The Jews in America Trilogy (125 page)

Schiff and Marshall, it seemed, preferred to resolve the matter without an outcry—or to assume an ostrich attitude in the hopes that, if ignored, the matter would go away. Finally, however, and under pressure, Marshall did issue a rather cautious statement. He did not, he said, wish to refute Bingham's remarks “by any sensational methods.” Instead, he had met privately with New York's Mayor George McLellan and the deputy police commissioner. A carefully worded retraction was worked out, and delivered to the press a few days later. In it, Commissioner Bingham admitted that his statistics were in error. Rather lamely, he blamed the mistake on unnamed “sources” outside his office who had got their numbers wrong—though why the police commissioner's office would not have correct crime statistics at its fingertips, and would have needed to turn to outside sources, was left unexplained. The outside sources had turned out to be unreliable. The commissioner was very sorry about the whole thing.

But on the East Side the Jewish press was far from mollified. As the
Tageblatt
remarked, the East Side was proud of “a Jacob Schiff and a Louis Marshall,” and considered these men a credit to American Jewry. But the East Side also wanted “self-recognition.… We wish to give our famous Jews their honored place in an American Jewish organization in the measure that they have earned it. But we wish them to work with us and not over us.” The
Tageblatt
also said, “We have a million Jews
in New York. Where is their power? Where is their organization? Where are their representatives?”

Here, of course, was a pivotal question. How
could
such a large and diverse population organize and form any sort of coalition of power? It was not just a question of German versus Russian, or uptown versus Lower East Side. The Lower East Side itself was seething with differences and factions. Some of the populace were Russians, some were Poles, some Hungarians, some Slavs, some Latvians, some Lithuanians, some Czechs, some Galicians. They all spoke Yiddish, but in accents so varied that it was often difficult for one group to understand another. The Russians disliked the Poles, the Poles disliked the Russians, the Russians and Poles collectively disliked the Lithuanians, and everybody who was not Hungarian found the Hungarians toplofty and condescending. In the
Jewish Daily Forward
, the letters-to-the-editor page, called Bintel Briefs, became a kind of forum for dispute, and one 1906 letter—signed simply “The Russian Mother”—tells just part of the story:

Dear Mr. Editor:

My own daughter, who was born in Russia, married a Hungarian-Jewish young man. She adopted all the Hungarian customs and not a trace of a Russian-Jewish woman remained with her. This would not have been so bad. The trouble is, now that she is first-class Hungarian, she laughs at the way I talk, at my manners, and even the way we cook.… Not an evening passes without … mockery and ridicule.

I therefore want to express my opinion that Russian Jews and Hungarian Jews should not intermarry; a Russian Jew and an Hungarian Jew are in my opinion two different worlds and one does not and cannot understand the other.

Some East Side Jews were budding Marxists, some were socialists, some were Zionists. Some were Orthodox, some were atheists. The Jews of Warsaw could not see eye to eye with those from Krakow. Already the phrase was being quoted: “If you get two Jews together, you have three arguments.”
Some European Jews were already declaring themselves thoroughly disillusioned with the United States, cursing America for what they saw as an overly legalistic society. As one East Sider complained, “In the old country, if you did something that was wrong, the policeman would tell you that it was wrong. If you said you did not know that it was wrong, the policeman would say, ‘Well, now you know, so don't do it again.' Here, if you do something that is wrong, they just arrest you and fine you or throw you into jail.” The American concept that ignorance of the law is no excuse appeared, to many immigrants, cruel and unjust.

The only possible means of unifying all the unhappy and disputatious elements on the Lower East Side seemed to be to get them all somehow to embrace America as an abstract ideal, to make them feel that they were loyal Americans first, Jews second. It was a large order—large, even, for a woman of Julia Richman's stubborn, iron-willed ambitions.

To the disinterested outside visitor, the Lower East Side in the early 1900s would have appeared utterly chaotic, and nothing been foreseen to come out of it except disaster—or, at the very least, some sort of violent social upheaval or revolution. And yet that is not what happened at all. Instead, out of it came artists, writers, lawyers, politicians, entertainers, and businessmen, like Irving Berlin, Jacob Javits, Samuel Goldwyn, David Sarnoff, Jacob Epstein, Eddie Cantor, Danny Kaye, and Edward G. Robinson. Out of this and similar ghettos came a premiere American architect named Emery Roth, a fashion photographer named Richard Avedon, a designer named Ralph Lauren, a cosmetics queen named Helena Rubinstein, a movie mogul named Louis B. Mayer, another named Adolph Zukor, and a liquor tycoon named Samuel Bronfman—and many, many, more, including a pretty New York girl named Betty Joan Perske, who, after being educated at the high school on Second Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street that was eventually named in Julia Richman's honor, went on to Hollywood and Broadway stardom as Lauren Bacall.

*
Later to be renamed Hunter College.

*
Until Ellis Island was opened as an immigration center in 1892, immigrants were received at Castle Garden, a onetime fort and sometime concert hall that stood on an island—since connected to Manhattan by landfill—just off the Battery.

*
The
i
or
y
suffix means “resident of.” Thus, a Pinsky is someone from Pinsk and a Minsky someone from Minsk. But there is even more in an Eastern European name than that. Immigrants from Russia proper considered themselves superior to those from Russian Poland. Therefore, it was better to have a name ending in
y
, indicating Russian, than
i
, indicating Polish. Similarly, a name ending in
ov
(the Russian style) carried more prestige and cachet than an
off
(the Polish).

*
Tageblatt
literally translates as “Daily Page.”

2

WHY THEY CAME

The routes the Eastern European Jews took to come to America were circuitous, difficult, and tricky. No two tales were exactly alike, though there was a common theme—escape. And all required a common element—bravery.

Shmuel Gelbfisz, for example, had been born in the Warsaw ghetto, probably in 1879. Later, he would give 1882 as the year of his birth, and since he arrived in New York with neither a passport nor any other documents, there was no way his claim could be gainsaid. His father had been a Man of the Book, and spent most of his hours endlessly studying the Talmud. But his mother was a moneylender and, as such, was a woman of some importance in the community, if not always a popular one when she knocked on the door to call in her loans. She was also unusual in that she could read and write, and earned additional money writing letters for her friends and neighbors to their relatives in the United States. But despite these advantages, her son was a restless boy who had grown impatient with his father's strict Orthodoxy. In 1896, when he was either fourteen or eleven, he decided to run away from home and head for the land of golden opportunity. He discreetly “borrowed” one of
his father's suits, had a tailor friend cut it down to his size, and with a small amount of money he had saved, plus a few rubles—borrowed again—from his mother's cash box, he set out more or less on foot—begging a ride wherever he could—for the German border.

At the border, he paid the customary bribe to a guard who promised to spirit him across. The guard took his money, but then betrayed him, and threatened to send him back. Using the excuse that he needed to use the toilet, Gelbfisz found himself in a bathroom with a high window overlooking the Oder River. He climbed to the window, flung himself out into the river, and swam across to Germany, where he made his way to Hamburg.
*
By the time he reached Hamburg, his money had run out. While wandering the streets wondering what to do next, he noticed a shop with a name on it that he thought he recognized. He spoke to the shopkeeper in Polish, and discovered that he had found a countryman. When young Gelbfisz explained his plight, the fellow Pole left his shop and scurried around the neighborhood collecting money for the refugee. Within a few hours, this kindly soul had collected enough money for Shmuel to book passage on a boat to England.

In London, penniless again, Gelbfisz spent three days and nights in Hyde Park, where his address was a bench just opposite the entrance to the old Carlton House, from which he watched the hotel's guests arriving and departing in their glittering finery through the great glass doors. On the fourth day, however, he was picked up by a charitable Jewish group, which, with some difficulty, managed to locate some distant Gelbfisz relatives who were living in the city of Birmingham. The Birmingham relatives were less than overjoyed to receive him, though they helped him find a job hauling coal. Finally, to be rid of him, they gave him sufficient carfare to get him to Liverpool. It was only about seventy-five miles away, but at least it was on the sea.

In Liverpool, Gelbfisz learned that steerage passage to Canada had just gone up from four pounds six shillings to five pounds. At the end of his rope, he finally took to the streets
as a beggar until he had raised the fare. Then, after the steerage crossing, he was deposited in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and made his way to the United States border, entering illegally in 1896. This was also the year that Thomas A. Edison's “Marvelous Vitascope”—a forerunner of motion pictures—was first shown to a New York audience, though the coincidence would not be noted until long afterward.

Years later, whenever he traveled to London, he always made a point of putting up at the Carlton House. Though he could not play a note, a grand piano was always ordered placed in the suite. But the major requirement was that the suite overlook the park, so that he could look down on the particular park bench that had once been his home. By that time, of course, Shmuel Gelbfisz had changed his name twice, and had become Samuel Goldwyn of Hollywood.

In some ways, to be sure, Shmuel Gelbfisz's emigration from Russian Poland was not typical. He set off for America of his own free will, out of a sense of dissatisfaction and restlessness. Others who left Eastern Europe at the same time did so out of desperation—to flee conditions that had become unbearable and to escape from lives that had become unlivable.

In the synagogues of the Pale of Settlement it had been customary, as part of the regular order of service, to include a special blessing for the good health and long life of the czar. This blessing was sincere enough, but the sentiments that accompanied it were less affectionate than fatalistic. One wished the czar good health and long life because at least one had a fair idea of the sort of terrors and confusions that
this
czar was capable of bringing down upon one's head. It was the
next
czar—this one's successor—who loomed as the dreadful question mark.

Life for the Jews of Russia had never been exactly easy. And one of the greatest hardships that had to be endured was the fact that, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, conditions had alternated violently back and forth between periods of relative tolerance and calm and periods of reaction and repression, depending upon who occupied the throne. In the mid-eighteenth century, with things in her country going well, Catherine II had started her rule as a relatively benign
monarch. She had felt that Jewish merchants and bankers would be good for her economy, and had welcomed them into the trades and professions. For a while it seemed as though Jews might one day gain the status of ordinary Russian citizens. But then the empress had a change of heart, and a period of restrictive policy followed.

The reign of Nicholas I, between 1825 and 1855, had been particularly savage. Under Nicholas, more than six hundred specifically anti-Jewish edicts were written into law. These ranged from the mildly annoying—censorship of Jewish texts and newspapers, rules that restricted the curricula of Jewish schools—to the monstrous: expulsion from homes and villages, confiscation of property, and a decree that bound young boys between the ages of twelve and twenty-five to service in the Russian army for twenty-five years. These boys were marched on foot to training camps hundreds of miles from their homes, often in Siberia, and many died along the route. Once in the camps, they were subject to Christianized training, and were forbidden to practice any Jewish ritual. Those who refused were beaten, tortured, or killed. The object of the “Iron Czar” was to remove all traces of Judaism from his czardom, to purify and Christianize it. Furthermore, he called what he was doing “assimilation” of the Jews. It was no wonder that the word had a sinister ring to the Russians when the German Jews talked of the importance of assimilation in America.

Tales of the lengths the young Russian-Jewish youths would go to in order to avoid the long military ordeal under Nicholas I—an ordeal that was tantamount to a death sentence—became legion. In Samuel Goldwyn's Warsaw, two young brothers had faced each other with pistols. One shot his brother in the arm, to cripple him, and the other shot his brother in the leg. One boy poured acid over his legs. The burns never really healed, he never walked again, and he spent the rest of his life with the lower part of his body wrapped in bandages. But pistols and acid were luxuries, unaffordable in most Jewish households. And so a popular way to render oneself unfit for conscription into the Russian military was to chop off the index finger of one's right hand—the trigger finger—with a kitchen cleaver. Many of the young men who arrived at Ellis Island had been self-maimed in that way.