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to help them. So he got me a job working for the Jewish Welfare Board, dealing with immigrants and their problems. The Board had set up a model tenement apartment up on 101st Street and First Avenue—up near the vinegar works. I taught the immigrant women and men how to live in the modern world. How to keep clean, store food, make beds, all that sort of thing. It was astonishing how little people knew, how uneducated and green they were. It was touching, you could not help being moved to see the struggles they had to understand, to learn, their desire to make good in America. I, having been born here, had no idea of my own parents’ struggle, they too had come as young people not knowing the language, the ways of the new world, but at least they had skills, my father had a profession, he had work the day he landed, he was always very proud of telling us that. My father always knew how to make a living, and he worked till the day he died. He was extremely responsible, for him the family waseverything, he not only got himself work but other musicians too, he became a sort of booking agent for musicians in addition to working himself. I learned ambition from him.
    At any rate, working for the Jewish Welfare Board, when the war started I was naturally involved with that. Teams of us used to travel to the armories to serve coffee and doughnuts and talk to the soldiers and maybe dance with them at their functions. It was all chaperoned, all proper. Your father by then was in the Navy, he was training to be an ensign at the Webbs Naval Institute on the Harlem River, and as usual, he was devilish; he would each night climb over the fence and sneak out to see me without official leave. He did things like that. He would come to wherever I was working—we did this work in the evening—and there he would be in his blue sailor suit, one sailor among hundreds of soldiers and it could be quite a problem for him, the rivalry between soldiers and sailors being what it was, and he was totally outnumbered and still he’d take me away from these other boys with whom I’d been talking or dancing. He was lucky not to be killed.
    Then in 1918 we had the terrible flu epidemic, and my two older sisters, my dear sisters, one twenty-three, the other twenty-four, they each contracted the flu and within months of each other they both died. To this day I don’t like to think about it. I saw my poor mother turn old before my eyes. It was never an easy life, she was the hardest-working person I had ever seen, and how they had struggled the both of them to make a good life, and bring us up properly and see to it that we had some prospects for our own lives, some promise. It was not easy raising six children on the wages of a free-lance musician, however responsible he was; and in those days, of course, there was nothing that made running a home easy; you washed clothes with a washboard, you scrubbed them by hand in the sink. I used to do that myself, and you shopped every day because there was no refrigeration, and you cooked from scratch, there were no conveniences in cooking any more than in anything else. She had never had help. And these two beautiful young women got sick and died. She lost her two oldest daughters! I’ve blocked itall out, I don’t remember the funerals. I try not to picture those girls. I don’t remember any of it, only that that time in my mind is blank, a grey space, an emptiness.
    When I was twenty-three I eloped with your father. We went to Rockaway Beach and we got married. What had happened is that my brother Harry, who was always very protective, went to Dave and he said, “You and Rose have been going out for eight years. She’s twenty-three and she wants to get married. She would like to marry you, but if you won’t she doesn’t want to see you anymore. You either marry her or stay away.” Well, you remember your father. He had a most unusual mind. He didn’t think the way other people thought, he was