My mother’s and Frank Sinatra’s address books

She did it her way

By Oliver B. Pollak

RICHMOND, California — The June/July 2020 issue of The Wall Street Journal Magazine contains a fascinating story by Will Friedwald with photography by Henry Leutwyler — “Sinatra’s Little Brown Book.” The article heralds Leutwyler’s just published Hi There!, a collection of 69 photographs of the address book that included Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as well as three telephone numbers each for Henry Kissinger, Roger Moore and Laurence Rockefeller. Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Zeppo Marx (the ex-husband of Sinatra fourth wife), and Sammy Davis, Jr. were all there. Sinatra, born in 1915 in Hoboken, NJ, ended his days in 1998 in Los Angeles.

Fleeing Germany after Kristallnacht, marrying, raising two children, emigrating to America, becoming a nurse, and hiking the world over – my mother did it her way.

Ruth Bachmann Pollak was born in Hannover, Germany in 1921 and departed from this world in Laguna Woods, California in 2016. Her gravestone at Mount Sinai in Burbank is inscribed, “I did it my way,” an homage to the 1969 recording by Ol’ Blue eyes,’ set to a French composition with 1968 lyrics by Paul Anka.

Mother’s little leather address book looks similar and familiar. Both echo world politics. Mother’s earliest entries start in early 1940s London and end in 1970s Los Angeles; from being a refugee in London to entering addresses incorporating my wife’s family.

Mother’s book is international in scope. Addresses in Australia, Canada, Chile, England, Germany, Israel, Palestine, South Africa, United States, in her fine hand identify the names of her parents, uncles, aunts. cousins, sister, nephew, other friends, fellow refugees and reflect their fleeing Germany and Austria with refugee suitcase in hand, migrations and settlement. Some have lines through the address, meaning moved or deceased. It also revealed divorces. Less than half a dozen of the people are still alive, myself and a couple of octogenarian cousins.

Sinatra’s camel brown leather address book contained, according to an online Esquire review, 108 names of political, musical and performing influencers, doctors, dentists, lawyers, agents, mostly men, suggesting probably more intimate little black books including women.

Mother’s address book contained about 90 names, 47 in England, including Dyne Engineering where my father worked as a tool and die maker. Other addresses included Barclays Bank, a cemetery, two doctors, and most poignant, Rabbi Dr. Munk at the Chief Rabbi’s Emergency Council at 86 Amhurst Park, London N. 16 that assisted locating victims who survived the Holocaust. They located Dr. Felix Bachmann, Ruth’s father, my Opa, a survivor of Theresienstadt. Today the building houses Getters Talmud Torah.

There are 36 American addresses. When we emigrated from England to America in 1952 we lived in McConnelsville, Ohio where my grandfather was a physician at Rocky Glen Tuberculosis sanitarium. There were addresses for people in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Zanesville, and Rabbi Samuel Rubin who got me through my 1956 Bar Mitzvah at Tifereth Jacob Temple on Slauson Avenue in Los Angeles.

In great part the names address books fade from face to face relationships, occasional letters, holidays cards and telephone calls into obscurity. It started with a fountain pen and ended with a ball point pen. From the 1970s mother had a Rolodex and a box for business cards. My sister remembers her singing along with Frank Sinatra.

Manuscript letters and diaries, telephone books and city directories appear on eBay far more frequently than personal address books. The listing of names and addresses in a personal directory disclose the celebrity and the quotidian, who knew whom, and in times of refugee crisis, who moved where.

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Pollak, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Nebraska Omaha, and a lawyer, is a correspondent now based in Richmond, California. He may be contacted via oliver.pollak@sdjewishworld.com