by Colin Asher
The church taught that the Old Testament and the New were both the word of God, but only the wild, apocalyptic majesty of the Hebrew Bible attracted Nils. The vengeful Lord of Genesis spoke to him when He proclaimed, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created.” And Nils could feel the power of God’s wrath when he read that fire rained on Sodom and Gomorrah from the heavens, leaving nothing behind but “dense smoke rising from the land.” The story of Abraham—a man so devout he was willing to kill his only son when God commanded it—taught Nils about faith and sacrifice.
Nils read Deuteronomy as well, and learned that God chose the Israelites “out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.” And afterward, he began to question the Church of Sweden’s theology. The Old Testament’s message seemed clear to Nils—the Jews were God’s chosen people, not the Christians—so he relinquished his ties to the church, announced he had become a Jew, and renamed himself to show the depth of his new faith.
At some point near his thirtieth birthday, Nils Ahlgren became Isaac Ben Abraham—or, Isaac, son of Abraham.
Conversion wasn’t uncommon in Sweden at the time, but it always went the other way. What Nils did was a sign either of true piety or pure madness. There were about three thousand Jews in the country, and they had few rights. A law called the judereglement prohibited them from marrying Christians, converting Christians, or living outside the country’s three largest cities. The Swedish Parliament eased those restrictions in 1838—and people rioted in response. The law was soon restored.
In that context, it’s no surprise that Isaac boarded a ship bound for America.
Isaac arrived in New York City alone.* He was thirty-three, maybe thirty-four. The manifest of the boat that brought him to America said he was a laborer, but he looked more like a prophet—Moses reborn as a Swede. He moved through the world with the swaggering confidence of a zealot, his eyes shone like turquoise spotlights through a thicket of hair and a full beard, and his speech was inflected with brimstone.
Isaac was beyond the reach of his country’s bigotry and his family’s judgment in America, so he embraced his new identity. He began attending synagogue in New York, and introduced himself as a scholar. There were German Jews in the city then, and Poles, and Prussians—people who had been born into their faith and suffered for their bloodlines in Europe—and Isaac, a convert, chided them for lapses in their orthodoxy. He tried to debate rabbis, and stood on street corners and hollered about the Lord’s wrath like a harbinger of the end of days.
Soon, though, Isaac realized the city was no place for a true believer and he went looking for wide-open spaces and greater freedom. He headed west, following a path that had been blazed by an earlier wave of Swedish immigrants. He passed through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, and then traveled north until he entered the Minnesota Territory, where people lived in log cabins and the government ruled from forts built at the edge of the Dakota Nation. Europeans were free to settle on any plot of land they cared to there, chase vice where it led, and worship any God they chose.
So, Isaac decided to stay. He became a trader, and for seven years he earned his living buying and selling pelts.
Then the Dakota Sioux started a war. The tribe’s territory had been shrinking for years as settlers claimed pieces of it in violation of a treaty, and tribe members were starving because the United States government had failed to pay for land it had agreed to purchase, and had taken control of. So the Sioux began attacking settlements and raiding forts. They defeated the territory’s militia in the Battle of Redwood Ferry, and afterward civilians fled along wagon trails en masse—their belongings piled on horse-drawn carts, bonnets or wide-brimmed hats on their heads to protect them from the August sun.
Isaac was among them. He traveled south after the Dakota Uprising, and didn’t stop until he reached Chicago—a young city growing up and out along the shore of Lake Michigan. Twenty years earlier, there had only been four thousand settlers in the area, and they had spent their nights hiding inside a fort they built on land they had snatched from the Pottawatomi nation. But when Isaac arrived, there were twenty-five times that many. New residents were arriving every day, and the city was simultaneously expanding to accommodate them and crumbling beneath their weight—brick buildings were rising as high as five stories, but the Rush Street Bridge collapsed when cowboys drove a herd of cattle across it.
Within a year of arriving in Chicago, Isaac met a woman named Jette Scheuer and began to court her. She was a German-born Jew who worked as a servant, and she was only twenty-seven years old. Isaac was forty-three by then, but she agreed to marry him anyway. Rabbi Bernhard Felsenthal of the Sinai Congregation made them husband and wife on March 29, 1863, and after the ketubah was signed and the Torah reading concluded, the newlyweds abandoned the city.
Isaac and Jette moved thirty miles south and east, to Indiana and the relative stillness of Lake County—close enough to Chicago to see the city’s lights shimmer on the horizon at night, but distant enough to ensure they would have clean air and potable water. They found a bit of unclaimed land near the tip of the Little Calumet River in an area that would later be called Black Oak, and squatted it. Isaac opened a country store, and he and Jette began farming. They decided to start a family, and soon Jette gave birth to a child. She had another the following year, and another the year after that.
When Isaac settled into fatherhood and married life, his name began to seem ironic. The fault was all his. He had cursed himself by selecting one that promised much more than he could deliver. The biblical Abraham had been a man willing to sacrifice everything for his faith. His son, the biblical Isaac, had been a settled family man who eschewed concubines and never left Canaan. But Isaac Ben Abraham—the man born Nils Ahlgren—had no taste for labor or suffering, and he was no patriarch.
Isaac had a convert’s desire to seem righteous and act righteously, but he also had the instincts of a grifter. He quoted from the Old Testament fluidly and often, but experimented with perpetual motion when he should have been working, and minted his own coins and used them in place of legal tender. It’s said he once tried to place his country store on wheels so he could roll it across the county line when tax collectors approached. And he held destiny in higher regard than family.
Isaac was a Zionist, and a socialist, and he believed he had a religious obligation to move to Jerusalem and build an egalitarian society there. When he pictured the future, he saw himself studying the Torah in the Holy Land, not farming a scrap of dirt in Indiana. In 1866, the power of that vision overwhelmed him, and he abandoned his family and traveled west alone—through the territories, and then Nevada, and finally into California. He stopped when he reached San Francisco, where he began preaching on street corners, the way he had when he arrived in America twelve years earlier.
Then Jette caught up to him. She had placed her two eldest children in someone’s care and chased Isaac across the country carrying her youngest son, Moses.† She reconciled with Isaac when she found him, and they made a new home by the San Francisco Bay and began saving money so they could sail for the Holy Land. They had a son the following year and named him Gershom, after the son of the biblical Moses. Next, they had a daughter and named her Hanna, after the mother of Samuel—last of the Hebrew judges.
The Abraham family crossed the Pacific and the Red Sea in 1868, and then proceeded toward Jerusalem by land. They must have seen the city for the first time when they crested the Mount of Olives. The glittering Al-Aqsa Mosque would have been visible, as would the Temple Mount and the white crenulated wall encasing the Old City. If it was the right time of day, they would have seen men and women filing through the Mughrabi Gate while wind riffled their long robes, and heard muezzin calling from the minarets of the city’s mosques—Hayya ’alas-salāh / Hayya ’alal-falāh.
Isaac and Jette found an apartment in the Old City, and then Isaac began recruiting adherents. He introduced him
self as a rabbi, and before long he attracted a following and the family’s apartment became a gathering place for pious men eager to learn about the promise of Socialist Zionism. He spoke, and people listened. It was the life he had been dreaming of since he left Indiana to pursue his destiny.
Jette was not so lucky. While Isaac parsed God’s will, she cooked, cleaned, and cared for their children. She watched her husband hold court, noticed that every step he took toward the Lord was a step away from his family, and decided to leave him.
About a year after the family settled in Jerusalem, Jette told Isaac she was taking their children back to Indiana. Then she told Moses, Gershom, and Hanna to pack, and to say goodbye to their father. Isaac didn’t interfere because he did not believe they would leave. He watched as they filed out of the apartment and walked away. Then he stepped outside so he could continue watching. He expected them to turn back, but they never did.
Finally, just before the family passed out of sight, Isaac yelled, “Hey! I’m coming with you!”
The Abrahams returned to America together, made their way back to Black Oak, and moved into their old house. Isaac was in his fifties by then, and diminished—by age, but also by the thousands of miles he had traveled and by his wife’s defiance. He and Jette had two more children together, but each received a German name like hers instead of a biblical one like their father’s. Their sixth child was Rosa; their seventh was Adolph.
Isaac walked out on his family for the second time in 1884. He was bent and gray by then, and the faith that had propelled him across both the world’s great oceans and the width of a continent, in an age when most people never left the village they were born in, had abandoned him. He still knew every word in the Bible, but they no longer meant much to him. He became an itinerant preacher after he left the farm, and kept himself fed by serving his audiences any flavor of gospel they requested. Hebrew, Baptist, Lutheran—it had all become the same to him.
Isaac’s fourth child, Gershom Abraham, was seventeen years old when his father abandoned him, and twenty-six in 1893, when he moved away from the Black Oak farm. Even at that age, he left only because he had no choice. Banks were failing by the hundreds that year, and businesses by the thousands. Small farms were going bankrupt because they couldn’t borrow money for seed, and unemployment had quadrupled. The financial crisis was called “The Panic,” and that’s what people did—they walked away from their homes and families and went looking for work.‡
In the Midwest, most found their way to Chicago, where six hundred acres of parkland were being developed for the World’s Columbian Exposition—an international fair so ambitious it promised to be the largest event in the region’s history. Forty-six nations were expected to participate, millions of people were expected to attend, and two hundred buildings had to be created to accommodate them.
Gershom and his older brother Moses applied for work at the exposition, and they were hired. They became laborers and, along with several thousand other men, they worked tirelessly for months to achieve a seemingly impossible goal: building a city within a city in less than a year.
They erected buildings, covered them with white stucco, and strung electric lights along their sides and eaves. They laid out the Midway Plaisance and a Court of Honor with a pool at its center that was presided over by a bronze statue holding a plaque that read LIBERTY. They built a Ferris wheel that could carry eleven hundred people at once, and a moving sidewalk that ran down a pier and ended at a casino. Then, just before their task was complete, Buffalo Bill Cody set up his Wild West show across from the exposition’s gates, and twelve Norwegian men docked a facsimile Viking ship they had sailed across the Atlantic. Spaniards arrived in replicas of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, and workers from Japan built a pavilion on a wooded island.
After all the streets had been paved and all the buildings painted, President Grover Cleveland traveled west from Washington, DC, to inaugurate the fairgrounds everyone had begun calling the “White City.” He was an egg-shaped man with a droopy mustache, and when he mounted the podium he had been instructed to mount at the appointed moment, he found himself facing a crowd of nearly half a million people. There was a golden button in front of him, and when he depressed it, hundreds of thousands of bulbs flickered to life and set the fair ablaze like a signal fire on the plains. Three giant spotlights began darting across the sky. The casino opened its doors, and the Ferris Wheel spun.
Gershom and Moses continued working at the exposition after it opened, and for months their days were a blend of futurism and retrograde spectacle—a moving sidewalk, an electric kitchen, and Calamity Jane spinning yarns. But then the fairgrounds closed and the aseptic promise of its whitewashed walls began to fade. Buildings were torn down, and the remaining structures collected soot from Chicago’s polluted air and turned gray. People without homes began camping inside them and cooking over open fires they fed through the night to keep warm.
Eventually, White City burned, and when it was gone, Gershom and Moses were unmoored. Their agrarian childhoods had taught them nothing about surviving in an industrial metropolis, but somehow they managed. Moses became a brass finisher, and Gershom became a machinist. He hired on at Otis Elevator, and then went to work for the Chicago Screw Company, where his shifts were long and tiring and he never received vacation. He began to suspect that leaving the farm had been a mistake, and he never stopped.
After settling in Chicago, Gershom made a study of his father’s character. He thought about Isaac’s rambling, his shirking, and his zealotry. He remembered the distance Isaac’s faith imposed between himself and the world, and reflected on the way Isaac left people behind when they became inconvenient. And when it was time for Gershom to decide what sort of man he wanted to become, he used his father’s life as his guide—whatever Isaac Ben Abraham was, Gershom Abraham refused to be.
Because Isaac was a believer, Gershom was not. He preferred the predictability of rubber and steel to the changeable nature of gods and ideas, and he believed only in the value of his labor. The American Dream was his faith—work hard, he told himself, and you will be rewarded. He never claimed atheism, but he never entered a house of worship either—temple, church, or mosque. It’s said he once referred to God as a son of a bitch, and blamed him for starting “all our wars.”
And because Isaac was an aesthete, Gershom was incurious but physically powerful. He never touched books, his lips moved when he read the newspaper, and he fought as a semiprofessional boxer. When he was in the ring, he faced his opponents dead-on, cantilevered his head back beyond their reach, and extended his hands so he could parry their punches. It was the stance used by Gentleman Jim Corbett, and it made Gershom look like a man whose fists were running toward a fight his body was trying to flee.
Gershom rejected Isaac’s legacy most poignantly by dedicating himself to family. He and Moses shared an apartment just north of the West Chicago railroad shops for years, and when the Black Oak farm failed, they moved their mother and a sister in with them as well. Gershom even agreed to help Isaac when he reappeared suddenly.
Isaac had not been in touch with his wife or his children for more than a decade when he tracked them down in Chicago, but they allowed him to move in with them anyway. It was winter, and they agreed to shelter him until it was warm enough for him to go back on the road. He wouldn’t have survived the season if they turned him away. He was in rough shape by then, and his faith had abandoned him completely. “There is no truth,” he supposedly said. “There is no religion, no truth. It is all nothing.”
Isaac left in the spring, just as he had promised. “I don’t have any right to live on you,” he said, “because I deserted you.”
Gershom showed his father out, walked him to Madison Street, and gave him fifty cents. He waited until a streetcar arrived, and then he watched Isaac climb on board and shuffle down the aisle—bent, bearded, and frail. It was the last time they saw each other.
Isaac died a few year
s later, and afterward Gershom erased the last trace of his father’s legacy by anglicizing his name and removing the Old Testament reference.§ At some point near his thirty-fifth birthday, Gershom Abraham became Gerson Abraham.
Gerson met a woman named Golda Kalisher in the late 1890s, and began courting her. He brought her to Lincoln Park to see the electrified fountain, and wooed her at a beer hall called Bismarck Gardens, where you could sit beneath trees and rest your stein on a white tablecloth. Soon, they were engaged.
Golda went by “Goldie,” and she was a blunt-faced woman with a sharp tongue. Discipline was her watchword. She and Gerson shared that, but not much more—they were both secular Jews who had been raised in large families. Their mothers had nearly identical names, and they were getting too old to be single. The list ends there.
If Gerson was attracted to anything about Goldie, it was her family, and the idea they represented. Her parents—Louis and Gette—were American archetypes. They had emigrated from Prussia with their sights set on assimilation, and achieved it. Louis was a cigar maker and a stern, attentive family man. He was proud that his children were citizens, and proud too that he had been able to move them out of the Jewish ghetto along Milwaukee Avenue within his lifetime. He allowed them to speak German at home, but insisted they speak English in public. He encouraged them to marry gentiles, and most of them took his advice.
Goldie was the exception. She married Gerson on July 2, 1899, and then moved into the flat on North Crawford Avenue with him, Hanna, Moses, and Jette. Nine months later, she gave birth to a daughter and named her Irene.
The family scattered afterward. The Packard Motor Car Company offered Gerson a job in Detroit, and he accepted. Rosa moved to Hammond, Indiana—near the old Black Oak farm—and brought Jette with her. She worked as a seamstress, and her wages supported them both. Moses stayed in Chicago.
