Streisand: Her Life (4 page)

For the first two years of the marriage, Manny and Diana lived with his family over the fish store, but in 1932 he got an attractive offer to help organize the education department of the Elmira Reformatory, a penal institution for youthful offenders in western New York State. The pay was better than anything he’d been offered before, so he and Diana moved to Elmira and set up a household of their own.

The following year Manny was promoted to assistant superintendent, and in the summer of 1934 he felt secure enough to add a child to the family. Diana became pregnant in August, and on the following Mother’s Day, May 12, 1935, Sheldon Jay Streisand was born in Elmira. Now Emanuel Streisand had a wife, a baby, and a teaching career. He seemed on top of the world, even though he couldn’t seem to shake those headaches....

A few months after Sheldon’s birth, a frantic Diana called Manny’s mother in Brooklyn. Manny had had a seizure—he had fallen to the floor, his body had twitched and convulsed uncontrollably, he had lost consciousness. “Please come, Anna, please come,” Diana pleaded. When Anna arrived, she stood with her daughter-in-law next to Manny’s hospital bed as his doctor explained that he had had an epileptic fit brought on by the head injury five years earlier. Nothing could be done, the doctor said, and another attack might happen at any time. The seizures could be dangerous, he went on, and he outlined to both women the procedures for dealing with another one should it occur.

N
ow a frightening, unpredictable illness threatened the otherwise happy, strong, athletic Manny Streisand. And in that less enlightened era, his affliction was considered shameful, something to be hidden. Only his immediate family knew about it.

When Manny recovered, Diana pleaded with him to return to Brooklyn, where they could be closer to both their families in case he “got sick” again. He agreed when he was able to secure a good-paying job—$2, 500 a year—teaching social studies to truants and delinquents at the Brooklyn High School for Specialty Trades on the Flatbush Avenue extension at Concord Street, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. In July
1
935 he moved his family to a roomy, high-ceilinged one-bedroom apartment in an attractive six-story building with a French chateau facade at 163 Ocean Avenue in Flatbush, directly across the street from Prospect Park.

Peter Greenleaf worked with Manny Streisand at the High School for Specialty Trades from the beginning of his tenure there, and he recalled his colleague as “very nice and well liked” by all. “We had some of the worst students in the country at that time. The principal used to send the teachers out into the street to pick up any boy who looked like he was under sixteen and drag him into the school. We prepared the boys for vocational careers. Manny and I taught academic subjects, which most of the students weren’t very adept at. But Manny actually was able to teach the boys something.”

By 1942 Manny had written an instruction manual for teachers entitled
Individual Instruction in English
and had distinguished himself enough to be listed in
Leaders in Education.
His salary now was $4, 500 a year, another colleague, Leonard Boyer, estimated, and he and Diana felt financially confident enough to have another baby. At the end of August, Diana found out she was nearly a month pregnant. She and Manny were thrilled, and both hoped for a girl.

In preparation for the baby’s arrival, the Streisands moved ten blocks directly east to a two-bedroom apartment in a six-story brick building at 457 Schenectady Avenue. Still a nice building today, with its marble wa
l
ls and intricately carved moldings in the lobby, it must have been quite an impressive place to live in 1941. And on April 24, 1942, the family rounded out nicely with the addition of the healthy little girl her parents named Barbara Joan.

N
AMED AFTER HER
grandmother Anna’s sister—Barbara is the English equivalent of the Yiddish Berthe—she was a bright-eyed baby with a ready smile, so fascinated by everything around her that she rarely cried. Her head was a little too big for her body, and its size seemed accentuated by a complete lack of hair until she was two, but everyone agreed with her parents’ assessment of her on her birth announcement as “a cute little trick.” In fact, some friends even told Diana that Barbara had the makings of the next Gerber baby food baby, but Diana found that notion unseemly. At school, Manny lost few opportunities to brag about his new daughter and show his colleagues pictures of her.

With the child came added expenses, and Manny took advantage of every opportunity to earn extra money. Immediately after school he’d hurry to the yeshiva at 656
W
illoughby Avenue, where he taught remedial classes. The year after Barbara’s birth, he worked as a counselor and tutor at a youth camp in upstate New York, a situation that kept money coming in during summer recess.

The following summer Manny accepted an offer to be head counselor at Camp Cascade in Highmount, New York, run by one of his fellow teachers at Specialty Trades, Nathan Spiro. Diana, high-strung and a chronic worrier, felt uneasy about spending the summer at Camp Cascade: “I don’t know, something within me was nervous.” But she was an obedient wife, and during the last week of June 1943 she, Manny, Sheldon, and baby Barbara arrived in the Catskill Mountains.

Manny’s job was rigorous. He led the kids on hikes, umpired softball games, coached swim meets, taught tutorials, and supervised the entire staff. In July his workload grew even heavier when several counselors suddenly quit. At the end of most of his eighteen-hour days now, he felt unaccustomedly tired.

On Wednesday, August 4, 1943, a suffocatingly hot day, Manny awoke with a headache. By mid
m
orning, after he had coached a swimming race, the pain had grown so severe he felt sick to his stomach. He told Nathan Spiro he would have to go back to his cottage and lie down for a while. He went to his bedroom and asked Diana to wake him in an hour. When she tried to, she couldn’t rouse him. She ran out and found Spiro, who called an ambulance. While she waited for medical help to come, Diana paced back and forth at the foot of the bed, her uncomplaining infant in her arms. Her husband’s breathing was shallow, and terror bit at her gut. “It’s going to be all right,” she kept repeating to herself. “It’s going to be all right.”

Spiro’s wife accompanied Diana to Fleischmanns Hospital, a sm
a
ll infirmary nearby, while his daughter baby-sat with Barbara. Before she left the camp, Diana had composed a telegram to Anna and Isaac that was delivered to the fish store that afternoon: “Manny very ill. Come immediately.”

By the time Anna got to Fleischmanns Hospital, her son was dead. Shortly after Manny arrived at the hospital, he had suffered a seizure. A doctor had injected morphine into his neck to halt the convulsions, and within a few minutes Manny had stopped breathing. Whether the dosage was too high or he had had an adverse reaction to the drug isn’t known, but at 2: 45
P. M.
Emanual Streisand was pronounced dead of respiratory failure.

His wife sat stock still in the hospital waiting room, her mind uncomprehending. His mother maintained the presence of mind to make the arrangements. The Jewish religion required that Manny be buried within twenty-four hours, but he owned no cemetery plot. Anna called home, and a stunned Isaac quickly sought the help of friends at his temple, who arranged for Manny to be buried at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens after funeral services at the Kirchenbaum Funeral Parlor that began at 3
P.M.
August 5.

At the burial, in accordance with custom, the mourners tore their lapels (“the rending of the garments”) and intoned “Blessed be the righteous Judge.” As her husband’s body was lowered into the ground, Diana Streisand whispered to her eight-year-old son, “Now you’re the man of the family.” Immediately afterward, the seven-day mourning period began. Diana sat shivah at her parents’ apartment; the Streisand family sat in their apartment above the fish store. Mirrors were covered with cloth so that all focus would remain on the deceased; conversation was limited to praises of the dead and expressions of condolence. Friends brought food, and twice a day a minyan of ten holy men came to the residences to hold services and lead the mourners in a recitation of the Kaddish, the mourners’ prayer. After a week the mourners left the apartments for the first time and walked around the block to symbolically cast off their sorrow.

It wasn’t that easy for Diana, or for Anna. Bess Streisand, the widow of Manny’s brother Murray, remembered that period with lingering sadness. “It was a terrible time. Dinah was just bewildered. Manny’s mother took it so hard. She was very devoted to him, very close to him. I don’t remember her carrying on with grief at the funeral, but after the shivah she wouldn’t go out, she didn’t do her shopping, she didn’t want to do anything. She fell apart completely.”

Diana spent much of her time in the ensuing months crying in her bed, the emptiness next to her like a chasm that threatened to swallow her up. Her mother and her sister helped with the children, but her situation was bleak. Manny’s pension would be only a fraction of what he had been making, and the September rent on their apartment loomed ahead of her. The Streisands couldn’t help out much, and neither could Diana’s parents. Louis Rosen, never a well-to-do man, was sixty-five now and retired. All he could do was take his daughter and her children into his modest one-bedroom apartment in the Philip Arms, a four-story brick building at 365 Pulaski Street in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section.

Shattered, depressed, frightened, Diana Streisand sold her furniture, packed up her belongings, and moved back in with her parents. Her mind heavy with worry, she wondered whether she and her fatherless children would have any kind of future at all.

T
wo-and-a-half-year-old Barbara toddled into her grandparents’ bedroom and climbed onto a chair next to a low mirrored dresser. Somehow she managed to clamber on top of it, and finally she sat staring at her reflection. She picked up a tube of lipstick and drew vivid red slashes across her cheeks and forehead. Then, using the edge of a blanket, she smeared the goo all over her face. When she leaned back to admire her handiwork, she came precariously close to falling off the dresser. Just at that moment Diana passed by the bedroom door, rushed in to grab her daughter, and saved Barbara from calamity.

As soon as the baby learned to crawl, she got into everything, her bright eyes aglow with delight and intrigue at each new discovery. One afternoon Diana watched as Barbara crawled over to a window, climbed up onto a chair, and stared longingly out at the street. Her heart ached when she realized that the baby was waiting for her father to come home.

Diana’s father wasn’t much of a substitute dad for his grandchildren. Overweight, his health in decline, Louis Rosen wanted little more at this stage of his life than peace and quiet. Now his household had more than doubled, and the apartment in the Philip Arms was too small for five people. Rosen and his wife slept in the one bedroom, Diana and Barbara slept in the living room, which had been converted into a bedroom, and Sheldon camped out on a cot in the dining room. Diana’s bed took the place of the living-room couch, and Barbara grew up thinking that sofas were “what rich people had.” Although World War II had ended in 1945 and America had begun its two-decade economic recovery from the Great Depression, circumstances had seen to it that the Rosen-Streisand family wouldn’t share in America’s new bounty.

Louis Rosen showed little patience with a prepubescent boy and a toddler in his home. As Sheldon recalled, “There was no love in that house. I remember there was a huge table in the dining room, and Barbara and I would scuttle under it to avoid beatings.”

Absorbed in her grief, uncomfortable with displays of affection, their mother provided little nurture. “Emotionally, my mother left me at the same time” as her father had, Barbra has said. “She was in her own trauma.” Diana was soon absent physically as well when the financial strains on the Rosen household forced her to return to work for the first time since before her marriage. She got a job as a bookkeeper, and every morning for the first few months of her mother’s employment Barbara would burst into tears when Diana walked out of the apartment: “I was always terrified something would happen to her and I would be alone in the world.”

As often as Barbara was shuttled from one caretaker to another, she might as well have been an orphan. Her uncle Murray Streisand recalled that “her mother was always leaving her with friends and relatives... [and] she felt deserted.” Grandmother Rosen did her best to care for Barbara and Sheldon while Diana worked, but the children proved a handful for the overweight, asthmatic woman, herself nearly seventy. In the fall of 1946, to ease the burden on her mother, Diana sent four-year-old Barbara to nursery school, and the following two summers she shipped both children to her sister’s farm in Colchester, Connecticut.

If there was a positive aspect of life on Pulaski Street for Barbara, it was the music that surrounded her. There was neither a radio nor a Victrola, but Louis Rosen continued to sing the traditional religious songs at home every Sa
b
bath and on holidays. “He sang with the children,” Diana said. “Of course, Barbara didn’t understand the Hebrew words to the hymns, but the musicality of them reached her. I’d sing to her, too, but I’d sing the popular songs.”

In the fall of 1947 Barbara began grade school at the yeshiva on Willoughby Street where her father had once taught. She proved an excellent but troublesome student. “I had very good marks,” Barbra recalled, “but my conduct was always marked poor. I was so impatient. I’d sit there holding up my hand and when the teacher ignored me, I’d talk anyway. We’d study the Bible and I had questions: why, why, why? It didn’t go over well.”

It was at the yeshiva that Barbara first encountered the cruelty of other children. She wasn’t a pretty girl. Her body, thin and ungainly, often seemed to move in several directions at once. Her head was still too large for her small frame, and a lazy left eye constantly threatened to drift into her nose, which had begun to grow in disproportion to her face. She became the butt of jokes and tauntings—“Big beak,” they called her, and “Cross-eyes,” and “Mieskeit,” a Yiddish word for an ugly person. To block the pain, she adopted a haughty, defensive air that only spurred her tormentors on.

T
OBEY WANDER BOROKOW,
a warm, loving Austrian immigrant who lived on the first floor of the Philip Arms with her husband and their six-year-old son, Irving, took a liking to the odd little girl who lived two floors above when Barbara and Irving began to play together in the hall. Tobey called Barbara
bubeleh
—her little darling—and she was probably the first adult who ever showed the child sustained and unreserved affection.

“My mother was a very friendly, outgoing sort of person,” Irving Borokow recalled. “She was very motherly to Barbara; she was probably in contact with her more than her own mother was. My mother became her mother, basically.” Another neighbor, Anna Lopatton, saw Tobey “take Barbara in and hug her and call her pet names, and I never saw her mother or her grandparents do that.” When Tobey saw that Barbara had only a hot-water bottle to play with as a doll, she knit a sweater for it. “It sounds awful,” Barbra has said, “but when I’d fill it with water it was like this warm human being. It had much more life and feeling than an ordinary doll.”

Tobey offered to baby-sit for Barbara after she got home from school and before Diana returned from work. Tobey would knit sweaters or cook stuffed cabbage, blintzes, and noodle pudding while Barbara and Irving sat transfixed in front of the Borokows’ seven-inch television screen. “We used to watch Laurel and Hardy every day,” Barbra has said, “on a tiny little television with a big magnifying glass attached to it so it would blow up the screen and the picture would seem bigger.” But when Irving’s father, Abe, came home at five o’clock, it was time for the children to clear out. According to Irving, “My father was just the opposite of my mother. He liked his privacy. He wasn’t very sociable with the children.”

“Whenever he came home,” Barbra has said, “Irving would say to me, ‘You have to go now.’ That really set me back years.” Once again, it seemed to Barbara, a father figure had rejected her. “She always felt a yearning for her father,” Irving said. “That was apparent even when we were kids.”

Barbara and Irving played house together, and she helped him run his lemonade stand on the sidewalk in front of the building. Before long, he developed a crush on her. He doesn’t recall ever telling Barbara how he felt,
n
or does he think she returned his feelings “because she always considered me like a brother.” But years later Barbra described him as “my first boyfriend” and recalled that he had told her he “liked” her. “He hit me over the head with a [toy] gun once—I guess that was his way of showing affection.”

H
ER MOTHER FRETTED
constantly over Barbara’s lack of interest in food. According to Irving Borokow, “a Jewish child had to be round, and Barbara was like a toothpick. So her mother constantly tried to feed her.” One concoction her mother made Barbara eat has stuck in Irving’s mind. “It was called a guggle muggle. It was like a shake with milk and chocolate and a raw egg. It was supposed to fatten her up.”

It didn’t, and neither did her mother’s virtual force-feedings. Diana became so frustrated with her daughter’s finicky eating that she often propped her up in bed and spoon-fed her as though she were an infant. At those times Barbara lapped up both the food and the rare attention from her mother. “When I wanted love from my mother,” Barbra has said, “she gave me food.”

During the summers of Barbara’s sixth and seventh years, 1948 and 1949, Dinah took another tack after a doctor told her that her daughter was anemic: she sent her away to “health camps” in upstate New York. “Those camps were the most horrible experiences of my life,” Barbra said. Once again her mother was sending her away, and this time to total strangers. “I’d get there, they’d dump me in a bathtub... like I was a piece of dirt.” The counselors scrubbed her, washed her hair with lice-killer, and put her into the camp’s drab uniform.

Homesick, missing the Borokows especially, Barbara cried miserably day after day, clutching the only link she had to her happiness with Irving and Tobey—“my identity, my sense of self”—a maroon sweater with wooden buttons that Tobey had knitted for her. Inevitably, the other kids mocked her tears, and when they did, her haughtiness would kick in. She’d turn up her nose and sniff. “I’m not crying,” she would tell them. “I have a loose tear duct that just runs.”

When Barbara returned home at the end of August, she hadn’t plumped up much. “The food was so awful at this camp that was supposed to make me healthy that I used to throw it under the table just to get it off my plate.”