Below is a slightly edited version of a paper I submitted in March 2020 for Tara Zahra’s class, “Writing Family History: Migration Stories.” I apologize for the atrocious endnote formatting!

For a photo gallery, a potentially helpful family tree, and a link to sources and so forth, see the end of the piece.

— PROLOGUE —

Once upon a time in foggy, mountainous, mid–19th century Transylvania, glamorous vampires mingled with gentile royalty in foreboding castles. Meanwhile, underage Hungarian Jews—“congenital embellishers,” (1) for better or worse—bought late-night drinks for “very cool Gypsies” in and around their suburban shtetls whenever the Romani passed through Hungary, about four times a year. (2, 3)

Hani’s father was a butcher and cattle dealer. Simon Baruch was blond and handsome, another local butcher who worked a different cattle stall at the same market. He caught Hani’s father’s eye, and was promptly whisked away to dine with the family. Hani was the oldest of her sisters, a skilled cook and housekeeper, and she served dinner that night. The men went into another room to talk dowries, and when Baruch left, Hani’s father asked if she knew who the boy was. She did not.

“Your husband! Your future husband!”

They lived happily ever after. (4)

— “THE SIMONS OF BECLEAN?” —

Simon Baruch was a butcher, and Hani was a housewife.

Their sons Andrew and Louis (whose name might have really been Leopold, but who might’ve been an individual brother of his own) were butchers too; their son Salomon (“Pop,” to me) mostly waited tables before opening an extermination business a little later in life; and no one talks about whatever it was that their daughters, Rosie and Julia, did for work. (5) No one really talks about Malvina, another (potential) daughter of theirs, at all. (6)

When Salomon was a very young boy, likely years before Andrew was born, his family moved to a new Transylvanian shtetl town: Beclean, in what was then (Austria-)Hungary. Two men in the town were talented at burning mud to make bricks, and so the family built a burnt-mud-brick house, which successfully withstood a flood. Hani would walk 15 or 20 blocks to do laundry at the river, and would carry the clothing home on her shoulders, dripping wet. And she often visited the butcher shop, cared for “five or six kids,” and would somehow still find time, every Thursday night, to bake more loaves of rye bread than she had children, and she’d make cheese patties to be served with sour cream. “Mothers like that, you don’t find in America.” (7)

Some 20 years after his family’s move to Beclean, around 1910–1914, Andrew was a high schooler in Dej, Hungary. Dej and Beclean are about 15 miles apart, relatively nearby suburbs to Kolozsvár, Hungary. It’s unclear whether the Simons moved from Beclean to Dej at some point, or if their 15-mile separation is a pedantic distinction that really only exists within the bounds of Google Maps in 2020. About a decade after beginning high school, Andrew’s hometown(s) of Beclean/Dej/Kolozsvar would become Romanian territory. Koloszvár officially acquired its new name, Cluj, when Hungary signed onto the contentious Treaty of Trianon in 1920 (Case 25). (8)

The Simons were Jewish, although they became less strictly religious as the years went by. They were religious enough so that as a child, Salomon Simon knew to hide from his father while covertly devouring the fried ham that the Roma brought to town when they passed through; (9) not so religious that Andrew even pretended to run a kosher butcher shop when he bought his own in Hell’s Kitchen the early 1930s. (10) (Though pretending to sell kosher meat, was, indeed, a relatively normal practice among New York’s Jewish butchers in the early to mid–20th century [Diner 183]. [11])

Their Judaism seemed to fit them well as the punch line to a storied achievement that shouldn’t have been possible for a Jew, like Baruch being a rough rider in the Hungarian army. Or, less often, as a reason why an opportunity, like Salomon graduating college, didn’t pan out. (12) At its most productive, religious observance was a catalyst for Andrew’s getting a raise in one of his earliest butcher shops in New York. Later, Andrew’s empty threat of labeling a German-descended meat supplier as anti-Semitic took his butcher shop to greater heights of financial success in the midst of the Great Depression. (13)

In 1946, the Simons’ Judaism was the reason that their European contingent never showed up on the 150 beautiful acres in upstate New York, that Andrew had purchased three years prior in order to help secure their farmers’ visas, thinking that the war would end soon. In 1946, Andrew found out that everyone still at home had been killed. (14)

— “POP” —

Big shots pervade Salomon and Andrew’s stories. The Simon brothers arguably weave in and out of “big shot” territory themselves over the course of their respective careers and migration stories, but perhaps no alleged big shot is so crucial to Salomon’s story as the nameless one who “came down from America” right at the turn of the 20th century—just after Salomon had lost a job, as it happened—and “told big things about ‘our country’” and possibly inspired a 17- or 18-year-old (15) Salomon to make the leap across Western Europe, and then the Atlantic Ocean, himself. (16) His leap turned out to be quite a prolonged one.

Salomon spent a month in Leipzig, eastern Germany, before moving on to the port city of Hamburg, where he spent “a year and a day” in waiting. He was faced with investigations at the border, but Salomon wouldn’t submit to the border officials’ scare tactics. Wearing “nothing but a winter—no, spring!—coat, and a small satchel,” Salomon was doggedly persistent in showing officials the letter permitting him to work in the U.S., meanwhile learning German and working at a big store so he could send payments to the shipping company he planned to sail with. Salomon ideally would have travelled on the faster, newer boat, that took only seven days to cross the Atlantic. But too many people were sailing, and the days started getting colder, so at the beginning of December, 1906, he gave up and sailed on a ship that had previously been used to shuttle cattle overseas. Salomon slept in the steerage of the S.S. Blücher, (17) where vomiting occurred regularly on the heads of bottom bunkmates, meals were served on the deck, and Russian Jews abounded. Storms at the back end of the journey caused the ship to arrive in 13 days, two longer than expected, but no matter: On December 13th, Salomon arrived at Castle Garden, then New York’s major port of arrival. He was investigated; they were particular. Salomon presented his passport and resume. He had no job, and $25. He could speak Romanian, Hungarian, Hebrew, German, and Yiddish, and thanks to rabbinical lessons as a boy in the shtetl, he could write in all but the latter. English—spoken and written—would come soon enough. According to Salomon, Castle Garden’s border agents let him in because “they thought that [he] fit into America.” (18)

So, too, did many other Hungarian immigrants of the time, it would seem. Salomon wasn’t unique in his 1906 emigration: It fell right in the middle of a three-year peak for the country, 1905, 1906, and 1907 being often cited as the “most intense years of emigration from the territory of Hungary” (Vida 128). (19)

When Salomon got onto the streets of New York, his $25 went quickly. Each night around 10 or 11 p.m., he’d join a line of hundreds (Italians; Jews; “all kinds of people”) and the line would wait outside, in December, until about eight a.m. He was one of many immigrants looking for a job, though I don’t completely understand how the line-waiting was supposed to help with that. He had no friends in America, but he had a tangential acquaintance from the old country, who tried to train Salomon to join him in the printing business. Salomon felt no allegiance to printing, and so, when his money ran out, he somehow “found a family” who took him in at their small farm in Lynbrook, Long Island, where Salomon worked from six a.m. until dusk for six dollars a month. From there, he took a train to Long Beach, and found a restaurant where the employees tended to be Hungarian. Salomon was a waiter, but worked his way up to some sort of treasurer position for the boss. At the beginning of the surge of Hungarian Jewish migration that spanned from the 1870s until World War I, by far the most popular trades upon arrival in New York tended to be in the garment industry (Perlman 146), (20) rather than the service work that Salomon took up. However, most Jewish immigrants of the time also lived in clusters around the Lower East Side of Manhattan (Perlman 138), (21) and Salomon didn’t fit into that mold, either. Alongside being a waiter in Long Beach, Salomon developed a side hustle: His restaurant neighbored a big hotel that was being painted by a crew of about 100, who would come next door for drinks after work. Salomon started buying cases of beer at 15 cents per bottle, and sold the bottles to the painters at 25 cents each. Salomon bounced around Long Island, working various restaurant jobs, and in the meanwhile he got a little sick, and he also got married. (22)

It was 1909 when Salomon and Aranka “Gussie” Simon were married in a hallway. Gussie’s family was able to pay for the wedding, perhaps because her uncle was “a very rich lawyer.” The rich lawyer and other wedding guests were subjected to a foodless hallway wedding, after which Salomon went out with his friends. Their first apartment was purchased for either $8 or $80. (Roughly $250—or $2500—today.) In March 1913, the couple moved to the Rockaways, in Queens, with their two babies. Alexander (“Allie”) had been born two years prior, whereas Morris (“Mo”) was only born in August 1912. Half a decade later, in 1918 or 1919, Salomon and Gussie started renting a bungalow in the Rockaways, and had their youngest child, a daughter named Charlotte. (23, 24, 25) The whole place cost Salomon and Gussie $250 per year, and Salomon couldn’t afford it. Luckily, Gussie was a talented dressmaker with her own patterns and apparently lots of hungry customers, and Salomon tried to help make ends meet by spending nights at the ocean, bagging whitefish to be pickled. But ends did not meet by the time rent was due, so they left. Gussie got a job making dresses for $35 per week, and Salomon went to work at a laundromat, delousing infested clothes. When Salomon told Gussie what he was doing, he said, “My wife started to cry and said, ‘No, you stay home and take care of the children and house, I’m making $35 a week, and that’s enough money.’ So that’s what I did.” (26)

Salomon became a naturalized American citizen on March 14th, 1921, (27) about 15 years after his arrival on U.S. shores. Rarely—if ever—did he return to the old country, perhaps due to a combination of factors: his marriage to Gussie and the children they had together; his status as an older child who needed to serve as an independent provider rather than a dependent on his parents; World War I, which consumed Europe during the heart of those 15 years Salomon took to acclimatize to the U.S. before becoming a citizen. Right as he migrated, Hungary ramped up its efforts to draw emigrants home, taking a more practical approach than it had previously by “‘easing the acquisition of estates’ for return migrants from the United States…” (Poznan 654), just one piece in a longer history of Hungarian repatriation tactics. (28) None of these governmental efforts seemed to “speak” to Salomon, though the extent to which they were even intended to speak to Jews is unclear to me.

Salomon left the restaurant industry in favor of extermination, and eventually—likely during the 1920s—he founded his own company, “Simon & Sons.” He wanted at least one more son working with him to fit the plurality of the title—and probably for cheap labor purposes—but the younger of his two sons, Morris, was never as helpful as he’d have liked. My mother described Grandpa Mo as “smart, but a ne’er-do-well [who] couldn’t get it together.” (29)

Robert Perlman’s analysis of New York census data also suggests that Hungarian Jewish men experienced a professional surge in the U.S. by the late 1920s (Perlman 214). (30) Salomon was part of this trend, having successfully upgraded from low-paying service industry jobs to an entrepreneurial pursuit of his own. Salomon and Gussie did well for themselves; Gussie making dresses before becoming a full-time mother and housewife, (31) Salomon executing pests alongside his son Allie, and executing perfect one-liners decades later when being recorded for an oral history, like, “You can’t kill a louse with church; you have to kill ’em with a good insecticide.” (32) Insecticides weren’t the only pest-killers being used by early to mid–20th century exterminators: Ferrets, too, were a common rat-killing mechanism. For most of their lives, Pop and Gussie lived in a large house at 167 Beach 87th Street, in the Rockaways. Their property also included three smaller bungalows, and much of the space was rented out each summer to beachgoers, while my grandfather Bruce was brought up in one of the small houses. Last week, he recounted his late-1930s memories of the extermination ferrets:

“When I was seven or eight years old, I got a 50-gallon oil drum, and some chicken wire that I put on top. And Pop [Salomon] would catch live rats in order to ‘blood-train’ the ferrets about killing them. We would put the live rat in the drum, and then toss in the ferret, which would promptly break its neck—that’s the way they killed [rats]—and I would charge the neighborhood kids a penny to stand around the drum, look through the chicken wire, and watch the slaughter… I made probably four or five cents a session, which meant I could buy two issues of the Daily News and spend a penny on gum. A Coke at the fountain was probably a nickel.” (33)

— “ANDREW” —

Andrew had different priorities than his exterminator brother when it came to delousing. He was only about seven years old when Salomon left for the U.S., and didn’t join his older siblings Salomon and Julia in New York until his mid-20s. He got held up in Europe by the First World War, but when he did decide to leave home, he had Julia’s advice to guide him on his way. Julia’s biggest bits of travel advice were to wait in Hamburg for a big boat, and to scrupulously disinfect and shave himself to prepare for the voyage over, as German ships were plagued by lice. To the latter piece of advice, Andrew retorted, “I have beautiful, wavy, big black hair, so no, no dice. I wouldn’t cut my hair for nobody.” (34)

The big, modern boat, however, was something Andrew was willing to wait for. But like Salomon, he found himself without a suitable boat in Hamburg, and an English shipping agent arranged for his passage on to England so he could ship out from there. Having landed in Greenwich, Andrew made his way up north, to Liverpool. No big boats were to be found there either, so with a new group of friends—two or three men in similar positions—Andrew meandered down to Southampton, but he and his crew stopped in London on the way. All in all, it took Andrew three months to get from his shtetl to the English port from which he’d finally sail, but he was in no rush: “I wanted to see Germany, England, whatever.” He was fairly unusual in this twisted, leisurely path to the U.S. via Southampton, unlike his older brother, who had taken the road most traveled in successfully migrating through Hamburg. As Tara Zahra writes in The Great Departure, “Hamburg and Bremen were the most common outlets for East European emigrants, but it was also possible to depart from Rotterdam, Antwerp, or Liverpool” (Zahra 40). (35)

Andrew sailed with something like $300 he’d collected over the course of his wanderings, having exchanged cash from Romanian currency wherever he stopped for coffee. When he arrived in New York, he felt secure in that he “still had $70.” I am unsure as to how he spent $230 aboard the S.S. Adriatic. Nonetheless, he had written letters back and forth with Julia. She arranged for him to have a place to stay, among fellow Hungarians, when he landed in New York. (36)

In Ties That Bind, Ties That Divide, Julianna Puskás writes that “The Hungarian middle-class element … was most strongly represented in New York. Adapting to their surroundings with difficulty, they were most diligent in protecting their Hungarian characteristics” (Puskás 110). (37) Beyond that initial housing set-up—which didn’t last long—Andrew did not seem overly invested in maintaining connections with [now Romanians] on American soil. He talked about getting a “businessman lunch” at a Hungarian restaurant in midtown later on in his New York life, when he would deliver meat around the city as part of a butcher shop job: “I came there, took the meat in the kitchen, and they said, ‘You wanna eat?’ I said, ‘Yeah, what you got?,’ and they said, ‘Goulash!’ I said, ‘I don’t come to America to eat goulash!’” and though Andrew claimed he was joking, he also said he was given roast beef—a delicacy he’d acquired a taste for on the ship from England—instead. (38) This checks out, according to Hasia Diner’s analysis of immigrant Jewish foodways in the 20th century in her book Hungering for America. Diner writes that these migrants largely “rejected the idea that back home foods tasted better and were more authentic. They expressed little emotional longing for … the old tastes and smells” (Diner 190). (39)

Of his arrival on American soil, Andrew said, “I went out to Rockaway to see my brother; he didn’t buy me even a nickel’s worth of bread! … He told me he has a lot of mortgage, he has three children, and so on.” Salomon was able to do a little networking on his younger brother’s behalf, though, as he was in the restaurant industry, with valuable connections to the butchers who supplied the restaurants where he worked. Salomon got Andrew his first butchering job in New York, where he was content earning $10 or $12 each week, for two weeks. At that point, Julia came down from Manhattan to see her two brothers, and Andrew said, “Well, Julia, I got a job, and I stay here with my brother; he has plenty of room!” Holding true to her reputation as someone who “no one liked,” (40) she said, “Never mind my brother in Rockaway, you come with me to the city. Don’t stay here in this dump.”

Andrew followed Julia back up to Manhattan, and lived in a room on 79th Street. He got a job working for a Ninth Avenue butcher’s shop managed by a neighbor who’d drive to work every morning via horse and buggy picked up from the 78th Street Stable, whereas Andrew would usually either take the subway, or drive a delivery wagon around the city before arriving at the shop, making three or four early deliveries and eating nearly as many rounds of breakfast as he went. Andrew was for a while considered by his coworkers to be a “greenhorn,” or a naïve newcomer to the industry—though he did, of course, have years of butchering experience from back in Europe. Desperate to get his hands on some actual meat, and prove his worth while improving his skills, Andrew began doing more, and harder, labor in exchange for permission to do actual butchering. “I knew if I carried all the loads in, they’d let me cut it up. So in no time I knew every trick of the trade. I was … getting already $35 [per week], which was big money,” he said. (41)

Andrew generally worked Saturdays, but when Yom Kippur rolled around, he took the day off out of respect to a promise he’d made his father that he would “keep the big holiday.” This behavior was typical of immigrant Jews of the time. In Jewish New York, Deborah Moore writes that central and eastern European immigrant Jews in New York tended to “[neglect] strict Sabbath observance in favor of economic integration … Indeed, only a minority of New York Jews observed the Sabbath or affiliated with a synagogue … But many more, perhaps as many as three-quarters, attended synagogue annually on the High Holidays” (Moore 106). (42) When he came back into work Monday, Andrew received his late envelope of the last week’s pay, and it was $10 short. When he pressed his manager about why, he was told, “Well, you wanted the day off. I had to hire a man and I had to pay him $10.” Andrew replied, “Well, if my work is worth $10 per day, then I don’t get enough pay! I want more money.” And the boss said, “No more money, no more work.”

Thus began a veritable saga of Andrew’s bouncing back and forth between neighboring butcher shops on Ninth Avenue, whose respective managers “were enemies in business but otherwise they [were] friends.” He worked hard to prove himself at the second location, and ended up being pulled back into the first by a conniving manager who seduced him back to work with an early-morning horse and buggy ride replete with quality cheesecake at a Hungarian casino/restaurant. “I was a big cake eater!” Andrew confessed. Me too. And history backs us up: “‘Unlike the other groups of the Ghetto, the Rumanian is a bon-vivant and a pleasure-lover; therefore he did not long delay to establish the pastry-shop’” (Diner 202). (43)

Only nine months into his second stint at his first Ninth Avenue butcher locale, however, Andrew went back home. He didn’t like making deliveries, just as his brother hadn’t enjoyed printing. When he announced his imminent departure, Andrew’s boss said, “You know, you’ll be back.” Andrew said, “Why the heck do you—”

“You’re making so much money; you have the chance to make more money.”

“This is no money! You know how much I made at home? One day I went to a market and bought a couple cattle and made a whole week’s paycheck in a couple hours’ time!”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

So Andrew sailed home. (44)

When he got back to interwar Romania, Andrew managed to sneak around the mandatory army reporting rule thanks to a little bribery and a lucky high school connection to the local police captain in his district. But soon a little bribery turned into a lot, and Andrew was losing five dollars every other day for six months, keeping sergeants quiet about his able-bodied Romanian presence. He decided to return to the U.S., and did, nonchalantly, just a few days later, via Cherbourg. Finally, Andrew knew how to easily get himself on a big liner. Once he landed back in New York and cleared customs, Andrew headed for a payphone and called his old manager, who sounded appropriately unsurprised to hear from him. For a dollar, Andrew and his suitcase took a taxi to the shop, only four or five blocks from the pier, and got straight to work. It was about two p.m. “That happened maybe three or four times.” (45)

In all, Andrew went back to Europe five times. He’d go back every two or three years; stay a couple months; sort of wish he could stay permanently. Like his older brother, and most other migrants from the region, government incentives did not draw him home; as Kristina Poznan writes, “Most migrants, in the end, based their decisions to return on family, economic, and work-related factors … [R]eturn migrants would migrate again if they believed that conditions in the United States to find work improved” (Poznan 657), (46) though that wasn’t exactly Andrew’s case, either. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in either 1925 (47) or 1928 (48) and that sweetened the deal even more: “American citizens, the Romanian army can’t bother,” he said.

Andrew’s brother Louis (or Leopold?) was also a butcher, and he supplied a big Romanian bologna producer. The man who’d successfully run the operation for years was getting old, and he passed the company down to his less business-savvy son. The son wanted everything modernized, and that meant big expenses that the bologna business started failing to keep up with, so Andrew’s brother pitched a homeward-bound Andrew as a consultant of sorts. Andrew said, “I didn’t know much about bologna-making, but I know how to manage a store, and think like that.” And Andrew was finally a big shot: He had about $5,000—the equivalent, he thought, to about two million Romanian leu. Andrew was almost set on investing half of that sum into the bologna business, and going in as a partner and manager himself. His fifth trip to Europe would be his last. But at the eleventh hour, another big shot—this one a family friend and advisor, a well-known lawyer in Cluj—advised Andrew against it. As an American citizen, he’d be limited to the role of silent partner, and the risk was too high. Andrew turned around, and went back to America. It was 1928 or 1929, and the Great Depression was on the doorstep. (49)

When the Depression arrived, Andrew lost everything from property to stocks to a third of his regular weekly salary—at that point it was about $60, and was to be cut down to $40. Disgusted, Andrew simply gave up: “I decided, ‘I’m not gonna work then, I’ll be a hobo.’” He vacationed in the countryside for a summer on the cheap, working a bit to earn the $22 per week he needed to pay room and board. Then he came back to New York, too proud to ask his old boss for another job, but as luck would have it, he bumped into the man at the market on 14th Street. The ex-boss asked Andrew what he was doing there, in a fancy suit, smoking a five-cent cigar, and Andrew retorted, “I have an appointment with a friend, a butcher—we want to buy a store together.” “Are you crazy?! Nobody buys, everyone wants to get rid [of their businesses]!” With no prior plans to venture into peak-Depression entrepreneurship, Andrew talked a big game. His old boss asked what he was doing in the meantime—nothing—and so, Andrew reentered the game, but decided only to work weekends, telling his boss that he’d go looking for a store of his own on the weekdays. (50)

In 1932, the Meat Cutters Union was organized, and Andrew was a member. Soon afterwards, he spent a few weeks in Europe, but upon his return to New York, he and his on-again, off-again boss went out for coffee. The boss was in distress, and told him, “I can’t hire nobody no more! The union sends me any man they feel or they want … Andy, I can’t hire you. Only thing you have to do is go to the union headquarters and tell them that you worked for me so many years and I want you back and they should give you the job.” Andrew tried, but the union bureaucracy proved as unhelpful as advertised. Still, Andrew needed a job, so he agreed to take a union-sponsored weekend gig. It was in Brooklyn at Fulton Street Market; Andrew was staying with Julia in the Bronx temporarily. It took Andrew two hours to find the place, and when he got there, he found himself mistreated and unable to speak the shop’s local language (Italian). Back at union headquarters, the union president, Albert, listened to Andrew’s complaints and said, “Yeah, but you have to take what I give you.” “No I don’t.” But Andrew did, once more, take what he was given, and this time the gig was even more remote, on City Island, and took Andrew three hours to reach. Andrew said,

“Finally I got there, the same story. A small butcher shop. I didn’t even take off my coat—I looked around and said, ‘I don’t want this job.’ A couple hours later I went back to the union office, and they used to give me a ticket for working, and I was a hot-headed Hungarian. I took the ticket and said, ‘Albert, stick it up your butt! If that’s the kind of job you’ll give me.’ So since then with Albert, I’m black-marked. I can’t get no jobs in the union, and the jobs they could give me I didn’t work, because I couldn’t work at that kind of place! I’m used to big business! The bigger the business, the better I like it. What do you do? You have to go into business.” (51)

So Andrew went into business. He’d found a young man in a marketplace, a guy by the name of something like Arthur Lefgutz, and they were both looking for shops. Andrew proposed that instead of settling for two small shops, they combine forces, and buy a bigger one as partners. Arthur found a shop at 49th Street and 10th Avenue, in Hell’s Kitchen, and Andrew happened to know the owner from whom they’d buy it: a Mr. Cutlet, or Cutlev? (I’d prefer the former, from a butcher pun standpoint.) Arthur and Andrew took the place over on a Saturday, and showed up Monday to a picket line. Little did they know that the first man they’d fired, on their first night of operations, had been a union man. Their inauspicious start didn’t prove telling for the business’s fate overall. The shop kept its previous name, Liberty Meat Market, and Andrew and Arthur abided by union rules. Business picked up, and “Maybe a year or a year and a half later, we had already $12,000 in the checking account.” The men picked up credit at various slaughterhouses, and cut deals around New York and New Jersey, often choosing cheap, would-be-discard meat over the fancy stuff, knowing that customers wouldn’t know the difference.

One day, Andrew called up Mr. Miller, a German slaughterhouse director he did lots of business with, despite suspecting him to be a Nazi sympathizer, and managed to squeeze 500 cattle heads out of his Connecticut slaughterhouse. A truck driver showed up at 11 p.m. with the 500 skin-on, brain-in heads, about 40 or 50 pounds apiece, and Andrew paid a cop on a nearby beat five dollars to help carry the heads in for an hour or two. Around seven a.m., delivery men began showing up, but “couldn’t get in the store because it was full of heads. A little while later my partner arrived and looked in the store and was fainting. He said, ‘what the heck is this?!’ … My partner opened the store and couldn’t open it for business because nobody could step in.” When all was said and done, Andrew estimated they’d made about $3,000 off the heads, double their initial investment. People didn’t know their names—“they called me Mr. Liberty”—but Andrew and Arthur were succeeding. (52)

It was 1941, the U.S. was on the brink of World War II, and Andrew was walking to the bank to deposit money one evening, when he passed a four-story building on the corner of 49th Street. A sign on its door read “CONDEMNED,” and Andrew immediately called some lawyers to enquire. He was told that yes, it was condemned (it was not adequately fireproofed), but he could buy the building, with its two stoops, for $6,000 cash. He spent half of Liberty Meat Market’s checking account on the property. Andrew’s brother-in-law was in the rooming business—he specialized in flipping buildings and turning space into apartments—so he agreed to do as much for Andrew with the top floors, such that he could make some profit. The brother-in-law was able to secure some material under the table, despite its being wartime, and promised to get all the necessary permits sorted when all was said and done. “He says, ‘Don’t worry, when I finish the job I go down to City Hall,’ and he’d see the mayor—no, not the mayor, some crook. Some politician. Everyone has a price. He says, ‘I pay my duty call to him and come back with a paper.’ I said, ‘I don’t care what you do. How much would everything cost me?’”

All the improvements and briberies ended up costing the second half of the butcher shop’s checking account—another $6,000—but Andrew and Arthur each had a full floor to live on, and got $50 per month in rent from the Yugoslav family who moved in on another floor, whose patriarch also agreed to take care of the buildings and sidewalk when they moved in. “We had a roof garden! In the evening we used to go up, we had some reclining chairs; it was cool up there! And my dog used to walk around the roof … Nobody came near, they were afraid of the dog.” (53)

To Andrew, content on his roof garden with a booming business and a feeling of settlement in the U.S. at long last, things seemed at peace in the world—though of course, it was 1941, and they were not. Andrew planned to bring his family across the Atlantic. He and a brother were in correspondence, and all the details were settled: Whenever he received word that they were ready to travel, Andrew would buy a farm in his brother’s name, and the family would be on their way. But “while writing back and forth, they missed the boat.” Having missed the boat, the extended family was stuck, silent in Europe as WWII picked up steam, and the Holocaust ravaged eastern Europe, its horrors at the time unbeknownst to the rest of the world.

In 1943, Andrew figured, “The war will be over sooner or later. I’m gonna buy a farm, so when the war is over [they] can come over. Big farm, with plenty of buildings and bungalows. A place to make a living.” So he purchased a farm in Ulster County, New York. It was near New Paltz, and it occupied 150 acres. Andrew’s wife, Margaret, went upstate (only about 80 miles north of Manhattan), and ran the farm for three years while Andrew stayed in business in Hell’s Kitchen. In 1946, he found out that everyone who’d been meant to come live on the farm had been killed in the Holocaust. (54)

“Margaret was there, three years alone. She gave me, ‘Either you sell the butcher shop or you sell the farm.’ And the butcher shop, I’d already made my money, and I didn’t want to sell the farm. It was a beautiful spot, one of the nicest spots there.” (55)

— “THE SIMONS OF NEW PALTZ?” —

My grandparents, Bruce and Arlene Simon, bought a smaller place just outside New Paltz in 1998, while my mom was pregnant with me. It’s called Breezy Lawn, and it, too, is a beautiful spot, complete with a main house, and three small buildings. As Bruce and Arlene’s progeny have spread out over the years—spouses aside, we were all born in Manhattan, but have since moved to England, Switzerland, Miami, Chicago, and the Bronx, among other places—New Paltz has been a constant second only to the Upper West Side apartment my grandparents have called home since before my mom could walk. I suppose New Paltz has only been a true constant to myself and my brother and cousins, all of whom are younger than me, since we’re the generation that grew up going. Still, it’s a permanent home; a family farm minus the barnyard animals and tractors.

Listening to Andrew’s oral history tapes a few weeks ago—painstakingly recorded in the 1980s by the legend who I think can only be described as my first cousin twice removed, Tom Yarmon—I was dumbstruck by the punch-in-the-gut insertion of this family farm that should’ve been home to so many of my ancestors who instead fell victim to the Holocaust. (I’d formerly been under the impression that I had no such relatives in my family history.) I was almost as shocked to hear about its location: It seems like no one’s talking about this New Paltz–adjacent property that long precedes Breezy Lawn in the family timeline. I immediately emailed my grandpa asking if he knew about it, and received a quick, “Yes. Visited the farm many times. Tried to find it 20 years ago but could not. Shame it was sold before we could buy it.” (56)

When I told my brother Sam about all of this in Cobb Café the other day, he got choked up, and his eyes welled up with tears; he’d also had no idea about the existence of Andrew and Margaret’s farm, much less its intended purpose that could never come to pass.

Next time we’re in New Paltz, I think we have a pilgrimage to make.

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