THOUGH IT WAS ONLY THIRTY-SIX degrees in the sun, the chilly stands at the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan were packed with people watching the Giants and Dodgers football game. The gusty wind that early December Sunday made it feel more like it was in the teens; bundled up in coats, hats, and scarves, fans cheered and bounced up and down to keep warm. Just before 2:30 p.m., the football play-by-play was interrupted with a bulletin: “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air, President Roosevelt has just announced.” The game stopped. The crowd went silent and still. There were murmurs. A few men in uniform pardoned their way through the crowd and moved toward the exits. The football game began again. But suddenly, it didn’t seem to matter who won.
Concerts, movies, Broadway matinees, and religious services throughout the city were all interrupted in the same way to make the same announcement, the crowds stunned and quiet for a few moments, then slowly realizing that this meant war.
Despite the cold, editors and writers at the Time-Life Building threw open their Sixth Avenue office windows and tossed paper airplanes out, announcing the news in scrawled notes. As the afternoon wore on, large groups of people found warmth huddling together in Times Square, watching the news zipper for the latest developments. Their relatives and neighbors on leave quickly donned their uniforms and streamed through Grand Central Terminal, Penn Station, and the subways to hurry back to their military postings. Lines to the local recruiting stations grew by the minute, outraged young men wanting to get even with the Japanese.
Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia—who was half Jewish—sped to city hall in a police radio car to meet with his top commissioners to develop a defense strategy. Later in the day he took to the airwaves on WNYC to warn residents “not to feel entirely secure because you happen to be on the Atlantic Coast.” He ordered the Empire State Building blacked out and Japanese nationals rounded up.
Jules and Edith—and even little Hannelore—sat and listened in their living room that night, heads bent toward the rounded Art Deco radio. For many Americans, the attack on Pearl Harbor left them angry and vengeful. But to mothers with sons already in the military, and immigrants with family still in Europe, the news was devastating. For the past few years, Jules and Edith had hoped that their beloved FDR would enter the fray and save their loved ones. But now that war was actually coming, they wondered if their German relatives would simply be part of the collateral damage.
Walter Winchell greeted Jules and his fellow New Yorkers that night on WJZ with an alarming broadcast. “Nothing matters anymore now except national security,” he screeched. “The American population is electrified tonight with the knowledge that every corner of the globe will be at war by tomorrow night.” Edith didn’t even have to say anything, just had to give Jules a sorrowful look to express what was unfolding in her head: her sister, Ushi, and her parents, Martha and Albert. Jules gave Edith the same weary look: his sister Golda, wherever she was with her own family, and Cilly, his youngest sister, somewhere in Paris, all of them in the line of fire.
Jules joined the New York State Guard and the city’s Civil Defense, searching for enemy aircraft and ready to guide people to bomb shelters if any bombs ever actually fell. Air-raid wardens and auxiliary fire departments stood by for emergency orders as hundreds of workers reported to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to guard the battleships that were under construction. The lights of Broadway, the Statue of Liberty’s torch, Times Square, and all the lights in the city would be dimmed each night as a precaution against air raids; it was part of Jules’s job to enforce the brownout.
He and Edith devoured several newspapers a day to improve their English and keep up on the war. They were distressed to read that the Veendam, the ship that had carried them to safety in America from Rotterdam, had been captured by the German navy and was now being used to house off-duty U-boat crews. Together, the family listened to The Adventures of Superman and to FDR’s radio chats, hoping it wouldn’t be too long before their loved ones were freed from Hitler’s grip on Europe. Inspired by the president’s speeches, Jules made him a fur pillow and mailed it to the White House, and to his amazement, received a letter of thanks in return.
For Harry, the declaration of war was a relief. He, too, still had relatives in Europe, though his immediate family had all come to America decades before. The cartoon Superman began hawking savings bonds and urging kids to organize drives for scrap metal and paper, which would be recycled to build armaments and make paper packaging for military supplies. After reading their Superman comics, they gladly gave them up for the war effort (which made them all the more rare in decades to come).
Harry got in on the action and hosted a number of rallies in Miami Beach, Florida, at the Versailles hotel, selling millions in war bonds. He also hosted groups of air force returnees at the hotel, treating them to cocktails, food, and dancing. Jack Liebowitz was still running the finances and growing the business back in New York, but Harry was the smiling face of the company, always traveling, entertaining the troops, and running corporate conventions and meetings with publishers, wholesalers, and anyone capable of holding a drink.
Along with a million other kids, Mayor LaGuardia’s two children joined the Supermen of America club. The superhero was ubiquitous, flying across every strata of American culture. The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov, who had escaped Berlin with his Jewish wife to France and then to America, wrote a poem about Superman, inspired by his son Dmitri’s reading habits. Imagining Clark Kent walking through a park with Lois Lane, Nabokov comically explained the superhero’s fake glasses: “Otherwise / when I caress her with my super-eyes / her lungs and liver are too plainly seen / throbbing.”
No one loved Superman more than the troops, though. The 33rd Bombardment Squadron adopted Superman as their insignia, and the navy included copies of Superman in its ration kits. At FDR’s request, Harry made comics specifically for the army, handing out one hundred thousand copies of the Overseas Service Edition of Superman every month to keep morale high and to help the troops pass the time between battles. Boring troop training manuals were also made into comic books to keep the young soldiers’ attention and to add some levity. Harry and Gussie would become friendly with both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, a picture of Harry and Eleanor together hanging in their apartment.
Even the Mob got in on the war effort. Costello and his buddy Lucky Luciano, from prison, orchestrated numbers runners, bartenders, and hatcheck girls to eavesdrop in Jules’s German Yorkville neighborhood and work as informers from their own clubs and restaurants throughout the city.
Once the United States was in the war, Yorkville—where Jules had felt so comfortable when he first arrived—drastically changed. Once-proud German-owned businesses removed their German-language signs. “Liberty cabbage” replaced sauerkraut on menus. And Aufbau, the newsletter published by the German-Jewish Club on Ninety-First Street near Jules’s apartment, urged all Germans to stop speaking their mother tongue in public. Hannelore was sent to kindergarten at the 92nd Street Y, where she learned English and helped teach it to her very German parents.
In 1940, Edith gave birth to their second child, Evelyn—whom they called Evy—making their cramped quarters seem even smaller. They left Yorkville altogether in 1941 to a new apartment in a reddish brownstone on Lexington and Sixty-First Street, its three front windows looking out onto a bus stop and its back bedroom view a tar roof where pigeons cooed in the afternoon. They moved the fur shop to a much more accessible first-floor storefront across the street.
The rooms were small and the apartment was modestly decorated. But the shop—more extravagant to attract upscale customers—was tastefully done with modern leather and chrome furniture, tall plants, and long mirrors. Edith had impeccable taste and was an equal partner in the business, working both in the back room designing furs and up front helping customers. The couple worked all the time, usually until 2:00 a.m. Once they were old enough, even Jules’s daughters would help in the shop, especially with repairs, tearing out old linings or separating the seams on the furs with their nimble fingers. Jules would deliver his creations to the luxurious apartments of his wealthy customers on the Upper East Side, who would sometimes make passes at the handsome young furrier.
Jules encouraged his customers to visit nearby Bloomingdale’s, pick out the style of fur they liked, and he would make it at half the price. Sometimes he even went to the department store with them to browse for what they wanted. Business was booming and Jules was able to hire another German refugee, Alice Limmer, to come and work with them in the shop. Alice lived way uptown in Washington Heights and had met Jules through the Jewish Friends Society. They not only worked together but became close friends. Alice would bring pumpernickel bread from a great Jewish bakery in Washington Heights. Edith would bring the cheese and salami. And they all—the girls included—would have picnics in the shop during their lunch break. Alice doted on Hannelore and Evy and they loved her back.
Though they were making money, Jules and Edith were frugal, never spending much on themselves or the girls. Still traumatized from their flight from Berlin and having to leave all their possessions behind, they saved their money in hopes of bringing their remaining relatives to America. The apartment was decorated in leftover fur scraps: mink pillows, a zebra skin rug, a fur-covered chair. The smallest bits were made into hand muffs and earmuffs for Jules’s girls. There were fur baby blankets and tiny white lambswool coats for them. A framed, signed letter from Albert Einstein hung on a wall in the living room, a reminder of their days in Berlin.
One extravagance the couple allowed themselves was a small piano, upon which Hannelore was given lessons. They loved music, particularly Lena Horne, and often attended the Yiddish theater downtown. To appear more American, Hannelore’s name was changed to Helen; and their last name changed from Schulzbach to Schulback. Even Jules officially changed his name from Julius. New identities, all in an effort to appear more American.