Part 9

More broken into individualistic groups than the Austrians and Hungarians, they have the strongest racial consciousness, and perhaps are also the depository of the greatest Jewish genius. The synagogue is the centre of each provincial or village group gathered in some Ghetto and, being subject to no ecclesiastical law outside of itself, is thoroughly Congregational. These synagogues vary in size and untidiness as the services vary in monotony and disorder. Each man prays or chants as fast or as slowly, as high or as low, as he pleases. Naturally, the effect is not harmonious, neither is there much harmony in the administration of ecclesiastical affairs.

Rabbi, Cantor and Shochet (the official slaughterer) are usually out with each other and with various members of the congregation, and quarrels during service are not unknown. While the worship seems fervent, it is often spiritless, and only a small portion of the Russian Jewish population works seriously at the business of its organized religious life. The younger generation has much unsatisfied longing for the real spiritual life, and there are a few Jewish Endeavour Societies entirely apart from the synagogues, in which this spirit expresses itself. A still larger number of the young people have slowly but surely drifted into complete antagonism to the faith of their fathers, and here lies the great conflict as well as the great problem.

Nothing in the whole story of immigration is so pathetic as this growing breach between the old and the new; this ever widening gulf which is not being bridged.

The Ethical Culture Society has a hold, although not a very vital one, upon a small number; and here and there one or the other of the young people drifts into a Christian church, but this makes no serious impression upon the mass.

Zionism has become the strong rallying point for many of them, and has gathered into its various lodges much of the radical element, which is coming back to the law and the prophets by the way of an awakened consciousness.

The Russian Jews are the busiest of our alien population, and although at first among the poorest, a respectable middle class is growing up, and is marching towards wealth, if not as yet enrolled among the millionaires.

Of the total of 600,000 Jews in New York City, nearly 100,000 are engaged in various branches of the clothing industry, and in mechanical and manufacturing pursuits. This is a remarkable showing for people who nearly all had to adjust themselves to manual labour for which they were not physically fitted, and which they had no opportunity to perform in Russia.

In the trades which they have entered they usually maintain a satisfactory wage, and cannot be regarded as a serious economic menace. If they remain crowded in the Ghettos of the Eastern cities, it is due, not so much to their gregarious habits and to the needs springing from their religious observances, as it is due to the fact that the trades in which they find readiest employment are here concentrated, and the wages most satisfying. The needle above all else is to blame for the congestion of the Ghetto, and a great transformation must come over Israel both physically and mentally, before the needle will be exchanged for the plow.

XI

IN THE GHETTOS OF NEW YORK

At last we are free, although still upon Uncle Sam’s ferry boat, which carries those of us who have passed muster, to the Battery, the gateway into the gigantic city and the vast country which lies beyond where, “sans ceremonie,” we are landed.

Boarding house “Runners” call out the names of their hostelries, express men entreat us to entrust to them our belongings, the voice of the banana peddler is heard in the land, and through the babel of sounds there arise the joyous shrieks of those who welcome their dear ones.

Over in Hoboken, where the cool-blooded Anglo-Saxon awaits his wife, who “toiled not neither did she spin” during her year abroad,--the joy remains unexpressed. She may say to him: “Hello, old man!” and he will reply: “How are you, old girl?” and that is all, so far as the public knows. But here on the Battery, where Jacob meets his Leah, for whom he has toiled and suffered these five years, for whose sake he ate hard rye bread and onions that he might save money to bring her to him;--when Jacob meets his Leah, there are warm embraces and kisses through the tears. Here, men embrace and kiss each other, and children are held up to the father’s gaze,--fathers who left them as infants and now see them grown.

Half a dozen stalwart men and women will almost crush a little wrinkled “Mutterleben,” their mother, coming to them for the sunset of her life, which is to be bright and beautiful after many dark mornings and cloudy noondays.

I attached myself to a young Russian Jew of about my own age, who had no relatives waiting for him, but who had the address of his parents’ friends. They had come here a few years before, and now served as the clearing house for that particular district in Russia, of which their native town was the centre.

We went up Broadway, and after plunging into the whirlpool of its traffic, emerged safe at the City Hall, crossed the Bowery and were at the edge of the great Ghetto, the heart of the largest Jewish community in the world. It numbers now nearly 700,000 souls, scattered through all parts of Greater New York, and massed in four centres, commonly called Ghettos; of which the one through which we are passing is the “Great Original” one. It is less dirty, less suspiciously fragrant than the Ghetto which my comrade has left, and in spite of squalor and visible signs of poverty, a certain air of joyousness pervades its life which is lacking in the old home. The hurdy gurdy grinder lures nimble footed children from block to block, like the “Pied Piper of Hamelin,” and they are happier and more graceful than the much be-starched children of the rich who take lessons in dancing and in conventional deportment.

The sidewalks and driveways are packed by humanity, most of it children, for the Abrahamitic promise that his “seed shall increase like the sands of the sea” has not yet departed from Israel--only the illustration is not quite complete, for while the Ghetto children are as numerous as the sands (I counted almost two thousand in one block), they are not nearly so clean.

The language of the Ghetto is Yiddish, a mixture of German, Hebrew, and Russian; but with enough English mixed with it to make the immigrant halt before such words as “gemovet,” “gejumpt,” “getrusted,” which sooner or later will become part of his own vocabulary.

Street signs are written in Hebrew letters, and the passer-by is invited by them to drink a glass of soda for a cent, to buy two “pananas” for the same sum, to purchase a prayer-mantle or “kosher” meat, to enter a beer saloon or a synagogue. Many of these signs are translated into English, and Rabbi Levinson on Cannon Street has in large English letters, “Performer of Matrimony;” in the same house one finds “wedding dresses for hire,” and can have his “picture photographed,” and also may buy “furnitings for pedrooms and barlours.”

Everything is for sale on the street, from pickled cucumbers to feather beds, and almost all the work done in this Ghetto is done by Jewish workmen. There are Jewish plumbers, locksmiths, masons, and of course tailors; and work and trade are the watchwords of the Ghetto, where, in all my wanderings through it, I have not seen that genus Americanum, the corner loafer.

The prevailing type of dwelling, even after tenement-house legislation, is much too crowded and too dirty. The New York Ghetto looks remarkably decent from the outside, but pharisaic landlords have beautified the “outside of the cup and platter,” while within, the house is poorly prepared for human habitation. A good example is the house into which I lead my friend. It is an old fashioned front and rear tenement with fifty families as residents, and on climbing the stairway to the fifth story to which our address directs, our nostrils are greeted by a fragrance which, compared with the well remembered smells of the steerage, is like unto the odours of Araby the blest.

We come into the kitchen, where the family of nine is just at dinner; two of the number, a husband and wife, are regular boarders. I doubt whether anywhere else, under similar circumstances, we would have received so genuinely hearty a welcome, in spite of the fact that we were practically strangers to them, and that I had no claim whatever upon their hospitality.

One of the children has already been dispatched to the nearest store to buy additional dainties, and room is made at the already crowded table for two very hungry adults.

My Russian friend, amazed as he was at the turmoil of the streets and the height of the buildings, is still more awed by the sight of such abundant and wholesome food, to which he may help himself without stint. There are large sweet potatoes which taste better than cake, and are permeated by the delicate flavour of nuts; they are a greater contrast to the small, gnarly, scant portion of potatoes which it has been his lot to eat, than any forty story sky scraper can be to the tumble-down shanty in which his father kept store. Meat,--a huge piece of meat, on his plate,--and in the memory of his palate, only the soft end of a soup bone, as a special delicacy. What a contrast!

“Last, but not least,” the pie, that apple pie, of which he had a whole one for himself and knew not how to attack it; until finally, following good precedent, he took it into his trembling hands and let his joyous face disappear in its juicy depths. After the dinner, he was catechized, all the inhabitants of the far away town were inquired after, and the record of the living and the dead told to the news hungry hearers.

What a marvellous group this is! and typical of thousands. The father is a cloak presser. He is a small, cadaverous looking man of very gentle mien, who knows not much beyond the fact that to-morrow the whistle will blow, and that he will be on the fifteenth floor of a great cloak factory, “doing his allotted task,” (God willing). The enemies that await him are many; the red-headed Irish “Forelady,” who looks hard after the creases in the cloaks, and who in turn, is suspected by him of all the evils in the catalogue of sin; the cloak designer, a Viennese Jew, who hates all Jews, especially Russian Jews, and more especially this particular one with whom, after the fashion of the Viennese, he quarrels for pastime. His fellow cloak presser, whose name was Elijah and who now calls himself Jack, is an ardent Socialist, who “pesters” my host by his economic theories which are obnoxious to him in the extreme. “I yoost haf to led him dalk,” is the refrain of my host’s complaint. Our hostess is corpulent and somewhat untidy; her horizon is even more limited than that of her husband. She, too, works; she is a skillful operator, and from 8 A. M. until 6 P. M. she hears nothing but the whirr of the machine. She does not even have an enemy to vary the monotony by her Socialistic doctrines. The oldest daughter is called Blanche, although she was named Rebecca; she too works, and has worked for several years, albeit she is not past sixteen. She embroiders in a fashionable dressmaking establishment on Broadway, and likes her place; she sees fine ladies and handles fine stuffs, and, “above all,” she says to me in good English, “I don’t have to associate with Russian Jews.” She reads good books,--fiction, biography, history--everything. The two on her shelf that evening, were “Ivanhoe,” and “The Life of Florence Nightingale.” Other children are growing up and going to work soon; so the family is on the up grade, in spite of the fact that work is not always steady, that the wife’s parents who live with them are old and feeble, that the youngest child is threatened by blindness, and that they have paid much money to quack doctors who advertise and to those who do not. It was pathetic in the extreme to see this family crowd together to make room for us for the night. My friend slept on a sofa, the ribs of which protruded like those of Pharaoh’s lean kine, and I slept soundly on the smoother surface of the floor.

The next day brought to us the momentous task of going out to find work, and before the whistle blew for the night’s rest, my friend was part of a sewing machine, while I being stronger, was assigned to pressing cloaks. My fellow cloak presser told a piteous story of his wife and four children on the other side, who had been almost heart-broken because he had been here two years and been kept by “hard luck” from sending for them. I worked by his side for a day, receiving my first lessons in cloak-pressing from him, and the last letter from his wife was so pathetic, that it drew tears from my eyes and money from my pocketbook towards those tickets. When the day’s work was over, and the possibility of soon seeing his family was almost realized, he said as we parted, “I shall sleep happily to-night;” and so did I, in spite of heat and sore muscles.

Rarely do these clothes pressers rise to a higher place in their trade, although occasionally by strict economy and much hard labour, one may own a shop and “sweat” the “greener” as he has “been sweated.”

In my wanderings through the Ghetto I dropped into a pawnshop on Avenue C one day, and after I made some purchases the proprietor grew friendly and introduced me to his family. He is the happy father of seven sons, all of them “smart as a whip,” and all of them doing well. The youngest one, Charles T., the smartest, is still in school and, like all the Yiddish boys, at the head of his class. Charles T. knows everything, from Marquis of Queensberry rules to the schedule of lectures at the Educational Alliance building. “What are you going to be, Charles?” I asked. “A business man like my father;” and the keen look in his big eyes, the determination of his whole frame and face, showed that he would succeed even better than his father, who is beginning to think of “being at ease in Zion,” and retiring from business. Charles T.’s father began life by buying rags on Houston Street; his sons will sell bonds on Wall Street.

The Ghetto is not all barter and manual labour, for there are many synagogues in which prayers are said every day; although only a few of these synagogues are anything more than halls or large rooms in tenement houses, sometimes above or below a drinking-place and in many instances in ball rooms, which on Saturdays and holy days put off their unholy garb.

If all the population of the Ghetto attended to its religious duties, these one hundred synagogues would have to be increased to a thousand; but on Saturdays many have to work, and increasingly many wish to work, so that not twenty per cent. of the Ghetto population attend religious services. However, on the great feast days, New Year’s day and the day of Atonement, everybody goes; or as Charles T.’s father would say: “I go to the synagogue twice a year and pay my dues, and then I’ll not have a ---- thing to do with them for another year.” Charles T.’s father is a politician.

Most of the Ghetto rabbis are, like Mr. Levinson, “Performers of Matrimony” and not much else; they are professionally pious and not deeply religious; they have no vision and measure a man’s religion by his observances of fasts and feasts; they are ignorant of all literature except the Talmud, that treasure house of Jewish thought and prison-house of Jewish souls. They are as superstitious as their constituency, and often less honest, but in not a few cases truly devout and charitable. There is no ecclesiastical control over these rabbis, and they are in some cases self-made men in the worst sense of the word, while their influence upon the ethical life of the Ghetto is almost “nil.” They are the Jews’ law court and judges in matters which pertain to ritualistic questions, but they are almost nothing to them in life. There is very little preaching, less pastoral visitation, and much useless bending of the back over musty books full of “dry bones” of rabbinical lore.

The one great Jewish intellectual and ethical centre of the Ghetto is the Educational Alliance building, with its various scattered branches; it is everything which a Young Men’s Christian Association is to a Gentile community, only more, inasmuch as it ministers to all, from childhood to old age. Israel’s intellectual hunger is as great as its proverbial greed for wealth, and this gigantic building, covering a block and containing forty-three classrooms, is entirely inadequate to meet the demand. The main entrance is always in a state of siege, and two policemen are stationed there to maintain order and keep the crowding people in line. I visited it on a hot Sunday afternoon in July, and I found the large, well-stocked reading-room uncomfortably filled by young men. The roof-garden is a breathing-place for thousands, and is always crowded by children, who are supervised in their play and who enjoy it eagerly.

The annual report reads like a fairy tale. Many of the lectures and entertainments have to be given a number of times to give all an opportunity to hear and to see, and some of the most difficult subjects discussed find the most numerous and enthusiastic hearers. Baths, sewing and cooking schools, are maintained, and to give even a list of all the agencies employed to lift this population would exhaust my space. There has been marked improvement among its constituency mentally and ethically, and the redemption of New York from Tammany was in no small measure due to the faithful work done by this and other similar centres, not the least among them being the University Settlement.

There are several Christian churches in this district, but what their influence upon the newcomer is I could not determine. In the main it may be said that the churches do not concern themselves greatly regarding this problem around them, although there are a few notable exceptions.

The following letter does not give one a hopeful view of the situation. The gentleman to whom this letter was written, Mr. User Marcus, was actively engaged in the kind of politics in which the churches ought to have an interest. He organized a club, and through one of its members secured a room in the Woods Memorial Church on Avenue A. After the first meeting Mr. Marcus received the following letter:

NEW YORK, NOV. 1, 1901.€

_Mr. User Marcus, 157 Second Ave., City._

DEAR SIR€--Word has just come to me that your club will mainly consist of Jews, also that you are acting independently of the club already formed. Now you must know that the young men who have the club are the men of our church, and therefore it would not be right to oust them for strangers, and especially Jews. The men are quite worked up about it, and came to see me about it the other night, and this is my decision: that you get another place of meeting other than ours. I have issued orders that you cannot meet again. And another thing: I told you strictly that you must be out by 10 P. M., which you were not, as you kept the room open until eleven o’clock. All these things have determined me on my course, and I hope that you will not take it in a wrong spirit, as I am acting simply for the best interests of my church, and feel that this is the best way for all concerned.

It seems to me that, being Jews, you would scorn to accept any favours from Christians. I should certainly be pretty far gone before I should ask or even accept a favour at the hand of a Jew, knowing as I do the feeling which exists between them and the people of our religion.

Yours respectfully,

The Jew suspects every convert and suspects and hates the missionary. His own religious faith may have little hold upon him, but he is hostile to the attempt to proselyte him and his brethren. He knows Christianity from its worst side, and he does not always see it in these missions from its best side, for all religious work which bends its effort towards making a big annual report must be superficial if not dishonest, and the temptation to make converts is very great, even if the methods employed are above suspicion.

The work of the Jewish Mission in the Ghetto ought to be the interpretation of the spirit of Christianity, so that it might remove suspicion and prejudice, and not increase them. Making converts in that mechanical way used in the revival service of the past is as obnoxious to the sensible Christian as it is to the sensitive Jew; while the coddling of the convert and his exhibition as an example do more harm than good. A true interpretation of Jesus by Christian people in the churches and out of them, a touch of kindness here and there without a thought of definite results, the treating of the Jew as a man and not as a special species, would do more to reach the Jewish soul than any organized missionary effort with which I am acquainted.

The two great social factors of the Ghetto are the Yiddish newspapers and the theatre, each of them in some degree entering into the life of every dweller in the Ghetto, as indeed each of them is a mixture of good and ill; a battle-field of past ideals and modern aspirations. The paper most in evidence on the street is the _Jewish Vorwaerts_, the Social Democratic organ; if all its readers were adherents of this political faith, its strength would be enormous. A careful examination of this subject shows that there are about three thousand Social Democrats in the Ghetto, and that three hundred of that number are of the extreme type. The politics of the Ghetto used to be very uniform; they were Democratic; years ago a Jewish Republican was a curiosity, to-day he is a very important minority. Tammany had a very strong hold upon this district, and even to-day the Tammany district leader is its political saint.

To “fix and be fixed” used to be considered no crime, and is still winked at with both eyes, although every time that Tammany is defeated, the Ghetto has a few less crooked windings. To evade the law is a vice brought from the lawlessness of Russia, and the political tutelage of the East side of New York has not improved the situation. The Hearst influence is felt here in a remarkable degree, and the New York _Evening Journal_ is a great power for both good and ill.

The Jewish immigrant receives his first training for citizenship in one of the lodges or societies of which there are legions. Here he becomes conscious of himself; and above all, he can talk, and unlock the flood-gates of unexpressed emotion.

I attended a “meetunk” as it is called, of a “Sick and Benefit Society,” and I think it is typical of all of them. The “meetunk” was held on Lewis Street, in a hall on the top story of a rather old and rickety building. Underneath the lodge room is a dance hall, beneath that a synagogue, and a saloon occupies the basement. The occasion was a public installation of officers, and the ladies were invited. To one who has seen these people in their old environment, the change seems miraculous. The men wore the very best and cleanest clothing, and the women were obtrusively stylish.