Max meets and marries Jenny.
LISA: Lisa, interviewing her grandfather, Max Did you know when you met Jennie that you would make her your wife?
MAX: Max, interviewed by Lisa or talking with other family members Nah, you can't know that. I was pushed to Jennie from my mother's sister, because I was the only boy around... My aunt made the match: "There's a pretty girl walking around, why don't you go together?" So we had a concert in Whitman Park – they used to have the concerts every summertime. So I went to a concert and I met Jennie! And ever since then, fartik /22/ I fell in love [with her] and we didn't let go of each other.
Oh, she was pretty, Jennie, was she pretty. Blond, reddish blond. And what's more, you know she could cook!
IMAGE: Jennie, ca. 1915
/22/ fartik: suddenly and totally.
Lisa asks a slightly naive question:
LISA: Were you chaperoned on the first date?
MAX: Chaperoned, no. We were grown-up people already. She worked in a shoe factory, and I worked in Washington Street, [in] my store. I was supposed to be my own boss. Then I got married and I came to New York.
NARRATOR: Lisa, backgrounding/commenting. The adolescent crush of fourteen year old Mordecai in Wysokie Litewskie seems in one way to have been a natural precursor to the real love he found as Max Leavitt in Whitman. The progression of romantic events – the meeting, attraction, love, marriage, children, happiness forever – rolls very smoothly over the tongue. But something was nonsensical about the situation.
It was certainly plausible from Max's point of view. He was lonely in his cleaning store, for it was difficult to meet young Jewish people. So, in the interest of insuring cohesiveness of the small Jewish enclave, Max's Aunt Gittle, in whose house he lived, played the obligatory role of the matchmaker.
Yet it is difficult to imagine their actual meeting. Whitman Park: a few acres of patchy grass with a baseball diamond and a well-cared for gazebo. I could envision how the musicians must have looked in 1917 in that bandstand; perhaps a Maurice Chevalier-type who would sing to the lovers as they strolled around the grass on warm spring evenings. But the inclusion of Max and Jennie into this fanciful movie in my brain was like Bergman redirecting Gigi. What were the first conversations they had with one another? Were they in Yiddish or in broken English? The linguistic differences and the clashing sensibilities seemed so obvious to me!
IMAGE: Max and Jennie, 1917
Lisa admits that her outlook on anti-Semitism might not have been realistic.
NARRATOR: Having been raised in a middle-class Jewish suburb, I was not directly exposed to anti-Semitism until I left. Perhaps the estrangement I felt to exist in Whitman was simply within myself.
In preparing for adulthood Max assumed that he would live among Gentiles. Having no strong religious convictions, he was already partially assimilated by the time he arrived in Whitman. And yet he also knew well upon arrival that anti-Semitism was part of the package of living and working with Gentiles. And so he managed to meet his love and to marry her in Whitman. He could have met her anywhere. The location didn't matter -- what mattered was only that they find similar people to share their lives with –– this naturally requiring that they be Jews.