Page 31 - WhyAsInY

ManHattan BeaCHeD
Uncle Aaron was the only person in my extended family who was ever accused of really making money, at least after the Depression. He founded, owned, and, after a protracted litigation, sold a company called Triangle Blades to either Schick or Gillette, I forget which one. He later owned a nightclub near the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Ebbets Field. It had a backlighted wall that, when he switched it on, dazzled me by creating the illusion of a waterfall in motion. And he was well ahead of his time: Uncle Aaron owned the first television that I ever saw (I was probably about six years old when my parents and I made a pilgrimage to visit it). It was a thirteen-inch DuMont, which telecast in snowy black and white and sat in a wooden cabinet that seemed to be five times as large as the screen. Much more impressive is the fact that in the 1940s he built what was probably the first, and for decades might have been the only, home tennis court in Brooklyn. It had a clay surface.
Which brings us to the third Simon, Cousin Avis, who was twelve years old at the time at which I moved into a crib in the room that was adjacent to hers. (I don’t recall having had a view of the tennis court from that vantage point, but, apparently, I had a virtually continuous view of doting females and, on a few notable occasions, my uncle Aaron.) As you will have noted, just as Reade was an odd surname for my father’s kid brother, and Yaverbaum was an odd name for my father’s older mar- ried sister (at least prior to the advent of the feminist revolution in the 1960s), Avis would appear to be an odd name for the daughter of a Jew- ish family, at least at the time in question.
But once again, there is a totally understandable explanation. I trust that you will recall the time-honored custom in Jewish families of nam- ing a child after a revered deceased relative. Well, I have not yet referred to my mother’s mother, who was obviously Beatrice’s mother as well. She too had passed away when my mom was a teenager (and thus my mother was in effect raised by her two older sisters, Beatrice, whom we have met, and the younger of my mother’s two older sisters, Rose, whom we will meet soon). But her memory was preserved with great pride by all, and, believe it or not, Cousin Avis was named in her honor.
Fanny Flexer Caplan, my maternal grandmother, from whom Bea- • 13 •