The Jews in America Trilogy Read Free

contradictions. It held its share of decidedly middle-class notions (dry-cleaning did not really clean a dress, no matter what the advertisements said—every young girl was taught this), and yet it was also a world of imposing wealth. Granny Goodhart’s lifetime spanned an era, from the Civil War days into the 1940’s, whenwealth was the single, most important product of New York City. It was an era when Fifth Avenue was still a street of private houses, and the great mansions to which everyone was periodically invited included Otto Kahn’s sprawling palace, Jacob Schiff’s castle, the Felix Warburgs’ fairy-tale house of Gothic spires. It was a world where sixty for dinner was commonplace (it was Otto Kahn’s favorite number), and where six hundred could gather in a private ballroom without crowding. It was a world that moved seasonally—to the vast “camps” in the Adirondacks (not the Catskills), to the Jersey Shore (not Newport), and to Palm Beach (not Miami)—in private railway cars. A total of five such cars was needed to carry Jacob Schiff and his party to California. Chefs, stewards, butlers, valets, and maids traveled with their masters and mistresses, and a nurse for each child was considered essential. Every two years there was a ritual steamer-crossing to Europe and a ritual tour of spas.
    Yet it was not particularly a world of fashion. One would find The Economist, Barron’s , and the Atlantic Monthly on the coffee table more often than Vogue or Town and Country . One would expect to find a collection of Impressionist paintings, or of fine books, rather than elaborate furs or jewels. One worried about being “showy,” and spared no expense to be inconspicuous. Granny Goodhart’s sister-in-law was the daughter of Adolph Lewisohn, a man who spent $300 a month for shaves alone. To keep his Westchester estate from being an eyesore to his neighbors, he employed thirty full-time gardeners to manicure his acreage and nurse his fourteen hothouses. He was so determined that his parties be in the best of taste—for years his New Year’s Eve ball in his Fifth Avenue house was one of the largest in the city—that, to keep his cellars supplied with the best wine and spirits, he ran up an average bill of $10,000 a month. And yet, at the same time, he had become interested in prison reform. When not giving dinner parties for his friends, he could be found at Sing Sing, dining with this or that condemned man in Death Row. He gave the stadium that bears his name to City College because, as he put it, “They asked me to.”
    Mr. Lewisohn’s friend and neighbor, Felix Warburg, had a squash court in his city house, another in his country house—which also had a polo field—a yacht, a full Stradivarius string quartet, and a set of black harness horses identically marked with white stars on their foreheads. When Mr. Warburg was depressed, he had a gardener build him a platform high in a tree; from there, Warburg would consider the possibility of clearing another of his famous “vistas” from the surrounding woods. Yet he was so inordinately domestic that, upon checking into ahotel room in a foreign city, the first thing he did was to rearrange the furniture into the coziest possible “conversational groupings.” He liked to give away a million dollars at a clip to a list of some fifty-seven different charities, and yet when his children asked their father how much money he had, he would make a zero with his thumb and forefinger. It was a world, in other words, that gave equal weight to modesty and dignity as to pomp, comfort, and splendor. Jacob Schiff, for whom one private Pullman was seldom ample, could therefore send his son home from a party because the boy’s suit was too “flashy.”
    Mr. Willie Walter, whose daughter was married to Granny Goodhart’s son, owned a custom-built Pierce-Arrow which he kept