Long Island, NewYork City & Teaneck
Other places in which significant things happened to me were New York City, Long Island and Teaneck, New Jersey. I was born in New York City on a snowy night in 1925. My parents grew up there and my grandparents (who were immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian empire and Odessa, Russia) settled there. I feel I have deep roots in New York City.
My mother wanted me to have a “sense of family” which I had in those places, staying with her family at Christmas time and on summer vacations. I stayed with her sister’s family, the Gamblings, in Manhattan at Christmas time and on Long Island in the summer. I also stayed with her parents, Granny and Grandpa in Teaneck, NJ. I loved being part of the Gambling entourage since Uncle Jack was a famous person with his own early morning radio show; WOR-AM, “Rambling with Gambling.” I loved staying in their luxurious apartment on Riverside Drive, and in a series of summer homes. Most of all I loved trips on Uncle Jack’s boat, a 40 foot cabin cruiser with a “flying bridge” on top. On one trip we circumnavigated Long Island, anchoring at various yacht clubs and going ashore for dinner and a stroll along the main streets. On another trip we went through the Troy “locks” to Lake Champlain. John and I slept in narrow bunks in the bow, while Auntie Rita and Uncle Jack slept in a bed that served as a table in the daytime. Uncle Jack taught us to play poker. I was thirteen and John was 8 years old. Even though John was 5 years younger than me and a boy, I loved playing with him. He was always upbeat and full of good ideas about how to have fun. I loved being part of a “real” family.
I loved Manhattan! The skyline, the broad Hudson River with the George Washington Bridge, Fifth Avenue with its fancy department stores and Rockefeller Plaza with its skating rink and expensive restaurants. Mother, Auntie Rita and I occasionally skated at that rink and Uncle Jack once took me out to lunch in one of those restaurants. I believe it was the French one. Especially at Christmas time, New York City was a “winter wonderland,” with the snow, the Christmas lights and decorations. After drab, smoggy, straight-laced Pittsburgh, it seemed like heaven to me. I remember how Uncle Jack took me and my cousin to see “Jumbo” in the old Hippodrome Theater. It was a combination of circus and musical, including a real elephant and trapeze performers. It starred Jimmy Durante. I was entranced. Uncle Jack wanted to leave at the intermission, but I insisted there was more to come. I also remember the matinees with Auntie Rita. We wore our pretty little, “matinee hats” with flowers and veils. We always had good seats. Those were the days before musicals. Mostly Vienese operettas, which I loved. I loved to go shopping with Auntie Rita on Fifth Avenue. In one department store, when Auntie Rita gave the clerk her credit card, the young woman asked, “Are you the Mrs. Gambling?” Auntie proudly replied, “Yes, I am.”
I also loved the summers on Long Island, in spite of the mosquitos, spending the whole day at Jones Beach as we often did, sometimes staying in the evening for the operetta at Zach’s Bay.
I was always happy to visit my Granny’s house in Teaneck, NJ. Grandpa never noticed me nor my cousin John. He was old, very deaf, and had lost interest in life. But Granny loved having us there for a week or two. She cooked for us Hungarian Stuffed Cabbage and Haluska. Haluska is a peasant dish consisting of boiled potatoes in pieces and boiled bits of dough, served with lots of butter, salt and pepper. She also baked fruit pies and sponge cakes. She and I took walks every afternoon after her rest. She had a very weak heart and astronomically high blood pressure. By fifty, living as a poor immigrant in a foreign country had exhausted her. (Nevertheless, she lived to be 75!)
We sometimes walked to Hackensack Cemetery. She showed me where she would soon lie, beside a young bombardier who had a Germanic name like her own. (Her name was Dora Graubart.) He had been shot down in World War II.
Granny loved to tell me about life in Hungary. How the peasants dressed up in their hand-embroidered clothes and danced the wild czardas every Sunday, after attending the Catholic Church in their village. She loved gypsy music and passed that love on to me. She seemed to feel a fondness for the gypsies who were feared and hated by everyone else. I think she envied their freedom to move around in their covered wagons, and live outdoors. She thought they were good-looking with their dark skins and strong white teeth. Whenever I came to New York, my relatives would ask, “Where do you want to go to dinner, Nancy?” I always said, “An Hungarian restaurant, with gypsy music!”
On the last day of my visit she always took me into the unfurnished sunroom. She brought out a huge iron key and opened a huge trunk, the trunk she had with her when she emigrated from Hungary in1895. There were photo albums of her siblings, whom she missed so much, and of her brother’s beautiful daughter, Margit Trattner, as a young girl, with a big, white bow in her dark hair. I said I would like to play with her. I later met her and her parents in Budapest, in the summer of 1938, when she was 19 and I was 13. She and her mother died in Auschwitz during the war. Trattner was known to be a Jewish name. I asked Granny to put a note there in the chest with the pictures. “These pictures should go to Nancy.” I still have them.
Just before last Christmas, (2019) Eva and I revisited NYC. It was decorated for the holidays, just as exciting and wonderful as ever. After delivering André’s ashes to our family plot in Hackensack Cemetery, we drove down Grayson Place to see if Granny’s house was still there. It was, looking just as it used to look. It was for sale. It made me very happy to see that those relics of the past, Granny’s house and The Gambling’s apartment have withstood the ravages of time.
As I write this in May 2020, in the midst of the world-wide Coronavirus pandemic, I feel sad to hear about the thousands of people in New York City who are sick and dying, and will die. No one knows how long it will last, nor what lasting effects it will have. I don’t even know whether I will survive it.