Rose Pastor Stokes the Yidishe Tageblat, Hattie and Rose Met at the Educational Alliance

On a 1905 winter’s day at the Educational Alliance on New York’s Lower East Side, Miriam Shomer’s friend Rose Pastor burst into her classroom just after Shomer had dismissed her art students. Pastor refused to reveal her excit- ing news until Shomer fetched their friend Hattie, who was teaching home economics down the hall. Shomer was twenty-three The Personal years old, “Hattie” Mayer, twenty-four, Pastor, twenty-six. While Shomer had met Rose Pastor Is Political: in 1903, when Pastor became a cub reporter at the Yidishe Tageblat, Hattie and Rose met at Rose Pastor Stokes the Educational Alliance. Hattie Mayer scraped by as a cooking teacher but never intended it Regina Morantz-Sanchez to be her life’s work. In time she would shed the Americanized name her family gave her when they arrived in the United States in the 1890s and would reclaim her Russian Jewish name, as a nom de plume, when she became the writer Anzia Yezierska. As the women eagerly assembled to listen, Rose announced: “Children, listen to me! I am making history. I am going to be married to the millionaire Stokes. Riches and poverty, Jew and Christian will be united. Here is an indication of the new era.” My book project is framed by this 1905 intermarriage between the immigrant cigar- maker Rose Pastor and the wealthy, Ivy-League, “old stock” reformer James Graham Phelps Stokes. The union took place at a time when mass immigration was challenging reigning presumptions about the nature of the American polity. I ask what conditions of possibility, both within Jewish culture and American society, made such a union possible. Their relationship Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division Archives Manuscripts and Library, University Yale developed in the Progressive period, when immigration, political reform, and shifting understandings of race, gender, and class were contentious issues. The transformations of Jewish life in Eastern Europe that altered traditional gender roles and provided new occupational opportunities for women, the dynamics of Jewish immigrant acculturation, 32 the relationship of Jews to the history of the of the University Settlement. Rose became American left, the role of Jews in progressive “enchanted” by “the slender young man . so reform politics—all assembled the conditions full of sympathy for the poor.” The feeling was that made this union possible. mutual. Graham courted Rose through the What struck me most about the recent summer and fall of 1904. By the spring she Jewish scholarship we discussed in our weekly was a frequent dinner guest at the settlement meetings was how expansive its understand- house. “The conversation,” Rose noted, “covered ing of the category “Jews” has become. Twenty the widest possible range of topics discussed years ago, Rose Pastor might have been men- from widely various points of view.” Rose tioned by historians as someone who had left listened intently to “those learned gentlemen the fold. No longer. I argue that her story is a and brilliant ladies—professors, publicists, profoundly Jewish one. Pastor spent her early doctors, lawyers, scientists, educators, scholars. years in London’s East End, where her mother, . .” Gradually, she became accustomed to the Hindl Lewin, migrated after leaving the Pale company of intellectuals. of Settlement in 1882, when Rose was three. In the spring of 1905, the couple Abandoned by her first husband, Hindl lived became engaged. The press sensationalized for eight years with the families of her older the event as a “rags-to-riches” love story, call- brother and sister. In 1890, she married a Ro- ing it “New York’s Most Interesting Romance.” manian Jewish immigrant named Israel Pastor. The couple felt it necessary to explain them- Unable to earn enough in London, Israel took selves. They characterized their union as a his family to America, settling in Cleveland. new kind of partnership, akin to what family The couple reluctantly sent eleven-year-old historians today call “companionate marriage.” Rose to work in a small cigar factory, where Acquaintances of Rose did not stress her wifely she remained for the next twelve years. By the proficiencies, but her independence and repu- mid-1890s, Rose’s stepfather had failed again diation of materialism. Anglo-Saxonists who as a breadwinner and at the end of the century worried about “race suicide”—intermarriage he left his family and disappeared. with “racially inferior” immigrant stock—were Though she had only a year and a assured by Graham that Rose was a “Jewess as half of formal schooling at London’s Jews’ Free the apostles were Jews.” In a powerful symbolic School, Rose read voraciously and hungered gesture, the two revealed that Rose would for an education. In 1901, she responded to return to cigar-making in order to “stay in touch a humorous plea for contributions from the with the people.” A few months before the editor of the Yidishe Tageblat. A.H. Fromenson wedding Rose and Graham invited the press to found her style so charming that, in 1903, he a union meeting, at which Rose gave a riveting brought her to New York with the offer of a address about her first-hand experience with full-time position as his assistant. Here she re- poor working conditions. In 1906, they joined ceived “practical newspaper” training. She also the Socialist Party. learned from the Tageblat staff, who became Rose’s autobiography, though selective her intellectual mentors. and occasionally self-serving, can, when read Pastor met Graham Phelps Stokes, well along with her letters, offer insight into which known on the Lower East Side as a promoter of of her early experiences she felt shaped her Progressive causes, when Fromenson insisted Jewish and political identity. She remembered that she interview the “millionaire resident” her birthplace in the Pale as “the simple 33 non-revolutionary background against which three months before their marriage, on April I had my beginnings.” She described warm 26, 1905, in which she expressed to him the joy encounters with loving grandparents and she took in their mutual engagement in social neighbors and an Edenic landscape whose reform, addressing him as “dear darling Saint!” beauty held out the possibility of life’s simple Two years later, in another letter, she wrote: pleasures. London, in contrast, offered poverty, “Oh what a wonderful cause we are working for, work, worry, instability, illness, and hunger. my Precious!... Someday, all our striving, all Even pooled wages yielded a minimal material our straining will gain for the world that peace existence; she recalled hunger pangs that that passeth understanding... and we shall gnawed at her so powerfully that they often have done our share. That is... a satisfying and interrupted her childhood play. Rose felt her inspiring thought.” extended family’s suffering deeply. It may well have been a relationship In addition to describing the misery of profound misrecognition, but Rose and Gra- of the downtrodden, Rose also recorded acts ham fell in love partly because they shared a of defiance, both hers and her mother’s. Rose similar language, if not experience, of politics. recounted the story of her mother’s spontane- There is much in Pastor’s memoir to help us ous walkout at a tenement garment shop that understand why this marriage made sense grew into a week-long strike. Rose clearly ad- to her, a Jewish woman from the ghetto who mired Hindl’s outspokenness and willingness had been a worker most of her life. Graham to form her own opinions. Rose also recalled enabled her to have the intellectual education adult conversation about bosses and workers she craved. He gave her an audience for her and, occasionally, religion, what she called “my artistic endeavors and a structure and com- grandfather’s kind,” as well as “the new kind.” I munity for their shared sense of purpose, take from these passages that what Rose meant seeing her, seemingly, as his equal. by the “new kind” of Judaism was her gradual The marriage remained a vibrant awareness of socialism, anarchism, and even political partnership for a decade and a half. Zionism among immigrant workers. Cleveland’s Rose’s charisma as a speaker led to years of lessons were similar to those of London. traversing the country, lecturing for the Inter- In New York, Rose seized the opportu- collegiate Socialist Society on college campuses. nity to grow intellectually. Early on she came Only with World War I did their union falter. to know not only Lower East Side Jewish per- Graham’s politics shifted rightwards. Rose’s sonalities but many nonconformist American radicalism intensified, and she helped found intellectuals who were trying to invent more the American Communist Party. In 1925, they inclusive understandings of “the social.” New divorced; each remarried within a year, she to York’s progressive reformers were attracted to the Communist political theorist Jerome Isaac Lower East Side Jewish intellectuals, who were Romain, a Polish-Jewish immigrant sixteen well-versed in the new European radicalisms. years her junior, and he to Lettice Lee Sands, a In different ways both groups sought solutions charming and attractive member of his elite to the problem of capitalist exploitation. I argue social world. that the Stokes-Pastor marriage was a tenta- In the end, Rose’s marriage was less tive and unstable realization of these mutual a radical break with her Jewish past, than an aspirations. Rose’s vision of her future is expression of the complexity of Jewish immi- expressed in a letter she wrote to her fiancé grant experience. 34.

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