The Jews in America Trilogy (111 page)

On March 15, 1925, Frances Marion Brandon formally announced her impending marriage to George Gillespie. She was, to be sure, somewhat apprehensive about the future of the union. She approached it in “fear and trembling, amid nameless premonitions.” Mrs. Brandon did not lack for a sense of the dramatic, and she actually went so far as to purchase a black wedding gown. It was, as she saw it, “A marriage I had agreed to as
the only
way of recovering quiet possession of my records from this Gillespie, and unravelling those financial irregularities, without painful notoriety.”

But her public announcement had the inadvertent effect not only of creating notoriety but also of catching Gillespie off his guard and trapping him. Obviously he had had no intention of marrying Frances Brandon, and was simply offering marriage as a way of putting her off and keeping her out of his account books. When the announcement appeared, it created a certain stir. For one thing, he was more than twenty years her senior; he was a self-proclaimed celibate, for another. When Gillespie was approached by a newspaper reporter for a statement about the upcoming nuptials, he protested, “I am a holy man!” And then, “I do not even know the woman. What is she? Some sort of city employee? Then how would I know her? The thought of marrying her never entered my mind! If a million other women had made that announcement, I could not have been more surprised.”

Needless to say, to Frances Brandon this statement
“came like a thunderclap, or rather, a roar of thunder that tore at the very core of my life.” There followed a period where she “remained as one dead for two years or more.” Then she instigated the swindle suit against Gillespie, asking $575,000 in damages.

It was, of course, a classic and pathetic case of a susceptible and perhaps foolish woman who had been successfully duped by a confidence man. And Frances Brandon might easily have won wide popular sympathy for her predicament, if she had not chosen to inject the issue of social “class”—and alleged Sephardic superiority—into the case. While it was still pending trial, she wrote and published a pamphlet intended to place her name above reproach, and thus disassociate herself from the shady doings of the nefarious Gillespie. Titled “The Truth at Last!!” it consisted of sixteen tightly packed pages filled with shrill vituperations and fulminations, besprinkled with quotations from the Old and New Testaments, Shakespeare, and Saint Thomas a Kempis, hectic with italics and spiky with picket fences of exclamation points. But at the heart of her exercise, alas, was the assertion that, in terms of background and breeding, George Gillespie was Frances Brandon's social inferior.

“Gillespie is Scotch,” she wrote, “judging by his name, and of sordid, squalid origin, a street gamin, a ruffian; salesman of children's dresses, etc.; then a dockhand at the New York Customs House; married a creature, her father a stablehand, her aunt a cook; menials; illiterates. In line therewith, his daughter married the son of a Bronx veterinary.” For all that, she wrote, “He palmed himself off as a ‘Society man and philanthropist,' and then was always concealing his family connections and their record as habitual petty jobholders, this ingrate … identified
me
… as a despicable ‘some sort of city employee.' … Why should I, a recognized executive, with a phenomenal record of
achievement, and a priceless law practice, exchange cake for crumbs,
retrogress
into the political rank and file, into a nominal public office, regardless of remuneration? For bread and butter? Hardly. My financial circumstances preclude that possibility. Then how? Through
Gillespie
!”

As for herself, she pointed out in her manifesto:

My sister, years ago, married the cousin of a beloved First Lady of the Land, our
American
equivalent for the bluest blood of Royalty. No fuss; no feathers; just unpretentiously. We are like that … though my own blood and kin traces back through America's proudest aristocracy, those
PIONEERS,
who tamed the wilderness with their bare and bleeding hands; sturdy stock; backbone of America.… First Settlers back beyond the Revolution, tracing ancestry not to the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, but even back of that, to
AMERICA'S FIRST SETTLER,
The Founder, Sir Walter Raleigh.

As if that were not enough, she crowed:
“I wear the crimson of nobility by right of that proud name
[Brandon],
and wear that peerless name as a diadem of stars upon my brow: When we were very young, I married Lyman da Fonseca Brandon!”
She then proceeded to recite all her ex-husband's genealogical credentials—the Duke of Suffolk, Mary, Queen of Scots, Kitty Mellish, and all the rest.

Her pamphlet went on to quote a lengthy testimonial in her behalf from Lyman Brandon. “I know Frances Marion Brandon,” her former husband wrote somewhat elliptically. “She is an Ace … A phenomenon, a paragon among women; one in a thousand thousand, to know her is to love, respect, honor, and cherish all womanhood as epitomized in her. Cast in heroic mold, modest, self-sacrificing … of invincible courage … gladly go to the scaffold for principle, for
THE TRUTH
… inspiration to women … her great soul … glorious womanhood.…” Lyman Brandon's prose sounded suspiciously like his former wife's, and he was every bit as prolix.

Finally, after a detailed recitation of Mr. Gillespie's “foul deeds,” Mrs. Brandon's paper terminated with these words:

Duped? Humbugged? Hoaxed? I was.
We all were!
But
CREDIT ME ALWAYS WITH THIS, THE HIGHEST FEATHER OF MY CAP
:
It was I, who called Gillespie's bluff; smoked him out; treed him!
I who rendered that
supreme service
to my fellow citizens. The Artful Dodger caught at last! Another prize captured by me; or rather, a
prize capture.
But those of you who do not yet know me may ask, have I any proofs? Have I?
Have I? My turn to thunder now!

What was it Crockett said?
“Come on down, Gillespie; you're a gone soon!”

And as the date for the trial approached, these words turned out to be prophetic. Mr. Gillespie was indeed gone. He had vanished without a trace.

And as for Frances Brandon, poor woman, her pompous and windy pamphlet had made her a laughingstock. While she attitudinized, New York giggled. While she fumed and ranted and exhumed fifteenth-century ancestors, readers of New York newspapers hugged their sides. She had made being related to the Grand Almoner of Ferdinand and Isabella seem—simply—funny.

To the Sephardic community of New York, Mrs. Brandon's behavior was a deep affront. She was, after all, using a Sephardic connection by marriage in order to establish her integrity; a pedigree she had merely married was being tossed around and advertised for all to see. Furthermore, Brandon was now no longer her husband but only her ex-husband. It was all just another reminder of how thin the fabric of Sephardic life had grown to be. As one of the Nathans wrote to a Philadelphia cousin: “In case it isn't obvious by her behavior, this Brandon woman is
not
one of us.”

But of course the feeling that there is some sort of mystical advantage in being a Sephardic Jew, or even in bearing
the traces of Sephardic “blood,” has persisted, persists. In the opening paragraphs of his autobiography, the late Bernard Baruch, whose father had been a German immigrant, wrote: “My grandfather, Bernhard Baruch, whose name I bear, had an old family relic, a skull, on which was recorded the family genealogy. It appeared that the Baruchs were of a rabbinical family and of Portuguese-Spanish origin.… Grandfather also claimed descent from Baruch the Scribe, who edited the prophecies of Jeremiah and whose name is given to one of the books of the Apocrypha.”

At the same time, the great financier admitted in a sheepish tone that was quite unlike him: “Somewhere along the line there must have been an admixture of Polish or Russian stock.”

And John L. Loeb, the present head of the banking firm Loeb, Rhoades & Company, is more ancestrally proud of his mother, the former Adeline Moses, than of his father, who founded the giant banking house. The Moseses were an old Sephardic family from the South who, though somewhat depleted from the days when they had maintained a vast plantation with slaves and cotton fields, were nonetheless disapproving when their daughter married Mr. Loeb, “an ordinary German immigrant.”

Both Messrs. Baruch and Loeb are dutifully listed in Dr. Stern's registry of the Old Guard.

21

“AN ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT SORT”

Tephardim in the New World might dream of titled ancestors in plumes and crests and jeweled swords, who had been the poets, philosophers, physicians, judges, astronomers, and courtiers during Spain's most glorious moments. But there were hundreds of thousands of other Jews, also Sephardic but with less elaborate claims, who descended from Spain's Jewish tailors, cobblers, blacksmiths, and knife grinders. At the time of the Expulsion Edict, these families had not been able to afford the enormous bribes demanded by Inquisitional officers that would get them sent, along with their property, to lucrative northern ports in Holland, Belgium, and England. Being poor, they could not afford to become
Marranos, who had to live by paying bribes. Being poor, they also lacked the sophistication and poise it took to lead the Marrano's double life. Finally, being poor and unsophisticated, they lacked the adaptability that would have allowed them to accept conversion.

There was nothing for these Jews but to surrender their money and their houses and escape. Some had fled to northern Africa. Others went eastward, across the Mediterranean, to Turkey, where they accepted the sultan's invitation, or to the islands of Rhodes and Marmara, or to Salonica and the Gallipoli Peninsula, areas where the Jews knew they would be well treated because these lands were still ruled by the Moslems.

There, in backwaters of history, it was as though a giant door had swung closed on these Sephardim, leaving them frozen in time. They were poor, uneducated, living in tight little communities of their coreligionists, proud, mystical, working by day as farmers or fishermen or small trades-people, returning at night to their fires and their prayer books, and their evenings of singing
cantos
and
romanzas,
in the pure medieval tongue. As “guests” of the Moslems, they were considered a separate and autonomous people, permitted to preserve their religious and cultural habits, as well as their strange language. For they did not, as the upper-class Spanish Jews did, speak Castilian. They spoke Ladino, a Judeo-Spanish mixture which sounded like Spanish but contained many Hebrew words and expressions, and was written in Hebrew characters. In Spain, Ladino had helped them preserve the privacy of some of their business dealings. Now it simply served to isolate and insulate them further as the world passed them by.

While Reform Judaism was remaking the pattern of Jewish life, threatening to topple the traditional orthodoxy, these Jews knew nothing of it. Word of the European pogroms never reached them, nor did any kind of
anti-Semitism. At the same time, they remained fiercely and proudly Spanish, and were convinced that one day they would be asked to return to Spain again. When they left Spain, the heads of families had taken the keys to their houses with them. Now the key to
la casa vieja
—the old house—was passed on from father to son, while decades turned into generations, and generations into centuries. These Jews had developed a rationale to explain why they had been expelled from Spain. It was, they decided, the Lord's punishment. Like the Jews in the Old Testament, they were being made to suffer because they had failed to cleave sufficiently to Judaic precepts. They had been insufficiently pious, and had failed to obey every letter of every Talmudic law. And so, while Jews elsewhere were modernizing and liberalizing their attitudes, practices, and rituals, these Sephardim were moving in the opposite direction, not only toward a greater piety and a more intense mysticism, but also becoming hyper-ritualistic, more orthodox than the Orthodox, their ways all but incomprehensible to others.

In the synagogues, the women were not only seated separately from the men, but behind heavy curtains, so that they would not distract the men from their prayers. Sephardic home life in such outposts as Rhodes and Salonica became heavily centered around the dinner table, where the preparation and serving of food was a formalized adjunct of religion; indeed, the Meal, the Bath, and the Prayer were a kind of trinity of Old World Sephardic life. Much of a mother's day was spent in her
cochina,
working at her stove preparing such traditional Spanish dishes as
paella, pastelitos con carne,
and
spinata con arroz
for her family. If callers dropped in, the woman of the house, no matter how poor she was, was required to urge food on them—wine and nut cookies, perhaps, or sesame seed pretzels, or eggs baked in their shells for days and days until the
whites had turned honey-colored. And to refuse food when it was offered was regarded as the highest form of insult.

In these Sephardic households, it was very much a man's world. The man of the house was known as
el rey,
the king, and his sons were
los hijos del rey,
and were treated accordingly. In skullcaps and shawls, the men of the house were served their meals first, with the women waiting upon them, bringing them saucers of warm water and towels between courses so that the men and boys could wash and wipe their hands at the table. The woman might stuff the grape leaves—plucked from the inevitable grape arbor planted outside each door—but it was the man's job to go into the market to shop for meat, to find the best eggplants, tomatoes, spinach, and rice. It was also considered proper for a husband to supervise his wife's cooking procedure, to stand at her shoulder with suggestions and criticism, and periodically to sample and taste, perhaps even picking up the spoon himself to stir in a bit of grated clove or oregano if he felt it was needed. A wife would never resent this sort of treatment from a husband because every good Sephardic woman knew that the worst punishment a man could inflict upon a woman was to reject—by pushing aside his plate—food that she had prepared.