As the daughter of a doctor in the thriving and MD-respecting Jewish community of Brooklyn, Helen Ratnoff Plotz grew up in the chambers of royalty, and, like little princesses everywhere, she found that what with prescribed music lessons, symphony concerts, and visits to European cathedrals, the undeniable blessings of her exalted station were not unmixed. The subject of this memoir, Dr. Hyman L. Ratnoff, a pioneer pediatrician in Brooklyn, was a graduate of Cornell Medical School and served on the staffs of Beth El Hospital and the Kingston Avenue Hospital; he was born in Pinsk in 1882 and died in 1944. Mrs. Plotz herself was born in 1913, was graduated from Vassar in 1933, and married a doctor’s son (and grandson) to become a doctor’s wife. She has four children, two of each sex, and on a recent visit to Europe did not fail to take them through the cathedrals—though also, she assures us, with frequent stops for ice cream. Mrs. Plotz and her husband would like nothing better than to have all four of their children grow up to be—doctors.
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A long time ago, when I was the Doctor’s daughter in the Russian Jewish community of Brooklyn, the doctor was at the very top of the tree. The wealth of the “allrightnik,” the learning of the rabbi, the worldly polish of the lawyer—all were overshadowed by the prestige of the doctor. His little black bag, the subject of jokes in more sophisticated circles, was a badge of honor as significant as the jeweled garter or the red ribbon.
Probably the doctor has called forth this particular kind of veneration in other times and places; indeed, Robert Louis Stevenson’s rather flowery tribute to the doctor is still reprinted by drug companies and distributed to their medical patrons, and not long ago the American Medical Association used Sir Luke Fildes’s sentimental Victorian painting “The Doctor” as one of the guns in its fight against compulsory medical insurance. But neither Stevenson nor Fildes could exceed our neighbors, Father’s patients, in their worshipful devotion to the doctor.
Into the sickroom the doctor brought not only his skill and a boundless sympathy, but something of the air of a larger world where Jew and Gentile met together as equals and comrades. The bright vision of that emancipated world which had risen before Jewish eyes in the Old Country, as they read the letters from America, was dimmed somewhat by the shabby realities of the tenements and the sweatshops, but by no means destroyed. And Father with his fine “English” education and his American-born schoolteacher wife was living evidence that this dream America really did exist. Had he not been born in just such a little Russian town as theirs, crossed the ocean in the steerage, and worked in Wanamaker’s while he studied for the scholarship that enabled him to study medicine at Cornell University? A greenhorn of greenhorns at eleven—a doctor at twenty-four—there was America for you. Besides, he voted for Debs and made no secret of his socialism. So when Father came to see patients he had to advise them not only about the baby’s running nose (“Wipe it,” he would say), but about the job, the boss, the mother-in-law, and the neighbors. And since Father had himself not forgotten the bitter poverty of his early years in America, he added to the other magic in his little black bag an intuitive understanding of underlying social and economic factors in his patients’ maladies and lives, and inevitably became the father confessor and spiritual prop of countless families. In Brownsville and its environs, he was the mythical American country doctor personified.
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Perhaps because he remembered his early struggles, Father was always eager to shield his children from the troubling realities of so much in the harsh life around us, and he succeeded in this—perhaps too well. As the only daughter of the Doctor, I shared in the power and the glory. When Father called for me at school (naturally, I couldn’t cross the street alone), the car, a Reo, was instantly filled with youngsters begging for a ride or just for the opportunity to see the Doctor plain. One little girl—I can see her yet—did succeed in riding home with us one day on the pretext that she lived around the corner; but when we reached home she admitted that all she wanted was to see the Doctor’s house. How different the Doctor’s house was from the other houses I could only guess, for I never entered one of the others and could not imagine being without plenty of books and dolls and clothes, much less without three abundant meals every day. My notions corresponded with those of Stevenson’s little prig:
The child that is not clean and neat,
With lots of toys and things to eat,
He is a naughty child, I’m sure,
Or else his dear papa is poor.
I was the only doctor’s child in the class, and not only did the children crowd to touch the hem of my garment, but the teacher favored me openly and the principal sent me on innumerable errands of state. My pretty dresses, and the fact that we spoke English at home, seemed conclusive evidence, to me as well as to my classmates, of our royal blood. And when the teacher listed my father’s occupation, amid all the painters, pressers, and peddlers, the word “physician” shone out like Abou ben Adhem’s name.
Business, no matter how prosperous, was somewhat vulgar according to our standards—one of Father’s favorite targets was the nouveau riche businessman who thought his money could buy anything he wanted. Father might have claimed that his contempt for the profit-maker stemmed from his socialism, but more likely it was part of the traditional Jewish disdain for the “handler” as contrasted with the scholar. For Father, “entrepreneur” meant “luftmensh,” and in spite of all my high school and college courses in economics, I am still snobbishly hazy about the business world.
What with Father’s belief in germs and various other new-fangled notions—we were kept in almost constant quarantine. (Needless to say, the result of all this aristocratic and hygienic isolation was that we had every known childhood illness and a few unknown ones.) We were put to bed at seven while all other children stayed up half the night, they said. No coffee, no movies, no penny candy for us. I did find a way out of this last deprivation: I let it be known that I would accept penny candy, and every day after that one of my vassals would have the privilege of sharing the licorice strings, Uncle Wiggilys, or shoe-button candy with the Doctor s daughter who ate from a germproof plate at home but had not a penny in her pocket. The rich spicy fragrance of pickles and pastrami tantalized us daily, but though I dared to eat the candy, I knew that “delicatessen” was plain poison.
In our house, cleanliness came a long way before Godliness—the latter indeed had little houseroom with us, thanks to Father’s socialism. Mother had somehow convinced herself that starch added something to my already painfully clean clothes, so that when I discarded my long and scratchy underwear about Decoration Day, I changed to equally scratchy, stiff-starched cottons. My chilhood was one long itch. The constant bathing, shampooing, and clothes-changing were part of the ritual attendant upon our position as the Doctor’s family, or perhaps symbolic of the middle-class standard to which our parents clung so stubbornly in the swirling tides of noisy, exciting, and often unwashed life which surrounded us. (Father’s socialism, which served to keep religion away, did not extend into our own lives or keep us from attaining an ever higher standard of living, and at last it disappeared for good when he began to vote for Roosevelt.)
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Soon after the First World War, doctors began making pilgrimages to Europe to study and prepare themselves to become “specialists.” Father had been specializing in children’s diseases almost from the beginning of his practice and now he was to complete his training by studying with Dr. Finkelstein and Dr. Czerny in the Berlin Clinics. That Father should return in triumph, first-class, to the Continent from which he had so thankfully escaped via farm cart and steerage, seemed to us children not at all miraculous. It was merely another of those unexplained family activities like going to the country or visiting the grandparents.
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Our family went to Berlin and Vienna after a preliminary dash through France and Italy. When Mother, like an American lady in a Henry James novel, visited museums and cathedrals, we children came too, willy-nilly. Indeed, I used to close my eyes tight, no matter what wonders were still unseen, when I had reached my saturation point. During a tour of Venice, Father rescued me from the Piazza San Marco and its photogenic pigeons and took me to a cafe for ice cream. The intuition that never failed his patients had allied him with a worn-out, cranky nine-year-old and provided me with an experience to be remembered long after I had forgotten the Bridge of Sighs and all the Doges.
When we reached Berlin, Father attended clinics and lectures while Mother shopped for linens and china and pictures. We played in the Tiergarten and now and then did the lessons in the American schoolbooks we had brought with us. Not for nothing was Mother an ex-schoolteacher!
Nineteen twenty-three was a year of Sturm und Drang in Europe, in which even we were involved. But, so far had our parents become imbued with American naivety, even they did not realize that we were living on the fringe of a revolution. And for us children, of course, such things as inflation and economic collapse had no meaning.
That spring the French occupied the Ruhr. Father took me to the Reichstag to hear the speeches. Our family lived in the Furstenholf Hotel on the Potsdamer Platz, almost in the center of Berlin. During that afternoon a mob gathered outside the hotel because some patriot had observed that the hotel was flying its own flag instead of the flag of the German Republic. A squad of youths was detailed to tear down the hotel flag and to force the manager to run up the Red, White, and Black. While the mob surged about, we went out onto the balcony to watch. Instantly, it seemed, the attention of the crowd was focused upon us. Angry shouts of “Amerikaner” reached us before we retreated to our rooms. I was petrified with fear, of course, and mingled with the fear, even then, was utter astonishment that anyone should not like us. And I think Father and Mother were as surprised as we when they grasped the fact that we were resented as minions of “Uncle Shylock.”
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The year of pilgrimage ended, we returned to Brooklyn and moved into our new house. Now I was no longer the Doctor’s daughter, but one of the doctors’ daughters, for we had moved to Park Place, which was known as Doctors’ Row. My playmates were mostly the children of the other doctors, and our lives now moved in a closed circle where doctors consorted with other doctors, doctors’ wives with other doctors’ wives, children with children. At parties, the doctors sat together and talked shop—I can’t recall any talk that didn’t center around cases and prognosis and diagnosis and treatment. Almost unconsciously the wives and children absorbed the jargon, and our vocabulary bristled with technical terms, often misused, I have no doubt, but certainly impressive. Our community was as inbred as a minor Balkan court.
And what a court it was. By now the doctors had become mightily prosperous. Not millionaires, indeed, not even “Jewish millionaires,” but still an incredibly long way from the little Russian towns and the crowded Brooklyn streets of their early years. Now they were working harder than ever, still climbing to the sixth floors of the old-law tenements and still carrying their little black bags. But their offices and homes were far away from those dingy surroundings and their children farther still.
The new offices and the new homes were furnished with trunkfuls of things their wives had brought from abroad. Our grandmothers had had Brussels lace curtains, when they could afford them, and portieres between the rooms. Our mothers replaced the Brussels lace with damask draperies and discarded the portieres. But the tables still burgeoned with “throws” and the sofas with cushions. The rugs were Oriental where Grandma’s had been Axminster, and the walls were covered with etchings and paintings. The grandmothers had had plate rails, the mothers had curio cabinets filled with objets d’art. Or almost art, anyway. Needless to say, the doctors’ offices were adorned, one and all, with Fildes’s painting, “The Doctor.”
And now the Doctor’s daughter became even more the child of the bluestocking schoolteacher of the period. Mother had willingly and efficiently scrubbed and cooked and answered doorbells and telephones in the first years; but now there was a housekeeper and a nurse, and Mother was ready for more worlds to conquer. With the same zeal she had devoted to her babies and her husband’s career, she turned, or rather returned, to two other pursuits: Culture and Good Works. And with Mother on her quest went the other doctors’ wives, not many of them, to be sure, so well armed as she, for she had a diploma from Hunter College, something which few of the other doctors’ wives had achieved.
For our sakes, Mother sat through endless Saturday mornings at the Philharmonic and eternal afternoons at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Of the Academy programs, only one remains with me. Every year, a nice old gentleman taught us bird calls; if you should need a red-eyed vireo some day, I could probably fetch one for you. There were excursions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which in those far-off days had no children’s programs but only hard floors and harder benches, and to the Children’s Museum where we felt more at home and where we sometimes went of our own accord when we could escape from some part of our full “leisure-time” program. For there were piano lessons, too, of course—the recorder had not yet replaced the piano as the chosen instrument of the intellectuals. Some of us had elocution lessons and were called upon to recite “The Polish Boy” at birthday parties. Others, myself among them, suffered through the barefoot—or aesthetic—school of dancing introduced by Isadora Duncan. Our teacher, her bony frame draped in the approved Greek tunic, would beg us to do just what the music told us. Alas, it told me nothing, but fortunately the little girl in front of me was a receptive creature, so I did what the music told her. To this day, I can’t hear a Brahms waltz without a reminiscent chilblain.
Our mothers organized Reading Circles and themselves worshiped at the shrines of Edward Howard Griggs and William Lyon Phelps. And they took the Delphian course. The volumes of the Delphian course were so forbidding in appearance that Father used to keep his spare cash in one of them; he said that no self-respecting burglar would open anything so highbrow.
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I much preferred Mother’s Good Works, for the inevitable concomitant of sweet charity in those days was food even sweeter. And there the doctors’ wives were invincible. Though they had their faithful Annies and Maggies in the kitchen, our mothers were themselves formidable cooks, mine an inspired one. Luncheon followed elegant luncheon and tea succeeded tea, all in some good cause. When I came home from school on a luncheon day, I made straight for the kitchen where Schnecken and cheesecake, cream horns, chocolate éclairs, and Bund cake jostled each other on the table and the Hoosier cabinet; and on the morning after a dinner party my brother and I could raid the icebox before breakfast for caviar and strawberries. The creative energy which nowadays goes into ceramics or Sunday painting was expended then on pineapple baskets of fearful intricacy and butter roses worthy of a more enduring medium.
Our parents felt good about the whole thing, too—and approved of themselves. When they turned over a check to the director of the Hospital or Settlement House, they did it from no uneasy conscience. Social service, or charity, as they thought of it, had taken the place of religion in their lives. Deeply Jewish, they were concerned almost wholly with secular causes. Mother served on the board of Council and Federation and most of all she was interested in the hospital to which Father gave unsparingly of his time and energy and money. Year after year the doctors’ wives faithfully raised the money that the hospitals needed for linens and layettes and social workers. In Calvin Coolidge’s glorious days, no complexities of “community service,” “aspects of guidance,” or “in-group and out-group” disturbed the innocent good will of our mothers. If people were poor, you did your best to feed, clothe, or cure them. The poor we would have always with us—at least until the triumph of socialism, and even that vision was more than usually vague on the female side. That the poor should cease to be the poor and become the underprivileged or the marginally employed or the psychologically maladjusted was not in their ken. There were, of course, the deserving poor and the undeserving poor, and even then, I suppose, undeserving poverty, as Liza Doolittle’s father said, had more ginger in it. It remained for the depression to erase the distinction between the worthy and unworthy poor, as well as between the thrifty and the improvident, and to make charity a dirty word. Meanwhile Mother and the other wives continued happily to take in each other’s washing, and to eat the sweet cake of charity.
The Jewishness of our parents was reflected not only in their causes, but in the cuisine that served those causes. It was before the triumph of creamed chicken in patty-shells or the Women’s Page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Though our mothers had forsaken kashrut, they devotedly prepared the immemorial foods of their ancestors.
Blintzes, latkes, tsimmes, chopped herring, and that supreme Jewish creation, gefilte fish, appeared not only at family meals, but at the ladies’ luncheons or the evening dinner parties, where the silver platters bore the gefilte fish as proudly as if it were turbot, and the potato kugel testified that the joy of the flesh was more important than the waistline. So it came about that we knew we were Jewish. Even now, when I am confronted with a plate of library paste on white toast, there rises to the surface of my consciousness, unbidden and hastily to be repressed, the unacknowledgeable, the prejudiced word “goyish.” So, no doubt, does a similarly forbidden word peer over the threshold when yet another arid and ponderous sponge cake is set before an assimilated Gentile.
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Neither the shul of the Orthodox immigrants nor the elegant Reform temple of the “aristocratic” German Jews played any part in our lives. To be sure, in despite of Father’s socialism, Mother—in a vague gesture of propitiation to the ancestors—sent us to Sunday school and confirmation classes. My brother had a hasty Bar Mitzvah. But nothing of this touched our real lives. The spiritual yearnings of my adolescence were not transmuted into the piety of an earlier day or into the militant Zionism of a later one, but into a nebulous Shavian socialism combined with an undefined aesthetic dedication.
The routine of our lives was almost but not quite identical with that of our new upper-middle-class neighbors. Only about half the houses on our street belonged to doctors, the rest were occupied by well-to-do business executives. Like the “lay” children, we went to camp in the summer, had our teeth straightened, and belonged to the Girl Scouts. But long after we had lost the aura that had been ours in earlier days, we retained one special privilege not given to even the most favored of the others. We had the day-to-day companionship with Father to set us apart from our schoolmates. Father lunched at home, usually with us, and was constantly in and out of the house. Harassed as he was by the telephone and doorbell, he had little leisure, but he spent the odd moments of his time with us and into those moments we crowded many rich experiences.
We had no long evenings by the fireside with Father reading his paper and Mother at her work-basket, as immortalized by hundreds of books and countless calendars and Christmas cards. But more than balancing this, I had the high privilege of “going on calls.” In the times when I didn’t have a music or dancing lesson, I accompanied Father, and it was then that I could talk to him without interruption, and he told me about himself. By now, Father had begun to let me see something of “reality,” of the struggle of his youth and his life—and I began to grow up.
Sometimes Father would take a earful of youngsters along, and as we rode from Flatbush to Williamsburg, from Canarsie to Brownsville, he told us an unending series of personal reminiscences, some, in retrospect, a little imaginative, but none beyond our admiring belief. One of his favorite stories was the account of his departure for medical school. Grandfather sat reading the Forward while Father, ticket in one hand, second-hand straw valise in the other, tried to say goodbye. “Papa,” he said, “I’m going to college—to Ithaca—to be a doctor.” At last Grandfather put the paper down and let his glasses slide forward on his nose. “Nu, geh!” said Grandfather calmly and returned to his paper. The story became a family joke, but when I tried to invoke Grandfather’s ghost so that I could start for college unencumbered by family, Father had a hard struggle with his protective instincts. I was cosseted and posseted within an inch of my life, whether because Father had himself missed the cottonwool of parental concern or because he was too aware of pestilences and plague, I have never determined.
Father was physician to the City Hospital for contagious diseases, and when he made his rounds there the children waiting in his car would stare in fascination at its buildings, hoping and fearing to catch a glimpse of the lepers for whom, Father said, the city had built a little house on the grounds. He told us about his internship there, his rounds in the horse-drawn ambulance, and about the dreadful summer of 1916 when hundreds of children were brought into the polio wards and when he took time out from the hospital only to visit Mother in the New York Hospital where the family’s latest had made his premature appearance. The baby had little will to survive, but Father made him live by putting him into a room lined with hot water bottles and having air pumped into his reluctant lungs. The improvised incubator and its occupant became famous, and the awe of my brother’s special origin endowed him, like Macduff, with a most unfair advantage over me.
Going on calls was one of the constants of my life and it outlasted the dancing lessons, the braces, and the summer camp. The last time I went on calls with Father was on my wedding day. Characteristically, I left Mother to cope with all the details while I tried to recapture my childhood in a last ritual.
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Father had been an enthusiastic reader in the days when he was still struggling with a new language, and somehow between jobs he had discovered Mark Twain, Shakespeare, and Coleridge. He detested highbrows and laughed at lectures, but he transmitted to me his enthusiasm for his favorites. I had no suspicion that Mark Twain was “culture,” so I read him from cover to cover many times over. Father’s own humor was startlingly like Mark’s. He too had that paradoxical blend of love for exaggeration and the instinct of deflation. Mark’s solitary esophagus is pigeonholed in my memory next to Father’s offhand “Professor Borsht of the Stchav Clinic” injected into the pedantic and boastful atmosphere of a medical meeting, and Mark’s gaping at the Art of Europe and asking solemnly “Is he dead?” has its parallel, for me, in Father’s remark to a group of doctors awestruck by the magnificence of the marble staircase in one of the movie cathedrals: “You know,” he said, “we had a staircase like that in my boyhood home.” And while his audience was still looking incredulous, he added, “For the servants, of course.”
His interest in Coleridge I can’t explain rationally, but why should I? When I was about seven, he brought home to the house in Brownsville the Doré Ancient Mariner. We two sat down on the floor and Father took me with him into that strange and thrilling world. In the next months, Father read me the Ancient Mariner many times until I knew it by heart. I can’t recall that he ever read me anything else, and now, after more than thirty years, I still cannot read the poem without hearing Father’s voice with its ineradicable foreign accent echoing through every line.
Father despised hobbies—a prejudice that he passed on to me—never played golf, never fished, traveled unwillingly and too fast and never looked at scenery. He did play cards—pinochle with the old socialists, bridge with the doctors—but as he said, cards weren’t a hobby. He did have one collection though, and that was first names. He collected names as lovingly as other men collected stamps or coins. He used to trace for us the evolution of Malkah into Molly and thence into Marlene or the progress of Beryl from Bernard to Barry. One of his patients, he said, had agreed wholeheartedly with him when he suggested that Abraham Lincoln’s mother would surely have named him Alan if she had only been more up to date. Another mother had indignantly rejected the name of Michael as too goyish. Her baby was to have a good Jewish name—Milton. And so he did.
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There was one aspect of my life as a doctor’s daughter I longed to escape and never could. That was parties. Was life one long party in the boom days before 1929? As I look back on my life it seems unremittingly punctuated with festivities. When I reached my teens, most of my rebellion centered around the innumerable luncheons and teas to which I was unwillingly led. At my twelfth-birthday party my childhood ended, not with a whimper but a bang, and my adolescence began. One of the conventions of our circle was that the mothers bought the gifts we exchanged at parties, so that when the packages were opened the giver was as interested as the recipient and as surprised. At this party, one of the boys thrust a package at me. I opened it and drew out a pair of pink silk panties. When we saw the panties, my pained and outraged cry was echoed by all the other little girls. Without a backward glance I rushed up to my room to dissolve in an agony of tears. The boy was even more appalled than I and certainly equally surprised, but I had no pity to spare for him. In the scene that followed the debacle, Father unexpectedly sided with the boy and tried in vain to quell my self-righteous rage. 1 told myself that Father was just another insensitive male—a good thing too, I see now as I look back on this revolt of my puritanical self against my tolerant parents.
As the doctors’ daughters grew, we progressed from birthday parties to luncheons and, at last, to dances. When we were small our parties had followed the classic pattern of games and birthday cake. After the age of twelve, we began to give luncheons or, rather, to have them given for us. When it was my turn to be hostess, Father would occasionally look in between patients or even join us for a brief moment. The double damask cloths, the Rosenthal china, the spun sugar baskets differed not at all from those offered up by our mothers to each other, in a ceremonial as unvaried and impressive as an ecclesiastical rite. I remember most clearly my sixteenth-birthday luncheon. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and pale green ice cubes vied with candy mint leaves and cream of spinach soup. Green-tinted cream cheese balls garnished the salad and green candles the cake. No daughters of Erin could have been more faithful than we in observance of the great day.
When we grew still older, there were evening parties. The rugs in the doctors’ offices were rolled back, the radio played, there were little sandwiches by the hundred and we danced with the doctors’ sons. Our romantic dreams were oddly limited. No doubt a psychiatrist would say that we had strong Father-images. In any case, the fact is that the Lochinvars we dreamed of usually had little black bags draped over their splendid saddles.
When the depression came, the life of the doctors’ daughters as we had known it came to an end. But as our parents kept the gefilte fish and still thought green ice cubes were nice for St. Patrick’s Day, so we have kept some of the flavor of that older life and some of its impulses—or, as we say these days, compulsions. And now, on some of the long Saturday afternoons I find myself, with the doctor’s children, in the Brooklyn Academy of Music, of all places, with the bird calls sounding in my memory.
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