The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  There were two ways to leave Russia: legally and illegally. Both courses were fraught with problems and frustrations, and they were equally expensive. To leave legally required costly visas, exit permits, and other bureaucratic travel documents, which often took months—even years—to acquire. Minsk was a popular gathering point for refugees waiting for permission to cross over into Poland, and another was Odessa, on the Black Sea. Sometimes families were delayed for so long in these cities while they waited for their necessary documents that children were conceived and born in the process, thus requiring additional permits and papers for the new babies. Today, many Russian-Jewish families who identify themselves as “from Minsk,” or “from Odessa,” actually represent families who had traveled long distances from tiny villages in the interior of the country. An illegal exit attempt was, obviously, riskier, but if successful it could also be much quicker. But one had to be prepared to bribe police, soldiers, and border guards at every step of the way.

  In general, there were four principal routes out of Russia. Jews from southern Russia and the Ukraine usually tried to cross the Austro-Hungarian border illegally, and then make their way to Vienna or Berlin, and from there northward to German or Dutch port cities. From western and northwestern Russia and Poland, another illegal crossing was required into Germany—the route Shmuel Gelbfisz had chosen—where the immigrants regrouped and made their way northward to the sea. From the Austro-Hungarian Empire it was somewhat easier, and Jews were able to make a legal crossing into Germany, and on to Berlin and the north. From Rumania, the preferred route was through Vienna, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam.

  Though a few who could afford to do so traveled some of these distances by train, most covered the long miles on foot, and these treks often involved swimming across border rivers, and inevitably involved dealing with members of patrols who profited handsomely from the refugees’ plight. For weeks before departure, young Jewish men and women not only saved their money but also practiced walking long distances to toughen their bodies for the ordeal ahead.

  Once in the European port cities, more confusion awaited them. Long lines of people waited for days at dockside to board loading ships, only to be told in the end that no space was available. In Bremen, Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam thousands of people slept huddled in doorways, on the streets, and in parks, railway stations, and public toilets. By day, most of those waiting tried to find odd jobs, and a few—but surprisingly few—resorted to begging. Daily, the signals kept changing. One Jewish group, which had made it from Amsterdam to London, was told by an immigration official that “the committee” would help them. But when they arrived at the address of the committee, they were told that the committee had gone out of existence. There were always bureaucratic delays to contend with. One young man, emigrating from Lithuania in 1882 when in his mid-thirties, was named Harris Rubin. He told this story: After weeks of waiting in various lines, he had finally obtained that precious piece of paper: a steerage ticket for passage on a waiting boat. But when he arrived at the dock and presented his documents to the passenger agent, he was curtly told that, because he was traveling alone, and had left his wife and children behind him, he could not board. Only those traveling as families were being accepted. A few days later, however, seeing that the boat had not yet departed, Rubin decided to try again. Apprehensively, he saw that he was going to have to confront the same passenger agent. But this time the agent merely waved him aboard.

  Then there were the rigors of the steerage crossing, which cost between twenty and twenty-four dollars, depending on the cupidity of the ship’s owner, and which lasted from four to six weeks, depending on the weather. The men and the women were separated by sex into two large holdlike rooms, stacked with bunks, below the water line. The bunks were narrow and short, arranged in tiers about two feet apart, and made of wood. There were no mattresses, blankets, or, needless to say, sheets. One’s sack of belongings became one’s pillow, and since belongings consisted of pots and pans and perhaps an extra pair of shoes, it was usually a lumpy one. One toilet served as many as five hundred people, and whether, or how often, one was allowed above decks for air depended on the arbitrary policy of the ship’s officers.

  Aboard ship, since most of the steerage passengers had never experienced ocean travel, seasickness was epidemic and sanitation was largely left in the hands of the passengers. As a rule, however, food was plentiful—no captain was eager to have reports of deaths at sea appear on his manifest—though not very appetizing. A typical daily menu consisted of bread, butter, salted herring, cake, and potatoes in their skins. But even those who felt well enough to eat were reluctant to touch the food, which they had been assured was kosher, but which they suspected—with good reason—was not.

  It was no wonder that the Jewish immigrants arriving at Ellis Island looked spent and wasted. They had been sustained on the crossing mostly by hope. And yet, before they could debark, the master of a ship routinely required each immigrant to sign a document testifying that he had been well fed, well treated, well cared for medically, and was in excellent health. To their credit, these documents helped many sickly immigrants pass through the United States Immigration Department’s health inspections.

  Then there was the first view of America: the turreted, mosque-like towers of the main immigration building at Ellis Island, rising out of the waters of the harbor like a fairy-tale castle surmounted with quaint domes and finials. Though the interior of this building was starkly institutional—cavernous processing rooms, where immigrants were shunted through a maze of corral-like iron fences from one set of inspections to another, meals served at long trestle tables with wooden benches in whitewashed mess halls—it must have seemed like paradise in comparison with steerage. In the vast, barrackslike dormitories filled with row after row of double-decker beds, there were at least clean white sheets, blankets, and fat down-filled pillows.

  Processing at Ellis Island could take several days. Most dreaded were the eye examinations for trachoma, a contagious form of conjunctivitis, which the New York Times, in rather an alarmist style, described as “a sweeping plague—especially on the east sides of our cities—of European importation [that] would surprise no medical man familiar with foreign conditions and in touch with the swollen tide of immigration flowing towards us from sources beyond the jurisdiction of modern sanitation.” Anyone suspected of suffering from what the Times called this “insidious and disabling eye disease” was sent back to Europe on the next boat. In 1904, twenty thousand immigrants were rejected because of trachoma.

  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 “eatin
g 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.