Of the total of 600,000 Jews in New York City, nearly 100,000 are engaged in various branches of the clothing industry, and in mechanical and manufacturing pursuits. This is a remarkable showing for people who nearly all had to adjust themselves to manual labour for which they were not physically fitted, and which they had no opportunity to perform in Russia.
In the trades which they have entered they usually maintain a satisfactory wage, and cannot be regarded as a serious economic menace. If they remain crowded in the Ghettos of the Eastern cities, it is due, not so much to their gregarious habits and to the needs springing from their religious observances, as it is due to the fact that the trades in which they find readiest employment are here concentrated, and the wages most satisfying. The needle above all else is to blame for the congestion of the Ghetto, and a great transformation must come over Israel both physically and mentally, before the needle will be exchanged for the plow.
XI
IN THE GHETTOS OF NEW YORK
AT last we are free, although still upon Uncle Sam’s ferry boat, which carries those of us who have passed muster, to the Battery, the gateway into the gigantic city and the vast country which lies beyond where, “sans ceremonie,” we are landed.
Boarding house “Runners” call out the names of their hostelries, express men entreat us to entrust to them our belongings, the voice of the banana peddler is heard in the land, and through the babel of sounds there arise the joyous shrieks of those who welcome their dear ones.
Over in Hoboken, where the cool-blooded Anglo-Saxon awaits his wife, who “toiled not neither did she spin” during her year abroad,—the joy remains unexpressed. She may say to him: “Hello, old man!” and he will reply: “How are you, old girl?” and that is all, so far as the public knows. But here on the Battery, where Jacob meets his Leah, for whom he has toiled and suffered these five years, for whose sake he ate hard rye bread and onions that he might save money to bring her to him;—when Jacob meets his Leah, there are warm embraces and kisses through the tears. Here, men embrace and kiss each other, and children are held up to the father’s gaze,—fathers who left them as infants and now see them grown.
Half a dozen stalwart men and women will almost crush a little wrinkled “Mutterleben,” their mother, coming to them for the sunset of her life, which is to be bright and beautiful after many dark mornings and cloudy noondays.
I attached myself to a young Russian Jew of about my own age, who had no relatives waiting for him, but who had the address of his parents’ friends. They had come here a few years before, and now served as the clearing house for that particular district in Russia, of which their native town was the centre.
We went up Broadway, and after plunging into the whirlpool of its traffic, emerged safe at the City Hall, crossed the Bowery and were at the edge of the great Ghetto, the heart of the largest Jewish community in the world. It numbers now nearly 700,000 souls, scattered through all parts of Greater New York, and massed in four centres, commonly called Ghettos; of which the one through which we are passing is the “Great Original” one. It is less dirty, less suspiciously fragrant than the Ghetto which my comrade has left, and in spite of squalor and visible signs of poverty, a certain air of joyousness pervades its life which is lacking in the old home. The hurdy gurdy grinder lures nimble footed children from block to block, like the “Pied Piper of Hamelin,” and they are happier and more graceful than the much be-starched children of the rich who take lessons in dancing and in conventional deportment.
The sidewalks and driveways are packed by humanity, most of it children, for the Abrahamitic promise that his “seed shall increase like the sands of the sea” has not yet departed from Israel—only the illustration is not quite complete, for while the Ghetto children are as numerous as the sands (I counted almost two thousand in one block), they are not nearly so clean.