What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [78]
But Siggi Wilzig, sent to Auschwitz at sixteen along with his entire family and tattooed number 104732, didn’t survive twenty selections for the gas chambers or a death march to Mauthausen in the final days of the war to fail or be sneered at in America. He worked steadily to better himself. He pursued one trade and business after another. He went from being a presser of bow ties in a Brooklyn sweatshop to a traveling salesman, first of school notebooks, then furniture. “I was the original Death of a Salesman. My fingers got arthritis from holding cases,” he told Roger D. Friedman of the New York Observer in a 1999 feature article. By the 1960s, he was managing a furniture store in Hillside, New Jersey, while Naomi was busy raising Ivan and his siblings, Alan and Sherry.
Then Jessica Mitford’s book The American Way of Death exposed the monopolistic practices cemeteries used to market and sell funeral services, caskets, and equipage. It prompted the federal government to step in. As a result, Naomi’s father was forced to separate his business into two. He would continue to sell the plots; Siggi would take over the headstones. “If you can sell men’s goods and furniture, you can sell monuments,” he told his son-in-law. And Siggi did. He built a million-dollar headstone company and began investing everything he could into undervalued gas and oil stocks.
One night he came home and told Naomi about a big investment he had made in Wilshire Oil Co. of Texas. “ ‘You bought more stock,’ ” she scolded, irritated. “There was never money to pay the bills because he was always buying stock.” By 1965, he had orchestrated a proxy fight and, despite objections to him because he was a Jew, Siggi was awarded four seats on the board. Six months later, he became the oil company’s chief executive. Next, he took over the Trust Company of New Jersey, a consumer-oriented bank, to offset the risks in oil exploration. “Picture Tevye as J. R. Ewing,” Friedman wrote.
Naomi played a traditional and subordinate role as Siggi’s wife. In addition to doing the child-rearing, she was active in Jewish affairs and charities for synagogues and local Jewish women’s groups. She also served as chief event coordinator for the Trust Company’s elaborate annual dinners, a sought-after gala invitation in New Jersey.
A great deal of Naomi’s time was consumed by a fifteen-year landmark dispute that followed the death, in 1980, of her father, who was known as “the czar of the Meadowlands.” He had been buying up land there since the end of World War II and had developed plans to build a billion-dollar mini-city, with a regional shopping mall, hotel, offices, parks, and museums, not far from the current Giants Stadium. A family feud pitted Naomi’s brother, Selig, and her mother against her and her four sisters. The battle ended with a court-directed sale of the land to the state. “It all went down the drain. It was a monumental loss for the family and—with stupid judges pulling us into court every day all those years—it just wiped out the rest of my family financially,” Naomi said.
As one after another of her children graduated from Ivy League colleges and began working for their father, Naomi and Siggi began to live increasingly separate lives. She spent more and more time in Florida, appearing at home as Siggi’s wife for Jewish holidays and important ceremonial or business events as Siggi continued to work fourteen-hour days. Naomi needed something meaningful in her