Paterson Memories

I am not a Patersonian.  I was not born there, and I never lived there; however, as the son and grandson of the Paterson diaspora, I may be one of the very few of my generation—I was born in 1965—who remembers first-hand the closing phase of Paterson’s Jewish heyday, in the late 1960’s and early 70’s.  As a young child I spent weekends with my maternal grandparents, Sylvia and Daniel Tauben on Park Avenue. My paternal grandparents, Mary and Arthur Weiss, lived in the same house on 36th Street near Vreeland Avenue until Arthur’s death in 1995. I absorbed Paterson in stories, biographies, and anecdotes heard (or overheard) over the course of decades.  Even after all of my grandparents moved away from the old Eastside neighborhood – the Taubens to Midland Park, and Mary Weiss to Wayne, Paterson always loomed large in conversation and memory.  I also have many first-hand memories of Paterson in general and Temple Emanuel in particular.
 
My maternal grandmother Sylvia (born 1916), was a native Patersonian.  Her parents, David and Sara-Dina Gerber, were both immigrants—he from the Kamanetz Podolsk region of western Ukraine, she from Lithuania.  According to family oral history, David had come to the U.S. some time before Sara-Dina, whose two older sisters had preceded her here, and invited him to meet her upon her arrival.  An ancient photo shows her wearing the watch he gave to her the next day.  David was a house painter by trade. I understand that he eventually owned rental property in the same neighborhood where an anti-Semitic landlord had earlier refused to rent to him.  David was the only of my great-grandparents to have survived until my birth. He exists in my memory as a silent old gentleman in a comfortable chair, with me at his knee.  (I’m told that, although Sara-Dina never mastered English, David spoke well.  I’m also told that he refused to ever dial a telephone, instead instructing the operator, “Girlie, give me LAmbert 3 – 4041”)!

My maternal grandfather, Daniel Tauben (born 1910), was born in Passaic to parents who had emigrated to the U.S. from Galicia (southern Poland, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire).  Some time around World War I, the family moved to New York State—“up the mountains” as they referred to it—and settled in the small town of Hurleyville in Sullivan County, where they ran a bungalow colony.  I still remember discovering the place some time in the mid-1970s, when Dan and Sylvia took me and my siblings to see the old homestead.  By then the place was totally overgrown with weeds and saplings. The farm was still identifiable by one surviving structure:  a small gazebo that stood in what had been the farmyard.  On the way, I remember stopping at the iconic ‘Red Apple Rest’—a cafeteria-style restaurant on Route 17 in Tuxedo and an obligatory way station on the road to the Catskills.
 
My paternal grandfather, I. Arthur Weiss—the “I” was for Isidore, or Yisroel—was the first of his family born in the U.S. (1904). Several older siblings were born in Warsaw. He was a lawyer who for many years practiced in downtown Paterson with his brother Harry.  Arthur was a native Patersonian who never left.  At some point in the 1970s, he served as a Paterson Fire Commissioner.  I distinctly recall greeting him immediately after the appointment, along with my brother Jeremy, as we bounded into the house, breathlessly announcing Batman & Robin-style:  “Yes, Commissioner!?”
 
Mary, Arthur’s wife, was born in Brooklyn in 1906, and she spent her early childhood in Princeton Junction, where her parents, Abraham and Sarah, had had a farm that they sold in order to buy a candy store in Newark.  Named “Mary” by an elementary school teacher who declared that her original name, “Mamie,” was not sufficiently American, Mary later became a school teacher in Newark, moving to Paterson in 1931 when she married Arthur.

My parents, Deborah and Stephen Weiss, both grew up in Paterson’s Eastside neighborhood and attended Eastside High School.  My mother had attended elementary school at Yavneh Academy, when it still met in an old mansion on 12th Avenue in Paterson, and was in its first graduating class.  My father, Stephen Weiss, attended public school and the Hebrew school at Temple Emanuel.
 
Ah, Temple Emanuel!  My earliest memories of the place are of holidays when I accompanied Dan and Sylvia Tauben to services, still—in the late 1960s—at such overwhelming capacity that the Yom Kippur overflow had to be accommodated in the ballroom.  I recall marching around the main sanctuary on Simchat Torah, circa 1970, waving a pennant flag with other children, and being jostled in the sukkah at Sukkot.  I also remember the women—Sylvia Tauben in particular—wearing long formal gloves up to their elbows.  I don’t have much memory of the services themselves, other than that Rabbi David Panitz, a revered figure in the community, led them from the bima wearing a high Lutheran-style clerical hat-  black on most days and white on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
 
Of course there was the Temple Emanuel building itself- a dazzling example in the Art Deco style, designed by Paterson architect Fredrick W. Wentworth in the 1920s.  The windows, in particular, made a deep impression on me- the swirling colors of the panels depicting the creation, Jacob’s ladder, and the massive star set in the flat roof all crowd my memory, as does the Deco pattern of the terrazzo floors in the hallway leading to the ballroom.  Even the theater-style seating in the sanctuary seemed unique to me—my grandfather Dan having explained that the sloping floor, as in a movie theater, reflected the professional background of the building’s major donor, Jacob Fabian, who had made a fortune in the early days of motion pictures.  (I later learned that the one barred seat on the first row of the right-side aisle was in honor of Mr. Fabian, whose accustomed location that had been).  In later years (the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s), I would often attend the weekday afternoon/evening minyan in the small side chapel with my grandfather Daniel, who served the then-dwindling congregation in various capacities, including building manager, treasurer, and reliable minyan attendee.

Other memories of the “old” Paterson include taking cookies to the fire station with my grandmother, Sylvia Tauben, (and playing on the fire truck), my first city bus ride with my grandmother Mary Weiss (during which I had the tremendous responsibility of pulling the cord to signal the driver to stop), tumbling down the Passaic River-facing hills at Eastside Park, and eating my first pastrami sandwich at Sunshine’s Deli at the corner of Park and Vreeland Avenues.
 
Even after Paterson had declined as a living Jewish community, it persisted in my memory.  My grandparents and their friends scattered though they were to suburbs near and far, or holed up in the Empress Apartments—a last bastion of Jewish life in Paterson—kept the “old” Paterson alive in conversations constantly.   There were Bess and Mitch Zalon, who gave me rides in a vast laundry cart along with their own grandson, also named Adam.  And I recall my grandmother Sylvia’s Hadassah women—Bernadine Mechanic, Edith Sobel, and others—patiently indulging me as I showed slides of my high school era trip to Israel, and relating all the work they’d done for the Paterson Hadassah chapter.
 
Some of the characters they drew for me seemed larger than life.  For example, there was “Tiny” Steiker, the late husband of my grandmother’s friend Nettie Steiker.  I never met Tiny, but judging from descriptions I imagined him to be in the neighborhood of 7 feet tall.  According to my grandmother Sylvia, Tiny’s hands were so large that she once saw him pick up a steak between his thumb and forefinger, and eat it as daintily as one might eat a lamb chop.  And then there was Judge Ervan F. Kushner, Sylvia’s polymath friend from their early days in Paterson’s public schools, whose Guide to Mineral Collecting at Franklin and Sterling Hill, New Jersey was my introduction to geology, and whose Bogged Down in Bora-Bora reminded me of the myriad ways the Second World War touched their generation.

My grandparents Arthur and Mary Weiss had a wide circle of friends whom I recall largely from the summers afternoons they would spend at the Hickory Hill Country Club in Totowa.  There were Joe and Roz Pink; I recall she always brought her hand to her neck to speak—this was before I learned what a stoma was—and that he had lost half a leg.  And there were Irving and Stella Ruttenberg (I recall her pronounced Louisville accent, which seemed to grow deeper the longer she lived in New Jersey).
 
Although my own parents, Stephen and Deborah, reared me and my siblings, Jeremy and Rachel, in the suburbs—Parsippany and North Caldwell—my early experiences with Paterson implanted in me an appreciation of urban life.   I was impressed that so many in the community lived within walking distance of each other—indeed that so much was within walking distance generally.  Also, I was impressed that so many people seemed to feel their lives were bound up with each other, even after they moved away from the city that had been their community’s home.
 
Adam S. Weiss, JHSNJ Member
973-420-7907
AdamSWeiss@yahoo.com