The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In 1912, with Ernest H. Lehman, she was working on another book, about methods of teaching Jewish ethics, which the Jewish Chautauqua Society of Philadelphia planned to publish. Among her other projected plans was the establishment of a correspondence course for teachers in religious schools. Her memoirs, to be titled Forty Years in the New York Public Schools, had been promised to the Macmillan Company.

  In June, Miss Richman sailed for Europe with a group of friends, intending a summer holiday. At the outset of the trip, with her usually splendid constitution, she felt fine. But during the crossing she felt increasingly ill. Seasickness was blamed, but when she landed at Cherbourg her condition was so poor that she was rushed by train to the American Hospital in Paris. There her condition was diagnosed as appendicitis, with “complications.”

  It was of these that she died a few days later.

  *Miss Richman’s fire was fictional. Three years after they were written, the Triangle fire made her words seem prophetic.

  4

  AN OCCUPATION FOR GENTLEMEN

  Despite the well-intentioned efforts of the do-gooders and reformers, and a general improvement in the immigrants’ economic status, there was still plenty of crime on the Lower East Side. It was almost inevitable in an area so densely packed with humanity. East Siders grew accustomed to hearing the periodic sounds of human screams rising from tenement streets and windows, and quickly learned to ignore them. The scream might mean a simple domestic argument, or it might mean that someone was being murdered, but in any case it was wisest not to become involved. If one did, and the police came, the innocent bystander was often hauled off to jail with the offender. Much of the crime was youthful hooliganism. Certain blocks were considered Irish territory, others were Italian, and still more were Jewish. None of the three groups got along with the others, but the Irish and Italian street gangs, being Catholic, tended to side together against the “Christ-killers.” The Jewish youths rarely carried knives, but the Irish and Italians did, and taunts and insults between the gangs frequently led to fights, stabbings, killings, followed by vendettas of revenge.

  In the summer months, each ethnic gang had staked out a particular strip of East River shoreline where the boys swam naked from the docks. These preserves, however, were always being invaded by bands of youths from enemy territory, and there were water fights and drownings. Jewish youths, instilled from the time of infancy with the idea that education was the best avenue out of the ghetto, were not often truants. But the Irish and Italians were less scrupulous about school attendance, and the Jewish youth forced to walk home from school through a hostile neighborhood often found himself confronted with a knife-wielding band of Irish boys demanding that he drop his trousers to show whether or not he was circumcised. If he were not circumcised “enough,” the enemy gang would try to perform the operation for him. Doughtier Jewish boys soon learned to give out as good as they got. If you could put up a good fight, after all, you earned for yourself that intangible asset, respect.

  It had been discovered that there was money to be made out of this touchy ethnic situation. For a few pennies a day, a beleaguered Jewish boy found that he could purchase the “protection” of an older or tougher Italian or Irishman. Or the tougher Jew might hire out to protect a frailer coreligionist, and become, in effect, his bodyguard. The protection notion quickly spread to involve the business community as well, and the shopkeeper and café owner learned that hiring a protector on a monthly basis was practical insurance against having his premises looted or vandalized. On this level, the protection business became quite lucrative, and many Jewish entrepreneurs—as well as Italians—became involved in it. No one seems to have given much thought to the legality of the protection business—or racket, as some called it. Paying protection was a nuisance, but a necessary one, part of the overhead and the cost of doing business, and the price was simply passed on to the consumer.

  The Jewish press of the Lower East Side in the early 1900s tended to overlook Jewish crime. The press was aware of it, of course, but preferred to underplay it. It was an embarrassment, and to make too much fuss about it might fan the embers of anti-Semitism, that ominous presence that always hovered close by in the Jewish consciousness. Meanwhile, Jewish parents worried lest their children be attracted by the flamboyant and obviously expensive life-styles of some of the more successful Jewish criminals.

  Hundreds of Jewish girls, unable or unwilling to work in the garment-industry sweatshops, had turned to prostitution. One particularly poor area, not far from the old Third Avenue elevated, was notorious for its “houses of iniquity,” as pious Jews preferred to call them. Pretty Jewish girls also openly walked the streets in fancy dresses, servicing their customers from tiny rented rooms or, for a lower fee, on stoops or while draped across garbage cans in back alleys. Percentages of their earnings were collected by Jewish pimps, also well dressed, a number of whom were said to have murdered girls who cheated them. Running gambling operations was by no means an exclusively Italian occupation. A number of Jews ran illicit gambling parlors in tenement basements or on rooftops. And along a certain section of Delancey Street the crap games were played in the open air on the sidewalk. Periodically, the police came through and broke them up, but within half an hour the games would be proceeding as enthusiastically as before the interruption.

  In fact, when a Jew and an Italian could put aside their religious differences to become partners in a gambling venture, they frequently made an unbeatable combination. In other words, Jewish crime—and it is important to remember that it was often not thought of as crime, but as a business dedicated to fulfilling certain human needs—was just another way to get ahead in the New World. It was simply one of the high-risk, high-return investment businesses that the Eastern Europeans tended to prefer.

  In a sense, the Eastern Europeans were all gamblers, inured for generations to the come-and-go, win-or-lose philosophy. Life in Russia had always been a gamble, with the whims of the czar the numbers on the wheel of fortune. And when at last Lady Luck ran out for the Jews, with the odds stacked impossibly high against them, there was emigration—another gamble. The risks and the dangers for the emigrant were incredibly high, but the rewards for the winners were even higher. This gambling nature was another thing the uptown German Jews found alien and unattractive—even though the Germans had taken the same gamble two or three generations earlier, and had become successful in fields that were essentially gambling operations: stockbrokerage and retailing. But the Eastern Europeans seemed, to the Germans, to be becoming successful in all sorts of endeavors that, according to most American business standards, were most “unbusinesslike.” The tailors and seamstresses of the old country were going into the fashion business. What could be riskier or more unpredictable than the whims of fashion? Yet it was apparent that some East Side cloak-and-suiters were prospering. It made no sense. (What was overlooked was that the former Russian tailors had brought with them the concept of sizing, which was already revolutionizing the garment industry; before the Eastern Europeans, all men’s or women’s ready-to-wear was sold in one or two, or at the most three, sizes.) Talented songwriters, musicians, and performers, in the tradition of the Yiddish theater, were journeying to the Borscht Belt in hopes of establishing careers that would lead them to Broadway or Hollywood. (The Yiddish theater, outlawed in Russia, had simply gone underground; it flourished anew in New York.) Others were becoming theatrical agents and producers. But what could be riskier than show business? In Russia, where Jews could not own real estate and where banks could not be trusted, Jews had tended to invest in precious stones, gold, furs, and other portables, which could be hidden from the tax collector and packed up quickly when the time came to move. In America, these people gravitated toward the fur and jewelry businesses, either as retailers or as auctioneers. Again, these were high-risk endeavors, subject to wildly fluctuating commodity prices and the fickle whims of fashion; but for those who succeeded, the returns were also high.


  And crime, of course, carried the highest risks of all. It was a business so unbusinesslike that it could not properly be called a business at all, and yet the Lower East Side would also produce some of the most successful and powerful gangsters in the world. One of these arrived at Ellis Island in April, 1911, as a ten-year-old boy named Meyer Suchowljansky.

  The Suchowljanskys had come from the town of Grodno, in Russian Poland, where, at least until the time of the Alexandrine pogroms, the family had been reasonably prosperous, dealing in furs, spices, and rice. Though there was ice on the walls of their house in winter, and the streets of the town ran with mud in spring, the house was built of wood and had a wooden floor—signs of status. Then the pogroms had come. Meyer Suchowljansky’s father emigrated to New York first. A few years later, he was able to send for his wife and son.

  From Grodno, young Meyer Suchowljansky brought with him two vivid and violent memories. One was of a local rabbi who had been walking home one night across a field and stumbled on the body of a Christian girl who had been raped and bludgeoned to death with a stone. Unfortunately, the rabbi took the unwise course of running to tell the authorities what he had found. To his further misfortune, the authorities he notified were two Russian Orthodox priests. The priests, arriving at the site, immediately decided that the rabbi himself had committed the act, and that his purpose was to use the girl’s blood in making Passover matzos.* The rabbi was arrested, taken to prison, and tortured for two years. For a time, he was kept in a dungeon beneath the church. Finally, in a public ceremony, his body was cut in quarters while he was still alive, and the quarters were hung on display on the walls of Grodno. Only after a number of weeks was the Jewish community given permission to cut him down and bury him.

  The second memory was of a visit to Grodno by a young Jewish revolutionary who had held a meeting at Meyer’s grandfather’s house. Young Meyer remembered the revolutionary soldier’s words: “Jews! Why do you just sit around like stupid sheep and allow them to come and kill you, steal your money, kill your sons and rape your daughters. Aren’t you ashamed? You must stand up and fight. You are men like other men. I have been a soldier in the Turkish army. I was taught to fight. A Jew can fight. I will teach you how. We have no arms, but it doesn’t matter. We can use sticks and stones. Even if you’re going to die, at least do it with honor. Fight back! Stop being cowards. Stop lying down like stupid sheep. Don’t be frightened. Hit them and they’ll run. If you are going to die, then die fighting. Protect your beloved ones. Your womenfolk should be able to rely on you.”

  Fight back. This would become the principal watchword in Meyer Suchowljansky’s life.

  Physically, however, Suchowljansky was far from prepossessing. As a scrawny child of twelve, he looked three or four years younger than his age. But he had large, bright, intense eyes that flashed dangerously when he was angry, and he soon earned a reputation in his neighborhood as a boy who, even when he was outweighed and outnumbered, never ran away from a fight. When attacked by older bullies, little Meyer would fight back with his teeth and fingernails, as well as with his knees, elbows, feet, and fists. Even when he lost a fight, his performance was impressive, and it had to be admitted that the little fellow was no coward. For this, he earned no small amount of admiration and respect.

  He was also a bright boy—particularly good at mathematics—and, though he remained a dutiful Jewish son, he also very quickly became wise to the ways of the East Side streets. One of his weekly chores was to carry his mother’s freshly made cholent—the meat and vegetable pie traditionally served on the Jewish Sabbath—to a nearby bakery to be slow cooked (his mother’s oven was too small). To pay the baker for this service, five cents was scrupulously set aside each week. Meyer’s route on this Friday errand took him along Delancey Street, where the noisy sidewalk crap games took place, and he would watch with fascination as the excited players exhorted their dice to fall in the desired combinations, and listen to their whoops of delight when they won and gathered up their take. One day, when he was about twelve, Meyer decided to throw the baker’s nickel into the game. He immediately lost it. He was then forced to return home with the uncooked pie and tell his mother that there would be no cholent for the Sabbath meal.

  His mother’s reaction was one of such utter desolation—she did not scold or punish him, but simply sat silently weeping—that Meyer that night made a solemn promise to himself. It was not, as his mother might have hoped, never to gamble again. Instead, he promised himself that the next time he gambled he would win.

  For the next few weeks, standing at a little distance from the play, he studied the crap games. He soon noticed that some of the regular players were obviously shills, or come-ons. He also observed the tactics of the “mechanics,” as they were called—men who could conceal as many as six dice in the palm of a hand, and by gently rubbing the indentations of the cubes with the tips of their fingers, could toss them in any combination they wanted. He noticed that whenever a greenhorn joined a game he was usually allowed to win—for a while. Then, when his excitement reached such a pitch that he tossed in his whole weekly paycheck, he lost. Circulating among the players, Meyer also became aware of the loan sharks, who offered loans to losing players—at who knew what elevated rates of interest—to encourage them to stay in the game. Finally, he realized that the men who acted as bankers in the street games were not the actual bankers at all. Certain well-dressed men, most of whom appeared to be Italian, were always found not far from the action in the street. These men never gambled. They might have been casual observers or passersby. But they watched the games very closely, and from time to time scribbled little notes on scraps of paper. These were the men who ran the games, who rented the sidewalk space, and periodically they approached the bankers and collected their lion’s share of the take.

  Having determined the proper moment to enter as well as to leave a game, Meyer ventured another cholent nickel, and won. He then wandered on to another game, waited for the right moment, and won again. Soon he would never have to worry about losing the money for his mother’s cholent again, because he had a considerable wad of cash stuffed into a hole in his mattress. It was at that point, he would declare later, that he decided his life’s career would be as a gambler, but as a gambler of a special sort. Never, he would caution friends, gamble with money that you cannot afford to lose, because, in the end, the gambler always loses. No winning streak can last forever. In gambling, the only one who consistently wins is the man who runs the gambling house, and who owns the roulette wheels, the crap tables, the blackjack tables, and the slot machines. And the beauty of the gambling business is that, though the owner might extend a bit of judicious credit here and there, it is otherwise cash, all cash.

  With this philosophy Meyer Suchowljansky, with his name abbreviated to Meyer Lansky, would go on to become the guiding genius of Las Vegas, to become the king of casino gambling in Havana and, later, the Bahamas, and to reach the point where he would be one of the richest men in America and regarded as the unquestioned financial linchpin of the mob.

  The young Shmuel Gelbfisz had found that in America his Polish name was an unpronounceable mouthful, and so it was first modified to Samuel Goldfish. But under whatever name he used he was at heart a gambler; in later years an entire file cabinet in his office would bear the label GAMBLING and be filled with the records of his wins and losses, and scribbled IOUs for huge sums from such Hollywood tycoons as Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, David Selznick, and Harry Conn. In the beginning, however, he was just a young man on the make, looking for a chance to grab the brass ring from the merry-go-round whenever it might appear.

  His first job in New York was as a telegraph delivery boy, and his first address was a rooming house in the Bronx. In the evenings he attended public night-school classes to learn English, and supplemented these lessons by reading old newspapers he fished out of trash cans. His scholarship was desultory, and his mastery of the language was imperfect, at best. But he had no
t been delivering telegrams long before, in one of his secondhand newspapers, he ran across an ad for a job as a glove cutter in upstate Gloversville, New York, then the glove-making capital of the country. He decided to journey there.

  Gloversville—originally called Stump City—was a drab little factory town dominated by mills and tanneries that turned out silk and leather gloves and mittens. But the glove and other subsidiary industries had made a number of local families reasonably rich. And, as he had been from his park bench outside London’s Carlton House, Sam Goldfish was awed by the visible trappings of wealth and power. Gloversville’s premier hotel was the Kingsborough, and in his off-work hours, Goldfish spent much time outside the hotel’s gilt-and-glass doors, watching the well-dressed guests pass in and out of the ornate lobby and chandelier-hung dining room.

  But the glove-cutting job itself turned out to be mechanical and boring, and Sam decided that the real excitement—and money—in the glove business was in selling. He persuaded his employer to lend him, in return for a cash deposit, a batch of gloves, and set off as a traveling salesman, given as his territory the Hudson River Valley between New York and Albany. In this role, he quickly discovered his true talent—as a master of ballyhoo. Spreading open his sample case, gesticulating wildly with his hands—a lifelong mannerism—he would wax rhapsodic over the virtues of his gloves, while moaning and clapping his hand to his forehead over the folly of retailers whose orders he deemed too small. Nor was he averse to a bit of bribery. For placing larger orders, buyers got not only bigger discounts but also little gifts of cash.

  Within a year, Sam Goldfish was his company’s top salesman, and was earning ten thousand dollars in annual commissions, a princely income in turn-of-the-century dollars. Still, on his trips back to Gloversville to place his orders, he somehow felt himself “not good enough” to pass the inspection of the haughty doorman and headwaiter of the Kingsborough Hotel. Like many immigrants, Sam distrusted banks. A man whom he had befriended in New York, who happened to be the stationmaster at Grand Central Station, handled his money for him, and acted as his banker, paying him a little interest on his funds. This was convenient because, on his selling travels, Sam Goldfish was always passing through Grand Central. It was also habit-forming, and later on he would set the style for other movie moguls who, like royalty, never carried cash.