The Trade Off

A woman who understands money is a woman who understands power. – Unknown

Editor’s Note: An excerpt from Samantha Greene Woodruff’s new novel about Bea Abramovitz, a young Jewish woman with an uncanny understanding of the stock market.—David Michael Slater

PROLOGUE

October 29, 1929: Black Tuesday a.k.a. “The Great Crash”

Bea didn’t have time to think. She dropped the morning paper the moment she read the headline and ran out the door. For the second time in a week, she was racing to Wall Street in a panic to try to help her brother. The crash had started last week, and today, the market finally hit what had to be the bottom. It was far, far worse than Bea ever could have imagined. She was sure Jake was on the phones and the wires like every other broker at every other bank, trying to sell anything he could. But selling was impossible. The lines were jammed. So were the streets. Bea was glad she planned to take the Lexington Avenue line instead of driving, because today the roads looked more like parking lots than busy thoroughfares.

When she emerged from the train downtown, she was stunned by what she saw. Wall Street was always bustling with people, but this was different. The streets were thick with dense mobs of men and women screaming, crying as they huddled over the papers with the latest stock updates. The ground beneath their feet was littered with red trading slips—sales orders that couldn’t even make it into the exchange. Bea thought of Nate, who she knew was planning to spend today on the trading floor—had he made it inside? She tried to push through the crowds to get to the National City Building, where Jake was; until this moment she’d been certain there was something she could do to help her brother. Now that she was here, she realized she was wrong. This was a catastrophe beyond remedy.

It was immediately clear to Bea that she should go back home. Being here wouldn’t help anyone and might even be dangerous. In addition to the distraught crowds, it seemed that people in the buildings above were hurling large objects from the windows. Bea pushed against the hordes to get out of the way. And then the screams of panic that had become the street’s soundtrack were broken by a giant thud. The crowd parted to reveal a man on the sidewalk, unmoving. Instantaneously the horror of this moment transformed into tragedy. Bea hardly had time before she started to heave, her insides coming up in violent convulsions. She had to get control of herself. She had to get out of there.

As she slowly stood back up, her usually acute senses were distorted. The scene in front of her moved as if in slow motion. All she heard was a dull buzz in her ears. She didn’t want to, but she knew she had to go look at the man. If for no other reason than to be sure he wasn’t someone she knew.

She was momentarily overcome with relief. This was a stranger, not Jake, not Nate, not any of the men she had worked with at J.P. Morgan or National City. Then, like a set of violently crashing waves coming too quickly, her momentarily relief was overtaken by the atrocity at her feet. No, she didn’t recognize this man, but she easily could have. He was clearly a broker. And from the looks of his high-end suit, he was a successful one. Well, he had been. Before the market crashed.

She saw her panic and horror mimicked in the faces of everyone around her, felt her cheeks soaked with tears. Only then did she hear the percussive sound of more thuds. Only then did she take in the bodies that were coming from the highest windows of every building on Wall Street. Only then did Bea truly understand the magnitude of this day. Until now she had believed that any loss in the market would be purely financial. Now she saw it was so much more. Things had grown so bad that bankers were jumping from windows rather than face a financially decimated future.

She had to get out of here, to get home. She was worried about Jake. Maybe she could reach him on the phone. Given the sense of importance he derived from his recently earned wealth, she couldn’t help but fear that he might be among the bodies on the street. She had to remind him that money wasn’t everything. She had to tell him her secret. To assure him they still had a tiny thread of hope.

1926

Three Years before the Crash

CHAPTER ONE

Bea Abramovitz knew only a little about wealth. Mostly she knew that other people had it and her family didn’t—and that her mother and her brother cared a lot about gaining it, and she, not so much. For her, Wall Street wasn’t about getting rich; it was about numbers, and patterns, and strategy. And she knew a lot about that.

Bea wasn’t yet an expert, but as she walked purposefully down Broad Street, she knew to ignore the curb sellers shouting offerings of nonsensical investments like “shares of a cocker spaniel for only one dollar.” They hawked things only an ignorant speculator or pure gambler would buy. The stocks that mattered were the ones traded inside the actual New York Stock Exchange, not on the street corners outside. Behind those doors, ownership of the new America—railroads, steel manufacturers, and innovators like DuPont and Westinghouse Electric—could be bought and sold. That was the place where, if all went well today, the rest of her life would begin.

Bea thought she was used to the city’s bustling streets, having spent her childhood helping her father sell fruit and vegetables at his pushcart on Orchard Street. She hadn’t realized that her chaotic neighborhood on a Friday afternoon, with women hurrying to gather their last jars of schmaltz, bargain for extra bones with their beef, and collect a few more apples before the sun set, was like a peaceful sabbath Saturday morning compared to Wall Street.

People rushed in all directions: dense throngs of men in dark suits and bowler hats, women in smart drop-waist dresses with colorful cloches pulled tight over their bobbed hair. Bea sped with the crowds past the pillared marble facade of the Federal Building, preparing to make her exit from the steady flow of foot traffic. She stepped out of the rush at the place where the perpendicular street signs above her head read “Broad” and “Wall.”

She had arrived.

Like its position at the physical center of the financial district at Twenty-Three Wall Street, the House of Morgan was, itself, the very symbol of the world of banking. So much so that it was this building that had been bombed to protest American capitalism six years before, killing thirty people and injuring hundreds. That didn’t scare Bea because, while the building itself still bore a few pockmarks from the explosion, it remained the most prestigious and powerful place to be on all of Wall Street. And she, Bea Abramovitz, was the only girl in the entire Hunter College class of ’25 lucky enough to get an interview there. Never mind that she was the only one interested in trying.

Bea had learned about the stock market from her father, Lew. She’d always loved numbers, unlike her twin brother, Jake. So, when she showed an interest in her father’s hobby of studying the market in the financial pages of the daily English-language newspapers, he encouraged her to join him. He taught her about the Dow—an index of twenty of the most prominent companies listed on the stock exchange—and the two of them would discuss where it closed each day or the specifics of some company’s stock that had risen exceptionally high or fallen precipitously low.

For Bea, what started as a way to spend time with her father quickly became a personal passion. The more she followed stocks, the more she recognized patterns and could predict what would happen. By the time she was in high school, she and her father had a running competition to see whose hypothetical investment portfolios performed better. Bea won more often than her father did, a point of pride for both of them.

Sure, the stock market wasn’t actually relevant to immigrants on the Lower East Side who didn’t have the time or money to buy shares of America’s great companies, but for Lew, studying the markets was his way to dream of reclaiming all that her parents had lost in their flight from Russia to America. To imagine that he might be the economist he’d been studying to become back home, instead of the produce peddler on Orchard Street that he’d been all of Bea’s life. For Bea, it grew from a thrilling game into a singular goal: by the time she started college, her intention was to make investing her job, as a broker on Wall Street.

This would have been realistic for Jake. He went to City College, the all-male school where finance classes were plentiful. But she went to Hunter, the all-female equivalent. And while both schools were renowned for academic excellence, the assumption was that most Hunter girls, if they didn’t simply marry upon graduation, would become teachers or secretaries.

Bea knew she was lucky to have the opportunity to go to college at all. Unlike the other exclusive women’s schools, such as Barnard or Smith, Hunter not only was open to young women of all backgrounds but also offered this education free to any girl who had the grades to qualify. Still, no matter how smart they were, no Hunter girl had ever worked as a stockbroker. If this was what Bea wanted, she’d have to create the opportunity herself.

School had always come easily to her, so from the start, she took the most challenging courses available. By the middle of her last year of school, Bea had taken every math, statistics, and economics class Hunter offered that might have relevance to the market, yet none of her professors had even mentioned the word stock. Bea wasn’t one to give up easily, but her last semester of school was about to start, and she didn’t feel any closer to her goal of becoming a broker than she had when college began. That was when Jake came home with news that would change everything.

“Hey, BB, too bad you can’t take classes over at City College—some of my pals are studying investing there this semester. Apparently the professor’s some former stockbroker who made it big before the war.”

This was it. This was Bea’s chance to really learn about Wall Street. “Are you going to take the class?” she asked hopefully.

“You know I’m awful at that stuff. I don’t have your mind for numbers.”

“But I could help you. I want to learn this anyway, so I would be happy to do your work for you. You’d just have to take notes so I could see the lessons.”

“I can’t. I’ve got a full course load already. I don’t have time to go, even if you do all the work. I’m just trying to get school over with as soon as I can. I’m already more than a year behind you with your crazy double course load.”

“Please, Jake, this could be my chance. And don’t you think you owe me this? You wouldn’t even be at City College if it hadn’t been for me doing all your homework in high school.”

“You’re right.” He chuckled. “Maybe I should’ve done it myself so I wouldn’t have to be there now.”

Bea shook her head and rolled her eyes. The fact was that Jake wouldn’t have gone to college at all if their father hadn’t insisted. Jake wasn’t bookish like Bea. It wasn’t that he lacked intelligence, but he didn’t have the interest or discipline for schoolwork; his strength was with people. Jake had always been able to charm anyone into doing almost anything. Her mother, Pauline, loved to talk about how many more potatoes Jake could sell to Mrs. Millowitz than Lew or Bea ever could, “just with a few words and a smile.” Still, their father insisted that he go to college because “a free education is a gift that will keep giving for the rest of your life.”

“Listen, my taking the class isn’t going to help you anyway. Don’t you know it’s connections you need to make it on Wall Street?”

Bea considered this for a moment. “Well, can you introduce me to the professor then?”

“Are you kidding? I don’t know the guy. Let’s see what my pals say about him after a few weeks of class; maybe then I can work something out.”

Bea didn’t want to wait. She had decided that this class, this professor, was her chance to get to Wall Street. And if Jake wouldn’t help her, maybe her dean, Mrs. Bauer, could. Bea had met with Mrs. Bauer periodically over the years she was at Hunter, usually when the poet-turned-administrator called Bea in to discuss her peculiar course selection. While she didn’t necessarily share Bea’s predilection for math, she’d always been supportive of Bea’s desire to challenge herself. Bea hoped that would still be the case. She went to Mrs. Bauer and proposed the unimaginable: that she go to City College and take the finance class herself.

Samantha Greene Woodruff has a BA in history from Wesleyan University and an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business. She spent fifteen years at Viacom’s Nickelodeon before leaving to parent her two young children. After studying at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, Woodruff completed her first novel, The Lobotomist’s Wife, which was a #1 Amazon bestseller and Amazon First Reads pick. She has contributed an essay entitled “Jew-ish” about her lifelong conflicted relationship with Judaism. to the essay collection, On Being Jewish Now (Zibby Books, November 1, 2024). All proceeds from the book will go to Artists Against Antisemitism, a non-profit founded in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks in Israel. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, Writer’s Digest, Female First, Read 650, and more. Woodruff lives in southern Connecticut with her husband, two children, two dogs, and a small reptile zoo. For more information visit www.samanthawoodruff.com or follow her @samgwoodruffauthor on Facebook and Instagram or @SWoodruffAuthor on X.

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What are five tiny delights that lift your spirits and make you happy?

• Sunrises

• Chocolate chips (a mix of white, milk and dark)

• Music

• Yoga

• A walk

What are five tiny JEWISH delights that lift your spirits and make you happy?

• Listening to my kids recite the Hebrew prayer as they light the Hanukkah candles

• Cinnamon challah

• Brisket

• Breakfast (even when I don’t fast)

• My tiny Star of David necklace