“Mother,” wrote Mr. Schiff in his diary, “believes it somewhat of a responsibility we are undertaking in assuming charge of the responsibility of the girl and her education but we have decided to assume the responsibility.” There is a hint of Schiff hysteria here, for Mr. Schiff was usually too cautious a stylist to use the word “responsibility” three times in one sentence. And what actually happened was that “Mother”—Therese Schiff—hadn’t protested any action of Jacob’s so hotly since he threatened to move her to Riverside Drive. But Mr. Schiff was a man of his word. Wakiko joined the Schiff party, returned to America with them, lived her three years with them, and was educated here.*
Meanwhile, Frieda and Felix Warburg had had, in fairly rapid succession, five children—four of them lively boys—and were beginning to feel crowded in their Seventy-second Street house. They already had, to be sure, quite a comfortable summer place in White Plains. Called “Woodlands,” it was an estate of a mere thirty acres to start, but Felix, who always liked to “square off” his property, enlarged it repeatedly until it composed some six hundred acres. (Penurious Morris Loeb wanted to call it “Moneysunk.”) It was built in the Tudor style around a large central tower, and it had an indoor swimming pool which was also a hothouse filled with orchids and tropical plants. It had—another idea of Felix’s—the “Presidential benches,” a series of wooden benches, each engraved with the name of a United States President, stretched along five miles of bridle paths. (The Franklin Pierce bench, at a far corner of the property, was forever being stolen by neighbors for firewood.) Felix loved vistas, and cut down great sweeps of the surrounding forest to create them. When Nina and Paul Warburg first saw Woodlands, Nina said that it was lovely, but she liked a water view—to remind her of Koesterberg on the Elbe, where a number of German Warburgs had summer places. Felix immediately ordered another vista cut down, this time all the way through to the golf pond of the Scarsdale Country Club. (Nina liked it so much that she and Paul came to live there, and built their own house on the estate, where Paul built her a beautiful rustic “outdoor study” with a pool of its own.) Felix was a man of sudden enthusiasms. Once Frieda said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to rent two cows so we could have our own milk for the children.” “Oh!” cried Felix, “I’ve always wanted a Guernsey herd.” So they acquired one.* He also laid out a few golf holes on the polo field, which had more or less occurred while he was building his driveway.
Mr. Schiff, however, didn’t like Woodlands. He was probably jealous because Frieda and Felix seemed to enjoy it so much. He became very difficult whenever the young couple tried to stay at Woodlands beyond the second week in June, when he expected them to join him on the Jersey shore. Whenever he came to White Plains, he made disparaging remarks about the place, and used to say, “I can’t wait to have the children breathe the good sea air at Rumson Road.” Also, to make Frieda even more nervous, whenever her father visited Woodlands, things had a way of going wrong—there would be a heat wave and the wells would run dry, or there would be a thunderstorm and the electricity would go off.
But Mr. Schiff’s objections to Woodlands were as nothing compared to the fuss he kicked up over the Warburgs’ new plan, which was to build themselves a new house in the city.
While his father-in-law was traveling in Japan, Felix bought a 100 × 100 piece of land at Fifth Avenue and Ninety-second Street, a particularly beautiful corner facing the Central Park Reservoir. Felix, with his usual exuberance, liked the Gothic style, and had always admired the old Fletcher house on Seventy-ninth Street and said, “If I ever build a house, I want the architect of that house to design it.” The architect of the Fletcher house was C. P. H. Gilbert and, when he had his property, Felix hired him.
It was to be quite a house that Mr. Gilbert designed. The ground floor was to contain a large entrance hall with an adjoining “etching room,” to house Felix’s print collection, and the kitchen and pantries. On the second floor was a music room built around an Aeolian electric pipe organ for Felix to play; a Red Room to house the Italian paintings, Raphael’s “Madonna and Child” among them; a huge conservatory with stained-glass windows; and the formal dining room. On the third floor Gilbert placed a joint sitting room for Frieda and Felix where they would both have desks on which to array family photographs and where they would place their Friday evening candles; a family breakfast room; Frieda’s boudoir and bathroom; their joint bedroom; and Felix’s dressing room and bath. The fourth was the children’s floor with their rooms and schoolroom, and Felix had designed an elaborate electric toy railroad with tracks snaked in and out of the doors through all the rooms on this floor. The fifth floor was taken up with the squash court and guest rooms (and, later, Edward Warburg’s art gallery). The sixth floor and the basement were servants’ quarters. Felix had also purchased an adjacent lot where he had conceived the idea of building an apartment house, to be used by Warburg relatives, connected to the main house by an umbilical bridge. (This plan, however, never came to be.)
The minute Mr. Schiff heard of the Warburgs’ plans to build 1109 Fifth Avenue he flew into one of his terrible rages. The trouble was, nobody seemed to know quite what his objections were. “Perhaps,” Frieda said, “he was angry because we hadn’t consulted him. Perhaps he felt we were doing it behind his back.” At the time, he denied this. The closest he could come to putting his objections into words was to say, “It’s conspicuous. It will add to the social anti-Semitism in New York if a young couple build such an ornate house right on Fifth Avenue.” But this didn’t make much sense. Schiff himself had an ornate house on Fifth Avenue too, just a few blocks to the south, and a new one to boot. He had acquired No. 965, and, when his son married Adele Neustadt, he had given 932 to Morti as a wedding present, who commented, “It’s nice to own a house in which I got so many spankings.” Pacesetter Schiff had, in fact, led the crowd’s march to Fifth Avenue.
As the building of 1109 got under way, it became most difficult for Felix, who had to suffer his father-in-law all day long at the Kuhn, Loeb office. The house became a closed subject between the two men, and the atmosphere between them became icy. At one point, Felix confided to Frieda, “I just don’t think I can go on working with your father under circumstances like these,” and Felix went so far as to go to Schiff and offer his resignation. Mr. Schiff stared at him stonily and said, “If you leave this company, I’ll see to it that you never work anywhere in America again.” It was a sizable threat, and Jacob was a man capable of carrying it out.
The situation was no easier for Frieda. Her father would not discuss the house with her. Though he walked past the site of the construction each Sunday morning with Samuel Sachs, on their way to Montefiore Hospital, where the two men ritually visited patients and checked on the upkeep of one of their favorite charities, when he came to the corner of Ninety-second Street he made a point of turning his head in the opposite direction. Finally, desperate, Frieda said, “Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s Gothic that upsets him so. Perhaps he’d like it better if we changed it to a Renaissance style.” She went to Gilbert with this suggestion, but he pointed out that, since the exterior walls were already built, it was a little late for a change of theme.
The house was completed in the autumn of 1908, a year in the building. Fortunately, the Schiffs were in Europe when it was time for Frieda and Felix to move in, so they were spared having to invite Jacob to take part in this. They decided to move in on their son Frederick’s birthday, October 14. But once in the house Frieda was faced with what might happen when her father returned to New York. She became convinced that he would never speak to her again. The night before he was due to arrive, she could not sleep for worry and, the next morning, was too ill and tired and frightened to go to the pier to meet her parents, as she had always done. Felix went alone.
That afternoon her father came by to see her. He was ushered into 1109 Fifth Avenue and up to her bedroom. He sat on the bed beside her for over an hour, telling her about the summer he had had i
n Europe, without once mentioning that he was in a new house.
But the next day a note was delivered to Frieda. It said: “Your mother and I wish you much happiness in your new home. Though it looked very complete to me, there must be something you still need, and we hope this check will help toward it.” The note was not signed, but of course the check was. It was for $25,000.
Certain night watchmen in the Warburg mansion, which is now the Jewish Museum, insist that the house is haunted. A mischievous ghost patrols the galleries at night, rattling the display cases. If so, it is probably the restless shade of Jacob H. Schiff trying to find his daughter.
*In addition to his nephew, he had the Neustadts, who were parents-in-law of his son Morti.
* Wakiko, who died in Japan only recently, for many years corresponded with the Schiff grandchildren she played with as a child, and not too many years ago her own grandchildren visited America, where they played with Schiff’s great-grandchildren.
* And with it a herdsman as flamboyant as Felix, who immediately ordered stationery printed which said, at the top in large letters, “WOODLANDS FARM, WILLIAM B. JONES, SUPERINTENDENT,” and, at the bottom, in very small letters, “Felix M. Warburg, owner.”
37
“WITTY AND INTERESTING PERSONALITIES”
In 1870 the number of Jews in New York City had been estimated as eighty thousand, or less than 9 percent of the city’s population; as such, they were no more than the object of casual curiosity. By 1907 ninety thousand Jews were arriving in the city every year, most of them from Russia and Poland. (Because the Russians and the Poles seemed indistinguishable, they were all grouped as “Russians.”) The Jewish population of the city stood at close to a million, or roughly 25 percent of the total. By 1915 there would be nearly a million and a half, or 28 percent. These statistics presented the Americanized German Jews in New York with the most pressing and painful problem they had ever faced, and a deep rift had developed between the Germans and the Russians, between uptown where the Germans lived, and the Lower East Side.
In Czarist Russia of the 1870’s and 1880’s, life for the Jews had become intolerable. The vast ghetto known as the Pale of Settlement, which included the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Lithuania, and much of Poland, had become a morass of overpowering poverty, and the situation for Jews who lived outside the Pale was not much better. In the 1880’s the tyranny over Jews became legalized under the May Laws, 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 at Kishinev in 1903, and the massive and savage pogroms that followed. In 1891 thousands of Jews were expelled without warning from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev, and six years later, when the government seized and monopolized the liquor traffic, thousands of Jewish innkeepers and restaurateurs were thrown out of business.
One reason for the pogroms, of course, had been the desperate, and largely unsuccessful, attempts of Jewish workers to organize trade and labor unions. In 1897 the General League of Jewish Workers in Russia, Poland, and Lithuania—Der Algemainer Iddisher Arbeter Bund—had been organized and, in the next three years, led several hundred strikes of cobblers, tailors, brushmakers, quilters, locksmiths, and weavers who had been working eighteen hours a day for a wage of two to three rubles a week. But 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 revolutionary activity. Then the Revolution of 1905 seemed to erase all hope. The only answer was to escape to America, the land of the free.
In the years between 1870 and 1905, more than a third of the Jews of Eastern Europe left their homes. Over 90 percent of these came to the United States, and most of these settled in New York City.
In New York they found a small, established, Americanized colony of German Jewish families who were solid, well tailored, capitalistic in their outlook, and wealthy. They found, in fact, what the Germans themselves had found in the Sephardim fifty years before. The new arrivals from Eastern Europe were ragged, dirt-poor, culturally energetic, toughened by years of torment, idealistic, and socialistic. Aside from the single fact of their common religion, the Germans and the Russians could not have been less alike.
To the older-established Germans, who had acquired the patina of manners and respectability, this vast mass of gruff-voiced, “uncouth, unwashed” Russians who had the temerity to call themselves fellow Jews and therefore brothers was a distinct embarrassment. Newspaper stories of “horrible conditions in the Jewish quarter” on the Lower East Side—with reports of overcrowding in tenements, vermin, garbage, marital disorders, violence, starvation, and crime—were a grievous thorn in the German Jewish side. To be identified as a Jew, along with “those people,” became increasingly irksome. “Those people” were loud, pushy, aggressive—“the dregs of Europe.” They made a bad name for everybody. In this period Mrs. Solomon Loeb counseled her children and grandchildren, “When traveling on a train for short distances, never hurry for the exit when it reaches your stop. People will think you are a pushy Jew.” Adolph Ladenburg cautioned his chauffeur—and it was intended as a rule of life for everyone in the family—“Never try to get through the traffic. Wait your proper turn before going. The stricter it’s run, the better for everybody’s good.” And he repeated it for emphasis, “Everybody’s good.” In blaming the Russians for the anti-Semitism that existed in New York, the Germans themselves began to display anti-Semitic attitudes.
German Jewish anti-Semitism had begun to take form when Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler of Temple Emanu-El, touting German superiority, stated that German roots meant “peace, liberty, progress, and civilization,” and that German Jews were freed of “the shackles of medievalism,” with their minds “impregnated with German sentiment … no longer Oriental.” By a queer rationale, the Germans began to speak of the Russians as something akin to the Yellow Peril and Russian “Orientalism” became a repeated theme. The German Jewish press echoed this, speaking of the “un-American ways” of the “wild Asiatics,” and referring to Russian Jews as “a piece of Oriental antiquity in the midst of an ever-Progressive Occidental Civilization.” The American Hebrew asked: “Are we waiting for the natural process of assimilation between Orientalism and Americanism? This will perhaps never take place.” The Hebrew Standard stated it even more strongly: “The thoroughly acclimated American Jew … has no religious, social or intellectual sympathies with them. He is closer to the Christian sentiment around him than to the Judaism of these miserable darkened Hebrews.” Yes, the Russians did seem to have a different color skin. Because many Russian names ended in “ki,” they were called “kikes”—a German Jewish contribution to the American vernacular. (Germans are also said to have invented the term “Bohunk,” referring to Jews from Bohemia.)
Looking around them, the immigrant Russians saw German Jewish millionaires and quickly learned that these men had started as peddlers. If that was the avenue to success, they would take it. The future for peddlers in the 1880’s and ’90’s wasn’t what it had been in the ’40’s and ’50’s, but Russian Jews would have to learn this the hard way. The Russian Jewish peddlers, with packs or behind pushcarts, took to the streets of Manhattan. In their dark baggy suits, hats, shoestring ties, and sausage curls, they chanted what became a familiar street refrain: “Suspendahs, collahbuttons, ’lastic, matches, hankeches—please, lady, buy!”
There was also the touchy matter of the Yiddish language which the Russians spoke. Yiddish newspapers had sprung up which the Germans denounced as “socialistic”—or worse. They called the Yiddish theater “barbarous.” Yiddish itself they called a “piggish jargon,” and insisted that it was “a language only understood by Polish and Russian Jews.”
But the truth was that Yiddish, which is Judeo-German, was perfectly intelligible to Germans who were not Jewish. Yet Yiddish, like the foot peddler’s pack, was another symbol of a buried past. Yiddish stood for poverty, meanness, the ugliness of the Judengasse—for everything the German wanted to escape.
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.
The Jews in America Trilogy Page 36