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correspondence for decades, including letters written by Art while Joe was off on business trips or family vacations with his wife and two sons. Dutifully, Art would tell him which shipments had arrived, which sales items were moving or not, what the next round of advertising would promote, and other mundane matters. There was fluency and energy in Art’s prose but rarely anything very personal or revelatory. On the odd occasion when Art would encounter Joe’s family during the latter’s absence, he would note it, but never sentimentally. In comparison, Joe’s letters to his brother, some of which he kept carbon copies of, were filled with levity—he would often insist that Art actually enjoy a vacation and not worry about business while on holiday—and Joe’s letters back and forth with his wife and sons were extremely tender, playful, open, and rich. Art was the worker ant, Joe the butterfly: together they were a natural team.
    Before he built this empire, though, Art Newman had to emerge as his own man. On December 7, 1917, he enlisted in the army reserve corps; he was called up to active duty three weeks later and lasted in the service until he was honorably discharged in February 1919. He never went overseas but rather spent his time with the Quartermaster Corps in Johnston, Florida, and later in Maryland and Virginia. He attained the rank of corporal and served mainly in motor pools, a dreary existence that he described in letters to Joe and in accounts of military life in the
Plain Dealer.
By 1920 he was back in Cleveland and living on East Ninetieth Street, the core of one of the city’s old Jewish communities. And sometime between then and 1925, he got married.
    I F THE marriage of Arthur and Theresa Newman is clouded in a mist of half-facts, that may be because Theresa Newman herself came froma more imprecisely chronicled background than did her husband. She was of either Hungarian or Bohemian stock and seems to have been born overseas sometime in the 1890s or maybe even earlier. She came to America at perhaps age four, perhaps in 1901. In one of the earliest official documents associated with her life—the birth certificate of her second son—she claimed to have been born in 1897 in Homona, Austria, citing the Hungarian name for the modern-day Slovakian town of Humenne. But that was only one version of her story.
    How she arrived in America and with whom is a mystery. Her father bore the Christian name Stephen, but in legal documents over the years his surname was variously rendered as Fetzer (which Theresa and her sons used most commonly), Fetsko (favored by most of Theresa’s siblings), Fetzko, Felsko, and, once, Fecke. Stephen was born in 1854 or 1855; by one account, he arrived in America in 1890 at the port of Philadelphia; by another, he came through New York in 1889. (Both dates, crucially, predate Theresa’s year of birth, as she identified it.) On August 11, 1902, he married Mary Polinak (or Polenak), who was born in either Hungary or Bohemia and was about twenty years his junior. Together they raised seven children; in Stephen’s 1946 obituary, they were listed as “Theresa Newman, Mae Eskowsi, Jewell and Andrew, Steve Polenak, Anna Kurma and Michael (deceased).”
    Over the years Stephen worked at various manual trades: laborer, shipbuilder, bricklayer. When her house was empty, Mary took work in a mill. Their contradictory, inconsistent, and seemingly hesitant attitude toward official record keeping may just be part of the family heritage as unschooled immigrants who came to America to fuel the industrial expansion of towns like Cleveland. They had neither the intellectual bent of the Newmans nor that family’s capacity for invention and self-fulfillment. If the Newmans were archetypical incarnations of the clever, successful Jewish immigrants who refashioned themselves in America, the Fetsko-Polenaks were among the imported labor force that did the thankless, muscular work of the great