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. 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

terror on roller skates. “I always had them strapped to my shoes. After a while the metal started to wear out.”

There were movie theaters aplenty in Brooklyn in those days, and Kleinberg went as often as he could afford to. Not that there was much time. He was already very busy running a small business, nurturing the entrepreneurial streak that was an early indicator of the success he would enjoy later on.

He was in the handkerchief business. Ever resourceful, he got his inventory of light-colored, lightweight linen and cotton styles with dark embroidery from the father of a friend, then sold them door-to-door. The ladies sitting idly on their front stoops were an enthusiastic, captive audience for the budding merchant. “They felt sorry for me,” he says with a sly smile. “I was pretty successful.”

As he got older, he added to his personal fortune by babysitting after school for many of the young mothers in the neighborhood. While at Montauk Junior High School, which was right around the corner from where

Bar Mitzvah in Brooklyn.

his family lived, he worked delivering groceries. “I always loved earning money,” he says.

Max Kleinberg was earning a decent living, too, at least by immigrant standards. By the time his son was a teenager, the family was able to participate in that great summertime migration to the Catskills, also known as the Jewish Alps, and the resorts the region was known for. Hotels like Grossinger’s, the Concord and Kutscher’s Country Club were the gloss on a broader community of more modest inns and bungalow colonies to which city Jews could repair and let loose away from the biases that pervaded their lives even in America. There were shows with Las Vegas headliners, dances, swimming, hiking, reading, playing mahjong and shuffleboard, and eating copious portions of excellent Jewish food. Everyone dressed for dinner.

For the teenage Kleinberg, it was another opportunity to earn money to help the family. He ran a concession stand at the Majestic Hotel, where he also made the sandwiches he sold. “I was a soda jerk,” he says, laughing.

It was during those same years that he began to discover his creative talents. He was accepted to the School of Industrial Art (now the High School of Art and Design) and was suddenly in his element. That was where he learned to draw, to use color and texture, study spatial relationships and perspective. Perhaps most importantly, he learned that he could use his eye and artistic talents to make a living.