“Isaac,” said his father, pronouncing his name Itzhak. “Dem iz a ongenem iberrashn.”
“In English!” Gussie pleaded, “I won’t be able to understand anything!”
“And that would be so bad?” said Isaac’s father, grabbing at Gussie’s nose and simultaneously slipping his thumb through his fingers. “Your nose, I have it.” Gussie reached for her grandfather’s hand, which he held just out of her reach.
“Can we give you a ride?” Isaac asked, knowing the answer would always be no on a Saturday.
“Your father, he is crazy,” Isaac’s father said, turning to Gussie. “Will you walk home with an old man?”
Gussie shouted an excited, “Yes!”
“We’ll see you at home,” Isaac’s father said, over his shoulder, as he and Gussie began picking their way through the grass, making a path toward Gershal Avenue and the homestead that sat on the far side of the hamlet.
Isaac kicked at a tall weed, then walked back over to the car. Gussie was charmed by Isaac’s father because she hadn’t been raised by him. And his father could afford to be generous with his affection because he wasn’t trying to convince his granddaughter to pull her weight on a failing farm. It had been a different story when Isaac was growing up.
His parents had arrived in Alliance in 1887 with nothing but a satchel of clothes and one small child—the eldest of Isaac’s siblings. By all accounts, their early years as colonists had been bleak. Isaac wasn’t entirely sure why this surprised anyone. His father had taught at the yeshiva in Volozhin and didn’t know the first thing about farming. He had read the writings of Michael Bakal and Moshe Herder and believed in the Return to the Soil Movement, but that didn’t mean he knew how to milk a cow or sow green beans. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society provided for some agricultural training but none of it could make up for the fact that Isaac’s father was, at his heart, a philosopher and not a farmer.
Isaac turned the car around in the grass and pulled out onto Gershal Avenue. Within moments, he had overtaken his father and Gussie, who walked hand in hand on the road’s narrow shoulder. When had his father’s back become so stooped? He honked the car’s horn as he passed and they both waved. At Almond Road, he took a right and wound his way toward his father’s farm.
The farmhouse, like many others in Alliance, had begun to fall into disrepair. Each of the community’s early settlers had been gifted forty acres of land but the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society had written them mortgages to cover the other costs associated with getting their farms off the ground. Residents built their farmhouses and barns on credit, which required profitable harvests from the start. Almost none were profitable, and most people’s mortgages quickly fell into arrears. To make ends meet, the men fell back on what they knew. At night, they traveled to Norma to work in the area’s only garment factory, or they waited for the shipments of hand-sewing projects, which garment factories in Philadelphia and New York began shipping to Alliance and other Jewish agricultural outposts by the truckload.
Isaac was born thirteen years into his parents’ failed agricultural experiment. The youngest of a dozen children, he was barely old enough to pull a sweet potato out of the ground when his older brothers and sisters began their exodus. The majority of them went to Philadelphia, thirty-five miles away. Two settled in New York and one went as far south as New Orleans. One died on a battlefield in France.
By the time Isaac was twenty, he, too, had begun plotting his departure. And not just because he couldn’t envision a lifetime spent toiling in South Jersey’s Downer soil. Alliance, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in particular, had crippled his once curious father, and what Isaac wanted was to go somewhere where he wasn’t beholden to anyone.
The right thing to do would have been to sit down with his father, to tell him that he didn’t want a farming life. But he couldn’t bear to witness his father’s disappointment. Instead he packed a few things in a bag, took forty dollars out of the old Campfire Marshmallows canister his father kept in the freezer, and set out in the dark to catch a southbound train from Norma at first light.
Isaac had never left Salem County, much less New Jersey. From the train window, he watched in wonder as the flat farmland of New Jersey’s coastal plain gave way to the rolling hills of Virginia’s Piedmont region, North Carolina’s pines turned into South Carolina’s live oaks, and eventually Georgia’s wetlands melted into Florida’s swampland. By the time the train stopped in Jacksonville, it was packed with speculators headed south. Isaac had bought a ticket for Miami but all the talk in the car was of West Palm Beach, so when the train pulled into the station and half the passengers got off, Isaac did, too.
West Palm Beach sat across the Intracoastal Waterway from the resort island of Palm Beach and had initially been established as a service town—somewhere for the maids and cooks and bellmen who worked in the big Palm Beach hotels to live. But by the time Isaac arrived, it was already obvious that West Palm Beach was where the action was.
The trick to making it in West Palm Beach, said the other guys in the boardinghouse where Isaac had taken a room, was to land a job as a binder boy. Subdivisions in West Palm Beach were going in so fast and real estate agents were so busy closing deals, most negotiated entirely by mail with buyers up north, that none of them had the time to put an actual FOR SALE sign in the ground and sell to passersby—residents, snowbirds, and tin-can tourists who had driven down to Florida to see what all the fuss was about. Real estate agents sent binder boys out to these undeveloped
