On the Trail of the Immigrant

by Edward Alfred Steiner

The next day brought to us the momentous task of going out to find work, and before the whistle blew for the night’s rest, my friend was part of a sewing machine, while I being stronger, was assigned to pressing cloaks. My fellow cloak presser told a piteous story of his wife and four children on the other side, who had been almost heart-broken because he had been here two years and been kept by “hard luck” from sending for them. I worked by his side for a day, receiving my first lessons in cloak-pressing from him, and the last letter from his wife was so pathetic, that it drew tears from my eyes and money from my pocketbook towards those tickets. When the day’s work was over, and the possibility of soon seeing his family was almost realized, he said as we parted, “I shall sleep happily to-night;” and so did I, in spite of heat and sore muscles.

Rarely do these clothes pressers rise to a higher place in their trade, although occasionally by strict economy and much hard labour, one may own a shop and “sweat” the “greener” as he has “been sweated.”

In my wanderings through the Ghetto I dropped into a pawnshop on Avenue C one day, and after I made some purchases the proprietor grew friendly and introduced me to his family. He is the happy father of seven sons, all of them “smart as a whip,” and all of them doing well. The youngest one, Charles T., the smartest, is still in school and, like all the Yiddish boys, at the head of his class. Charles T. knows everything, from Marquis of Queensberry rules to the schedule of lectures at the Educational Alliance building. “What are you going to be, Charles?” I asked. “A business man like my father;” and the keen look in his big eyes, the determination of his whole frame and face, showed that he would succeed even better than his father, who is beginning to think of “being at ease in Zion,” and retiring from business. Charles T.’s father began life by buying rags on Houston Street; his sons will sell bonds on Wall Street.

The Ghetto is not all barter and manual labour, for there are many synagogues in which prayers are said every day; although only a few of these synagogues are anything more than halls or large rooms in tenement houses, sometimes above or below a drinking-place and in many instances in ball rooms, which on Saturdays and holy days put off their unholy garb.

If all the population of the Ghetto attended to its religious duties, these one hundred synagogues would have to be increased to a thousand; but on Saturdays many have to work, and increasingly many wish to work, so that not twenty per cent. of the Ghetto population attend religious services. However, on the great feast days, New Year’s day and the day of Atonement, everybody goes; or as Charles T.’s father would say: “I go to the synagogue twice a year and pay my dues, and then I’ll not have a ---- thing to do with them for another year.” Charles T.’s father is a politician.

Most of the Ghetto rabbis are, like Mr. Levinson, “Performers of Matrimony” and not much else; they are professionally pious and not deeply religious; they have no vision and measure a man’s religion by his observances of fasts and feasts; they are ignorant of all literature except the Talmud, that treasure house of Jewish thought and prison-house of Jewish souls. They are as superstitious as their constituency, and often less honest, but in not a few cases truly devout and charitable. There is no ecclesiastical control over these rabbis, and they are in some cases self-made men in the worst sense of the word, while their influence upon the ethical life of the Ghetto is almost “nil.” They are the Jews’ law court and judges in matters which pertain to ritualistic questions, but they are almost nothing to them in life. There is very little preaching, less pastoral visitation, and much useless bending of the back over musty books full of “dry bones” of rabbinical lore.

The one great Jewish intellectual and ethical centre of the Ghetto is the Educational Alliance building, with its various scattered branches; it is everything which a Young Men’s Christian Association is to a Gentile community, only more, inasmuch as it ministers to all, from childhood to old age. Israel’s intellectual hunger is as great as its proverbial greed for wealth, and this gigantic building, covering a block and containing forty-three classrooms, is entirely inadequate to meet the demand. The main entrance is always in a state of siege, and two policemen are stationed there to maintain order and keep the crowding people in line. I visited it on a hot Sunday afternoon in July, and I found the large, well-stocked reading-room uncomfortably filled by young men. The roof-garden is a breathing-place for thousands, and is always crowded by children, who are supervised in their play and who enjoy it eagerly.

The annual report reads like a fairy tale. Many of the lectures and entertainments have to be given a number of times to give all an opportunity to hear and to see, and some of the most difficult subjects discussed find the most numerous and enthusiastic hearers. Baths, sewing and cooking schools, are maintained, and to give even a list of all the agencies employed to lift this population would exhaust my space. There has been marked improvement among its constituency mentally and ethically, and the redemption of New York from Tammany was in no small measure due to the faithful work done by this and other similar centres, not the least among them being the University Settlement.

There are several Christian churches in this district, but what their influence upon the newcomer is I could not determine. In the main it may be said that the churches do not concern themselves greatly regarding this problem around them, although there are a few notable exceptions.

The following letter does not give one a hopeful view of the situation. The gentleman to whom this letter was written, Mr. User Marcus, was actively engaged in the kind of politics in which the churches ought to have an interest. He organized a club, and through one of its members secured a room in the Woods Memorial Church on Avenue A. After the first meeting Mr. Marcus received the following letter: