There was an enclave of new Boschan and Politzer immigrants in New York City in the early 1900’s where relatives congregated as they emigrated from their birthplaces for a variety of reasons. My father; to escape the inevitable draft in the army, my mother; to escape an arranged marriage. The emigres supported one another during the process of adjusting to their new way of life in the United States. Eventually, they moved on to other parts of the country when opportunities arose.
My mother, Ida Boshan, did not know my father, Charles Politzer, before arriving in New York. However, each had gravitated to that area where their relatives had already settled and they found that they had relatives in common. I have learned that Boschans and Politzers had married before them.
A cousin of mine, Lilian Politzer Rubin, told me that our fathers (who were brothers) came from Siefer, Hungary. My father had done his apprenticeship as a butcher in Vienna, Austria, and, rather than face mandatory conscription into the Austro-Hungarian army, he immigrated to New York around 1906.
My mother also arrived in New York in 1906. She left home rather than become party to an arranged marriage to a local farmer, perpetrated by her parents. She grew up in Trnava, Austro-Hungary, which is now Slovakia, the eldest of ten children; two brothers and sevenother sisters
Ida Boshan is the lady in the middle, Charles Politzer is the gentleman in the middle
The Boschan family before Ida, on the far right, left for America.
It was the custom then that the oldest girl in the family must marry before the younger daughters could marry, and her younger sisters were already engaged and applying pressure. Their father had been in Kaiser Franz Joseph’s army in Herzegovina and, later, became an overseer of the Kaiser’s fields, so the family resided on a large plot of land and were farmers.
Though I have been resentful of my father’s attitude that girls were less valued than boys, it also provided me with the impetus to prove him wrong, and to strive to do my best whenever possible.
Between the two of them, I feel that I have inherited healthy and quality genes, a respect and admiration for family, and regard for citizenship. Hopefully, I have passed some of these qualities on to my own children.
Ida Boschan and Charles Politzer were married in New York city on 3 March, 1907, in a Jewish ceremony and here are their Katubas in English and Hebrew.
There is a darker yelllow where Frieda is sitting.
I can remember that everyday when we sisters came home from school there was a fresh round loaf of rye bread with jam for us to snack on. I think my mother would get the rye bread fresh from the bakery every day. One thing I remember very clearly, when I was 12, that on Saturdays we sisters spent the day cleaning at home while my mother and Aunt Gretchen went to matinees at the Bonstelle Playhouse or any other matinees playing in town. They had a wonderful time together. My mother loved to go and she dressed up like a Lady and really was a Lady going out.
Between Josephine and I, we got all the work done with the other girls helping. My sister Bertha never wanted to do house work. I can remember Josephine, who was the oldest, would get real mad at her. Gretchen was usually deep in dance lessons, when all this was going on.
I don’t remember much about when we were young. In general, we went to school, and did things together.
One thing I do remember, was when I learned to write long hand, a second time, very prettily. There were glass doors at our school and one day I put my hand on the glass and it went straight through! I had to have my wrist fixed up and when it all recovered, there was this lump on the inside of my wrist. So, for the rest of my life, people would ask me why I had that lump there. I had to learn to write all over again from the beginning. (You will note in a few places in this story, Frieda’s hand writing that was very very fine.)
The two families would get together for picnics on a regular basis. Either in our back yard or theirs. Gretchen didn’t take part in the eating on these occasions in order to keep her ballet figure. She watched her weight very closely even at an early age, because of her dancing.
It was Gretchen who chose me to go out to dinner with them early on. We were close friends, Gretchen and I. She shared her feelings and dreams with me and I with her. But it was different than now-a-days. We didn’t have a lot of time to converse and share our secrets when we were growing up. Gretchen was more the out going one and I tagged along. Since she was a year younger than I, we didn’t go to the same classes in school and I don’t remember going back and forth to school with her. She had lots of home work to do after school; piano lessons from her mother and ballet practice. I eventually had three younger sisters to take care of after school and other duties. I went to watch her in ballet class some times, but I just wanted to watch. So we were both very busy with our own things growing up.
Gretchen was very preoccupied with her dancing. She took ballet lessons. And she was very good at it. She went to Olga Fricker’s Ballet School and eventually, by the time we were teenagers, became one of the principle dancers and a soloist in the Concert Group of Miss Fricker’s Dancing school which was connected to the Bonstelle Playhouse in Detroit. When I was twenty I got a job making costumes for Miss Fricker’s ballet company. That’s when I took lessons there, too, so that I could understand more about how to make the costumes.
Gretchen
Gretchen’s mother used to make costumes for her. The one that I remember particularly, that I had a picture of, was a butterfly costume with wings – a white satin butterfly. During World War I, Aunt Gretchen sold liberty Bonds and to do this she would set up entertainment programs for people to watch. She would plan the whole thing and she would have Gretchen perform solo dances in her butterfly costume.
Eventually both families moved away from Gratiot Avenue. The Haveman’s moved to the north side of town and we moved to Southfield Road in a house on 10 acres of land where wild strawberries grew in the woods. I can remember on Sundays when maybe 25 of our relatives would come out to our house to pick wild strawberries in the woods and stay for dinner. I can still see them now, maybe 20 aunts and cousins would sit in a row in the kitchen against the wall watching me washing the dishes singing “I’m forever blowing bubbles. Pretty bubbles in the air……” I was always washing the dishes. My sister Josephine was always on a date. My immediate younger sister Bertha was always studying and I was always washing the dishes or taking care of my three younger sisters.
I went to Northern High school. At the time, we lived 5 1/2 miles from the nearest public bus stop. So my father bought a car and gave each of us, who were old enough, a chance to learn to drive it. Then he decided that I would be the regular driver. So it was my job, every morning, to drive us to the bus stop and park the car there and catch the bus to school.
Frieda’s Highschool graduation pictureyears later…………………
…..after leaving Flint for Detroit, MI, Dad bought a Meat Packing Plant, hoping a son would arrive to take over the business, but when that didn’t happen, he opted for a retail butcher shop as a means of livelihood, which was located near where we lived.
I (Polly) worked at our father’s butcher shop from the age of 8 years old, probably in 1927 or 28, both inside and outside running errands, and continued through high school.I worked there all day Saturday and was in charge of the financial issues during my high school years.
College?
In the summer of 1937, I was accepted at Antioch College and gleefully showed the notification to Mother and Dad. It required a financial statement and a signature confirming that financial obligations would be covered, which amounted to about $400 per year, at that time. Dad’s unbelievable reply was, “What do you want to go to College for? You’ll just get married.” I tried to explain how important it was to me to further my education. I had graduated Magna Cum Laude from high school, a member of the Honor Society. I was determined to do something more with my life than marry a Jewish boy and become a “hausfrau”. Here was an opportunity to broaden my horizons and meet a variety of people and have a number of job experiences (through the special Antioch college work-study program), which would allow me to earn some of the needed money. Anyway, I felt that I had already earned part of the cost by working at the butcher shop all those years and I had spoken to Dad before about my expectations of going to college. But Dad concluded the discussion by saying he couldn’t afford it!
I just blew apart! I attacked him with my fists and pummeled as hard as I could, screaming that “It isn’t fair! You know that I have been working for this for a long time.” Mother stepped in and pulled me off, to stop the hitting. I was beside myself! I threw myself on the ground and just sobbed. I was devastated.
When we all cooled off and could talk; probably the next day or so, Dad came up with a compromise. I was to go to work for a year; put away some savings, and apply again the next year. Meantime, Dad would also put money away for my college expenses. I agreed. I got a job as a stock clerk at Himmelhoch’s Department Store and enrolled in a required English class at Wayne State University night school. My pay on the job was $14 a week which did not allow for much savings. Actually, it paid off in the long run, because when I applied again at Antioch for the following year, they offered me a scholarship and gave me advanced academic and work-study credit for my year of work.
My older sister Bertha had a similar experience. She graduated from high school and wanted to go to college, but Dad said he couldn’t afford it. According to Bertha, Dad had contributed money to his brother Morris, so that Morris’s sons (Edward and Rudolf Politzer) could go to the University of Michigan.
It was clear, Dad thought that higher education was wasted on girls.
The signature confuses me. I always thought that my mother made the linoleum cut. For sure she held on to this all these years…….
Around the time I started high school, my older sister Frieda, who was already called Fritzie most of the time, began working for Olga Fricker at her School of Ballet, as the costume designer. Fritizie lived in her studio on the top floor of the school which was a three story building on Cass Avenue near Wayne University. Fritzie and I had become better acquainted with each other and were then very good friends: I found in her someone I could talk to and she was very supportive. I let her know how lonely I was living in the “boonies”, at home.. She made arrangements with Olga Fricker to let me join an after school ballet class and pay for it by being responsible for keeping Olga’s office clean.
I enjoyed the ballet classes; I worked hard and made enough progress to be in a recital. Most thrilling of all, I was included in the group that auditioned to be extras on stage with the Corp de Ballet Russe for a performance of “Petrushka” starring Balanchine. And I was one of those chosen!
Then, at Christmas time, after I had advanced to dancing “on toe” I was included in a group that was booked at a downtown theater to perform an “interval” where a Shirley Temple movie “The Littlest Colonel” was being featured. This was two weeks of “showbiz”; three performances a day! full of grease paint! costumes! music! and waiting……… I think I saw the Shirley Temple movie twenty times.
I also began to take voice lessons, learning excerpts from Shakespeare, etc. I was a stagestruck kid. My bedroom was plastered with pictures of Lunt and Fontaine.
When recital time came around and Fritzie became very busy in the costume department, I became her go-fer and all around assistant: standing in for the “dummy” (Mannequin, dress form) while patterns were fitted; going to the fabric store to match materials and thread and trimmings; putting together a hurried snack at any time of the day or night when the pressure was on. Many times I just spent the night at the studio and would catch the bus to school in the morning. And Fritzie rewarded me by taking me to plays, such as “the Women” by Clare Boothe Luce, which raised questions about sex and society for me. And Fritzie was there to answer my questions. I had never been able to talk about my personal questions with my mother. She was very shy, unable to cope with subjects like sex or personal hygiene. And personal discussions never seemed to be appropriate during the time I spent with Bertha, one of my other older sisters. Sometimes Bertha would take me with her to her Art Class at Wayne and I “felt big” when she did. Somehow, my relationship with Fritzie was more like being an equal rather than being the “little sister”.
At the beginning of my sophomore year, Fritzie presented me with a special gift: two lovely raspberry red outfits. One was a long sleeved wool crepe, a rather, dressy dress. The other, a sporty pin whale corduroy shirt dress. I was delighted. My wardrobe had always consisted of hand-me-downs or things I had made myself and I was not a faultless seamstress.
Between my junior and senior years of high school, 1936, I applied for a drama Scholarship that was being offered at Northwestern University, and I got it. When I was awarded the scholarship to be a “Cherub” (the name given to the students in this program), Fritzie immediately came forward by putting together my wardrobe. She made a spectacular organdy formal (one of the requisites in the brochure) to be worn at the competition that was to be held at the end of the session. The dress was perfect for the occasion; very feminine; a hyacinth blue organdy penner entirely edged with matching ruffles over a blue taffeta slip.
……….By this time, summer 1937, Fritzie had her own business designing women’s clothes in Gross Pointe, an upscale suburb of Detroit. ……….
It was Fritzie who persuaded me to apply to Antioch College. I had thought I would like to go to a women’s college because that is where my high school friends had applied. Fritzie’s comment was, “Growing up with six sisters, why the hell would you want to go to a girl’s school?”. But she also had an alternative for me to consider. The daughter of her friends, Ralph and Clara Holmes (Ralph was the drama critic on the staff of the Detroit Times) was attending Antioch College in Ohio, and was very enthusiastic about it. It had a unique work-study program and was a small school. Fritzie arranged for me to spend a weekend at the school and financed the trip. I was hooked after that experience and determined to fulfill my part in the bargain I made with Dad and see to it that he kept his part. In the summer of 1939, word came that I had been accepted with advance credit for my courses at Wayne State University and also work credit, with a small stipend toward my tuition.
Fritzie made me a very collegiate blue plaid pleated skirt that I wore for years.
Many times, my aunt Polly would tell us about the prom dresses that my mother made for her. Polly would write to Fritzie and mention the date of the dance, and on the very day of the dance a package would show up with a dress that fit Polly perfectly.
