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1981 33 01 00 Doc Herscher.Pdf TABLE OF CONTENTS Uri D . Herscher: Introduction ............................... 1 Hams ~ubin:Worker on the Land ........................... 7 Alexander Harkavy: Chapters From My Life (Translated by Jonathan D . Sarna) ....................... 35 Isaac Don Levine: Letters of an Immigrant .................... 53 Ida R. Feeley: Growing Up on the East Side ................... 85 Lillian Wald: Crowded Districts .............................. 95 Jeannette W. Bernstein: The Grateful Thread .................. 105 Bessie Schwartz: My Own Story ............................. 117 Moses Lasky: Origins ...................................... 135 INTRODUCTION 1 Introduction Uri D. Herscher Myself an immigrant, I have a rather insatiable curiosity about the experience of immigrants. My own family is of Central European origin, but it is from Eastern Europe, and particularly from what before 1917 had been the tsarist empire, that the preponderant majority of Jewish CmigrCs have come during the past hundred years, and so, almost inevitably, my own explorations have been focused on what eighty years ago an often puzzled, insecure, German-oriented American Jewish community disdainfully called the "Russians" - to the dismay of the Poles and Lithuanians and Ukrainians and Byelorussians and Moldavians among the immigrants from the tsarist empire. Of course these immi- grants commonly assuaged their wounded pride by referring contemp- tuously to their Central European predecessors here, a mixed multitude of Rhinelanders, Prussians, Bavarians, Alsatians, Austrians, Bohemians, Germanized Magyars, Prussianized Western Poles, Silesians, and Gali- cians, as daitchen - Germans. The confrontation, or maybe it would be closer to the truth to say, the misunderstanding, simply adumbrates an all but omnipresent feature of Jewish community life and history: that the biblical saying "its ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peace" belongs, when applied to Jewish communal affairs, to the realm of utopia.' Now, this theme, utopia, is certainly worth a second look. It is a major presence in the configuration we call the immigrant experience. Perhaps nothing sums it up better than the epithet the immigrants used for America, especially before they arrived here. I mean, goldene medineh. America beckoned to them, to their imagination, as the Golden Land, the Golden West, as it were. Some of them, it is said, fully expected to find American streets paved with gold. I think not very many of them, if indeed any at all, were quite so naive. They are unlikely to have thought of gold-paved streets; they would have thought, rather, of a society golden in the social and economic opportunity it offered, golden in the religious pluralism it sheltered, in the political liberty it affirmed - golden in everything and in every way the tsar's empire was dross. Uri D. Herscher, the guest editor for this issue, is Associate Professor of American Jewish History at the Los Angeles campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. He is the author of A Socialist Perspective on Jews, America and Immigration (with Stanley F. Chyet) and the forthcom- ing Jewish Agricultural Utopias in America, 1880-1910. INTRODUCTION All too often the tsars and their ministers lived up to what the syllable tsar means in Hebrew: "enemy." They were indeed the enemy, treating their Jewish subjects like pariahs, concocting a devil's brew of disabilities to restrict Jewish residential rights and Jewish economic activity. Espe- cially from the 1880's on, as the empire's economic crisis deepened, Jews were subjected to pogroms, expulsions, confiscatory taxation - whatever indeed could demonstrate the tsarist regime's view of them as, in the words of one high-ranking official, the "Hebrew leprosy." No wonder some two million Jews fled Russia between the 1880's and the outbreak of World War I. The tsars, blessedly different in this respect from their Soviet successors, encouraged the exodus. An American counsul stationed in the tsarist capital reported in the mid-1880's that "the Government is well satisfied and even anxious to get rid of its Israelite population, and when [the Jews] go it is not with a blessing but with a kick and 'glad to get rid of you'." One of Tsar Alexander 111's closest associates is said to have proposed that Russia's "Jewish problem" be solved by forcing a third of the Jewish population to emigrate, requiring a third to accept baptism, and allowing the remaining third to starve to death.= But it was not only from peasant pogromists and from tsarist officials that such intolerance came. Even a presumably anti-tsarist radical spokesman might comternplate with pleasure the undoing of the Jews. The revolutionary Narodniki (Populists) urged their followers to "wreak . vengeance on the landowners; pillage the Jews; kill the [tsar's] officials!" Is it any wonder that so many Jews left everything familiar to them and turned their backs forever on Eastern Europe?' Still, they were remarkable people, these Jews who took it upon themselves to quit Stepmother Russia and cross the Atlantic to the Golden West. They were an extraordinary breed: a blend of utopian idealism and the courage to brave uncertainty. Within a few weeks or at most a few months, they exchanged a largely agrarian medieval society for the Western world's urban-industrial frontier, the faltering feudal econ- omy of Eastern Europe for the burgeoning industrial capitalism of North America. Initially, to be sure, it seemed as though they had exchanged the misery of their shtetlach, their East European villages, for the misery of grimy ghettoes in New York and Boston and Philadelphia. But as the social reformer Jacob Riis observed, "nowhere in the world" were "so many people crowded together in one square mile as here" on the Lower East Side of New York City, and yet its poverty and filth notwithstanding, the neighborhood was, according to Riis, "the healthiest spot in the city" due to "the temperate habits of the Jew and his freedom from enfeebling vice^."^ The proletarian writer Michael Gold would recall his own experience as a child with immigrants newly arrived on New York's Lower East Side. When I woke of a morning, I was never greatly surprised to find in my bed a new family of immigrants in their forei n baggy underwear. Around the room was scatterred their wealth, all tieir striped calico seabags, . feather-beds, pots, pns, fine peasant linen. Every tenement was a Plymouth Rock like ours. T e hospitality was taken for granted until a new family AMERICAN JEWISH ARCHIVES rented its own flat. The immigrants would sit around our supper table, and ask endless questions about America. They would walk up and down our East Side Street, peering at policemen and saloons in amazement at America. They would make discoveries; they would chatter and be foolish. After a few days they left us with thank^.^ Not a few immigrants disintegrated in the New World. But what was most characteristic was not prolonged confusion but a determination to rise in the world, to make the New World of America into a goldene medineh for themselves and their children. Sholom Aleichem's Tevye had a son-in-law who believed that "a poor man was far more important than a rich one" and that money was "the source of all falsehood," and such beliefs were certainly not lacking among the immigrants, but the typical immigrant was rather remote from these ideas. Alfred Kazin wrote of the public school he attended in Brownsville: "It was never learning I associated with that school: only the necessity to succeed, to get ahead . in the daily struggle to 'make a good impression' on our [Anglo-Saxon] teachers who . never stopped trying to dig out of us whatever small morsel of fact we had managed to get down the night before. We had to prove that we were really alert, ready for anything, always in the race." It does not sound very attractive or very edifying, that race, but these remarkable runners, included, after all, Kazin him~elf.~ In his most recent autobiographical volume, Kazin asks: When did the Jews lose "their martial strength and ancient stoniness?" And he answers: when Judaism "became the weeping religion of powerlessness in their exile."' That is saying too much even for Jews who remained in Eastern Europe. It is very much at odds with the spirit which could be seen among Jewish immigrants settled in America. Rabbi David Philipson, a native Midwesterner and a member of the Hebrew Union College's first graduating class in the 1880's, recorded in his diary an episode which amused him but which can be read as more than comedy: [Cincinnati, September 25, 19051 I had an amusing experience this morning which showed me that "muscular Judaism" is not non-existent. Several weeks ago I preached a sermon [against] Bible teaching in public schools. This sermon called forth a vicious attack by a Presbyterian minister by the name of Macauley, who was reported to have said amon other things that he did not blame the Russians for the manner in whick they treated the Jews. This almost incredible statement on the part of a Christian minister aroused the keenest indignation on the part of the Jews. One of them, a teacher of athletics, Morris Isaacs by name, met me this morning and told me that he had written Macaule a letter which that entleman would not readily publish to the world. In tiat letter, he had tolf him what he thought. of hlm and had advised him to cease from troubling Dr. P [hilipson]. He, Isaacs, would be glad to meet him anywhere and at any time and would encounter him, as he might choose, "with or without glove^."^ It was indeed a muscular Judaism the immigrants discovered for them- selves on these shores. They did not, most of them, lose themselves; they did not forfeit their Jewish religio-ethnic identity.
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