The Jews in America Trilogy (126 page)

During his reign of terror, Nicholas I was also successful at persuading Jews to turn against, and betray, their fellow Jews. In each community, at least one Jew was given special officer status—and, of course, pay—to function as a
khaper
, or “grabber.” The
khaper
's job was to identify the Jewish boys to the military police, who then snatched them from their schoolyards, from the streets, and even from their houses.

No wonder the accession of Alexander II—whom Disraeli called “the kindliest prince who ever ruled Russia”—came as a relief. Alexander permitted a few Jewish youths to enter Russian universities. Certain Jewish businessmen whom he found useful were permitted to travel in parts of Russia where they had previously been prohibited. Special Jewish taxes were eased somewhat, and Alexander reduced the compulsory conscription period for Jews to five years. In his army, too, it was possible for a Jew to rise to officer rank without becoming a
khaper
. Then, on March 1, 1881, Alexander II was assassinated by a band of revolutionaries. With his successor, Alexander III, came disaster.

The new czar's tyranny over the Jews became legalized under the May Laws of that year, which prohibited Jews from owning or renting land outside towns and cities, and discouraged them from living in villages. The increasing economic pressures triggered the “spontaneous” outbreaks of 1881, the massacre of Kishinev in 1903, and the massive and brutal pogroms that followed. In 1891, thousands of Jews were expelled without warning from Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Kiev, and six years later, when the government seized and monopolized the liquor traffic, thousands of Jewish innkeepers and restaurateurs—not to mention malt, grain, and corn dealers—were thrown out of business.

The reason behind Alexander III's persecution of the Jews was the same as Nicholas I's: a fanatical resolve to create a homogeneously Christian country, which meant the eradication of Judaism as a religious entity. As one of Nicholas I's edicts had explained, “The purpose in educating Jews is to bring about their gradual merging with the Christian nationalities and to uproot those superstitions and harmful prejudices which are instilled by the teachings of the Talmud.” For “uproot,” the czar might have substituted “kill.” It was certainly an uprooting
process more furious and brutal than anything that had been attempted since the Inquisition, four hundred years earlier, and it would not be surpassed until the Hitler era.

But another, more palpable reason—though it was never as clearly spelled out—behind the pogroms, both the official and the “spontaneous” ones, was the desperate, and largely unsuccessful, attempts by Jewish workers to organize trade and labor unions. In 1897, the General League of Jewish Workers in Russia, Poland, and Lithuania—Der Allgemeiner Jiddisher Arbeiter Bund—was organized, and over the next three years, led several hundred strikes of cobblers, tailors, brush makers, quilters, locksmiths, and weavers, who had been working eighteen hours a day for a wage of two to three rubles a week. Many of these strikes were marked by violence, bloodshed, and arrests. In the first years of the twentieth century, thousands of persons were arrested for political reasons, most of them Jews. In 1904, of thirty thousand organized Jewish workers, nearly a sixth were thrown into prisons or exiled to Siberia. The Pale of Settlement had become a hotbed of secret revolutionary activity. Then the revolution of 1905, a failure, seemed to erase all hope. It appeared that the only solution was to escape to America, the land of the free.

Needless to say, emigration was a painful step to take in itself, and an enormous gamble. But the decades of persecution had had at least one positive effect—a Darwinian principle had been proved, and only the hardest and toughest had survived. Years of common martyrdom had instilled common strengths. Proud and cynical, those Jews who had made it through the pogroms had begun to see themselves as a kind of aristocracy of endurers, and had even developed a certain hard-boiled sense of humor about their situation. If one can turn terror into a joking matter, there is strength in that. And there was certainly a touch of grim amusement in Russia as the downtrodden continued to offer up blessings for the czar's long life.

But pride and humor were put to the test with emigration. Emigration was an admission of failure. It meant an inability to endure any longer. As a result, some of the older rabbis stubbornly counseled their congregations not to emigrate—that emigration meant that the Jewish backbone had finally been broken, that a noble cause was being given up, the white flag
raised. Thus, many Jewish families left their homes filled with a sense of shame, believing that the act of leaving marked them as cowards. Thus, many of the arrivals in the New World stepped off the boats in a thoroughly complicated and confused state of mind, not knowing whether they were spineless fools or heroes.

At the same time, the Jewish immigrant had often left behind him a seriously divided family. If, for example, a young man finally made up his mind to leave for America, he usually had the support of his mother, who saw nothing but hopelessness for her son's future in Russia. His father, on the other hand, was often opposed. The Jewish father, who in many cases was the Talmudic scholar and spiritual head of the household, had heard tales of young Jews' losing their faith in profligate America, and also argued that a son's duty was to remain at home to help support his family. Often the domestic bitterness that the young immigrant left behind him never healed, which only added to his guilt at having abandoned his homeland.

But abandon it they did, by the hundreds of thousands.

In the forlorn little Jewish settlement of Uzlian, deep in the province of Minsk—where to live in a house with a wooden floor instead of one of dirt was a sign of enormous affluence—a child was born on February 27, 1891. Only years later would he reveal one of his most vivid childhood memories. Beginning in 1881, with the ascension of the despotic Alexander III, Jews of the region had been fleeing in increasing numbers every year, and he could recall standing with his mother at the Minsk railway station with throngs of Jews, waiting for the train that would take them to the port city of Libau. Nearby a political demonstration of some kind was taking place. Suddenly a company of cossack soldiers came charging down on horseback, and commands were barked out ordering the crowd to disperse. Whether the soldiers were acting on orders from above or merely on a whim there was no way of knowing. No one moved. Then the mounted soldiers tore into the crowd, wielding long whips, trampling screaming mothers and children under their horses' hooves, while the terrified little boy clung to his mother's skirts.

When he and his family finally made it to New York, via Canada, in 1900, he was nine years old. His name was David Sarnoff, the future founder and board chairman of the Radio
Corporation of America. Other Russian Jews would have memories similar to Sarnoff's. Some would try to erase them from their minds, and never speak of them. Others would cling to their memories obsessively, and repeat the stories to their children and grandchildren, reminding them that such things could, and did, happen.

There were two ways to leave Russia: legally and illegally. Both courses were fraught with problems and frustrations, and they were equally expensive. To leave legally required costly visas, exit permits, and other bureaucratic travel documents, which often took months—even years—to acquire. Minsk was a popular gathering point for refugees waiting for permission to cross over into Poland, and another was Odessa, on the Black Sea. Sometimes families were delayed for so long in these cities while they waited for their necessary documents that children were conceived and born in the process, thus requiring additional permits and papers for the new babies. Today, many Russian-Jewish families who identify themselves as “from Minsk,” or “from Odessa,” actually represent families who had traveled long distances from tiny villages in the interior of the country. An illegal exit attempt was, obviously, riskier, but if successful it could also be much quicker. But one had to be prepared to bribe police, soldiers, and border guards at every step of the way.

In general, there were four principal routes out of Russia. Jews from southern Russia and the Ukraine usually tried to cross the Austro-Hungarian border illegally, and then make their way to Vienna or Berlin, and from there northward to German or Dutch port cities. From western and northwestern Russia and Poland, another illegal crossing was required into Germany—the route Shmuel Gelbfisz had chosen—where the immigrants regrouped and made their way northward to the sea. From the Austro-Hungarian Empire it was somewhat easier, and Jews were able to make a legal crossing into Germany, and on to Berlin and the north. From Rumania, the preferred route was through Vienna, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam.

Though a few who could afford to do so traveled some of these distances by train, most covered the long miles on foot, and these treks often involved swimming across border rivers, and inevitably involved dealing with members of patrols who
profited handsomely from the refugees' plight. For weeks before departure, young Jewish men and women not only saved their money but also practiced walking long distances to toughen their bodies for the ordeal ahead.

Once in the European port cities, more confusion awaited them. Long lines of people waited for days at dockside to board loading ships, only to be told in the end that no space was available. In Bremen, Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam thousands of people slept huddled in doorways, on the streets, and in parks, railway stations, and public toilets. By day, most of those waiting tried to find odd jobs, and a few—but surprisingly few—resorted to begging. Daily, the signals kept changing. One Jewish group, which had made it from Amsterdam to London, was told by an immigration official that “the committee” would help them. But when they arrived at the address of the committee, they were told that the committee had gone out of existence. There were always bureaucratic delays to contend with. One young man, emigrating from Lithuania in 1882 when in his mid-thirties, was named Harris Rubin. He told this story: After weeks of waiting in various lines, he had finally obtained that precious piece of paper: a steerage ticket for passage on a waiting boat. But when he arrived at the dock and presented his documents to the passenger agent, he was curtly told that, because he was traveling alone, and had left his wife and children behind him, he could not board. Only those traveling as families were being accepted. A few days later, however, seeing that the boat had not yet departed, Rubin decided to try again. Apprehensively, he saw that he was going to have to confront the same passenger agent. But this time the agent merely waved him aboard.

Then there were the rigors of the steerage crossing, which cost between twenty and twenty-four dollars, depending on the cupidity of the ship's owner, and which lasted from four to six weeks, depending on the weather. The men and the women were separated by sex into two large holdlike rooms, stacked with bunks, below the water line. The bunks were narrow and short, arranged in tiers about two feet apart, and made of wood. There were no mattresses, blankets, or, needless to say, sheets. One's sack of belongings became one's pillow, and since belongings consisted of pots and pans and perhaps an extra pair
of shoes, it was usually a lumpy one. One toilet served as many as five hundred people, and whether, or how often, one was allowed above decks for air depended on the arbitrary policy of the ship's officers.

Aboard ship, since most of the steerage passengers had never experienced ocean travel, seasickness was epidemic and sanitation was largely left in the hands of the passengers. As a rule, however, food was plentiful—no captain was eager to have reports of deaths at sea appear on his manifest—though not very appetizing. A typical daily menu consisted of bread, butter, salted herring, cake, and potatoes in their skins. But even those who felt well enough to eat were reluctant to touch the food, which they had been assured was kosher, but which they suspected—with good reason—was not.

It was no wonder that the Jewish immigrants arriving at Ellis Island looked spent and wasted. They had been sustained on the crossing mostly by hope. And yet, before they could debark, the master of a ship routinely required each immigrant to sign a document testifying that he had been well fed, well treated, well cared for medically, and was in excellent health. To their credit, these documents helped many sickly immigrants pass through the United States Immigration Department's health inspections.

Then there was the first view of America: the turreted, mosque-like towers of the main immigration building at Ellis Island, rising out of the waters of the harbor like a fairy-tale castle surmounted with quaint domes and finials. Though the interior of this building was starkly institutional—cavernous processing rooms, where immigrants were shunted through a maze of corral-like iron fences from one set of inspections to another, meals served at long trestle tables with wooden benches in whitewashed mess halls—it must have seemed like paradise in comparison with steerage. In the vast, barrackslike dormitories filled with row after row of double-decker beds, there were at least clean white sheets, blankets, and fat down-filled pillows.

Processing at Ellis Island could take several days. Most dreaded were the eye examinations for trachoma, a contagious form of conjunctivitis, which the
New York Times
, in rather an alarmist style, described as “a sweeping plague—especially
on the east sides of our cities—of European importation [that] would surprise no medical man familiar with foreign conditions and in touch with the swollen tide of immigration flowing towards us from sources beyond the jurisdiction of modern sanitation.” Anyone suspected of suffering from what the
Times
called this “insidious and disabling eye disease” was sent back to Europe on the next boat. In 1904, twenty thousand immigrants were rejected because of trachoma.