JULES’S FEET HURT. HE HAD been pounding the pavement for weeks, running from one city office to another in Berlin, gathering the many documents he needed to flee to America: two copies of each of their birth certificates, certificates of good conduct for both him and Edith from the German police. Jules visited the Jewish authorization office, the passport office, the tax office, the foreign exchange office, the public emigrant advisory office, and finally the American consulate, where he put his name on a waiting list for an interview. He, Edith, and Hannelore also had to undergo a physical examination to prove they were fit to enter America. He filled out medical clearance forms, tax documents from his fur shop, and a police certificate declaring he had no record. It seemed to Jules like a forest’s worth of paperwork. Hitler’s party wanted Jules and those like him to leave the country, so why make it so difficult?
And it wasn’t only the Nazis. In 1938, the United States issued visas to a fraction of the Jews desperate to escape the Third Reich. Jules worried that they had waited too long.
His most difficult hurdle would be finding a financial sponsor in America, someone who would vouch for him, providing an affidavit promising to support him if he couldn’t support himself. This was perhaps the most important document of all. Without a sponsor, Jules could not immigrate to America.
Jules knew where to start. He had a cousin in New York City, in a place called the Bronx. Her name was Faye. Her mother and Jules’s mother had been sisters. He sent Faye a letter to enlist her help and got a response back saying she would do what she could, but maybe he should think about coming to America himself, just for a visit, to try and find a sponsor. Jules was his own best advocate: he was handsome, smart, and an experienced salesman.
Faye wasn’t well-off enough to be Jules’s sponsor. But she was smart and savvy and fairly well connected in New York. Born in Austria at the turn of the century, she came to America in 1924, when it was much easier to do so. When she first arrived in New York, Faye met her husband, Sam. They set up an apartment in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, but while on their honeymoon in upstate New York, in a rowboat on Lily Lake, Sam had a heart attack and fell into the water. Faye, barely four foot ten, was unable to save him, and watched in horror as he went down amid the lily pads.
Somehow Faye rebounded and got a job working at Thomas Cook Travel Agency, where she would learn proper English. There was barely a trace of an accent by 1938. Faye was sophisticated and cool. And Murray, her new husband, was a mensch. Everyone loved them. The family—remember this was a family of furriers—jokingly called them May and Furry. (Murray had a dark mustache, though he was balding and not all that furry.)
Faye was a neatnik and a princess who never cooked and either ate out or ordered in Jewish deli. On weekends, they visited relatives for dinner. No one ever ate at Faye’s. Well, hardly ever. She made spaghetti with ketchup for the kids, but it didn’t go over so well.
Faye and Murray lived in the Norwood section of the Bronx, a great place to raise kids, with the newly constructed Williamsbridge Oval park built on top of the old Gun Hill reservoir, which had supplied drinking water to generations of Bronx residents. Whenever their Bronx apartment needed a paint job, Faye and Murray would simply move to a new apartment. They moved within the same Norwood neighborhood every three or four years.
Murray was doing well in the dental lab business in Manhattan, creating the crowns, bridges, and dentures used by dentists, probably making between $3,000 and $4,000 a year, a respectable sum for 1938. But he was not doing well enough to sponsor refugees from Germany. Though the State Department refused to say how much a sponsor had to make, a $5,000 annual salary was rumored to be the cutoff. Each case was different, with American bureaucrats weighing many factors: the refugee’s skill set, earning potential, education, relation to the sponsor, and the willingness and sincerity of the sponsor to actually step up and support the immigrant and their family members if need be. In some cases, it was better to have a close family connection with some money rather than a distant millionaire “friend.” But there were no hard-and-fast rules set down by the US government on what would get you through the golden door to America. No “open sesame” answers. No guaranteed formula. Refugees were forced to just guess and pray.
Scams and sponsors-for-hire were a problem. Some sponsors would claim to have set aside a special fund for the refugee to help support them when they arrived on US soil. But the State Department soon discovered many cases of “revolving funds,” where a sponsor would withdraw the money as soon as the immigrant arrived in the US, then place it in the name of another immigrant. And so on. For this reason, the State Department didn’t give much weight to letters of credit or bank funds, since those trusts were often fake and fleeting. A rich family member was your best bet, though Jules had no rich family members in America.
Faye promised to help find a reliable sponsor not only for Jules but for Jules’s sister Mollie and her furrier husband, David, as well, who were also ready to leave Berlin. Mollie tried to convince her sister Golda and her husband, Simon, to leave Berlin, too, but Simon was still depending on God for help and refused to talk about it.
And so it was that they all decided Jules would travel to New York in search of a hero.
He booked passage on the Queen Mary and got a transit visa to travel through England, then bought an expensive double-breasted pin-striped suit to impress anyone who might consider sponsoring him. Reserving a room at the grand Art Deco Piccadilly Hotel in Times Square to make it look like he was more well off than he actually was, Jules played the part of the young entrepreneur coming to America.
Jules left his small family behind in Berlin, with Edith running the fur shop on her own. It was a painful goodbye, but Jules tried not to make his anxiety known. He hugged them, kissed them, and said he would see them in a few weeks. Not to worry. But Jules secretly worried he might never make it back. So many things could go wrong.
In the harbor in Southampton, the Queen Mary sat with her three red and black raked funnels. It seemed impossible that something so large could actually float, but there she was, patiently waiting for him. Jules boarded the opulent Deco ocean liner and set sail. Over five days, Jules would visit her two indoor swimming pools, three-story high-columned dining room, and Jewish prayer room—built by the British ship designers to show their German competitors that they were not anti-Semitic. In one photo, Jules stands on deck in his double-breasted suit and a beret, a Queen Mary life preserver around his neck.
The day Jules sailed, Hitler returned triumphant to Berlin after having annexed Austria. Hitler had been born in Austria and long believed the two German-speaking countries should be united. More than a million fans swarmed the streets in Berlin, waving Nazi flags, climbing onto lampposts to get a better view, hanging out of windows, and screaming “Heil!” as the Führer led a motorcade of 150 cars from the Tempelhof military airfield to the Reich Chancellery. In a black Mercedes convertible sedan, Hitler waved at the frenzied crowd. A national holiday was declared, and the soldiers were out in force, trying to control the unruly but happy hordes. Giant red swastika flags draped the buildings en route. Edith stayed home with her sixteen-month-old daughter, listening to the horror unfold on the radio, not daring to go out, and secretly wondered, now that he had his chance, if maybe Jules would run away and never return. She cried at night, fearful he would not come back, even if he wanted to.
All week long, Edith followed the Nazi propaganda. Prominent Jewish businessmen as well as Catholic clergy opposing Hitler were arrested that week in Vienna. Though the German military had already occupied Austria and Hitler considered the countries united, the chancellor of Austria held a vote on independence. Hitler declared it would be subject to fraud, and said he would refuse to accept it. The referendum on whether to unite with Germany was held nonetheless, the YES circles large, the NO circles very small on the ballots, campaign workers watching which way their fellow Austrians voted. Turnout was 99.7 percent, with 4.4 million votes for the Anschluss—unification—versus fewer than 12,000 against it. After the vote, Austria’s chancellor was arrested and sent to a concentration camp.
Jules stepped onto the cold streets on the West Side of Manhattan, the Empire State Building and the other skyscrapers looming so close, just like the ones he had seen years before in Metropolis. He was armed with a list of contacts, phone numbers, and addresses, all people he had never met, including Faye in that mysterious place, the Bronx.
Jules was no peasant from the hinterlands, but Times Square weakened his strong, twenty-five-year-old knees. The glittering signs advertising Camel cigarettes, Coca-Cola, and Planters, with the monocled Mr. Peanut bowing and removing his top hat, shone down upon him in glorious, pulsing neon. The zipper on the New York Times building shouted the latest headlines that week—Neville Chamberlain vowing to fight for France or Belgium if they’re attacked, but making no such promises for Czechoslovakia. Mussolini declaring that Italy was primed for war. But Jules could not read English. He recognized the names, but the other words scrolled by in an electric blur.
He understood the marquees, though, and couldn’t believe his tired eyes. Cab Calloway and his Cotton Club Orchestra performing at the Paramount and Count Basie stomping at the Savoy. Milton Berle was starring at the Globe, Deanna Durbin live at the Roxy, and Kitty Carlisle opening up at the Majestic. The Strand featured Edward G. Robinson, a Romanian Jew like Harry, who had escaped with his family to the Lower East Side at the turn of the century after his brother was hit in the head with a brick by an anti-Semitic mob.
The Piccadilly Hotel was on Forty-Fifth Street and Broadway in the heart of Times Square. It felt like Jules was staying at the center of the world, at the center of this miraculous, vertical city, the lights of the skyscrapers like diamonds sparkling in the cold air, the ice crunching beneath his wingtips. The hotel bar, the Piccadilly Circus Lounge, attracted actors and theatergoers alike. All week long, Jenö Bartal and his orchestra played in the hotel’s Georgian ballroom with its crystal chandeliers and pine paneling decorated with Victorian-style portraits and still lifes. If only Edith were here, they would tango and fox-trot, he thought. If they ended up settling in New York—Lord willing—Jules promised himself he would take her here to dance every chance he got.
Every day he searched for a sponsor. He would travel up to the Bronx to meet Faye and Murray and go to temple with them, meeting their friends and making connections. When he met someone who might be a potential sponsor, a successful doctor or dentist or furrier, Jules would treat them to a cocktail at his fancy hotel or a beer at Jack Dempsey’s new bar on Broadway and Forty-Ninth Street, trying his best to appear casual and confident and not the desperate man he actually was.
Though it was officially spring, it was snowing in New York. During his stay, Jules trudged through the slush and took the subway to the German neighborhood of Yorkville on the Upper East Side to chat up his fellow countrymen, not daring to tell them he was a Jew. Apartments, they told him, could be rented for $75 a month. His main activity, aside from looking for a savior, was checking out the city’s many fur stores—his potential competition—and then meeting with a fur dealer downtown. At the Astor Place subway stop—named for the nineteenth-century fur baron and owner of the Waldorf Astoria, John Jacob Astor—Jules noticed the beaver plaques and tiles along the station walls. He laughed to himself. It was as if the beavers were calling him to his new home. Jules was thrilled when he learned that New York’s official city seal featured beavers, a reference to the pelt trade that had been its first big business in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Until he arrived in New York, Jules had had no idea how stressed he had been on the streets of Berlin, worrying that any moment he could be beaten up or detained by police, his arrest or death a whisper away. In New York, there were no neighbors to curse him or spit at him or call him a dirty Jew. He didn’t have to hear “Heil Hitler” every ten minutes. There was a sudden lightness in his step, a slight relaxation in his shoulders, and a feeling that he had a future, a feeling he had lost the last few years in Germany.
Jules tried to read the headlines in the New York Times and the other papers hawked by the newsboys on the city’s corners until he finally tracked down a German newspaper in Yorkville. He was sorry he had. The lightness he had found in America was now clouded by the horror quickly growing in his home country. The panic crawled from the headlines into his head, where it took up permanent residence. Some Jews, despondent over financial ruin and unable to find passage out, were committing suicide. The situation in Berlin was growing more dire by the second. Jules’s time—and that of his family—was indeed running out.
Fearful and yearning for Edith and Hannelore, Jules would visit the movie theaters in Times Square, ducking in for a night showing or a matinee. Jules sat in the darkened theaters alone, forgetting the headlines for two hours. Playing that week was Bringing Up Baby with Cary Grant at the RKO Palace, and over at the Loew’s State, A Yank at Oxford, with Maureen O’Sullivan falling for Robert Taylor, “a two-fisted Yankee who takes England by storm.”
Without subtitles, Jules didn’t understand much of the new American releases, but they were a comfort nonetheless. Afterward, he would stroll through Central Park past horse-drawn carriages and crying babies, hungry pigeons and happy families, missing his own so deeply, he looked down to see if there was an actual hole in his chest.