David Pokross

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

David Ralph Pokross was born on December 30, 1906, in Fall River, Massachusetts. His father, Israel Pokross, had emigrated in 1893 by himself from his shtetl Gorodischi, in the Ukraine when he was 21, settling in Fall River because people from his shtetl had previously come to that mill city.

David recounts, "It was my understanding from my father that he came to this country to have the opportunity to make a better living than he ever could in his shtetl and also to avoid being drafted into the Russian army. For a young Jewish man, army duty was a terrible ordeal, for it meant living in the army for 25 years, the term of ser-vice, without Kashrut (Kosher food)."

Israel became a peddler and was able to save enough money to bring his parents, Penny arid Jennie Pokross, and siblings - Moses, Jacob, and Bertha-to Fall River within a few years of his arrival. At the date of his naturaliza-tion as an American citizen, October 25,1898, Israel described himself as a storekeeper and wrote his surname as Pokrass. At some later date, he changed it to Pokross. By this time, he was the owner of some tenement properties in the Flint, a polyglot Fall River neighborhood where David lived until he was about eight.

When Israel was 32 years old, he married Jennie Lucksniansky (then 17 years old), who was born in Russia in 1887 and moved to Providence, Rhode Island, at the age of four. In May 1905, they had a daughter, Eva; David was born a year and a half later. Tragically, in 1909, when David was two, his mother died of pneumonia at the age of22. When David was four, his father married Lillie Goldstein, who came from New York. Israel and Lillie had three daughters together - Sophie, Ethel, and Estelle. Sophie died in 1926 of tuberculosis when she was 15; Estelle, born in 1914, lived until age 68, when she died of cancer; and Ethel, born in 1912, is alive today. David's older sister, Eva, currently lives in Florida with her husband, Ben Leavitt.

"When my mother died, my father's mother and father lived at 50 Cananicus Street, only a short distance from 217 Harrison Street where we lived, and I spent a great deal of time with them and with their daughter, Bertha, who lived with them. My grandparents spoke only Yiddish and I answered in English. My grandmother always said that I spoke Yiddish like a goy. [English was a "must" in his parents' house-hold. They spoke Yiddish only when they did not want the children to know what was going on.] I had a good understanding of Yiddish words, but I never did learn -speak Yiddish fluently. As the years went on and I heard less and less Yiddish, memory of such words failed, but many words never left me."

David recalls that his grandparents were very poor. He has two particularly distinct memories of them:

"One was in the summertime when my grandfather would permit me to stay overnight at his house and I used to sleep in the bed with him. I remember him saying his prayers before going to sleep. He'd wake up at five in the morning, go out and hitch up the horse, and drive off with me to the outskirts of Fall River. On the way, he would -put on his prayer shawl and phylacteries and say his prayers, which he knew from memory. I would hold the reins. When he finished, we were on the outskirts of the city and he'd stop and tie up the horse; and we'd have some breakfast that my grandmother had prepared. Then he would go around to different farms in the Westport area of Fall River and buy used burlap bags. He'd bring those back to his barn to be washed and mended by my -grandmother. My grandfather then resold the bags. That's how he made a living, such as it was.

"One of the important incidents in my life was that as a little boy in my grandparents' household, I often saw my grandmother standing on a chair. She was a little woman, and she would drop pennies in a black box - the pushke (the charity box) - and I would say, 'Grandma, you and Grandpa are so poor, what are you doing with your money?' And she said, "David, always remember, however poor you are, there's somebody poorer.' That message, I think, had a great influence on my life - the memory of that message."

David was close to his young stepsisters, and especially to his sister Eva. However, his stepmother was unaffectionate toward him and Eva... Although David's father was proud of him, he seemed unable to praise him to his face.

"Some way, somehow, what I often wanted was for my father to put his hand on my shoulder and say, 'You've done well.' He never did, even many years later, when we walked out of my Harvard graduation in June of1927 and I had graduated magna cum laude. Never in his lifetime did he say a nice word to me."

Israel was kind to his parents. He and his brothers, with their wives and children, made weekly Sunday visits to their parents' home. This made for strong family unity. Israel also saw to it that David and Eva stayed in touch with their natural mother's family, sending them to providence to visit their maternal grandparents, Aaron and Ida Lucksniansky (affectionately called Zayde and Bubbe by Eva and David), and their children: Aunt Bessie Wolpert, Uncle Tom Lucksniansky, and Aunt Mollie Lucksniansky. There they were showered with the love and affection that they did not receive at home. David particularly remembers how his grandfather would embrace Eva and him and shed tears as he referred to his deceased daughter, Jennie, as mein shayner faygeleh, Yiddish for "my beautiful little bird."

As a child, David began to assist his father, who had developed a thriving real estate business:

"My father owned lots of tenement properties in the city. At a very early age, he had me going around on Saturday mornings collecting rent. I worked very, very hard as a kid. My father had me working shoveling snow off the sidewalk in front of those tenement houses allover the city. I used to maintain the three furnaces in the house in which we lived, and a furnace in the garage with 30 separate spaces adjacent to the home, stoking them with coal at 6:00 a.m. on cold winter mornings. As I look back at it, I never had much time to play."

David's father was for many years president of the strictly orthodox Quarry Street Synagogue located in the Flint, a symbol of the high respect in which he was held by the community. While their home was kosher, Israel worked on Saturdays, not un-usual for his generation of strivers. David would often attend Sabbath services with his grandfather. After grammar school classes, he studied with other Jewish boys at a Talmud Torah, in the home of a teacher.

"We would recite the portions of Genesis that we were supposed to have memo-rized the day before, then start new passages, and I think the whole thing was perhaps an hour each day, and we all pitched in. None of us felt it as a hardship. We were good comrades working together. The sad part about it, to me, was the fact that I grew up really without any knowledge of the basic history of Jews. I did not get that until many years later.

"Because he had to work, my father never attended religious services on Saturdays; however, he did observe all the Jewish holidays. Until high school, I usually accompa-nied him. The Jewish holidays, beginning with Rosh Hashanah, were very meaning-ful for me. During the week before Rosh Hashanah, while we lived in the Flint, there was the annual visit to the cap maker on Pleasant Street, to the shoe store on Bedford Street, and to the general store on Pleasant Street for anew blue suit-all Jewish-owned stores. And then there were the good-natured but envious remarks of my non- Jewish playmates because I was excused from all school classes on the holidays."

As was common, David's religious education ended with his bar mitzvah. David never made a conscious decision to discontinue religious education as he was growing up in Fall River; a post- bar mitzvah program simply did not exist.

When he was growing up, David's closest friends were fellow Jews and the homes he visited were Jewish homes. But on the playground in the Flint, everyone mixed together.

"We had Jews, Polish, French, English, Portuguese, and Syrian people. We were a very mixed neighborhood, and we generally got along very well. I would be playing a game with a group of kids on the playground and some Irish kid would not like what -I did and would call me a bloody Jew or a Christ killer and hit me. I would return the hit. And then we would start playing again. It was an area of mostly hard-working people. The non-Jews worked largely in the cotton mills of Fall River. Jews rarely worked in those mills, though some did-long hours. Jews mostly were storekeepers, operating, among others, clothing and dress shops, groceries, bakeries, creameries, butcher shops, and junkyards.”

David attended public school and was quickly identified as a very bright youngster. In school, he received a level of recognition that he -not get at home. He remembers being in the second grade at the Davis School and unexpectedy being told to leave the room. He was surprised -to be directed to the fourth grade, where he joined his sister Eva.

"I remember as a little boy, in the fifth grade at the Davis School Miss Peters, the teacher, saying - and there were fairly large clas---those days, maybe 30 or 40 kids - that she was going to give us a problem to see what we could do with it. I worked on it and handed it in. The next -day, she said only one of the students had understood the problem and solved it and that was David Pokross. Then she asked me to come see her after class. She said, "You know, you're a bright young man and you want to work hard. You want to go to college and you'll do well in life if you do that." I remembered that. Who knows much her guidance helped steer me to my future?

"My father did not ever understand what I was studying in school. He himself never went to school in this country, but he learned to read English and he spoke the French-Canadian patois very well. As a young man, he thought it was a necessity in Fall River, as French-Canadians were the dominant ethnic group in the city.

"My father talked about teachers, how important they were in our lives. One day my father made it very clear to me that a teacher is kind of like a god. You did what the teacher said. He didn't fully understand the American school system or what teachers wanted us to do, yet it was clear to me that in his mind, my studies carne first. This was an important influence on me.

"I am told that when I was seven or eight rears old, and people would ask me, 'What are you going to do when you grow up?' I would say, 'I am going to Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and I'm going to be a lawyer.' I’m sure I hadn't the slight-est idea what those words meant. The reason behind this was that my father used to speak at the dinner table with great admiration about a lawyer named David Rudofsky. He was a very famous lawyer in Fall River who had graduated from Harvard College and the Law School and was a very good friend of my father. David Rudofsky and my father were considered to be the two wise men of the Jewish community.