Dr. Metablog

A "Ditmas Park" Novel

From my birth in 1939 until I fled to Ithaca in 1956, I lived on East 9th Street, in a section of Brooklyn that had no other name than "Flatbush." But all is flux, as Heraclitus said in a very different context, and now the undistinguished neighborhood of my youth has been upgraded to pretentious "Kensington."  Moreover, the adjacent section of Flatbush through which I early morning shambled to fabled Erasmus Hall H. S., consisting of a large stock of handsome old Victorian homes, has also been re-christened. It's now "Ditmas Park."  

Ditmas Park is where Emma Straub's novel, Modern Lovers (2016) situates itself. It is, she claims, "the only neighborhood in New York City that felt like the suburbs."  A sentence of praise or an instance of wicked irony, one might ask?

Suburb or not, Modern Lovers does not take place in the Flatbush of my youth. Yes, streets retain their familiar names (Rugby, Argyle, Stratford, Newkirk, Ocean Avenue). In fact, one of the modern lovers, a fiftyish wife and mother, works out of a real estate office at the corner of Cortelyou Road and East 16th Street, exactly where old Mr. Hart used to repair the fragile gears of my three-speed. But all is yuppified. None of the children in this novel go to PS 217 or PS 139 or Erasmus (in fact, these anchors of my old neighborhood go unmentioned). Instead, the young 'uns attend expensive "Whitman," an elite private academy. The young lady who is at the center of the story has both a 'mum" and a "mom" -- a circumstance that no doubt occurred 70 years ago, but no one would have talked about it, at least openly. It's Flatbush, all right, but where are the Italians and Irish and the Jews?  A decade ago I toured PS 217 and couldn't help being struck by the "diversity" of the student body -- Turks, Syrians, Russians, central and south Americans, Asians both east and south, and of course Afro-Americans. These folks don't appear in Modern Lovers. Nor do the ubiquitous Hasids. No wonder Emma Straub likes the slice of Brooklyn that she describes as suburban.  Here's a Brooklyn novel that's more Updyke-y than Fuchs-y.

Modern Lovers tells a warm, approachable, sound, humorous-to-slightly-satirical story. It's modern, in the sense that the lovers aren't young and aren't searching for mates; instead, they're middle-aged and trying to repair troubled marriages. I don't doubt that Modern Lovers hits some readers' bull's eyes --  even if it misses my tired old target. For me, it was a story of considerable sociological interest -- an instance of how the decades have transmogrified my Flatbush into hip Ditmas Park.

At the end of the novel, the entrepreurial ladies start a new restaurant, Hot and Sweet, which bakes perfect apple turnovers and supersedes that old frayed  Cortelyou Jewish deli.

Dodge City Nincompoops

The rip-roaring conclusion to Dodge City (1939), is marvelously dumb. The bad guys, led by really nasty villain Jeff Surrett (Bruce Cabot) have jumped out of the burning railroad car and onto their horses. They are going to make a getaway, we assume. But for some reason, the six schmegeggees don't ride away from the railroad tracks. Instead, they continue exactly parallel to the tracks, allowing Wade Hatton (Errol Flynn) to get out his rifle and pick them off, one after another.

All that the black hats needed to do was to hang a right and ride off into the brush, or just rein up, and let the train go by. The train is on a railroad track.  But no. Not these guys. They keep on riding alongside the train until they're all shot. End of movie, but not the end to my astonishment. I'm baffled that the director, Michael Curtiz of all people, allowed such a brainless ending. 

Also: Errol Flynn, with his anachronistic 1930s mustache and condescending smile, was so goody-goody and upstanding that I felt a strong urge to piss on his leg.

 

Starokonstantinov

Ukraine has been invaded and whole cities have been obliterated by the Putin dictatorship. It's tragic. Once again, I'm overwhelmingly grateful that my grandparents chose to pack up and leave the blighted Ukraine. It's a decision that has looked better and better with each passing year.  

My father's family came from a Ukrainian "shtetl" called Starokonstantinov, or Alt Konstantin ("old Constantine"). As a youth, I overheard but did not understand conversations in Yiddish about a place that my grandparents called (phonetically) Xusantine-gebernia, where the X stands for a non-English deep guttural fricative. Seventy years ago I paid little attention to my eastern European ancestry. Now I'm fascinated.

Where is Starokonstantinov?  What is a "shtetl?"

I've just read Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern's new (2014) and highly pertinent history, The Golden Age Shtetl (an oxymoronic title if there ever was one). Y P-S defines a shtetl as "an East European market town in private possession of a Polish magnate, inhabited mostly but not exclusively by Jews, and subject to Russian bureaucracy." Starokonstantinov, he claims, was a "quintessential shtetl." "My" ancestral shtetl lies in the western part of Ukraine, about 50 miles south of a line drawn between Lviv and Kyiv. Nowadays, it has a population of about 30,000 souls.

I know that my grandfather's people lived in Starokonstantinov from the middle of the nineteenth century, but I have no idea when they first arrived -- it might have been years or centuries before. The town itself is not an ancient foundation. It enters history only in the late 16th century when a Polish noble named Konstanty Ostrogski built himself a castle (which still survives) and took ownership of the surrounding area. Starokonstantinov was a "private town" -- meaning that it was owned by the Ostrogski family for several hundred years. In its first years, Starokonstantinov was included in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1569 it became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1793, and for many years, even after my ancestors had struck out for the new world, it was a possession of the Russian Empire. Now it's in the independent Ukraine, and hoping to remain so.

The history of Starokonstantinov is marked by a series of tragedies prior to the one now in progress. An early disaster was the Battle of Starokonstantinov in 1648, which was a key event in the Chmielnicki Massacres of 1648-49. Eastern rite Cossacks broke into the fortified town and killed all of its 130 Jewish families and as many Polish Roman Catholics as they could find. During the early part of the 18th century, the Haidamack massacre of Uman by Cossacks spilled over into other Ukrainian shtetls, including "mine." And then beginning in 1881 came the series of pogroms -- anti-Jewish peasant riots provoked and tacitly supported by the Russian officialdom. In Starokonstantinov, there were 6611 Jews in 1847 and 9212 (61% of the total population) in 1897. (There would have been two more if my grandparents hadn't seen the light in 1895). During the Nazi occupation in 1942, virtually all the remaining Jewish population (6731 in 1939) was murdered. It's a troubled, tragic history.

I'm not sure what it means to say that a town was wholly owned by Polish nobility. Did the Ostrogskis own all the land, or the land and some of the buildings? Did they administer the public works? The churches? Did they possess the surrounding farms?  Did they own, until they were freed in 1861, the serfs?  Most likely, each shtetl had its own particular form of ownership (the late medieval world was anything but standardized). Y P-S does not explain; perhaps he assumes it's common knowledge.

Starokonstantinov occasionally makes an appearance in The Golden Age Shtetl.

I had not realized how active my ancestors might have been in the vodka trade. "In Starokonstantinov, the possession of Countess Rzewuska, about fifty [Jewish-owned] inns and taverns yielded 67 percent of the town revenues." (Query: how and when did the shtetl pass from the Ostrogskis to the Rzewuskis, who were a very prominent and wealthy Polish family)? As far as I can tell, the "town revenues" went directly into the hands of the Polish overlords. In 1827, "Starokonstantinov Jews realized the that their efforts to prevent the draft of men for twenty to twenty five year terms in the Russian army [had failed], and the Jewish populace turned against their own kahal elders and attacked their houses." "Local police had to summon an additional army unit to suppress the outburst." (The "kahal" was a committee of prominent Jewish citizens who were the nominal governors [under Polish supervision] of the Jewish population.) In the first half of the nineteenth century, the divorce rate among Jewish couples in Starokonstantinov, was 16 percent. In larger cities, it was even higher (in Letichev it was 47 percent). Y P-S attributes the surprisingly high rate of failed marriages to the relative freedom of Jewish women and to the breakdown of traditional constraints as the Jewish population became increasingly urbanized. A major fire in Starokonstantinov in 1835 hastened the shtetl's decline. Russian travelers found Starokonstantinov and especially its roads deplorable. "A Russian army officer observed that Starokonstantinov is dirty beyond any measure: but 'if we bother ourselves to learn the reasons for this situation, we would perhaps find out that even the Jews, whom are usually blamed, have nothing to do with it.... To drive through the streets of the town is a real challenge, as there is no pavement. Stones once paving the road have long sunk into the soils. When it is raining, they do nothing but prevent movement.'" Mud season in Starokonstantinov must have been an annual challenge. Nevertheless, Starokonstantinovites were readers: a merchant estimated that in the shtetl there were "about 20,000 books, mostly prayer books, bible and bible commentaries, tractates on the Talmud and the Kabbalah." Y P-S thinks that this number must be a great exaggeration. But it's on the record that a merchant named Pinhas Yosef Bromberg from Starokonstantinov brought twenty Hebrew books with him while traveling on business to St Petersburg. 

My great-grandfather was a participant in the commerce of Starokonstantinov. According to my father, he was a "factor."  A "faktor" (Yiddish from German) was essentially a middleman. My ancestor had a horse and a wagon (perhaps, I allow myself to fantasize in a moment of self-aggrandizement, two horses and two wagons). According to tradition, he mostly dealt in grain, but factors such as he bought and sold whatever was available: wood, coal, ribbons, calico, mirrors, bolts and screws, vodka and wine. They did much of their business at fairs and Starokonstantinov was famous for its very prominent fair.