Phyllis (Kleid) Cohen
"LIVING WITH FRIEDA AND NATHAN"
By Phyllis Kleid Cohen (Youngest Daughter of their Youngest Daughter)
The Family
To most of you reading this, Frieda and Nathan were the progenitors of the Bashner Kinsmen. To me, they were simply Bubba and Zeider.
We lived together from the time I was born in 1932, when Nathan was 68 and Frieda was 67 until their deaths. We shared our days in our little house in Jamaica, N.Y. with their youngest daughter, Leah, my mother, Herman (Hymie) my father, and my two sisters, Frances, 12 years my senior (and really my second mother), and Lillian, 8 years older than me who I thought looked just like Lana Turner.
The House
The house had 2 levels – the upstairs which contained three bedrooms and one bath, a shelf halfway down the stairs with our only telephone -- a party line, meaning you had to wait until your neighbors were off before you could send or receive a call. The main level had a living room, a dining room and a teeny kitchen. In front of the house was a small stoop, and you entered through a glass-enclosed porch.
The teeny kitchen with an ice box and no freezer, was somewhat miraculous because it was here that Leah and Frieda, who was lame from a car accident years before, prepared wonderfully bountiful and delicious Shabbat meals every Friday night for the relatives – always Uncle Manny and Aunt Sylvia, and often Aunt Sarah and Uncle Sam Leo and Uncle Sam Bashner and his wife, Aunt Ida, until he was widowed. After that he came to live with us for a time until he married Aunt Frieda and then together they resumed the Friday night visits.
Before Passover, the house was always busy – Zeider took the train down to Manhattan and returned with armfuls of chickens -- but I also remember going with him to a dingy kosher slaughter shack somewhere on the other side of the tracks and watching chickens being beheaded and sold to us. This memory is particularly vivid because the poor creatures were able, for a time, to run around without their heads -- an impressive experience for a 6 year old.
Then the cooking started and Frieda oversaw preparations for a very kosher, very ritualistic Passover seder sometimes for 40 relatives, always ending in song.
Zeider
Zeider was a peaceful, undemanding, religious man and prayed several times a day wearing his Tefillin (phylacteries) in the morning. Both he and Bubba spoke very little English and communicated with my parents in Yiddish. This was especially useful when they didn’t want us to understand. When they spoke to me, I understood but answered in English. A retired tailor by trade, Zeider sometimes altered our clothing. Much of his time was spent sitting quietly in a chair and reading the Yiddish newspaper, or tending to the stray dogs we always seemed to be collecting, and who were always inexplicably named Susie. Fran was his eager partner in this enterprise. He also loved watching the birds in our back yard and often announced in Yiddish/English, “Look, today they are having a meeting.”
Frieda
Frieda was proactive in everything she did -- a prime mover.
A story told from before I was born: There was an enormous radio in our living room and it was here that Frieda and Leah one day heard a radio appeal from an orphanage. Two little sisters needed a temporary foster home because their mother had died and their father couldn’t care for them. Sadly, the girls were about to be split up. That very same day, Frieda and Leah rode the train into Manhattan and arranged to take them home. The foster children, Ruth and Evelyn, lived in our house for 4 years and were then reunited with their remarried father. Years later, when I was 5 or so, they came back with their father to visit, and from my upstairs bed I listened to the loud, emotional reunion but never actually got to meet them.
Nathan and Frieda were observant; however, she often took me to the movies on Saturday mornings and brought a lunch to fortify us through a double feature as well as a serial and the news. The lunch was usually roasted chicken and kugel and I think if she had figured out a way to include soup she would have done it. I suspect these weekly movie trips were arranged to afford Leah and Hymie a bit of quiet time.
Far Rockaway
Frieda was an excellent cook and before my time she had owned and run an inn in Far Rockaway where family members were “drafted” to help. Hilarious stories made the rounds about those days – how three or four of the draftees had to share one bed, how one pain-in-the-neck customer who demanded ice water (no freezers, remember?) was secretly given water to satisfy his thirst from a pan placed under the icebox which caught water from the melting ice. I’m not sure that Frieda was included in this prank but other irreverent relatives certainly were.
Far Rockaway was one of my favorite places. As a small child, I remember Uncle Louis’ Skeeball Concession on the boardwalk and Cousin Danny wearing an apron and a portable coin machine to make change for the customers. He always let me play a free game. As new parents, Arnie and I summered there with Leah and subsequently rented a house on Beach 61st Street for several years hoping to improve Steven’s health. (It worked!) We had a very warm reception and became close to several other Kinsmen families on the same block – the David Leos, the Matt Ginsburgs and the Harvey Schechtmans. We also got to see Aunt Bertha and Uncle Louis when they came to visit.
The Aunts and Uncles
Aunt Ray and Uncle Ben, because they lived California, weren’t frequent visitors to Jamaica as was the East Coast crowd. Uncle Louie Bashner and Aunt Carrie Levine with their families lived far enough away that they generally visited only on Sundays. An important innovation for us to stay in touch was our monthly Bashner Kinsmen meeting held in rotating homes. The younger married cousins also attended and they included Ed and Ann Leo, Sid and Pauline Leo, Stanley and Dottie Leo, Esther and Manny Gruber, Henny and Sam Malkin, Sylvia and George Chapman, Sam and Minnie Chiat, Lil and Irv Schwartzberg (and later Lil and Mac Wallach), Evelyn and Stan Nordheimer and Roz and Matt Ginsburg. Each year the Kinsmen held a Chanukah party in someone’s den – a new and previously unheard of addition to the wealthier homes in our family.( When did anyone ever have a room set aside purely for entertainment? Only two generations before, kitchen tables on the Lower East Side had doubled as beds for borders who were recent immigrants.) I rarely attended the Kinsmen meetings but gleaned much of the goings on from conversations I overheard in my house. They were apparently raucous, demonstrative, affectionate events and often very funny, particularly when the business part was conducted by Ed Leo.
Flying to Mexico
These years from my birth in 1932 to 1940 encompassed the Great Depression, and a lot of Kinsmen conversations centered on making a living and how everyone was coping. Our immediate family did not feel the effects because my father’s firm was able to stay in business. Hymie had been working for an import-export house since age 13 (the only job he ever had until his death). Despite, having only an eighth grade education, he was considered to be very smart. In 1938 his firm, Carr Brothers, sent him to Mexico to close a deal and most of the Kinsmen came to the airport on Long Island to see him off. I think that nobody in the family had ever flown in an airplane before. Everyone wore their finest clothes, which was usual for senders-off as well as travelers. He came back with the business contract successfully tucked in his pocket and tons of photographs and exotic chotchkes as gifts for everyone.
South Fallsburgh
Every summer we packed up our car the day after school ended, picked up Hymie in New York and headed for South Fallsburgh in the Catskill Mountains. I couldn’t wait to go -- and then couldn’t wait for the car trip to be over because it was the pre-highway era and the car, like most others, was not air-conditioned. The trip from Jamaica took many, many hours (it seemed like years). We passed dozens of stopped cars on the side of the road which had overheated and we always carried a container of water. Our one oasis was the Red Apple Rest on old Route 17 and once we reached it we knew we were almost there. The Red Apple Rest unquestionably had the most delicious hot dogs in the world. Once we were established in our small bungalow in South Fallsburgh, Hymie, like the other fathers, began his weekly trips back and forth, arriving in the cool Catskills Friday evenings and leaving Sunday nights. The women, led by my mother, would greet them noisily on Fridays nights banging pots with metal spoons. Since none of the women owned cars, and most of them (Leah being the exception) couldn’t drive anyway, during the week we depended on peddlers who came and went selling food – the fish man, the dairy and egg man, the soda man, the fruits and vegetables guy and most importantly the ice man. On hot days, we hiked to Echo Lake a mile or so away, along a railroad track to swim off a wooden, very splintery dock. On cooler days, we took the same hike to pick huckleberries. When it rained, we traded comic books or played cards and, if it wasn’t raining, played ping pong on a warped table with dented balls which we could un-dent with a lit match (not always perfectly.) During the summer Kinsmen various members arrived on staggered visits.
Quick Impressions of the Elders
Aunt Rachel – warm, motherly, practical
Uncle Ben – adored Rachel
Aunt Sarah – I could always talk to her. Tall, dignified, ramrod straight, beautiful
Uncle Sam – My advisor after Hymie died, extremely honest and highly respected business man, tall, dignified, ramrod straight
Uncle Manny – always smiling, joking, loved children, very handsome
Aunt Sylvia – classy, statuesque, adored by Manny
Uncle Louis – jovial, a tease, hard working
Aunt Bertha – good natured, warm, homey
Uncle Sam Bashner – sweet, very involved in his family
Aunt Ida – beautiful with porcelain features
Aunt Carrie – had a special relationship with Leah, caring, stylish, very generous
Uncle Nat -- solid, outstanding business man
Leah – always put others first, very involved with siblings and their children, irreverent sense of humor
Hymie – serious, adored Leah, unfailingly respectful to Frieda and Nathan
Outstanding Memories
- Frieda and Nathan’s 50th Anniversary (Yes! That picture. If you look closely, I was there.) What a contrast to today! Arnie and I celebrated our 50th three years ago and that was only eight years after we both stopped skiing.
- Cousin Morty Bashner’s marriage to Gabby. He was a frequent visitor and I loved to talk to him because he always treated me as an adult, without teasing. I admired him tremendously because he was a self-made professional
- Hymie’s death, unexpectedly in 1947 while still in his 40’s. After that we sold our house and moved to Sarah and Sam’s apartment house in New York City so Leah could work in their tailor trimming store on 3rd Ave. and 68th Street.
- The family rallying around Leah after Hymie died and how important it was to me.
- Cousin Esther Leo (Gruber’s) death from cancer. Because I would visit Uncle Sam’s store almost daily after school, I felt close to all the Leos and Esther was especially close to Fran. It touched me deeply that from her deathbed, Esth, had some er sent a ring for my newborn daughter, Adrienne, engraved with her name.
- Leah’s irreverence -- which shaped the personalities of her children. My sister, Fran, had some of that and so did Lil. I too, started out that way until I found it wasn't really my style - so I only have it sometimes.n, had some of that and so did Lil. I, too, started
- Fran’s marriage to Jack Dichter and the birth of Marc who was the boy my father never had. Phyllis Leslie was born just before Hymie died and Howard later.
- Lil’s marriage to Lee Sterling who returned as a wounded veteran from the battlefield in WWII, and courted her on crutches. The births of their three children, Karen, Alan and Wendy.
- The day WWII began and the days it ended -- VE and VJ Days
