Abraham Richman, 1872-1969

Dad (1937)

Memoirs of the Past

I
AROUND THE TURN OF THE CENTURY AT 1900.
I LIVED IN STANTON STREET NEAR THE RIVER.
THERE WAS A BIG CHICKEN MARKET.
A LIVE CHICKEN WAS A QUARTER EACH AND
.05 FOR THE MEAT,  .06 A POUND FOR THE MEAT
AND THE BEST STEAK MEAT WAS .09 a pound.

Eggs was 2 dozen for a quarter.
a big pumbernicle bread was .05 EACH.


A BIG PITCHER OF BEER 2 QUART SIZE WAS .06
12 Big Bananas .05.


THE HIGHEST PRICE LABORS WERE SHOVELING SNOW AT THAT TIME FOR .25 PER HOUR.
AND ALSO ON THE DOCKS PAID .25 A HOUR.
THEY, THE MEN, WOULD SHAPE UP AND GET A BRASS CHECK


II
WITH A NUMBER ON THE CHECK AND WE WOULD UNLOAD THE SHIPS.


WE DID'NT NO ABOUT UNIONS AS YET.
ANYONE THAT WAS WAY STRONG WAS GIVEN A JOBS ON THE DOCKS.


PAINTERS WAGES WAS $2.25 A DAY FOR 9 HOURS A DAY.
PAINTERS UNION STARTED AROUND 1910.


CARPENTERS WAGES WAS @2.75 A DAY BEFORE 1910, BRICKLAYERS $3.00 BEFORE 1910.
ELECTRICIAN WAS MOSTLY UNKNOWN AT THAT TIME IN THE 1900.


HOW POOR PEOPLE LIVED AT THAT TIME.


A BIG SCHOONER OF BEER WAS .05 WITH A HOT PLATE OF SOUP


III
FREE ALSO BREAD AND THEY HAD FREE LUNCH COUNTERS ALSO FREE FOOD.


A BIG GLASS OF WHISKEY WAS .10


THE RENT WAS A FLAT $9.00 OR 11.00 A MONTH. FOR 4 OR 5 ROOMS.


IN THEM DAYS THERE WAS NO STEAM OR HOT WATER.
THEY HAD COAL STOVES AND COAL WAS $4.00 A TON.


AT THAT TIME SOME BUILDINGS HAD THE TOILETS IN THE YARD AND SOME IN HALLS.


THERE WAS A LOT OF BIG CHARITY ORGANIZATION. AT THAT TIME AND A DOCTOR WOULD COME TO YOUR HOUSE FOR .50 A VISIT.


THERE WERE NO WELFRARE AND RELIEF DEPARTMENT AS YET OR SOCIAL SECURITY OR UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE THEN AS WE SEE IT TODAY.

Brooklyn College 9/50

Sight Singing 101

I came late for that class an awful lot, plus I often cut it. The 'teacher' had a Russian accent and was fond of making a steady stream of sarcastic (or sardonic) remarks. He was cool, aloof, and indifferent. His impersonal demeanor I now recognize as typical of about 10% of the Brooklyn College faculty whose great goal in life was to flunk as many students as possible. He was only one of several Ivan the Terribles I have had to deal with in my long life

He continuously played softly on the piano in a cute sort of way, favoring the key of D minor and stuffed with octaves sounding out the Slavic melodies used in our over sized red sight singing book.

There were about 10 people in the class. The most striking looking one was a very tall, heavy set, good looking young man with blond hair named Prokofiev who always wore a fresh business suit and tie. There was always so much conversation between the Russian teacher and Prokofiev that I do not remember him singing anything.

There was also a skinny, nondescript, casually dressed jazz clarinetist who sang the exercises so quickly the teacher would ask him to repeat it over and over again. Ivan would then sit silently cogitating over the skinny clarinetist's performance:

"You are singing all the notes in perfect pitch and time but you are nowhere near the song itself," he would declare.

That statement would lead to much controversy between the students and teacher that lead nowhere.

There was a girl and a guy sweating it out along with me and another petite pretty girl who incessantly played the arpeggios from the Bach violin Chaconne flawlessly on the piano between breaks.

The guy who was sweating it out told me he enjoyed the orchestra and when he found out that I had been accepted for it, he insisted I should come to rehearsals where, unlike this class, I would have a lot of fun.

When Ivan the Terrible, the introductory sight singing teacher contrived to read over everyone's performance at the end of the term to give them their grade, the class fought for me to get a B, but Ivan with lots of weltschmerz in his voice complained that I was absent and late too much, so he was giving me a C.

There were about three other classes at Brooklyn College that lived up to and even exceeded the standards of Ivan the Terrible. Only once was I able to beat the Ivan's to the punch.

I was, along with the rest of a newly formed class, waiting for the arrival of the unknown German teacher. When he tardily arrived about 15 of us rushed for the doors and got our drop slips. When I gave him mine to sign he stared at me quizzically and looked then hurt that I wanted out from his chamber of horrors.

My friend, the pianist Monty Eisman, also was taking a sight singing class from another teacher said he was doing well with the do, re, mi, fa, method that teacher used. Ivan used the interval system.


Which system do you use?

Three Coney Island 'Friends': A Mosaic Study

Murray, Harry, Jordan (1992 mosaic)

Most people thought of Murray as a hopeless social freak--handsome, witty, intelligent, and an intensive conversationalist, but, nevertheless, without purpose or direction. Of his style of life the kindest observation that could be made was 'dissipated.' After all the years that I have not seen him or learned anything about him, there may still be the possibility that he is grinding away as a harmless bureaucrat waiting for his pension. Or, he may have died from AIDS.

Once, in the early 60s, we were having coffee in Greenwich Village, he told me about seeing Rex Harrison in Washington Square Park walking with two beautiful women hanging from each of his arms. How alive, debonair, and poised Harrison appeared to him. Such a man, he confessed to me, was to be envied.

If only he too could be like Harrison at 60, as he now views him in his early 30s.

At first I was surprised to hear such a shallow view of a life, but then I realized how consistent it was with his attempt to grapple with some of the severe choices he had to now make at this stage of his life.

Harry was another story. After a troubled youth, he had managed to prove his worth as a university sociologist. Once when I visited Coney Island in the late 60s his mother who was working at the Half Moon Hotel shouted to me from the Hotel, "He has made Stanford."

We all respected him for his academic accomplishments. Shortly after his mother's Half Moon Hotel Stanford announcement, I spent a day with him in Coney Island, on the boardwalk where we ate giant hot egg rolls from a Chinese food vendor. I can still see the egg roll steaming out of Harry's mouth and I marvelled at the gusto with which he devoured the hot egg roll.

However, I felt that his "do good ism" was still cankered over by an unrelenting egocentricity which he carried over from his earlier Narcissistic days.

All three of us had strong adolescent desires to see American capitalism somehow change for the better.

That did not happen.

For the early '90s when I wrote this sketch, it appeared that the polarities of capitalism and communism had been temporarily resolved by a Pax America supporting a world economy. American capitalism grew by leaps and bounds each day. Politics based on Marxism of any variety became remote, futile, and even ridiculous

World politics and movements in the early '90s are on such a novel scale as to defy the simplistic Marxian dialectics from the 1940s thru to the 1960s. The term Post-Modern says it all.

Those of us who have held radical views (like Jeremiah Wright) have been catapulted into our own self-seeking orbits. For us, the "Coney Island Friends," there is no longer a common denominator.

Mosaics From 1949-1954 (Year-Tight Compartments)

1948-Wallace Convention in Philadelphia, Truman Election, Editor for Lou Relin's Lincoln High Landmarks.

Worked as editor for my high school English teacher's yearbook. Also kept his classes attendance logs. Students were taking their photos for the book.

Time of Slavin's Solid Geometry course and run-in with Orgel with George Gabin, who now, at the age of 80, is incredibly a world class European artist! Thank God sister Roz helped me out of that mess.

It was a period of intense shyness and feelings of physical inadequacy which was not helped by acne.

Decided to switch to night high school (Seward Park) to avoid some of the difficulties I was having in my senior year at Lincoln High. Murray Liebman encouraged me to make the switch since he wanted an intelligent companion to help him through some of the courses he was taking, like English, American History, and Economics. He really seemed to enjoy listening and talking to our Economics teacher on the subject of the Wall Street Stock Market.

2/49

Switch to Night School. In English and American History class with Murray Liebman. We took the American History Regents together and the night the teacher handed out our grades I was absent. When I asked him how I did he first teased me and then fessed up that I had received the highest mark in the class, and that the teacher told the class that in all his many years of teaching American History he had never read such a brillant analysis of the Spanish-American War period in United States History on a Regent's Examination!

After that bit of suprising news I realized what a good friend Murray was and has been from 18 to 80.

It is strange how the act of reminiscing and writing are so much at odds with each other. Writing about the past seems to always be pushing you into the present and demands that you organize, shape, and polish the stream of consciousness of your past life.

Summer of 1949

I can't remember at all what I did then. I think it may have been carrying beach chairs? A really weird Coney Island type Summer job.

Going back to January of 1948 I went back to Lincoln High to pick up my grades in physics. I had an interesting teacher who had been Irving Ziller's teacher and had nominated him for the Physics Medal at his Graduation. That teacher (Edelman, or something like that) was from England, very dignified--he wanted me to take the Westinghouse Science Test!!! I won his attention by my first hand knowledge of vibrating strings from my study of the violin, an important subject which goes back to Greek Pythagorean Philosophers and endorsed by Plato.

The day I picked up my Physics grades was after the night of sister Shirley's marriage to the Columbia Grad school novelist, Eugene Ziller. There was an orgy of drinking at that wedding and I remember being put to bed by an old family friend, Irving Kaufman, who was nicknamed 'Red' for his red hair, which is now gray. Is that the fate of all red heads? Like the Mentalist's "Red John?"

He folded my arms as if I were a corpse and smilingly consoled me that Eugene and Shirley were off to New England for their Honeymoon and that it was time for me to, "Gay Schloffen," Yiddish for me to go to sleep. And then he placed a small bouquet of red roses in my folded hands.

When I woke up it was a rainy, miserable cold day. I went to our corner candy store for a cup of coffee and I felt like hell with my first hangover from the night before. Although I felt encouraged by the good grades I received in Physics, it was then that I resolved to go to night school.

To be continued

Running on Empty: The Problem of Fatigue at the Workplace

Chapter 4: Running on Empty
Jordan Richman
George Miller Beard and Sigmund Freud: The Id Versus Civilization

George Miller Beard coined the term neurasthenia in 1869 to describe a set of symptoms which revolved around the issue of fatigue. Freud studied the use of Beard's term, accepted it and then described himself as a neurasthenic. He later modified the meaning of the word to limit it to a description of a nervous disorder caused by sexual frustration.

Id, ego, superego, and libido were key terms in Freud's psychoanalytical theories.

The Id is the primitive, unconscious store of energy from which come the instincts for food, love, sex, and other basic needs. It is constantly in search of pleasure and seeks to avoid pain.

The libido represents the energy forces behind sexuality. Freud believed sexual energy could be sublimated or channeled to serve the demands of society.

Conflicts between the individual's sexual needs and the work ethic sap sexual energy and lead to fatigue as well as other neurotic symptoms.

The ego or "I" maintains a balance between the demands of the Id and the superego which represents one's sense of right and wrong--the conscience--and the knower of the outside world (external reality).

Freud then developed an elaborate explanation of neurosis, basing it on unresolved sexual conflicts from early childhood and the various stages of infantile and child sexuality. In Western culture, Freud believed neurosis developed by the continued existence of an attachment of the child to the parent of the opposite sex into adulthood, the Oedipus and Electra complexes. There are a number of other concepts which are identified as Freudian theories concerning personality and neuroses, such as penis envy, psychomatic disorders from unresolved childhood conflicts, the importance of dream symbols, and the need for therapeutic catharsis to resolve neurotic guilt feelings.

The neurotic personility might develop different combinations of symptoms, pains, ailmments, or dysfunctions similar to the neurasthenic patient. Freud's neurotic image, like the neurasthenic one, would always include the presence of fatigue, exhaustion, and incapacity at various levels. The only treatment for Freud's neurosis would be psychotherapy, preferably Freudian.

Beard died at the age of forty-four and Freud at seventy-six. In his longer life, Freud was able to develop and modify his ideas more thoroughly than Beard.

Beard and his fellow neurologists postulated the existence of a mystery substance that provided enegy for the nervous system. He believed that some people had a limited amount of that energy. They were easily distressed by "the forces of civilization," a phrase Beard used to describe the technological advances of society and the complex urban relationships that were beginning to take place in America after the Civil War. This stress "bankrupts" the nerve cell enegy of those who are by temperament inclined toward neurasthenia, while stronger constitutions are able to withstand the stress of the new tech tecnologies and forms of social organization.

In Civilization and its Discontents (1939)), Freud viewed the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century and concluded that there were two forces at work in the western psyche, Thanatos, the death wish, and Eros, the urge for life. Thanatos leads to hate and war, Eros to love and the energy sublimations (transformations) necessary for the development of civilization. Since sublimation is easy for some and difficult for others, the fate of civilization always hangs in the balance as the two forces struggle against one another for dominance.

Running on Empty in the Big City: Work and Depression in the Shadows of New York City

ART REVIEW

ART REVIEW; Views of a Yiddish Past Spring Comically to Life

By GRACE GLUECK

Published: September 14, 2001

Meet Julius Knipl, real estate photographer, distinguished by his fedora, fine-line mustache and healthy length of nose. Living in a time warp on a rich diet of nostalgia, he is the brainchild of Ben Katchor, a cartoonist who has peopled an imaginary world with characters from a mid-20th-century Yiddish past that he manages to make vividly present.

In Knipl's universe, wholesale-calendar salesmen, importers of folding rain bonnets, stagers of going-out-of-business sales, manure futures brokers and other small-business men are caught up in the sights, scents and sounds of low-end urban life.

They spend hours riding escalators for the thrill of it, attend canned-food tastings at neighborhood groceries, catch their faces reflected in the sheen of egg-washed Danish pastries and give home musicales based on the sounds emitted by faulty radiators. One man, Emmanuel Chirrup, a skidproof-slipper tycoon, has replicated the squalid apartment of his parents at the time of his birth, down to the aroma of reheated pot roast.

Knipl (the name means a small treasure or nest egg in Yiddish) and other Katchor characters strut their stuff in ''Ben Katchor: Picture-Stories,'' a display at the Jewish Museum of the cartoon strips and drawings created by Mr. Katchor since 1988 for The Village Voice, The New York Press, The Forward and the design magazine Metropolis.

There are also excerpts from his comic-strip novel ''The Jew of New York'' and color drawings for his opera, ''The Carbon Copy Building,'' which won an Obie award when it was staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1999.

What's artful about these drawings -- mostly in black and white, with gray ink wash -- is their evocation of New York's demoniacal energy, the look of its down-at-the-heels neighborhoods and storefront facades, and the ethnic faces that Mr. Katchor has evolved from perusal of books like ''Lexicon of the Jewish Theater,'' published in 1931, with its illustrated biographies of actors and actresses.

Then, too, there is the zaniness of his characters' ruminations, like Knipl's poetic inventory of the remains of dinner with friends at the Hylozoic Restaurant: ''a piece of brisket lost in the shadow of a dessert plate; a wedge of sour tomato reflected in a pool of cole slaw dressing.'' And his subway reminiscences: of chocolate-vending machines, subterranean luncheonettes and track workers reading soft-bound leather books.

Born in 1951 in Brooklyn, Mr. Katchor grew up on comic strips, and in his teens began publishing his own on a mimeograph machine. In the 1980's, he contributed to the underground comics magazine Raw, and in 1988 he began the Knipl strip for The New York Press. Obsessed with urban life, he says in a filmed interview shown at the exhibition that for him ''every inch of pavement is a whole new world of activity.''

One of his meatier creations is ''The Jew of New York'' (1992-93), a ''historical romance'' originally done as a serial for The Forward. It takes off from the real-life effort of a 19th-century visionary, Mordechai Noah, to create a Jewish state on an island in the Niagara River in western New York State.

But the real story here is the peripatetic adventures of the hero -- Nathan Kishon, a slaughterhouse worker dismissed for mixing kosher with nonkosher animal tongues -- among hustlers of beaver pelts, importers of mother-of-pearl buttons, peddlers of soil from the Holy Land, would-be carbonators of Lake Erie water and Indians passing as Jews.

Like the rest of Mr. Katchor's work, the tale is told through vivacious, verbose cartoon strips and wanders off in many directions. It ends with a gray but graphic fire, ignited by an apparatus rigged to generate the smell of pickled herring at a theater presenting ''The Jew of New York,'' a play about the life of Mordechai Noah.

But Mr. Katchor's sagas never actually end, even when they come to a halt. You know they will regenerate in other strips, like ''Hotel and Farm'' (named for Katchor's Hotel and Farm in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., operated by his father in the 1930's), which currently appears in The Forward. Its action switches back and forth between rural and urban life, with farms that now cater to the canned- and frozen-food markets, and seedy hotels peopled by characters of varied virtue.

Given the visual challenge of a show devoted largely to black-and-white comic strips that demand a good deal of close-up reading, the museum has done a creditable presentation. The display has been enlivened with artfully fabricated artifacts, like the desiccated remains of turtle soup (circa 1831) from one Ormon's Restaurant in Manhattan and early samples from the Lake Erie Soda-Water Company.

And there are audio excerpts from ''The Knipl Radio Show,'' a 1995 production by David Isay, starring Jerry Stiller, that was broadcast on National Public Radio. ''Pleasures of Urban Decay,'' the film in which Mr. Katchor is interviewed, is also shown as a continuous loop.

Although the show seems to include miles of cartoons, you don't have to eyeball every episode to agree that he is an outsize talent, one that has found itself in a brilliant archaeological exploration of a very special world (with maybe some help from fellow diggers like Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel and E. L. Doctorow).

''Ben Katchor: Picture-Stories'' remains at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 423-3200, through Feb. 10.

Photo: A detail of the cover of ''Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories,'' part of ''Ben Katchor: Picture-Stories,'' at the Jewish Museum. (Ben Katchor/the Jewish Museum)

Adventures in Neurasthenia, continued

The popularity of treating symptoms like mental and emotional fatigue as neurasthenia ran from 1870 to 1910.

A large number of celebrities in literature, the arts, politics, and business were labeled as being neurasthenic, a diagnosis they accepted for themselves.

Theodore Roosevelt went out West to deal with his neurasthenia, while Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, to challenge the male physicians' ways of dealing with neurasthenia as she experienced it.

By 1920, the Freudian approach, which was much more complex in explaining symptoms of fatigue, began to supplant the simple one-disease theory of neurasthenia. Satires against quack doctors who treated patients suffering from persistent fatique and other nervous disorders were written during the heyday of neurasthenic rest cures. S. Weir Mitchell's The Autobiography of a Quack, (1900) is one such example. In 1910, O'Henry wrote a satire called Let Me Take Your Pulse: Adventures in Neurasthenia.

More recently, a historical novel on the subject was written by T.C. Boyle called The Road to Wellville (1994).

The appearance of a condition labeled Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS)  in the mid-1980s through to the mid-1990s has brought a renewed interest in the the term neurasthenia. In JAMA, April 27, 1994 appeared an article, "Was Neurasthenia a Legitimate Morbid entity":

During its heyday, which lasted from the 1870s to the turn of the century, the diagnosis of neurasthenia provided patients with a scientifically legitimate explanation of their inability to perform their expected roles. Furthermore, the patients, who tended to be in their 20s and 30s and from the urban middle classes, recovered.

Today, many people feel, like Beard's patients that they are living on a plane lower than normal. Symptom clusters that include fatigue and a general lack of vitality continue to command considerable medical attention. One has only to consult current medical journal articles on chronic fatique syndrome to see that symptom puzzles that engaged our recent ancestors continue to intrigue us. 

Neurasthenia does live on, however, as a popular diagnostic entity in China, where its discourse of nerves and energy flows is believed to be more compatible with traditional Chinese explanations of fatigue and malaise than with the more purely psychological explanation[s] from the post-Freudian West.