And so, pending that mysterious something to which I was often alluding as the source of my prospective fortune, I became a frequent visitor at her house. Sometimes she would invite me to supper; once or twice we spent Sunday together. As for little Maxie, he invariably hailed me with joy. I was actually fond of him, and I was glad of it.
CHAPTER IV
THE time I speak of, the late '80's and the early '90's, is connected with an important and interesting chapter in the history of the American cloak business. Hitherto in the control of German Jews, it was now beginning to pass into the hands of their Russian co-religionists, the change being effected under peculiar conditions that were destined to lead to a stupendous development of the industry. If the average American woman is to-day dressed infinitely better than she was a quarter of a century ago, and if she is now easily the best-dressed average woman in the world, the fact is due, in a large measure, to the change I refer to
The transition was inevitable. While the manufacturers were German Jews, their contractors, tailors, and machine operators were Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Russia or Austrian Galicia. Although the former were of a superior commercial civilization, it was, after all, a case of Greek meeting Greek, and the circumstances were such that just because they represented a superior commercial civilization they were doomed to be beaten
The German manufacturers were the pioneers of the industry in America. It was a new industry, in fact, scarcely twenty years old. Formerly, and as late as the '70's, women's cloaks and jackets were little known in the United States. Shawls were worn by the masses. What few cloaks were seen on women of means and fashion were imported from Germany. But the demand grew.
So, gradually, some German-American merchants and an American shawl firm bethought themselves of manufacturing these garments at home. The industry progressed, the new-born great Russian immigration—a child of the massacres of 1881 and 1882—bringing the needed army of tailors for it. There was big money in the cloak business, and it would have been unnatural if some of these tailors had not, sooner or later, begun to think of going into business on their own hook. At first it was a hard struggle. The American business world was slow to appreciate the commercial possibilities which these new-comers represented, but it learned them in course of time
It was at the beginning of this transition period that my scheme was born in my mind. Schemes of that kind were in the air
Meyer Nodelman, the son of my landlady, had not the remotest inkling of my plans, yet I had consulted him about them more than once. Of course, it was all done in a purely abstract way. Like the majority of our people, he was a talkative man so I would try to keep him talking shop. By a system of seemingly casual questioning I would pump him on sundry details of the clothing business, on the differences and similarities between it and the cloak trade, and, more especially, on how one started on a very small capital
He bragged and blustered, but oftentimes he would be carried away by the sentimental side of his past struggles. Then he would unburden himself of a great deal of unvarnished history. On such occasions I would obtain from him a veritable treasure of information and suggestions.
Some of the generalizations of this homespun and quaint thinker, too, were interesting. Talking of credit, for example, he once said: "When a fellow is a beginner it's a good thing if he has a credit face."