There was something to be said, after all, for three generations of a family—from frail grandparents to nursing infants—all living together under one low roof. You learned to know very well whom you could trust and whom you could not. There might be family bickering, but at least you were bickering with someone you knew. There might be little privacy, but at least there was intimacy. Even lovemaking was an experience shared by the entire family. Chores and responsibilities could be parceled out according to talents, and the occasional presence in a family of a luftmensh—literally, someone who lives on air and does no work at all—or a shlemiel could be tolerated. In getting to know your neighbors only too well, you also got to know whom you could turn to in time of need, and whom you could not. To settle disputes, there was always the rabbi, with his book of answers to every question, and his infinite wisdom.
What mattered about America was not that the kitchen sink was also the family bath- and washtub, or that an entire tenement was served by a single common toilet that often didn’t work. What mattered was that one no longer lived in dread of the gloved fist pounding on the door at night, of one’s barely adolescent son being conscripted into the czar’s army, never to be seen again, or of being forced to stand by helplessly as one’s mother or sister was raped and disemboweled by drunken cossack soldiers. No wonder the Russian Jews had learned to dread the coming of the Christmas holidays, and had carried that dread with them to America. That season, and again at Easter, was when the czar’s soldiers were handed bonuses and sent off on leave and when, as like as not, they would decide to charge, in an orgy of violence, into the Jewish quarter. No wonder the Lower East Side Jews were baffled to learn that the uptown Germans, increasingly, celebrated Christmas with toys under a tree.
At least, in New York, the old uncertainties were in the past. It was for this reason that the raucous cries of the pushcart peddlers had a curiously joyous ring. It was this sort of feeling that, years later, would prompt Senator Jacob Javits to say that, having had a mother who was a pushcart vendor, he had always felt himself to be a member of a particular elite—of a choosy and exclusive club. The strong emotional attachment that East Side families felt toward their individual pushcarts was something that the uptown Jews simply could not understand.
German-Jewish anti-Semitism had begun to express itself when Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler of Temple Emanu-El, touting German superiority, declared from his pulpit that German roots meant “peace, liberty, progress, and civilization,” and that German Jews were freed of the “shackles of medievalism,” that their minds were “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” along with bolshevism became a repeated theme. The German-Jewish uptown press echoed this, speaking of “un-American ways” among the “wild Asiatics,” and referring to the Russians 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.” It was a paraphrase of Kipling’s “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain …” The Hebrew Standard, another journal that printed the uptown view, put 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.” Because many Russian and Polish names ended in ky or ki, the mocking terms of “kikey” and “kike” came into use—a German-Jewish contribution to the American vernacular.*
Miss Julia Richman, meanwhile, continued to sail undaunted through these troubled waters, head held high, serenely convinced of her own infallibility. With her hair sweeping elaborately upward from her wide forehead in carefully measured rows of waves, she had emerged unscathed from the Adenoids Riot, and continued, relentlessly, in her efforts to homogenize the East Siders into the American mainstream. Her new target became the Hebrew language. As early as 1894, she had drafted a report to the Hebrew Free School Association, urging that the teaching of Hebrew be discontinued, or at least de-emphasized, arguing that one new language was sufficient for an immigrant child to have to struggle with. It was a sensible enough point. But it was lost on immigrant parents, who had always stressed the teaching of Hebrew in their religious schools. How else would a Jewish child be able to read the sacred texts? Miss Richman was unmoved.
For her stands on matters like this, Julia Richman was vilified—to the extent that many of her more important contributions, revolutionary for her time, were overlooked. She had, for example, inaugurated special classes for retarded students. She instituted regular meetings between parents and teachers, and helped to organize parent groups on a school-by-school basis long before anyone had heard of the PTA.
Immigrant children obviously faced special problems in terms of learning. If, for example, a fourteen-year-old boy, fresh off the boat and knowing no English, was enrolled in a public school, he might easily be placed in a class of first-graders who were learning the alphabet and their first sums. Needless to say, the fourteen-year-old felt miserably awkward and out of place. Miss Richman looked for new and imaginative solutions to such situations. Under her aegis, special classes were set up for cases like this. The fourteen-year-old would thus spend three or four months in a special class learning the rudiments of English, and then be shifted to a class with his own age group. Miss Richman also knew that children learn from other children, and so youngsters who had mastered the language were enlisted to help instruct those who had not. It was a method that worked as well as any; that is, those who were eager to learn did very well, and those who were not did not.
Her approach to the first stumbling block, language, was clear-headed and commonsensical. A 1907 syllabus for English classes in Miss Richman’s district read:
Spoken language is an imitative art—first teaching should be oral, have children speak.
Teach children words by having them work with and describe objects.
Words should be illustrated by means of pictures, toys, etc.
Presentation of material should keep pace with the pupil’s growth in power.
A bright pupil should be seated next to one less bright, one should teach the other.
In copying, the purpose is language, not penmanship.
By 1905, ninety-five percent of the students in the thirty-eight schools of the Lower East Side were Jewish, and in at least one school in Miss Richman’s district—P.S. 75 on Norfolk Street—the student body was one hundred percent Jewish. It was perhaps natural, then, that Miss Richman should have instructed her teachers—a great many of whom were Irishwomen—in what was “special” or “different” about a Jewish child. On the plus side, she reminded her staff, were such traits as the Jew’s idealism and “thirst for knowledge.” But she also cited “other characteristics” of Jews in general and Russians in particular that teachers might encounter, and might find alien and off-putting. Among these were “occasional overdevelopment of mind at expense of body; keen intellectualism often leads toward impatience at slow progress; extremely radical; many years of isolation and segregation give rise to irritability and supersensitivity; little interest in physical sports; frank and openminded approach in intellectual matters, especially debatable questions.”
In order to encourage “interest in physical sports,” and to try to keep the children off the crowded streets, Miss Richman’s schools and playgrounds were kept open on afternoons, evenings, and over weekends. Because she felt that the Eastern European Jewish mentality was more pragmatic than reflective, she introduced a course called “Practical Civics,” which studied the way the American city, state, and federal governments actually worked, and replaced standard courses in American history—with their emphasis on memorizing the dates of wars and the names of generals and the birthdates of
Presidents—with this. One point of Practical Civics was to show that American capitalism and the free-enterprise system actually worked.
Miss Richman’s East Side students were also instructed in manners, morals, hygiene, etiquette, and grooming, and understandably, these lessons were less palatable to her students. In a world where meals at home were seldom eaten with more than a single wooden spoon, it was hard to grasp the importance of knowing which fork to use at an elaborate table setting. (Years later, to be sure, many former students educated under the Richman regime would ruefully admit that they were grateful to her for their knowledge of how to conduct themselves in a more polite society than had once been theirs.) On her periodic surprise visits to her schools, Miss Richman was a stickler for little politenesses and courtesies, and the children would be put through their paces: “Good morning, Miss Rich man. How are you today?… Fine, thank you.… Yes, ma’am.… No, ma’am.… Yes, please.… Thank you very much.…”
Richman students were expected not only to learn English, but also to learn to speak it correctly, another onerous chore for the immigrants, who had difficulty with certain English constructions. There is, for example, no equivalent in either Russian or Polish for the English ng sound, and in both languages consonants preceding vowels are given hard emphasis. Thus, words like singing and belonging tended to come out as sin-ging and belon-ging. There was also trouble with the th sound, which exists only in Greek, English, and Castillian Spanish, so that this came out as dis, and cloth as clot. Nor is there an equivalent to the letter w in the Russian alphabet, so that water, for example, was pronounced vater. The New York speech that Americans today call a “Brooklyn accent” is directly descended from the immigrants of Eastern Europe, but Miss Richman’s students were not supposed to talk that way. There were actual cases when her students were denied their diplomas until they could properly say “Long Island,” and not “Lon Gisland.”
The phrase “de facto segregation” did not exist in 1906, but Miss Richman realized that this was the situation that existed in her mostly-Jewish schools. And in determining to do something about it she raised more hackles. In an effort to achieve a greater ethnic balance, a proposal was drawn up to bus children from the East Side to less crowded schools on the West Side. Reaction to the idea of busing was strong even then, and there was an immediate angry outcry from Jewish parents. The Jewish Daily Forward inveighed against Miss Richman, pointing out that she was a German Jew, of the enemy camp, who was bent on destroying the fabric of East Side family life. East Side parents, it seemed, felt much more comfortable sending their children to schools that were close to home, and where they could be with other Jewish children. It made the whole immigration and Americanization process seem much less terrifying. The busing proposal failed, but it left a great deal of anger and distrust in its wake.
Nonetheless, Julia Richman’s name was known throughout the city, and her position seemed secure. In 1908, however, she very nearly came to grief. That was the year when, perhaps unwisely, she had the temerity to step boldly outside the realm of public education into the raffish world of the pushcart vendors. This was the most sensitive of areas, and however well-intentioned she may have been, she demonstrated that she did not understand one simple fact of Jewish immigrant life: the synagogues and the Hebrew language might be the spiritual bulwarks of the Lower East Side, but the pushcarts had become the immigrants’ temporal anchor in the New World.
By then, of course, many New Yorkers would have agreed with her that the Jewish pushcarts were an abomination and a blight on the city’s landscape. And even before Miss Richman decided to deal with the problem single-handedly, there had been efforts made to bring it under control. The city required that each pushcart vendor purchase a fifteen-dollar license, and it issued only four thousand of these licenses at a time. But at least ten thousand additional unlicensed vendors were plying their wares about the streets, and as a rule, a few dollars in bribes could be counted on to persuade the police to look the other way. At the same time, there was a great deal of worried talk in the press about “Jewish crime in the streets,” though the stories failed to mention that a vast majority of the arrests were for pushcart violations.
In 1908, Julia Richman went to Police Commissioner General Theodore Bingham and demanded that he vigorously enforce the pushcart license laws. At first, Bingham was reluctant. “You don’t want to be too hard on the poor devils,” he told her. “They have to make a living.” Miss Richman replied frostily, “I say, if the poor devils cannot make a living without violating our laws, the immigration department should send them back to the country from which they came.”
Her retort was widely quoted, and immediately the East Side erupted in fury. Considering the powerful emotional attachment of the vendors to their carts, she had struck a raw nerve. Immediately, Miss Richman’s resignation was again demanded, to which Miss Richman replied, as usual, that she had no intention of resigning. Once more it was declared that Miss Richman should be reassigned to a school district as far from the East Side as possible. But Miss Richman was nothing if not stubborn. Instead of trying to temper her inflammatory statement, or retracting it, she repeated it, insisting that pushcart violation was grounds for deportation.
At this point, Julia Richman might well have been in fear of her physical well-being if, by sheer coincidence, an event had not occurred that managed to deflect the criticism from her to the shoulders of another scapegoat. An article appearing in the North American Review, tided “Foreign Criminals in New York” and written by none other than Commissioner Bingham himself, stated that, though Jews comprised only twenty-five percent of New York’s population, they accounted for fifty percent of the city’s crime. Among other things, Bingham said:
It is not astonishing that with a million Hebrews, mostly Russian, in the city (one-quarter of the population) perhaps half of the criminals should be of that race when we consider that ignorance of the language, more particularly among men not physically fit for hard labor, is conducive to crime.… They are burglars, firebugs, pickpockets and highway robbers—when they have the courage; but though all crime is their province, pocket-picking is the one to which they take most naturally.…
On the heels of these incendiary remarks, all Miss Richman’s deportation comments were forgotten, and the focus of East Side fury became Theodore Bingham. It was recalled that this was not the first time the commissioner had made anti-Semitic statements and allegations. The previous year, in an article for Harper’s Weekly, he had claimed that twelve hundred out of two thousand pictures in his department’s rogues’ gallery were of Jews.
While the Yiddish newspapers on the Lower East Side fumed in print over the commissioner’s statements, demanding that Bingham be fired, there was an almost eerie silence from the drawing rooms and offices of such wealthy uptown Jews as Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall. Where, the Jewish Daily News—or the Tageblatt, as it was known in Yiddish*—wanted to know, were the voices of these powerful men who claimed leadership of the Jewish community? Years earlier, the Tageblatt reminded its readers, in 1877, when one of the uptowners’ own German kind, the banker Joseph Seligman, had with his family been turned away from Saratoga’s Grand Union Hotel (where the Seligmans had vacationed for years) on the grounds that the hotel no longer wanted Jewish guests, there had been such a public outcry nationwide among the Jewish mighty and well-heeled that the hotel had been forced out of business. Where, in the face of this latest insult, was the outcry now? Was the difference the fact that the maligned this time were Russian Jews?
Schiff and Marshall, it seemed, preferred to resolve the matter without an outcry—or to assume an ostrich attitude in the hopes that, if ignored, the matter would go away. Finally, however, and under pressure, Marshall did issue a rather cautious statement. He did not, he said, wish to refute Bingham’s remarks “by any sensational methods.” Instead, he had met privately with New York’s Mayor George McLellan and the deputy police commissioner. A carefully wor
ded retraction was worked out, and delivered to the press a few days later. In it, Commissioner Bingham admitted that his statistics were in error. Rather lamely, he blamed the mistake on unnamed “sources” outside his office who had got their numbers wrong—though why the police commissioner’s office would not have correct crime statistics at its fingertips, and would have needed to turn to outside sources, was left unexplained. The outside sources had turned out to be unreliable. The commissioner was very sorry about the whole thing.
But on the East Side the Jewish press was far from mollified. As the Tageblatt remarked, the East Side was proud of “a Jacob Schiff and a Louis Marshall,” and considered these men a credit to American Jewry. But the East Side also wanted “self-recognition.… We wish to give our famous Jews their honored place in an American Jewish organization in the measure that they have earned it. But we wish them to work with us and not over us.” The Tageblatt also said, “We have a million Jews in New York. Where is their power? Where is their organization? Where are their representatives?”
Here, of course, was a pivotal question. How could such a large and diverse population organize and form any sort of coalition of power? It was not just a question of German versus Russian, or uptown versus Lower East Side. The Lower East Side itself was seething with differences and factions. Some of the populace were Russians, some were Poles, some Hungarians, some Slavs, some Latvians, some Lithuanians, some Czechs, some Galicians. They all spoke Yiddish, but in accents so varied that it was often difficult for one group to understand another. The Russians disliked the Poles, the Poles disliked the Russians, the Russians and Poles collectively disliked the Lithuanians, and everybody who was not Hungarian found the Hungarians toplofty and condescending. In the Jewish Daily Forward, the letters-to-the-editor page, called Bintel Briefs, became a kind of forum for dispute, and one 1906 letter—signed simply “The Russian Mother”—tells just part of the story:
The Jews in America Trilogy Page 91