The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Dear Mr. Editor:

  My own daughter, who was born in Russia, married a Hungarian-Jewish young man. She adopted all the Hungarian customs and not a trace of a Russian-Jewish woman remained with her. This would not have been so bad. The trouble is, now that she is first-class Hungarian, she laughs at the way I talk, at my manners, and even the way we cook.… Not an evening passes without … mockery and ridicule.

  I therefore want to express my opinion that Russian Jews and Hungarian Jews should not intermarry; a Russian Jew and an Hungarian Jew are in my opinion two different worlds and one does not and cannot understand the other.

  Some East Side Jews were budding Marxists, some were socialists, some were Zionists. Some were Orthodox, some were atheists. The Jews of Warsaw could not see eye to eye with those from Krakow. Already the phrase was being quoted: “If you get two Jews together, you have three arguments.” Some European Jews were already declaring themselves thoroughly disillusioned with the United States, cursing America for what they saw as an overly legalistic society. As one East Sider complained, “In the old country, if you did something that was wrong, the policeman would tell you that it was wrong. If you said you did not know that it was wrong, the policeman would say, ‘Well, now you know, so don’t do it again.’ Here, if you do something that is wrong, they just arrest you and fine you or throw you into jail.” The American concept that ignorance of the law is no excuse appeared, to many immigrants, cruel and unjust.

  The only possible means of unifying all the unhappy and disputatious elements on the Lower East Side seemed to be to get them all somehow to embrace America as an abstract ideal, to make them feel that they were loyal Americans first, Jews second. It was a large order—large, even, for a woman of Julia Richman’s stubborn, iron-willed ambitions.

  To the disinterested outside visitor, the Lower East Side in the early 1900s would have appeared utterly chaotic, and nothing been foreseen to come out of it except disaster—or, at the very least, some sort of violent social upheaval or revolution. And yet that is not what happened at all. Instead, out of it came artists, writers, lawyers, politicians, entertainers, and businessmen, like Irving Berlin, Jacob Javits, Samuel Goldwyn, David Sarnoff, Jacob Epstein, Eddie Cantor, Danny Kaye, and Edward G. Robinson. Out of this and similar ghettos came a premiere American architect named Emery Roth, a fashion photographer named Richard Avedon, a designer named Ralph Lauren, a cosmetics queen named Helena Rubinstein, a movie mogul named Louis B. Mayer, another named Adolph Zukor, and a liquor tycoon named Samuel Bronfman—and many, many, more, including a pretty New York girl named Betty Joan Perske, who, after being educated at the high school on Second Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street that was eventually named in Julia Richman’s honor, went on to Hollywood and Broadway stardom as Lauren Bacall.

  *Later to be renamed Hunter College.

  *Until Ellis Island was opened as an immigration center in 1892, immigrants were received at Castle Garden, a onetime fort and sometime concert hall that stood on an island—since connected to Manhattan by landfill—just off the Battery.

  *The i or y suffix means “resident of.” Thus, a Pinsky is someone from Pinsk and a Minsky someone from Minsk. But there is even more in an Eastern European name than that. Immigrants from Russia proper considered themselves superior to those from Russian Poland. Therefore, it was better to have a name ending in y, indicating Russian, than i, indicating Polish. Similarly, a name ending in ov (the Russian style) carried more prestige and cachet than an off (the Polish).

  *Tageblatt literally translates as “Daily Page.”

  2

  WHY THEY CAME

  The routes the Eastern European Jews took to come to America were circuitous, difficult, and tricky. No two tales were exactly alike, though there was a common theme—escape. And all required a common element—bravery.

  Shmuel Gelbfisz, for example, had been born in the Warsaw ghetto, probably in 1879. Later, he would give 1882 as the year of his birth, and since he arrived in New York with neither a passport nor any other documents, there was no way his claim could be gainsaid. His father had been a Man of the Book, and spent most of his hours endlessly studying the Talmud. But his mother was a moneylender and, as such, was a woman of some importance in the community, if not always a popular one when she knocked on the door to call in her loans. She was also unusual in that she could read and write, and earned additional money writing letters for her friends and neighbors to their relatives in the United States. But despite these advantages, her son was a restless boy who had grown impatient with his father’s strict Orthodoxy. In 1896, when he was either fourteen or eleven, he decided to run away from home and head for the land of golden opportunity. He discreetly “borrowed” one of his father’s suits, had a tailor friend cut it down to his size, and with a small amount of money he had saved, plus a few rubles—borrowed again—from his mother’s cash box, he set out more or less on foot—begging a ride wherever he could—for the German border.

  At the border, he paid the customary bribe to a guard who promised to spirit him across. The guard took his money, but then betrayed him, and threatened to send him back. Using the excuse that he needed to use the toilet, Gelbfisz found himself in a bathroom with a high window overlooking the Oder River. He climbed to the window, flung himself out into the river, and swam across to Germany, where he made his way to Hamburg.* By the time he reached Hamburg, his money had run out. While wandering the streets wondering what to do next, he noticed a shop with a name on it that he thought he recognized. He spoke to the shopkeeper in Polish, and discovered that he had found a countryman. When young Gelbfisz explained his plight, the fellow Pole left his shop and scurried around the neighborhood collecting money for the refugee. Within a few hours, this kindly soul had collected enough money for Shmuel to book passage on a boat to England.

  In London, penniless again, Gelbfisz spent three days and nights in Hyde Park, where his address was a bench just opposite the entrance to the old Carlton House, from which he watched the hotel’s guests arriving and departing in their glittering finery through the great glass doors. On the fourth day, however, he was picked up by a charitable Jewish group, which, with some difficulty, managed to locate some distant Gelbfisz relatives who were living in the city of Birmingham. The Birmingham relatives were less than overjoyed to receive him, though they helped him find a job hauling coal. Finally, to be rid of him, they gave him sufficient carfare to get him to Liverpool. It was only about seventy-five miles away, but at least it was on the sea.

  In Liverpool, Gelbfisz learned that steerage passage to Canada had just gone up from four pounds six shillings to five pounds. At the end of his rope, he finally took to the streets as a beggar until he had raised the fare. Then, after the steerage crossing, he was deposited in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and made his way to the United States border, entering illegally in 1896. This was also the year that Thomas A. Edison’s “Marvelous Vitascope”—a forerunner of motion pictures—was first shown to a New York audience, though the coincidence would not be noted until long afterward.

  Years later, whenever he traveled to London, he always made a point of putting up at the Carlton House. Though he could not play a note, a grand piano was always ordered placed in the suite. But the major requirement was that the suite overlook the park, so that he could look down on the particular park bench that had once been his home. By that time, of course, Shmuel Gelbfisz had changed his name twice, and had become Samuel Goldwyn of Hollywood.

  In some ways, to be sure, Shmuel Gelbfisz’s emigration from Russian Poland was not typical. He set off for America of his own free will, out of a sense of dissatisfaction and restlessness. Others who left Eastern Europe at the same time did so out of desperation—to flee conditions that had become unbearable and to escape from lives that had become unlivable.

  In the synagogues of the Pale of Settlement it had been customary, as part of the regular order of service, to include a special blessing for the good health and long life o
f the czar. This blessing was sincere enough, but the sentiments that accompanied it were less affectionate than fatalistic. One wished the czar good health and long life because at least one had a fair idea of the sort of terrors and confusions that this czar was capable of bringing down upon one’s head. It was the next czar—this one’s successor—who loomed as the dreadful question mark.

  Life for the Jews of Russia had never been exactly easy. And one of the greatest hardships that had to be endured was the fact that, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, conditions had alternated violently back and forth between periods of relative tolerance and calm and periods of reaction and repression, depending upon who occupied the throne. In the mid-eighteenth century, with things in her country going well, Catherine II had started her rule as a relatively benign monarch. She had felt that Jewish merchants and bankers would be good for her economy, and had welcomed them into the trades and professions. For a while it seemed as though Jews might one day gain the status of ordinary Russian citizens. But then the empress had a change of heart, and a period of restrictive policy followed.

  The reign of Nicholas I, between 1825 and 1855, had been particularly savage. Under Nicholas, more than six hundred specifically anti-Jewish edicts were written into law. These ranged from the mildly annoying—censorship of Jewish texts and newspapers, rules that restricted the curricula of Jewish schools—to the monstrous: expulsion from homes and villages, confiscation of property, and a decree that bound young boys between the ages of twelve and twenty-five to service in the Russian army for twenty-five years. These boys were marched on foot to training camps hundreds of miles from their homes, often in Siberia, and many died along the route. Once in the camps, they were subject to Christianized training, and were forbidden to practice any Jewish ritual. Those who refused were beaten, tortured, or killed. The object of the “Iron Czar” was to remove all traces of Judaism from his czardom, to purify and Christianize it. Furthermore, he called what he was doing “assimilation” of the Jews. It was no wonder that the word had a sinister ring to the Russians when the German Jews talked of the importance of assimilation in America.

  Tales of the lengths the young Russian-Jewish youths would go to in order to avoid the long military ordeal under Nicholas I—an ordeal that was tantamount to a death sentence—became legion. In Samuel Goldwyn’s Warsaw, two young brothers had faced each other with pistols. One shot his brother in the arm, to cripple him, and the other shot his brother in the leg. One boy poured acid over his legs. The burns never really healed, he never walked again, and he spent the rest of his life with the lower part of his body wrapped in bandages. But pistols and acid were luxuries, unaffordable in most Jewish households. And so a popular way to render oneself unfit for conscription into the Russian military was to chop off the index finger of one’s right hand—the trigger finger—with a kitchen cleaver. Many of the young men who arrived at Ellis Island had been self-maimed in that way.

  During his reign of terror, Nicholas I was also successful at persuading Jews to turn against, and betray, their fellow Jews. In each community, at least one Jew was given special officer status—and, of course, pay—to function as a khaper, or “grabber.” The khaper’s job was to identify the Jewish boys to the military police, who then snatched them from their schoolyards, from the streets, and even from their houses.

  No wonder the accession of Alexander II—whom Disraeli called “the kindliest prince who ever ruled Russia”—came as a relief. Alexander permitted a few Jewish youths to enter Russian universities. Certain Jewish businessmen whom he found useful were permitted to travel in parts of Russia where they had previously been prohibited. Special Jewish taxes were eased somewhat, and Alexander reduced the compulsory conscription period for Jews to five years. In his army, too, it was possible for a Jew to rise to officer rank without becoming a khaper. Then, on March 1, 1881, Alexander II was assassinated by a band of revolutionaries. With his successor, Alexander III, came disaster.

  The new czar’s tyranny over the Jews became legalized under the May Laws of that year, which prohibited Jews from owning or renting land outside towns and cities, and discouraged them from living in villages. The increasing economic pressures triggered the “spontaneous” outbreaks of 1881, the massacre of Kishinev in 1903, and the massive and brutal pogroms that followed. In 1891, thousands of Jews were expelled without warning from Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Kiev, and six years later, when the government seized and monopolized the liquor traffic, thousands of Jewish innkeepers and restaurateurs—not to mention malt, grain, and corn dealers—were thrown out of business.

  The reason behind Alexander III’s persecution of the Jews was the same as Nicholas I’s: a fanatical resolve to create a homogeneously Christian country, which meant the eradication of Judaism as a religious entity. As one of Nicholas I’s edicts had explained, “The purpose in educating Jews is to bring about their gradual merging with the Christian nationalities and to uproot those superstitions and harmful prejudices which are instilled by the teachings of the Talmud.” For “uproot,” the czar might have substituted “kill.” It was certainly an uprooting process more furious and brutal than anything that had been attempted since the Inquisition, four hundred years earlier, and it would not be surpassed until the Hitler era.

  But another, more palpable reason—though it was never as clearly spelled out—behind the pogroms, both the official and the “spontaneous” ones, was the desperate, and largely unsuccessful, attempts by Jewish workers to organize trade and labor unions. In 1897, the General League of Jewish Workers in Russia, Poland, and Lithuania—Der Allgemeiner Jiddisher Arbeiter Bund—was organized, and over the next three years, led several hundred strikes of cobblers, tailors, brush makers, quilters, locksmiths, and weavers, who had been working eighteen hours a day for a wage of two to three rubles a week. Many of these strikes were marked by violence, bloodshed, and arrests. In the first years of the twentieth century, thousands of persons were arrested for political reasons, most of them Jews. In 1904, of thirty thousand organized Jewish workers, nearly a sixth were thrown into prisons or exiled to Siberia. The Pale of Settlement had become a hotbed of secret revolutionary activity. Then the revolution of 1905, a failure, seemed to erase all hope. It appeared that the only solution was to escape to America, the land of the free.

  Needless to say, emigration was a painful step to take in itself, and an enormous gamble. But the decades of persecution had had at least one positive effect—a Darwinian principle had been proved, and only the hardest and toughest had survived. Years of common martyrdom had instilled common strengths. Proud and cynical, those Jews who had made it through the pogroms had begun to see themselves as a kind of aristocracy of endurers, and had even developed a certain hard-boiled sense of humor about their situation. If one can turn terror into a joking matter, there is strength in that. And there was certainly a touch of grim amusement in Russia as the downtrodden continued to offer up blessings for the czar’s long life.

  But pride and humor were put to the test with emigration. Emigration was an admission of failure. It meant an inability to endure any longer. As a result, some of the older rabbis stubbornly counseled their congregations not to emigrate—that emigration meant that the Jewish backbone had finally been broken, that a noble cause was being given up, the white flag raised. Thus, many Jewish families left their homes filled with a sense of shame, believing that the act of leaving marked them as cowards. Thus, many of the arrivals in the New World stepped off the boats in a thoroughly complicated and confused state of mind, not knowing whether they were spineless fools or heroes.

  At the same time, the Jewish immigrant had often left behind him a seriously divided family. If, for example, a young man finally made up his mind to leave for America, he usually had the support of his mother, who saw nothing but hopelessness for her son’s future in Russia. His father, on the other hand, was often opposed. The Jewish father, who in many cases was the Talmudic scholar and spiritual
head of the household, had heard tales of young Jews’ losing their faith in profligate America, and also argued that a son’s duty was to remain at home to help support his family. Often the domestic bitterness that the young immigrant left behind him never healed, which only added to his guilt at having abandoned his homeland.

  But abandon it they did, by the hundreds of thousands.

  In the forlorn little Jewish settlement of Uzlian, deep in the province of Minsk—where to live in a house with a wooden floor instead of one of dirt was a sign of enormous affluence—a child was born on February 27, 1891. Only years later would he reveal one of his most vivid childhood memories. Beginning in 1881, with the ascension of the despotic Alexander III, Jews of the region had been fleeing in increasing numbers every year, and he could recall standing with his mother at the Minsk railway station with throngs of Jews, waiting for the train that would take them to the port city of Libau. Nearby a political demonstration of some kind was taking place. Suddenly a company of cossack soldiers came charging down on horseback, and commands were barked out ordering the crowd to disperse. Whether the soldiers were acting on orders from above or merely on a whim there was no way of knowing. No one moved. Then the mounted soldiers tore into the crowd, wielding long whips, trampling screaming mothers and children under their horses’ hooves, while the terrified little boy clung to his mother’s skirts.

  When he and his family finally made it to New York, via Canada, in 1900, he was nine years old. His name was David Sarnoff, the future founder and board chairman of the Radio Corporation of America. Other Russian Jews would have memories similar to Sarnoff’s. Some would try to erase them from their minds, and never speak of them. Others would cling to their memories obsessively, and repeat the stories to their children and grandchildren, reminding them that such things could, and did, happen.