The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “She might have been the model for Rosetti’s Beatrice,” wrote the Bazar, “or for the quiet and dreamy maidens in a Burne-Jones drawing.” Upon seeing her, the Bazar reporter wrote, “there grew into my consciousness, as one gains clear sight after darkness, the certainty of her essential womanliness; her eye was gentle, her movement graceful, her manner restful; she had poise, that inevitable accompaniment of character.” The Bazar, however, was not too awed to forget to remind its readers of the essential incongruity of the situation, and that “the groom [was] a Yale graduate, a clubman, a banker, a member of one of the oldest and most exclusive American families, heir to fortunes multiplied at will … and the bride, an East Side Russian Jewess of humble origin, who has spent years in a cigar-factory. It was hard to imagine Hymen’s torch kindled at the altar of more dissimilar lives.”

  The pair were asked all the most obvious questions. Hadn’t Mr. Stokes’s old and most exclusive parents disapproved of the match? Graham Stokes issued a manly statement to the Times: “I wish the Times would correct two serious errors in the published accounts of my engagement. The first is that there is serious opposition on the part of my family. That is entirely false. There is nothing but the utmost cordiality and delight. The second error is that there is a difference in religious belief between Miss Pastor and myself. She is a Jewess, as the Apostles were Jews—a Christian by faith.” As proof of family solidarity behind the union, Graham Stokes announced that his clergyman brother would perform the marriage ceremony in an Episcopal service.

  Rose Pastor also adopted the Jews-and-Christians-are-the-same argument, saying that she believed Judaism to be an “inspired religion,” an so did her fiancé. However, she added, both of them believed that, added to the tenets of Judaism, were “many additional truths” of Christianity. She pointed out that both Moses and Paul were Jews, and that Jesus “came not to destroy the law of the prophets but to fulfill.” After all, weren’t both the Old and New Testaments bound between the same hard covers? Both she and Mr. Stokes, she said, “accepted the teachings of Jesus unqualifiedly, regarding Him as a divine teacher and guide.” Harper’s Bazar also tried to sort out this tricky matter, saying, “The only difference between them is a matter of ancestry. Her ancestors were of the Jewish race, his were not. It is a question of race and not religion. [She] is a Christian woman, and has all the impulses, beliefs, strength, and sweetness which characterize the ideal Christian character.”

  These theological rationalizations might satisfy Harper’s Bazar and its largely Christian readership, but they sat not at all well among members of the Old World Orthodox-Jewish community in which Miss Pastor had been raised, who greeted her statements with outrage and dismay. She could not, her Lower East Side countrymen insisted, have it both ways. A Jew was a Jew. A Christian was a Christian. And though the word conversion had been carefully avoided in describing Miss Pastor’s religious highwire balancing act, it was pointed out that Episcopalian marriages were not performed unless both parties had been baptized. In other words, Rose Pastor was converting to Christianity, and trying to hide the fact behind a smoke screen of obfuscation and Judeo-Christian double-talk.

  Others pointed out that if there had been a good Jewish father in the picture, such goings-on would not have been tolerated. No one, meanwhile, had asked Rose Pastor’s mother how she felt about the matter. Perhaps this was because Anna Pastor’s limited English would have made her a difficult interviewee. Or perhaps the poor woman was too overwhelmed by what was happening to her family to think coherently about it. In any case, for a readership more titillated by the ways of the rich than those of the poor, the press was much more interested in what the Stokes family thought about the unusual alliance. But if any of them had misgivings, they kept very stiff upper-class upper lips and refused to show it.

  Of Rose Pastor’s social zeal, the New York Times commented, “As she talks on the uplifting of the poor, her face lights up.” At the same time, one of her friends—unidentified—was quoted describing her as “very interesting, very sincere, but somewhat of a dreamer.”

  The Jewish press, however, remained cynical and unconvinced of her sincerity. The Tageblatt’s rival, the Daily Forward, was always looking for ways to embarrass the Tageblatt or one of its staff, and the Forward was quick to pick up one juicy bit. Not many months before the engagement was announced, the Tageblatt had run an editorial that had inveighed heavily against intermarriage between Christians and Jews. The editorial had taken to task Israel Zangwill, the British writer, for marrying a Christian woman. And who had been the author of that polemic? Why, none other than Miss Rose Pastor herself! But now, when it suited her, Miss Pastor endorsed interfaith marriages.

  Miss Pastor, meanwhile, continued to insist that the couple’s common interest in the poor overrode all their differences, and that the Stokes family’s money had not been a consideration in her decision. Of her own self-education, she said, “It was a hard struggle. I read much, and I only read books that I thought would be useful to me, and then I began to write. My efforts to obtain an education were all due to a desire to be of service, not because I had any desire to rise above the station I then occupied in life.”

  As the early summer progressed, the news and magazine stories about the romantic pair continued, and both complained that they could not leave their homes or offices without running a gauntlet of photographers and reporters. In response to repeated questions about what she and Mr. Stokes expected to accomplish on the Lower East Side, Rose replied, “If our life and our united deeds do not speak for us, I feel we should be silent.” What deeds, the Daily Forward wanted to know? Everyone knew that New York’s Christian community wanted to Christianize the newly arrived Jewish immigrants. So, secretly, did the uptown Jewish merchant-banker class—those of Julia Richman’s ilk—many of whom had already converted.

  These stories of threatened conversions frightened the Lower East Side Jews. Down through the centuries had come horror stories, such as the account of how King Manuel of Portugal, in order to solve the Jewish “problem,” had all the Jewish children in his realm kidnapped on the first day of Passover in 1497, taken to churches, and forcibly baptized. Then, their parents were given the choice of baptism or exile. Conversion-scare stories also sold papers, and the Tageblatt countered with a report of a Jewish man who had been accosted on a New York street by a Christian, and forced to eat oysters. The man became violently ill and died. Later, the Tageblatt admitted that the story was a fiction.

  While all this was going on, a date for the “wedding of the century” was set. It would take place on July 18, 1905, the bride’s twenty-sixth birthday, at the Point, another summer home of the bridegroom’s parents, in Noroton, Connecticut, overlooking Long Island Sound. (The Stokeses, it seemed, spent July at the shore, and August in the mountains.) To minimize the publicity, only the immediate families and a few close friends were invited. Of course this attempt at privacy only whetted the press’s appetite, and on the day of the wedding there was more publicity than ever. Some reports had it that the bride looked radiant, others that she looked sad and worried and drawn. One said that Mrs. Anson Phelps Stokes, Sr., heaved a great, mournful sigh when her son uttered the words “I do.” But the fact was that the Point was so thoroughly cordoned off by police that none of the press was able to see either the bride or the groom, or witness any part of the ceremony. Nor would the family go so far as to reveal what the bride wore.

  Two days later, Mr. and Mrs. James Graham Phelps Stokes boarded the White Star liner Cedric for a three months’ honeymoon in Europe. Though they had come aboard early, in order to avoid detection, they were recognized by a photographer as they strolled on the deck. The photographer’s head and shoulders were covered with a black cloth, and to foil him, Graham Stokes blocked his lens with a corner of his coat. Unable to see what was the matter with his camera, the photographer darted back and forth underneath his drapery. Finally, Stokes tapped the man on the shoulder, and politely asked him
not to take any pictures.

  The newlyweds did, however, grant a shipboard interview to a New York Times reporter in their stateroom. They would visit England, France, Switzerland, Hungary, and southern Italy, they announced. From Budapest, they would also journey northward to the little Polish shtetl where Rose Pastor Stokes had been born. Otherwise, said Mr. Stokes, “we have no definite plans. We avoided making any. Both of us are tired, and we are looking for a rest. When we reach London, and we are going there first, we will be met by my mother’s automobile and our first run will be through Scotland. All our travel will be by automobile. We have had too much publicity. A great deal has been said about what my wife and I propose to do in uplifting the fallen. The fact that the people of the East Side are as self-respecting as we are seems to have been overlooked. What we want to do now is just to go away quietly and have a restful time.” (In its headline on the Stokes departure story, the Times commented somewhat tartly, “Not So Bent on Uplifting,” seemingly missing the point of Mr. Stokes’s statement.)

  The Times reported that Mrs. Stokes wore a white shirtwaist, a gray walking skirt, and a wide-brimmed straw hat with a large black ostrich feather. Mr. Stokes wore a light suit, a “negligee shirt,” white canvas shoes, and a straw hat. It was also noted that the Stokes stateroom on the Cedric’s promenade deck was “comfortable but not overluxurious,” though certainly it was more luxurious than the steerage quarters in which the bride had first sailed to America.

  There were one or two more ominous notes. The only people to arrive at the pier to see the Stokeses off were two young girls with whom Rose Stokes had worked. No members of either of their families had come to wish them bon voyage, and the curious absence of any flowers, candy, fruit baskets, wine, or other offerings that might have been expected in a honeymoon stateroom drew comment.

  The newlyweds were well out to sea when the first blistering attack upon them appeared. On July 20, 1905, an editorial prepared by the Hebrew Standard, and headlined “The Climax of Apostacy” (sic), which the paper would publish the following day, was distributed in advance to other American newspapers. The article took it for granted that Rose Pastor’s Christian marriage implied the bride’s denunciation—as well as renunciation—of her inherited faith, and said, among other things:

  The christological influence the young millionaire and his newly Christianized bride will exert over the children with whom they will come into contact will be distinctly harmful. They are Jewish children, and any teaching which will create a gulf between them and their parents must certainly be regarded with suspicion.

  Notwithstanding the statement that all the work the gentleman in question will do on the east side will be of non-sectarian character, we find that he is a Director of the Federation of Churches, which is doing distinctly Christian work on the east side. Consequently we may safely presume that the work both he and his newly-made wife will be engaged in among Jewish children will be of a non-Jewish character, and to this we strenuously object.

  That this Christian gentleman and Jewish girl should have married is their own business, that the lady should have adopted another religion is a matter for her own conscience, but the announcement that they are to work on the east side among the Jewish children is certainly the business of the community. We may say quite frankly and openly that they would have shown far better taste had the young couple quite frankly and openly said that they would leave the east side alone and continue their uplifting work among other sections of the population in greater need of it than the Jewish community.

  Interestingly, the Hebrew Standard had also editorialized that the uptown German Jews were “closer to the Christian sentiment” around them, and had nothing in common with the “Orientalism” of the East Side’s “miserable darkened Hebrews.” Was the Standard addressing itself to a “white” Jewish readership? Or was this just another indication of the kind of Jewish schizophrenia that seemed to be sweeping the country? In any case, it was another dark omen that the Cinderella Story, and the Romance of the Century, might in the end turn out to be something else again.

  “Fame!” Rose Pastor had written in one of her verses for the Tageblatt:

  Fame!

  What’s in the name

  To make men hurry and scurry so;

  To make them hanker and worry so;

  Rushing forever past friend and foe

  Rushing so madly through maddening crowd,

  Heedless of human hearts crying aloud;

  Hearts that are hungry—and still theirs are proud!

  Passing the true for profitless gain;

  Giving up all for the naught of a name—

  For fame!

  But now, of course, Rose Pastor Stokes herself was famous, and her marriage—giving up her Jewishness for the naught of a name—had provided a whole generation of East Side Jewish girls with a romantic idyll of how, with a simple “I do,” it was possible to leap out of grinding poverty into success and luxury. Upon returning to New York from their summer-long honeymoon in Europe, Rose and Graham Phelps Stokes set themselves up in a top-floor apartment in a building on the corner of Grand and Norfolk streets on the Lower East Side, just nine blocks east of the Bowery. They had chosen this far from fashionable address, Rose explained to an interviewer from Harper’s Bazar, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, it was close to the University Settlement, where both planned to continue to work. For another, it was hard by the teeming Eastern European Jewish ghetto, and the poor whom they intended to uplift. To her interviewer, Rose dismissed the apartment as “tiny,” though it had a comfortable quota of six rooms—a library, a dining room, a sitting room, a large and well-equipped kitchen, and two bedrooms—and a bath. The building had an elevator, run by “a German woman in a blue calico gown.” Rose pointed out that the apartment rented for “only” thirty-eight dollars a month. But the interviewer noted that, though Rose Stokes described her decor as “simple,” there were “finely bound books” on the bookshelves of the library, a piano in the sitting room, “handsome vases” filled with fresh flowers on the tables, some bronze pieces, Oriental rugs on the floors, and Millet etchings on the walls. Mrs. Stokes explained that she had “literally” no servants, “the only help being the janitress, who is called in on sweeping-days.”

  The Stokes apartment, and its location, also had a symbolic significance, Rose explained. With it, she hoped to demonstrate how, with a few simple touches, even the most cramped dwelling place in the ghetto could be made pleasant and attractive. Rose explained how, with little economies, it was possible to live on a modest budget. For example, she used very little meat, substituting “eggs cooked in innumerable ways.” She used lots of uncooked vegetables, plenty of milk, good bread and butter and fruit, but neither coffee nor tea. Another economy was to eliminate table linen. Instead of napery—“quite an item in the household expenses”—she used “pretty Japanese napkins” of white paper, which could be bought at twenty cents the hundred, disposed of after each meal, and “which entirely eliminate laundry work.” She went on to say that she hoped her apartment would have a second symbolic function: that it would “arouse public interest, and force more general recognition of the unfair condition of life and labor that weighs down our neighbors.” This was why she was taking a reporter from Harper’s Bazar, and a photographer, on a tour of the place.

  But which was it to be? An example of how the poor could get by with substituting eggs for meat, using paper napkins instead of linen, milk instead of coffee or tea, and thus be able to afford Oriental rugs and fresh flowers? Or a demonstration of the fact that the rich lived better than the poor—a fact that few of the poor had not grasped? Rose Pastor Stokes seemed not to have realized that she could not have it both ways; that her elevator building, her janitress, her six rooms with private bath, her steam heat and electricity were amenities that would have seemed incomprehensible to the average tenement dweller down the street, where a family of five lived in a single windowless cell, a single feti
d toilet served an entire building, the family bathtub was the kitchen sink where only cold water ran, and a fire escape in good weather provided the luxury of a second room. She seemed not to realize that, for a family bringing in only six or seven dollars a week, an apartment costing “only” thirty-eight dollars a month would have been out of the question. This appeared to be at the heart of Rose’s problem. Now that she was indeed famous, she seemed not quite to know what to do with her fame.

  As the year 1905 drew to a close, meanwhile, there was a certain amount of speculation within the upper reaches of New York society as to whether the new Mrs. James Graham Phelps Stokes would be listed in the next edition of the Social Register. Or whether, for having married a Jewess, Mr. Stokes would be dropped from the little list of who mattered in New York’s white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant upper crust.

  These questions were duly answered when the 1906 issue of the Register made its annual autumn appearance. Both newlyweds were listed, along with their prestigious clubs, at the unlikely address of 47 Norfolk Street, close to what was now their joint settlement-house work—though they also indicated a more prepossessing summer address: a place called Caritas Island, off the Connecticut shore near Stamford. Thus, Rose Pastor earned another distinction of sorts. She had become the first person of known Jewish descent to be included in New York’s official “stud book,” unless one counted August Belmont, who “passed.”