The Family (7 page)

The end was a rapid blur. The last walk to synagogue. The last reading from the Torah. The last tears shed at the graves of the two babies Gishe Sore had lost and buried in the Rakov cemetery. The last meal in the creaking wooden house by the lake. The last breath of the blue and white lilacs that bloomed in profusion all over town. Finally the day of departure was upon them. A horse and wagon dragged them through green meadows and dark pine woods to the rail station at Olechnowicze. A train took them northwest toward the coast. There was a fifteen-minute stop at the Smargon station, and the uncle (but not the aunt) came to the platform to bid them farewell and praise young Chaim Yasef for his hard work and ambition. Like everyone, the uncle said he hoped to visit them one day. In America.

The train rattled through Vilna with its many magnificent synagogues and narrow streets teeming with Jewish workers, teachers, beggars, and revolutionaries. Through Kaunas crouched behind its immense brick fortresses. Through the grain fields that in a decade would cease to be Russia. As the land flattened and the trees grew stubbier, they could sense the pull of the sea. And then, all at once, through the train windows, there it
was—the Baltic—430 miles across from Stockholm to Petersburg, tinged with gray even at the balmy cusp of summer, as if winter were curled beneath its surface.

No time to marvel at the miracle of horizonless water or explore the beckoning chaos of the dockside streets of Libau. The Russian-American Line's
Russia
—a sleek black barracuda of a ship—was waiting to carry them to New York.

It was the season of lingering twilight and the heavy perfume of fruit trees. But no flower's scent could penetrate the acrid smoke rising from the
Russia
's funnels or the reek of oil, wet cloth, rancid food, and vomit that permeated its steerage. Europe faded to a brown smudge. The continent had been the family's home for a thousand years—probably more. None of them ever again set foot on Russian soil.

G
ishe Sore thought she knew about America from her children's letters, from the bits and pieces that appeared in the Yiddish and Russian newspapers, from the gossip she picked up in the store and the rumors that spread from neighbor to neighbor. But now she saw that she hadn't understood the first thing. Who knew that New York was islands—one tiny island for the colossal statue, another for the immigrants, a long narrow blade of an island for the millions of people who had come before her and the new ones pouring in beside her from every corner of the world?

The crossing in the
Russia
's third-class compartment had made them all sick. The ship stank; the food was worse than anything she cooked. But now that they had trudged up and down the endless stairs in the palace of the immigrants, had their eyes and hair examined, sworn they were neither bigamists nor anarchists, received the coveted stamp on their papers, found their luggage, piled through the door marked “Push to New York,” and fallen into the arms of their American children, Gishe Sore's insides had settled at last. Now, on the morning of June 1, 1909, with her shoes touching American soil for the first time, she was terrified.

Her American children—not children anymore but glossy adults in expensive clothes—took charge of everything. Gishe Sore let herself be
guided to the dock at the edge of Ellis Island, where a ferry was waiting to take them across the harbor to Manhattan. She looked where the American children pointed. She listened to them explain: that was New York City—Manhattan—their new home. She stared at the treeless forest rising from the point of land surrounded by slopping brown water. To her it didn't look like a place where people lived, but she submitted. What choice did she have? One hour in America and already everything was topsy-turvy: the children led, the parents shuffled along behind.

The ferry docked at the Battery and all the new immigrants spilled out with their luggage, their baskets, their screaming children, their heavy reeking foreign clothes. Gishe Sore waited and sweated while the American children found a taxicab. It took an eternity to cover the couple of miles from Ellis Island to their flat. She gazed through the cab window at the shadowed canyons where dark-suited people milled on every corner and rushed along the margins of every street and disappeared into or emerged from gaping holes in the pavement. The canyon walls shrank block by block as they inched their way across the tip of Manhattan—but as the buildings became humbler, the life on the streets grew denser. They passed beneath the ramps leading up to the Brooklyn Bridge and crossed into the Lower East Side. East Broadway, Catherine Street, Allen Street, Henry, Madison—
their street
. Instead of houses set in fenced gardens, there were just buildings, ugly brown and gray and black buildings, all more or less the same height, all perforated by dirty opaque rectangular windows, all pushed together with no air or light between them. Every street, every housefront, every roof, every corner was perfectly, drably geometrical—not a curve or curl to soften the right angles—but the effect was shoddy, haphazard, sprawling, and dirty beyond belief. Hebrew letters painted on awnings and stenciled on shopwindows brought no comfort—the signs were too pressing, the messages too clamorous. Outside the storefronts more stuff for sale spilled out onto the streets—food, clothing, household items, cast-off junk heaped on pushcarts and rickety tables or hauled around by plodding blinkered horses. The ugly buildings were defaced by ugly grillwork—fire escapes strewn with laundry, children, boxes, crates, stray bundles, broken furniture, more junk. Not a green leaf or patch of brown earth anywhere; not a wisp of shade in the profligate light of June, not a path to
walk down or a bench to sit on and chat with the neighbors. And such neighbors—in such numbers. Gishe Sore would be lost forever the first time she ventured out alone. She would be robbed, cheated, pushed into an alley, or tripped down cellar stairs. She would die and no one would ever find her.

They pulled up to 195 Madison Street—a tall narrow six-story redbrick and limestone-trimmed tenement house indistinguishable from all the tenement houses on all the other streets of tenements. The bars and ladders of a fire escape ran up the left side of the building; sooty stone scrolls, shields, and flowers framed the second- and third-story windows.
This was the place where they had to live?
Two blocks from the commercial madness of East Broadway; two blocks from the filthy snout of the
East River, smelling of fish, ships, and garbage; three blocks from the brain-rattling racket of the elevated train; three blocks from the playground of the Henry Street Settlement; practically in the shadow of the construction site of the twin-towered Manhattan Bridge. Every three blocks they passed more people than the entire population of Rakov.
Half a million Jews packed the one and a half square miles of the Lower East Side in 1909: 702 people per acre in the densest acres. It was one of the most crowded places on earth, and all of them seemed to be swarming outdoors on the June afternoon that Gishe Sore and her family arrived. Aside from the crisscross steel girders of the Manhattan Bridge at the end of the street, it was all tenement houses as far as she could see. Tenements and bodies. In every room of every building, bodies fought for a ray of light and a sip of air. Bodies slept four to a bed and on two chairs pushed together; bodies sat hunched over sewing machines in parlors and sunless back bedrooms and at kitchen tables heaped with cloth and thread; bodies ate, slept, woke, and cleared out for the next shift of bodies to cycle through. Toilets in the hall or in courtyard outhouses; windows opening, if they opened at all, onto fetid air shafts; no privacy; no escape from the racket and smell of neighbors; no relief from summer heat or blasting winter furnaces.
This was the place her American children had brought them to live?

They climbed, the seven of them clattering up through the stink of chicken fat, fried onions, boiled cabbage, and overflowing toilets. The stairs were dark and battered. They stopped on the third floor, and one of the
American children opened one of the doors. Their flat was at the rear, facing north into the rear windows of another tenement building across a tiny garbage-strewn courtyard. Four dark tiny rooms with
350 square feet between them ran one after another to the building's back wall; only the room at the end of the chain had windows that admitted any light. There was a sink in the kitchen but no hot water. They shut the door but they couldn't shut out the smell or the noise. Gishe Sore, stony-faced, tried not to cry. “For mother, it was shocking,” one of the children recalled. “She was used to a large house with plenty of ground, and here were four tiny rooms for eight persons.” Eight persons because even though Ethel, Sam, and Harry had been on their own in America for some years now, they were expected to move in with their parents. The three boys, though no longer boys—Harry was now twenty; Sam nineteen; Hyman (as Chaim Yasef would call himself) seventeen—slept in one room; the three girls (Ethel and her little sisters, Chana, now Anna, and Leie, now Lillie) in another—just like in Rakov. “At least the whole family is together again,” Gishe Sore kept repeating to console herself. As if eight were not enough, to eke out a few extra pennies they soon took in a boarder, nineteen-year-old Isidore Gordon, who bunked in with the brothers. The family was crowded—but everyone was crowded at 195 Madison Street. The tenement's sixteen apartments housed 115 people—all of them Russian Jews or the children of Russian Jews. Sam and Chana Chadman, upstairs, had eight kids; the Fibes, who lived under the roof, had five kids and three boarders; the Shulbergs had seven in their flat; Abe and Goldie Greenberg had eight. The same thing next door at 197 Madison Street, the same across the street, the same on Henry Street to the north and Jefferson Street to the east. “If a dog came around he'd have to prove he was Jewish before they let him in,” one immigrant said of his neighborhood, “that's how Jewish it was.” That was the Lower East Side in 1909. All twelve tribes of Israel, plus of course the Kohanim, lived between Delancey and Allen.

—

Some immigrants forever grieve for their “real” homes, the predawn smell of baking bread, the glaze of rain on cobblestone, the echo of bells in the alley. Others step off the boat, fill their lungs with the raw unfamiliar air, and get to work. They never look back because they never have a moment
to spare or an urge to regret. Itel was one of these. When she fled the tsar's police and arrived in Hoboken on April 25, 1905, she had twelve dollars and the address of her father's brother Joseph in her pocket—406 Newark Street, Hoboken—but what she carried in her head proved to be far more useful than anything in her luggage. Uncle Joseph, a Hebrew schoolteacher, had been charged by Avram Akiva with looking after his daughter, housing and feeding her, and keeping her safe and proper (i.e., not too flagrant about the romance with William). But Itel (she never surrendered her original Yiddish name with family and intimate friends) had other ideas. She had not escaped the tsar's police only to be policed by a pious uncle. Within weeks of her arrival, she quarreled with her aunt and decided to strike out on her own. Enlisting Ethel as a roommate, she found a two-room cold-water basement apartment, also in Hoboken, for ten dollars a month. William, then working as an unpaid apprentice garment worker on the Lower East Side, could come and go freely. Itel had everything arranged to her liking except a job. Ethel was employed in a Jersey City dress factory—but there was no way in hell that Itel was going to chain herself to a factory sewing machine six days a week while some cigar-chomping foreman barked at her. So she resuscitated the old Kaganovich sisters dressmaking partnership from Rakov. She and Ethel bought a Singer machine for $11.98 (on installments) and began making dresses in their basement flat. Uncle Joseph steered the mothers and sisters of his students their way—and word spread through Jewish Hoboken that the Cohen sisters would whip you up a lovely stylish dress to order for seventy-five cents. Soon they were charging three dollars a dress and working from morning until dark. “We did not have a life of glory,” Ethel commented drily years later. But they made a living.

Itel and William were married on June 10, 1906, in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony arranged and paid for by William's uncle Max (one of the prosperous Botwinik family that Shalom Tvi's wife, Beyle, belonged to). A traditional Jewish ceremony to please the family; a gorgeous white wedding dress of French wool with a straight skirt that fell just shy of the ankle to please the bride (who designed and sewed it, naturally); and a traditional American honeymoon to Niagara Falls to please the newlyweds. They took a week off from work and then set up housekeeping in a Hoboken railroad
flat. William tried to make a go of a candy store, Itel went back to making dresses, Ethel, complaining of the damp, left Hoboken for a dressmaking job in Manhattan. A year into the marriage, William was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Convinced that cleaner, drier air was essential for his health, the couple relocated to a small resort town in the Catskill Mountains north of the city. It was a crippling move financially since Itel's work dried up and their income dwindled to next to nothing. But William soon recovered (the diagnosis proved to be wrong) and within the year they were back in Hoboken. They found a first-floor flat in a tidy low-rise building at 212 Willow Street on a block of brownstones and four- and five-story apartment houses near the Hudson River. It was a blue-collar neighborhood of German, Irish, and Italian bartenders and chauffeurs, porters and butchers, dockworkers and mill hands—not a single Jew among them aside from the Rosenthals. Lewis, their first child, was born on August 10, 1907, and a Polish maid named Stosia Radzekowki—a gentile—was hired to look after the baby. Even after the rest of the family arrived in 1909, Itel and William stayed put in Hoboken. They wanted no part of the Lower East Side: no Jewish neighbors; no Jewish help; no tenement house; no haggling on Hester Street; no sweatshop. And no Jewish religion for them or their children. In a break with tradition that mortified Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore, Lewis, the first grandson, had not been circumcised. Itel and William refused the rite that had been inflicted on Jewish male infants for thousands of years. The coming generation, the American generation, would grow up with rituals and beliefs that had been chosen, not mindlessly inherited from their forebears.

—

At forty-seven, Avram Akiva looked like a biblical prophet. His graying beard flowed over his chest; his eyes were dark and piercing; his shoulders were square, his posture upright, his expression stern and melancholy. But the appearance was deceiving. Under the beard lurked a wise, gentle soul. The scribe was not one to cast out a daughter for breaking God's covenant or to love a grandson less for the sins of his parents. Though thirty years earlier Avram Akiva had studied beside the finest Jewish scholars in the world at the Volozhin yeshiva, at heart he was not a zealot but an obliging, practical man, willing to bend when necessary, careful to fight only the battles that counted. So he kept his thoughts to himself about his first
grandson's failure to be circumcised. And when the American children told him he had to change his name, he shrugged and went along. Avram Akiva Kaganovich did not sound American, they said; no one but a Jew would be able to pronounce it. From now on, in New York, he was Abraham Cohen and Gishe Sore was Sarah. Anyway, what did a name matter? Call him what they wanted, he would always be a stranger and a sojourner in this new land, like the first Abraham in Hebron. If it made them happy that he should sign his name Abraham Cohen, he'd sign. God knew who he was.

Mild and tolerant Abraham Cohen might be, but he was not blind. In New York, the American children told him, a man had to have a paying job, so he got himself set up in a small concession selling religious books, tefillin, and mezuzot in a Rivington Street synagogue. Every morning he walked to work up Essex Street, across East Broadway, Hester, Broome, Delancey; every evening he walked back to the cold-water flat on Madison. Every walk through the cauldron of commerce seared his senses anew. He couldn't take three steps without being jostled, shouted at, solicited, implored to buy. Boys who should have been in cheder hawked the
Jewish Daily Forward
on street corners. Grown men, idling in candy shops, blew smoke from cigars and sucked egg creams from straws. Peddlers cried “I cash clothes!” over and over in a kind of dirge as they hauled their carts through the streets. Women openly peddled their bodies to passing men. On his first Shabbat in New York, Abraham was stunned to see men and women, Jews all of them, bartering and selling, buying and eating, passing money from hand to hand.
Handling currency on the Sabbath
—unheard of in Rakov.
Even on Kol Nidre night, the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, the shops were open, the streets were full, Jews went on wheeling and dealing and shouting and swearing as on any other night. It was like spitting in God's face. Synagogues were everywhere—depending on whom you asked, the Lower East Side had 500, 800, 1,000 shuls in those days, more than Minsk, more than Vilna—but all those houses of prayer and study did not make New York a holy city. Abraham saw soon enough that these so-called shuls were not true synagogues but small provisional tabernacles set up in dance halls or shop fronts by
landslayt
—people from
the same village or region back in Russia. Every shtetl with a sizable presence in New York had its own
landsmanshaft
—a benevolent association that provided insurance, sick benefits, and burial plots for
landslayt
—and many
landsmanshaftn
also formed congregations. Forty or fifty former neighbors from the Pale would gather on Shabbat in an upstairs tenement room or vacant store or even a converted church fitted with an ark and some benches.
On a special occasion, like a bar mitzvah, there might be a bottle of whiskey and an extra dollar for the rabbi. Rakov's exiles prayed at Beth David Anshei Rakov, at 225 Clinton Street; and the Volozhin community davened at 209 Madison Street, just a few doors down from the family's tenement, in a pretty little mission church that had been made over into the Etz Chaim Anshei Volozhin. Rivington Street alone had eighteen
landsmanshaft
shuls jostling with its beer joints, butcher shops, bakeries, and soda fountains. Thirty more on Columbia Street, thirty-eight on Henry Street, more than a dozen on Orchard Street. So there were plenty of places to pray, but to Abraham, these makeshift sanctuaries of brick and cork and soot and smudged gray windows lacked the savor of grace. In Rakov, generations of Jews had darkened the wooden beams of the old synagogue with the exhalations of their souls—but in New York even prayers were muttered in haste between one deal and the next. The Lower East Side was the capital of Jewish America, but
barely 12 percent of Jews attended synagogue. Sam went to shul with his father on Saturday, said his morning prayers, showed respect—but the other two sons quit going through the motions the minute the old man wasn't looking.