Lillian Fisher

Among that small but highly visible group of Jewish immigrants were Simon Newman, who had been born in 1853 in Hungary, and Hannah Cohn, who was born four years later in what was variously de-scribed as Hungary and Poland in legal documents throughout her life. Simon had arrived in the United States as a young, footloose man and found work as a dry goods peddler. Hannah had emigrated as a seventeen- year-old in 1870, along with her parents and some older siblings who moved on to settle in Arkansas. Hannah and Simon were married in Cleveland on October 10,1876, and they started a family almost immediately. In the 1880 census, the Newmans listed two girls in their household: Minnie, not quite two, and an infant, Lillian. At nearly regular intervals they added to the family: a son, Aaron, born in 1881, followed by another pair of girls, Ottile (1884) and Gertrude (1886). By then Simon had graduated from peddler to manufacturer-merchant, with his own hat-making workshop and store, Newman’s Millinery. Perhaps that accounts for the pause inbirths in the family. It wasn’t until 1891 that Joseph, the second son, was born, followed by the last of the bunch, Arthur, in 1893. The Newmans lived in the Jewish neighborhoods of Cleveland that resembled the Jewish enclaves of other big American cities, with push-carts and small family businesses and tenements pouring out old-world noises and aromas—cauldrons from which bright young men and women strove toward integration into American society through education and entry into social and cultural institutions. As in New York and Chicago, the Cleveland Jews established themselves relatively rapidly in professional, academic, and public pursuits throughout the city. They may even have made a quicker ascent there than in other places, because of the youth of the city and its lightning rise and its sprawl. Consider the Newmans. There were grander birthrights, even among recent immigrant families, than the Newmans’ tiny family hat-making business. But Hannah and Simon were raising a remarkably creative and successful group of offspring. Their hat shop, for instance, would one day be immortalized in 1943 in Polly Poppingay, Milliner, a popular chapter book for children written by Gertrude Newman, who by then had already published another children’s book, The Story of Delicia, a Rag Doll.

Lillian, too, was a writer, producing verse in Yiddish. Ottile would become a school teacher and go on to head the drama group at the Euclid Avenue Temple, probably the most prominent synagogue in Cleveland; one of her sons, Richard Newman Campen, would graduate from Dartmouth College and forge a career as a noted historian of midwestern art and architecture. The Newman boys were also to make marks on the world. Aaron attended some college and then became a reporter for the Cleveland World and, in 1906, the cofounder and business manager of the Jewish Independent, one of several Jewish papers in town.

In 1927, that incredibly flush year, he inaugurated two enterprises: the Little Theater of the Movies, the first cinema in Cleveland devoted exclusively to foreign films, and the Cleveland Sportsman’s and Outdoors Show, a trade fair at which manufacturers and retailers exhibited the latest recreational gear. During the Depression he wrote several satirical pamphlets about the fear of Communist strains in the New Deal.*Quite a character. And yet his brother Joseph made even more of a splash in the world. No history of twentieth-century Cleveland is truly complete without mentioning, at least in passing, the ingenious, loquacious, mercurial, professorial, practical, affable, quixotic sprite born Joseph Simon Newman. Poet, inventor, orator, journalist, gadabout,boulevardier, and mensch, Joe Newman published science columns and light verse in newspapers, held patents on electronic communications gizmos, wrote the annual musical comedy revue for the City Club for more than three decades, taught at Cleveland College, served as a trustee of the Cleveland Play House, published four books of poetry,and built with his kid brother, Arthur, the most successful sporting and recreational goods store between Chicago and New York.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/15233061/Paul-Newman-A-Life-by-Shawn-Levy...