Benjamin Graham turns toward the yawning doorway, and a blast of wintry air slaps him in the face.
“Look what just sauntered in,” Ben’s friend Richard Goldberg hisses in his ear. Richard’s a lanky white man, a head taller than Ben, with ardent eyes and a storm of dark curls.
A tall, powerfully built white man—black double-breasted suit, no overcoat—strides past their table and takes possession of Cowan’s sole empty table. The bulk of the clientele at Cowan’s, a popular Harlem speakeasy where Black folks come to enjoy a night out, take no notice of him. But the owner—William Cowan himself, Ben surmises—rushes over to take his order, waiting as the man brushes rain from his lapels. The tall white man appears to be a regular here. Ben has never set foot in this nor any of Harlem’s “Swing Street” clubs. Its low ceiling, smoky gloom, tang of sweat, and boisterous jazz make him yearn to excuse himself and head for home.
Janie Shore Goldberg, the lithe and vivacious Black singer who is Richard’s wife, leads her elder sister, Jean Shore, a full-figured Black woman of uncommon gravitas, away from the table.
Richard eyes the white man across the room. “Aren’t you going to ask who that is?”
Ben likes Richard or he wouldn’t have accepted his invitation—no, his insistence—that Ben join him and his family tonight. Richard Goldberg is one of Ben’s favorite clients, an early investor in Ben’s Joint Account during the Roaring Twenties. Richard stayed loyal to Ben after the Crash wiped out seventy percent of the fund’s value. Through the lean years that followed, Richard never lost faith in Ben’s genius for picking undervalued stocks and his disciplined investment strategy that restored the battered Joint Account to its pre-Depression heights. Now, at forty-two, Ben’s a self-made millionaire again—and Richard’s trust in Ben has been rewarded with a substantial nest egg of his own.
“Sure.” Ben glances at the intense white man drinking in the corner, his arm around the waist of the only white woman in the club. “Who?”
“Fritz Kuhn. I wrote a critical article about his new organization, the German-American Bund.”
“Why critical?” Ben speaks in affable tones, yet he observes Richard from afar. He barely takes any notice of Richard’s daughter Bessie, or of the Blacks packed at round wooden tables with mismatched chairs, dressed in flowered frocks and sharp suits, their eyes darting to the empty floor near the piano, their full-throated laughter filling the hollows left by departed musicians. Ben doesn’t want more music. He’s alone, even as he sits with a man he likes and respects.
“Because the Bund are a bunch of antisemitic Nazis, and their leader, Kuhn, is the worst of them all,” Richard says. “Styles himself the ‘American Fuhrer.’”
Richard’s tall, slender teenage daughter Bessie, a striking mixed-race girl with a tumbled crown of dark spirals, leans in. “Surely Mr. Hitler has more pressing matters to attend to in Germany—like inflation and unemployment—than appointing some knucklehead to be dictator of America.” She’s got a honeyed complexion, the color of burnished bronze, and her father’s lucid, intelligent eyes.
She’s well-spoken, Ben thinks. He recalls turning down an invitation to her high school graduation. “Are you a college girl, Bessie?”
“I’m a freshman at Barnard.”
Ben nods admiringly. Earning a place at Columbia’s affiliated women’s college is no mean feat. “I’m a Columbia man, too.”
She furrows her brows. “They let you live in the dorm. Not me. I have to live at home.”
Ben is aware that his alma mater discriminates against Black students—and to a lesser extent, Jews. “I was too poor to afford the dorm. A scholarship boy. I lived at home, too.”
The girl does a double take, eyebrows lifting. She’d had Ben pegged as a silver spoon boy.
Richard turns to Bessie, beaming with pride. “She earns high marks all in her classes.”
Bessie glares at Fritz Kuhn, the way his hand grazes the woman’s breast. “What a creep.”
“A creep who preaches racial hatred but sneaks off to Harlem for the jazz,” Richard says.
Ben skipped Goldberg’s article about this pro-Hitler character, this Kuhn. Richard sees it as his journalistic duty to point a finger at anyone who perpetuates antisemitism.
The girl leans into her father. “When’s Mama going to sing?”
“Soon,” her father says, exuding paternal warmth. “Can’t wait.” Richard might be the only man Ben knows who’s happily married. Ben’s own wife, Hazel, has long since quashed his affection by bossing him relentlessly.
Ben has never heard the Shore Sisters sing. Janie’s got a frog in her throat, so the sisters plan to sing one song. Enough for Ben. He’s ready to call it a night.
Bessie stands and peers at the piano. “What’s taking them so long?”
Ben has spent his entire life walling off emotion, his own and everyone else’s, so he’s surprised to feel a stab of sympathy for the girl. She doesn’t fit in with Black people like her mother, nor with Jews like her father. Now her parents plan to leave her with her aunt, the singer Jean Shore, while Richard’s journalistic mission takes him to Berlin, a city gripped by Nazi fanaticism, where Jews are blamed for every national ill—from Germany’s defeat in the war to the alleged degeneration of the German race.
Jean, squeezed into Cowan’s “dressing closet” with her sister and pinning up a stray lock of wavy dark hair, worries about Bessie, too. Ever since Richard sent her to a fancy white girls’ school, Bessie thinks she’s smarter than everyone else. Now she goes to a white girls’ college where the other girls snub her and she doesn’t have a friend.
“Daddy, I like it here. We should come to Harlem more often,” Bessie says.
Jean Shore sweeps by and kisses Bessie on her curly head. “You’ll get your fill when you stay with me, sleeping on my couch.” Bessie leans her head against her aunt. Jean sees her innocence: The girl trusts her parents to make wise decisions, knowing full well they’re heading to a snake pit.
A tall, strapping, young Black man, his strong shoulders square inside his sleek tuxedo jacket, strides out and sits down at the piano. He plays a rapid, sparkling run across the keys, and the Shore Sisters step out to a smattering of huzzahs.
“We got a special song for you tonight,” Jean says. “Song we learned from a dear friend of ours, Billy from Pittsburg.”
“Boy genius, still in high school,” Janie says.
“A song he’s been composing while he clerks at a drugstore after school,” Jean says. “He calls it ‘Lush Life.’” Self-deprecating humor shines from her eyes. “I don’t know what that means, do you?”
Ben thinks of opulent luxury and heavy drinking, neither of which suit him—or luxuriant foliage growing thick and green, the lush and abundant life he longs for but does not have.
Melancholy piano tones ring out, and the women’s velvet-toned voices suffuse the smoky room. The crowd goes quiet. No one makes a move to dance. The sisters fill the murky space with heartbroken notes.
Ben hears “siren song” and pictures his own siren, the young woman with whom he’s falling in love: blonde, statuesque, unattainable. “Tempt me to madness,” he thinks, cleverly rhymes with sadness. The song washes over him, the women’s voices prodding at his numb heart, jabbing at his sore spots—and at those of all “whose lives are lonely too.”
The sisters and their pianist bring their song to a poignant close, and the audience erupts in applause. Bessie rushes to her mother and aunt, drawing them into an exuberant hug. An admiring crowd fences them in.
Richard takes a manilla envelope out of his satchel and slides it across the table to Ben. “Janie and I sail for Europe on Sunday, on the Manhattan.”
Ben frowns. He’s aware that Hazel is keeping company with the captain of the Manhattan, a Spaniard. She’ll be more demanding and irritable after he sets sail. Ben and Hazel have an agreement to live together for the sake of their children, to dine together as a family most evenings, and to see whomever they wish.
Richard puts the document in front of Ben, praising his friend for the remarkable job he did after the Graham Joint Account bottomed out after the Crash. “You brought my account back up to its pre-Depression heights.”
Ben grins, buoyant that all losses have been made good, for Richard and all his clients.
Richard reminds Ben that Ben already agreed to manage the finances for his family, if anything should happen to him. Now he asks Ben to serve as Bessie’s guardian—until she reaches her majority at twenty-one—should anything befall them in Berlin. In that eventuality, she would become Ben’s ward. “Say you’ll look after my daughter. Please do this for me, Ben.”
“I’m afraid I can’t.” Ben doesn’t know the girl. “We have four children of our own.”
“You wouldn’t need to take her under your roof. She’ll live at her Aunt Jean’s while we’re traveling and—” Richard trails off. “I’d want her to have your guiding hand. She doesn’t want to marry. She wants a career—” His shoulders slump as he contemplates the forces aligned against his daughter. “Even with all her intelligence and strength, she can’t do it alone. You could help her find her way,” he pleads.
Ben shakes his head. “I’m not at liberty to take on—”
Richard interrupts. “Please, it’s just a formality.” Richard pushes a pen toward his friend. “Sign your consent, and my attorney will see that the court approves the guardianship.”
Ben refuses the pen. “You wouldn’t ask if you didn’t think it was dangerous to go. You’re right, it’s much too dangerous. Don’t go. Cancel your trip.”
A fierce obstinacy overtakes Richard’s face. “Someone has to have the guts to report on what Hitler’s doing. He wants Germany to be ‘Judenfrei’— ‘free of Jews.’” Janie joins Richard and nestles at his side, an affectionate hand on his shoulder.
As a boy, Ben knew antisemitism firsthand. He remembers the blows and taunts. Richard, he thinks, loves his country, loves democracy and freedom, and dedicates himself to reporting difficult truths. Ben picks up the pen and signs the document. More than a formality. A favor to a brave and worthy friend, a favor he hopes to never hear about again.
“Thank you, Ben.” Richard smiles up at Janie. “Besides, Berlin welcomes gifted singers—singers that can only perform here in darkest Harlem. She’ll be the darling of Kurfürstendamm.” Janie and Bessie rejoin them.
“Darling of the—what?” Bessie says.
“The heart of Berlin’s nightlife,” Janie says. “I’ve got seven bookings.”
Jean takes her seat between Janie and Ben. She startles when a cold blast hits her and Ben in the face. A second white man hurries in, a well-built young fellow whose low-brimmed fedora reveals a glimpse of a Charlie Chaplin–style toothbrush mustache trying for dashing.
Jean emits a resigned sigh. “Good. He missed our song.”
“You know him?” Ben asks.
Jean nods. “It’s Kroeber, my boss. I wish he wouldn’t come, but he always does.”
The man takes the empty chair beside Fritz Kuhn.
Ben regards her with curious eyes. “You sing for him at work?”
“Hell, no. I cook and clean. When he was little, I sang.” She squirms at the memory of planting nursemaid’s kisses on his boyhood cheeks.
“Maybe that’s why he likes to hear you sing.” No woman, Ben thinks, not even his dear French governess, ever sang to him.
Jean shrugs. “He and his cronies can’t get enough of the clubs. Later they’ll be at the Stork Club, swilling drinks and mooning over Dorothy Lamour.”
“A colleague told me,” Richard says to Jean, “that Germans come all the way from Hamburg to get your boss to authenticate their antique jewelry.”
Ben glances at the two white men, who appear to be sharing a confidence. Ben quickly looks away. Had he imagined it, or did Jean’s boss and Fritz Kuhn flick their gaze at him?
“I wouldn’t know,” Jean says dully, all the power, sensuality, and spirit that once animated her drained from her eyes. “I cook for him, and feed his dog.” The hard edge in her voice softens when she says dog.
The Next Day. Ben Graham’s Office, 52 Wall Street, Manhattan’s Financial District
Ben Graham opens a New York daily newspaper on his desk. He reads Richard Goldberg’s front- page article, headlined “The Nuremberg Laws in Action: Nazis Enforce Ban on Marriage to Jews.”
Two Days Later. A Berlin Hotel Room.
Black-uniformed SS—Schutzstaffel—guards wearing swastika armbands charge through the door, pointing guns at Richard and Jane Goldberg. “No!” screams Richard. “She’s a mother!” He shouts again: “Nein, sie ist eine Mutter!” Shots ring out. Blood spatters the framed photograph of Bessie on the nightstand.Two bodies slump to the floor. Guards collect Richard’s notebook, his Royal Model O typewriter with a typed sheet of paper in the platen, a Leica camera, a worn leather camera bag, and five rolls of film.
The Next Day. Ben Graham’s Office, 52 Wall Street, Manhattan’s Financial District
Ben holds his head in his hands, distraught. The same New York daily newspaper proclaims “Foreign Correspondent Richard Goldberg and Wife Murdered in Berlin.”
One Week Later. Jane Shore’s Funeral, Abyssinian Baptist Church, Harlem.
Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., assistant pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, projects solemn authority as he addresses the large congregation, nearly all of them Black. In the front pew, Benjamin Graham—one of the few exceptions—sits beside Jean Shore and other members of Jane’s family.
“We have come together to bid farewell to our beloved sister, our dulcet-toned songstress, Jane Shore Goldberg.” The reverend’s sonorous voice rolls through the church, filling every corner of the sanctuary. “May we carry her memory with us, holding her close to our hearts. Jane Shore Goldberg loved her husband Richard and her daughter Bessie, she loved her sister Jean, and she loved many of us. Her legacy asks us to free our hearts of hate and anger and blame, to hold instead the love Janie gave to her family and community—our community. Just as we fed and clothed our needy during the Great Depression, just as we create a home to be a refuge for our aged citizens, we join together now in serenity and strength, with dignity and respect for all, even those with whom we disagree. We will join together to help all who labor and all who seek honest labor, just as Jane sought honest labor on 125th Street and, time after time, she was turned away. May you go in peace.”
“Hear, hear!” cries a pale, petite woman in agreement. She sits close to Jean, wearing a distinctive flat hat.
Ben rises to his feet, surrounded by hundreds of church members whose numbers have swelled due to the thousands of Black Southerners who came to Harlem, seeking jobs and safety, in the mass movement of people known as the Great Migration. While mourners file past to the exit, the assistant pastor, a man of manifest moral authority, takes Ben aside.
“Guardian’s a big job,” Reverend Powel says, commanding dark-brown eyes trained on Ben. “You truly want to take on this responsibility for Bessie Goldberg?” Ben declares that he does. The reverend explains that these circumstances are unusual. A guardian is almost always a close family member. In Bessie’s case, her closest relative would be her maternal aunt, Jean Shore. Still, the reverend understands why Bessie’s father chose Ben. Bessie’s Aunt Jean can provide a roof over her head, feed and clothe her, give her a good family and an aunt’s love. But Bessie attends Barnard, a white women’s college, and Jean can’t guide her in the white world.
Ben nods gravely. “I’ll do what I can.” He can’t imagine what his role might entail. He can’t offer her a job; no women work on Wall Street, other than a few secretaries with stellar shorthand and typing skills.
Outside the church, Ben finds Bessie weeping in the arms of her Aunt Jean.
“All he did was write about their stupid Nuremberg Laws,” Bessie wails into her aunt’s shoulder. “Their laws. It’s not like he invented them to make them look like vicious antisemitic swine.”
Jean tells Ben that Bessie will continue to live with her, her husband Curtis, and her son Raymond, age twelve, while Bessie attends her classes at Barnard.
Ben, for his part, will look after her finances and provide a stipend, enough to cover Bessie’s tuition and board.
“If any problem should arise,” Ben tells Jean and Bessie, “please don’t hesitate to call on me for help.”
Bessie erupts. “I don’t know you. You’re the last person I’d ever ask for help.” She storms off, clenched fists swiping back her tears.
Jean shares a look with Ben. “Forgive her.”
“I do. My father died when I was eight.” Ben rubs his brow. “We lost our breadwinner, but I still had a mother.” In her detached, dry-eyed presence, he’d barely felt a lick of emotion.
Jean pats Ben’s arm, regarding him with consoling eyes.
Ben averts his gaze. “If Bess needs anything, call me.” Ben puts a printed envelope with his office address and telephone number into Jean’s hand.
Jean nods, though Ben has no idea how hard it is to make a call from Harlem. She’d have to clean out her piggy bank to pay her nearest candy store owner to let her use his telephone.
A Week Later. Jean Shore’s Apartment, Harlem:
Jean Shore picks up a large piece of grey-brown cardboard, the kind used by laundries for folded shirts. Someone slipped it under her door. Seeing what’s glued to the cardboard, she throws it to the floor. It’s the newspaper article announcing Richard and Janie’s murders. How could anyone be so cruel, reminding her of Janie’s terrible end in such a callous way?
A sharp, choked yelp escapes Jean’s throat. Across the top, scrawled in red letters, someone wrote “You’re next!” And where the article says “…survived by a daughter, Bess Goldberg,” they circled Bessie’s name in red.
History
1) “Lush Life,” a song by Billy Strayhorn
Billy Strayhorn, widely regarded as a musical genius and one of jazz’s greatest composers, began writing the earliest version of ”Lush Life” at the age of sixteen. He continued refining the piece for several years, completing it in 1936. Although the song remained largely unknown to the public, Strayhorn played it in private settings, making it plausible that the Shore sisters—fictional friends of his—could have heard it during that period. ”Lush Life” did not receive its public debut until 1948, when Duke Ellington invited Strayhorn to the stage at Carnegie Hall to accompany vocalist Kay Davis on piano in a performance of the song.
2) The Nuremberg Laws
The Nuremberg Laws, enacted in September 1935, stripped German Jews of their citizenship and basic civil rights. The laws not only prohibited marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans but also outlawed extramarital sexual relations between them in the name of protecting “German blood and honor.” By systematically excluding Jews from German society, the Nuremberg Laws marked a major step toward the persecution that would culminate in the Holocaust.
3) Fritz Kuhn and The German-American Bund
Following the collapse of the Friends of New Germany, which many viewed as the American branch of the Nazi Party, Fritz Kuhn founded the German-American Bund. Under Fritz Kuhn, the Bund established its headquarters in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan and formed chapters all over the US. The Bund launched camps (such as Camp Siegfried on Long Island) that served as family retreats, training hubs for paramilitary fighters (the “O.D.” or Ordnungsdienst, “Order Corps”), as well as youth camps where uniformed children were indoctrinated in Nazi ideology and taught to perform the Hitler salute.
Kuhn was known as “Bundesführer,” having anointed himself the “American Fuhrer.” It’s true that he was a regular visitor to Harlem nightlife and enjoyed Black jazz, despite his white supremacist ideology. This contradiction became part of his public reputation.
4) Reverend Adam Clayton Powel Jr.
Under his leadership, the Abyssinian Baptist Church became one of the largest Black churches in America, growing to 14,000 members. Powel helped lead Harlem’s landmark “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign, an event readers will encounter later in these pages. When, at Jane’s funeral, he says that she “sought honest labor on 125th Street,” he is referring to the fact that Black women shopped there but were routinely denied jobs as clerks in its shops and department stores. That injustice became a central target of the campaign. Reverend Adam Clayton Powel Jr. was elected to the New York City Council in 1941 and elected to Congress in 1944, where he served fourteen terms in the House of Representatives.
5) Women on Wall Street
Ben was right when, in his thoughts, he ruled out the possibility of giving Bessie Goldberg a job on Wall Street—unless she learned stenography skills and sought a secretarial position. According to this New York Times article on the subject of women on Wall Street, dated June 23, 1929:
“But woman, in her headlong plunge into financial business, has fallen upon various and chaotic conditions. To some of the stock brokers’ houses she is not admitted at all; in others her main new job is with the women customers. Into the men’s board rooms, woman, whether as customer or clerk, rarely penetrates. She may shop, vote, ride in the subway and work in business offices with men, but when it comes to stock trading she is rigidly segregated.”
Muriel Siebert became the first woman to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange in 1967—for $445,000, the equivalent of four million dollars today. For the next ten years, “It was 1365 men and me,” she said.
6) Black People on Wall Street
Just as sexism prevented women from finding jobs in finance, racism prevented Black people from finding jobs on Wall Street. In 1936, any Black people Ben would have seen when he walked to and from his office would have been men who worked as janitors, elevator operators, shoe shiners, drivers, and messengers. Antisemitism also prevented many Jews from finding employment at “white-shoe” firms and banks controlled by Protestant elites, although some smaller investment houses were Jewish concerns. All three of these painful “isms” would have stood in Bessie’s way, had she or any mixed-race woman sought to work in finance in the first half of the twentieth century.
Since we are treating membership on the New York Stock Exchange as a bellwether of acceptance on Wall Street, it is important to recognize the groundbreaking individuals who broke the following barriers.
Joseph L. Searles was the first Black man to become a member of the New York Stock Exchange, in 1970.
Martina Edwards became the first Black woman to become a member of the New York Stock Exchange, in 2004.
7) What’s True about Benjamin Graham
His father died when he was eight. The family slid to the edge of poverty.
He worked multiple after-school jobs to help his mother get by.
As a boy, he endured antisemitic taunts and some beatings.
He earned a scholarship to Columbia and lived at home during college.
He lost seventy percent of his holdings in the aftermath of the Crash.
He managed his fund without pay for five years to repay his investors’ losses.
Those who kept their money with him ultimately recovered everything they had lost.
By 1936, Ben and his wife Hazel remained married while seeing other people.
At age 63, Ben saw that he had built a “breastwork” or wall around his heart.