Upper East Side, Manhattan, New York
It was a beautiful—almost spring—morning in Manhattan, a perfect day for an excursion. So I hopped on the Lexington Avenue line to head uptown to see the apartment building where the Marx Brothers–Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo (who was born there)–called home between 1895 and 1910. Harpo called the apartment on the fourth floor of 179 East 93rd Street (between Lexington and Third) the “first real home” he could remember.
That’s because, according to Harpo, the Marxes were “poor, very poor,” and there were ten mouths to feed. In addition to the five brothers, there were Minnie and Frenchie, the boys’ parents, Minnie’s parents, Fanny and Lafe Schönberg, and cousin Polly, who the Marxes had adopted. Before finding the flat on 93rd Street, the family had moved around a lot, always keeping one step ahead of their debts. But they always preferred to live in and around the German-speaking neighborhoods of the Upper East Side. Minnie had been born in a small village in Lower Saxony, while Frenchie came from a French Alsatian town (hence his nickname) that had remained loyal to Germany. They both spoke the same German dialect and gravitated toward other immigrants who shared their mother tongue.
But while shared language and ethnicity was a source of comfort and community for many, the cliquishness of the Upper East Side was also a dangerous obstacle course for kids. One could read tomes of ethnic American history and sociology and find no more brilliant, poetic, and succinct description of the story of American diversity than Harpo’s recollections of his childhood neighborhood.
In his 1961 memoir Harpo Speaks!, the actor-comedian whose given name was Adolph, described the Upper East Side as being “subdivided” into German blocks, Irish blocks, a few Jewish blocks, and “a couple of Independent Italian states thrown in for good measure.” The north-and-south avenues meanwhile—First, Second, Third and Lexington—were “neutral zones” that “belonged more to the city than the neighborhood.” Four blocks to the west, Central Park was a “friendly foreign country,” where it was “safe territory for lone wolves.” But on the cross streets, it was “open season” on the kids whose ethnic group didn’t dominate any given block.
When a kid’s ethnicity was unclear–which was not uncommon–the toughs would ask him to identify what block he lived on. To save time and any more trouble than he was already in, Harpo decided early on to answer such questions honestly. So, when a group of Irish or German street kids asked him what street he was from, he’d say 93rd Street. And when they asked which block of 93rd Street—between Third and Lex, “that pinned me down,” he wrote, “I was a Jew.”
Even though Harpo was small, he wasn’t flat footed. He learned that the worst thing he could do was not have anything to “fork over for ransom.” To keep himself from being beaten to a pulp, he never left his block “without some kind of boodle in [his] pocket—a dead tennis ball, an empty thread spool, a penny, anything. It didn’t cost much to buy your freedom; the gesture was the important thing.”
Decades later Harpo waxed philosophical about this urban obstacle course. “Every Irish kid who made a Jewish kid knuckle under was made to say ‘Uncle!’ by an Italian, who got his lumps from a German kid, who got his insides kicked out by his old man for street fighting and then went out and beat up an Irish kid to heal his wounds. ‘I’ll teach you!’ was the threat they passed along, Irisher to Jew to Italian to German. Everybody was trying to teach everybody else, all down the line.”
In the end, he concluded, “It was all part of the endless fight for recognition of foreigners in the process of becoming America.”
While few would characterize that brand of multicultural education as ideal, Harpo’s honesty about inevitable interethnic tensions and competition is nonetheless refreshing.
Mosaic, melting pot, salad bowl. These are terms that have been used to describe America’s demographic diversity. But they’re all pretty inaccurate, as they make no reference to the competition and conflict among ethnic–as well as racial groups–that have always characterized American life.
Now that today’s post-civil rights social mandate requires us all to pretend to love one another (or else!), we no longer properly acknowledge the grittier side of group behavior–and human nature–that cannot be banished by either slogans or legislation.
The marvelous Encyclopedia of New York City says the Marx Brothers’ brand of “anarchic comedy” came to be “strongly associated” with ethnic New York. It’s hard not to conclude that the neighborhood conflict they endured as children didn’t play a critical role in forging what the Encyclopedia calls the unique mix of verbal repartee, rapid timing, and physicality that defined their humor.
