A Word In Edgewise: Houses and Homes, Continued

Places where one can go to be one’s self — I touched on two such recently, and a third came to mind. But, with its different vibe and different clientele, it deserved its own space.

I was born and raised in New England, and while my folks predictably subscribed to the Hartford Times and Courant, we also took the New York Daily News, tabloid-sized, offering a more spirited, if you will, brand of journalism. A better fit for a kid’s hands, it sported a thick, color Sunday funnies section (“Smokey Stover” and others long gone) and snide columns by Walter Winchell and others of his ilk. It covered the Big Apple’s crime scene from hardened professionals to zip-gun-wielding juvenile delinquent gangs. Gossip, innuendo, blood-and-thunder; free goosebumps at a safe remove from pedestrian West Hartford.

I’d take note of books and quirky people featured in the Daily News, then check titles in Kottenhoff’s drugstore paperback rack, and from first though ninth grade, I read pretty much whatever came to hand or what I could reach on my parents’ book shelves. Parents gifted Robert Lawson’s “Rabbit Hill” and E.B. White’s “Stuart Little”; the drugstore’s circular rack introduced me to Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles,” Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness,” and, via NY Daily News articles, for 35 cents, Polly Adler’s “A House Is Not a Home.”

Adler was a madam, and men came to her house(s) to play. I would have been around 13 when I read it and found it fascinating then. Detailed, though not prurient, and while I don’t remember my exact take on her saga, it was compelling enough for me to keep the paperback for 60-ish years, until it was swept away with much of my library during my last move.

The current furor over what children can or cannot read prompted me to search online, where I found Adler’s 35-cent paperback now fetches $25 or $30 or more. I also noted the University of Massachusetts Press reissued the original in 2006 with an introduction by Rachel Rubin, author of “Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature.”

I’m not sure where a banning parent would start. But reading Polly’s story, then and now, was more uplifting than titillating. “Madam” and “house of ill repute” hardly embody an entire life, and just as how although Jonathan Evison’s 2018 “Lawn Boy” used 4-letter words and the character had sex on occasion, it is, in fact, the story of a determined young man’s search for worthy work and a life companion. So does Adler present her saga, her survival, ever wielding a trenchant wit.

Consider little Pearl Adler, 13, oldest of nine siblings, born in the White Russian village of Yakow, near the Polish border, in 1900. Her father has announced she’s being shipped to America to make her way. She sets off, accompanied by a cousin, her few belongings stuffed in a potato sack. The cousin, terrified, refuses to leave; Pearl sails. The rest makes for fascinating reading. She was in her profession twenty-five years; found it wasn’t easy to retire; went back to school; wrote this book. Herself. No ghosts.

Before banning, let a parent — or any reader — consider; just how many jobs, other than grinding piece-work or factory drudge were available to a 13-year-old, Yiddish-speaking Jewish girl in 1913? “Madam” was not her first choice, but … rather than poverty, Pearl, now Polly, took a different path, with the guiding thought: “Whatever you’re going to be, be the best at it.” She hit the mark: a worthy read.