From Harlem to Brooklyn

1 FROM HARLEM TO BROOKLYN We are formed in this world when we are sons and daughters and the first truths we know throw us into conflict with our fathers and mothers. The struggle for mastery – for the freedom of manhood or woman- hood – is the struggle not only to overthrow authority but to reconstitute it anew. Arthur Miller I would venture to say, the garment industry in this century has given birth to more writers, scholars, critics, and professors than any other American profession. Mark Schechner rthur Miller’s story begins in the shtetl: Radomizl. It begins with those Awho decided to leave the known for the unknown, in search of safety and fortune. In the years between the assassination of Alexander II, in (which was followed by pogroms and the destruction of synagogues), and the outbreak of war in , one-third of East European Jews left their homes and migrated. As the then head of the Russian Synod, and friend of Dostoevsky, remarked, ‘One-third will die, one-third will leave the country, and the last third will be completely assimilated within the Russian people.’ For the Jew, the first priority was to survive, but assimilation, even if possible, was not survival. Separation had always been a destiny and a fate. Two million people moved west, partly from fear of persecution, partly to escape destitution and partly because they saw a better future away from the villages and small towns that had defined their existence. Sometimes they went first into the major cities – Warsaw, Lodz, Minsk – but there was little respite there, little prospect of improvement. So they moved on. An active debate began as to whether this exodus should become official Jewish policy. In his study of the immigrant Jews of New York, Irving Howe recalls the conference of ‘Jewish notables’ in St Petersburg that discussed this question. On the one hand were those who declared: ‘Pogroms are a result of rightlessness and when they have been obviated the attendant evils will vanish Electronically reproduced by permission of the publisher from ARTHUR MILLER by Christopher Bigsby, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2009. with it.’ On the other, the minority, were those who insisted: ‘Either we get civil rights or we emigrate.’ In the end, though, public declarations meant very little. People made their own decisions. Architects have a word for pathways worn down by people who ignore those thoughtfully provided by city planners and designers, instead following their own whims and necessities. They are called ‘lines of desire’. Those who chose to leave the country of their birth, whatever the pressures to remain, followed lines of desire. There are lines like that in America, still visible a century and a half after wagon wheels wore grooves in rocks as people moved on in search of gold, land, or simply unbounded freedom. Those worn down by immigrants are no less real for being invisible. In there were , Jews in America. By the figure was over a million. In the figure was ,,. Individuals would abandon their families and step into the unknown. Sometimes entire villages would band together and set out by cart, train and ship on a journey to a country they knew only by report and whose language was a mystery. A people rooted in the past opted for the future, sure only that it would be better. There was, it seemed, a place of hope. Howe quotes one immigrant to that distant country who arrived in New York in as declaring: ‘America was in everybody’s mouth.’ In there were just , Russian Jews in New York; thirty years later there were nearly half a million. In the words of a lullaby: Your daddy’s in America, little son of mine. But you are just a child now so hush and go to sleep. America is for everyone, they say, it’s the greatest piece of luck. For Jews, it’s a garden of Eden, a rare and precious place. People there eat challah in the middle of the week. They carried their God with them but for some He would be lost along the way or abandoned, on arrival, in the clamour of a society in which ambition and material advance constituted the axial lines. A tension was thereby created between one generation and another. One set about the business of recreating the world they had left behind, with its schuls, ritual observances, Yiddish newspapers; the other threw itself into the new life, anxious to claim the possibilities and identity offered by a strange but seem- ingly welcoming country. As a result fault lines opened up not only between the past and the present but within families whose alliances began to shift, whose sense of identity derived from different experiences. The role of victim no longer seemed appropriate to a free society. Children married ‘out’. For- getting, it seemed to some, was more important than remembering, when to remember meant to preserve a sense of shame and suffering along with tradition. Miller and his family would enact such a process, while in his work Electronically reproduced by permission of the publisher from ARTHUR MILLER by Christopher Bigsby, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2009. he would inhabit those contradictions – this man who not once but three times married out of the faith. To join another society is to be invited to embrace its values, to share its myths. For the Jew, however, there was another history, there were other myths, and from the negotiation between the two would be born a life and a literature. At times, as the Jewish writer emerged as a major voice in America, he seemed a paradigm of the modern sensibility, simultaneously within and without, alienated but wishing to be accommodated. Yet in a society for which the past exists merely to be transcended or reinvented as romantic fable, the weight of history, the sheer particularity of experience, could be lost in a celebration of a supposed new self. And that particularity remained, that memory, that awareness that the threat could never be said to have wholly disappeared. This was a time, in New York, when horse railway carriages moved at five or six miles an hour and horse omnibuses forced their way through streets packed with people and past pedlars selling from handcarts, rented at ten cents a day and with an annual fee of a few dollars. Though such a mass of people would have been a shock after Radomizl, otherwise it was not such an unfamiliar world. There were synagogues. You could buy kosher food and go to the Yiddish theatre. This was an area already known as ‘Jewtown’, the title of a chapter in Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, published in . Riis, a Danish immigrant, a photographer and journalist, offers an account of the tenements of New York when the Millers and Barnetts (Miller’s mother’s family) lived there, in the process revealing something of the prejudices that confronted incoming Jews from Eastern Europe: ‘No need of asking where we are,’ he explains, the ‘jargon of the streets, the signs of the sidewalk, the manner and dress of the people, their unmistakable physiognomy, betray their race at every step.’ He describes ‘men with queer skull caps, venerable beards, and the outlandish long-skirted kaftan of the Russian Jew’. The ‘oldest women’, he insists, ‘are hags; the young houris. Wives and mothers at sixteen, at thirty they are old. So thoroughly has the chosen people crowded out the Gentiles in the th Ward that, when the great Jewish holidays come around every year, the public schools in the district have practically to close up.’ Beyond that, though, he characterizes them as a race concerned with only one thing: Thrift is the watchword of Jewtown, as of its people the world over. It is at once its strength and its fatal weakness, its cardinal virtue and its foul disgrace. Become an overmastering passion with these people who come here in droves from Eastern Europe to escape persecution, from which freedom can only be bought with gold, it has enslaved them in bondage worse than that from Electronically reproduced by permission of the publisher from ARTHUR MILLER by Christopher Bigsby, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2009. which they fled. Money is their God. Life itself is of little value compared with even the leanest bank account. In no other spot does life wear so intensely bald and materialistic an aspect . Over and over again I have met with these Polish or Russian Jews deliberately starving themselves to the point of physical exhaustion, while working night and day at tremendous pressure to save a little money . As scholars, the children of the most ignorant Polish Jew keep fairly abreast of their more favored playmates, until it comes to mental arithmetic, when they leave them behind with a bound. It is surprising to see how strong the instinct of dollars and cents is in them. They can count, and correctly, almost before they can walk. With little money, they had no choice but to work as many hours as possible. Living in squalor, they had to set themselves first to survive and then, slowly, to prosper. How else to escape the conditions that Riis describes. Their reputation as money-grubbers, however, stuck and years later Miller’s mother, Augusta, would find any discussion of money by her relatives repellent. Miller himself recalled a time when his aunt had asked him to drive her from her son Morton’s place to New York in the pouring rain.

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