WHERE HAVE ALL THE YEKKES GONE

MARISSA PIESMAN

My greatest wish as a child was to live in Manhattan. I lived in a lot of places that were not Manhattan—the Bronx, Brooklyn, Boston, Appalachia, Anchorage, Louisville and on a kibbutz, picking grapefruit. After graduate school finally got my wish. I lived in the West Twenties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and Nineties. I eventually ended up in Washington Heights. My soon-to-be husband and I went back and forth on the move. When we drove up to see the neighborhood, Jeff was not very enthusiastic. As we drove, he said, in his most sarcastic voice, “Are we in Boston yet?” The next time we drove up, he was already quite jazzed about living in the Heights. I was not. “Okay,” I said. “Keep in touch.” We ended up buying a 1400 square foot apartment with a view of the Hudson River.

Back in 1986, when we moved in, Castle Village was just converting to a cooperative. It was mainly populated by yekkes. Do you know what they are? According to one version, the term came from the German word “jacke” which meant jacket, an item of dress typical of Western European Jewish men. I must say, when we first moved in, almost all our neighbors were ancient. There was no one in the elevator in the morning and no one on the 181st Street subway platform either.

Charles Paterno had intended to create a five-building cooperative. He had already built Hudson View Gardens across the street, as a co-op back in the twenties. It was very restricted—no Jews, no foreigners and even no Catholics. Despite Paterno’s intention, the Depression nixed his plans. Paterno ended up renting to the large wave of German and Austrian Jewish immigrants fleeing the Nazis.

Castle Village was known for its classiness when it opened in 1939. Hummingbirds flew around the seven-acre garden and tenants’ shoes were put out in the hallway to be polished overnight. The local grammar school went up through the eighth grade. The students were predominantly of German stock and, according to a friend of mine who was born in 1941 and attended P.S. 187, an unusually large percentage of the boys in his class became doctors.

The yekke population was easy to spot. The women wore brown or green loden coats and their husbands wore drably colored suit jackets. The men’s hats always sported a feather tucked into a band. These aging couples shpatzired around the neighborhood, mostly in Fort Tryon Park.  For the most part, the only Jews that managed to get out of Germany and Austria in the thirties and during the war were, for the most part, wealthy.  Quite a few of my neighbors had Swiss chalets and spent their summers there. A few had the chutzpah to keep their Manhattan apartments air-conditioned during the summer while they were in Europe. Why? Was it to prevent mold? I think they did it just because they could. This was before Castle Village switched to a billing system based on electrical usage.

By the time Jeff and I departed the Upper West Side for the Upmost West Side, many of the yekke husbands were already deceased. Their widows, however, are stalwart. They loved their neighborhood and refused to pack it in. Washington Heights is very hilly; Fort Tryon Park has many vertical challenges. These female yekkes never stopped ascending and descending the paths in the park.

Female centenarians were not unusual in the neighborhood; not a rare species by any means. When Mrs. Bernstein told her card club colleagues that she was dropping out, they tried to convince her to stay. They assumed that she was having a hard time keeping up because she was a hundred years old. As it turned out, she had decided to join a more challenging bridge club. These overly determined widows are an inspiration to me. Spines of steel is what they have.

Tromping up and down the challenging topography of Upper Manhattan has kept them going. My friend Inez, who just turned eighty-nine, was born in Vienna. The family made it over to Cuba and then to New York. Inez speaks three languages and works out in the gym every morning. She was widowed but kept the family car. She drives her widowed friends around, mostly to Westchester, for shopping and stopping in at their favorite pizza place. Greta, of beloved memory, never went out of her apartment to throw out her garbage without lipstick. She drove until she was ninety-two. Hilda, also of beloved memory, lived to be a hundred and three and just kept walking.

Dr. Ruth Westheimer lives up the block. She is four foot seven, ninety-four years old and still quite a presence. Not so long ago, she invited everyone over to her synagogue to show us her most recent film. This year she is featured at a major fund-raising event for Fort Tryon Park. Perhaps Ruth Westheimer is a one-off; she is both a sex therapist and a former Haganah sniper. But so many yekke refugees have told me so many amazing stories—escapes to Shanghai and Tehran and Tel Aviv and eventually making it to Washington Heights. And every time I have a conversation with one of the old ladies in the gym or in the backyard or in the lobby…well, the conversation is guaranteed to have a boffo ending.