The Jews in America Trilogy (122 page)

Mr. Marshall, however, was very much an outside observer, and had spent no time on the receiving end of Miss Richman's “usefulness.” To those who had, she seemed more like a martinet. By 1906, the year of the Adenoids Riot, Miss Richman was very much an authority figure on the Lower East Side, and for this she was in no small way resented. With her clipped, precise speech, her imposing bosom, her carefully marcelled mane of dark red hair, in her spotless white gloves and expensively tailored if understated suits, she was also a commanding physical presence. At fifty-one, she was definitely in her prime, if not at the height of her popularity, and in the wake of the riot there were allegations that somehow her school district could have prevented the misunderstanding; as there had been in the past, there were a number of noisy demands for her replacement or resignation. But Miss Richman moved on to another useful—if unpopular—project: free eye examinations for all her pupils and, if necessary, free corrective eyeglasses. (Jewish immigrants were particularly fearful of eye examinations; those who failed to pass them at Ellis Island had been refused entry.) As usual, she ignored her critics.

At the time, Julia Richman was living at 330 Central Park West on the Upper West Side—a neighborhood that was directly antipodal to her school district—and her address was certainly a part of her problem. (By contrast, Lillian Wald had settled in a fifth-floor walk-up on Jefferson Street, asking only for the luxury of a private bathtub.) Where Miss Richman lived was also a ghetto of sorts, but it was a ghetto of affluence. The western flank of Central Park and the side streets leading off it had become a wealthy German-Jewish residential district. The development of the passenger elevator had led to the building of a number of tall, imposing apartment houses on the Upper West Side with grand-sounding names, such as the
Chatsworth, the Langham, the Dorilton, and the Ansonia, and the apartments they offered were usually spacious with high ceilings, commanding views of the city in all directions, and many servants' rooms. New York's Christian upper crust might still prefer their Upper East Side town houses, but the city's German-Jewish elite—historically leery of investing in real estate—tended to choose apartment living. (It was not until many years later that luxury apartment houses were built on the Upper East Side.)

At addresses like Julia Richman's lived families who had been poor immigrants themselves a little more than a generation earlier, but who now wore top hats and frock coats to their Wall Street offices. In the years during and after the Civil War, former rural foot peddlers had made the great transition into banking, retailing, and manufacturing. Their names were Guggenheim, Lehman, Straus, Sachs, Altman, Loeb, and Seligman. For years, the little knot of families had intermarried with one another, and by the early 1900s they composed a tight network of cousins and double cousins. Within the group, of course, there were stratifications. The German Jews of Frankfurt origin considered themselves superior to the Jews of Hamburg, but the Jews of Frankfurt
and
Hamburg considered themselves superior to those of Munich, or anywhere in the south. The Seligmans thought of themselves as better than the Strauses, since the Seligmans had become international bankers while the Strauses, of Macy's, had remained “in trade.” The Guggenheims, who were Swiss Jews, were a problem. They were the richest of the “crowd,” but they were considered socially somewhat gauche. Julia Richman's family belonged very definitely to this small set, which called itself the “One Hundred,” to distinguish itself from the Christian “Four Hundred” of Mrs. William Astor. Julia's sisters, furthermore, had all made proper in-the-group marriages—Addie Richman to an Altman, whose family ran what was considered to be New York's finest department store, and Bertha Richman to a Proskauer, whose family included prominent lawyers.

By 1906, the dividing line between “uptown” (German) Jews and “Lower East Side” (Eastern European) Jews had become the source of much hard feeling, and Julia Richman was, in both manner and appearance, very uptown. Her uptownness was assumed to account for her heavy emphasis on discipline
and correctness, and for her high-handed habit of involving herself in matters—such as the police force—that had previously been considered out of the jurisdiction of the schools. Lillian Wald at least seemed sympathetic to the East Siders' most pressing needs. Julia Richman seemed more interested in getting the East Siders to conform to her own exacting standards, in imposing her own toplofty values, in changing centuries-old ways of thinking, seeing, living, being.

To complicate matters further, the Lower East Side had become something of a fashionable cause, or Cause, in New York City. Rich Christian ladies, such as Mrs. Oliver H. P. Belmont and Miss Anne Morgan (sister of J. P.), made sable-clad forays into the Lower East Side to dispense their Christian charity to the “poor, deserving Jews.” These Lady Bountifuls were distrusted and suspected of being missionaries bent on conversion, and it was hard to distinguish Julia Richman, in her stone marten scarves, from one of these.

It was also suspected that her efforts at uplifting were—like those of her family and social set—self-serving, and based essentially on a bad case of embarrassment. The Eastern European Jews were especially sensitive on this point, and with good reason. Julia Richman's values were seen as those of the wealthy few, and she seemed to be trying to force-feed her notions to the hungry masses, who, in their own eyes, already had perfectly acceptable standards of their own, which they saw no need to change. Marching into their midst with her pronouncements on the importance of clean fingernails and lessons on how to curtsy, this uptown woman not only came from enemy territory, she also symbolized capitalism, a force that traditionally oppressed rather than uplifted the poor. She lived on a street that was already being called the Jewish Fifth Avenue.

On top of everything else, she represented a form of Judaism that the Eastern Europeans did not fully understand and were not ready to accept. She actually practiced a religion very different from theirs. As early as 1845, thirty-three young German-Jewish immigrants who had arrived in Manhattan just a few years before banded together to establish a Reform congregation, which they named Emanu-El. The very term “Reform,” of course, indicated that these Germans felt that there was something about traditional Judaism that needed updating and correcting. Reform had had its seeds in Germany, but had
come into full flower in the United States, where it was regarded—by the German-American Jews, at least—as an essential step toward assimilation into the American culture.

Reform Judaism was touted as “the dominion of reason over blind and bigoted faith,” but it really represented the new dominion of America over the Old World. Among the revisions advocated by Reform was that houses of worship no longer be called synagogues, but instead be known as temples. The principal day of worship was shifted from Saturday to Sunday, to conform with the religious habits of the American majority. The use of Hebrew was virtually dropped from the order of service, in favor of English. Keeping kosher households was deemed both archaic and impractical—as well as un-American. (The great American leader of the Reform movement, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, had shocked the Jews of Cincinnati by putting on a banquet at which shrimp and crawfish were among the delicacies offered.) In fact, inside the new Reform temples, with their pulpits and pews and chandeliers, where hatted women worshiped alongside unhatted men and not in separate curtained galleries, the atmosphere was often indistinguishable from that of an American Christian church. The strictly Orthodox, kosher-keeping Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Hungarians viewed all these developments as examples—sinister and shocking ones—of how quickly the faith could erode in America if one were not ever watchful.

In Russia, rabbis had long warned their congregations that Westernization of the religion would spell its undoing. Steeped in centuries of Orthodoxy, the Men of the Book had spent their days bowed at the eastern walls of their synagogues, endlessly studying the Talmud, dissecting its exhortations, preparing commentaries on the Holy Word, and commentaries upon commentaries—often at the expense of any other kind of labor or scholarship. In most Eastern European congregations, the reading of secular books had been banned—for how could the words of mere men be allowed to compete with the Word of God? From this had grown the belief, which the Eastern Europeans had brought with them to America, that work other than Talmudic scholarship was unworthy of the Jew, that poverty was the pious Jew's lot, that pursuit of Mammon was unrighteous. That the uptown German-Jewish businessmen had not only grown rich, but had also tailored their religion to fit
more easily into the Christian mode in the process, seemed sheer apostasy. To the Germans, who saw themselves as “Americanized,” this attitude merely seemed unenlightened—backward, ignorant.

Simple statistics also offered an explanation for the increasing East-West, German-Russian mutual antipathy. In 1870, the number of Jews in New York City had been estimated at eighty thousand, or less than nine percent of the city's population. With the exception of a handful of crusty, aristocratic, and ingeniously interrelated Sephardic families who had been living in the city since the mid-seventeenth century, most of these families had come originally from Germany—driven out not so much by religious persecution (though there was some of that) as by taxation and the threat of conscription into the German armies. Since their numbers were small, their arrival in New York had been a nonevent, and their presence in the predominantly Christian city went relatively unnoticed. They lived very quietly, almost deliberately so, preferring inconspicuousness to ostentation. They worked hard and, in the process, had gained a reputation for probity. As bankers, they had established valuable international connections with such powerful British and European firms as Hambro's and the House of Rothschild. During the Civil War, while amassing considerable fortunes of their own, they had helped establish the Union's credit overseas at a time when President Lincoln's treasury desperately needed it.

As merchants, the Strauses of Macy's, the Rosenwalds of Sears, Roebuck, and the Altmans of Altman's had provided the city with high-quality merchandise at fair prices. As publishers, the related Ochses and Sulzbergers offered a newspaper that was responsible, even essential. As families, they kept to themselves, and if they had any desire to storm the gates of Mrs. Astor's Christian circle they were too proud to show it. (Indeed, the German Jews often left the impression that
theirs
was the more difficult social sphere to storm.) They projected just the opposite wish—to leave the established structure of Christian society exactly as they had found it. The German Jews, in other words, were assimilationists only
up to a point
, and had prudently not tried to push beyond that point. It might be added, too, that many of the German Jews were blond, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed. In appearance, they did not stand out
against the prevailing look of the population. They flowed pleasantly—not with it, but alongside it.

And yet, by 1906, nearly ninety thousand Jews were arriving in New York City
every year
, most of them from Russia and Poland. (Because the Russians and the Poles seemed indistinguishable, all these immigrants were grouped as “Russians.”) Now the Jewish population of the city stood at close to a million, or roughly twenty-five percent of the total population, and by 1915 there would be nearly a million and a half, or twenty-eight percent. In sheer numbers, the Jews of New York seemed to be overtaking the non-Jewish population. And, massed together on the Lower East Side, they were nothing if not conspicuous.

They arrived looking like bindle stiffs—hobos with their worldly possessions, slung over their shoulders in gunny sacks. The men were swarthy skinned, often bearded and side-curled. They were poor, and looked it: ill-clothed, ill-shod, often sickly. They were nearly always in need of baths and fumigation—and smelled it. They looked, and were, frightened—and what is more alarming than a look of terror in a stranger's eyes? There was something even more off-putting in their collective appearance: they looked not only fearful, but defiant, wary, suspicious. They looked poor, and yet they did not look
abject
, the way Americans tend to think poor people
ought
to look. The immigrant Jews from Eastern European lands conformed to no previous immigrant image. As a group, they were not beggars. There were no outstretched Jewish hands asking for alms. At the same time, though poor, they seemed curiously proud. There were certain means of livelihood that, though readily available to them, they were unwilling to perform. Immigrant Italians, Irish, and Swedes lined up for jobs helping to dig the tunnels for New York's subway system, and lay its tracks; not the Jews. Irish girls happily took positions as cooks, parlor maids, and children's nurses for rich families, but not the Jews. Scotsmen worked as coachmen, footmen, and chauffeurs, and Englishmen worked as butlers, but the Jews would have none of these occupations. It was not that they had no taste for hard, physical labor. Jewish newsboys raced through the streets night and day delivering papers; Jewish girls toiled long hours in sweatshops working at sewing machines, and brought piecework home with them at night. A Jewish youth
seemed to have no reluctance to work as a singing waiter in a restaurant; why did he refuse to buttle in a rich man's house? Why would he not join the police force or the fire department the way the Irish did? Was mere something innately repugnant about wearing a
uniform?
It was all very perplexing. The phrase “doing one's own thing” had not yet come into the language, but that was what the Eastern European Jews seemed bent on doing, and through it all, they seemed buoyed up by some inner strength or fire. They were feisty, fractious, independent, argumentative—bickering shrilly and incessantly with one another. They seemed almost to wear a collective chip on the shoulder.