The Jews in America Trilogy (63 page)

The house at Meadow Farm was considerably more modest than the huge old place at Woodlands, and, after Felix Warburg's death in 1937, Frieda moved to Meadow Farm for her summers. Here she worked on dispersing items from her husband's estate—the art collection to museums in Washington, Boston, Springfield, Brooklyn, and New York, as well as to Harvard, Vassar, Princeton, New York University, and the David Mannes School of Music. She also busied herself with the Felix and Frieda Schiff Warburg Foundation, which aids a number of Jewish causes as well as the Visiting Nurse Service, the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, New York University, the Planned Parenthood Federation, the National Urban League, Tuskegee Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Lewisohn Stadium Concerts and—hard though it may be to believe—a long list of other charities.

After Felix's death, Frieda herself established a separate foundation for settling immigrants in Israel. By 1955 it had built over a thousand homes. In winter Frieda traveled to her house on Eden Road at Palm Beach, where in her twilight years her afternoons were filled with bridge and canasta and visits with old friends. Adele Lewisohn Lehman had a place nearby, and so did the Henry Ittlesons, the Sol Stroocks, and Edithe Neustadt Stralem, whose sister had married Frieda's brother Morti. In all three places—New York, Palm Beach, and Westchester—there were plenty of family around. Still, whenever she had a free moment, Frieda dictated her reminiscences into a recording gadget, as her family had urged her to. “They say I am a link with the past,” she said.

She wrote: “To me, and to all our family, it has always been of the utmost importance to know one's past and to live up to it with pride and a true sense of responsibility.” Her memoirs gently took to task certain members of the family—her brother Morti's branch—who, she felt, did not always “live up to” the past. Of Morti Schiff himself she wrote: “I loved him dearly, even though I might criticize his ‘society' kind of life, which I knew was a sort of escape for him.”

Of Morti's daughter, the four-times married Dorothy Schiff, publisher of the New York
Post
, Frieda said: “Many of her ventures, matrimonial and otherwise, have left some time-gaps when it was not easy for us to maintain contact. To me, she is disarmingly amusing and charming,
even if her enthusiasms at times seem to carry her beyond her depth.… I am always tremendously amused by her giggly anecdotes and her youthful exuberances concerning the passing scene.” Of Morti's son, the polo-playing Kuhn, Loeb partner, John Schiff, who married the George F. Baker, Jr.'s' daughter Edith and who went sailing into the
Social Register
, the Piping Rock Club, the Turf and Field, the Creek, the Grolier, the River, the National Golf Links, the Meadow Brook, the Pilgrims, and the Metropolitan Club of Washington, his aunt commented: “Like his father he has a way of making abrupt, short, assertive statements which sound brusque until the shy grin that follows gives him away. He was brought up in the tradition of the Long Island gentleman, which sometimes comes into amusing conflict with his underlying German-Jewish inheritance.”

Outside the winter house on Eden Road, there nested a pair of cardinals—wintering also—whom Frieda named “Spellman” and “Mrs. Spellman.” Frieda wrote:

I like to think that the birds, like myself, have not only derived warmth from the sun but from the surroundings in which we have found ourselves. It is pleasant to realize that these good things have been and will be a part of my life always.… There have been times when I yearned for the ability to lose myself in deep religious faith, and, although I have observed many of these forms, I must admit that the most meaningful experience to me has been the sense of family (
Familiengefühl
), which has grown and flourished in our household.

Familiengefühl
had become the crowd's most powerful religion. It was why family holidays and anniversaries had become far more important than the Sabbath or the Jewish holy days. For the Seligmans, at one point, there were 243 days out of every calendar year that marked a family anniversary of some sort, and nearly every one of these was given some sort of observance. Lives revolved around family days. Had not young Felix and Frieda Warburg chosen a family birthday—Frederick's—to move into their new house at 1109 Fifth Avenue? It was
Familiengefühl
that warmed Margaret Seligman Lewisohn's debut party, held at the Warburgs' house. Congreve, the Warburgs' steward-butler, had, as his somewhat unusual hobby, been raising chickens from an incubator in the Warburg basement. It was probably the only chicken hatchery on upper Fifth Avenue, and no one in the family was entirely sure whether it was a good idea. But when Congreve incorporated his project into the family debut, everyone forgave him. He designed a centerpiece for the party consisting of
three-day-old baby chicks “coming out” of a brooder, with a low white picket fence all around it. The chicks chirped all through the party.

Since the family was still the business, a little
Geschäftsgefühl
mixed with the
Familiengefühl
was not inappropriate. And, on the eve of his daughter's marriage, Felix Warburg could write to his son Gerald to say:

Carola's wedding presents are coming in, and as she reports to me, business is good. Do not get too fat, because the house will be crowded on the 27th, for with 280 people who insist on seeing Carola married, and about 900 who will come afterward to shake her poor hand off, there will not be any rugs left in the house, and anything that is eatable, drinkable or smokable will disappear very fast Dr. Magnes will officiate and I am quite sure he will say the right thing at the right time.

For Jacob Schiff's sixtieth birthday, a huge family party had been held at 1109. A stage and screen were erected in the second-floor music room, and at the height of the evening the lights dimmed and Gerald Warburg, dressed as Mercury, appeared from behind a curtain and pointed dramatically to an enormous photograph of the Rock of Gibraltar that appeared on the screen. The lights dimmed once more and, with a thunderous roll of drums from offstage, a photograph of the twenty-two-story Kuhn, Loeb building was superimposed upon the Rock.

But perhaps the gathering with the most
Familiengefühl
of all was Frieda Schiff Warburg's own sixtieth-birthday party, planned as a surprise for her by the children and grandchildren. Her sons Frederick and Edward devised a skit which showed that religion
was
the family. It was their version of the Seder ceremony, reinterpreting the Exodus from Egypt. But Egypt, in the Warburg version, was southern Germany, and the Lost Tribes of Israel—Solomon Loeb and his brothers—were given a Baedeker but managed to get themselves even more lost; instead of turning right at the Nile, they turned left and found themselves in Cincinnati. There, Frederick declared, the family's business was “buying feathers from the Indians and selling them at football games.” Next, Edward gave an illustrated lecture on Frieda's life, using slides of various works of art to represent its various phases: a hectic cubist painting to show her frame of mind after her morning telephone calls; a plump Lachaise sculpture to show her girth before visiting Elizabeth Arden's Maine Chance Farm, and a Pavlova figure by Malvina Hoffman to show the “new” Frieda Schiff, after Arden. As a finale, her sons delivered a poem they had written for the occasion. It
asked a long series of questions about who did what in the Warburg family, and the chanted answer, at the end of each stanza, was: “The boys, the boys.”

Frieda and Felix Warburg's only daughter, Carola, has a summer home in Katonah, in upper Westchester, a large, rambling old place at the end of a long, shaded lane, and the house stands on a little rise under huge old trees, surrounded by rolling lawns, a garden, and a tennis court. Carola Warburg is the widow of Walter N. Rothschild—of “the Brooklyn branch,” as he used to say, of the European House of Rothschild—head of the Abraham & Straus department store, and a well-known yachtsman who, among other benefactions, presented his fifty-five-foot yawl, the
Avanti
, to the United States Naval Academy and once gave an elephant to the Prospect Park Zoo. Mrs. Rothschild is a tall, handsome, silver-haired woman who nearly always wears blue—“It's the only color I seem to see”—and whose main charitable interests are hospitals and the American Girl Scouts, of which she was national vice president. She is on the boards of Montefiore Hospital, of the Brearley School, of the Ellin Prince Speyer Animal Medical Center—Mrs. Rothschild lives surrounded by dogs—of the Maternity Center, and is active in the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. When asked, however, if she is a practicing Jew, she answers, “Well, I was married by a rabbi,” and one gathers that this is one of the few concessions she has made to her religious heritage. She is, of course, Jacob Schiff's granddaughter, and the great-granddaughter of Solomon Loeb and Fanny Kuhn; her cousins, near and remote, are named Lewisohn and Seligman; in her dining room, amidst some of her own paintings, many of which are of fruit—“I had a fruit period”—hangs the Anders Zorn portrait of Frieda Schiff Warburg, painted in the pink dress she wore the night she first met Felix. One might expect Carola Warburg Rothschild to encapsulate all the values of her forebears. In many ways, she does.

Of her father, she says, “Fizzie taught them all how to do it. They all learned from him. The Schiffs were never strong on humor. The Warburgs were. We had a certain graciousness of living, and a sense of
noblesse oblige. That's
what we had—and discipline. We had discipline.”

As her mother and grandmother did before her, Mrs. Rothschild spends much of her Katonah summers surrounded by small grandchildren—she has thirteen—who have such names as Peters and Bradford (her three children all married non-Jews). Meals in her dining room
are nowhere near as formal as they were in her grandfather's day, but, of course, they are still served by a white-coated butler, and one day one of the children sat down at the dinner table in his bare feet. “I looked at him,” says Mrs. Rothschild, “and I said, ‘No bare feet at the dinner table.' He said to me, “Is that a rule, Grandma?' and I said, ‘Well, I hadn't really thought about it. But yes. It's a rule.' He said, ‘Okay, if it's a rule.' It's that simple. If you tell a child it's a rule, he obeys it. It's discipline again. That's what's been omitted from so many of these young people's lives—discipline. You can't give a horse its head without using the rein. You have to rein to be under control. You have to accept rules and limitations in order to cope with things. If you have discipline, then you can always rise to occasions.”

Index

A. T. Stewart & Co.,
158
,
159
,
162
,
164

Abraham & Straus,
20
,
420

Abraham family,
20

Adams, Henry,
124

Adams, James Truslow,
99

Adirondacks camps,
18
,
23
,
231

Adler, Cyrus,
180
,
192

Adler, Felix,
132
,
141
,
166

Aldrich, Nelson,
383

Aldrich, Bill,
342
n
.

Alexander, James W.,
326
–
27

Alexander family,
326
–
27

Alfonso XIII of Spain,
351

Alger, Horatio,
150
–
51

Alsterufer Warburgs,
211

Altschul, Mrs. Frank,
16
–
17

Altschul family,
20
,
361

Amalgamated Copper Co.,
292

American Hebrew
,
318
,
321

American Jewish Committee,
355
,
356
,
370

American Metal Co.,
407

American Museum of Natural History,
252

American Potash & Chemical Corp.,
361

American Smelting & Refining Co.,
292
,
293
,
294

Amherst College,
204
–
5

Ami, Ben,
319

Amory, Cleveland,
25

Anaconda Copper co.,
250

Anderson, Robert,
150

Anglo-American Telegraph Co.,
116

Anglo-California National Bank,
133
,
137

Anglo-French Commission,
344

anti-Semitism,
16
–
17
,
22
,
73
,
112
,
116
,
124
,
135
,
142
–
43
,
160
–
65
,
177
,
204
,
210
–
11
,
239
,
261
–
64
,
314
,
339
–
40
,
349
,
355
–
56
,
380
,
400
,
403
–
4

Arden, Elizabeth,
419

Arling, Emanie,
see
Philips, Mrs. August

Armstrong Committee,
328

Armstrong-Jones, Antony (Lord Snowden),
382

Arnold, Florine,
see
Seligman, Mrs. Alfred Lincoln

Astor, Jacob,
see
Astor, John Jacob

Astor, John Jacob,
40
,
72
,
75
,
138
,
158
,
358

Astor, John Jacob, Jr.,
75

Astor, Mrs. John Jacob, Jr. (
née
Gibbes),
75

Astor, Mrs. William Waldorf,
118
,
124
,
382
,
295
,
326
,
330
–
32
,
380
–
81