The Jews in America Trilogy (127 page)

Finally, there was the culture shock upon arrival in the city itself. Each immigrant's experience was different, of course, but there were a few common themes. A number complained, for example, of rude stares and jeers—particularly from children and teenagers. But most immigrants found that, compared with what they had endured, they were treated surprisingly well, though there were some aspects of America for which they were unprepared. Here, for example, are some of the impressions of one Isaac Don Levine. Later a successful journalist, Levine was born in Byelorussia in 1892, and came to the United States as a youth of nineteen.

He was astonished, for one thing, by the “skyscrapers,” and craned his neck backward to count up to sixteen floors of one building before being overcome by dizziness. Levine also marveled at the letter boxes, the mechanics of which he had a bit of trouble figuring out, and at the frequency of mail collections and the speed of delivery. In Kiev, he noted, a letter might travel for twenty-five years before reaching its destination. At first, he was startled by the sight of policemen carrying clubs instead of wearing sabers, and their habit of swinging their clubs as they walked about he at first found frightening. Later, he decided that this was just a mannerism, and not a threatening gesture. He noted that American policemen tended to be very tall.

Young Levine also observed that America appeared to be “the land of companies,” and that even a poor shoemaker whose shop was one basement room had hung out a shingle proclaiming himself to be the “Brockton Shoe Repairing Company.” There were other surprises. Back home in Russia, a number of foreign currencies had circulated interchangeably. But when Levine tried to pay his streetcar fare with a ten-kopeck coin, it was refused. He was also astonished to find, when he
produced the correct fare in American money, that he was not given a ticket. Instead, the conductor simply pulled a chain and rang a little bell. Furthermore, the conductor made no attempt to cheat or overcharge him—did not even try to extract a bribe—as had been commonplace back home. He was struck by the speed and efficiency of the American railroads. A trip from Boston to Kansas City, he learned, took only forty-eight hours, and involved only one change, in Chicago. At home, to cover a similar distance between Vilnius and Orenburg took six days, and involved changing trains no fewer than eight times. On the trains and streetcars, he admired the “two rows of leather straps hanging on both sides of the car for the convenience of the standing public,” and added, “I cannot understand why they should not have at home the same useful device.”

Levine found the prices of clothes—“American clothes lack grace and elegance, but provide comfort”—low by comparison with those at home, and the rent “not as high as it sounds at first.”

He noted that most American schools were taught by women, not men—“old maids with kind hearts, but not pretty looks”—and when he finally screwed up sufficient courage to try to enroll in a public high school in order to improve his English, he was surprised to find that the principal who interviewed him was a man dressed in an ordinary business suit, not an officer in a military uniform. Perhaps Levine's most astonishing discovery of all was the American public library system. Here he found that after filling out a simple form he was given two cards—one for fiction, one for nonfiction—good for four years. With these, he could remove as many books as he wished “without a penny's expense on my part,” and was left wondering “how it is possible that no money deposit should be made.” He saw that there were no policemen patrolling the stacks of books, that “no suspicious eye follows you,” and that some library patrons were so relaxed in their surroundings that they actually slept in their chairs. On the other hand, he was disappointed to discover that the young woman who issued his library card appeared to be illiterate. She had asked him how he spelled his name. “In our country, I said, a girl who could not spell would not command such a position.” Levine asked his friend Hyman about this, and Hyman confirmed that many highly placed Americans could not spell. The doctor whom
Hyman had consulted about his wife's rheumatism had also asked him to spell his name. “Just think of it,” wrote Levine in a letter home: “the doctor, a university man, and cannot spell.”

There were new curiosities daily. Like most Russian immigrants, Isaac Levine had never seen a Negro. But here, he wrote, “You meet colored people everywhere, and they seem to be more numerous than the whites. Most of them are very poor and ignorant.” He also noticed an odd practice among American males involving their legs. When sitting down, in a streetcar, or at a restaurant table, men hitched up their trousers at the knee, exposing much more ankle and calf than would have been acceptable at home. Men also seemed to think nothing of pulling up their trousers, sitting back in their chairs, and tossing their feet up on tabletops or windowsills—behavior for which they would have been arrested in Russia. For a long time Levine watched with fascination, through an open window, a man who was seated beyond it with his feet up on the sill. The upper portion of the man's body was obscured behind the newspaper he was reading, and as he read his body seemed to sway backward and forward. Later, Levine discovered the explanation for this extraordinary motion—an American invention called the rocking chair.

Levine was impressed with the fact that every American home, “except very old ones,” had a bathroom, but other conveniences were more distracting. In Russia, for instance, he had been told that all American houses were lighted with electricity. But in New York he found that the poorer homes were still lighted by gas. Though he was shown how to light and extinguish the gaslight in his room, he had also heard that many American suicides were accomplished by taking gas. He was more than a little nervous, when he lowered his lamp, “over this dangerous [ether] flowing in a pipe not far from [my] bed.”

Levine was also unprepared for the American gum-chewing habit. Sitting next to a young woman on a streetcar who was “making queer motions with the muscles of her mouth,” he wondered “what kind of mouth disease she possesses.” Learning that Americans chewed a chicle concoction for pleasure, he was nonplussed. He was equally put off by Americans' use of tobacco: “On every step you meet a pipe sticking from the mouth of a venerable citizen, a common pipe, at the look of
which decent people at home would be horrified.” Of American food, he was impressed by the eggs, which he discovered “are absolutely oval and if you possess that steadiness in your hand—they can be made to stand erect on either of its ends,” something that the small round eggs of Russia could not be made to do. As for American drinking habits, Levine was of two minds. He complained that “vodka, real, real strong vodka, for which the hearts of some of our country men here long so much … is not to be found here.” On the other hand, while admitting that the “American drunkard is usually a peaceful dove,” he also found it “more disgusting to see it in a nicely dressed, civilized being than in a tattered, illiterate peasant,” and was appalled by the number of saloons—“some of the streets are literally covered with them”—and the fact that he had been told that American consumption of alcohol “beats Russia.” He added, “The people begin to realize the great harm caused by it and the prohibition movement is gaining ground.”

Obviously, Isaac Levine was a fairly resilient young man, who quickly learned to take the ways of the New World in his stride, and looked on the bright side of things. Passing an American schoolhouse, he would observe that it was “rather large, surrounded by a spacious, clean yard, but ugly looking.” It reminded him of “a jail at home or of a soldiers' quarter-house.” But over it “the American flag was waving … and my aesthetic feelings were fully satisfied looking at it. I think it is the most beautiful banner in the world.”

Still, an element of homesickness could not be ruled out. In an old photograph, taken by Lewis W. Hine around 1910 and showing a group of Jewish women and children working on piece goods in a Lower East Side tenement, there is an odd detail. Though the scene is one of hardship and even squalor, a photograph is shown hanging prominently on the wall of the shabby room. It is of Czar Nicholas II—the last of the czars—and his family.

In the single decade between 1900 and 1910, more than eight million immigrants poured into the United States, most of them from Eastern Europe, a heavy percentage of these Jewish. The record of 1,000,000 immigrants in a year was first broken in 1905, was broken again in 1906, and reached an all-time high in 1907 with 1,285,000. Not all of these people, of
course, became rags-to-riches success stories. But an astonishing number of them did. By the early 1900s, a new aroma seemed to be wafting across the air of the Lower East Side—barely detectable, perhaps, from the outside, but there nonetheless—the heady, intoxicating smell of Prosperity.

Though certainly overcrowded, the entire Tenth Ward could no longer be viewed as a single, unmitigated slum. Already “better neighborhoods” had begun to carve themselves out of the confusion of narrow streets. The poorest street, with the worst overcrowding, the most people to a room, was probably Cherry Street. But, by contrast, just a few blocks away was East Broadway, a wider thoroughfare, which had become the Lower East Side's best address. On East Broadway lived the rabbis, doctors, shopkeepers, and families who had secured white-collar jobs in the city's bureaucracy. A 1905 census revealed that one out of every three families living in the apartments on East Broadway employed at least one servant.

In 1903, the
Jewish Daily Forward
, which always closely scrutinized these trends, reported that a new word had entered the Yiddish language:
oysesn
, or “eating out.” To dine out—not at a friend's or relative's house, but at an actual
restaurant
—had been unheard of in the old country (and up until that point, even in the new), but the
Forward
noted that this stylish habit was “spreading every day, especially in New York.” And, a little later, the newspaper commented that vacations in the country “have become a trend, a proof of status.”

The
Forward
had begun carrying advertisements for resort hotels in the Catskills as early as 1902, when at least three such establishments offered their services, stressing kosher meals and farm-fresh eggs and vegetables. Their greatest attraction, of course, was clean mountain air and escape from the muggy heat of New York summers. In the beginning, these “resorts” were primitive affairs—hastily and cheaply converted farmhouses that had been divided up into tiny, cell-like rooms, or barns that had been filled with beds for dormitory-style living. For four or five dollars a week, children half-price, they seemed a bargain. But it wasn't long before hotels in the Catskills began offering more amenities—electric light, hot and cold running water, telephones, billiard tables, bowling alleys, and even nightly entertainment. And in less than two decades' time the great Jewish resort palaces—Grossinger's, the Concord—
would make their appearance, upon which the whole idea of Miami Beach would soon be modeled. The mocking phrase “Borscht Belt” would be born, and Jewish comedians and performers—trying their wings for Broadway and the movies—would make wicked fun of their new-rich audiences' fancy airs and pretensions, to their audiences' great and unblemished delight.

Meanwhile, on the Lower East Side, another trend was noted by the ever-watchful
Forward
. Suddenly, it seemed, everybody on the East Side had to own a newfangled contraption called a Victrola, and the
Forward
complained vociferously about the noise created by them. In 1904, the paper editorialized:

God sent us the Victrola, and you can't get away from it, unless you run to the park. As if we didn't have enough problems with cockroaches and children practicing the piano next door.… It's everywhere, this Victrola: in the tenements, the restaurants, the ice-cream parlors, the candy stores. You lock your door at night and are safe from burglars, but not from the Victrola.

Pianos? By 1904, owning a piano was yet another symbol of Jewish status. According to the
Forward:

There are pianos in thousands of homes, but it is hard to get a teacher. They hire a woman for Moshele or Fennele and after two years decide they need a “bigger” teacher. But the “bigger” teacher, listening to the child, finds it knows nothing. All the money—down the drain. Why this waste? Because Jews like to think they are experts on everything.

Granted, the
Daily Forward
tended to exaggerate cases (
thousands
of pianos?) and, in its generally cranky tone, liked to scold its Jewish readers for not doing exactly as the
Forward
thought best. An opinionated paper, it preferred to see immigrant Jewish noses pressed firmly to the grindstone, and Jewish money not frittered away on such frivolous frills and luxuries as meals in restaurants, holidays in the mountains, phonographs, pianos, and piano lessons for the children. (No matter that the pianos were usually bought “on time” from secondhand
dealers, or taken over from previous tenants who couldn't afford to move them.) Still, it was clear that the immigrants had money to spend, or waste, depending upon how one looked at it, and were determined to spend it exactly as they wished.

Some immigrant Jews were doing even more extraordinary things. Some were even marrying Christians.

*
Later, he would boast that he had managed to swim the Oder even though he had never learned to swim.

3

A JEWISH CINDERELLA

Of course not all the Jews who escaped from czarist Russia made straight for the Lower East Side. Some, having made it as far as England, settled there, and an Eastern European enclave developed in the Whitechapel section of southeast London. Others, having crossed the Atlantic in English vessels to Canadian ports, settled there, in such cities as Montreal and Toronto, both of which now have large Jewish populations. Others, having cleared Immigration at Ellis Island, quickly made their way to join family or
landsleit
—countrymen—who had settled in the American Midwest or Southwest. Rose Pastor's family had settled in Cleveland, where no one would have suspected that she would create a national news sensation in 1905 in faraway New York.