97 Orchard

by Jane Ziegelman

Though pushcarts formed the backbone of the immigrant food economy, East Siders also patronized neighborhood shops: butchers, groceries, delicatessens, and dairy stores. This last group, a type of business that no longer exists, included Breakstone & Levine, sellers of milk, butter, and cheese, formerly located on Cherry Street, and forerunner to the modern-day Breakstone brand. But inside the tenements, hidden from the casual observer, immigrants trafficked in a shadow food economy in which neighbors took responsibility for feeding each other. Transactions within the tenement were most often cashless. Neighbors exchanged gifts of food as part of an improvised bartering system in which the poor gave to the truly destitute, or, in many cases, to families struck by tragedy: a death, sickness, a lost job. In return for her edible gifts, the tenement homemaker received the same consideration whenever her luck was down—and no one in the tenements was immune from a run of bad luck. Mrs. Rogarshevsky, a widow with six kids, was certainly eligible, and edible charity must have streamed into the apartment during and after her husband’s long illness, when she adjusted to her new role as breadwinner.

  The continuous give-and-take that carried food from one apartment to another was a strategy for survival among tenement-dwellers sustained by the tenement itself. In buildings where apartment doors were hardly ever locked or even closed, where stairways were used as vertical playgrounds, rooftops functioned as communal bedrooms, and front stoops were open-air living rooms, the business of daily life was an essentially shared experience. Tenement walls, thin to begin with, were riddled with windows, windows between rooms, between apartments, and windows that opened onto the hallway. As a result, sounds easily leaked out of one living space and into another. Or, if they were loud enough, ricocheted through the central stairwell. During summer, when East Siders hungered for fresh air, and windows to the outside world were open wide, voices were broadcast through the building via the airshaft. In the brownstones and apartment houses above 14th Street, New Yorkers lived more discreetly, sealed off from the larger world in their own domestic sanctuary. In the tenements, the people who lived above and below you were often blood relatives, but even if they weren’t, you were fully briefed on their domestic status down to the most intimate details, and vice versa.

  Fannie Rogarshevsky (back row, second from right) and three of her children posing in front of 97 Orchard, circa 1920. (The two children in the front row are unidentified.)

  Courtesy of the Tenement Museum

  The communal nature of tenement-living was unavoidable and frequently unbearable. (Tenement-dwellers craved two things that many took for granted: privacy and quiet.) At the same time, it encouraged neighbors to look after each other in ways unheard of in other forms of urban housing. Visitors to the tenements, settlement workers, sociologists, and social reformers, were struck by the generosity of the poorest New Yorkers, recounting their many acts of kindness in memoirs and studies. In fact, their writing became so cluttered with examples of tenement compassion that Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement, was moved to write, “it has become almost trite to speak of the kindness of the poor to the poor,” by way of introducing her own extended list.

  The acts of kindness took many and varied forms. Between 1902 and 1904, a sociology student named Elsa Herzfeld carried out a study of family life in the tenements, which outlined some of them:

  The readiness to share seems to me to be one of the chief traits in the relation of neighbor to neighbor. The aid given is of a simple kind. It satisfies an immediate need. Above all it is spontaneous…. When a mother has to go out for the day, she “leaves” the children with her neighbor or asks her to go in “and have a look at them.” The neighbor comes in when the children are sick, she offers her blankets, makes some soup, suggests her own physician, or brings cakes and goodies to the sick child. She visits a neighbor patient in the hospital and brings her ice cream and candy or flowers. If a mother dies suddenly, a neighbor takes the children to her own room. If a child is neglected, she takes her “for months and asks no board.” The young girl on the same floor is given a place in the home “to keep her from fallin’ into low company.” If your husband gets “drunk,” a neighbor opens her door to you. If you get separated or dispossessed, “she has always room for one more.”11

  As a rule, East Siders avoided taking handouts from the established charities because of the stigma it carried. Even the trip to the charity office, oftentimes located in alien neighborhoods, was a much-dreaded exercise in humiliation. In a coming-of-age memoir set on the Lower East Side, Bella Spewack, who later went on to a successful career as a Broadway playwright, describes her mother, pregnant at the time and with two kids already at home, abandoned by her husband, trying to convince the charity officer that she was worthy of $14 in rent money. “To get help from that place…you must cry and tear your hair and eat the dirt on the floor,” Spewack writes. But seeking help from a neighbor was another story entirely. In the tenements, there was no need to explain or plead your case. Passengers on the same proverbial boat, the people around you grasped your situation with perfect clarity and gave what they could, with no probing questions or edifying lectures.

  Sharing food with neighbors was standard practice among immigrants of every nationality, and in some cases, between nationalities. So, for example, an Italian housewife fed minestrone to the Irish kids who lived on the second floor, while Russians brought honey cake to the old Slovak lady across the airshaft. Widespread though it was, food-sharing loomed especially large among Jewish immigrants, who arrived in the tenements with their own long history of culinary charity. Fridays just before sundown, in the towns and cities they had come from, a woman who could afford the extra expense prepared a little more food than her own family needed and distributed it to less well-off neighbors. The sight of women carrying loaves of challah through the streets, or covered pots of stewed fish was a regular Friday-night occurrence. A second option was to invite a poor stranger to join the family Sabbath table, an old widower or beggar, or maybe a peddler who was miles from his own home. Public feasts were held for the poor in honor of weddings and brisses, the circumcision ceremony held on the infant’s eighth day of life. Food-sharing, in short, was a built-in feature of the Jewish kitchen.

  Fannie Cohen was an immigrant homemaker from Poland, who arrived in New York in 1912, a married woman with two young kids. Her husband was already here, having immigrated a full eight years earlier, and was working on the East Side as a carpenter. The family lived at 154 Ridge Street on the Lower East Side, in a tenement much like 97 Orchard, where Mrs. Cohen gave birth five more times, though one of the children died at fourteen months from contaminated milk. Mrs. Cohen had received a classic Jewish culinary education. Friday nights, she made gefilte fish (her standard formula combined whitefish, carp, and onion), which she chopped in a large wooden bowl and simmered along with the fish bones, wrapping them first in cheesecloth to prevent the kids from choking on one. She also made roasted carp, the whole fish rubbed with peanut oil, chopped garlic, and paprika, then baked until the skin was varnished-looking and slightly crisp. On Shavuot, the holiday in late spring that celebrates God’s gift of the Ten Commandments, she made yellow pike, the fish sliced crosswise into meaty steaks then simmered with lemon, bay leaves, pepper, and a pinch of sugar. The main culinary attraction on the Purim table was goose and, for dessert, hamantaschen. On Passover she made brisket, fruit compote, and chremsel, dainty pancakes made from matzoh meal that were eaten with jam or dipped in sugar.

  Whatever the holiday, it was Mrs. Cohen’s habit to prepare more food than her own family could ever consume. Friday mornings at three a.m., she mixed up a batch of dough for the Sabbath challah, using twenty pounds of flour, forty eggs, and five cups of oil. The only vessel large enough to hold it was a freestanding baby’s bathtub. Once mixed and kneaded, the dough was left to rise in its metal tub, covered by a wool blanket, until mid-morning, when it was sectioned off into loaves and left to rise again. By afternoon, Mrs. Cohen had t
wenty braided loaves cooling by the window. Some she gave to the neighbors, and some to the local rabbi, who always received the two largest loaves, each one the size of a placemat. Two loaves she kept for the family, but the rest she packed up and delivered to the newly landed immigrants at Battery Park, ferried there directly from Ellis Island. Knowing that some of them were stranded for the night—a tragedy on the Sabbath, when every Jew should be celebrating—she also came with soup, conveyed across town in metal canisters with screw-on tops.

  In America, the newly arrived immigrant became the main recipient of the Jew’s edible charity, while the tenement became the new shtetl. On Shavuot, Mrs. Cohen made hundreds of blintzes—some blueberry, some cheese, some potato—and sent them through the building, delivered by one of her kids. For Passover, she sent around tins of flourless sponge cake. But sometimes, there was no holiday at all and Mrs. Cohen still fed the building, handing a plate of stuffed cabbage or a square of kugel to one of the children with the instruction, “Bring up Mrs. Drimmer some food” or “Take this to Mrs. Sipelski,” depending on which of the neighbors was sick or jobless or otherwise in need. These food deliveries always involved a round trip, since the child was later sent back to retrieve the now-empty dish. And sometimes the charity extended beyond the tenement to the larger neighborhood, like on Passover, when Mrs. Cohen invited strays, down-and-out characters whom her husband had rounded up on the way back from the synagogue, to eat from her own Seder table.

  Here is Mrs. Cohen’s challah recipe, scaled down to yield two good-size loaves:

  CHALLAH

  2 ½ lbs or 7 ½ cups bread flour

  2 ounces fresh yeast or 4 teaspoons instant yeast

  1 ½ cups warm water

  ½ cup peanut oil or other vegetable oil

  4 eggs, room temperature

  ½ cup sugar

  3 tablespoons salt

  Dissolve yeast in warm water and let stand until mixture looks foamy, 5 to 10 minutes. Combine with remaining ingredients, stirring to form a dough. Knead dough for 10 minutes, then place in a lightly greased bowl. Cover with a damp cloth and let rise until doubled in volume, 1 to 2 hours. Punch down dough, knead ten times and divide in two. Separate each half into thirds. Roll each section into a rope about 18 inches long. Braid ropes, pinching the ends and turning them under. Place on a lightly greased baking tray and cover with a damp cloth. Let rise until doubled in size. Preheat oven to 375ºF. Before baking, brush challah with one egg yolk mixed with 1 teaspoon water. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until brown.12

  Though food items of one kind or another dominated the pushcart trade, the market also provided East Siders with a sweeping array of nonedible goods. Pots, pans, dishes, scissors, soap, clothing, hats, and eyeglasses are just a minute sampling. In short, any useful item from mattresses to sewing thimbles was available at the pushcart market. But East Side vendors also trafficked in more fanciful goods, including the decorative objects known in Yiddish as tchotchkes, figurines, wax fruit, and mass-produced wall prints. The subject matter of pushcart artwork was often inspirational, the immigrant drawn to portraits of heroic figures from the worlds of literature and politics. There were postcard-size prints of William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Sholem Aleichem (the Yiddish Mark Twain), and President Lincoln, the great hero of the ghetto. Another revered figure was Christopher Columbus and, in later years, Franklin Roosevelt. Fannie Rogarshevsky kept a plaster bust of Columbus on the parlor mantel.

  The market also supplied East Siders with intellectual stimulation in the form of books. Browsing the pushcarts for reading material was, to put it mildly, a hit-or-miss venture. The carts carried a grab bag of mostly secondhand volumes, many of them reference books. On the same cart, the shopper might come across a history of railway statutes, a yearbook from the Department of Agriculture, a collection of Hebrew prayer books, and an assortment of dictionaries. More discerning readers skipped the carts and shopped from the profusion of book stands scattered through the neighborhood. The stands were semipermanent structures, urban lean-tos supported by the tenements on one side, with counters and shelves improvised from discarded doors, window shutters, and stray planks of wood. Unlike the pushcarts, the book stands dealt mostly in new merchandise, books that were published by immigrants for immigrants, often produced in small local print shops.

  Sometime in 1901, the same year the Rogarshevskys landed in New York, a skinny paperbound volume made its first appearance on the East Side book stands. The Text Book for Cooking and Baking by Hinde Amchanitzki was America’s first Yiddish-language cookbook, a photograph of the author, her wig neatly parted, gracing its cover. Very little is known about the author’s own immigration history, though in her foreword she shares details from her culinary past. Amchanitzki’s career as a professional cook started in Europe and continued in America. Her recipes, she writes, are based on forty-five years of experience working in both private homes and restaurants, including an extended stint in a New York establishment that catered to “the finest people.” Amchanitzki’s intended readers were women much like Mrs. Rogarshevsky—seasoned homemakers trained in one culinary tradition, now ready, in their own cautious way, to take on another. Accordingly, the recipe index skips between the Old and New World kitchens, with stuffed spleen, chopped chicken liver, and sponge cake alternating with breakfast pancakes, tomato soup, and banana pie. A third group of dishes, however, falls somewhere between the two kitchens, an amalgam of New World ingredients and Old World techniques. Included in this category is Amchanitzki’s recipe for cranberry strudel:

  CRANBERRY STRUDEL

  Take a quart of good cranberries, a half pound of sugar, and a bit of water. Cook until thick and put aside to cool. Take a glass of fat, a glass of sugar, 2 eggs, and stir together. Add a glass of water and mix well. Take two glasses of flour, two and a half teaspoons baking powder, mix them together, and stir into batter. Take a sheet and grease it well. Pour in half the batter and spread it evenly over the entire sheet with a spoon. Spread the cranberries evenly over the dough and pour the remaining dough over the cranberries, covering them completely. Sprinkle sugar on top and bake thoroughly. When done, let cool and cut into pieces. This is a very good strudel.13

  Early twentieth-century cookbooks brought news from the American kitchen to immigrants with limited access to the food habits of mainstream America. One place where contact was possible was the settlement house. The idea behind the settlement house, a British invention of the 1850s, was to bring together the educated and laboring classes for the benefit of both parties. It was always assumed, however, that the educated person had more to give, the laborer more to gain. America’s first settlement house, the Neighborhood Guild (later known as the University Settlement), opened in 1887 on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side, followed by Hull House in Chicago two years later. By 1910, the number of settlement houses in the United States had reached four hundred.

  The settlement house aspired to elevate the working person to “a higher plane of feeling and citizenship.” Most offered classes in literature, music, theater, and dancing, with kindergartens for the youngest children, clubs and gymnasiums for the older ones, and reading rooms for the adults. Some offered vocational training—more for women than men—providing instruction in millinery, sewing, and nursing. In immigrant-dense neighborhoods, where settlement houses assumed the job of Americanizing the foreign-born, there were also English-language classes, classes in civics, and American history. At the Educational Alliance, for example, immigrants could enroll in a lecture course that covered federal and state history, geography, government, and American customs and manners. Students who completed the course received copies of both the Constitution and Declaration of Independence printed in English and Yiddish.

  Similar efforts to Americanize the immigrant took place in settlement cooking classes. The class curriculum was shaped by a relatively new approach to housework, known as domestic science, a movement that gained ground with American hom
emakers in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The women who led the domestic science charge set out to ennoble the homemaker’s daily grind of cooking and cleaning by grounding it in scientific theory and method. They envisioned the home as a kind of domestic laboratory in which women applied their knowledge of chemistry, sanitation, dietetics, physiology, and economics to the everyday work of cooking and cleaning. To help spread their gospel, they established cooking schools in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago, and domestic science programs in colleges and universities, including the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and Columbia University in Manhattan. The Russian-American writer Anzia Yezierska was granted a scholarship to study at the Columbia School of Household Arts, but private cooking programs were generally beyond the means of working-class women. The domestic-science movement reached the working class through charitable institutions like churches, YMCAs, and settlement houses, where classes were offered for free or at prices scaled to the working person’s budget.

  The classes focused on the simplest and plainest American foods, beginning with a lesson on how to make toast and brew coffee in a freshly scoured coffee pot. Students learned how to properly boil oatmeal, rice, and potatoes, how to make pea soup, mutton stew, creamed codfish, biscuits, and gingerbread. Settlement houses that catered to Jews adapted the standard lesson plan so it conformed to Jewish dietary law, but only because they had no choice. The people who ran the settlement houses were Reform Jews, many from German families, who had immigrated to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. In other words, oyster-eaters. In their desire to Americanize the immigrant, they would have preferred to dispense with kosher laws—and some, in fact, tried—but their students wouldn’t allow it. As one settlement worker explained it, “There are some kosher laws that have to be followed, else the teaching would go no further than the classroom and would never show practical results.”