The Family (8 page)

Abraham spent his days selling prayer books to a few old gents on Rivington Street and regretting that he no longer worked as a scribe, but his children had no time for piety. Every morning they rushed out to work—every evening they rushed off to English classes, Yiddish variety shows, meetings, God knows what. Everyone was doing the same. Racing against the American clock. Looking for a gap in the fence they could slip through. No one set foot on Madison Street who didn't have to be there—no one left unless he got lucky, figured out an angle, found a way to elbow through the crowd. Prayer fell on deaf ears here. Only money charmed open the door. “
Success, American style . . . was all very simple,” wrote immigrant poet
Harry Roskolenko. “Don't work for others. Work for yourself. Don't be a wage slave.”

Success, American style, meant nothing to Abraham. What little money he earned he saved. He kept his own counsel, walked uprightly, salvaged what he could of the old ways. Abraham never really learned English, but he understood more than anyone realized.

—

Letters from Rakov were eagerly anticipated, passed from hand to hand, pored over and sighed over and quoted from until the paper grew limp and tattered. The letter from Shalom Tvi that arrived on Madison Street early in April 1910 brought one special bit of news: Beyle had given birth to yet another daughter—her fourth, counting the baby who had died during the 1905 revolution. So seven-year-old Doba and three-year-old Etl now had a new little sister named Sonia—a black-haired beauty with a healthy set of lungs. Everyone marveled that God should give Shalom Tvi only girls while the rest of the siblings had at least one boy each. Without a son, who would say the kaddish for Shalom Tvi when he died? If this kept up, there would be no more Kohanim in Rakov.

Aside from the birth of Sonia, there was the usual recitation of town gossip, business setbacks, and hand-wringing over the state of the Jewish community.
Zionism remained strong among Rakov's youth and many were learning Hebrew, but emigration to Palestine had slackened off because of the unstable political situation in the Land. The shtetl had raised seventy-three rubles for the Jewish National Fund to buy up arable plots from Arabs. The police were cracking down on Jewish shopkeepers under a new law that forbade stores to open on Sundays and Christian holidays. The fate of Rakov's Jewish library was uncertain—it had closed shortly after the family left for America, then reopened, now who knows. Jewish firefighters had been forbidden to carry their own flag in the anniversary celebration, even though most of the Rakov fire brigade were Jews. And so on. Abraham and Sarah read Shalom Tvi's letter over and over. They thought about the lake, the old wooden shul, the vegetable garden behind the house, the trees that would soon be blooming in the orchards. If they regretted anything, they kept it to themselves. They had left the land of the pogrom and come to the land of opportunity. Things were bound to improve.

—

In their first spring in the New World, the 1910 census was taken, and the family duly added eight new names to the national roll. Sarah was at home on Monday, April 25, when census enumerator Harry Barewitz came calling. Where else would she be? The others had jobs or school to attend, but Sarah, who in Rakov had stocked the shelves and kept the books, now stayed at home and burned the cooking. Her sons and daughters told her that there was no need to run a shop anymore. In America, the children worked—the mothers kept house. So it was Sarah who opened the door to Mr. Barewitz the census enumerator and answered the questions he was required to ask. The family name was now Cohen. Nine people lived in the flat including the teenage boarder. She and Abraham were both forty-seven; Ethel (the former Ettel) was twenty-two; Harry (Hersch) was twenty; Shmuel (nineteen) had become Solomon (Mr. Barewitz made a mistake—
it should have been Samuel); Chaim Yasef (seventeen) was now Hyman; Chana (fifteen) was Annie (another error—the family always called her Anna); Leie (twelve) was Lillie. The two younger daughters attended public school, but everyone else had a good-paying job. Ethel was a dressmaker in a dress shop; Harry was a salesman for a jewelry store; Sam operated a machine in a leather factory; Hyman was a watchmaker in a jewelry shop; Abraham was a “merchant in a bookstore working on his own account.” The only one without a “trade or profession” was Sarah. She told Mr. Barewitz to write “none” beside her name.

Sarah had lived at 195 Madison Street for almost a year when the census enumerator showed up that Monday in April—but the rawness and strangeness still had not worn off. No garden, no cow, no neighbors she knew to gossip with, no work, no sky she could see, not even a glimpse of the sidewalk from the grimy rear-facing windows. Sarah had been right to tremble when the family first threaded these streets. Hester Street would never replace the Rakov market. The faces on the sidewalks would never look familiar. She would never grow accustomed to the noise and crowds. She would never again feel that the place she lived was scaled to her comprehension. Even the language foamed at her ears without penetrating her brain. Hyman, enrolled in English classes at the Educational Alliance, already sounded like he had lived in America all his life. Sam owned a
cheap set of the complete plays of Shakespeare—in English—and boasted that he had read every one of them.
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?
But Sarah would have no part of this brave New World. They talked about how large and grand and rich America was, but when she looked out the window, all she saw was the rear wall of the tenement across the courtyard with another frightened Jewish lady staring back at her.

S
am was the shortest of the three brothers and even when he was nineteen it was clear he was going to be the stoutest. Not proud, not stuck on himself, not bent on taking charge, Sam was approachable, tractable, eager to please, someone you could confide in, kvetch to, commiserate with. His forehead was high and smooth, his hair thin and brown and wavy, eyes small, dark, and deep set. When he wore his gold wire-framed glasses he looked like a Russian poet. But Sam was no poet. Sam was a born salesman who at the age of nineteen had gotten himself yoked to a machine in a leather factory. In later years, Sam never said a word to his kids or grandkids about this chapter of his life—where he worked, what kind of machine he operated, whether the factory made belts or shoes or coverings for furniture. He was not especially handy nor was he patient. He was intolerant of both stress and monotony, so whatever he did for twelve or fourteen hours a day in whatever dusty loft or converted stable or unventilated back room must have been soul-destroying. There was certainly noise that never stopped and lubricated steel parts that never quit moving. “
Machines, needles, thread, pressing cloths, oil, sponges—and the all-embracing smells of bodies, steam, and anger,” wrote one Lower East Side immigrant of the cloak-making factory where his father toiled. “These were the ever-present elements of the garment industry, but there
was no oil to soothe away the anger.” The windows were sealed shut even in the summer heat. The fan, if there was a fan at all, blew only in the office where the boss worked. No radio. No bathroom break. Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour for lunch. Eight crummy dollars in your pocket after a six-day week. Leather is heavy, smelly when it's being processed, hard to cut or stitch, suffocating to spread and move around in close airless spaces. Sam and leather cannot have been a good match. His uncle Shalom Tvi and aunt Beyle ran a leather business back in Rakov, and maybe Sam had helped them out in the factory now and then. But it was one thing to work for your father's good-natured brother and another to have some ruthless foreman breathing down your neck. Sam was educated, a son of the scribe, born to the priestly caste—whatever shame or rage he felt at working for strangers on the hides of cows he never spoke of it. He never spoke of wolfing down a few bites of lunch with the other sullen, sweaty workers. He never spoke of the lousy wages, endless days, aching muscles, head-splitting racket. He never spoke of strikes—and those were banner years for protracted, ferocious strikes among Lower East Side garment workers. He never spoke of any of it, but the facts and circumstances speak for themselves. Sam was a born salesman. He had a salesman's voice—as warm and enveloping as chicken soup and so richly guttural that even his English sounded like transliterated Yiddish. He loved being out on the street, wheeling and wheedling. He loved to schmooze, to kibitz, to hear the talk of the trade. But necessity trumped love in those years. The family could not live without the eight dollars a week that Sam added to the twelve that Harry made and the ten that Abraham and Hyman each pulled in. So Sam, who had missed out on the apprenticeship in Smargon that boosted Harry and Hyman into the watchmaking business, gritted his teeth, pushed his spectacles up his low-bridged nose, and worked a machine in a leather factory.

—

Sooner or later everyone got a break—sooner if they kept their eyes open and their head down. Sam's break came in the shape of a clock. Actually, it was Harry, the smooth, smart oldest son, who came up with the idea that made it happen. Harry figured that with so many shop fronts vying for attention on the Lower East Side, the way to stand out was to put a clock in the window. A
nice big display clock would make people check the time—time is money, they were always saying—and once they stop they'll want to take a look at what's for sale, maybe step inside and spend a little money.

A clock is like free advertising, Harry told the brothers. And we'll be the ones to sell them. Or rather Sam will. Sam who could sell a cross to the Pope, water to a drowning man, a razor to a rabbi. Sam will peddle display clocks to all the shops on Hester, East Broadway, Ludlow, Essex. No cash down—payable on the installment plan—twenty-five cents a week. Who's gonna say no?

So Sam started out to sell. One morning he turned up on East Broadway with a bulging sack swinging from his hand. Eyeglasses gleaming, shoulders squared for battle, he pushed open the door of a candy shop and strode to the counter. The sack was opened and a big electric clock was extracted and set down on the counter.

A lot of guys tossed him out, but that never stopped Sam. Nothing stopped Sam so long as you didn't insult him, laugh at him, or call him a greenhorn. The word
no
was not in his vocabulary. Throw him out the door and he'd climb in the window. Bar the window and he'd come around the back.

Sam was good. But the business model was crappy. The average sale was ten dollars—which at a quarter a week meant forty weekly trips to collect. Forty trudges up East Broadway or dodging the pushcarts on Hester Street's Pig Market. It was a punishing routine and the cash barely trickled in. No way to make a living. So the brothers put their heads together again and came up with a better idea. Kienzle Clock Company, the German-based manufacturer where Hyman worked, was starting a new line of quality alarm and musical clocks. Hyman could buy the clocks in bulk from Kienzle at the wholesale price and Sam could sell—
for cash
—to select outlets and peddlers.

So Sam set out with a sack of chirping clocks, and at the end of the day he returned home with an empty sack and ten dollars of profit in his pocket. The same thing the next day, and the next. Sam quit peddling the display clocks altogether. The brothers had something better.

They called a family meeting. The Cohens were a distinguished family, bearer of an ancient name—and now for the first time in hundreds of years
they had an opportunity within reach that matched their ability and ambition. It was time to stop working for others. It was time to make a success of themselves, American style. Harry knew jewelry. Hyman knew timepieces. Sam knew how to sell. Abraham knew how to command respect. Why not pool their resources in a family firm? What the sons proposed to their father was to take the chirping alarm clock idea and expand it into a full-fledged wholesale operation specializing in silverware, clocks, and cut glass.

The father stroked his beard. The boys held their breath. The wife and daughters sat with their hands in their laps. If Abraham said no, the idea would die on the spot.

Finally, the father broke the silence.
I have over a thousand dollars in savings
, he told his sons.
What I have I'll combine with what you have
. How on earth had Abraham accumulated that much money? And to give it all to them, just like that, to start a business?

One of them—nobody remembers who but it was probably Harry—proposed a name: A. Cohen & Sons.

Abraham Cohen had never been a wage slave. With a business in the family, his sons and grandsons would never have to be wage slaves either. The father gave his blessing and A. Cohen & Sons was born.

By November 1911, they had found an empty storefront to rent at 126 East Broadway—a redbrick five-story tenement building with ground-floor retail space. Two big cast-iron-framed windows on the street, a tall black door, a storage cellar. They signed a year's lease at fifty dollars a month. It was a prime location on the Lower East Side's main commercial artery—East Broadway, “
the sentimental heart and the battling mind of our ghetto,” was lined with coffeehouses, newspaper offices, schools for rabbis, Zionist organizations, and the headquarters of Jewish charities. Their shop front stood a block from the newly opened Garden Cafeteria, where Yiddish journalists, writers, intellectuals, and union organizers gathered to schmooze and drink tea; a block and a half from the Educational Alliance, where every self-improving immigrant took night classes; another half block from the headquarters of the
Jewish Daily Forward
going up at 175 East Broadway—at ten stories, the tallest and finest building in the neighborhood, complete with marble columns and carved busts of Marx and Engels.

They hired a painter to dab the company name on one of the windows
in gold letters etched in black—A. Cohen & Sons, Importers & Jobbers—and in January 1912, the company opened for business. Abraham was president. Harry and Sam were co-proprietors. Hyman, at eighteen, was too young to be listed as a legal owner, but the three brothers were equal partners from the start and they would always draw equal salaries. Once there was enough profit to draw a salary.

In the first months they ran the business in their spare time. Sam kept peddling, Hyman held on to his position with Kienzle, Abraham retained the concession at the Rivington Street shul. Harry worked the neighborhood taking orders during the day, and Hyman came in at night and all day Sunday to package up what Harry had sold. The Cohen brothers were middlemen, buying from manufacturers and selling to retailers, though many of their retailers were in fact pawnbrokers or custom peddlers who hawked merchandise door-to-door and street to street. They were always squeezed for cash, always scrambling to eke out a few more days and a few extra dollars of credit. A year after they opened for business the company's net worth was $3,091.79—$91.79 more than the initial investment.

The Cohen brothers were not pioneers or visionaries; they had not hit on some essential new product or revolutionary process; they were not going to corner the market, make headlines, or have their names emblazoned on college libraries or hospital wings. But they were eager and determined and they kept an eye cocked for the angle or niche. Hyman figured out a way to make inroads into the silverware market by selling direct to the proprietors of Catskills boardinghouses and vacation farms that catered to urban Jews. If the guests kept kosher, the landlady needed twice as much flatware—one set for meat, another for dairy. They set their sights on the Lower East Side's huge Italian population, second only to the Jews. The neighborhood's Italian groceries, in addition to purveying salami, olive oil, canned tomatoes, and parmesan cheese, also carried cheap housewares—vases, candlesticks, clocks, and bowls—that were exchanged for coupons collected by loyal customers. Some wholesaler had to supply these housewares—why shouldn't it be A. Cohen & Sons? It was pure Lower East Side: Jewish boys wholesaling the tchotchkes that Neapolitan shopkeepers used to entice Sicilian housewives to part with their money. Sam was soon doing so well on the salami circuit that he quit peddling alarm
clocks. The end of an era for him—and the start of a new one for the company.

Inevitably, they brought their familiar roles and rivalries into the business and then back home to the flat on Madison Street. Harry, though diplomatic, had a fuse. Sam's skin was the thinnest. Hyman liked to claim credit for whatever succeeded and assign blame for what failed. It was an explosive mix. The boys had always bickered, but once they were in business together their fights became epic and operatic. Soon their father's primary job was to keep his sons from one another's throats. Abraham was not a tyrant, a bully, a ranter, or a table banger—he didn't need to be. In the family, his word was law; and in the family company, his word brought the sons to order and guaranteed that business was conducted honestly, equitably, and humanely.

But how the hell did they figure out how to run a business in the first place, these jumpy young men and their otherworldly father? The Cohens had left a small faded market town at the margin of Europe for “
the capital of capitalism, the capital of the twentieth century, and the capital of the world.” What made them swim to the surface so fast? Commerce seethed in every crevice of the Lower East Side, but most of it was two-penny trading, a peddler's sack, a candy shop, a sewing machine whirring by a tenement window. What gave the Cohen boys the chutzpah to start a wholesale business and the shrewdness to succeed? Money might, on the face of it, seem to be the obvious motive, but judging from the choices they made later on when they all had some dollars in their pockets, money was not central. The brothers liked to be comfortable and openhanded, but none of them was hounded by the plutocrat's craving for bottomless coffers. They didn't care all that much about power either, at least outside the confines of the family. They wanted to win, but not crush the competition. They didn't live large, run after women, hobnob with famous people or politicians. Nor did they work to please God. God was their father's concern. The sons started a business because in America
they could
. In Russia, a Jew had no choice. Except for the most exalted or brilliant, there was no possibility of owning land, joining a profession, securing a place in government or academics. But in America, by law, a Jew was the equal of anyone (even if the law was often subverted or skirted by family wealth, social connections,
schools, clubs, churches, and codes). In America, as long as your skin was white, industry and energy were rewarded no matter what your last name was, and imagination could make you a fortune. The American playing field was far from level, but at least Jews were allowed on it. Which may explain why some Jews, the Cohen family among them, were determined to play like gentlemen. Nothing pleased Hyman more than to hear a gentile corporate executive praise him for his “attitude.” Meaning, he did not act like a grasping, uncouth immigrant jobber. Hyman made it a matter of pride that he would be
more
upstanding,
more
rigorous,
more
square and scrupulous and clean-cut and aboveboard than the next fellow. Never let it be said that the Cohen brothers were cheap chiselers.

The boys, in short, made a mad rush to Americanize. All of them became naturalized as U.S. citizens. They did their best to lose their accents; they shaved every morning and wore sober three-piece suits with starched collars that covered their necks. Sam even sported a top hat. Never let it be said that the Cohen brothers were greenhorns. They knew which avenue to open a business on, where to bank, how to avoid getting cheated, how to order a good meal in a fine restaurant, and so what if it wasn't strictly kosher. Lots of other Jews their age were joining Zionist youth groups, singing Hebrew songs, going off to training camps to learn how to be farmers in Palestine. That was not their dream. A different ideal motivated the Cohen brothers—an ideal compounded of self-interest, tribal and family loyalty, ambition, business savvy, and a burning desire to fit in with the American mainstream that was surging up the avenues of New York in a mighty torrent. Maybe in their heart of hearts they felt they were better than the rest, a cut above, Kohanim who could raise their hands in priestly blessing. It was not a family renowned for modesty. But they scaled their dreams to reality. They didn't want to conquer America—they simply wanted their American slice. So they pooled their resources, threw in their lot together, and, to the sound of shouting voices and slammed doors, made common cause. They would never cease to be Jews, but from the moment they set foot on Ellis Island they had ceased to be
Russian
Jews. From now on they were Americans, and as Americans they would rise or fall.