World's Fair Read Online Free PDF

unconventional, his ideas were different. Even then. I knew he wanted to marry me. But he didn’t like to be told what to do, he never liked that. So the answer was to marry in this scandalous way, to elope, and get married by a justice of the peace rather than formally in a synagogue with a bridal veil and a celebration with the families’ blessing. He disliked religion, your father. He was very modern, interested in the new ideas—just as he loved new gadgets he loved new ideas. He believed in progress. He’d learned some of this from his father, Isaac, a wonderful man, very scholarly, but not pious. For Isaac religion meant superstition and poverty and ignorance as it had in the old country. He was a socialist, your grandfather Isaac, he believed the problems on earth in life—food, shelter, education—should be solved on earth. The promises of Heaven didn’t interest him. So your father had a background in these sorts of ideas. We went out to this remote beach community and married and set up house there. Both families were outraged and hurt. We lived a block from the ocean away from everyone else. I loved it there, it was very beautiful. Every day Dave took the train into the city. He worked for a man named Markel, who was in the phonograph business. After World War One, phonographs—Victrolas we called them—became popular. Markel liked Dave and taught him the business. That is how he got into it, through that man. For a while before we were married, I worked for Markel too, keeping the books, running the office. Dave had gotten me that job.
    At any rate, though it was sometimes lonely in Rockaway, that was more than compensated for by the ocean and the sky and the privacy. We didn’t have our families on our backs. You don’t know what that meant. To have come from a large family living together, to have grown up in apartments and city streets. Now we were alone and we had privacy and we had space. It was a wonderful time in our lives. When we went out we went down to the Village, Greenwich Village. It was very much the thing then. Your father had a gift for making friends, meeting people, and he naturally gravitated to people of intelligence, people with fine minds and radical ideas. Well, in the Village that’s the way things were, lots of young people thinking new thoughts and living differently from everyone around them. We had artists for friends, and writers. We read the latest books, listened to poets reading their poems in living rooms, in garrets in the Village. We knew Maxwell Bodenheim, who was then a very well known Village poet, we even met Edna Millay, who was already well known outside the Village. We ate in restaurants where actors and playwrights ate; I remember one, you walked down a few steps from the street, Three Steps Down, that was the name of it, and there we found ourselves sitting at a table next to Helen Hayes. How young and beautiful she was.
    George Tobias, the actor, was a friend of ours. He was a young man then. He later went to Hollywood. And Phil Welch, a reporter for the New York Times . Phil admired your father very much. We had wonderful friends. Only now do I see that our lives could have gone in an entirely different direction.

FOUR
    W inters, with their short and darkening days, were difficult. When it stormed, snow got down my collar, inside my galoshes and under my sleeves. Despite my mother’s bundling me in several layers of clothes, all sealed in by my snowsuit, I was wet and freezing in a discouragingly short time considering everything I had had to go through to get out the door. I moved lurchingly, stiffly, breasting the snow like some tiny golem.
    But the season had its revelations. I stood one afternoon at my front steps with a gale blowing and immense drifts of snow filling the block, banking against the parked cars, and making dunes of the stone stoops of the private houses. It was awesome, furious, but afterward, the sky clearing, the stars appearing in