CHAPTER 2:
NEXT STOP: BROOKLYN
There was another family of cousins, also on Kleinberg’s mother’s side, in Borough Park, Brooklyn, who offered to take the family in once the Connecticut leg of the immigration journey was over. Kleinberg’s mother and sister had arrived by this time, and the four of them moved into the Morgenstern apartment surrounded by other Jewish immigrants. “They didn’t have a lot of room and we didn’t want to bother them,” Kleinberg remembers. “I think we stayed for about two months.” The neighborhood was made up mostly of four-story attached houses. Life improved greatly once the Kleinbergs moved into their own apartment, a twobedroom on the same street as his mother’s cousin. Max Kleinberg was once again selling furs to fur designers like his brother, Fritz, who, by this time, had Americanized his name to Fred Kleinberg and had a small shop in Queens. “My father was earning money at this point, enough so we could eat and not starve,” Kleinberg recalls. 12
M I LO K L E I N B E R G A N D M K DA : S I X D E C A D E S I N D E S I G N
His mother worked some, too, in a neighborhood grocery owned by another family, also immigrants from Vienna. Kleinberg didn’t speak a word of English when he started classes at the local public school. But within six months he’d learned the language well enough to translate for the German-speaking students who came after him. He was a popular little boy who made friends easily, both at school and on the street where the family lived. American children didn’t play the soccer he so loved back in Vienna, but Kleinberg found something else to do, something else to capture his imagination that he would have fun doing with his new friends, and that he could pursue for free. “I played handball in a big playground not far from where we lived, and I played paddle tennis,” he says. As an adolescent, he became something of a neighborhood
