Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman

1 | Witz-Krieg!

8 Among the two million Jews who left Europe for America at the turn of the twentieth century was a passel of Lustigs. Between 1906 and 1920, siblings Anna, Abraham, Fanny, and Saul Lustig arrived in Chicago as single adults in their late teens and early twenties. Their sister Esther joined the family exodus in1909,butsheleftStashev,inRussian-ruledPoland,asthetwenty-six-year-old wife of Leon Sherman and the mother of two daughters, Rose, four, and Kate, three. More than any of her siblings, Esther carried the greatest weight of the old world with her when she arrived in America, and that weight burdened her daughter, Rose, who struggled mightily to shrug it off. It was a gift to Rose’s son, Allan Sherman, who saw in it something to anchor his rootless life. “To Grandma and Grandpa, Jewishness was a basic condition of life,” Sherman wrote. “Everybody was meant to be Jewish; the fact that some people weren’t was some kind of clerical error on God’s part.” ThepatriarchoftheLustigclanfollowedhisfivechildrentoChicagoin1921, and he imparted another key legacy. Most Stashev Jews worked as craftsmen, as merchants dealing in cloth, wheat, lumber, and leather, or as home-based Witz-Krieg! Witz-Krieg! / 9 laborers doing piecework for garment makers or shoemakers. But Esther’s father did none of the above. Instead, he practiced a risky trade that will forever instill fear in prospective in-laws. Leib Lustig was a musician. The Lustig family’s search for a better life began in 1883, when Leib, twenty­two , left his birthplace in the tiny Polish shtetl of Ozarow for the neighboring but larger Stashev. Sometimes even a musician must be practical. Leib’s daughter Esther was a baby, there were more on the way, and in Ozarow the Jews were so poor four children sometimes shared one bed on a mattress made of straw. Three slept side by side and the fourth lay across the bottom at the feet of the others. An even more practical move would have been for Leib not to be a musician, but that decision was out of his hands. He had to play the violin. By the time he was born it was an established family calling. Jews in the Ozarow region adopted European-style family names beginning in 1805, and many took the name of their occupation. One name for the musicians who played at weddings and festive holidays was merry makers, or lustik-makhers. So the best Leib could do was find a larger and richer town than Ozarow, which might also have been too strict and monolithic in its religious observance for the Lustigs. Leib was a rule-breaker and he encouraged family members to follow in his footsteps. “He called my mother old-fashioned because she did not smoke cigarettes,” said Syril Gilbert, one of Leib’s great-­ grandchildren. That outlook made Ozarow a poor fit. In the mid-nineteenth century, it held fewer than eighteen hundred people, with two-thirds or about twelve hundred being Jews. That number was small enough for a powerful Hasidic dynasty to exert a large influence, and Ozarow became home to such a dynasty in 1812, when Rabbi Yehuda Arie Leib ha-Levi Epstein, a disciple of the Seer of Lublin, became a rabbi there. The Seer taught that certain holy men had “divine authority to lead a community,” and in Ozarow Epstein’s descendants led the town’s Hasidim for over a century, until the last Epstein immigrated to America in 1927. Religious practice was pervasive. Among the orthodox, even letters to family began “by citing the Torah portion of the week.” In Ozarow, “taking the right road meant going straight from cheder [Jewish primary school] to yeshiva.” For Leib Lustig the right road led to Stashev. It was not a great town, but with eight thousand people, including more than five thousand Jews, it was 10 / Overweight Sensation quadruple the size of Ozarow, and that meant four times as many weddings. Stashev also was home to a military garrison of eight hundred soldiers, which was great news for Jewish tavern owners and brewers, who also had children to marry off. In short, it was a town amenable to musicians, and when Leib arrived there the Jewish community was grooming several that in the early twentieth century were recognized more widely, such as the pianist and conductor Israel Schwoger, violinist Moses Rotenberg, and violinist and violin...