Mother, daughter team up for memoir about life as Palo Alto’s first Jews

Palo Alto’s entire Jewish community once fit — albeit snuggly — inside a single brown-shingle house on Homer Avenue.

It was the first home of the Levins, a family that came to be known in the early 1900s as “the town’s Jews.”

The family was anchored by Jacob and Julia Levin, immigrants who escaped Russia’s pogroms, started a junk business and came to run a vibrant household eventually numbering a minyan plus one.

“We were the only Jewish family in Palo Alto,” said the Levins’ now 94-year-old daughter, Louise Henriques Mann, who lives on the border of the city in which she was raised. A retired stockbroker, she has co-authored with her daughter a family history called “The Mishpucah: Growing Up Jewish in Early Palo Alto.”

While “town Jew” is a label that might make many cringe these days, Mann didn’t consider it remotely pejorative.

“Oh no,” responds Mann, a spry woman with a quick grin who tends a lush rooftop garden outside her apartment. “They respected my father very much,” she said of Levin, the proprietor of the Palo Alto Junkyard and patriarch of a Jewish-style “Cheaper by the Dozen” clan.

“Everyone knew about Jake the junkman and his nine kids,” said daughter Susie Washington Smyth, who wrote the history after encouraging her mother to tape-record her memories.

The resulting cascade of family tales includes one about a toy parade Mann and her siblings staged down Emerson Street with some life-size toys donated to their father by a wealthy client in Atherton. The Levin kids, Smyth said, were “a lot like ‘The Little Rascals.’”

While both Smyth and her mother describe early Palo Alto as a surprisingly liberal and tolerant community, Mann experienced scattered instances of anti-Semitism.

The tough Catholic kids who lived next door once started throwing rocks at her and her siblings, calling them “Christ-killers.” In high school, an English teacher selected her to read from the role of Shylock in the “The Merchant of Venice.”

But such instances were isolated and overshadowed by warm childhood memories of her mother’s homemade challah and noodles and the family’s big Shabbat dinners and holiday gatherings.

Smyth said her family’s history embodied a typical success story for many early 20th-century immigrants. “They came to America for a better world. They found it through struggle, through sacrifice.”

Trained as an upholsterer, Jake Levin became a junk man in America, traveling door to door with a horse and buggy, collecting rags, scrap metal and other items.

In 1905, the Levins and their two small children moved to Palo Alto, where Levin opened a junkyard. After the 1906 earthquake, Levin’s services were in heavy demand to clear and salvage debris from nearby Stanford University.

Both the business, which became Levin Metals Corp., and the household grew. “I was born there in 1909,” said Mann, the fifth of nine children.

Though Jake Levin ran the business, it was Julia Levin who frequently ran the show. “She had the heart of gold,” recalls Mann of her mother, a 5-foot-2-inch dynamo who spoke with a heavy accent and frequently butchered the English language. Her spirit was gentle and upbeat.

“There was no room for anything other than optimism,” said Smyth of her grandmother.

Jake Levin, who died in 1935, and Julia Levin, who died in 1974, also believed in serving their community. Though Jake Levin wasn’t particularly religious, his wife was; the couple helped found Temple Beth Jacob in Redwood City and Congregation Beth Am, now in Los Altos Hills.

“The Mishpucah: Growing Up Jewish in Early Palo Alto” by Louise Henriques Mann as told to her daughter Susie Washington Smyth. (192 pages, self-published by Saturna Publishing, $18.95) should be available in late October in the following Palo Alto and Menlo Park stores: bob and bob, Kepler’s Books and Bell’s Bookstore.