most important to Daddy, Robert Lincoln, the son of Daddy’s revered “Uncle Abe.” I could only hope Daddy and my uncles could become as respected in their business as these Jersey Shore predecessors. I played with the children of all these powerful men, my “cousins.” It was simple, swimming and sunning and riding bicycles, going to Asbury Park, now famous for Bruce Springsteen, then famous for its boardwalk, its carousel, its imposing casino, which was a beach club that had nothing to do with gambling and was designed by the same architects who built New York’s Grand Central Station.
I normally never liked to eat very much, but the salt air made me hungry for the cotton candy, the toffee, the popcorn, the hot dogs, the all-American junk. Daddy couldn’t have picked a more all-American spot to celebrate his birthday on the Fourth of July. His idea of relaxing was sitting outside overlooking the sea, drinking scotch, smoking cigarettes, and playing gin rummy with my uncles and other men like Uncle Benny, visiting from California. Here in the Jersey breeze, America’s highest rollers would get all worked up over their hands as they played for a penny a point. Daddy and Benny also enjoyed fierce handball competitions. You could see how intense they could be. In those games, you could see how these men could rule their world.
Despite my summers in Deal and my travels with my parents all over the country and to Cuba, as a little girl my New York was a very limited slice of Manhattan, bounded on the north by 96th Street, the south by 42nd Street, the west by the Hudson, and the east by Fifth Avenue. I never visited the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building or Gracie Mansion, never saw Wall Street or Greenwich Village, never was taken to Macy’s or Gimbels. Daddy did take Paul and Buddy to Yankee Stadium to see baseball, but not me. They said I was too little.
I certainly wasn’t shown my Daddy’s roots on the Lower East Side, where his gang had gotten its start running garages of hot cars that transported illegal booze. Occasionally we would go to Brooklyn to visit Daddy’s mother, Grandma Yetta. But this was fancy Brooklyn, not poor Brooklyn. Daddy had set his mother up in a luxurious apartment on Ocean Parkway, the grandest boulevard in the borough, supposedly modeled on a street in Paris. It went all the way out to Coney Island, where they never took me, either.
Grandma Yetta was very sharp, and she didn’t seem very Old World at all, like Grandpa Lansky was supposed to have been. I was too young to remember him, but Grandma Yetta would later become a great friend to me. She knew everything and about everyone, and I could see sometimes how all her chattering, especially about Uncle Benny in Las Vegas and all his tsuris (trouble, I learned to translate), would make my reserved father very nervous.
That, and stories like how her sister had also immigrated to the States and raised a family. This sister’s immigrant husband was so proud of his kids that he then took them back to Poland to show them off to the relatives who stayed behind. But his timing was terrible. Just on his visit, the Nazis invaded, and they took him and his kids to a concentration camp and killed them all. Neither Mommy nor Daddy had wanted my tender ears to hear horror stories like that, but Grandma had a mind and a mouth of her own. I could see where Daddy got his drive and power. Everyone said his brother Jack, who seemed weak and passive, was much more like their father.
Some of Yetta’s horror stories turned out to be comforting. Yetta told me how she had lost two daughters, Lena and Rose, who would have been my aunts, Lena to walking pneumonia in 1915 and Rose in 1928, to skin cancer, just before Daddy married Mommy. That’s why he needed a wife, she told me. That’s why he treasured his daughter, she assured me. And that I would always be Daddy’s pet, the most important woman in his life. “More than Mommy?” I
I normally never liked to eat very much, but the salt air made me hungry for the cotton candy, the toffee, the popcorn, the hot dogs, the all-American junk. Daddy couldn’t have picked a more all-American spot to celebrate his birthday on the Fourth of July. His idea of relaxing was sitting outside overlooking the sea, drinking scotch, smoking cigarettes, and playing gin rummy with my uncles and other men like Uncle Benny, visiting from California. Here in the Jersey breeze, America’s highest rollers would get all worked up over their hands as they played for a penny a point. Daddy and Benny also enjoyed fierce handball competitions. You could see how intense they could be. In those games, you could see how these men could rule their world.
Despite my summers in Deal and my travels with my parents all over the country and to Cuba, as a little girl my New York was a very limited slice of Manhattan, bounded on the north by 96th Street, the south by 42nd Street, the west by the Hudson, and the east by Fifth Avenue. I never visited the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building or Gracie Mansion, never saw Wall Street or Greenwich Village, never was taken to Macy’s or Gimbels. Daddy did take Paul and Buddy to Yankee Stadium to see baseball, but not me. They said I was too little.
I certainly wasn’t shown my Daddy’s roots on the Lower East Side, where his gang had gotten its start running garages of hot cars that transported illegal booze. Occasionally we would go to Brooklyn to visit Daddy’s mother, Grandma Yetta. But this was fancy Brooklyn, not poor Brooklyn. Daddy had set his mother up in a luxurious apartment on Ocean Parkway, the grandest boulevard in the borough, supposedly modeled on a street in Paris. It went all the way out to Coney Island, where they never took me, either.
Grandma Yetta was very sharp, and she didn’t seem very Old World at all, like Grandpa Lansky was supposed to have been. I was too young to remember him, but Grandma Yetta would later become a great friend to me. She knew everything and about everyone, and I could see sometimes how all her chattering, especially about Uncle Benny in Las Vegas and all his tsuris (trouble, I learned to translate), would make my reserved father very nervous.
That, and stories like how her sister had also immigrated to the States and raised a family. This sister’s immigrant husband was so proud of his kids that he then took them back to Poland to show them off to the relatives who stayed behind. But his timing was terrible. Just on his visit, the Nazis invaded, and they took him and his kids to a concentration camp and killed them all. Neither Mommy nor Daddy had wanted my tender ears to hear horror stories like that, but Grandma had a mind and a mouth of her own. I could see where Daddy got his drive and power. Everyone said his brother Jack, who seemed weak and passive, was much more like their father.
Some of Yetta’s horror stories turned out to be comforting. Yetta told me how she had lost two daughters, Lena and Rose, who would have been my aunts, Lena to walking pneumonia in 1915 and Rose in 1928, to skin cancer, just before Daddy married Mommy. That’s why he needed a wife, she told me. That’s why he treasured his daughter, she assured me. And that I would always be Daddy’s pet, the most important woman in his life. “More than Mommy?” I
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