Streisand: Her Life (3 page)

That was fine with Isaac (who now spelled his name with a c) because he had decided to go into a new business. Using a nest egg he had struggled for years to save, he had found a store in Brooklyn that rented more reasonably than most in Manhattan. And so, on January 1, 1920, Isaac and Annie Streisand and their five children moved to Brooklyn, where Isaac set himself up as a fishmonger.

T
HEIR NEW HOME
was an apartment building at 196-198 Stockton Street in the borough’s Williamsburg section, a scant four blocks from the elevated train that ran along Broadway and over the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan. Stockton Street provided a more pleasant, leafier residential area than the Streisands had known in Manhattan, but within the building itself there seethed a similar microcosm of New York immigrant life. The children shared one of the two bedrooms, two boys to a bunk bed and Molly in a third. They shared clothes, toys, household duties.

Emanuel, as the oldest child and a boy, naturally would have been looked up to by his siblings, but by the age of twelve he had displayed special leadership qualities. He was good-looking, with intense, close-set hazel eyes and wavy brown hair, and his intelligence had set him apart in school, where he particularly excelled at English and history and was allowed to skip two grades. Good-natured and generous with his time, he read to Hy and Phil every day and helped them with their homework. He showed a talent for speaking, so much so that at Phil’s bar mitzvah in 1927 he read the passages from the Torah and the Haftarah on his brother’s behalf. “Manny wasn’t bashful,” Molly recalled. “He was a good talker.”

He displayed a talent for athletics, too, and played handball and tennis during an era, his daughter would later proudly point out, “when Jewish boys didn’t do things like that.” Manny also baby-sat for his brothers and sisters most days after school while his mother and father worked in the fish store at 175 Sumner Avenue, about nine blocks from the apartment. “My father would get up before three in the morning three times a week and take the train into Manhattan to the Fulton Fish Market,” Molly recalled. “He would pick out only the best and the freshest fish. Then it would be delivered in these big heavy boxes, and my father had to lift them. He had to have three hernia operations.”

Manny helped out in the store on Thursdays, the busy day before the start of the Jewish Sabbath at sundown on Friday, by cleaning and chopping fish. As the younger boys grew older, they pitched in, too. Molly helped her mother scrub the floors and walls of the shop after closing. “The store was spotless,” she said. “My parents never went out. They never did anything but work.”

In September 1920 Manny, not yet thirteen, entered Boys High School on Marcy Avenue, fifteen blocks south of the apartment. During his four years at the school, he distinguished himself through his love of reading, his facility with English, and his talent for tutoring less accomplished students. Toward the end of his high school career he decided he wanted to be a teacher. In the fall of 1924, at sixteen and a half, he entered the College of the City of New York on a partial scholarship with a double major in English and education, traveling back and forth by subway to the school on 139th Street in Manhattan. He was the first Streisand to attend college, and his father fairly burst with pride. “He’s so smart he could be president!” Isaac boasted.

Molly believes that her brother got most of his intelligence from their mother. “She was a very smart lady, smarter, really, than my father. She knew English fluently, and after her kids left the house she went back to school, not for any reason other than an interest in learning. She was interested in everything; she was ambitious.”

To help pay for the educational expenses not covered by his scholarship, Manny worked part time at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. One summer he drove a Good Humor ice-cream truck in New Jersey; during another he worked as a lifeguard, and he spent a third hitchhiking through Canada and the northern United States, taking odd jobs for a few days at a time. “He was an
adventurer,”
Barbra has boasted, and Molly agreed. “He’d try anything, Manny. He wasn’t afraid of anything.”

In June 1928 Manny received his bachelor of science degree in education and a Phi Beta Kappa key. That fall he was hired as an elementary school English teacher in Manhattan, and the following year he taught at a junior high school. At night he took courses toward his master’s degree at CCNY, and over the next two summers he took additional courses at Cornell, Hunter, and Columbia. He received his master’s degree in 1930, and that fall got a job at a vocational high school. He was paid very little as a novice teacher, and his education had been expensive, so he continued to live in his father’s home, which was now an apartment above the fish store on Sumner Avenue.

Manny had every intention of pursuing his education until he earned his Ph.D., and he had begun work toward that goal. But he never received a doctorate because in 1928 his attentions were diverted by a petite, pretty blue-eyed nineteen-year-old named Diana Rosen. “Manny had a lot of girlfriends,” Molly recalled. “He started dating very young, and oh, were they crazy about him. They were very nice girls. But I guess there was something special about Dinah.”

S
HE WAS BORN
Ida Rosen on December 10, 1908, the third child of Louis Rosen, a thirty-year-old Russian immigrant, and his wife, the former Ida Friedland, also thirty and from Russia. Later she would adopt the name Diana, which evolved into the nickname Dinah. She and her three siblings lived in the family apartment at 1554 Pitkin Avenue in the East New York section of Brooklyn.

Louis Rosen worked as a tailor in a Manhattan shop and officiated part time as a cantor in his synagogue. “My father was a very religious man,” Diana recalled. “Very spiritual, a strong man. He would put on the prayer shawl and sing religious songs around the house. I believe the musicality in the family came from my father. I inherited it from him, and Barbra inherited it from me.

“I grew up the way Barbra grew up, hearing singing around me. My greatest pleasure in those days was listening to singers on our Victrola. I’ve always loved to sing, but my parents wouldn’t have dreamed of letting me do it professionally. I remember when I was seventeen, I registered with my best girlfriend to sing in the Metropolitan Opera Chorus. But we attended rehearsal only once. I brought us home too late and worried our parents. So both of us girls gave it up and put it out of our minds.” Still, at parties Diana and her friend could always be found around a piano, singing with the other boys and girls. “I was far too shy to sing alone before a crowd, but in a group I loved it.”

Although she was a good student, Diana gave no thought to higher education. Her goal—the same as that of most young women of her generation—was to meet a nice boy with a solid career ahead of him, get married, and give her parents grandchildren. In Emanuel Streisand—tall, dark, handsome, just turned twenty—she found him. “It was love at first sight, oh, boy!” Diana recalled years later of her introduction to Manny at the home of one of her girlfriends early in 1928. They dated for a year, during which he dazzled her with love poems and courtly attentions and charmed her with his sense of fun. He was serious and ambitious, but he also had a silly side. “My brother liked to put on skits at parties,” Molly recounted. “He had a great sense of humor.”

A year after they met, a misunderstanding escalated into a nearly yearlong separation. Neither could get past foolish pride long enough to telephone the other. “If he likes me enough,” Diana proclaimed, “he’ll call me.” When he finally did, late in 1929, she was at a Saturday movie matinee and missed the call. Having decided to continue to play hard to get, she didn’t call him back. But a few days later her fate was sealed when she ran into Manny at the El station. He was on his way to school. “I was dumbfounded,” she said. “If that wasn’t an act of God, nothing else was.” Embarrassed, Manny apologized for not having called for so long, and explained that he had been busy with his master’s degree studies. Amused by his discomfort, Diana forgave him, and their romance was rekindled.

O
N A FINE
spring day in 1930, Diana and Emanuel stood under the
chuppah
, the traditional satin Jewish wedding canopy, which was held aloft by his brothers Murray and Hy. In the crowded Sumner Avenue living room, as dozens of family members and friends watched and beamed, Manny slipped a simple ring on Diana’s finger and they became husband and wife.

Unable to afford a real honeymoon, the Streisands drove into Manhattan in his rickety tin lizzie for a show and a night at a nice hotel. On the way back into Brooklyn, a driver in front of them braked sharply and Manny was unable to stop in time. The cars collided. Manny’s forehead slammed against the windshield, cracking the glass.

When Molly next saw her brother, she exclaimed, “What happened to you?” Manny’s head was bandaged, his eyes black-and-blue. “He didn’t say much about it, though. Dinah was hurt, too. Something happened to her leg.”

Within a few days Manny began to suffer dizzy spells and searing headaches. “He took a lot of aspirins,” Molly recalled. “But he was the type who never complained. I don’t think my mother ever even knew about the accident.” Over time the headaches lessened, and although they never stopped, they were infrequent enough for a stoic sort of man like Manny to ignore.

Over the next thirteen years, Emanuel Streisand’s life seemed blessed. He and Diana were happy in their marriage; she was a
folks mensch,
an uncomplicated, unpretentious woman who delighted in being Mrs. Emanuel Streisand, keeping her home spotless and her husband well fed with good kosher food. The only thing missing was a baby, but Manny told his wife that the Great Depression, which had fallen across America after the stock market crash of 1929, made everything too uncertain for them to take on the financial burden of a baby. He promised her he would make as much money as possible so that within a few years they would be able to add to their family.