The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In other words, the Bronx was a neighborhood for a whole second fresh start for the immigrant, and a place to forget, if possible, the hardship of that first fresh start on Hester Street—not a place in which to muster rent strikes and demonstrations, or to haggle with a vendor over the price of whitefish on his cart, but a place to be “righteous,” fit, and seemly, another step toward Americanization, assimilation. And there was another point about the Bronx that Bennett may have missed, which was emotional and psychological: the Bronx is the only borough of New York City’s five that is not situated on an island. In the Russian Jews’ trek to freedom they had been hopping from island to island—from insularity of the European ghetto, to England, to Ellis Island, to lower Manhattan. But when they had made it to the Bronx, they were setting their feet firmly on the soil of the American mainland, for me first time.

  Of course, the Bronx comprised a large amount of real estate, and it was not all equally desirable. Moving from east to west, you went from Tiffany Street poverty through neighborhoods that got progressively better until you reached Independence Avenue, and wealth, in Riverdale, where the mayor’s mansion was, and where Toscanini lived. Meanwhile, roughly in the center of the borough, the Speedway Boulevard and Concourse had been renamed Grand Concourse. This splendid eight-lane north-south thoroughfare, completed in 1914, had been laid out by the city planner Louis Risse, whose inspiration the Avenue Champs-Élysées in Paris had been. By the 1920s, the Fordham Road–Grand Concourse intersection had become a great transportation nexus, and the business and social center of the Bronx, with stores, banks, restaurants, and the RKO Fordham Theatre. Farther along Grand Concourse, great apartment houses had gone up, and alongside it lay Joyce Kilmer Park, where mothers could take their children out in strollers and sit on park benches and gossip under the big shade trees.

  But the climax of the Grand Concourse was the completion, in 1923, of the Concourse Plaza Hotel, the first hotel in the Bronx and designed as a showplace. Governor Alfred E. Smith spoke at the dedication ceremony, and a borough newspaper called the Bronx Tabloid declared that the hotel would “enable the social life of the borough to assemble amid luxurious surroundings, in keeping with its prestige as the sixth greatest city in the country.” All the important county political dinners were given there, in the glittering ballroom with its gilded balcony railings and huge crystal chandeliers suspended from ceilings twenty-eight feet high. In the dining room, the French chef was partial to elaborate menus that included tournedos Rossini and—daringly, for a Jewish neighborhood—lobster thermidor, though most of the residents of the Grand Concourse were second-generation Jews who had abandoned the strictures of their parents’ Orthodoxy.

  The hotel’s lobby and public rooms were favorite gathering places for stars of the New York Yankees, from Yankee Stadium just three blocks away, as well as for Bronx politicians and businessmen and their wives. Every Bronx Jewish girl dreamed of being married at the Concourse Plaza with the best wedding that money could buy, and Jewish mothers promised their little boys that, if they were good, that was where their bar mitzvah parties would take place. By the 1920s, the Jewish families who lived along the Grand Concourse had nothing in common with West End Avenue families in the fashion and entertainment industries, who led more here-today-gone-tomorrow lives. Instead, these were solid, white-collar Jewish professionals—doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants, educators, druggists, and civil servants: a new Russian-Jewish American bourgeoisie.

  Many of these men were graduates of New York’s City College. During the early 1900s, City College had provided another avenue of escape from the Lower East Side—but that it had done so was a matter involving many contradictions and anomalies. For one thing, City College was not located anywhere near what could be called a “Jewish neighborhood.” It was not in Brooklyn or the Bronx, or on the West Side. It was at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Twenty-third Street, near fashionable Gramercy Park, and, even on the new subways, it was not exactly an easy commute uptown from Rivington or Grand streets. City College had not set out to be a Jewish college. Nor had its original intent been to Americanize or homogenize the foreign-born. Two successive presidents, Horace Webster and Alexander Webb, were not only Christians but ex-West Pointers, from a day when West Point was not at all hospitable to Jews. Webster and Webb, furthermore, had established a tradition of running the school in a paramilitary manner, a fact that young immigrants from police-run states should have found repellent.

  In many ways, City College took a hostile stance toward Jewish students. For example, Jews were originally barred from its fraternities, a fact that would forever incense Bernard Baruch, a City College alumnus of 1889. And so it is hard to say why or how City College managed to earn the deep affection, the almost passionate loyalty of Jewish immigrants. Yet, it did. For a Jewish mother, to be able to say that her son was studying at City College was to wear a badge of tremendous pride. To young immigrants themselves, by the early 1900s, City College had become a shining symbol—as one alumnus put it, “a passport to a higher and ennobled life.” The passions that City College stirred in the breasts of its alumni were almost like a parent’s devotion to a seriously handicapped child.

  Its teachers were, for the most part, mediocre. Its physical plant was in no way beautiful or inspiring. Its exterior was shabby, its interiors dark and grim, its plumbing primitive, its desks and chairs rickety and splayed, its library ill kept and out-of-date. On top of everything else, City College was not even a real college, but more like a combination of high school and college. If, for instance, a boy had completed grammar school, he could take a City College entrance examination, and if he achieved a passing grade of 70, he could be admitted as a “sub-freshman.” Then, during his sub-freshman year, he was expected to cram four years’ worth of high school study into a single year. Similarly, if he had completed one year of high school, he could also apply for sub-freshmanship, and if his exam grades were good enough, he might actually be admitted to a freshman class. Naturally, this system meant a high degree of turnover among the student body, and whereas hundreds of young men had started City College as freshmen and sub-freshmen, only two or three dozen remained in the graduating class four or five years later. The graduating class of 1906 was typical. One hundred and forty men graduated that year. Over a thousand had entered as freshmen and sub-freshmen four or five years earlier. This steep rate of attrition also meant that competition to succeed was particularly fierce. City College was a survival course. Perhaps that was why the school stirred such fervent loyalties among those relatively few youths who actually made it through, and why it conferred upon its graduates the almost mystical belief that they were members of a privileged and special Elect. It was not the school or its teaching staff that inspired its Jewish students. It was the students who inspired themselves.

  In the 1880s and 1890s, only a tiny handful of Russian-Jewish boys joined the few German-Jewish students enrolled at City College. But as the new century progressed, the word of the challenge of City College began to spread. By 1903, more than seventy-five percent of the students at City College were Jewish, most of them the sons of Russian immigrants, and in the graduating class of 1910, of the 112 graduates, at least 90 were Jewish. Finally, after the First World War, with Jewish soldiers who had seen a bit of the world returning home determined to make more of their lives than their parents had, and with tuition loans available, City College became a virtually all-Jewish school. By then, of course, the restrictive clauses against Jews in fraternities had become meaningless.

  By then, too, the academic standards of City College, and the quality of education it delivered, had improved dramatically. It was not quite Harvard or Columbia, perhaps, but it was close. And it was all thanks, probably, not so much to the efforts of its administration or its faculty as to the zeal and ardor of its students themselves, and their determination to educate themselves into the mainstream of America.

  *Max Fisher is no kin to the (Christian)
Fishers of Fisher Body, after whom the freeway, street, and building are named. But he doesn’t mind the coincidence.

  *Patrick O’Higgins once asked Madame Rubinstein what went into her Crème Valaze. She waxed rhapsodic and replied, “It’s made of a wonderful mixture of rare herbs, the essence of Oriental almonds, extracts from the bark of an evergreen tree …” Later, be stumbled on the formula, but could not find any of these exotic ingredients listed. Instead, there were commonplace materials such as ceresin wax (a petroleum derivative used as a substitute for beeswax), mineral oil, and sesame.

  8

  MINSTRELS AND MINSTRELSY

  In 1919, Irving Berlin had made a decision that would make him a millionaire, even though, at thirty-one, he was already a very prosperous young man. He had walked out the door of the music-publishing house that employed him, and for which he had been composing popular songs at an alarming rate—and being paid a small royalty based on sales of the sheet music—never to come back. Instead, he intended to form his own music-publishing firm, Irving Berlin, Inc., to market his own songs.

  The lore of songwriting is full of bitter tales of composers who wrote enormously popular songs—even minor classics—but who, having sold their rights to them for a pittance, died poor and were buried in potter’s field. John Philip Sousa, for example, was supposedly paid only ninety dollars for “Stars and Stripes Forever.” For “When You Were Sweet Sixteen,” Jimmy Thornton was paid thirty-five dollars. And such old favorites as “The Stories That Mother Told Me” came from the days when Harry Von Tilzer and Andy Sterling were peddling their songs around Union Square for two to five dollars apiece.

  But the music world also has more inspiring stories, such as that of Mrs. Carrie Jacobs Bond, a plucky Chicago housewife, whose husband’s sudden death left her a widow with a young son to support. Her son got a job selling newspapers, and Mrs. Bond, who had always considered herself vaguely musical, thought she’d try her hand at writing songs. She wrote song after song, submitted her compositions to publisher after publisher, and they were all uniformly rejected. Finally, she decided to publish them herself, and with two hundred dollars borrowed from a friend and three hundred dollars scraped together from her own savings, she set about to do the job from her kitchen table. As it happened, one of the songs she was working on at the time was a wistful, sentimental ballad called “The End of a Perfect Day.” While trying to get that song into the marketplace, she ran short of cash to pay her printer, but was able to borrow an additional fifteen hundred dollars from her doctor, who lived down the street, promising to pay him a share of the profits, if any. “The End of a Perfect Day” became one of the best-selling songs of all time, and in its first fifteen years sold an unprecedented five million copies, by which time her doctor alone had made more than a hundred thousand dollars on his investment. The song has been sung at weddings and at funerals, by church choirs and on the concert stage, has been translated and recorded in every language, including Urdu. It still sells briskly, and earns its composer’s estate a tidy annual sum. It was the Carrie Jacobs Bond route that Irving Berlin decided to follow.

  He had been born Isidore Baline in 1888 in a Russian village called Temum, which no longer exists, the youngest of eight children. Since he was only four when his family emigrated to America, he had no clear memories of the old country except one: lying on a blanket beside a road and watching his house, along with the rest of the town, burn to the ground. Of the family exodus to America that followed, he retained no memory at all.

  Perhaps because he was the youngest of such a large brood, he was a rather solitary, introspective child. Rather than being the most babied of the family, he seems to have been the one most overlooked by his busy mother. He was desultory in his school work, and not even City College held out any lure for him. He did, however, learn to swim the traditional way—by being tossed into the East River by some older Irish youths—and actually became so adept at it that he perfected a little trick. In the impromptu swimming pools that had been created out of disused East Side docks, children were allowed to swim in groups of fifty or so for fifteen minutes. Then a lifeguard blew his whistle, whereupon all swimmers had to get out of the pool to make room for the next group. Isidore Baline, however, developed a tactic whereby, at the sound of the whistle, he would submerge himself and remain underwater until the next group had entered the pool—a matter of three or four minutes. Then he would surface and continue his swim undetected. He became such a good swimmer that he once swam all the way to Brooklyn and back. His only other talent, as a boy, seemed to be singing: he possessed a sweet soprano voice, and he liked to sing. His idol became George M. Cohan, whom every Jewish boy of the era simply assumed was a Jewish composer and performer.

  At the age of fourteen, and for no particular reason, Izzy Baline ran away from home. He was apparently not very much missed, because he did not run far—only a few blocks away, to the Bowery. The Bowery, in those days, did not have the skid-row aura it emanates today. In fact, it was almost glamorous. It was the Broadway of the Lower East Side, crammed with bars, restaurants, and nightclubs that offered vaudeville-style entertainment. It was an era when “slumming” was a popular diversion for uptowners, when debutantes and their escorts dressed in their shabbiest clothes and came down to the Bowery for a taste of how the other half lived, and for the thrill of rubbing shoulders with gamblers, gangsters, and other East Side lowlifes. From the slummers and from their regular neighborhood customers, the bars of the Bowery did a thriving business. Izzy Baline decided he could earn a living as a “busker” in the Bowery bars.

  Buskers were free-lance entertainers who cruised from bar to bar, singing songs, or dancing, or performing comedy routines, then passing the hat for pennies among the customers. On a good night, a busker could earn as much as a dollar, which, in a neighborhood where a steak pie cost a nickel and a room in a boardinghouse cost a quarter a night, was enough to provide him with food and shelter and even a bit of pin money. For a while, Baline worked as a kind of Seeing Eye dog for a blind busker known as Blind Sol. He led Blind Sol on his singing rounds of the bars, sometimes joining him in a duet, and was paid with a share of Blind Sol’s take. For a brief period, too, he sang—for five dollars a week—with an itinerant vaudeville troupe that billed itself as THREE—KEATONS—THREE. There was Ma Keaton, who played the saxophone. Pa Keaton did a comedy routine, and their baby, Buster Keaton, was a comic prop who got laughs by being tossed back and forth across the stage by his parents.

  In terms of his later career, however, Izzy Baline’s most important employment occurred when he was hired as a singing waiter in a bar called the Pelham Café on Pell Street, in the heart of Chinatown. The Pelham Café had a perfectly dreadful reputation. To begin with, Chinatown, full of “sinister Oriental types,” opium dens, and tong wars, was considered one of the most dangerous areas in the city, where police were always breaking up dope rings and trying to solve the periodic clueless throat-slittings. At the center of all this unlovely activity stood the Pelham Café, which was known far and wide not by its official name but by the even unlovelier sobriquet of Nigger Mike’s. Nigger Mike’s was said to be the favored hangout of all the most notorious criminals and the most flamboyant and popular prostitutes. In Nigger Mike’s back room, it was said, illegal gambling, opium smoking, and Lord knew what else went on. It was the unsavory reputation of Nigger Mike’s, and of its alleged “back room” (which, in fact, did not exist), that had made it one of the most sought-after slumming places in town. Naturally, “Nigger Mike” Salter, who ran the place, did nothing to discourage his establishment’s expanding ill repute. And Mike Salter, meanwhile, was not a black at all, but a Russian Jew whose swarthy complexion had earned him the nickname—one he didn’t mind at all. If anything, it enhanced his saloon’s shady image, which was its chief drawing card.

  The songs that Izzy Baline sang while working as a singing waiter at Nigger Mike’s were a pastiche. Like Helena Rubinstein, he was proving himsel
f to be a masterful adapter. Some were simply the popular songs of the day—“Dear Old Girl,” “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider,” and “Sweet Adeline.” But then, for variety, he sometimes added new and slightly off-color lyrics to well-known favorites, and he also offered a few tunes that he had simply composed in his head. At Nigger Mike’s there was a battered upright piano, and in his off hours, he laboriously picked out these new songs on the keyboard, though, unable to read or write music, he had no idea how to transcribe his tunes to make musical manuscripts. In fact, he never really did master the piano. Years later, after Irving Berlin had become one of the most popular composers in America, it was something of a shock to strangers to discover that he could play in only one key—F sharp—and had never learned to read music, or to transcribe it.

  It was while singing at Nigger Mike’s, meanwhile, that Izzy Baline had his first brush with fame. Prince Louis of Battenberg was visiting New York and, it seemed, the notoriety of Nigger Mike’s saloon had traveled as far as Europe. One of the sights the prince wanted to see in the city was the famous Chinatown café. Nigger Mike himself was not at all sure how to deal with such an illustrious customer, and when the prince and his party arrived he announced that drinks would be on the house. When the prince was ready to leave, he thanked his host, and then offered a tip to his singing waiter. Baline, thinking that he too must appear as hospitable as his boss, politely refused the tip. A reporter named Herbert Bayard Swope—later to become the editor of the New York World—who was covering Prince Louis’s visit, decided that here was an amusing story: an immigrant Jewish waiter who would refuse a tip from a visiting German prince. Thus the name of Izzy Baline found itself in the papers the following morning.