Hassenfeld Brothers

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a toy box opening, a wind-up spring)
HAS-BRO. Two brothers and a shortening.

[Verse 1]
Henry and Helal Hassenfeld, out of Poland, into Providence,
selling textile remnants — literally the offcuts, the leftovers —
then pencil cases made out of the leftovers, then pencils,
then, because they had the boxes, toys to put inside the boxes.
Hassenfeld Brothers. That's the name above the door.
Nineteen twenty-three. Rhode Island. Two immigrants.

[Chorus]
HASBRO! It's HASsenfeld BROthers, squeezed!
It's two men's surname and their relationship, abbreviated!
The second biggest toy company that has ever existed
is a contraction of a family, and nobody hears it!
Hassenfeld Brothers. Say the whole thing.
It's four more syllables. It's not too much to ask.

[Verse 2]
And the pencil case is the part I keep returning to —
that the empire is downstream of a box that held some pencils,
which was downstream of the offcuts of somebody else's cloth,
which is what you sell when you have arrived with nothing at all.
Every enormous thing starts as the leftovers of a smaller thing.
That's not a moral. That's just how it happened here.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And there's a warmth in this one that the others mostly lack:
no feud, no crash, no clerk mishearing anyone,
no daughter handed something she could not refuse.
Just two brothers who put "brothers" in the name on purpose
because the fact that they were brothers was the point of it.
The shortening kept the brothers in. That's something.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the toy box closing)
Hassenfeld Brothers.
The BRO is the brothers. It was always the brothers.