Flesh and Blood So Cheap Read online

  Russia was different. Poland’s eastern neighbor banned Jews from its territory. Russians followed the Eastern Orthodox faith, a branch of Christianity. They despised Jews, calling them “Christ killers,” Poles because they were Roman Catholics, and Muslims because they were not Christians at all. When Jewish merchants came to trade, the czars, or emperors, warned them to stay away or die. They meant it. In the year 1563, soldiers drowned Jewish “intruders” on orders from czar Ivan the Terrible.

  In the late 1700s, Poland’s stronger Russian, Austrian, and German neighbors forcibly partitioned, or divided, the country among themselves. Russia seized eastern Poland, the largest section, where the largest number of Jews also lived. Although the czars did not want any Jews in their lands, they got them anyhow. So, when we discuss Russian Jews, we mean those who were originally Polish Jews. (Poland would not regain its independence until 1918, at the end of the First World War.)

  The Pale of Settlement, showing the Russian territories to which most Jews were restricted, where nearly five million Jews lived by 1900. The Pale contained hundreds of small towns called shtetls and several cities; some of the major ones are indicated here. (picture credit 1.4)

  The czars decided to segregate, or separate, the Jews from Russians by creating the Pale of Settlement. Originally, the word pale meant “fence” or “barrier.” But instead of building a real fence, the czars separated the mainly Jewish areas from Russia proper by a line drawn on a map. The Pale of Settlement—Pale for short—held the territories along Russia’s western border. It stretched from Russian-ruled Poland in the center to the traditional Russian lands along the Baltic Sea in the north and the Black Sea in the south. Several thousand Jewish merchants and skilled artisans had special permission to live in Russian cities. The rest dared not leave the Pale, or step “beyond the Pale.” For if the police caught them, the czar took all their property and sent them to prison. By the year 1900, the Pale held 4.8 million Jews.

  Russian Jews at a market, 1903. (picture credit 1.5)

  The Pale was dotted with hundreds of shtetls. Most Jews lived in a shtetl, the Yiddish word for “small town.” East European Jews often knew three languages. The first was Hebrew, the language of the Bible and prayer but not of conversation; the second was the language of the country in which they lived and spoke to gentiles. The third, Yiddish, or “Jewish German,” was the language of everyday life. When Jews first came to Poland from Germany, they spoke the German language. Over time, German mixed with Hebrew, Polish, and Russian words, forming Yiddish. However, Yiddish is written in Hebrew characters from right to left, like Hebrew. A vivid language, it can express everything from joy to grief with power and emotion.

  All shtetls seemed cut from the same pattern. One looked much like another. A traveler described a shtetl as “a jumble of wooden houses clustered higgledy-piggedly about a market place” that served the gentiles living in the countryside. Peasants brought their cows and chickens, hides and wool, timber and grain to market. Jewish merchants traded these for goods manufactured in cities: clothing, boots, lamps, pottery, cutlery, nails, tools. Also, the shtetl’s own artisans kept small shops or worked out of their homes.6

  Women played a key role in these activities. Wives not only ran the home, they and their daughters helped the menfolk earn a living. A traditional Yiddish marriage song mentions just a few of their duties:

  Cobblers’ wives must make the thread …

  Tailors’ wives must sit up late …

  Butchers’ wives must carry the meat …

  Weavers’ wives must throw the spindle …

  Filers’ wives must turn the [stone-sharpening] wheel …

  Painters’ wives must mix the paint …

  Carpenters’ wives must saw the boards …7

  Despite the Jews’ important economic role, Russians never let them forget they were outsiders. Russia was the only country where anti-Semitism, hatred of Jews, was official government policy. Ordinary Russians, egged on by their rulers, spat out the word Zhid (Jew) like a foul curse.

  No country persecuted Jews like Russia. Its laws limiting Jewish rights filled a book of nearly a thousand pages. By the 1880s, Jews could not be army officers or judges or serve on juries. Not one Jew taught in the Russian school system or was a university professor. Only one in ten high school or university students could be Jewish. The law banned Jews from owning land outside a shtetl—even for a graveyard. Nor could they deal in oil, coal, or gold or do business on Sundays. Jews who had received permission to live in Russian cities a century before had to return to the Pale, leaving their possessions behind.8 None of these limitations existed in England or other western European countries. There, the “career open to talent,” the right to follow any calling and rise as high as one’s abilities could go, was the law of the land.

  Many Jews, finding it impossible to earn a living in the shtetls, moved to slums in large cities within the Pale. They settled in cities most Americans had never heard of, places with strangesounding names: Warsaw, Vilna, Lodz, Minsk, Grodno, Bialystok. But city jobs were scarce, too. Many Jews were so poor they said, half joking, they lived on air. Small wonder that Yiddish is rich in words for poverty and bad luck. One grammar book has nineteen columns of words for misfortune.9

  Yet there were worse things than poverty. In the name of “keeping order,” the czar’s Cossacks, fierce horsemen, swept into shtetls to whip and loot, rape and burn. If anything went wrong, Russia’s rulers made Jews scapegoats, those who bear blame for the sins of others. In bad economic times, for example, officials directed popular anger away from the government and toward the Jews. People unleashed their anger in pogroms, from a Russian word meaning “riot” or “devastation.” A pogrom, in effect, was a license to commit murder.

  A 1904 cartoon illustrating the plight of the Jews in Russia, where they were constant victims of the czar’s Cossacks in numerous pogroms. Note President Theodore Roosevelt admonishing the czar to stop the oppression. (picture credit 1.6)

  In April 1903, around the time Sadie Frowne saw the Statue of Liberty, the New York Times described a typical pogrom. “There was a well-laid plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Orthodox Easter,” its reporter noted. “The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, ‘Kill the Jews,’ was taken up all over the city [of Kishinev].… The scenes of horror that attended this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror.”10

  Only after the massacre did the police step in—to arrest Jews who had tried to defend their families by force. From 1903 to 1906, during the reign of Czar Nicholas II, some 3,100 Jews lost their lives in pogroms. A single month, November 1905, saw no fewer than six hundred pogroms, an average of twenty a day. It is not surprising that many Jews decided that Russia was no place for them.

  Crossing the Big Water

  Jews had found refuge in America since colonial times. In 1654, several families from Holland settled in New Amsterdam, renamed New York a decade later to honor its English conqueror, the Duke of York. During the War for Independence, New York banker Haym Salomon used his fortune to support the patriot cause, and as many as two hundred Jewish men served in the Continental Army. In the years following independence, America’s Jewish population rose slowly, to 4,000 in 1820 and 250,000 by 1880. Then came the deluge, as “American fever” swept the shtetls. Between 1881 and 1914, over 2.1 million Jews left the Pale and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.11

  Everyone knew something about America from newspaper articles and letters of relatives who had already gone there. Although Jews also went to Canada, Australia, and South America, the United States was by far their favorite destination. Parents sang their children to sleep with a lullaby:

  In America, they say

  There is never any dearth.

  It’s a paradise for all

  A real heaven on earth.12

  An imm
igrant named Mary Antin recalled, “ ‘America’ was in everybody’s mouth. Business men talked of it over their accounts; the market women made up their quarrels that they might discuss it from stall to stall; people who had relatives in the famous land went around reading their letters for the enlightenment of the less fortunate folks [and] children played at emigrating.” Antin added that “scarcely anybody knew one true fact about this magic land.”13

  She was right. The real America was no paradise. Its streets were not paved with gold, as rosy reports often led would-be immigrants to believe. Many hardships awaited the newcomer. But America was a land of opportunity and, thank God, it had no czar. Its constitution guaranteed religious freedom, the right to worship (or not) as one pleased.

  Emigrants on board a ship bound for the United States of America, circa 1905. (picture credit 1.7)

  Going to America was easier than it had ever been. In the days of wooden sailing ships, crossing the Atlantic Ocean was a dreadful ordeal. Travelers often made their wills before sailing, for you never knew if you would reach the far shore alive. Voyages took from six weeks to five months, depending on weather and luck. Storms blew immigrant vessels off course. Wind gusts tore sails to shreds and toppled masts. Mountainous waves capsized ships or pounded them to bits, drowning all aboard. Even on a “normal” voyage, ships swarmed with disease-carrying vermin: rats, mice, lice, fleas, roaches. A disease called “ship fever” often killed half the passengers and crew. Some ships reached port with scarcely a person able to stand on their own.

  By 1903, iron steamships had greatly improved ocean travel. In that year, Russian Jews sailing from Hamburg in Germany or Italians from Naples could count on spending six to seventeen days aboard ship. The cheapest ticket cost thirty-four dollars. Even so, ocean travel was far from pleasant. Immigrants did not have separate cabins. Instead, they crowded into the steerage, or lowest deck, which housed the steering cables that controlled the ship’s rudder. They slept on iron or wooden bunks, in three tiers, each with a straw mattress and no pillow. Between two hundred and four hundred people shared two toilets that stank to high heaven. There were no showers or bathtubs. Immigrants had to wait until they reached shore to wash. “Everything,” one recalled, “was dirty, sticky, and disagreeable to the touch.”14

  Sailors called first-time passengers “landlubbers,” because they had never been aboard an oceangoing vessel. Most had never seen a stretch of water broader than a river or lake. Once their ship left port, the land quickly vanished over the horizon. The open Atlantic, seemingly endless, was terrifying; on a “quiet” day the ship rocked constantly.

  During storms, the winds howled like demons. Even the largest steamship heaved and tossed, bounced and rolled like a crazy cork. Crew members slammed the hatches shut to keep out the water. The air belowdecks grew stale, reeking of dampness and sweat. Food spoiled; drinking water grew scarce.

  Even without storms, the ship’s rocking made nearly every passenger seasick. On bad days, you could hardly walk without stepping into a puddle of vomit. An immigrant recalled that “hundreds of people had vomiting fits.… I wanted to escape from that inferno but no sooner had I thrust my head forward from the lower bunk than someone above me vomited straight upon my head. I wiped the vomit away, dragged myself onto the deck, leaned against the railing and vomited my share into the sea, and lay down half-dead upon the deck.”15 The ship’s “heads,” or toilets, often backed up. The filthy overflow covered the area, filling the air with dreadful odors. Crossing the Atlantic in steerage was not for softies.

  Eventually, seagulls appeared overhead. A shoreline became visible in the west. Hours passed. The ship steamed into a vast harbor teeming with vessels of every size. To its right, docks lined the shore far as the eye could see, like the teeth of a comb jutting into the water. Behind the docks rose rows of soaring towers—“skyscrapers.” To the ship’s left stood the big woman with the spikes on her head and the lamp in her hand.

  An immigrant family observes the Statue of Liberty from Ellis Island, 1900. It was a beacon of hope to millions reaching U.S. shores. (picture credit 1.8)

  II

  What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them. Something has been added to him which he had not had before. He is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood. He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgment.… The change he undergoes is unmistakable. New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again.

  —Charles Whibley, English journalist, American Sketches (1908)

  Ellis Island

  The thrill of seeing Lady Liberty passed quickly, overcome by other sights and feelings. New York City was known as the “Golden Door,” the immigrants’ main port of entry into the United States. Their first stop, however, was not the city itself, but a low-lying island in the harbor.

  Throughout the 1880s, immigrants arriving in New York entered at Castle Garden, a huge, run-down building at the tip of Manhattan Island. In 1892, the federal government opened a new reception center on Ellis Island. Named for Samuel Ellis, the original owner, it was once called Gallows Island by New Yorkers, because pirates were hung from gallows that stood on its shore. Executions were a popular attraction. On hanging days, men, women, and children scrambled onto boats to watch the spectacle from the water’s edge. When the federal government took over, eight out of ten immigrants, twelve million in all, passed through Ellis Island until the reception center closed in 1924. Today, it is a national historic site, part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument.

  Ellis Island, early twentieth century. (picture credit 2.1)

  Ships carrying steerage passengers anchored at the main dock. The uniformed officers who met them as they came ashore seemed cold and unfriendly. No smiles. No hearty “Welcome!” These had no place in the reception center. For Ellis Island was a giant filter designed to admit workers for the nation’s growing economy and reject any who might become a burden on taxpayers.

  Immigrants had reason to call Ellis Island the Island of Fears. After checking their luggage, they entered an immense hall divided by rows of iron railings. Officers had them form dozens of lines and file past the waiting doctors. The process seemed like an assembly line, only it handled human beings, not manufactured goods. The first doctor listened to each person’s heart with a stethoscope. Down the line, others checked for signs of tuberculosis, smallpox, and similar “loathsome diseases.” Next, a doctor examined eyes for trachoma, a contagious disease. He did this with a buttonhook, a metal tool used to button gloves. Using the hook, he pulled each eyelid back to look for signs of the disease.

  Finally, an inspector asked a series of questions. Have you any money or relatives in the United States? Do you have more than one wife or husband? Where will you live? Ever spend time in a jail or an insane asylum? These questions were not only meant to get facts. They tested intelligence and, the law said, ruled out “idiots, imbeciles or morons and other deficient persons.”1

  Passengers on the steerage and upper decks of an immigrant ship, 1902. (picture credit 2.2)

  Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, waiting on the first of many lines in the arduous process to enter the country, 1904. (picture credit 2.3)

  Rejection for any reason meant returning to Europe at the expense of the steamship company that brought the person. This often involved a painful choice, since a family member’s rejection forced the others to decide whether to leave, too. Most immigrants, however, passed through Ellis Island within a day. Ferries ran around the clock, taking them to Manhattan to begin their new lives.

  A United States health inspector performing an eye examination on Ellis Island. (picture credit 2.4)

  An Italian family looking for lost baggage, 1905. (picture credit 2.5)

  The Empire City

  What the immigrants found was different from anything
they had ever seen or imagined. By the early 1900s, America had become a nation of fast-growing cities. With a population of 3.5 million, New York was the second-largest city on earth; only London, England, was larger. Cities had become centers of the Industrial Revolution, the changeover from the artisan’s hand labor to machinery powered by steam or electricity. Manufacturers built their factories in cities because they had an abundant labor supply.

  Growing cities brought growing problems. Traditional buildings of wood, stone, and brick could not be very tall without collapsing under their own weight. How, then, to put more people, more buildings, more factories—more everything—into a limited area? Reach for the sky! “When they find themselves a little crowded,” William Archer, an English visitor, said about New Yorkers, “they simply tip a street on end and call it a skyscraper.”2 In the 1880s, architects, experts who design and make building plans, began using new materials to create the skyscraper. This type of building had a skeleton of iron beams bolted together and connected to iron columns reinforced with concrete. A structure of this kind might soar hundreds of feet above the ground. Its iron skeleton easily supported brick walls pierced by windows made of mass-produced plate glass to flood the interior with natural light.