Famous Nathan by Mr. Lloyd Handwerker Read Free Book Online Page B

but it was a shock buffered by traditions, customs, and practices that were instantly recognizable from the eastern European culture left behind. Nathan immersed himself in it as in a cold bath. He lived in a succession of tenement apartments in Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side.
    His initial landing place, the apartment of a cousin where he spent his first nights in his adopted homeland, did not last long. He lay awake on his kitchen cot one evening soon after he arrived, listening to a discussion between the host couple. Nathan soon realized they were talking about him.
    â€œHow long is he going to stay with us?” asked the wife of his cousin. “He’s eating up the food.”
    Nathan didn’t wait. He was too proud to be where he wasn’t wanted. He left early the next day, taking his paltry belongings with him.
    â€œI didn’t want to eat breakfast with them in the morning,” he recalled. “I didn’t tell them why.”
    Such was the extent of New York’s well-established Jewish community that a greenhorn like Nathan, even an itinerant one, could survive and even prosper. It was possible for immigrant Ostjuden to work, live, and worship in venues that did not demand them to speak English. Whole neighborhoods, congested as they were, offered Nathan safe harbor among fellow countrymen.
    The Lower East Side neighborhood was incredibly concentrated. A third of a million Jewish immigrants lived in a forty-block area around Allen, Essex, Canal, and Broome Streets: the Tenth Ward of New York City. Home to some of the most densely crowded buildings on earth, the neighborhood had a population of 69,944, or approximately 665 people per acre. The language used to describe such dwellings is uncannily reminiscent of descriptions of Old World shtetlach, invoking some of the same words.
    â€œThe rooms were damp, filthy, foul, and dark,” stated one government sanitary inspector. “The air was unbearable, the filth impossible, the crowded conditions terrible, particularly in those places where the rooms were used as workshops. The life of the children was endangered because of the prevailing contagious diseases, and children died like flies.”
    One vital difference existed between the Galician misery of the Old World and the Tenth Ward congestion of the new: there were jobs for willing and able employees in America. Nathan himself had three separate offers of employment in his first week in the country. The jobs might have been low paying and grueling, but they represented gainful employment nonetheless.
    Common in the neighborhood were positions doing piecework in the garment business, much of the time accomplished in the same apartments in which the workers lived. A garment jobber might subcontract out batches of cut fabric for buttonholes, trim, or simple stitching, collecting the completed pieces from the sweatshop workers to return to the manufacturer. Almost half of New York City’s workforce was engaged in clothing production. A pieceworker could earn up to ten dollars a week (compare this to Nathan’s weekly wage of $4.50 at the luncheonette). Rent of a tenement apartment was usually around ten or twelve dollars a month.
    Pushcarts were another common neighborhood livelihood. At the turn of the century, there were some twenty-five thousand of them on the Lower East Side. Hester Street in particular became something of a movable bazaar, nicknamed chazermark or “pig market” for its crowds and fulsome odors.
    There were also shadier occupations available to newly arrived immigrants. Jewish gangsters Ben “Bugsy” Siegel and Meyer Lansky began their criminal careers as lowly stickup men on the Lower East Side. Street prostitution, brothels, and white slavery were commonplace enough to cause hand-wringing in the press and action by relief organizations. A survey of a Manhattan magistrate’s court in 1908–09 revealed that three-quarters of the