The Jews in America Trilogy (48 page)

At the moment when language seemed at the heart of all the bitterness, two young German Jewish girls took a somewhat different stand. They were Alice and Irene Lewisohn, daughters of Leonard Lewisohn, who made a pact that they would never marry, but devote their lives instead to the welfare of immigrant Jews, and to the girls' greatest love, the theater.
*
The girls began giving funds to build the Neighborhood Playhouse as a headquarters for the performing arts in the heart of the Lower East Side ghetto. Their plan was to produce plays in both English and Yiddish, and yet, when their first play,
Jephthah's Daughter
, was offered in English, the Yiddish press accused the girls of catering to uptown groups and not supporting Yiddish theater, which the immigrants needed and missed so badly. While the girls continued to present most plays in English, subsequently several Yiddish-language plays were performed at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Uptown, of course, the sisters were treated as scandalous rebels, especially when it was learned that the
Folksbühne
group was performing at their Playhouse. (The
Folksbühne
was sponsored by the “Socialist” Workmen's Circle.) The Neighborhood Playhouse also gave the noted actor-director, Ben Ami, his first chance to present himself in the United States, even though he spoke no English.

To most well-to-do Germans, one of the most terrifying things about the Russians was their interest in forming trade unions. This
threatened the Germans' pocketbook, always the most vulnerable part of the anatomy of any rich man. And so, to the uptown German, the Lower East Side Russian became the Enemy. The division between the two camps widened. It was worker versus boss, mass versus class, vulgar versus genteel, “foreigner” versus “American,” Russian versus German, Jew versus Jew.

Still, though there was literally nothing about the Russians of which the Germans approved, the Russians could not be ignored. There were simply too many of them. Clearly, the Germans would have preferred it if the Russians had never come, but there they were. For a while, the United Hebrew Charities and the Baron de Hirsch Fund—a £493,000 trust established by the German capitalist for the specific purpose of helping Jewish immigrants settle in America—embarked on programs to inspire Eastern Europeans to settle elsewhere than New York. These organizations, trying to sound charitable, pointed out that the “country air” in New Jersey or the Catskills would surely benefit the immigrants. They met with little success. In 1888 two hundred Jews were shipped back to Europe in cattle boats. But what were two hundred out of hundreds of thousands? Uptowners, increasingly alarmed, attempted to have laws passed in Washington to restrain further immigration. But the tide could not be stopped.

The next logical step, as far as the Germans were concerned, was to try, if possible, to reshape these shabby immigrants along what the Germans considered “acceptable” German lines—to clean the immigrants up, dust them off, and get them to behave and look as much like Americans as possible. The East Side settlement houses, originally little more than delousing stations, were set up. The United Hebrew Charities began providing free lodging, meals, and medical care for immigrants, and sponsored entertainments and lectures—on manners, morals, marriage, and the dangers of socialism—designed to show the poor Russians the unwisdom of their former ways. When refugees overflowed Castle Garden and the rooming houses nearby, the New York Commissioner of Emigration opened the Ward's Island buildings, and Jacob Schiff contributed $10,000 for an auxiliary barracks.

Others contributed in their own way. A particularly busy lady of the period was Mrs. Minnie Louis, a voluble woman whose ample body was overstuffed with good intentions. Minnie was not exactly a member of the German “crowd” of the highest social standing, but she represented its point of view. And if, since the Sephardim had Emma Lazarus, the Germans wanted a poet of their very own, Minnie filled the role. In a
poem, addressed to the immigrant Russians, she explained “What It Is to Be a Jew.” She started by declaring what a Jew wasn't:

To wear the yellow badge, the locks,

The caftan-long, the low-bent head,

To pocket unprovoked knocks

And shamble on in servile dread—

'Tis not this to be a Jew.

But, she added:

Among the ranks of men to stand

Full noble with the noblest there;

To aid the right in every land

With mind, with might, with heart, with prayer—

This
is the eternal Jew!

Be a man, in other words, like Jacob Schiff or Solomon Loeb or the Lehmans, Warburgs, Seligmans, and Lewisohns. It was a large order. Jacob Schiff admired the poem. The Russians admired it less.

Minnie Louis, in her stone marten cape, became a familiar figure on the Lower East Side, where she passed out cookies and exhorted immigrants to stop speaking Yiddish and cut off their curls. But to the Russians Minnie became an object of suspicion. On the Lower East Side it was widely rumored that she was not a Jew at all but a Christian missionary.

It would take more than poetry and cookies to elevate the immigrant to what the Germans considered his proper station. And so, led by men like Jacob Schiff, the massive programs of philanthropy began. As the
American Hebrew
sorrowfully observed, “All of us should be sensible of what we owe not only to these … coreligionists, but to ourselves, who will be looked upon by our gentile neighbors as the natural sponsors for these, our brethren.” The Germans took up this task with a heavy collective sigh, as if assuming the white man's burden. This was the atmosphere of philanthropy—money was given largely but grudgingly, not out of the great religious principle of
Zedakah
, or charity on its highest plane, given out of pure loving kindness, but out of a hard, bitter sense of resentment, embarrassment, and worry over what the neighbors would think. Many wealthy gentile families were enlisted to aid the Germans in their heavy chore of uplifting the Russians. In the 1890's Mrs. Russell Sage, Warner Van Norden, and Henry Phipps all contributed importantly to the United Hebrew Charities, and Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell established her East Side Relief Work Committee
to “put our poor ‘Hebrew Jews' at work and to clothe the poor Negroes of the Sea Islands.”
*

As the wheels of philanthropy began to turn, pulling its heavy load of impoverished humanity behind it, any spirit of benevolence that might have existed at the outset grew less. Philanthropy became something very close to patronage, with the Germans, the patron lords, doling out funds to the poor, the miserable, the dependent and the patronized, the new “huddled masses.” From a tithing system of raising money, something painfully like taxation developed, and wealthy Germans, having been brusquely informed of how much they were expected to contribute, emerged from meetings of the United Hebrew Charities with red and angry faces.

Not surprisingly, the Russians, on the receiving end of this charity, had no trouble sensing the spirit in which it was given. Uptown social workers and investigating teams invaded the Lower East Side, poking through blocks of railroad flats, clucking about filth and garbage, and asking impertinent personal questions—often to people who, in their own circle, were considered men of consequence. The Germans, however, were frequently surprised that the Russians, having accepted their largess, did not always respond with gratitude. As the
Yiddishe Gazette
reported in 1894:

In the philanthropic institutions of our aristocratic German Jews you see beautiful offices, desks, all decorated, but strict and angry faces. Every poor man is questioned like a criminal, is looked down upon; every unfortunate suffers self-degradation and shivers like a leaf, just as if he were standing before a Russian official. When the same Russian Jew is in an institution of Russian Jews, no matter how poor and small the building, it will seem to him big and comfortable. He feels at home among his own brethren who speak his tongue, understand his thoughts and feel his heart.

Alas, it is possible that this reporter is speaking of just such German philanthropists as Jacob Schiff. Schiff, for all his giving, lacked the common touch. His buttoned, German sense of superiority was too great. When faced with a Russian, his blue eyes glazed. When the son of a German friend of Schiff's announced that he had fallen in love with, and wished to marry, a Russian girl, his father cried, “You must have got her pregnant!”

It was not surprising that, as Russian Jewish families grew prosperous, they established charities to care for their own. Needy Russians
began turning their backs on German philanthropy in favor of Russian. Though the United Hebrew Charities opposed it, East Side doctors organized the Jewish Maternity Hospital in 1906, where Jewish mothers could be certain they were being served kosher food (which the Germans also frowned on), and where the relationship between doctor and patient was not one of benefactor to beggar, but of equality. Uptown, at Mount Sinai Hospital, though 90 percent of the patients were Eastern Europeans, there was a rule that no Eastern Europeans could be admitted to the staff.

Some Russian and Polish Jewish families did, as they began to make money, attempt to copy the German model and assumed German airs. They became the “Kalvarier Deitsch,” and boasted, “
Mayn weib iz gevoren ah deitschke un ich bin gevoren ah deitsch.
” (“My wife has become a lady and I have become a gentleman.”) But, for their attempts to bask in the glow of German respectability, they were also looked down upon. Many Russians Germanized their names; Selig became Sigmund, and so on. Others took German surnames, but this was often because, if one had a Russian name, it was impossible to obtain credit at an uptown German bank.
*
And no matter how successful a Russian became, or how hard he tried to Germanify himself, he found the sacred circle of uptown German Jewish society closed to him. Though the Germans gave away millions to the Russian immigrants, they never extended them invitations to their dinner parties, clubs, and dances.

When, on rare occasions, Russians found themselves inside a German's Fifth Avenue mansion, they reacted with awe. Felix Warburg, who was even more philanthropic than his father-in-law, Mr. Schiff, had a private little joke which used to amuse his family whenever a recipient of his charity came around. As a boy in Berlin, when the Kaiser's car sped by it played a little four-note melody on its horn. The joke in Germany used to be that the words to this tune were “
Mit unserem Gelt”—
“With our money.” Sometimes a Warburg pensioner would come to the Warburg house with a little gift for Felix. Accepting it, Felix would hum the little tune under his breath. It made his children giggle.

Once Felix invited two Russians to a Jewish charities meeting at his house. He had never met them before, but he knew how to spot them. They were the two who didn't come in dinner jackets. He
overheard this pair standing in front of one of his Italian paintings and saying, “When Communism comes and there's a division of property, I hope I draw this house.” Felix stepped over to the improperly attired men and said, suavely, “When Communism does come, and there is a redistribution of goods, I hope that if you do get my house, you will also invite me to be your guest, because I have always enjoyed it,” and walked away.

But Adolph Lewisohn, who was always something of an individualist and who often did offbeat, rather surprising things, once decided that he would invite some Russian Jewish families to his Fifth Avenue house to dine. They came, and, to his astonishment and delight, he and the Russians hit it off very well. The crowd was shocked, and asked, “How can Adolph
do
that?” But Adolph defended his action, and insisted that his Russian friends were not boorish and uncouth at all but that, on the contrary, they were “witty and interesting personalities” and had conversed intelligently about music, literature, and art. “They had read more Shakespeare than I had,” he said.

But, despite such gestures, the stern wall between German and Russian persisted. In the early 1900's a group of East Side Jews began to envision a United Hebrew Community, “to effect a union of Jewish societies and congregations in New York City.” But it would take events of violence of a world-wide and unimagined sort to bring this about even partially.

*
Alice later broke the pact, and married Herbert Crowley.

*
In this period, the Germans were forced to face another irritating fact: They were being increasingly equated with Negroes.

*
As a result, in Jewish circles in New York today one can always speculate whether so-and-so, with his German name, is really a German or a secret Pole or Russian.

38

THE EQUITABLE LIFE AFFAIR

One of the most colorful and written-about young men in turn-of-the-century New York was James Hazen Hyde. He had been nicknamed “the hayseed” by his Harvard classmates, but now, five years out of college, he was considered a hayseed no longer.

Upon the death of his father, H. B. Hyde, the young man had found himself, at the age of twenty-three, the custodian of a billion dollars' worth of life insurance, and was in charge of the savings of 600,000 individuals who held policies in the senior Hyde's Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, “Protector of the Widow and Orphan,” the largest insurance company in the country. The Equitable had over $400 million in its treasury. Young Hyde, whose father had built the company from scratch, owned 51 percent of it.

The minute the Equitable passed into James Hazen Hyde's hands, he became, in view of the vast ramifications of the Equitable, a director of forty-six other corporations, including the Metropolitan Opera, but whether he had the intellectual equipment to cope with these directorships was doubtful. He was far more interested in enjoying himself. He had a barber imported from Paris to cut his hair and trim his beard in the French style, and, in the restaurants where he liked to stop, he positioned various French chefs, who had nothing to do but await the
moments when their employer might drop in and wish some specialty. Hyde loved costume balls, indeed parties of all varieties. He threw a
bal masqué
at Sherry's that cost him $200,000. He had a country château on Long Island, with a private “office” in the stables where he entertained “actresses” and other friends; and where “French costume dramas and other entertainments were performed.” A reporter from the Paris
Figaro
described Hyde's country office as