The Russian revolution of 1917 took place in two stages—in February, when Nicholas II was overthrown, and in October, when the Bolshevist rule was established. Most Russian Jews greeted the news of the czar’s downfall, when it reached America, with great jubilation. Of the Bolsheviks’ takeover in October, there was less certainty and unanimity of approval. In New York, the conservative Tageblatt was disapproving, and editorialized that true freedom and order would not come to Russia until the Bolshevist movement had failed, and a representational democracy, on the lines of America’s, had been adopted. But the socialist-minded Daily Forward was rapturous, and its managing editor, Baruch Vladeck, wrote: “Life is strange: my body is in America. My heart and soul and life are in that great wonderful land, which was so cursed and is now so blessed, the land of my youth and revived dreams—Russia.”
America’s entry into the war, meanwhile, effectively halted transatlantic immigration from Eastern Europe, and never again would there be such a tide of immigration as had been seen over the previous four decades.* Then, in the clamorous, almost hysterical spirit of jingoism that swept across America following the war, a flurry of increasingly restrictive United States immigration laws were passed that reduced immigration to a trickle, and virtually “froze” the American Jewish population at the figure where it then stood. These laws were drawn blatantly along racial and ethnic lines, and set strict quotas; they were accompanied by much patriotic breast-beating about eliminating “undesirables,” “the foreign element,” decrying “foreign ideologies,” and calling for “one hundred percent Americanism.”
It was as though America, having achieved victory in Europe, had decided that it must cleanse and purify itself and turn itself into not only the mightiest but also the most moral nation in the world. Vice and self-indulgence would be eliminated through prohibition of alcoholic drink. In the South, the Ku Klux Klan had been revived in the name of red-blooded Americanism, to show the black man who was boss, and even blacks who were war veterans were lynched. In this same mood, in Michigan, Henry Ford began publishing his Dearborn Independent, which immediately revealed strong overtones of anti-Semitism, and which would publish the spurious document The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. (The Protocols, a proven fake, claimed to reveal an international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world’s money.) For years after this, many Jews would refuse to buy a Ford car, and an embarrassed Mr. Vladeck of the Daily Forward would be chastised for accepting advertising from the Ford Motor Company, particularly since he had frequently refused to accept advertising from political parties with which he disagreed.
In the state of Tennessee, the teaching of the theory of evolution was outlawed as not being sufficiently patriotic and “Christian,” even though the story of Creation was written in the Old Testament. Immediately following the Russian revolution, the Lower East Side had surged with prosocialist and antisocialist rallies and meetings, but by 1919 events—including Rose Stokes’s trial—had made it clear that socialism was no longer an accepted American ideology. And a number of Eastern European Jews, remembering that the czarist pogroms had been aimed at stamping out anticzarist socialist dissidents as much as anything else, began to wonder uneasily if the same sort of anti-Jewish, antisocialist violence might not be about to erupt in the United States. Others, like Mr. Vladeck, may have simply felt that their hearts and souls were still in Russia. In any case, by 1920, some twenty-one thousand Jews had left America to return to their spiritual homeland, declaring themselves “Former Prisoners [of Capitalism].”
Meanwhile, by 1919, the Lower East Side had changed drastically—both cosmetically and demographically—from what it had been in Miss Julia Richman’s heyday, and she no doubt would have approved the changes. Rough-cobbled streets had been paved with asphalt. Old docks in the East River had been converted into swimming pools. A number of new parks had been created, and handsome new schools and other public buildings had been built. Furthermore, the “Jewish Quarter,” or ghetto, could no longer be defined as existing between the boundaries of certain streets. The East Side was still a neighborhood of immigrants, but the Jews were moving out. By 1919, the pushcarts were all but gone, as the peddlers had moved indoors to shops, or to factories uptown. A few old-timers remained, not so much out of love as out of familiarity with their surroundings, but a new generation, American-born, had come of age since the 1880s, and had gone to college, studied to be lawyers, doctors, accountants, teachers, architects, had prospered and had moved away. This generation of Jews would leave their memories of the ghetto behind them. They would also, as we shall see, shuck the strict Orthodoxy of their parents, in favor of a more modern, more American, more assimilationist Judaism.
There had been setbacks, to be sure, in this outward and upward process of mobility. In 1914, three popular Russian-Jewish banks on the Lower East Side, run by the brothers M. and L. Yarmulowsky, Adolf Mandel, and Max Kobre, had collapsed. These banks had been very casually set up by men who made their depositors big promises but who had little banking expertise, and whose loan policies were, to say the least, fly-by-night. In August of that year, responding to rumors that me banks were in an unsound financial condition, the New York State banking superintendent shut down all three. There was an immediate panic on the Lower East Side, and in the investigation that followed, the banking commission’s worst fears were confirmed. The Yarmulowskys’ bank, for example, owed $1,703,000, and had assets of only $654,000. The Mandel bank had $1,250,000 less than what it owed.
That the hard-earned savings of thousands of immigrants were wiped out in these bank closings was, of course, a tragedy. But on the other hand, it was impossible not to be impressed by the fact that these savings, in 1914, represented collectively more than ten million dollars. Also, those Jewish savers who had been wiped out did not accept their fate meekly or docilely, or even philosophically, as they might have done a generation earlier, or as they certainly would have done back home in Russia, where such disasters had been routine. They were fighting mad. M. Yarmulowsky and his family had to escape across rooftops to avoid the angry mob that had gathered outside his house. Reserves were called out to control the hundreds of demonstrators in front of Mandel’s house. And the furious depositors marched to the district attorney’s office, demanding satisfaction, in the American way, through legal action against the perpetrators of the fiscal malefactions. As a result, Mandel was convicted of embezzlement, Yarmulowsky was found guilty and given a suspended sentence, and Kobre committed suicide.
And yet, by 1919, the Eastern European Jews were back on their feet again, and moving steadily out of the ghetto. Some were moving to pleasant brownstones along Prospect Park in Brooklyn. In once-suburban Harlem, where many middle-class Jews had already moved, there was a postwar influx of poor blacks from the rural South, and in response to this, Jewish families made the next logical move northward, into the Bronx. Here, big, new, and roomy apartment houses—some red brick, some tan, some gleaming, expensive white—were rising along the wide street that was then known as Speedway Boulevard and Concourse. Both Harlem and the Bronx were becoming what sociologists call “entry neighborhoods,” and they marked clear stages in the immigrants’ passage out of poverty into some notion of respectability. Others moved to the Upper West Side, along Central Park West and West End Avenue, or, if they could afford it, to what by the 1920s had become the most fashionable Jewish address in the city, Riverside Drive, where there were big apartments with spacious views of the Hudson and the New Jersey Palisades beyond. From the affluence of Riverside Drive, it would seem only a step to the manicured lawns and gardens of Scarsdale, or to Georgian mansions on Long Island’s South Shore, or to tennis courts and polo fields in Beverly Hills.
*The lady traveling with Mr. Guggenheim, who was Mrs. Guggenheim, was rescued.
*Emma Goldman and the Polish-American anarchist Alexander Berkman had founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth in 1906, shortly after Berkman’s release from prison for attempted murd
er—the shooting and stabbing of Henry Clay Frick in 1892 during a strike at the Carnegie-Phipps steel mill in Pennsylvania. In 1917, Mother Earth was suppressed, and its editors jailed. A year after Rose Stokes’s trial, both Goldman and Berkman were indeed deported to Russia.
*Between 1933 and 1940, about 140,000 Jewish refugees from the Nazis arrived in the United States, mostly from Germany and Austria. Then, after World War II, another 150,000 who had somehow managed to escape the concentration camps arrived. About 12,000 of these were from Eastern Europe, and were ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews, with their side curls, black hats, suits, and overcoats, who settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.
Part Two
GETTING OUT: 1920–1950
6
THE JEWISH LAKE AND OTHER CREATIONS
The uptown German Jews watched the emergence of the Russians as successful entrepreneurs with a curious commingling of emotions. On the one hand, there was a certain sense of relief and satisfaction: the “Jewish Quarter,” downtown, was no longer an embarrassment of crowding, poverty, illness, and ignorance; the settlement houses and other social programs that the uptown moguls had helped institute had done their jobs, and the Russians, no longer eyesores, were moving into the mainstream of American life. At their uptown, exclusively German Temple Emanu-El, wealthy German hands were no longer beseeched to dig into ample German pockets to help “our miserable brethren” on the Lower East Side, and this development was welcomed. But, on the other hand, this had all happened so fast that it was almost dismaying. The Germans had complained so bitterly to themselves of the Russian burden they had shouldered that it was almost disappointing to have the burden removed so quickly—as someone who has enjoyed poor health for a number of years, and all the perquisites of illness, may feel a letdown when told that he has been miraculously cured.
It had taken the Germans two and in some cases three generations to reach their status of wealth and almost assimilation. It had taken the Russians barely one. Was it possible that the Russians were, of all things, cleverer? The banker Felix Warburg, who was Jacob Schiff’s son-in-law, had actually met a few Russian Jews socially, and had announced, not without condescension, that he had found them “witty and interesting personalities.” Among the mixed emotions, that of jealousy could not be ruled out. By 1920—the year, coincidentally, of Jacob Schiff’s death—it seemed uncomfortably possible that the Russians might one day eclipse the Germans, not only in terms of sheer numbers, but in terms of economic and social power. And it seemed possible that that day might not be far off.
Thus, the caste lines remained firmly drawn. The Russians did indeed seem enterprising; the Germans would admit that. But they also seemed brash, aggressive, pushy, loud, argumentative. They had not acquired the fine sheen of social polish that the Germans had striven so hard, and for so long, to possess. At a Jewish fundraising gathering at Felix Warburg’s Fifth Avenue house, a black-tie affair, two men were spotted who were not wearing dinner jackets. “They must be Russians,” one of Mr. Warburg’s sons whispered. The Russians, in other words, might have become successful, but they had not yet, in the Germans’ eyes, become ladies and gentlemen.
Even more perplexing, perhaps, was the fact that Russian Jews were not going into endeavors that were considered solid and respectable, such as stockbrokerage and investment banking and insurance. They were going into chancier fields. Since many Russian men and women had arrived with some experience as tailors and seamstresses, they had gone into tailoring and dressmaking, and were now taking over the entire garment industry, and in the process turning it into what would become the largest single industry in New York City. Previously, nearly all the cloak manufacturers had been Germans, and prior to 1900, the average American woman had been very poorly dressed. Rich women shopped for fashions in Europe, or had dressmakers to copy the European designs that appeared in American fashion magazines. But poorer women dressed in what amounted to sacks, with neither fit nor style. But once the Russians entered the business, all that began to change. The Germans had been merely merchants, but the Russians were artists and artisans. In addition to the concept of sizing, they brought with them a knowledge and appreciation of the colors and textures and weights of fabrics. Having worked as tailors in Russia, they knew how a pleat should fall, how a hem should hang, where a gusset or a gore or a dart should be placed. Russian furriers understood the qualities of furs by the feel and by the smell of untreated pelts, and they knew how sections of kid could be pieced together to conform to the shapes of women’s hands. Once they had mastered the mechanics of the garment industry—the machines that had been unavailable in the old country—they were able to introduce to it literally thousands of innovations, to perfect and revolutionize the industry. With the new techniques of mass production, they were able to offer women stylish, well-fitting clothes off the racks at low prices, and by 1920 fashion was available to even the lowliest waitress or shopgirl. They had invented American fashion.
Still, to the Germans, it seemed an unbusinesslike enterprise, for what could be chancier, more unpredictable, than fashion, which was subject to shifting tastes, whims, and sudden fads? Fashion, furs, diamonds, jewelry—all wildly fluctuating commodities, all even riskier than show business. But the Russian Jews seemed to thrive on risks.
Crime, meanwhile, could hardly be considered a business at all. What could be a more win-or-lose, go-for-broke career than a life outside the law? That the East Side had produced a number of criminals was well known, and the attitude toward these people among the Russian-Jewish community was somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, Jewish parents did not point out these men to their children as examples of American success. And yet, at the same time, there was a certain grudging admiration for men who could buck the system and get away with it. The Jewish criminal wore snappy clothes, drove an expensive car, was good to his wife, and could afford to send his sons to Harvard instead of the City College of New York. There was a certain glamour about him, rather like a Hollywood movie star. Crime, after all, was another way out of the ghetto, and nobody could be faulted for wanting to get out. And, for some, it was proving a very rapid way out of the ghetto—as whirlwind a way as Rose Pastor’s engagement and marriage. Also, for otherwise perfectly legitimate Jewish businessmen, it was often useful to have a friend with “connections” who could get things done expeditiously, without going through a lot of legal red tape. Union problems, for example, could often be handled with a little muscle from certain quarters. And so the Jewish criminal was not regarded, among Jews, as an enemy of society, but more as a part of the general American landscape. By 1920, Meyer Lansky had become part of this panorama.
There are at least two versions of how Meyer Lansky first became friendly with another tough young East Sider named Salvatore Lucania, later to become known as Charles “Lucky” Luciano. Lansky liked to recall that they had first encountered each other at what had threatened to become a Lower East Side street battle between the Italians and the Jews, and how Luciano had been attracted by the tiny—fully grown, he was only a few inches over five feet tall—Lansky’s spunk and nerve. Luciano had called off the fight and later taken Lansky under his protection, gratis. Luciano would recall the initial meeting somewhat differently. Luciano had been earning extra pin money collecting pennies from Jewish youths for protection, but when he approached Lansky with the usual proposition, Lansky had replied, “Fuck you!” Impressed, Luciano had offered to supply Lansky with free protection, to which Lansky had replied, “Shove your protection up your ass!” Realizing that they were kindred spirits, the two became lifelong friends and business associates. This friendship, too, marked the beginning of a Jewish-Italian alliance against a common East Side enemy, the Irish.
Soon, into the Lansky-Luciano group came another, somewhat older Jewish youth named Benjamin Siegel. Siegel was a well-built, good-looking fellow who had quite a way with the ladies, and whose ambition in those days was to become a movie star. It was not such a farfetched
notion, since one of his best friends was a young actor named George Raft. Raft had been a street fighter and gambler out of Hell’s Kitchen, and had boxed his way up from a number of small-time clubs all the way to Madison Square Garden, where he realized that he hadn’t the fighting ability to reach top boxing circles. He had turned to dancing in nightclubs and revues, and became famous overnight for teaching the young Prince of Wales to do the Charleston. From there, it was on to Broadway and Hollywood. His friend Benny Siegel, though, had kind of a wild streak in him. Most Jewish and Italian street toughs eschewed knives and guns, but Siegel was always armed with one weapon or another, and would brandish these at the slightest provocation. For this behavior, and other bizarre habits—it was said that Siegel invented the game called Russian roulette—he was labeled “crazy as a bedbug,” which earned him the nickname “Bugsy,” though this was an appellation his friends were careful never to use to his face. Bugsy Siegel, as we shall see, eventually did get to Hollywood, though not in the manner he had originally planned.
Into this loosely organized but very effective fraternity came other Lower East Side Jews: Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, whose nickname derived from the fact that even as a kid he was adept at the “twist” of extortion; Arnold “the Brain” Rothstein, much admired for his ability to conceive and carry out grand schemes, and who came up with the notion of fixing the 1919 [baseball] World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. Then there was Jacob “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, whose thumb, it was said, was stained green from collecting bribes and blackmail; and Abner “Longie” Zwillman, whose nickname referred to the uncommon length of a certain anatomical endowment; and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, whose doting mother called him “Lepkele,” or “little Louis,” and whose early career had involved picking pockets and robbing pushcarts. But from the very beginning of the organization, there was only one man who was its acknowledged leader—the little Caesar who planned the battles, deployed the troops, settled internal arguments, and, with his mathematical genius, kept the books—and that was Meyer Lansky. If much of the brawn of the group was supplied by others, it was Lansky who supplied the brains.
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