech in those days. To put it in perspective, Uncle Moe was nine years old, Uncle Irv was seven, Uncle Nat was five and Uncle Lou was three when I was the first Bar Mitzvah of the Lerner boys.
In Montreal there was a place like an inn, a combined steamship agency and restaurant called Tatarinsky's. All the immigrants came in there. The owner became an employment agency if you were looking for a job. If you needed letters sent to relatives in Europe, he took care of that. They called him a "dressne stoll" which is a Russian name for a place where you find addresses. Everybody knew him. When I left Montreal in 1920, all the Jews were together, everybody knew everybody else. The Jews were all kosher - from the richest to the poorest. There was one big synagogue in that city, and there was no such thing as a "Conservative" Synagogue. There were many shules. For many years Sol’s father had a shule in his home where we all went.
The Colemans and the Geiers were boarders at our home in Montreal when they first came from Europe. My mother (Bubby) had five boarders in addition to her family. She had little pots containing boiled meat and would make that for the boarders to take to work with them for their mail meal at lunchtime. Two boarders would share a room for sleeping. The men came over first and left their families in Europe while they saved up the money for their passage. Mr. Geier wasn't married then. Afterwards he and his girlfriend were married at our house.
Remember my Bubba Nessa in Montreal, where she was very active in the temples (just like Bubby Lerner became) and with the poor people in Montreal. There was a big orthodox synagogue with a choir that was known all over the Canadian provinces. The people supported it well. But the rest of the shules were very small, where the rabbi didn’t get a salary and he had to go on what people donated when they were called up to Torah. A shule would be made out of little grocery stores and other places like that. Bubby Nessa would go around and scout out so many places - markets, grocery stores, butcher shops. From Tuesday to Thursday she would call on them for donations for the synagogue - candles, fish, money - and she would carry it in a big bag apportioned out for different poor people. When Bubby Nessa came, they knew they had to give to her. She had her own route and they couldn't say no to her. Until the day she died she was like that, and she died in her late 80's or early 90's. She was still alive for many years when Bubby Lerner came back to Montreal to visit.
On my father's side of the family, I never knew my grandmother or grandfather. They had all died. They had five children, four sons and a daughter - Mima (Aunt) Alta. Besides my dad, Chaim Lerner, there was a brother Morris in New York City, the widow and family of a second brother in Worcester, Massachusetts, and a third brother, Menasha, who stayed in Tulchin where he owned land and farmed. Actually a Jew couldn't own land there, but he had a good gentile friend who bought the land in his name and he and his family lived there and farmed. They lived in the heart of the worst banditry and killing. This last uncle had two children, Joe and Devorah. Before World War I, Joe came to Montreal to see us. Buy then his father wanted him to come back home. So he and his sister (who had come to New York) returned to Europe, and we never heard from them again.
When I went to live in Worcester, Massachusetts, between 1916 and 1918, I got to meet some of my father's family. I stayed with my aunt, the widow of my father's brother, who had remarried to a man named "Striker" and had a second family. I had two cousins from the first marriage, Dave Lerner (who committed suicide over a love affair) and Ben Lerner. Ben had a grocery store in Worchester.
In 1917, Pesach, my father came to Worcester to see me. His brother in New York City he hadn't seen since they parted when they left Europe. They never wrote each other because my Uncle Moshe (Morris) had the same problem with his hands shaking that I do. Bennie Lerner, my cousin in Worchester, also had the same problem with shaking hands. My father never got any mail from his family in twenty-five years, you just didn't make long distance telephone calls in those days. But when he was coming to see me, he wrote Uncle Moshe he was coming to Massachusetts and would go on to visit him in New York. When does a Jewish baker have a holiday? Only during the Passover holidays when they don't bake. Otherwise he used to work sixteen hours a day, everyday except Shabbos. I went with my father and that's when I got to meet the family in New York.
Recollections about my brothers...
I can remember that I, my brother Moe, and Irv were the older group and the three of us had a lot in common. Nat and Lou were the younger ones. Nat would get into more fights. Once he took an old rusty scythe and he almost cut his finger off. It was hanging and I had to take him to the emergency hospital. He'd get into more scrapes than you could believe and he'd fight with all the rest of the kids, and with the kids on the block. He was just a rebel and my mother would be aggravated to death. But one thing about Nat, when my mother was sick he would be scared. He didn't know what to do for her. He would wash the floors-anything....
I remember Moe as a great believer in what people told him. Once he met somebody who didn't believe in medication. Lou got an appendix attack one time, which almost burst, and Moe told him "You don't have to go to the doctor." One day he was working at Christopher's Ice Cream Place and he became a "nature man". For example, we would watch as he chewed is food so many times that we started counting. This fellow who he worked with at the ice cream place was an ex-pug. And Moe kept himself physically fit. This person told Moe, "You know, I can make a great fighter out of you." Then next thing we knew he left home. Finally we heard from him in Chicago. He knocked around in the Midwest for six or eight months. At that time I wrote a song for Uncle Moe called "Mother and Dad". Here's how it goes...
I dreamt of travels since I was a child,
My time at home was too mild.
But my journey's ended
My ways are mended
And here is what I have to say...
Mother and Dad,
Best pals I've had
I'll never leave you again.
I left my home,
Started to roam,
Looking for fortune and fame.
But now I know,
My time was too mild,
For a rolling stone gathers no moss.
Still a wealth I'm possessing
In God's greatest blessing,
It's you dearest Mother and Dad.
I remember Irv going to school and working for a drug company. But he was ten when I was sixteen and went to Worcester for two years, so it's hard to have a clear memory of him when he was young. Irv and Nat were very close. Irv looked after Nat like his real kid brother. He tried to keep him in line. Irv was very easy to get along with, and he had friends that idolized him. To this day, when I go to the B'nai B'rith meetings or meet some of his old friends, I'm always known as Irving's brother. They loved him. I was in Hollywood B'nai B'rith Lodge and then switched to Howard Paul Wilson Lodge where Irv became President. Irv called a spade a spade.
When Lou came to Los Angeles, he became such a good student that Moe and I made up our minds that we were going to send him to college. We were so sure that he was going to get somewhere in life, and he did!
My brother Jack was born after I had left from Worcester, Massachusetts. One day I got a letter from my Dad saying my mother had had a baby. My aunt asked me, "Nu? So what do you hear from your folks?" Here I was, seventeen years old, thinking, "Oh my God, my mother had a BABY!" My face was as red as a beet! When I came back home in 1918, there was Norman (born in December 1917) downstairs in our little bakery, in the box with cornmeal in it. (It was wartime and you had to put cornmeal in the bread; you couldn't make it from pure wheat.) He was playing with Jack who was two and a half years old, and Norman was about six or eight months old. Jack was teasing him and Norman was crying. Jack looked up and thinking I was going to him cried out in Yiddish, "You leave me alone."
Advantage and disadvantage of being the eldest...
The biggest disadvantage of being the eldest had to do with being punished to set an example for the others. My father worked so much that we only say him from one Friday, and my mother ran the house. So if we did anything from the beginning of the week on, it was saved up for my mother to tell my father at the end of the week. We were sleeping when he came and when he went. So picture this...he would come home Friday and take a bath in the house, cleaning up and wanting to enjoy being with all of us. We would come home form school Friday afternoon with preparations being made for Shabbos, and Mother would start to tell him everything that happened from Monday on, to which he'd say, "Leave me alone, I want to enjoy with my children." And she'd say, "I suffer with them all week and you're not going to do anything?" "If you let Joe do everything the others will follow in his footsteps...." My father wouldn't want to touch us, but what could he do? My mother had it all down and she wanted to see us punished. Mostly I was Moe and me. I thought it was wrong. My God, I forgot already what I did Monday, by Friday. Finally my Dad would take a stick although not wanting to, but to appease her, would hit us. We felt like were being punished unjustly.
The advantage of being eldest was that whatever communication we had with my father, and that was very little, was closer because I was the oldest. When I was twenty I went with him from Montreal to Los Angeles. He was very timid man, and it's hard to imagine him navigating himself alone.
Trip to Los Angeles...
How it is we came to L.A. started with my father who, as you know, had a little bakery shop in Montreal. Things weren't going too well for him. He received a letter in April or May of 1920, which mentioned that there was a man out in L.A. by the name of Weitz whom my Dad probably knew because he had a pushcart and used to deliver bread in the streets of Montreal. He was buying and delivering bread for a bakery in L.A. The man who owned the bakery wanted to sellout and Mr. Weitz wanted to buy it but he didn't know anything about baking. So they asked if my Dad would be interested to come out as a partner to do the baking and Mr. Weitz would do the selling. My Dad was so fed up that he took them up on the offer. By that time the Colemans (family of Bessie and Yetta who later married Uncle Moe and Uncle Lou) were in Los Angeles from Montreal. The Colemans lived on one side of an alley way, the Geiers lived right across on the other side, and Mr. Weitz (my future wife's father) lived two doors away. Everybody knew everybody else in those days.
We planned to come out to California on the 15th of July 1920 and around the beginning of July there was an earthquake. The Montreal Daily Star had a headline about half the size of the font page that read "EARTHQUAKE IN CALIFORNIA!" Underneath it listed those in Los Angeles that were killed. We already had our tickets and people came to our house saying "Don't go to California, you'll get killed! You'll die!" The earthquake had occurred in front of the Million Dollar Theater - there was a big crack right in front of it.
In those days it took twenty-four hours from Montreal to Chicago by train. We left on a Sunday morning and got to Chicago Monday morning. We didn't catch a train until 4:30 in the afternoon to go to Los Angeles. My father wouldn't eat in a restaurant and he wanted to take food along for the trip. They told us "Go to Maxwell and Hallstead Streets, that's the Jewish section." We went there about 10 o'clock when the stores were just opening up. I was walking along thinking I was with my Dad but when I turned around, I was talking to a stranger. There was my Dad about a half block back and somebody had taken his jacket off, put a coat on him and was measuring him for a suit. He was saying, "I don't want anything, I don't want anything, - but he was so timid they didn't pay any attention to him". Well, we bought a salami and bread to take along on the train. On Monday afternoon we got on the train and arrived in Los Angeles Thursday afternoon with $25 between us.
We went to live with the Geiers who also had two other boarders beside us. Mr. Geier delivered produce. He had a truck and used to peddle fruits and vegetables. There were no supermarkets in those days and people used to go around the neighborhoods peddling. He'd leave early in the morning to go to the market and come home about four o’clock, then start counting out his money. He made a nice income.
Well, Friday morning I got up and took the streetcar for a nickel up Fifth Street all the way to Broadway where I go off, then started walking north to Third Street. That’s when I saw this HUGE Grand Central Market. (When I left Montreal I was working in a very nice produce place with superior merchandise. It was like working in Beverly Hills and I was making $14 a week.) So I was drawn into the market and saw all these stands. I went up to the first person I saw an asked about a job. They sent me over to a man named Bob who asked me if I had any experience. "Yes," and I explained. Well, he explained that his uncle had just left for four or five weeks and if I wanted a job temporarily I could have it. "Come in tomorrow morning." I didn't as what they paid or anything else. I race back to the Geiers, "I got a job!"
So the next day, Saturday, I started and all day they had me chop corn...cut both the ends off and open it. After the first week they paid me $25. I thought, "What a country this is! Where does the money come from?!" I worked there seven weeks and got $30 by the last week.
I saved up a little money, then I asked Mr. Geier what I should do next. He suggested I rent a horse and wagon for $2, buy some merchandise, then go down to Market Street and peddle it. So I did. Fifteen dollars a day, sixteen dollars a day, around the neighborhoods. Eventually I bough a donut and cake route and had that for a long time.
My father came and worked as a baker. But after a couple months he didn't like the figuring, keeping books. So he went to my future father-in-law, Mr. Weitz, and said, "Look, just pay me like you would pay and ordinary baker and I'll stay on. I don't want any headaches. Business, schmisness. Who wants business?" And he gave up the partnership.
We came here, my father and I, on July 15, 1920. The Weitz family came from Europe to join Mr. Weitz in September 1920. That's when I met Auntie Pearl, when she came from Europe and I drove her to her house. She was fifteen and I was twenty. Her brother Sol, who was two years younger than me, was too old to start going to school. They put him in the bakery, and my father taught him to be a baker. Uncle Moe was sent for about six months after we were here. He was sixteen. I taught him how to drive a car. Then the rest of the family came a couple months later. Before the end of the year, both my family and Aunt Pearl's families were here.
Things that stand out in my mind about my parents...
My mother Rose, your Bubby, was a person who was fifty years ahead of her time. She loved life and was a "ham" from the word "Go!" She was the kind of person who wanted to get in the middle of things, be "one of the girls." Her biggest delight was to get in a crowd and start to tell some stories...and she would tell some real hot ones. She had a wonderful memory. She did a lot of charity and helped to support Rabbis who had little temples that couldn't afford to pay them. She made luncheons, sold raffle tickets. She always went around with books of tickets.
I'll never forget when she took the train to Audrey's wedding in 1954. The wedding was in the big temple in St. Paul, Minnesota. We got out at night and it started to snow (in May!). She got so excited, but she didn’t want to get her feet wet - so we had to carry her to the car. She sat at the head table at the dinner, and after dinner she had to make a speech. Then she started to reminisce and tell stories that had people rolling in the aisles. By the end they were saying "Mr. And Mrs. Lerner, you two can go home, but Bubby stays!"
My father Chaim, your Zadeh, had a "thing" about paying his bills promptly. When he gave a donation to the temple he had to run over on Sunday to give it. When he had a utility bill, he would run with the money Uncle Lou or one of the boys and tell them to run, pay the bill. We would say, "Dad, it can be paid tomorrow." No, no, it had to be paid right now. And the finniest thing is that now, when I get a bill, it's the same thing. I have to pay it right away. I don't want anything hanging over my head.
Pearl: ""Yyou know, I used to work at the bakery, at night with Zadeh. I didn't feel right to see him walking up the hill alone after work, so I used to walk home with him, and he would get the biggest pleasure to talk with me about what happened that day. I can never describe what a wonderful man he was. Bubby and Zadeh had a weekly ritual. On Friday morning they would go down to the Grand Central Market and then on to the Million Dollar Theater downtown and see a movie together."
It's hard to say what else I would liked to have done, or what other direction I would have liked my life to have gone if things had been different economically. At one point I took up telegraphy (Morse Code) until my hand started shaking and I couldn't continue. I used to write songs, parodies. From my childhood experiences I would not punish in anger. I believe I accomplished that. Life has so many pleasantries and disappointments. You experience so many things, and you just have to thank God that things aren't worse.