by David Laskin
They climbed, the seven of them clattering up through the stink of chicken fat, fried onions, boiled cabbage, and overflowing toilets. The stairs were dark and battered. They stopped on the third floor, and one of the American children opened one of the doors. Their flat was at the rear, facing north into the rear windows of another tenement building across a tiny garbage-strewn courtyard. Four dark tiny rooms with 350 square feet between them ran one after another to the building’s back wall; only the room at the end of the chain had windows that admitted any light. There was a sink in the kitchen but no hot water. They shut the door but they couldn’t shut out the smell or the noise. Gishe Sore, stony-faced, tried not to cry. “For mother, it was shocking,” one of the children recalled. “She was used to a large house with plenty of ground, and here were four tiny rooms for eight persons.” Eight persons because even though Ethel, Sam, and Harry had been on their own in America for some years now, they were expected to move in with their parents. The three boys, though no longer boys—Harry was now twenty; Sam nineteen; Hyman (as Chaim Yasef would call himself) seventeen—slept in one room; the three girls (Ethel and her little sisters, Chana, now Anna, and Leie, now Lillie) in another—just like in Rakov. “At least the whole family is together again,” Gishe Sore kept repeating to console herself. As if eight were not enough, to eke out a few extra pennies they soon took in a boarder, nineteen-year-old Isidore Gordon, who bunked in with the brothers. The family was crowded—but everyone was crowded at 195 Madison Street. The tenement’s sixteen apartments housed 115 people—all of them Russian Jews or the children of Russian Jews. Sam and Chana Chadman, upstairs, had eight kids; the Fibes, who lived under the roof, had five kids and three boarders; the Shulbergs had seven in their flat; Abe and Goldie Greenberg had eight. The same thing next door at 197 Madison Street, the same across the street, the same on Henry Street to the north and Jefferson Street to the east. “If a dog came around he’d have to prove he was Jewish before they let him in,” one immigrant said of his neighborhood, “that’s how Jewish it was.” That was the Lower East Side in 1909. All twelve tribes of Israel, plus of course the Kohanim, lived between Delancey and Allen.
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Some immigrants forever grieve for their “real” homes, the predawn smell of baking bread, the glaze of rain on cobblestone, the echo of bells in the alley. Others step off the boat, fill their lungs with the raw unfamiliar air, and get to work. They never look back because they never have a moment to spare or an urge to regret. Itel was one of these. When she fled the tsar’s police and arrived in Hoboken on April 25, 1905, she had twelve dollars and the address of her father’s brother Joseph in her pocket—406 Newark Street, Hoboken—but what she carried in her head proved to be far more useful than anything in her luggage. Uncle Joseph, a Hebrew schoolteacher, had been charged by Avram Akiva with looking after his daughter, housing and feeding her, and keeping her safe and proper (i.e., not too flagrant about the romance with William). But Itel (she never surrendered her original Yiddish name with family and intimate friends) had other ideas. She had not escaped the tsar’s police only to be policed by a pious uncle. Within weeks of her arrival, she quarreled with her aunt and decided to strike out on her own. Enlisting Ethel as a roommate, she found a two-room cold-water basement apartment, also in Hoboken, for ten dollars a month. William, then working as an unpaid apprentice garment worker on the Lower East Side, could come and go freely. Itel had everything arranged to her liking except a job. Ethel was employed in a Jersey City dress factory—but there was no way in hell that Itel was going to chain herself to a factory sewing machine six days a week while some cigar-chomping foreman barked at her. So she resuscitated the old Kaganovich sisters dressmaking partnership from Rakov. She and Ethel bought a Singer machine for $11.98 (on installments) and began making dresses in their basement flat. Uncle Joseph steered the mothers and sisters of his students their way—and word spread through Jewish Hoboken that the Cohen sisters would whip you up a lovely stylish dress to order for seventy-five cents. Soon they were charging three dollars a dress and working from morning until dark. “We did not have a life of glory,” Ethel commented drily years later. But they made a living.
Itel and William were married on June 10, 1906, in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony arranged and paid for by William’s uncle Max (one of the prosperous Botwinik family that Shalom Tvi’s wife, Beyle, belonged to). A traditional Jewish ceremony to please the family; a gorgeous white wedding dress of French wool with a straight skirt that fell just shy of the ankle to please the bride (who designed and sewed it, naturally); and a traditional American honeymoon to Niagara Falls to please the newlyweds. They took a week off from work and then set up housekeeping in a Hoboken railroad flat. William tried to make a go of a candy store, Itel went back to making dresses, Ethel, complaining of the damp, left Hoboken for a dressmaking job in Manhattan. A year into the marriage, William was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Convinced that cleaner, drier air was essential for his health, the couple relocated to a small resort town in the Catskill Mountains north of the city. It was a crippling move financially since Itel’s work dried up and their income dwindled to next to nothing. But William soon recovered (the diagnosis proved to be wrong) and within the year they were back in Hoboken. They found a first-floor flat in a tidy low-rise building at 212 Willow Street on a block of brownstones and four- and five-story apartment houses near the Hudson River. It was a blue-collar neighborhood of German, Irish, and Italian bartenders and chauffeurs, porters and butchers, dockworkers and mill hands—not a single Jew among them aside from the Rosenthals. Lewis, their first child, was born on August 10, 1907, and a Polish maid named Stosia Radzekowki—a gentile—was hired to look after the baby. Even after the rest of the family arrived in 1909, Itel and William stayed put in Hoboken. They wanted no part of the Lower East Side: no Jewish neighbors; no Jewish help; no tenement house; no haggling on Hester Street; no sweatshop. And no Jewish religion for them or their children. In a break with tradition that mortified Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore, Lewis, the first grandson, had not been circumcised. Itel and William refused the rite that had been inflicted on Jewish male infants for thousands of years. The coming generation, the American generation, would grow up with rituals and beliefs that had been chosen, not mindlessly inherited from their forebears.
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At forty-seven, Avram Akiva looked like a biblical prophet. His graying beard flowed over his chest; his eyes were dark and piercing; his shoulders were square, his posture upright, his expression stern and melancholy. But the appearance was deceiving. Under the beard lurked a wise, gentle soul. The scribe was not one to cast out a daughter for breaking God’s covenant or to love a grandson less for the sins of his parents. Though thirty years earlier Avram Akiva had studied beside the finest Jewish scholars in the world at the Volozhin yeshiva, at heart he was not a zealot but an obliging, practical man, willing to bend when necessary, careful to fight only the battles that counted. So he kept his thoughts to himself about his first grandson’s failure to be circumcised. And when the American children told him he had to change his name, he shrugged and went along. Avram Akiva Kaganovich did not sound American, they said; no one but a Jew would be able to pronounce it. From now on, in New York, he was Abraham Cohen and Gishe Sore was Sarah. Anyway, what did a name matter? Call him what they wanted, he would always be a stranger and a sojourner in this new land, like the first Abraham in Hebron. If it made them happy that he should sign his name Abraham Cohen, he’d sign. God knew who he was.
Mild and tolerant Abraham Cohen might be, but he was not blind. In New York, the American children told him, a man had to have a paying job, so he got himself set up in a small concession selling religious books, tefillin, and mezuzot in a Rivington Street synagogue. Every morning he walked to work up Essex Street, across East Broadway, Hester, Broome, Delancey; every evening he walked back to the cold-water flat on Madison. Every walk through the cauldron of commerce seared his senses anew. He cou
ldn’t take three steps without being jostled, shouted at, solicited, implored to buy. Boys who should have been in cheder hawked the Jewish Daily Forward on street corners. Grown men, idling in candy shops, blew smoke from cigars and sucked egg creams from straws. Peddlers cried “I cash clothes!” over and over in a kind of dirge as they hauled their carts through the streets. Women openly peddled their bodies to passing men. On his first Shabbat in New York, Abraham was stunned to see men and women, Jews all of them, bartering and selling, buying and eating, passing money from hand to hand. Handling currency on the Sabbath—unheard of in Rakov. Even on Kol Nidre night, the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, the shops were open, the streets were full, Jews went on wheeling and dealing and shouting and swearing as on any other night. It was like spitting in God’s face. Synagogues were everywhere—depending on whom you asked, the Lower East Side had 500, 800, 1,000 shuls in those days, more than Minsk, more than Vilna—but all those houses of prayer and study did not make New York a holy city. Abraham saw soon enough that these so-called shuls were not true synagogues but small provisional tabernacles set up in dance halls or shop fronts by landslayt—people from the same village or region back in Russia. Every shtetl with a sizable presence in New York had its own landsmanshaft—a benevolent association that provided insurance, sick benefits, and burial plots for landslayt—and many landsmanshaftn also formed congregations. Forty or fifty former neighbors from the Pale would gather on Shabbat in an upstairs tenement room or vacant store or even a converted church fitted with an ark and some benches. On a special occasion, like a bar mitzvah, there might be a bottle of whiskey and an extra dollar for the rabbi. Rakov’s exiles prayed at Beth David Anshei Rakov, at 225 Clinton Street; and the Volozhin community davened at 209 Madison Street, just a few doors down from the family’s tenement, in a pretty little mission church that had been made over into the Etz Chaim Anshei Volozhin. Rivington Street alone had eighteen landsmanshaft shuls jostling with its beer joints, butcher shops, bakeries, and soda fountains. Thirty more on Columbia Street, thirty-eight on Henry Street, more than a dozen on Orchard Street. So there were plenty of places to pray, but to Abraham, these makeshift sanctuaries of brick and cork and soot and smudged gray windows lacked the savor of grace. In Rakov, generations of Jews had darkened the wooden beams of the old synagogue with the exhalations of their souls—but in New York even prayers were muttered in haste between one deal and the next. The Lower East Side was the capital of Jewish America, but barely 12 percent of Jews attended synagogue. Sam went to shul with his father on Saturday, said his morning prayers, showed respect—but the other two sons quit going through the motions the minute the old man wasn’t looking.
Abraham spent his days selling prayer books to a few old gents on Rivington Street and regretting that he no longer worked as a scribe, but his children had no time for piety. Every morning they rushed out to work—every evening they rushed off to English classes, Yiddish variety shows, meetings, God knows what. Everyone was doing the same. Racing against the American clock. Looking for a gap in the fence they could slip through. No one set foot on Madison Street who didn’t have to be there—no one left unless he got lucky, figured out an angle, found a way to elbow through the crowd. Prayer fell on deaf ears here. Only money charmed open the door. “Success, American style . . . was all very simple,” wrote immigrant poet Harry Roskolenko. “Don’t work for others. Work for yourself. Don’t be a wage slave.”
Success, American style, meant nothing to Abraham. What little money he earned he saved. He kept his own counsel, walked uprightly, salvaged what he could of the old ways. Abraham never really learned English, but he understood more than anyone realized.
—
Letters from Rakov were eagerly anticipated, passed from hand to hand, pored over and sighed over and quoted from until the paper grew limp and tattered. The letter from Shalom Tvi that arrived on Madison Street early in April 1910 brought one special bit of news: Beyle had given birth to yet another daughter—her fourth, counting the baby who had died during the 1905 revolution. So seven-year-old Doba and three-year-old Etl now had a new little sister named Sonia—a black-haired beauty with a healthy set of lungs. Everyone marveled that God should give Shalom Tvi only girls while the rest of the siblings had at least one boy each. Without a son, who would say the kaddish for Shalom Tvi when he died? If this kept up, there would be no more Kohanim in Rakov.
Aside from the birth of Sonia, there was the usual recitation of town gossip, business setbacks, and hand-wringing over the state of the Jewish community. Zionism remained strong among Rakov’s youth and many were learning Hebrew, but emigration to Palestine had slackened off because of the unstable political situation in the Land. The shtetl had raised seventy-three rubles for the Jewish National Fund to buy up arable plots from Arabs. The police were cracking down on Jewish shopkeepers under a new law that forbade stores to open on Sundays and Christian holidays. The fate of Rakov’s Jewish library was uncertain—it had closed shortly after the family left for America, then reopened, now who knows. Jewish firefighters had been forbidden to carry their own flag in the anniversary celebration, even though most of the Rakov fire brigade were Jews. And so on. Abraham and Sarah read Shalom Tvi’s letter over and over. They thought about the lake, the old wooden shul, the vegetable garden behind the house, the trees that would soon be blooming in the orchards. If they regretted anything, they kept it to themselves. They had left the land of the pogrom and come to the land of opportunity. Things were bound to improve.
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In their first spring in the New World, the 1910 census was taken, and the family duly added eight new names to the national roll. Sarah was at home on Monday, April 25, when census enumerator Harry Barewitz came calling. Where else would she be? The others had jobs or school to attend, but Sarah, who in Rakov had stocked the shelves and kept the books, now stayed at home and burned the cooking. Her sons and daughters told her that there was no need to run a shop anymore. In America, the children worked—the mothers kept house. So it was Sarah who opened the door to Mr. Barewitz the census enumerator and answered the questions he was required to ask. The family name was now Cohen. Nine people lived in the flat including the teenage boarder. She and Abraham were both forty-seven; Ethel (the former Ettel) was twenty-two; Harry (Hersch) was twenty; Shmuel (nineteen) had become Solomon (Mr. Barewitz made a mistake—it should have been Samuel); Chaim Yasef (seventeen) was now Hyman; Chana (fifteen) was Annie (another error—the family always called her Anna); Leie (twelve) was Lillie. The two younger daughters attended public school, but everyone else had a good-paying job. Ethel was a dressmaker in a dress shop; Harry was a salesman for a jewelry store; Sam operated a machine in a leather factory; Hyman was a watchmaker in a jewelry shop; Abraham was a “merchant in a bookstore working on his own account.” The only one without a “trade or profession” was Sarah. She told Mr. Barewitz to write “none” beside her name.
Sarah had lived at 195 Madison Street for almost a year when the census enumerator showed up that Monday in April—but the rawness and strangeness still had not worn off. No garden, no cow, no neighbors she knew to gossip with, no work, no sky she could see, not even a glimpse of the sidewalk from the grimy rear-facing windows. Sarah had been right to tremble when the family first threaded these streets. Hester Street would never replace the Rakov market. The faces on the sidewalks would never look familiar. She would never grow accustomed to the noise and crowds. She would never again feel that the place she lived was scaled to her comprehension. Even the language foamed at her ears without penetrating her brain. Hyman, enrolled in English classes at the Educational Alliance, already sounded like he had lived in America all his life. Sam owned a cheap set of the complete plays of Shakespeare—in English—and boasted that he had read every one of them. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? But Sarah would have no part of this brave New World. They talked abou
t how large and grand and rich America was, but when she looked out the window, all she saw was the rear wall of the tenement across the courtyard with another frightened Jewish lady staring back at her.
