Streisand Barbra - Streisand: her life, 2012

M R . AND M RS . E MANUEL S TREISAND
take much pleasure in announcing
the rather expected and hoped-for arrival of
B ARBARA J OAN

(a cute little trick even if they must say so, weighing 7 lbs. 5 ozs. net)
at
5: 04 A. M., Friday, April 24, 1942
After 10 days at her original residence,

The Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn,
she moved to 451 Schenectady Ave., Brooklyn, N. Y., where she is
living with her proud parents and her especially proud brother,
Sheldon Jay

O utside, the world was on the cusp of catastrophe. Five months earlier the United States had gone to war against Germany, Italy, and Japan, and American boys were being carried off to battle by the tens of thousands. Austria, from which Emanuel Streisands father had emigrated in 1898, had been overrun by Hitlers Nazis in 1938, and its Jews, some of them Streisand family members who had stayed behind, were being systematically slaughtered in concentration camps. Russia, the homeland of Mrs. Streisands parents, had been under siege by the Nazis for months.

But inside their well-kept apartment on a quiet residential street in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, Manny and Diana Streisand lived a separate peace, and most was right with their insular world. Thirty-four when his daughter was born, Manny hadnt been called up for service because of his age, his fatherhood, and the fact that he had carved out an extraordinary career as a teacher of troubled young men. The firstborn son of a man who still barely spoke English, in 1941 he had been included in the Science Press directory Leaders in Education. He made a decent living as a teacher of truants and delinquents at the Brooklyn High School for Specialty Trades, and supplemented his $4, 500 annual salary by tutoring at a yeshiva in the late afternoon during the school year and at educational camps every summer.

Manny Streisand worked hardtoo hard, his wife often thoughtbut in Thoreaus words, he loved turning the free meandering brook of an errant teenagers life into a straight cut ditch of education, discipline, and prospects for a future. And he was determined to give his wife, his seven-year-old son, and his new baby girl the best possible life, one free from the terrible hardships his own parents, Isaak and Anna Streisand, had endured over the past half century.

I SAAK STREISAND STOOD on the train station platform at Lvov, surrounded by his sisters and parents, covered in layers of sheepskin against the frigid Baltic air. It was the first day of January 1898, and the strapping seventeen-year-old was on the verge of a new life. He was leaving the harsh world of the Jewish shtetl in the village of Brzezany in eastern Galicia, a principality under the control of Austria-Hungary and bordered by Poland on the northwest, Russia on the east, and Austria-Hungary on the south. He was going to America, a land of seemingly endless opportunity: in the prior twenty years in the United States a former newsboy from Ohio named Thomas Alva Edison had become rich and famous by inventing, among many other things, the light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera and projector.

The konduktor blew the trains shrill whistle to signal the schnellzugs departure, and a series of thick noises rumbled from the engine as it struggled to start. Isaak picked up his three bulky bundles and said his final farewells. His mothers stoicism dissolved into tears as she hugged her only son, whom she would never see again. Mali Feldman Streisand and her husband, Kesriel, had been born in Brzezany, and they would stay there. It was for the young to seek a better world.

Conditions in Galicia demanded that Isaak leave. One of the most destitute spots in eastern Europe, the country barely provided sustenance for its people, most of them farmers with only primitive skills and no outlet outside the village in which to sell what they produced. Villages consisted of two rows of thatched huts along either side of a muddy dirt path; next to each hut lay a great heap of manure, which every summer Isaak and his sisters kneaded with earth to form bricks that were then baked hard in the sun and used the following winter as fuel against the often thirty-below-zero cold.

The Streisands had two rooms, the hot room and the cold room. In the first the entire family, which included Kesriels parents, ate, slept, and worked in a twelve-by-sixteen-foot space. The cramped quarters contained just two pieces of furniture, a table and a narrow wooden bench, and the pripitshik, a huge brick stove-fireplace in the middle of the room from which a seven-foot-long wooden shelf extended. The parents and grandparents slept on this shelf, the warmest spot in the hut, while the children slept on the wooden bench, which extended along the side and back walls. The manure that fueled the fire turned the indoor air caustic.