by David Laskin
CHAPTER SIX
THE BIRTH OF A BUSINESS
Sam was the shortest of the three brothers and even when he was nineteen it was clear he was going to be the stoutest. Not proud, not stuck on himself, not bent on taking charge, Sam was approachable, tractable, eager to please, someone you could confide in, kvetch to, commiserate with. His forehead was high and smooth, his hair thin and brown and wavy, eyes small, dark, and deep set. When he wore his gold wire-framed glasses he looked like a Russian poet. But Sam was no poet. Sam was a born salesman who at the age of nineteen had gotten himself yoked to a machine in a leather factory. In later years, Sam never said a word to his kids or grandkids about this chapter of his life—where he worked, what kind of machine he operated, whether the factory made belts or shoes or coverings for furniture. He was not especially handy nor was he patient. He was intolerant of both stress and monotony, so whatever he did for twelve or fourteen hours a day in whatever dusty loft or converted stable or unventilated back room must have been soul-destroying. There was certainly noise that never stopped and lubricated steel parts that never quit moving. “Machines, needles, thread, pressing cloths, oil, sponges—and the all-embracing smells of bodies, steam, and anger,” wrote one Lower East Side immigrant of the cloak-making factory where his father toiled. “These were the ever-present elements of the garment industry, but there was no oil to soothe away the anger.” The windows were sealed shut even in the summer heat. The fan, if there was a fan at all, blew only in the office where the boss worked. No radio. No bathroom break. Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour for lunch. Eight crummy dollars in your pocket after a six-day week. Leather is heavy, smelly when it’s being processed, hard to cut or stitch, suffocating to spread and move around in close airless spaces. Sam and leather cannot have been a good match. His uncle Shalom Tvi and aunt Beyle ran a leather business back in Rakov, and maybe Sam had helped them out in the factory now and then. But it was one thing to work for your father’s good-natured brother and another to have some ruthless foreman breathing down your neck. Sam was educated, a son of the scribe, born to the priestly caste—whatever shame or rage he felt at working for strangers on the hides of cows he never spoke of it. He never spoke of wolfing down a few bites of lunch with the other sullen, sweaty workers. He never spoke of the lousy wages, endless days, aching muscles, head-splitting racket. He never spoke of strikes—and those were banner years for protracted, ferocious strikes among Lower East Side garment workers. He never spoke of any of it, but the facts and circumstances speak for themselves. Sam was a born salesman. He had a salesman’s voice—as warm and enveloping as chicken soup and so richly guttural that even his English sounded like transliterated Yiddish. He loved being out on the street, wheeling and wheedling. He loved to schmooze, to kibitz, to hear the talk of the trade. But necessity trumped love in those years. The family could not live without the eight dollars a week that Sam added to the twelve that Harry made and the ten that Abraham and Hyman each pulled in. So Sam, who had missed out on the apprenticeship in Smargon that boosted Harry and Hyman into the watchmaking business, gritted his teeth, pushed his spectacles up his low-bridged nose, and worked a machine in a leather factory.
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Sooner or later everyone got a break—sooner if they kept their eyes open and their head down. Sam’s break came in the shape of a clock. Actually, it was Harry, the smooth, smart oldest son, who came up with the idea that made it happen. Harry figured that with so many shop fronts vying for attention on the Lower East Side, the way to stand out was to put a clock in the window. A nice big display clock would make people check the time—time is money, they were always saying—and once they stop they’ll want to take a look at what’s for sale, maybe step inside and spend a little money.
A clock is like free advertising, Harry told the brothers. And we’ll be the ones to sell them. Or rather Sam will. Sam who could sell a cross to the Pope, water to a drowning man, a razor to a rabbi. Sam will peddle display clocks to all the shops on Hester, East Broadway, Ludlow, Essex. No cash down—payable on the installment plan—twenty-five cents a week. Who’s gonna say no?
So Sam started out to sell. One morning he turned up on East Broadway with a bulging sack swinging from his hand. Eyeglasses gleaming, shoulders squared for battle, he pushed open the door of a candy shop and strode to the counter. The sack was opened and a big electric clock was extracted and set down on the counter.
A lot of guys tossed him out, but that never stopped Sam. Nothing stopped Sam so long as you didn’t insult him, laugh at him, or call him a greenhorn. The word no was not in his vocabulary. Throw him out the door and he’d climb in the window. Bar the window and he’d come around the back.
Sam was good. But the business model was crappy. The average sale was ten dollars—which at a quarter a week meant forty weekly trips to collect. Forty trudges up East Broadway or dodging the pushcarts on Hester Street’s Pig Market. It was a punishing routine and the cash barely trickled in. No way to make a living. So the brothers put their heads together again and came up with a better idea. Kienzle Clock Company, the German-based manufacturer where Hyman worked, was starting a new line of quality alarm and musical clocks. Hyman could buy the clocks in bulk from Kienzle at the wholesale price and Sam could sell—for cash—to select outlets and peddlers.
So Sam set out with a sack of chirping clocks, and at the end of the day he returned home with an empty sack and ten dollars of profit in his pocket. The same thing the next day, and the next. Sam quit peddling the display clocks altogether. The brothers had something better.
They called a family meeting. The Cohens were a distinguished family, bearer of an ancient name—and now for the first time in hundreds of years they had an opportunity within reach that matched their ability and ambition. It was time to stop working for others. It was time to make a success of themselves, American style. Harry knew jewelry. Hyman knew timepieces. Sam knew how to sell. Abraham knew how to command respect. Why not pool their resources in a family firm? What the sons proposed to their father was to take the chirping alarm clock idea and expand it into a full-fledged wholesale operation specializing in silverware, clocks, and cut glass.
The father stroked his beard. The boys held their breath. The wife and daughters sat with their hands in their laps. If Abraham said no, the idea would die on the spot.
Finally, the father broke the silence. I have over a thousand dollars in savings, he told his sons. What I have I’ll combine with what you have. How on earth had Abraham accumulated that much money? And to give it all to them, just like that, to start a business?
One of them—nobody remembers who but it was probably Harry—proposed a name: A. Cohen & Sons.
Abraham Cohen had never been a wage slave. With a business in the family, his sons and grandsons would never have to be wage slaves either. The father gave his blessing and A. Cohen & Sons was born.
By November 1911, they had found an empty storefront to rent at 126 East Broadway—a redbrick five-story tenement building with ground-floor retail space. Two big cast-iron-framed windows on the street, a tall black door, a storage cellar. They signed a year’s lease at fifty dollars a month. It was a prime location on the Lower East Side’s main commercial artery—East Broadway, “the sentimental heart and the battling mind of our ghetto,” was lined with coffeehouses, newspaper offices, schools for rabbis, Zionist organizations, and the headquarters of Jewish charities. Their shop front stood a block from the newly opened Garden Cafeteria, where Yiddish journalists, writers, intellectuals, and union organizers gathered to schmooze and drink tea; a block and a half from the Educational Alliance, where every self-improving immigrant took night classes; another half block from the headquarters of the Jewish Daily Forward going up at 175 East Broadway—at ten stories, the tallest and finest building in the neighborhood, complete with marble columns and carved busts of Marx and Engels.
They hired a painter to dab the company name on
one of the windows in gold letters etched in black—A. Cohen & Sons, Importers & Jobbers—and in January 1912, the company opened for business. Abraham was president. Harry and Sam were co-proprietors. Hyman, at eighteen, was too young to be listed as a legal owner, but the three brothers were equal partners from the start and they would always draw equal salaries. Once there was enough profit to draw a salary.
In the first months they ran the business in their spare time. Sam kept peddling, Hyman held on to his position with Kienzle, Abraham retained the concession at the Rivington Street shul. Harry worked the neighborhood taking orders during the day, and Hyman came in at night and all day Sunday to package up what Harry had sold. The Cohen brothers were middlemen, buying from manufacturers and selling to retailers, though many of their retailers were in fact pawnbrokers or custom peddlers who hawked merchandise door-to-door and street to street. They were always squeezed for cash, always scrambling to eke out a few more days and a few extra dollars of credit. A year after they opened for business the company’s net worth was $3,091.79—$91.79 more than the initial investment.
The Cohen brothers were not pioneers or visionaries; they had not hit on some essential new product or revolutionary process; they were not going to corner the market, make headlines, or have their names emblazoned on college libraries or hospital wings. But they were eager and determined and they kept an eye cocked for the angle or niche. Hyman figured out a way to make inroads into the silverware market by selling direct to the proprietors of Catskills boardinghouses and vacation farms that catered to urban Jews. If the guests kept kosher, the landlady needed twice as much flatware—one set for meat, another for dairy. They set their sights on the Lower East Side’s huge Italian population, second only to the Jews. The neighborhood’s Italian groceries, in addition to purveying salami, olive oil, canned tomatoes, and parmesan cheese, also carried cheap housewares—vases, candlesticks, clocks, and bowls—that were exchanged for coupons collected by loyal customers. Some wholesaler had to supply these housewares—why shouldn’t it be A. Cohen & Sons? It was pure Lower East Side: Jewish boys wholesaling the tchotchkes that Neapolitan shopkeepers used to entice Sicilian housewives to part with their money. Sam was soon doing so well on the salami circuit that he quit peddling alarm clocks. The end of an era for him—and the start of a new one for the company.
Inevitably, they brought their familiar roles and rivalries into the business and then back home to the flat on Madison Street. Harry, though diplomatic, had a fuse. Sam’s skin was the thinnest. Hyman liked to claim credit for whatever succeeded and assign blame for what failed. It was an explosive mix. The boys had always bickered, but once they were in business together their fights became epic and operatic. Soon their father’s primary job was to keep his sons from one another’s throats. Abraham was not a tyrant, a bully, a ranter, or a table banger—he didn’t need to be. In the family, his word was law; and in the family company, his word brought the sons to order and guaranteed that business was conducted honestly, equitably, and humanely.
But how the hell did they figure out how to run a business in the first place, these jumpy young men and their otherworldly father? The Cohens had left a small faded market town at the margin of Europe for “the capital of capitalism, the capital of the twentieth century, and the capital of the world.” What made them swim to the surface so fast? Commerce seethed in every crevice of the Lower East Side, but most of it was two-penny trading, a peddler’s sack, a candy shop, a sewing machine whirring by a tenement window. What gave the Cohen boys the chutzpah to start a wholesale business and the shrewdness to succeed? Money might, on the face of it, seem to be the obvious motive, but judging from the choices they made later on when they all had some dollars in their pockets, money was not central. The brothers liked to be comfortable and openhanded, but none of them was hounded by the plutocrat’s craving for bottomless coffers. They didn’t care all that much about power either, at least outside the confines of the family. They wanted to win, but not crush the competition. They didn’t live large, run after women, hobnob with famous people or politicians. Nor did they work to please God. God was their father’s concern. The sons started a business because in America they could. In Russia, a Jew had no choice. Except for the most exalted or brilliant, there was no possibility of owning land, joining a profession, securing a place in government or academics. But in America, by law, a Jew was the equal of anyone (even if the law was often subverted or skirted by family wealth, social connections, schools, clubs, churches, and codes). In America, as long as your skin was white, industry and energy were rewarded no matter what your last name was, and imagination could make you a fortune. The American playing field was far from level, but at least Jews were allowed on it. Which may explain why some Jews, the Cohen family among them, were determined to play like gentlemen. Nothing pleased Hyman more than to hear a gentile corporate executive praise him for his “attitude.” Meaning, he did not act like a grasping, uncouth immigrant jobber. Hyman made it a matter of pride that he would be more upstanding, more rigorous, more square and scrupulous and clean-cut and aboveboard than the next fellow. Never let it be said that the Cohen brothers were cheap chiselers.
The boys, in short, made a mad rush to Americanize. All of them became naturalized as U.S. citizens. They did their best to lose their accents; they shaved every morning and wore sober three-piece suits with starched collars that covered their necks. Sam even sported a top hat. Never let it be said that the Cohen brothers were greenhorns. They knew which avenue to open a business on, where to bank, how to avoid getting cheated, how to order a good meal in a fine restaurant, and so what if it wasn’t strictly kosher. Lots of other Jews their age were joining Zionist youth groups, singing Hebrew songs, going off to training camps to learn how to be farmers in Palestine. That was not their dream. A different ideal motivated the Cohen brothers—an ideal compounded of self-interest, tribal and family loyalty, ambition, business savvy, and a burning desire to fit in with the American mainstream that was surging up the avenues of New York in a mighty torrent. Maybe in their heart of hearts they felt they were better than the rest, a cut above, Kohanim who could raise their hands in priestly blessing. It was not a family renowned for modesty. But they scaled their dreams to reality. They didn’t want to conquer America—they simply wanted their American slice. So they pooled their resources, threw in their lot together, and, to the sound of shouting voices and slammed doors, made common cause. They would never cease to be Jews, but from the moment they set foot on Ellis Island they had ceased to be Russian Jews. From now on they were Americans, and as Americans they would rise or fall.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SOCIALIST IN A BLACK SATIN DRESS
Itel heard all about the business that her brothers and father were trying to make a go of on the Lower East Side, but she really couldn’t summon much interest in A. Cohen & Sons. By 1912, Itel and William had a burgeoning business of their own to run. Without advertising, without even hanging a sign in her window, Itel at the age of twenty-six had become Hoboken’s premier dressmaker. Well-to-do matrons from Jersey City and even Manhattan trekked to the shop on the ground floor of the Rosenthals’ house on Washington Street to commission gowns and frocks from the seamstress with the goldene hent—golden hands—though “seamstress” did not begin to cover Itel’s job description. In the course of seven years, the penniless Bundist revolutionary had realized the ur-American dream: she had become a successful small business owner. Itel and William had always shared quarters with their sewing machines, but at last they had an entire house to themselves, on the more prosperous stretch of Hoboken’s main commercial artery, with enough room to live and work on separate floors—downstairs for the business, upstairs for the family (Lewis, their son, was five years old). Six girls worked in shifts at the three Singer treadle sewing machines in the workroom. There was even a reception room at the front of the house where ladies could relax and flip through fashion magazines while waiting th
eir turn. Itel had always been formidable: now she had the means to make a formidable impression. When a fashionable new client arrived in a chauffeur-driven car, Itel was on hand to greet her, usher her into the reception room, and ply her with charm. Charm was Itel’s stock in trade. The ladies loved Itel’s dresses, but also they loved Itel. She made them feel special. It was Itel who helped the new client decide on which pattern suited her best and Itel who took the woman’s measurements—bust, waist, hips, thighs, shoulder, back, neck—while chatting away amiably in her throaty Yiddish accent. From the back of the shop, unseen but unceasing, came the noise of sewing machines, and, over the mechanical chatter, William’s deep bass voice booming out commands, comments, reprimands, praise. Initially, William had come on board to lend a hand with stitching and ironing, but with the volume of business they were handling now, he had become more of a floor manager, keeping the machines in working order, directing the flow of production, checking the workmanship of every sleeve and collar. “The Jewish needle made America the best-dressed nation in the world,” Jacob Riis wrote; he might have been talking about the Rosenthals of Hoboken.
One girl to one dress, with two days to get the job done—that was the method that Itel and William decided worked best in their shop. It wasn’t exactly the assembly line at Ford, but it kept production ticking along smartly. When a new order came in, Itel selected one of the girls and walked her through the infinite fussy design and fabrication details, and the girl took over from there. After the seamstress had roughed out the pattern, cut the cloth, and basted together the garment sufficiently so that it could be tried on, the client returned for the first fitting. Itel helped the woman into the dress and then the golden hands went to work tugging, gathering, tucking, pinning, pinching, scrawling marks with tailor’s chalk. The woman was assured that she would love it and she believed it implicitly—Itel’s assurance was a force of nature.
