Lady at the O.K. Corral (3 page)

Every mile she rode toward Tombstone took her farther from San Francisco and from her life as the daughter of Sophia Lewis and Hyman Marcus, Jewish immigrants who had arrived separately in New York around 1854, escaping the political upheaval and limited opportunities in their native towns in the province of Posen. A large Jewish community, Posen had been partitioned from Poland in the late eighteenth century and absorbed into Prussia, which would eventually become the core of modern Germany.

Prussian policy rewarded assimilation. Jews were encouraged to convert to Christianity with the carrot of citizenship and the stick of discrimination; many Jewish schools were closed down, and Jews were severely restricted in where they could live, work, and marry. Other Jews were emancipated in 1820—but not the Jews from the annexed region, who were denied citizenship for another generation.

Class distinctions evolved within the newly expanded population. Some stereotypes came from within the Jewish community itself. German Jews sought to project an image that was secular, sophisticated, and upwardly mobile, in stark contrast to poorer, less educated and worldly Prussian Jews who spoke mostly Yiddish and were more likely to stay stuck at the bottom of the social ladder. Craftsmen or small merchants, they were also most vulnerable to dislocation in a rapidly industrializing European economy.

In the minds of those given to labels, these Jews were less likely to succeed, more likely to be disparaged as “Polacks.” It was a stubborn prejudice that would survive well enough to be transplanted into the soil of another continent.

Hyman Marcus had every reason to leave Prussia. His own father, the baker Moses Marcus, had probably received citizenship in 1834, but Hyman faced an uncertain future. He could follow his father's profession in their town or move to a larger city—perhaps Breslau or Berlin. Or he could start over in England or the New World. Like thousands of other Jews from Prussia, he chose America.

Hyman booked passage to New York, the most popular and the easiest destination to arrange, even for families or women traveling on their own. Soon after he arrived, he met and married the widow Sophia Lewis, who had emigrated a few years before with her daughter, Rebecca. Sophia and Hyman were married around 1855, and three children followed: Nathan in 1857, Josephine in 1860, and Henrietta in 1864.

Despite the strangeness of their new country, Hyman and Sophia were comforted by the presence of many other immigrants. They probably settled in the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan's Lower East Side, where they would have found the streets filled with Jews speaking German and Yiddish, including many from Posen. The Jewish population of New York City more than tripled in the 1850s, reaching about 60,000 by the end of the decade. Hyman would have been relieved to see an abundance of jobs in food production, especially for bakers and confectioners. One local directory shows that there were nine Jewish bakers preparing “real kosher” matzos for Passover in 1859.

However, conditions in pre–Civil War years were primitive and dangerous. In Five Points, families crowded together in slums with backyard wooden privies. Outbreaks of typhoid were common. The city's highest mortality rates were of immigrant children under the age of five. There were public schools, but many immigrant children did not attend classes at all, and were taught at home, or worked side by side with their parents. New York City had a police department, but no professional firefighters.

The most influential forces in the community, next to the synagogues, were the ten Jewish newspapers that recorded births, deaths, marriages, political meetings, cultural events, and advertisements, vying with Civil War coverage, and with exciting letters from transplanted New Yorkers who had made their way to San Francisco. The West loomed large in the imagination of all Americans and must have been particularly irresistible for immigrant Jews who had come searching for the promised land of economic opportunity, social mobility, and political power, and had not found it in New York. Now San Francisco beckoned to them as a remarkable Jewish success story.

San Francisco sprang up as a child of the 1849 gold rush. When the output of California gold, so extraordinary in the early years, began to decline, San Francisco thrived because of its harbor and geography, evolving quickly from a village of shanties and wood-frame buildings to a metropolis with a diversified economy that could support a large workforce of skilled and unskilled laborers. San Francisco became the home of an affluent and influential Jewish community, which included retail businesses founded by Levi Strauss and Solomon Gump, as well as the founders of the Wells Fargo Bank and Lazard Frères. Although smaller in absolute numbers than the New York Jewish community, San Francisco boasted a similarly glittering cast of entrepreneurs in retailing and manufacturing, bankers and stockbrokers, and represented a wider range of Jewish economic interests, from fur trading in Alaska to wheat farming, sugar mills, and vineyards.

With arrivals from England, Australia, Holland, and Russia, as well as the large representation from Germany and Prussia, Jews created a vibrant cultural and religious life within the city, and constructed a sturdy social safety net for those less fortunate, including orphan asylums and services for the elderly. There were five Jewish newspapers, and Jews were active in political life, electing merchant Abraham Labatt as alderman for the new city of San Francisco in 1851. Considerable chest-thumping proclaimed San Franciscan Jews to be the most prominent and prosperous group of Jews in the world, so integrated into San Francisco's commercial life that steamer service—the city's vital link to the rest of the world—was suspended on the Jewish high holidays. An enthusiastic editorial in the
Daily Alta California
lauded Jews for being true Californians, and congratulated the non-Jewish Californians, since “no other part of the world can instance a similar act of liberality.”

With this encouraging track record of tolerance, plus a temperate climate and booming economy, San Francisco had much to offer an immigrant Jewish family. Hyman Marcus had achieved only modest success as a baker, and he and Sophia were ready to leave the filth and the grinding poverty of Five Points. They had already made the far more difficult decision to leave Europe; the second leg of their family voyage at least would not require another new language and a new continent. It was not uncommon for young and energetic immigrant families to make multiple moves. In fact, rate wars between rival railroads and steamship companies made it actually cheaper for some families to move than to pay the rent.

The Marcus family made the bold choice to continue west across a continent that was still decades away from regular train service. Together with some 40,000 other people who would travel to California in the late 1860s, they arrived in San Francisco in time to be counted for the 1870 census. While Sophia Lewis's obituary would later identify her as a California pioneer who sailed around the Horn, the family most likely crossed the Isthmus of Panama, which replaced the dangerous eight-week-long all-sea voyage to become the major artery connecting the East Coast to California and the primary route for transporting gold, mail, news, and packages. Adult passengers watched the scantily dressed Panamanian natives through the train windows, marveled at the rain forests, and exclaimed at the deep canyons and unfamiliar flora and fauna.

Once the travelers reached the western coast of Central America, they boarded another overcrowded steamship. Josephine, then about eight years old, remembered almost nothing of the journey. Since she tried to eliminate any impression that her family was ever poor, she would have been silent anyway about an unpleasant three weeks in steerage.

The San Francisco that greeted the Marcus family was still recovering from the 1868 earthquake, but its economy was robust. The chaotic boomtown atmosphere of the gold rush years was gone; schools, community centers, and restaurants replaced brothels and saloons. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 would soon connect San Francisco even more to the outside world. The city was growing up, but it retained a strong entrepreneurial spirit.

Although Josephine's new neighborhood was a step up from Five Points, middle-class stability and status still eluded the Marcus family. Josephine would later claim that her father had a “prosperous mercantile business” that gave her a “comfortable and prosperous” home, but all evidence points to a more precarious existence. Hyman was still a baker. Local directories show that the family moved frequently—at least six times in their first ten years in San Francisco, all within the lower-class sections of Ward 4.

Not all Jews were so sure that the wealth and influence of San Francisco was a good thing. Among the most fascinating portraits of nineteenth-century San Francisco is that of Israel Joseph Benjamin. Born in 1818 in the province of Moldavia (now Moldava and part of Romania), Benjamin had some commercial failures before seizing on the idea that he might emulate the great medieval traveler Benjamin of Tudela and wander the world as an itinerant preacher and commentator on contemporary Jewish life. Supported by donations and hosted by curious local leaders, he traveled extensively throughout the Near East, North Africa, and Europe before sailing to the United States.

Benjamin saw much to admire in the thriving cultural and intellectual life of American cities. But he was unsparing in his contempt for their emphasis on commercial success and indifference to high culture and scholarship. Repelled by the materialism he saw, he concluded that neglect of learning was the source of all American misfortunes, not only those of Jews. “Will America be able to become a nation of princes without the education of a prince?” he asked rhetorically. In his view, young people who were brought up to be merchants, bankers, farmers, and mechanics were not destined to become independent, compassionate, or intellectual.

Benjamin devoted one of his longest stays to San Francisco. He observed that the pinnacle of society belonged to the Germans, and the lowest class rungs were the provinces of Polish Jews. He was amazed to discover that when a major fire destroyed two streets and eight large warehouses in San Francisco, the Eureka Benevolent Association, one of several Jewish social services organizations, turned its back on Polish Jews made homeless by the fire. Benjamin related the sad tale of a religious Polish Jew who applied for help to feed his many children. Refused by the board of directors—which included mostly Germans and Frenchmen—he went to an American Christian and told him the story; according to Benjamin, “that person went to the president of the society and shamed him into giving the Pole money.”

SOON AFTER THE
Marcus family arrived in San Francisco, Josephine's half sister Rebecca married Aaron Wiener, a clothing salesman who was also from Prussia. Josephine never forgot the sight of her father's stovepipe hat and long tails, her mother's wine-colored moiré, the bride's pale silk lavender dress trimmed with white satin, and her own yellow high-button shoes. She recalled her errand to purchase “diamond dust” to sprinkle over the bride's elaborate, perfumed coiffure. Young Josephine could not resist opening and sampling the precious powder, which spilled out of the package and blew away.

Josephine found the strict discipline of school disagreeable, and was not much of a student; her sister Henrietta, known to all as Hattie, was the family's star scholar. The sisters' education was, however, a sign that the family had finally risen to the middle class. Neither Josephine nor Hattie was put to work to support the family, nor is there evidence that Mrs. Marcus worked outside the home.

As a child, Josephine was infatuated with the stage; the abundance of San Francisco theaters and their low ticket prices made it a favorite pastime. Among her closest playmates were the Belasco daughters, whose brother David was already on his way to becoming one of the most famous playwrights of his era. It was a heady time for Jewish performers like Adah Isaac Menckens, who stunned even worldly San Franciscans with her onstage appearance in flesh-colored tights. Rebecca took Josephine and Henrietta to the opening of the Academy of Music, never dreaming that its owner, Elias Johnson (Lucky) Baldwin, would one day be Josephine's close acquaintance. San Franciscans also loved artists and art; one painting by the Jewish artist Toby Rosenthal was so popular that thousands of people lined up to pay twenty-five cents to see it. When it was temporarily stolen, people filed past to pay their respects to an empty picture frame (it was eventually returned).

Josephine's rebelliousness began to emerge in small ways, such as having her ears pierced by her Chilean classmate's
abuela
, though her mother had forbidden it many times in the past. Josephine dragged Hattie with her, taking advantage of the young girl's admiration and willingness to follow her older sister blindly. Looking back on her adolescent self, Josephine acknowledged that she needed discipline, but chafed against it. She contrasted the “tolerant and gay populace” to the “merciless and self-righteous” child-rearing philosophy embodied in the public schools.

Even if her father had risen more quickly beyond his humble origins and lowly profession, even if they'd had servants and membership in the right clubs, the Marcus family would still have been outsiders in the upper reaches of San Francisco Jewish society, where a less than perfect German accent signaled “second class.” Everywhere around Josephine were intense signs of the social stratification that determined one's future. The odds were stacked against her: she was no longer the poorest of the poor, but she was not likely to win a German husband. She went to the wrong schools and was invited to the wrong parties. Nor did she have the talent or sheer will to break through all those barriers and still distinguish herself as an educator, lawyer, artist, or political activist, careers pursued by some Polish Jewish women in San Francisco.

Seeing the signs of a surging American economy and upward mobility all around her, a proud and energetic young woman like Josephine would have resented the assumption that she was inferior by birth. How ironic that in a city with an impressive lack of anti-Semitism, the Jewish community could be blamed for imposing antique prejudices on its own members. For some notable successes such as David Belasco or Gertrude Stein, San Francisco would be celebrated as the epitome of bohemian sophistication and freedom, exotic and freewheeling. For Josephine, San Francisco meant a predictable, dull life of lowered expectations.