MR. AND MRS. EMANUEL STREISAND
take much pleasure in announcing
the rather expected and hoped-for arrival of
BARBARA JOAN

(a cute little trick even if they must say so, weighing 7 lbs. 5 ozs. net)
at
5: 04 A. M., Friday, April 24, 1942
After 10 days at her original residence,

The Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn,
she moved to 451 Schenectady Ave., Brooklyn, N. Y., where she is
living with her proud parents and her especially proud brother,
Sheldon Jay

Outside, the world was on the cusp of catastrophe. Five months earlier the United States had gone to war against Germany, Italy, and Japan, and American boys were being carried off to battle by the tens of thousands. Austria, from which Emanuel Streisand’s father had emigrated in 1898, had been overrun by Hitler’s Nazis in 1938, and its Jews, some of them Streisand family members who had stayed behind, were being systematically slaughtered in concentration camps. Russia, the homeland of Mrs. Streisand’s parents, had been under siege by the Nazis for months.

But inside their well-kept apartment on a quiet residential street in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, Manny and Diana Streisand lived a separate peace, and most was right with their insular world. Thirty-four when his daughter was born, Manny hadn’t been called up for service because of his age, his fatherhood, and the fact that he had carved out an extraordinary career as a teacher of troubled young men. The firstborn son of a man who still barely spoke English, in 1941 he had been included in the Science Press directory Leaders in Education. He made a decent living as a teacher of truants and delinquents at the Brooklyn High School for Specialty Trades, and supplemented his $4, 500 annual salary by tutoring at a yeshiva in the late afternoon during the school year and at educational camps every summer.

Manny Streisand worked hard—too hard, his wife often thought—but in Thoreau’s words, he loved turning the “free meandering brook” of an errant teenager’s life into a “straight cut ditch” of education, discipline, and prospects for a future. And he was determined to give his wife, his seven-year-old son, and his new baby girl the best possible life, one free from the terrible hardships his own parents, Isaak and Anna Streisand, had endured over the past half century.

ISAAK STREISAND STOOD on the train station platform at Lvov, surrounded by his sisters and parents, covered in layers of sheepskin against the frigid Baltic air. It was the first day of January 1898, and the strapping seventeen-year-old was on the verge of a new life. He was leaving the harsh world of the Jewish shtetl in the village of Brzezany in eastern Galicia, a principality under the control of Austria-Hungary and bordered by Poland on the northwest, Russia on the east, and Austria-Hungary on the south. He was going to America, a land of seemingly endless opportunity: in the prior twenty years in the United States a former newsboy from Ohio named Thomas Alva Edison had become rich and famous by inventing, among many other things, the light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera and projector.

The konduktor blew the train’s shrill whistle to signal the schnellzug’s departure, and a series of thick noises rumbled from the engine as it struggled to start. Isaak picked up his three bulky bundles and said his final farewells. His mother’s stoicism dissolved into tears as she hugged her only son, whom she would never see again. Mali Feldman Streisand and her husband, Kesriel, had been born in Brzezany, and they would stay there. It was for the young to seek a better world.

Conditions in Galicia demanded that Isaak leave. One of the most destitute spots in eastern Europe, the country barely provided sustenance for its people, most of them farmers with only primitive skills and no outlet outside the village in which to sell what they produced. Villages consisted of two rows of thatched huts along either side of a muddy dirt path; next to each hut lay a great heap of manure, which every summer Isaak and his sisters kneaded with earth to form bricks that were then baked hard in the sun and used the following winter as fuel against the often thirty-below-zero cold.

The Streisands had two rooms, the “hot room” and the “cold room.” In the first the entire family, which included Kesriel’s parents, ate, slept, and worked in a twelve-by-sixteen-foot space. The cramped quarters contained just two pieces of furniture, a table and a narrow wooden bench, and the pripitshik, a huge brick stove-fireplace in the middle of the room from which a seven-foot-long wooden shelf extended. The parents and grandparents slept on this shelf, the warmest spot in the hut, while the children slept on the wooden bench, which extended along the side and back walls. The manure that fueled the fire turned the indoor air caustic.

For Galicia’s 10 percent Jewish minority, persecution and hopelessness joined poverty. Two years before Isaak Streisand left Brzezany, a series of nighttime rape-and-plunder raids against the people of the shtetlach by their Slavic neighbors had left the Jews terrorized, their spirit dashed. The plight of the Galician Jew became a worldwide cause célèbre, but not much help ever came, and thousands of Galicians were among the one-third of eastern Europe’s Jewish population that emigrated to America between 1880 and 1930, a group that included over a dozen Streisands from Brzezany and its neighboring villages. Now Isaak was among them.

Kesriel Streisand helped his son onto the train, then stood and watched as the long black clattering hulk chugged slowly out of the depot. The rail journey lasted nearly a week as the schnellzug made its way northwest at barely fifteen miles an hour through Poland and Germany to the port city of Bremen. There, on Saturday, January 8, Isaak hauled his bags onto the S.S. H. H. Meier, a mid-sized ship of the North German Lloyd Company, along with three hundred sixty other mostly Jewish emigres who were pressed together into cramped steerage quarters.

The ship wended its way up the Weser River to the North Sea, then veered westward into the Atlantic for an arduous two-week crossing. Illness caused by damp and cold, poor sanitation, and spoiled food claimed several lives; the bodies were tossed overboard. By the time the ship approached Ellis Island, many of the huddled masses on board were weak and dispirited. But the sight of the Statue of Liberty renewed the hope that had propelled them westward.

Isaak was processed through Ellis Island on Friday, January 21. A doctor checked his health, and a German-speaking translator recorded his responses to the standard questions. Then, along with hundreds of others, he shuffled aboard one of the boats that ferried immigrants from Ellis Island to Manhattan around the clock. At a dock on the Lower East Side, he stepped off the gangplank to face an uncertain future.

OVER THE NEXT nine years, Isaak was assimilated into the teeming immigrant neighborhoods of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He worked as a common laborer, doing odd jobs for his German-speaking neighbors. He had little need to learn English, and he never spoke it more than haltingly. By 1905 his three sisters had come through Ellis Island as well.

Late in 1906 Rachel Streisand introduced her twenty-seven-year-old brother to a pretty, vivacious blue-eyed fifteen-year-old girl named Annie Kesten, who had come to America the year before from Galicia with her father, Max, her mother, the former Dreijzie (Daisy) Cohen, and her sister, Berthe. On May 1, 1907, Isaak and Annie were married in Manhattan by magistrate Elias Friedman.

The newlyweds settled into a small tenement apartment at 248 East Seventh Street at a rent of $15 a month. Almost exactly nine months later, on February 5, 1908, their first child, Emanuel, was born. At more or less regular two-year intervals afterward, Annie gave birth to Maurice (nicknamed Murray), Herman (Hy), and Philip. In 1916 a daughter, Daisy, named after Annie’s mother, was born, but she died in infancy. In 1918 the Streisands’ last child, Molly, was born.

Slowly, Isaak Streisand made his way up in the world. Molly Streisand, now Mrs. Nat Parker and Isaak’s only surviving child, recalled that her father “used to carry a sewing machine around on his back” as he went from house to house doing odd tailoring jobs. “He made I guess eleven dollars a week. He didn’t have much, but we ate pretty good.”

Annie’s cooking skills helped. She kept a kosher home, and Molly recalled that “my mother was a marvelous cook, a great baker. She would make huge cheesecakes, and sponge cakes with a dozen eggs. She’d stay up all night when it came a holiday and she’d make five cakes and gefiite fish and pickled herring and cherries with plums and peaches, and matzo balls. Her matzo balls were perfect, they weren’t hard—like some of them that you can bounce off the wall!”

The Streisand brood remained in the cramped Seventh Street apartment until 1919, when Annie fell and injured herself on the building’s rickety and debris-strewn inside stairs. She sued the landlord, Henry R. Stern, for the $166 medical bill. On December 8 a judge ruled that Stern should pay the medical bill, but granted his request that the Streisands be ordered to vacate the premises by the end of the month.

That was fine with Isaac (who now spelled his name with a c) because he had decided to go into a new business. Using a nest egg he had struggled for years to save, he had found a store in Brooklyn that rented more reasonably than most in Manhattan. And so, on January 1, 1920, Isaac and Annie Streisand and their five children moved to Brooklyn, where Isaac set himself up as a fishmonger.

THEIR NEW HOME was an apartment building at 196-198 Stockton Street in the borough’s Williamsburg section, a scant four blocks from the elevated train that ran along Broadway and over the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan. Stockton Street provided a more pleasant, leafier residential area than the Streisands had known in Manhattan, but within the building itself there seethed a similar microcosm of New York immigrant life. The children shared one of the two bedrooms, two boys to a bunk bed and Molly in a third. They shared clothes, toys, household duties.

Emanuel, as the oldest child and a boy, naturally would have been looked up to by his siblings, but by the age of twelve he had displayed special leadership qualities. He was good-looking, with intense, close-set hazel eyes and wavy brown hair, and his intelligence had set him apart in school, where he particularly excelled at English and history and was allowed to skip two grades. Good-natured and generous with his time, he read to Hy and Phil every day and helped them with their homework. He showed a talent for speaking, so much so that at Phil’s bar mitzvah in 1927 he read the passages from the Torah and the Haftarah on his brother’s behalf. “Manny wasn’t bashful,” Molly recalled. “He was a good talker.”

He displayed a talent for athletics, too, and played handball and tennis during an era, his daughter would later proudly point out, “when Jewish boys didn’t do things like that.” Manny also baby-sat for his brothers and sisters most days after school while his mother and father worked in the fish store at 175 Sumner Avenue, about nine blocks from the apartment. “My father would get up before three in the morning three times a week and take the train into Manhattan to the Fulton Fish Market,” Molly recalled. “He would pick out only the best and the freshest fish. Then it would be delivered in these big heavy boxes, and my father had to lift them. He had to have three hernia operations.”

Manny helped out in the store on Thursdays, the busy day before the start of the Jewish Sabbath at sundown on Friday, by cleaning and chopping fish. As the younger boys grew older, they pitched in, too. Molly helped her mother scrub the floors and walls of the shop after closing. “The store was spotless,” she said. “My parents never went out. They never did anything but work.”

In September 1920 Manny, not yet thirteen, entered Boys High School on Marcy Avenue, fifteen blocks south of the apartment. During his four years at the school, he distinguished himself through his love of reading, his facility with English, and his talent for tutoring less accomplished students. Toward the end of his high school career he decided he wanted to be a teacher. In the fall of 1924, at sixteen and a half, he entered the College of the City of New York on a partial scholarship with a double major in English and education, traveling back and forth by subway to the school on 139th Street in Manhattan. He was the first Streisand to attend college, and his father fairly burst with pride. “He’s so smart he could be president!” Isaac boasted.

Molly believes that her brother got most of his intelligence from their mother. “She was a very smart lady, smarter, really, than my father. She knew English fluently, and after her kids left the house she went back to school, not for any reason other than an interest in learning. She was interested in everything; she was ambitious.”

To help pay for the educational expenses not covered by his scholarship, Manny worked part time at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. One summer he drove a Good Humor ice-cream truck in New Jersey; during another he worked as a lifeguard, and he spent a third hitchhiking through Canada and the northern United States, taking odd jobs for a few days at a time. “He was an adventurer,” Barbra has boasted, and Molly agreed. “He’d try anything, Manny. He wasn’t afraid of anything.”

In June 1928 Manny received his bachelor of science degree in education and a Phi Beta Kappa key. That fall he was hired as an elementary school English teacher in Manhattan, and the following year he taught at a junior high school. At night he took courses toward his master’s degree at CCNY, and over the next two summers he took additional courses at Cornell, Hunter, and Columbia. He received his master’s degree in 1930, and that fall got a job at a vocational high school. He was paid very little as a novice teacher, and his education had been expensive, so he continued to live in his father’s home, which was now an apartment above the fish store on Sumner Avenue.

Manny had every intention of pursuing his education until he earned his Ph.D., and he had begun work toward that goal. But he never received a doctorate because in 1928 his attentions were diverted by a petite, pretty blue-eyed nineteen-year-old named Diana Rosen. “Manny had a lot of girlfriends,” Molly recalled. “He started dating very young, and oh, were they crazy about him. They were very nice girls. But I guess there was something special about Dinah.”

SHE WAS BORN Ida Rosen on December 10, 1908, the third child of Louis Rosen, a thirty-year-old Russian immigrant, and his wife, the former Ida Friedland, also thirty and from Russia. Later she would adopt the name Diana, which evolved into the nickname Dinah. She and her three siblings lived in the family apartment at 1554 Pitkin Avenue in the East New York section of Brooklyn.

Louis Rosen worked as a tailor in a Manhattan shop and officiated part time as a cantor in his synagogue. “My father was a very religious man,” Diana recalled. “Very spiritual, a strong man. He would put on the prayer shawl and sing religious songs around the house. I believe the musicality in the family came from my father. I inherited it from him, and Barbra inherited it from me.

“I grew up the way Barbra grew up, hearing singing around me. My greatest pleasure in those days was listening to singers on our Victrola. I’ve always loved to sing, but my parents wouldn’t have dreamed of letting me do it professionally. I remember when I was seventeen, I registered with my best girlfriend to sing in the Metropolitan Opera Chorus. But we attended rehearsal only once. I brought us home too late and worried our parents. So both of us girls gave it up and put it out of our minds.” Still, at parties Diana and her friend could always be found around a piano, singing with the other boys and girls. “I was far too shy to sing alone before a crowd, but in a group I loved it.”

Although she was a good student, Diana gave no thought to higher education. Her goal—the same as that of most young women of her generation—was to meet a nice boy with a solid career ahead of him, get married, and give her parents grandchildren. In Emanuel Streisand—tall, dark, handsome, just turned twenty—she found him. “It was love at first sight, oh, boy!” Diana recalled years later of her introduction to Manny at the home of one of her girlfriends early in 1928. They dated for a year, during which he dazzled her with love poems and courtly attentions and charmed her with his sense of fun. He was serious and ambitious, but he also had a silly side. “My brother liked to put on skits at parties,” Molly recounted. “He had a great sense of humor.”

A year after they met, a misunderstanding escalated into a nearly yearlong separation. Neither could get past foolish pride long enough to telephone the other. “If he likes me enough,” Diana proclaimed, “he’ll call me.” When he finally did, late in 1929, she was at a Saturday movie matinee and missed the call. Having decided to continue to play hard to get, she didn’t call him back. But a few days later her fate was sealed when she ran into Manny at the El station. He was on his way to school. “I was dumbfounded,” she said. “If that wasn’t an act of God, nothing else was.” Embarrassed, Manny apologized for not having called for so long, and explained that he had been busy with his master’s degree studies. Amused by his discomfort, Diana forgave him, and their romance was rekindled.

ON A FINE spring day in 1930, Diana and Emanuel stood under the chuppah, the traditional satin Jewish wedding canopy, which was held aloft by his brothers Murray and Hy. In the crowded Sumner Avenue living room, as dozens of family members and friends watched and beamed, Manny slipped a simple ring on Diana’s finger and they became husband and wife.

Unable to afford a real honeymoon, the Streisands drove into Manhattan in his rickety tin lizzie for a show and a night at a nice hotel. On the way back into Brooklyn, a driver in front of them braked sharply and Manny was unable to stop in time. The cars collided. Manny’s forehead slammed against the windshield, cracking the glass.

When Molly next saw her brother, she exclaimed, “What happened to you?” Manny’s head was bandaged, his eyes black-and-blue. “He didn’t say much about it, though. Dinah was hurt, too. Something happened to her leg.”

Within a few days Manny began to suffer dizzy spells and searing headaches. “He took a lot of aspirins,” Molly recalled. “But he was the type who never complained. I don’t think my mother ever even knew about the accident.” Over time the headaches lessened, and although they never stopped, they were infrequent enough for a stoic sort of man like Manny to ignore.

Over the next thirteen years, Emanuel Streisand’s life seemed blessed. He and Diana were happy in their marriage; she was a folks mensch, an uncomplicated, unpretentious woman who delighted in being Mrs. Emanuel Streisand, keeping her home spotless and her husband well fed with good kosher food. The only thing missing was a baby, but Manny told his wife that the Great Depression, which had fallen across America after the stock market crash of 1929, made everything too uncertain for them to take on the financial burden of a baby. He promised her he would make as much money as possible so that within a few years they would be able to add to their family.

For the first two years of the marriage, Manny and Diana lived with his family over the fish store, but in 1932 he got an attractive offer to help organize the education department of the Elmira Reformatory, a penal institution for youthful offenders in western New York State. The pay was better than anything he’d been offered before, so he and Diana moved to Elmira and set up a household of their own.

The following year Manny was promoted to assistant superintendent, and in the summer of 1934 he felt secure enough to add a child to the family. Diana became pregnant in August, and on the following Mother’s Day, May 12, 1935, Sheldon Jay Streisand was born in Elmira. Now Emanuel Streisand had a wife, a baby, and a teaching career. He seemed on top of the world, even though he couldn’t seem to shake those headaches....

A few months after Sheldon’s birth, a frantic Diana called Manny’s mother in Brooklyn. Manny had had a seizure—he had fallen to the floor, his body had twitched and convulsed uncontrollably, he had lost consciousness. “Please come, Anna, please come,” Diana pleaded. When Anna arrived, she stood with her daughter-in-law next to Manny’s hospital bed as his doctor explained that he had had an epileptic fit brought on by the head injury five years earlier. Nothing could be done, the doctor said, and another attack might happen at any time. The seizures could be dangerous, he went on, and he outlined to both women the procedures for dealing with another one should it occur.

Now a frightening, unpredictable illness threatened the otherwise happy, strong, athletic Manny Streisand. And in that less enlightened era, his affliction was considered shameful, something to be hidden. Only his immediate family knew about it.

When Manny recovered, Diana pleaded with him to return to Brooklyn, where they could be closer to both their families in case he “got sick” again. He agreed when he was able to secure a good-paying job—$2, 500 a year—teaching social studies to truants and delinquents at the Brooklyn High School for Specialty Trades on the Flatbush Avenue extension at Concord Street, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. In July 1935 he moved his family to a roomy, high-ceilinged one-bedroom apartment in an attractive six-story building with a French chateau facade at 163 Ocean Avenue in Flatbush, directly across the street from Prospect Park.

Peter Greenleaf worked with Manny Streisand at the High School for Specialty Trades from the beginning of his tenure there, and he recalled his colleague as “very nice and well liked” by all. “We had some of the worst students in the country at that time. The principal used to send the teachers out into the street to pick up any boy who looked like he was under sixteen and drag him into the school. We prepared the boys for vocational careers. Manny and I taught academic subjects, which most of the students weren’t very adept at. But Manny actually was able to teach the boys something.”

By 1942 Manny had written an instruction manual for teachers entitled Individual Instruction in English and had distinguished himself enough to be listed in Leaders in Education. His salary now was $4, 500 a year, another colleague, Leonard Boyer, estimated, and he and Diana felt financially confident enough to have another baby. At the end of August, Diana found out she was nearly a month pregnant. She and Manny were thrilled, and both hoped for a girl.

In preparation for the baby’s arrival, the Streisands moved ten blocks directly east to a two-bedroom apartment in a six-story brick building at 457 Schenectady Avenue. Still a nice building today, with its marble walls and intricately carved moldings in the lobby, it must have been quite an impressive place to live in 1941. And on April 24, 1942, the family rounded out nicely with the addition of the healthy little girl her parents named Barbara Joan.

NAMED AFTER HER grandmother Anna’s sister—Barbara is the English equivalent of the Yiddish Berthe—she was a bright-eyed baby with a ready smile, so fascinated by everything around her that she rarely cried. Her head was a little too big for her body, and its size seemed accentuated by a complete lack of hair until she was two, but everyone agreed with her parents’ assessment of her on her birth announcement as “a cute little trick.” In fact, some friends even told Diana that Barbara had the makings of the next Gerber baby food baby, but Diana found that notion unseemly. At school, Manny lost few opportunities to brag about his new daughter and show his colleagues pictures of her.

With the child came added expenses, and Manny took advantage of every opportunity to earn extra money. Immediately after school he’d hurry to the yeshiva at 656 Willoughby Avenue, where he taught remedial classes. The year after Barbara’s birth, he worked as a counselor and tutor at a youth camp in upstate New York, a situation that kept money coming in during summer recess.

The following summer Manny accepted an offer to be head counselor at Camp Cascade in Highmount, New York, run by one of his fellow teachers at Specialty Trades, Nathan Spiro. Diana, high-strung and a chronic worrier, felt uneasy about spending the summer at Camp Cascade: “I don’t know, something within me was nervous.” But she was an obedient wife, and during the last week of June 1943 she, Manny, Sheldon, and baby Barbara arrived in the Catskill Mountains.

Manny’s job was rigorous. He led the kids on hikes, umpired softball games, coached swim meets, taught tutorials, and supervised the entire staff. In July his workload grew even heavier when several counselors suddenly quit. At the end of most of his eighteen-hour days now, he felt unaccustomedly tired.

On Wednesday, August 4, 1943, a suffocatingly hot day, Manny awoke with a headache. By midmorning, after he had coached a swimming race, the pain had grown so severe he felt sick to his stomach. He told Nathan Spiro he would have to go back to his cottage and lie down for a while. He went to his bedroom and asked Diana to wake him in an hour. When she tried to, she couldn’t rouse him. She ran out and found Spiro, who called an ambulance. While she waited for medical help to come, Diana paced back and forth at the foot of the bed, her uncomplaining infant in her arms. Her husband’s breathing was shallow, and terror bit at her gut. “It’s going to be all right,” she kept repeating to herself. “It’s going to be all right.”

Spiro’s wife accompanied Diana to Fleischmanns Hospital, a small infirmary nearby, while his daughter baby-sat with Barbara. Before she left the camp, Diana had composed a telegram to Anna and Isaac that was delivered to the fish store that afternoon: “Manny very ill. Come immediately.”

By the time Anna got to Fleischmanns Hospital, her son was dead. Shortly after Manny arrived at the hospital, he had suffered a seizure. A doctor had injected morphine into his neck to halt the convulsions, and within a few minutes Manny had stopped breathing. Whether the dosage was too high or he had had an adverse reaction to the drug isn’t known, but at 2: 45 P. M. Emanual Streisand was pronounced dead of respiratory failure.

His wife sat stock still in the hospital waiting room, her mind uncomprehending. His mother maintained the presence of mind to make the arrangements. The Jewish religion required that Manny be buried within twenty-four hours, but he owned no cemetery plot. Anna called home, and a stunned Isaac quickly sought the help of friends at his temple, who arranged for Manny to be buried at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens after funeral services at the Kirchenbaum Funeral Parlor that began at 3 P.M. August 5.

At the burial, in accordance with custom, the mourners tore their lapels (“the rending of the garments”) and intoned “Blessed be the righteous Judge.” As her husband’s body was lowered into the ground, Diana Streisand whispered to her eight-year-old son, “Now you’re the man of the family.” Immediately afterward, the seven-day mourning period began. Diana sat shivah at her parents’ apartment; the Streisand family sat in their apartment above the fish store. Mirrors were covered with cloth so that all focus would remain on the deceased; conversation was limited to praises of the dead and expressions of condolence. Friends brought food, and twice a day a minyan of ten holy men came to the residences to hold services and lead the mourners in a recitation of the Kaddish, the mourners’ prayer. After a week the mourners left the apartments for the first time and walked around the block to symbolically cast off their sorrow.

It wasn’t that easy for Diana, or for Anna. Bess Streisand, the widow of Manny’s brother Murray, remembered that period with lingering sadness. “It was a terrible time. Dinah was just bewildered. Manny’s mother took it so hard. She was very devoted to him, very close to him. I don’t remember her carrying on with grief at the funeral, but after the shivah she wouldn’t go out, she didn’t do her shopping, she didn’t want to do anything. She fell apart completely.”

Diana spent much of her time in the ensuing months crying in her bed, the emptiness next to her like a chasm that threatened to swallow her up. Her mother and her sister helped with the children, but her situation was bleak. Manny’s pension would be only a fraction of what he had been making, and the September rent on their apartment loomed ahead of her. The Streisands couldn’t help out much, and neither could Diana’s parents. Louis Rosen, never a well-to-do man, was sixty-five now and retired. All he could do was take his daughter and her children into his modest one-bedroom apartment in the Philip Arms, a four-story brick building at 365 Pulaski Street in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section.

Shattered, depressed, frightened, Diana Streisand sold her furniture, packed up her belongings, and moved back in with her parents. Her mind heavy with worry, she wondered whether she and her fatherless children would have any kind of future at all.