|
|
January 7, 2005/Tevet 26 5765, Vol. 57, No. 19
Egg foo yong and kosher pickles
Reconstructing the past on the Lower East Side
NORMAN LEVINE
Special to Jewish News
"Don't you need a suit? A gorgeous suit?" a small man, wearing a white yarmulke, asked me as I paused at the corner of Grant and Orchard streets on the Lower East Side of New York. He thrust a card in my hand advertising a nearby clothing store.
"I'm sorry," I replied, "I really don't need anything right now."
"I have a better deal for you," a voice bellowed from behind my back. Turning I saw a rotund man, hands in his pants pockets, a smile on his face, and a black yarmulke on his head, straddling the doorway to a clothing store. "Everyday I have better prices than they do. Why don't you try me?"
I walked to the left down Orchard Street, and the yarmulkes vanished. Chinese stores and street merchants hawking egg foo yong and egg rolls engulfed me. It was 11 a.m. on a Sunday, a street fair was beginning to assemble, and the Orient was in the ascendant. Except for a few remnants, the Lower East Side was no longer the melting pot for immigrants from Russia, Poland or the Ukraine, but from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Canton. A century ago, the Lower East Side remided one of the shtetls of Vilna, Cracow and Kiev, but today it resembles a suburb of Beijing.
A small neighborhood in southeast Manhattan, at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, the Lower East Side is a microcosm of the history of American immigration. Waves of the newly arrived flowed through its narrow streets. Because the Lower East Side welcomed them, it acted as the starting line for their upward mobility as America became a land of immigrants. The Irish settled here in the 1840s because of the Potato Famine, followed by the Germans in 1848 because of the revolution on the Rhine. Beginning in 1900, the Jews streamed through Ellis Island into the Lower East Side's tenement houses. The newest current of immigrants is from China, and whereas a century ago kosher pickles and pastrami sandwiches were sold in the luncheonettes, today it is brown rice and fried shrimp: such is the destiny of culinary multiculturalism in America.
It is necessary to take a walking tour through the Lower East Side in order to relive the Jewish experience that unfolded in these narrow avenues and streets. The starting point of any walking tour must be the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, located at 90 Orchard St.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum narrates the history of the ethnic tides flowing through this neighborhood. In the spirit of American diversity, the museum pays tribute to the successive struggles of the Irish, Germans, Chinese and Italians, but its primary focus is on Jewish immigration from 1900 to 1914. Confined to a single floor, the museum is a veritable Barnes and Noble of histories and memoirs of life in this Jewish enclave, and also abounds in Jewish memorabilia.
After an introductory video presentation, a group tour took me around the corner to 97 Orchard St., the archetype of the tenement house into which the Ashkenazic Jews stuffed themselves. The tenement house was the anvil that shaped their process of Americanization.
Five stories high, with four three-room apartments on each floor, the overcrowded tenement was the only means by which America could absorb the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe. This pressure cooker living was an unavoidable precursor to citizenship.
Each apartment consisted of 325 square feet divided into three rooms and 10 to 12 people packed themselves into this suffocating space. The middle room was the kitchen, a second room a bedroom for the parents and infants, and the third room a workshop by day and a dormitory by night. During the day while the family members or relatives were at work or school, this third room became a workshop in which the mother at her sewing machine stitched dresses for the marketplace. In the evenings, the sewing machine was put away, and the room morphed into a dormitory in which 10 or more relatives slept on cramped mattresses on the floor. Ventilation was poor, and tuberculosis a scourge.
These tenement houses were firetraps, because cooking was done with coal stoves, and candles were used for lighting. Fires were a frequent occurrence, and many families perished in the flames.
They were also dangerously unsanitary, as no central water system, or indoor plumbing existed. Outhouses were in the backyards, so if a person on the fifth floor needed to use the bathroom, they rushed down five stories of steps. The stairways were normally crushed with traffic from all 20 apartments and roughly 200 people.
Outhouses, washing facilities for clothing and drinking water were all adjacent to each other in the backyard, and this meant that the drinking water was frequently contaminated. Diseases were uncontrolled, cholera was rampant and the rate of infant mortality was high. Large families were the only answer to this bacterial warfare against life.
Electricity, gas stoves, and centralized plumbing only civilized the tenements in the 1920s, and only then were two bathrooms installed on each of the five floors.
These circumstances guided the Jews in their assimilation into American society, and by the end of the Second World War, they were no longer immigrating to America from Eastern Europe. Instead, they emigrated out of the Lower East Side into Long Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and the suburbs of New York, to become the Lower East Side Diaspora.
The Lower East Side is now a fashionable part of the city, and the same three-room apartment in a tenement house in which my grandmother slaved over a sewing machine is selling today - after being refurbished with microwaves and window air conditioning - for almost $1 million.
The Jewish experience on the Lower East Side was larger than just tenement culture. With a map as my guide, I explored the outer frontiers of the neighborhood, where I uncovered three synagogues with diverse architecture and histories. These discoveries contributed memorable images and sounds to my reconstruction of the past. They acted as concrete narratives, remembering the original homelands in Eastern Europe from which the Jews fled at the turn of the 20th century.
The Beth Hamedrash Hagadot Synagogue has a Gothic architecture, and today still houses the oldest Russian Jewish congregation in the United States. The Eldridge Street Synagogue is an eclectic mix of Moorish, Romanesque and Gothic styles. The First Romanian-American Congregation was the prayer site of many of the greatest cantors, two of whom, Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker, went on to sing at the world renowned New York City Metropolitan Opera.
Reflecting on questions of historical destiny, my private explorations took me to a singular example of the Jewish instinct for group preservation, the Kehila Kedosha Janina, a synagogue of the Judeo-Greek heritage.
Upon the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the sultan in Istanbul invited them into the Ottoman Empire. For approximately 800 years, Jews and Muslims lived harmoniously in the Iberian Peninsula, and when the Jews were exiled by the Spanish monarchy, the Islamic potentate in Istanbul opened his domains to them. Many Jews from the Spanish Diaspora went to Istanbul, and many Jews migrated north to Janina, Greece, thereby establishing the Judeo-Greek tradition, or Romaniote Judaism.
The congregation of the Kehila Kedosha Janina is miniscule, about 20 members in all. It has no rabbi and would be extinguished if left to its own resources. Fortunately, other Judeo-Greeks are spread throughout the United States; financial contributions coming from across the country are the life blood of this community, which is the sole Romaniote congregation in the western hemisphere.
For Jews, the Lower East Side is archeology, with only scattered relics of a historic period of transformation. It is a cross between a deserted recollection and a transplanted Beijing.
But mitzvot know no cultural boundaries, and it is certain that the mitzvot of transformation will once again bless the immigrant in this part of New York City.
Norman Levine is an author and free-lance writer living in Phoenix.
|
|
