In 2002, my father-in-law passed away after a short illness, leaving us the money with which we purchased Mill Brook House. None of our parents ever saw the house, but it’s no stretch to connect Abe to it. Without him, our life in Charlemont would not exist. This is his centennial year.
Abe was the oldest son of first generation, Ellis Island, Lower East Side Jewish immigrants. His father, a house painter, died of lead poisoning in his 30’s, leaving Abe’s mother Sophie to raise six children alone. Sophie was a hell-raiser, who paid the rent by marching in demonstrations for the Communist Party, but life was hard and money scarce. As the oldest child, Abe had to step into his father’s shoes and help raise the younger children. Fortunately, both he and kid brother Izzy inherited a drawing and drafting ability, which provided both with a good living as commercial artists later in life.
Despite poor eyesight, Abe was drafted toward the end of World War II and served behind the lines as a sign painter. Deployed to the Philippines in 1945, he caught up with Izzy, who, ten years younger, was stationed there as an infantryman being readied for the invasion of Japan. (After its surrender, Izzy was among the first American troops to land on Japan's main islands.)
Demobilized, Abe returned to Lower Manhattan and married his sweetheart, Gertrude Erlich. Steve was born three years later and would remain their only child. Shortly after Steve’s birth, the couple moved to Brooklyn and never left, although they spent summers at a bungalow colony in the Catskills. (This was still the Borscht-Belt era in which Catskill summer resorts were either Jewish or not.)
A fabulous draftsman, Abe had a passion for painting and filled dozens of canvasses with pictures in oil, pastel, or acrylic, for which he crafted beautiful frames. He refused to consider selling them, hanging and storing the paintings throughout his home, where they created an overwhelming presence.
Abe’s was the archetypal turn-of-the-century immigrant story: child of a generation that sought and struggled to make a better life in a new land, he served in WWII, rose into the middle class buoyed by postwar prosperity, and lived to see anti-Semitic discrimination made illegal, an arc of success that seems more elusive today.
The Sternbach boys, Hymie, Izzy, and Abe, on the roof of their tenement, 1930's.