Famous Nathan (4 page)

“On the train, there was a long bench from one end to the other. I was lucky with the policemen when they came to check to see if anybody was crossing the border without papers. I would look down the train car, and when I saw that who was coming was wearing boots, polished boots, when I saw one foot, a polished shoe, I knew it was a policeman.” He would bolt from the train and reboard by a different door.

Nathan later remembered disembarking in Frankfurt early in the morning, a stranger in a strange land, admiring the gardens, the fountains, but having only a “penny and a half” left to his name. All he could afford was a soft pretzel. So he bought a pretzel and went to a fountain to fill up on water.

“I slept in a synagogue. I slept on the floor. I couldn't read, I couldn't write. I had nothing. I slept in my shoes.”

From the mouths of everyone around him, he heard the same word … America. Emigration was like a fever, everywhere in the air. Newspaper ads listed daily departures of passenger ships. His brother Israel, already in New York, wrote to Joseph, encouraging him and Nathan to make the crossing. Behind them lay poverty and war. There was no reason to turn back. The whole Handwerker family was either moving or planning to move.

Nathan was in Germany, but he wanted to be in America. “I was dreaming about it.” Joseph Handwerker was restless, too, and soon moved on from Frankfurt to Berlin, and then on to Antwerp, Belgium. Nathan followed, having to cross a series of borders to get there. Guard after guard failed to detect the young Galician refugee.

“Angels covered me up,” Nathan said about his journey. “That's the only way I can see it. Four days sitting on the train. Three borders. The German border, Luxembourg, and Belgium. And nobody asked me where I'm going. When I got off the train, I knew they wouldn't send me back. And I bent down and I kissed the sidewalk.”

In Antwerp, Nathan applied himself to building up a nest egg for the cross-Atlantic journey. He was tireless, going door to door in the diamond district of the busy Belgium port city to sell his services as a cobbler. “I want to make shoes,” he told anyone who would listen. “New shoes, men's and ladies' shoes, and soles and heels. You'll be satisfied.”

Scrimping and saving, in half a year he managed to build up a bankroll of several hundred Austro-Hungarian kronen, the gold coins of his countrymen that he could easily change for any other currency. He kept his money in the bank. His brother Joseph was not so frugal. He got swept up in the nightlife of the city, going out almost every night while Nathan stayed home and worked at the cobbler bench.

Both brothers were making more money than they ever could have dreamed back home in Galicia. But only one kept his eye on the prize. “My brother Joe, when he went to a restaurant, he used to eat the biggest piece of fish, the best. He spent money on gambling, on going out, on girls.”

After six months in Antwerp, Nathan was ready. He headed off to join the oldest Handwerker brother, Israel, in New York City. A steerage ticket on a passenger ship to America cost him one hundred of his hard-earned kronen. He traded in another thirty kronen for American dollars, spending money for the New World. Nathan thus took his place amid the single greatest wave of emigration in human history.

*   *   *

On Saturday, March 16, 1912, nineteen-year-old Nathan Handwerker boarded the SS
Neckar
in Rotterdam, Netherlands, bound for New York City. (Once again, he had to manage a border crossing to get to his departure port, and once again, angels had covered him up from the hostile eyes of the authorities.)

“I could buy a ticket, I found out, for a certain amount, around a hundred dollars American. I needed twenty-five more dollars for when I arrived at New York, or else immigration wouldn't let me in. I know about this since I talked to people. I had to find out myself where I am and where I'm going.”

His brother Joseph cooked Nathan a chicken for the journey, using a lot of garlic, and also bought him oranges and salami. Nathan felt safe enough that he could travel with a valise now, so he packed up all the foodstuffs into the suitcase with his only suit.

SS
Neckar,
one of four Rhine-class steamships running on the Norddeutscher Lloyd line, had four decks and space for almost three thousand passengers: 140 first class, 150 second class, and 2,600 third class.
Neckar
was actually an old cattle ship repurposed for the booming trans-Atlantic passenger trade. At least in the crowded quarters of steerage, the livestock idea fit perfectly.

When Nathan boarded the SS
Neckar,
he quickly realized he was out of his element.

“I didn't understand what they were talking,” he recalled, describing his inability to understand the instructions of the ship's crew. “They were taking away my valise with the food and put it in the checking room. A lot of people are going in the same boat, so we had three people to a room, three beds, one on top of another.”

He had heard of thieves and pickpockets victimizing passengers on these Atlantic crossings, the poor immigrants arriving in America robbed of what little they had. “So I grabbed the top bed. If the thief is going to rob me, he has to go to the top.” He hid his money in his sock and once again slept in his shoes.

Joe's garlic chicken was even then rotting somewhere in the baggage hold of the ship. Nathan never saw his valise again. He eyed the food offered to steerage passengers like him. Not liking the look of the meat, which he immediately judged to come from horse, not cow, he chose the herring instead. For the whole crossing, he survived on that, bread, and potatoes (“They gave us them with the peels”).

“The only thing I had to buy was a glass of beer for a nickel. I was afraid to take out a dollar because they shouldn't see I had money. Every morning, I went out to the deck, and I take off my shoes. Because the money I had hidden there smelled, and I aired it out.”

At the SS
Neckar
's steady pace of thirteen and a half knots, it took Nathan twenty-two days to cross the Atlantic. He spent his time perfecting his signature. He did not yet know the Latin alphabet and still had no ability to read or write at all. He had someone write his name for him. Then he carefully learned to imitate the letters, practicing over and over.

Also on the same sea that spring, making the journey at a higher latitude, was the mighty RMS
Titanic
. Aboard were many of the richest and most celebrated people of the age, but also 1,706 steerage passengers who more resembled Nathan Handwerker than Jacob Astor or Benjamin Guggenheim.

Nathan's initial sighting of the American shoreline might very well have been a spray of white light on the horizon. The illuminated wonders of Coney Island's amusement parks could be seen from thirty miles out at sea and were often the first glimpse of the New World for immigrants nearing the end of their exhausting transatlantic journeys.

Neckar
arrived in New York Harbor on April 7, 1912, an Easter Sunday, the sixth day of Passover that year. Manhattan was not yet a crowded forest of skyscrapers, but for an immigrant from the countryside of Poland, the view was still impressive. Dominating the New York skyline was the ornate, still-under-construction Woolworth Building—at 792 feet, the tallest structure in the world.

The weather on the day of Nathan's arrival, according to newspaper reports, was “charming,” the warmest Easter it had been in forty-two years. President Taft played his first game of golf of the season that weekend. Oarsmen were out on the Harlem River. The holiday crowds “filled Fifth Avenue with color.”

Nathan saw none of it. U.S. immigration authorities allowed first- and second-class passengers to disembark when the boat docked that Sunday at a West Side pier. Third-class passengers like Nathan were made to wait until the next day, when they would be ferried to the immigration facility on Ellis Island. Later that afternoon, with the SS
Neckar
still docked and Nathan still on board, the weather turned nasty. What was termed in the press to be “a mini-hurricane” or “a gale” rocked New York Harbor.

Back in Europe, war clouds had continued to build. Russian armies mobilized. Serbian troops laid plans for an autumn offensive that would carve up huge tracts of the Balkans for annexation. War was fast becoming modernized, with the first aerial bombing (of Turkish troops by an Italian dirigible) accomplished that March. The next month in Moscow, the first issue of the underground organ of the Communist Party,
Pravda,
was distributed, only to be immediately confiscated and burned by Tsarist police.

That was the world from which Nathan Handwerker had escaped. He had gotten out just in time. As James Joyce said about his hero Stephen Dedalus (writing during the same period as Nathan's miraculous journey), history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. Now at last Nathan had done so. He had arrived in America, the land of his dreams.

His difficulties began almost immediately.

 

3

Luncheonette Man

“All you have to say is, ‘All hot—get 'em while they're hot!'” Nathan, age twenty, far right.

THE FERRY RIDE
from Manhattan's West Side docks to Ellis Island represented a last ordeal in an immigrant journey packed full of such trials. Immigration authorities transferred steerage passengers—so-called because their cramped quarters were often in the ship's stern, where the steering mechanism for the old sailing ships had once been located—to ferries a few hundred at a time. The ferry fleet was made up of small, flat-bottomed crafts designed to be able to negotiate the shallow waters around Ellis.

Facilities on the boats were few and crude. After transatlantic voyages that had lasted three weeks, passenger hygiene failed to maintain a high standard. Ship captains crammed the Ellis ferries full and then idled for hours offshore, waiting for processing backlogs to ease on the island. The decks were crowded. Immigrants often bulked themselves up by wearing their whole wardrobes in layers. Memoirs and oral histories repeatedly cite the stench and misery of the three-mile trip across the harbor.

Although the weather that Monday of Nathan's transit had turned cold, his memory of his trip to Ellis Island was tinged with fondness for the bounty of the new country: “The first nickel I spent on the boat that took me to Ellis Island, I bought a pie for a nickel. A whole pie. And I don't remember what to drink.”

From 1901 to 1914, an average of five thousand newcomers a day—and sometimes as many as eight thousand a day—took the same ferry ride to Ellis. Nathan Handwerker arrived near the tail end of America's second great wave of immigration. The first wave, primarily from famine-struck Ireland, came aboard the “coffin ships” of the mid-nineteenth century. The second lasted from the turn of the century to the beginning of the First World War. During this period, a million immigrants a year passed through Ellis, two-thirds of whom shared backgrounds in eastern, central, or southern Europe.

The U.S. Congress initially placed immigration regulation and policy under the purview of the federal Treasury Department, the focus being the potential revenue these aspiring citizens would bring to their adopted homeland. But in 1903, the Bureau of Immigration was reassigned to what was then called the Department of Commerce and Labor. The turn-of-the-century influx of European immigrants gave rise to various concerns. Did the new arrivals bring disease? Would they spread their strange customs and their radical politics? Would immigrants flood the labor market, or would hardworking Americans be forced to support them as public wards?

Ellis Island's immigrant inspection station was conceived at least in part as a dam against the flood. We tend to forget that Ellis could be a place not only of reception but of rejection, too. Overall, only a small number of those processed—around 2 percent—were denied entry and sent home. Still, anxiety over possible deportation remained a common theme in the recollections of many new arrivals. Ellis soon earned the nickname “the Island of Tears.”

After the wait offshore—at times hours long and seemingly interminable—the ferries from the West Side docks pulled up to the Ellis Island wharf and discharged their passengers. The inspection station's main building, just over a decade old when Nathan first saw it, was designed to impress. The French Renaissance rock pile represented a formal gateway to America, Emma Lazarus's “golden door,” or what another commentary called “the Plymouth Rock of its day.” The redbrick façade featured quoins, elaborate corner belvederes, and three arched entrances. The structure's exaggerated profile lent the building distinction even when viewed at a distance, as it so often was, across the water.

Inside, a gauntlet. Medical division staff members from the United States Public Health Service posted themselves along the stairway to the Great Hall on the second floor. They subjected each new arrival to a blazingly fast, six-second medical examination. Shortness of breath while climbing the stairs singled an immigrant out as suffering from lung or heart conditions. The uniformed doctors peeled back eyelids with metal buttonhooks or hairpins, looking for conjunctivitis. Any sign of infectious disease or disability brought out the chalk, and the health inspectors marked the suspect with stigma-like symbols:
G
for goiter,
PG
for pregnancy,
X
for “mental defects.”