Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  As for Schmuel, he realized he had been dealt a bad hand. Upon the death of Aaron, he began to cut himself off from people—even his family—becoming indifferent, often bitter. Schmuel felt deprived of a father and blamed his mother for “killing” him. For years, he admired the way she had kept her large family together under adverse conditions. Now he felt neglected and forced into unendurable circumstances—all of which he attributed to her. For the rest of his life, Sam Goldwyn, encountering a baleful situation, would shake his head and say, “You don’t know how many rotten mothers there are in the world.”

  At age sixteen, Schmuel, his mother’s eldest son, assessed his future in Warsaw. His responsibilities had suddenly increased sevenfold, and life in the Jewish ghetto showed no signs of improving. The tall, skinny teenager, with his doleful eyes, saw only hopelessness around him, and the probability that as a Jew he would serve as cannon fodder in the czar’s army. His face—with its jutting jaw and mashed nose—had already experienced many fights. He had become what was often referred to as a “miniature Jew,” those Jewish youths who carried the burdens of adults. He felt too young to assume those responsibilities but old enough to act on a fantasy he had been fostering.

  “When I was a kid ...” Goldwyn later admitted, “the only place I wanted to go was to America. I had heard them talking about America, about how people were free in America.... Even then America, actually only the name of a faraway country, was a vision of paradise.” Because of the prohibitive cost, Schmuel knew he would have to make his journey in stages. His mother had a married sister in Birmingham, England; that was his first milestone if he intended ever to cross an ocean.

  Schmuel took one of his father’s suits to a tailor, who altered it to the boy’s narrow frame. He sold off the rest of the clothes that he thought had any value. The old clothes grubstaked his future. Lange Hannah had long sensed Schmuel’s restlessness, but upon learning of his plans, she wailed for days. At the same time, eleven-year-old Mania remembered, her mother wanted him to go. Even at that age, she felt her mother believed Schmuel was the member of the family most likely to survive, that with prayer he might make it to America. He might even prosper enough to help the rest of his family toward a better life.

  Schmuel stopped off at his grandparents’ flat. His grandfather was out playing chess; his grandmother asked if he wanted supper or to spend the night. Schmuel replied that he had come over “just to kiss you.” Then he left Warsaw for the port of Hamburg as tens of thousands of Jewish pilgrims did—he walked.

  Between 1880 and 1910, one and a half million Jews joined wagon trains of pushcarts leaving Eastern Europe. In the 1880s alone, the family of Louis B. Mayer left Demre, near Vilna, in Lithuania; Lewis Zeleznick (later Selznick) ran away from Kiev; William Fox (formerly Fuchs) emigrated from Tulcheva, Hungary; the Warner family uprooted itself from Krasnashiltz, Poland, near the Russian border; Adolph Zukor abandoned Ricse, Hungary; and Carl Laemmle left Wurttemberg, Germany—gam—blers with nothing to lose, all from within a five-hundred-mile radius of Warsaw.

  In 1895, Schmuel Gelbfisz walked alone, almost three hundred miles due west to the Oder River. There he paid someone to row him across; half the fare was for the ferrying, half for smuggling him out of the Russian empire into Germany, past police who guarded the border on both sides. “This took most of the little money in my pocket,” Goldwyn later recounted, “and then I tumbled into the water, got a good soaking, and lost the rest.” He walked another two hundred miles to Hamburg.

  He was drawn to the harbor, a maelstrom of activity. Emigrants speaking German, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Latvian piled onto ships in pursuit of happiness. Schmuel got by on his Yiddish. He stood on the dock, penniless, and watched the throngs of those able to proceed. Gazing at the boats departing for England, he considered stowing away.

  Schmuel was not completely alone in Hamburg. His mother had given him the name of a family that had moved there from Warsaw. The boy wandered the streets until he found the storefront bearing the name Liebglid. “I stormed into the shop with my ragged clothes and dirty, tearstained face,” Goldwyn remembered, “and told the proprietor my story. ‘I can’t go back,’ I cried, ‘I am on my way to America and I won’t go back.”’ The comforting shoulder offered him belonged to Jacob Liebglid, a young glovemaker who had left Poland only a few years earlier for many of the same reasons Gelbfisz had. In Hamburg, Liebglid had cut out a tolerable life for himself.

  Schmuel was put to work and stayed for several weeks, learning the rudiments of glovemaking. He realized he could remain in Hamburg and become a glovemaker like Liebglid; but he refused to settle. He insisted he had to move on. Liebglid canvassed the Jewish neighborhood, raising the eighteen shillings necessary to put Schmuel on a boat train to London.

  Great Britain was at the zenith of empire, but poverty was the same everywhere. Schmuel scrounged around London to subsist. He lived off scraps and stolen food, and he slept for three nights in the bushes of Hyde Park. Finding all doors in London closed to him, he pressed on to his relatives, who would at least provide him with food and shelter.

  The next leg of his odyssey was the 120-mile walk from London to the Midlands. He lived for two days on a single loaf of bread. In Birmingham, he found the ghetto, and his mother’s sister and her husband, Mark Lindenshat, a foreman in a factory that made fireplace tools. They welcomed him, but they could not support him.

  With little meat on his bones and speaking but a few words of English, Schmuel became an apprentice to a blacksmith. His job was to pump the bellows with his feet. “This did not last long, however,” he admitted years later, “because I lacked the strength to keep up a good fire.” He was discharged and was subsequently let go from several other backbreaking jobs in the industrial city.

  Schmuel later admitted that he often cried openly in front of his relatives. Convincing himself that he would never be strong enough for any physical labor, he often took to his bed. “I was too weak to do the work and they didn’t understand,” Goldwyn later admitted to his son; “that’s why I was crying.”

  The overburdened Lindenshats packed him off to other relatives, Dora and Isaac Salberg. Dora claimed that she taught the boy how to use a handkerchief and a knife and fork. She also took credit for anglicizing his name, translating Schmuel Gelbfisz to Samuel Goldfish. She explained the disadvantages of emphasizing his Jewish heritage. People began to call him Sam.

  In 1897, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland celebrated the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. The pomp of the occasion threw into greater relief Goldfish’s miserable circumstances. It also helped shape his taste, converting him into a lifelong Anglophile. He coveted the best that was British—manners, clothes, speech, looks, and, especially, an air of self-confidence.

  For a while, Sam Goldfish sold sponges. Isaac Salberg, having failed in business in Birmingham, packed up one day and moved to South Africa. Before leaving, he had invested a small sum of money in a sponge dealership. Goldfish was supposed to peddle the wares and return the original investment to the company. It never saw a farthing.

  Goldwyn later claimed that while staying with the Salbergs he was struck by a quote from Benjamin Franklin in a reader from which he was studying English. The essay was called “Information for Those Who Would Remove to America”; the phrase was: “America, where people do not inquire of a stranger, ‘What is he?’ but ‘What can he do?’” By the fall of 1898, Sam Goldfish felt the urge to move on. He journeyed another hundred miles, northwest to Liverpool.

  Years later, Goldwyn told his son that when he arrived in Liverpool he did not have enough money to pay for a transoceanic passage and that he was sitting on a bench crying when a man approached to comfort him. “I’m so unhappy. I don’t know what to do,” he blubbered. The cavalier Englishman allegedly said, “Why don’t you to go America; I’ll give you the money.” That was exactly the sort of fairy tale Goldwyn later liked people to believe about him. On other occasions, he said his aunt ha
d passed a hat on his behalf. Dora Salberg always claimed that Sam skipped town with the sponge money. Goldwyn’s future wife of forty-eight years said, “Sam always told me that he stole the money to get to America.”

  GOLDWYN could wax tearful about the vision of arriving in New York Harbor and seeing for the first time that Mother of Exiles welcoming the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But there is not a trace of his ever passing through Ellis Island, the immigration clearinghouse that had just been built to replace seam-split Castle Garden. There are no records of a Samuel Goldfish or Gelbfisz or any variant spelling either boarding a ship in England in the 1890s or disembarking in America. The nonexistence of the entry card required of every man, woman, and child who was processed at Ellis Island indicates that Sam Goldfish was not only a teenage runaway but also an illegal alien.

  There are no records, either, of a Samuel Gelbfisz or Goldfish boarding a ship bound for Canada. This omission probably originates with a dockside clerk. On either side of the Atlantic—in immigration halls and shipping-line offices—it was the job of clerks with neat penmanship to record on a long list the name of every passenger who walked before them. This required reading the rudimentary scrawls of hundreds of passengers a day. The clerks often made their own adjustments or mistakes. Sam Goldfish, with little command of English, had poor handwriting. On his exit forms, the sloppy second syllable of his surname could easily have been read a number of ways.

  At exactly this time, amid the thousands of outbound-passenger lists, a single entry fits his description. On one “Schedule A—Names and Description of Passengers” for the Dominion Line’s Labrador, sailing from Liverpool to Canada in November 1898, passenger number 90 in steerage class is almost certainly he: “Sam Goldberg,” age nineteen, a laborer born in Russia, whose ultimate destination was New York.

  The Labrador was a schooner-rigged vessel, one of the largest sailing ships at sea. She was capable of carrying one hundred passengers in first class (called “Saloon” on Dominion Line ships), fifty in second class, and one thousand in what the Labrador called “third class.” This was steerage.

  One-way Saloon fare was ninety dollars. Steerage cost fifteen dollars, which rented an iron berth, a hammock, or, for some lucky passengers on the Dominion Line, cots. Most passengers used their clothes for bedding. Crowding in the airless, badly lighted ship’s belly made most of them sick.

  “Sam Goldberg”’s greatest advantage in sailing on the Labrador when he did was that only 128 other passengers occupied the space allotted for one thousand. That extra room carried its own price. The weather in England turned suddenly cold that week, and storms were forecast in the Atlantic. Practically all of the ship’s passengers were male laborers between the ages of sixteen and thirty, the only souls hardy enough to brave a winter crossing.

  The Labrador set sail in the late afternoon of November 26, 1898, heading northwest through the Irish Sea and the North Channel. The next day she picked up a few passengers in Londonderry, Ireland, then steamed due west. For the next eight days, the ship battled an angry sea.

  The flight of the Jews from their homelands was more than cartographic. For most of them it was the first departure from the holy laws that had governed their lives, starting with their daily bread. There was no indication when or where the Jewish passengers would connect with another Jewish community; and there were limits to one’s adherence to strict dietary laws. At what point does a religious man eat? Sam Goldfish’s goal was no longer to be a good Jew; it was to become a good American, even if that meant sacrificing centuries of orthodoxy.

  The Labrador pulled into the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, at three-fifteen in the afternoon on December 4, 1898. The weather that greeted Goldfish was worse than he had left behind. A cold snap had stung eastern Canada; the most arctic December since 1871 gusted its way into New England and New York. “Goldberg” either jumped ship in Halifax or (if he had enough sense of Canadian geography) waited another day, until the Labrador anchored at Saint John, New Brunswick, leaving him sixty miles from the United States border.

  Once he had his legs back, Goldfish took to the road again. Probably somewhere near Milltown, Maine, he crossed a snow-covered patch of land into America. Goldwyn affirmed on his Declaration for Naturalization five years later that the date was January 1, 1899. Many years after that, he admitted that upon entering the United States, he literally got down on his hands and knees and kissed the ground. He did not know a soul within four thousand miles.

  In America, the landscape did not suddenly change, nor was nineteen-year-old Sam Goldfish any less cold or hungry. He felt he was not in the real America yet. “To me then,” Goldwyn later recalled, “New York was America.” Over the next month, he trudged through more snow than New England had seen in ten years. Sometime in late January 1899, he arrived in Manhattan, his head full of the stuff on which American dreams are made.

  2 New York

  THE GREAT METROPOLIS was a mare’s nest, its slums as awful as Warsaw’s, in some areas worse.

  Samuel Goldfish scared up temporary lodging in a boardinghouse in the Bronx and a job delivering telegraph messages. Both were the result of tzedaka—that requirement of Jews to look after their own.

  Making his rounds in Manhattan, Goldfish beheld some of America’s wonders, riches beyond his imaginings. But he also saw poverty at every turn. On the Lower East Side, he encountered the most crowded living conditions he had ever seen. Communities of immigrants speaking their native tongues, with pushcarts and small shops, thrived as though entire city blocks from Eastern Europe had been set down there. Newspapers appeared to be in every European language but English.

  Goldfish stumbled across the American Council of Nationalities. Someone there spoke of a place far beyond Manhattan with a growing population of Polish immigrants, a small town upstate where gloves were made. Factories were so hungry for labor, they would even provide transportation.

  Goldwyn quickly considered whether he had exchanged one urban pen for another. He could remain in the relatively familiar surroundings of New York City, or he could gamble on the unknown in the hinterlands. Curiously, a special breed of those East European Jews who had come to America within a few years of Goldwyn’s arrival chose to escape that most crowded Jewish ghetto, New York City: Louis B. Mayer became a scrap-metal and junk dealer in Saint John, New Brunswick, then moved to Haverhill, Massachusetts; Adolph Zukor became a furrier in Chicago; Lewis Selznick became a jeweler in Pittsburgh, Carl Laemmle a clothier in Oshkosh; the father of Jack, Harry, Sam, and Albert Warner became a cobbler, then opened a bicycle shop in Youngstown, Ohio; William Fox cut linings for men’s suits and opened a cloth-sponging business, but extricated himself from the Lower East Side as soon as he could. For Sam Goldfish, the choice was clear.

  The train trip was some 180 miles out of Pennsylvania Station on the New York Central Line, due north along the banks of the Hudson River until Albany, at which point the tracks elbowed westward into Fulton County. Each mile grew more rustic, even in winter affording beautiful glimpses of fields, forests, and valleys formed by the foothills of the Cat-skills, the Adirondacks, and the Mayfield Mountains. The train followed the Mohawk River for forty miles until it reached the town of Fonda. From there it was eight miles north (by electric railroad) to the twin cities of Johnstown and Gloversville.

  Gloversville, New York, was a pretty community with broad streets lined by trees on both sides. The Cayadutta River ran right through the town, turning the wheels of mills and machinery. The population was pushing fifteen thousand people.

  Into the nineteenth century, the area had become a convenient camp-ground for travelers between New England and the expanding territories of Ohio. In 1803, one Ezekiel Case, who had journeyed as far west as Cincinnati, learned how to tan deerskins. He brought hides back to the area, where women cut and sewed them by hand into crude gloves and mittens. Land speculators cleared away acres of pinewoods, and the region became known a
s Stump City.

  Another settler was a leather dresser from England, who found the waters of the nearby Mohawk River exceptional for softening hides. He shared his craft with anyone who wished to settle near him and learn. In 1825, an entire load of gloves left on a six-week trip to Boston. From that time “to the present,” reads the official 1902 Board of Trade manual, “every variety of skins gathered from all quarters of the globe has been received and experimented with, so that at the present time there is no kind of glove that is not manufactured here.” Stump City changed its name to Gloversville in 1828; it incorporated as a city in 1890.

  Like the rest of the country, Gloversville received Jewish immigrants in two waves. Nathan Littauer, born in Breslau, Germany, in 1829, was the first Jewish settler in the region. He bought a storehouse and barn in the middle of town and opened his first dry-goods store. “After several years experimenting with the importing of finished leather gloves and lambskins for glove linings,” reports The Jewish History of Fulton County, “Mr. Littauer established a glove factory in his building. The glove business was an immediate success and word went to the ‘old country’ that there was a need for glove workers.” They came by the hundreds.

  The German Jews were the first to convert the makeshift craft of glovemaking into a business. After Littauer came men named Meyers and Deichsel and Levor and Rubin and Adler, then Lehr and Klopot and Bachner and Moses. They became moguls of a new industry. By the time Samuel Goldfish joined the 12,000 employed in the leading local industry, some $4 million worth of capital had been invested in the 125 factories in the area, which produced $15 million worth of gloves a year.

  The city of Gloversville was divided into four segments by its two principal streets, Fulton running east and west, and Main extending north and south. Grand Victorian homes of the factory owners were located in the northeast quadrant. Upon his arrival, Sam Goldfish was given a room in a boardinghouse in the southwest corner of the city, literally on the wrong side of the tracks.