![]()
1
CURLY’S ROOTS (1886-1903)
Curly’s Parents Start the Stooge Dynasty • Life with Father, Mother, Moe, and Shemp
Shortly after the turn of the century, my father, Moe Howard, who was a very young child at the time, listened with fascination to his father, Solomon, as he told him bedtime stories about his youth in Russia and his emigration to America. Decades later, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Moe, whose retentive memory was spectacular, decided to write his autobiography and jotted down, in the minutest detail, his memories of those ancient bedtime stories. In the first segment of his original manuscript, there were hundreds of pages covering just my grandfather meeting my grandmother and hundreds more detailing their arduous journey from Russia to America.
Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, where Curly’s father, Sol Horwitz, was born.
World Book Encyclopedia
After my father died, the task of editing those voluminous notes down to size and completing his autobiography fell on my shoulders, and hundreds of pages of the Horwitz family’s ancestry were deleted.
Ten years later, while researching the mystery of Curly and his roots, I came across this mass of discarded material tucked away in a carton in my attic. Knowing that no book on my uncle Curly, the superstooge, would be complete without more details about his family, I found myself rereading page after page.
This is no ordinary story but a yarn that has the makings of a “Jewish Roots” and that describes where all the Stooges’ insanity originated.
Curly’s father, Solomon Gorovitz, was born in the city of Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, on November 4, 1872. At age fifteen, as was the tradition for orthodox Jewish youths, Solomon, shy and inexperienced, was sent to a rabbinical seminary over one hundred miles away in Vilna (Vilnius), where he would live at his cousin’s house during the two years of his biblical studies.
Taking along a few simple belongings, young Solomon made the difficult journey by foot, wagon, and train. To this wide-eyed, naive Lithuanian teenager, the trip and the radical changes in his life loomed as a frightening event.
Upon his arrival, Solomon breathed an exhausted sigh of relief when he was greeted by his cousin Nathan and then taken by horse and buggy to the Gorovitz home. It was here he met his second cousin, Jennie. Born on April 4, 1869, Jennie Gorovitz was three years older than Solomon. She was robust, with sparkling eyes and raven-black hair, a young girl who could be sweet as an angel one minute and a domineering martinet the next.
To Jennie, Solomon was far from being the boy every teenage girl dreams about. As the weeks passed, Solomon was bewildered by her scorn until another cousin, Victor, explained, “Don’t you know that you hurt most the people you love.”
Cousin Victor’s words helped to soothe Solomon’s wounded pride for the moment, but throughout his life my grandfather learned to totally ignore most of Jennie’s barbs, except those times when they became too thorny. Then he’d put on his hat, show her his back, and stride silently out the door. In later years, Curly, Moe, and Shemp referred to this as “the hat trick.”
Later, as Solomon’s graduation from rabbinical school drew near, fate stepped in to change his life forever. My great-grandfather had gotten word that the czar’s soldiers were roaming the country and conscripting all men of Solomon’s age into the Russian army.
To a religious Jewish family, the thought was intolerable, since Jewish boys were conscripted for incredible lengths of service and sometimes subjected to forced conversions.
This was a time of urgency, and the Gorovitzes had to take immediate action. They decided to give Solomon the identification papers of a young Jewish man who had died after serving his stint in the army. Aware that this ruse was certain to be discovered eventually, the Gorovitzes made plans to get Solomon out of the country and ship him to America.
Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century.
Map by Norman Maurer
This was easier said than done. The Gorovitzes realized that naive, unworldly Sol would never survive the difficult journey alone. On the other hand, Jennie was a strong, strapping young woman, and the two together would have more than a fighting chance to make it out of the country, but they had to patch up their differences, marry immediately, and leave for America together.
Opposites attract, and Mrs. Gorovitz, always the optimist, was certain Sol and Jennie would eventually learn to love each other.
But Jennie had a mind of her own, and it took some convincing to get her to agree to the marriage. The wedding was a hurried one, and immediately after the ceremony, my great-grandmother and -grandfather made preparations to send the newlyweds on their way.
Jennie’s bag was packed, and the senior Gorovitzes supplied the young couple with enough kopecks and rubles to cover the costs of lodging as well as bribes for the border guards and payment for passage to America. Mr. Gorovitz, however, was adamant about securing Jennie’s dowry, since the couple would need the money from it when they got to America. He placed one hundred rubles in a small sack and concealed it by sewing it inside the fly of Solomon’s pants. Little did he or Solomon realize the embarrassment that would result from this simple security measure.
And so our young couple joined several other young couples for their difficult trek across Lithuania, Poland, and Germany, finally arriving at their destination, the North Sea port of Hamburg.
They were packed like sardines in the ship’s steerage, and the voyage across the Atlantic lasted fourteen days. The seas were rough and, as was always the case in steerage, the trip was most unpleasant. This was especially so for Solomon, who constantly held his hands to his fly to protect his wife’s dowry; he had to endure with embarrassment the curious stares of his fellow passengers.
During the voyage, Jennie made detailed plans of how she would find work in America. Even at this early point in their married life, Jennie demonstrated that she was destined to take over as the family breadwinner.
The trip across Europe under Jennie’s guidance had taught Solomon respect for her capabilities and her honesty, qualities that he greatly admired. Neither a thinker nor a man of action, he surrendered his masculine authority then as he would continue to do throughout his life.
Upon the young Gorovitzes’ arrival at Castle Garden, New York, in 1890, they went through the usual immigration red tape and the typical problems caused by the ever-present language barriers. When asked their names by the immigration officer, Jennie, with her thick Lithuanian accent, replied, “Gorovitz.” To the officer it sounded like “Horwitz,” and Horwitz it would remain for the rest of their lives. Not so with Moe, Shemp, Curly, and Jack, who, for the sake of euphony, would eventually change their name to Howard.
Jennie’s oldest brother, Julius, who had previously emigrated to America, gave the newly-weds the first roof over their heads—a room in his furnished apartment at Twenty-Second Street and Third Avenue.
Curly’s fraternal grandparents in Europe, circa 1880. Chaim Nocham (Charles Norman) was born and died in a shtetl near Vilna, killed while rescuing the Torah from the town synagogue in 1900. Wife Dora died of starvation in a post-World War I famine in Russia.
Courtesy of Stanley Marx
There they were, Jennie and Sol, two strangers in a strange land, unaware that they would one day change the course of comedic history.
Jennie and Solomon started their family in 1891 with the birth of a son, Irving, a sickly child but nevertheless a joy because of the added realization that, according to law, Irving was an instant American citizen. Jennie and Sol catered to their new son’s every whim, since he was their firstborn and tradition gave him a special place in this blossoming Jewish family.
Irving, however, would one day be Jennie’s first disappointment, for he would grow up to become an insurance salesman and not the professional that Jennie, the typical Jewish mother, had dreamed about.
In 1892 Sol found a job as a clothing cutter. He worked hard until the union struck for a shorter work week and he found himself unemployed. Desperate to prove that he could support his family, he decided to go into business for himself. He used every cent of his and Jennie’s money to purchase a pack of notions, which consisted of handkerchiefs, socks, matches, and other sundries, and made the decision to become a peddler.
Jennie hated the idea of a husband who was a peddler, but she had little choice. Irving’s delicate constitution forced her to stay home and care for him, but Jennie wasn’t too concerned about her husband’s new career, as she had the feeling that Sol’s current vocation would be short-lived. She was right.
One morning, while hawking his wares on a Brooklyn street, Sol was accosted by a group of toughs who had decided to harass this “Jewish character” with the fiery red mustache and bulging backpack. They went after Sol, pulling his mustache, roughing him up, and finally shoving him hard against a nearby wall. The impact ignited one of the matchboxes in his backpack. Instead of ripping off the pack, Sol panicked and ran down the street, his back in flames. Fortunately, onlookers in the windows above heard his cries and doused him with whatever liquids they could find, including buckets of slop.
Poor Sol limped his way home, arriving flushed, beaten, and filthy. Sympathetic, Jennie took him in her arms, then helped him clean up. She realized that Sol would never change, that he would always be that young, inexperienced boy from Vilna who wanted to be a rabbi. She knew from that moment on that she would have to take charge in order to keep a roof over her family’s heads and food on their table.
Through the years, Jennie accepted the job of provider with graciousness, skill, and enthusiasm. She thrived on accomplishment and constantly tried to make Sol feel that he had contributed to her success. Even when she became a wealthy real estate saleswoman, consummating million-dollar deals, she would always hand Sol the checks for deposit—made out in his name. In her own strange way, she had grown to love and honor this man she called her husband.
In 1893 Jennie gave birth to another son, Benjamin “Jack,” a fat little blond-haired baby. Although Jack would be a good student and a fine athlete, he would not be the answer to Jennie’s dream of having a professional in the family, for he would follow in his brother Irving’s footsteps and become an insurance salesman.
While Jack was the picture of health and vitality, Irving, now two, was thin and short for his age. Although Jennie admired and doted on h...
