Nine Women, One Dress(3)

I met Max Hammer on the boat to America that left the Polish port of Gdynia in the summer of 1939. It was my older cousin Morris’s ticket, and my father brought me with him to see Morris off. It was a week before my bar mitzvah, and I was sad that my cousin would miss it. When we picked him up that morning he was ill. Very ill, burning up with a fever. His mother, though worried, insisted he get on the boat to America. We looked alike, Morris and I. Though he was sixteen, he was small, and though I was nearly thirteen, I was big. People often mistook us for twins. His father had died years before, and he’d grown up with me almost as a brother. My father was a dressmaker and taught us both everything he knew, from how to make a pattern from a sketch to how to make buttonholes without a machine.

When we arrived at the boat they would not let Morris on. By that point he had a rash covering half his body—you could almost see the heat coming off him. Now that I have seen nearly every childhood illness, I would guess it was roseola. The stewards turned him away, yelling that he would take down the whole ship.

My father took Morris’s ticket, bag, and papers and led us around to the other gangplank. I assumed we were just trying a different entrance for Morris, but at the last minute my father gave me all the money in his pocket, all the money in Morris’s pocket, and his gold wedding band. He kissed me on the head and told me to get on the ship. I cried, I begged, I pleaded. I tried warning him of the scene he would face at the house when he went home to my mother without her only son a week before his bar mitzvah. I looked down, embarrassed by my tears, and by the time I looked up he and my cousin were gone. I never saw my father or Morris again. Max Hammer, who was about six years older than I, witnessed the whole thing. He pulled me onto the boat by my sleeve and told me that my father had just saved my life.

It was three days before I could speak, and by then Max had told me his whole life story—even the part that had not happened yet. The first thing he said he would do when we landed in America was find his girl, Dorothy, who had arrived months before, and ask her to wait for him. They had already been waiting quite a while. He said he had known she was the one from the first time she smiled at him through the window of his father’s dress shop in Kraków. They were barely twelve years old at the time. He said that he would make the start of his fortune, then marry her and make the rest. Even in steerage on a rat-infested boat with barely a loaf of bread between us, I believed every word he said. He was larger than life.

I told him that I was to become a bar mitzvah on Saturday, and he arranged it that I did. I recited my Torah portion, and by the time we were halfway across the Atlantic the Germans had invaded Poland from nearly every direction. I endlessly worried about whether I would ever see my family or my homeland again. I went onto that boat a boy, but I landed in America a man. And not just because I was bar mitzvahed. I assumed my cousin’s name, Morris Siegel, along with his age, nearly seventeen. I knew no one but Max Hammer, but I had a feeling that knowing him would be enough. Everything he had said would happen happened. Though not exactly in the order he predicted.

The very first thing we did was head to Brooklyn to find Dorothy. The photo she had sent was taken in front of a street sign at the crossroads of Coney Island Avenue and Avenue J. We waited all day in front of the sign. Max had shown me her photo so many times on the boat that I was the one who spotted her first. Their reunion was like nothing I had ever seen—I was too young to have had a girlfriend, and I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to feel that way about a girl. The kissing and the tears. They both cried. I had never seen a man cry like that before. It wasn’t just that tears filled his eyes, they ran down his cheeks relentlessly. Dorothy took us to a little dairy restaurant and we ate like we hadn’t eaten in a month, which we barely had. I miss those dairy restaurants—they were once as prevalent as Starbucks in the old Jewish neighborhoods. Warm blintzes and cold waiters. Max told her of his plan to wait to get married until he’d gotten his business going. Then she told him of her plan—she didn’t care that he hadn’t any money, she wasn’t letting him out of her sight again. They were married that week. She was really the boss, from the very beginning.

I was able to make contact with a distant cousin in Jersey City who owned a dress factory, and I began to work there. As a pattern-maker’s apprentice I fit perfectly into Max’s grand plan, and I was happy to be working toward a rightful place in it. More than that too: the little we heard from home was not good, and doing the same work as my father helped me feel connected to him. The pattern-maker took me under his wing and I learned his way of making patterns, though I liked my father’s way better. By the next year Max had convinced my cousin to back him in a dress house on Seventh Avenue. Besides lending him the money, my cousin lent him me, and in the blink of an eye the label Max Hammer was off and running.

The early days were my favorite. At that point I could make a pattern for any style. While the dress houses around us had fancy designers making original creations, Max had a different idea. He would send me to the newsstand every day to buy copies of Hollywood magazines: Film, Photoplay, and Motion Picture. If Carole Lombard, Joan Crawford, or Bette Davis was wearing it, we would knock it off. He had an incredible eye and could pick out just which dresses would look good on the average American woman while making her feel like a movie star. While most other pattern-makers needed the dress to produce a copy, I could usually do it from just the photo.