The Jews in America Trilogy (35 page)

Sam was a strong-willed little man. In 1848 he became concerned about a Parisian milliner who appeared to have defaulted on payment for a shipment of feathers. Sam set out for Paris to collect the bill in person. News traveled slowly in those days, and he had not heard about the Revolution that had broken out in France (which was one reason why Paris ladies were not buying ostrich-plumed hats that year). As he reached the frontier, he was warned repeatedly to stay out of France. But he continued on, in the face of hordes of escaping refugees, into Paris, right up to the barricades. When challenged, he cried out, “
Je suis un Républicain d'Hamburg!
” Since Hamburg was recognized as a free city, he was permitted through the battle lines and went on to the milliner's shop, where he demanded and got payment of his bill.

He was a martinet when it came to disciplining his children, and Adolph had a dreadful respect for his father that was a long way from love. The German backhanded slap was his father's favorite form of punishment, and young Adolph received many of these. When he was seven, still during the year of mourning his father had imposed upon him, his older sister was married in a gay ceremony. At the wedding a traditional collection was taken for the poor, and young Adolph made a comment about collections that was, for his age, unusually perceptive (and, for a future philanthropist, interesting). He said he had heard that in Christian churches and cathedrals there were two kinds of alms boxes. Those of solid wood earned pennies, but those with glass sides—where donations were visible—always yielded larger coins and bills. He was slapped for bringing up “churches and cathedrals” at a Jewish wedding.

Once he ate lamb chops and cream puffs at the same meal, which was against the orthodox dietary law, and was slapped for that. He took lonely walks in the fields outside Hamburg. He picked wildflowers which he pressed between books, and built a little glass herbarium, planted with mosses and herbs, and placed it in his bedroom window
overlooking the canal. One day it was gone. His father had decided it was “not manly.”

He tried to please his father by taking an interest in the business. During the Sabbath—from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday—the Lewisohn offices were closed, but after sunset Saturday business commenced again in an informal sort of way, upstairs in the parlor. Here Adolph's father and uncles and clerks gathered to discuss the week's transactions, and to receive an occasional visiting salesman. On one of these evenings a salesman from Russia arrived selling bristles. Russian bristles were an important item for export, and Adolph's uncle, after examining samples in various colors, placed an order for bristles in white, yellow, gray; and black. Adolph, who had been quietly listening, said suddenly, “In New York they won't want black bristles.” He was thereupon dealt another slap by his father. Later his father said, “You were right about the black bristles, but that makes no difference. You have no right to speak out against your uncles and elders.”

Adolph was nearsighted, and heavy-lensed spectacles were prescribed. The glasses, at least, protected him from the slaps, and he seemed to withdraw behind them into a private world of worry and hope. At the age of ten he had heard terrible news. His dead mother whom he had loved so much had suffered from “melancholia.” Now one of his older sisters showed the same disturbing symptoms, and had to be carefully watched. Adolph himself began to nourish a secret fantasy—a dream of escape, and travel, and of riches with which to buy treasures that even “
der reiche Lewisohn
” could never afford, riches that could buy not only freedom from the black cobbled streets of Hamburg but something that Adolph began to see as a kind of grandeur and stature. The squinting, overweight boy became, in his own mind, a secret potentate.

Aside from the Scriptures, there was little to read in the Lewisohn house. But there were newspapers of sorts. There were two Hamburg dailies—
Der Freischütz
and
Nachrichten—
but these were not sold outright; they were loaned or rented. The papers were delivered, read for an hour or so, then picked up again and carried on to another family. Naturally, when each paper arrived at its appointed hour, the senior member of the family—Adolph's father in his case—got to read it first. By the time it got to Adolph it was usually time for it to be collected again.

An exception to this publishing practice was
Die Fremdenliste
, “the list of strangers.” This stayed in the house because it was not so much a newspaper as an advertising handout paid for by various Hamburg
hotels, listing the commercial and other travelers who arrived from out of town. At first glance,
Die Fremdenliste
may not seem much more exciting than reading a telephone book, but for Adolph Lewisohn poring over the list of strangers had a special fascination. The strangers had strange names, and they came from exotic ports, and he could let his imagination go and create exciting histories and daring exploits for them all. The strangers became his intimates as he fleshed them out and let them populate his waking and sleeping thoughts. Many were titled personages, and
Die Fremdenliste
carefully listed each arrival according to his status, wealth, and importance. Royalty came first—the visiting kings, princes, and dukes. Then came courtiers and those with powerful royal connections. Then came religious titles, then generals and counts and barons. After these came the
rentiers
, the landed gentry who lived on their incomes. And last of all, at the bottom of the list, were placed the “
Kaufmänner
” or merchants. Adolph, the merchant's son, set his sights on the princely category.

At times
Die Fremdenliste
published bits of general news. Here, for instance, Adolph learned of the rich gold fields that had been discovered in California. He also read how fellow Germans and fellow Jews like the Seligmans were becoming titans of American finance. And the Seligmans had originally been simple country folk, not even successful merchants!

At the age of fifteen Adolph went to work for his father. He was sent on a two weeks' business trip to Frankfurt and Zurich, his first taste of travel outside Hamburg and, as it turned out, his first real taste of the kind of grandeur he had dreamed about. Returning from Frankfurt he made an illicit side trip to Wiesbaden, one of the grand spas of the day, and one starry night he stood outside the window of the great gambling casino and watched women in furs and jewels and men in monocles and cutaways move slowly through the gilded and mirrored rooms under heavy chandeliers where, as he said later, “to me everything looked beautiful!” A few months later his father sent him on another business mission to Schleswig-Holstein, and from Schleswig he was required to visit a small island off the coast, a half-hour's boat trip away, his first sea voyage. He was seasick both over and back, and when he returned to Germany, he said, “I was seasick, but I shouldn't have been because I'm going to America.” His father laughed at him.

Adolph's father had sent an agent to New York to be the firm's sales representative, but it turned out that the man was not as trustworthy as the senior Lewisohn had supposed. Two of Adolph's older brothers,
Julius and Leonard, were sent over to replace him and soon wrote home to Germany asking for another brother.

Adolph's father knew that Adolph had “liberal tendencies,” and Sam had the usual parental fear that, once in America, Adolph would abandon orthodoxy. But at last Sam consented. Adolph was to sail on the Hamburg-America packet ship
Hammonia
, and all the way down the Elbe on the tender his father lectured him on the importance of keeping the dietary laws, asking him to swear never to give up the tenets of his faith, and Adolph “tried to promise.” As young Adolph started up the gangplank, his father became terribly agitated and cried out, “It's natural that you should be upset too, my son!” But Adolph wasn't a bit upset. And when his father gripped his hand and said, “If you'll promise not to cry, I won't cry either,” Adolph Lewisohn stood for several minutes, trying to cry to please his father, but, as he wrote later, “I could not dissemble. To me, there was nothing to cry about.” It was the happiest moment of his life.

When he got to New York—it was 1867, just two years after his contemporary, Jacob Schiff, had made his first trip to America—Adolph wrote home to his father:

The city leaves nothing to be desired.… Everything is as grandiose and animated as possible. Life here not only corresponds to my expectations but even exceeds them. We have very nice rooms, which, of course, cost also a nice sum of money ($55.00 a week with board, on Broadway). The business hours are from eight o'clock in the morning until half-past six in the evening without interruption, but then you have the evening for yourself.… I like this very much, as in Hamburg I mingled with strangers. I am getting along quite nicely with my English.

He also assured his father that, “of course,” the firm did not do business on the Sabbath. It was an assurance he would be required to repeat up to the time of his father's death, even though, in fact, the opposite was true.

“What I did resent,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir dictated when he was an old man, “was that my father was so bent on the strict orthodox forms that he insisted on our devoting ourselves entirely to that way of life, letting everything else go that might interfere with it.” In New York the Lewisohn boys bought some lard for export to Hamburg. When old Sam Lewisohn heard of this transaction, he cabled the boys with orders to dispose of the lard immediately; he would not accept it, and he refused to deal in it. He could, and did, deal in pigs'
bristles because bristles were inedible. But lard was edible and violated kosher restrictions. Sabbath strictures stated that the orthodox Jew could carry nothing on his person except his clothing, unless it was carried within an enclosed courtyard. Sam Lewisohn had no courtyard, and, as Sam pointed out, since the city gates were not closed on Saturday, the entire city could not be considered a courtyard, either. This meant that nothing could be carried, not even a handkerchief. If one of his children needed a handkerchief on the Sabbath, Sam said the handkerchief must be knotted about his arm—worn, in other words, as part of his clothing.

Sam Lewisohn would not even allow the key to his house to be carried on the Sabbath. Since some coming and going was necessary, and since Sam did not like to ring his own doorbell, the key to the house was ritually placed on a little ledge outside the door, next to the lock, on Friday, so it could be used on Saturday without carrying it. Adolph could never understand why his father bothered to lock the door in the first place.

No fire could be lit in the house between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday. In the pregas days some of Sam's Jewish neighbors in Hamburg brought hot dishes to a community stove on Friday, where they would be kept warm for Saturday. But since this involved carrying—from public stove to the house—on the Sabbath, Sam would not permit it, and the Lewisohns ate only cold dishes on Saturday, even in the coldest winter, in a cold house. “Every Saturday and every holiday morning,” wrote Adolph, “saw us all at the synagogue. I suppose Jesus Christ did the same, because the New Testament tells us that he drove the money-changers from the Temple and that at times he preached in the synagogue.” He added, somewhat slyly: “As a pious Jew, he must have attended the synagogue, although I suppose that toward the end of his life the authorities would not let him preach. Perhaps if he were to appear today and preach as radically as he did then, he would not be allowed in the more conservative Christian churches.”

From his study of his
Fremdenliste
, Adolph had observed how German society of his day had become rigidly stratified. Unless ennobled by a “von,” no businessman, merchant, or professional man was
hoffähig
, or received at court. It was a stony rule that the nobility and the common people never mixed, nor spoke to, nor even acknowledged each other—nor was it as simple as that. The nobility was stratified within itself, as was the nonnobility. Each German belonged to his
Kreis
, his little group, and any intercourse between these groups was not only not
done, it was considered dangerous. Mingling of the classes invited disorder, a state the German feared the most. The wife of a doctor did not speak to the wife of an architect; the architect's wife did not speak to the merchant's. This continued down the many rungs of the social ladder until the wives of tailors refused to speak to wives of shoemakers. The Jew, of course, occupied his own isolated position, and Adolph, who wanted friends almost as much as he wanted to be rich, came to America believing that a preoccupation with Jewish ritual and “feelings of Jewishness” only intensified the Jew's isolation from the world around him, and made him seem—and feel—more alien and aloof.

In New York, once, arguing with a friend who said, “Jewishness is drawn in with our mother's milk,” Adolph replied with a smile, “Well, that doesn't apply to me. I had a Christian wet nurse. Perhaps that explains why I get along with the Christians better than you do, and why I have so many Christian friends.”

“I could never see,” he said on another occasion, “why it should be considered
bad
to be a Jew. Some Jews are noisy and offensive. So are some gentiles. Noisy, offensive gentiles should be avoided. So should noisy and offensive Jews.”

When he encountered anti-Semitism, he liked to analyze it in a businesslike way. As a fifteen-year-old in Hamburg, he had seen a performance of
The Merchant of Venice
, and had been startled by, and “did not approve” of, the portrayal of Shylock in the play. He proceeded to make a careful dissection of Shylock's character and behavior. “I could not understand why Shylock should be regarded as a mean character,” he wrote. “Shylock had not asked for credit from anybody or committed any wrong or crime. He was simply living his own life with his family.” Then, said Adolph,