STUDY QUESTIONS

Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michael, The Jewish Woman in America (975): 91-120 (chapt. 4)
 

. . . the refugee couple with their cardboard luggage standing on the ramshackle landing-stage
he with fingers frozen around his Law she with her down quilt sewn through iron nights
--the weight of the old world, plucked drags after them, a random feather-bed . . .

--ADRIENNE RICH, "From an Old House in America"
 
 

Philadelphia's outdoor market on Marshall Street was typical of those found in every Jewish ghetto in America at the beginning of the twentieth century. Reminiscent of the shtetl marketplace of Eastern Europe, the street was crowded with pushcarts by day, and at night empty but for the leavings on the cobbled brick sidewalk and along the curb: banana peels, squeezed-out orange halves, chicken feathers, fish scales, bits of ground horseradish--the overflow from a grater--yellow blobs of chicken fat here and there, an occasional squashed egg, thin shreds of printed fabric, and loose pages of the Jewish Daily Forward blown back and forth across the street by the wind. Even after everyone had left, the strongest smells lingered in the air--herring, pickles, sauerkraut, garlic, goose and chicken droppings.

Every Monday night, Molly Chernikovsky and her landsleit turned left on Girard Avenue and walked down Marshall Street to Rappoport's schvitz, known in America as the Turkish baths. Monday and Wednesday were women's nights; for many married women a night at the schvitz was "her" night. Monday nights were crowded; Wednesday nights were sparsely attended --who knows why? Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at the schvitz were for men only. On Friday and Saturday, Rappoport's was closed.

Molly Chernikovsky's night at the schvitz was for pleasure, not purpose. The schvitz was not the mikvah; it was a place of fun and games. Some rituals were observed, but they were not religious ones. Noise prevailed: loud voices, laughter, the sucking of ice wrapped in a terry washrag, thighs slapping moist wood as the girls and women dropped their work-weary bodies heavily onto the slatted benches lining the walls of the steam room. After sweating out the week's grime, the women took a cold shower, wrapped themselves in thick white towels, the kind they never had in their own homes, and sat down to eat.

Molly always ate a thick corned beef sandwich on seeded Jewish rye bread, spread with a particular yellowy mustard and filled with creamy dripping cole slaw that trickled from the palm of her hand onto her wrist and ran in a narrow rivulet down her forearm, collecting in a tiny pool in the bend of her arm. After taking a bite, Molly switched hands and sucked up the collected liquid, continuing this procedure until the sandwich was finished. Then, with licked fingers, she squirted cold seltzer out of a blue glass siphon bottle to "wash down" the remains of the sandwich, and belched. She got up and walked across the room to wash her hands in the sink. After drying her hands, she began brushing her long dark hair, braided it and pinned it up, and sat down to a poker game that usually lasted until midnight.

Sometimes she went home, but more often she spent the night on a cot in the bathhouse's dormitory. At six in the morning Molly was up. She dressed and went straight from the bathhouse to her sewing machine, while other women left to set up their pushcarts. Those who had brought their children went home to prepare breakfast for them and for the husbands they had left behind.

During their menstrual periods, women had to forego the schvitz. They usually stayed away until they had been to the mikvah. Molly didn't have to give up the Monday night ritual in those days because she didn't start menstruating until she was - eighteen,, which, she said, was not rare for Jewish girls from Odessa. It was also one of the reasons she gave for having married late--at the age of twenty. She said she was a real beauty and could have had any man she wanted, had she wanted any. But she was looking for someone a little special, because she was not an ordinary girl, a common person. She describes herself:

Already at the age of fourteen, I was big and buxom and beautiful. With large, white, even teeth, and a long, big straight nose. A real Russian Jewish type. I had this thick, black shiny hair--you should only wash it once a month if you want to keep it. I made two fat braids, and I wound them around my head. I had these big red cheeks, just like you see now, and good skin, the same. I had wonderful eyes, you can see. And I was smart, very smart. Smarter than most men. And I was bigger, too. From leftover pieces of material I used to take home from the factory, I made all my own clothes. Shirtwaists, skirts, even underwear. I always wore a long-sleeved shirtwaist, high at the neck. Not because I was Orthodox, but because I liked my arms covered. Maybe it was a habit. But I think I liked the way it made me look. I wore sometimes a skirt of print, sometimes a solid. And I covered myself with a shawl, like in the old country. I liked it. I could have had a coat, but I liked to hold myself together. It was a nice look. I didn't wear a hat like other women, or even a kerchief, because I wanted to show my hair.

 Most people like Molly do not write memoirs; indeed she is illiterate. Their lives have been described by their literate, educated children--usually their sons--whose own acculturation prevents them from fully understanding their mother's experience. The oral biographies of these women, when available, reveal feelings and attitudes which their children did not detect, and they also help to explain how women facilitated the successful adaptation of Jewish immigrants to American life.

By 1910 Jewish women outnumbered men, according to one history of New York City's East European Jews, indicating that from the very beginning they meant to stay--it was a permanent move. This was apparently not the primary motive of many other major ethnic groups emigrating during approximately the same time period. While it was true that young Jewish males made up the largest proportion of this group's émigrés in the early movement to America, they sent back money to enable other members of their families to join them. The men of other ethnic groups were derogatorily labeled "birds of passage" because many stayed here only long enough to accumulate money to enable them to return home and buy land. Of course, their motives and their aspirations differed because of a substantial difference in their status. Immigrants from other groups were nationals of countries to which they felt they belonged, whereas East European Jews were a disenfranchised, persecuted minority living in a host culture that found their ways distasteful, if not contemptible. They never felt they fit in and were grateful if they were left alone--merely tolerated

Making a Life

In 1909 about 40,000 Russian Jews emigrated to America, Malka (Americanized to Molly) Chernikovsky among them. She was thirteen years old, the youngest of eight children, three of whom had died in childhood of unknown diseases. She had come alone, with just the words "New York" printed on a label pinned to her coat, to join the four others in her family who had already settled in, two boys, two girls.

Molly's sister Ida and Ida's husband, Sam, had come to America in 1903. They arrived in New York and there they stayed. It was, by historical count, the twenty-second year of the mass emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe. While prior to 1881 a small number of Eastern European Jews had come to America to seek new opportunities, beginning in that year Jewish emigration from the cities, urbanized towns, and shtetls of Eastern Europe increased dramatically. Young women, married couples, and whole families, as well as the usual young unmarried men, made up the movement. Between 1881 and 1885, about 54,500 Jews from those areas entered the United States.

This increase in emigration is usually seen as the direct result of the deteriorating social, political, and economic conditions discussed in the previous chapter. Between 1885 and 1898 some 411,650 Jews followed their landsmen to America, and by 1914, about 1,382,500 more had joined them. Despite the efforts of various Jewish immigrant aid societies to disperse the newcomers throughout America, by some estimates as many as 70 percent of the Eastern European Jews who arrived in New York stayed there, although Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, and Boston each attracted enough Jews to establish its own ghetto and more than enough to support traveling Yiddish theater companies by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century.

Molly and Ida were born in a shtetl near Odessa. They tended a garden and helped their mother keep store on a square of cloth spread on the ground in the town's open marketplace. Carrying the best of her parents' few possessions--a samovar, some cutglass vases, the brass candle holders, two homemade feather comforters used as mattresses, pots, and a silver thimble, Molly arrived in America speaking only Yiddish and some Russian. She had been sent for, brought over by her "rich" brother Morris--an auctioneer on the boardwalk of Coney Island.

Once here, Molly went to work as a servant for a family of East European Jews who had already become successful, a job which she found humiliating because it was an occupation fit only for the very lowest-type Jewish girl, while she--she was the daughter of a merchant. While working for this family, Molly learned to operate a sewing machine, and then she moved to Philadelphia where she got a job as a seamstress in the factory where her other sister, Sophie, was employed. Now a member of the outside world, Molly learned to speak English and "made the acquaintance of many girls just like me. We had a life. We went on Sundays to Fairmount Park. We packed a big meal. We sang. We danced Russian dances. Believe me, it was better than it was in the old country. Then I met my husband and that's another story."

Molly married at twenty, became pregnant immediately and left her job at the factory. Her husband worked for a manufacturer of men's suits. He was a tailor and a union organizer.

He was Russian born, but an American type. He wasn't scared of nobody. We had a crowd of married and single people. We went to the Yiddish theater on Sunday and then to the Automat for coffee. We had picnics, we went to the zoo, to the amusement park, all over. I had first a boy, then two years later a girl. We didn't have much money, but it was enough to get along and we enjoyed. Sometimes in the summer we went to Atlantic City for a week always on--; Saturday night there were people in our house. We told stories about our lives in the old country and here. Some of the women in our crowd had been in the Bund, they were political types, and here they were active in the union. My sister Sophie was also a union person. My brother-in-law Meyer was a carpenter and a real dancer. A lively man. After having a few schnapps he would dance for us. We made a circle around him and some of the women would join him in the circle. Everybody brought their kinder and we put them to sleep on the floor or on chairs we pushed together. Everybody had a good time. I made boiled potatoes with sour cream and we had herring. This was our Saturday night.

 When Molly's husband died, leaving her with two small children and no insurance, she opened a grocery store in the cellar of her house on Christian Street.

I sold whatever I could get. One day I stopped the milkman on the street and asked if he could deliver to me. He sent an egg man. Then a bread man came and also we have a friend, a baker, and he began bringing me bagels on Sunday morning and challah on Fridays. It didn't take any capital. I opened up and suddenly I had a store. The neighbors bought. The children stayed with me in the store or played in front. I managed. One day a man came and asked me if I wanted to sell fruits and vegetables he would deliver. He came twice a week. He fell in love with me; so, I married him. I thought, enough struggling, now I would have somebody to take care of me and the family. But what he brought in, you could do without. So I kept the store open and I still ran it alone. And I had right away two more children--two girls.

Molly's house burned down in 1939, and she gave up religion. Why? Because the fire was started by the Shabbos candles. "What kind of God would take away the house and business of a poor person who observed? I'm not one who thanks God for bringing tsores. " The following day she took a bus to New York to borrow money from her rich brother Morris and her sister Ida, who was in real estate. When she returned she bought "a real store with a house over it, from my friend Sadie who wasn't doing so well there. Her husband, don't ask. It was cheap and I knew I could always make something out of nothing. Except for my husband. He was nothing when I met him and so he remained. I supported the family, and him, too."

During the Second World War, Molly became an operator in the black market. Molly said she didn't make a fortune, but she did "all right." She took numbers, bought real estate, and put up bail money for her neighbors on which she made "a small commission." She said she made quite a lot of money this way because somebody was always in jail where she lived, and eventually she was, too. She ran an illegal chicken and meat business that supplied most of the Jewish shopkeepers in North Philadelphia. Molly said her friend Sadie was very jealous. She said, "To hear Sadie tell it, I had my hands in starting the war so I could make a profit from it. But people have to eat, and I had some contacts in chicken and meat, so what should I do, tell them to give it to somebody else?""

Minding Their Own Business

Jewish men and women in the old country had been small merchants, traders, artisans, and craftsmen, and when they got to America most engaged in similar pursuits. As they had in the old country, women continued contributing to the family's income in significant numbers. One study of an immigrant community in Philadelphia found that one out of every three Jewish households had a female wage earner. In the community surveyed, over 73 percent of unmarried Jewish females were part of the labor force, but only about 7 percent of the married Jewish women worked outside their homes. Since the wages of one worker--either male-or female--were usually too low to support an entire family, many married women with small children who could not leave the home found other ways to contribute to the family's income. Some took in laundry, did hand sewing, produced goods for various industries at home, looked after the children of other women who worked in stores and factories, and many took in boarders and lodgers.

Like Molly, many Jewish women were an integral part of the small retail shop system that supplied the needs of the neighborhood. In numerous "mom and pop" stores, women were fullfledged partners, taking their turn at opening and closing up, and running the shop alone while their partners ate or had a rest, for most of these stores were open from six in the morning until ten at night. Despite the fact that women spent as many hours in the store as they could, probably almost if not as much time as men did, women were often described as "minding" the store, while men were "working" there. This situation is the source of the refrain commonly heard even today among Jews who, when they meet a Jewish woman on the street without her husband, often ask her, "So, who's minding the store?" Although the words imply that women took a passive role, this does not necessarily reflect the nature of the partnership, nor the real relationship between the man and the woman, but rather the patriarchal assumption that the man is "boss" or head of the household. Indeed, some women had more experience as merchants in the old country than their husbands, and they often took the initiative in opening up a small business. They were known to do the ordering and keep track of the merchandise, as well as selling and keeping the store clean.

In addition to running the-business with their husbands, these women of course still had full responsibility for the home and family. Women managed their dual roles with typical efficiency. Mary Antin reports that her mother ran back and forth between the shop counter and her kitchen behind the store, where she did the family's cooking and washing, and writes that "Arlington Street customers were used to waiting while the storekeeper salted the soup or rescued a loaf from the oven." But the double burden was not without its toll on some women. Michael Gold, in Jews Without Money, noticed the effect the multiple work had on one wife, Mrs. Ashkenazi, who was married to Reb Samuel:
 

She was a tiny, gray woman, weighing not more than ninety pounds, and sapped dry as a herring by work. Her eyelids were inflamed with loss of sleep. She slaved from dawn till midnight, cooking and cleaning at home, then working in the umbrella store. At forty she was wrinkled like a woman of seventy. She was always tired, but was a sweet, kindly, uncomplaining soul, who worshipped her family, and revered her impractical husband.

Butcher, tobacco, and shoe repair shops, bakeries, candy stores, groceries, and delicatessens run by couples became the daytime social centers for Jewish men, women, and youth. They were often the hub of a neighborhood; people came in just to chat, not to buy. Visitors or customers exchanged news and gossip, made dates and arrangements between families, passed on word of job openings, complained about their children and the difficulties of adjusting to American ways. These small stores often served, too, as communications centers for disseminating information about strike meetings.

In America, East European Jewish women took other occupations similar to those they had in the old country. Standing by their pushcarts, for example, some women peddlers found themselves back in their element, doing the familiar. Louis Wirth, writing about immigrant life in the Jewish ghetto of Chicago, comments that:
 

[i]n accordance with the tradition of the Pale, where the women conducted the stores . . . women are among the most successful merchants of Maxwell Street. They almost monopolize the fish, herring and poultry stalls.

The situation was similar in New York, where female peddlers had to accede to a somewhat perverted form of chivalry in order to pursue their trade:

There are many women in the pushcart business . . . who rent their carts at eight or ten cents a day, just as the men do, but who get them by proxy, delegating to some men the task, it being a law, unwritten but acknowledged, that women should not undertake pushcart trundling. In addition to these women who have no husbands to take the initiative, or perhaps such incapables as cannot be trusted, there are a whole army of pushcart women trained and habituated to the business, who from long custom or love of excitement follow their consorts about the streets and help in the selling, even if they do not have a cart themselves.

The pushcart trade had its own class distinctions. The highest status was awarded those women who had their own carts and a regular place and clientele. Next in prestige were the women who rented carts by the week and occupied spaces on the street where and when they were available. Snobbery among the women in the business assigned the very lowest status to the pushcart trundlers, those who walked along the streets hawking their wares and whose daily stock varied with what was available. Sometimes these trundlers were fortunate enough to find a busy corner that hadn't already been taken. There they would set up shop for the entire day, if the police didn't interfere. Some women went into the business legally by taking out a license, but many just went about hoping they could talk themselves out of any trouble that might come their way. These illegal merchants often took a small child with them both to help out with the selling and to act as a front to arouse the sympathy of potential customers or bothersome police. Frequently these children did not even belong to the pushcart trundler, but were "borrowed" from neighbors, and paid a few cents a day.

Making Do

Jewish women from Eastern Europe brought with them social patterns and skills that served their families well. They had judged wisely when they chose the few possessions to carry with them across the ocean. In small, cold rooms they bedded down their children under warm down comforters, and on stoves fired with coal instead of the wood they were accustomed to, they put their treasured pots to simmer. Although the tenement flats seemed strange and the names of the streets sounded unfamiliar to them, they faced some of the same daily problems they had had before, and they lost no time in dealing with them.

No strangers to bargaining, these women held their own against the peddlers of New York's Hester Street or Chicago's Maxwell Street, and they stretched their few dollars as far as possible. A contemporary observer describes the scene at a New York pushcart around the turn of the century:

"Buying and selling were not, as elsewhere, a mere affair of looking at a price mark and making up one's mind. The price asked was only meant as a declaration of war, the act of purchase was a battle of insult, the sale was a compromise of mutual hatred."

"Weiberle [ladies], weiberle, " cries the merchant, "come by me and get a good messiah [bargain]."

The woman stops with a sneer, pokes contemptuously at the merchandise, insults it and the salesman, underbids him half. He tries to prove that he would die of starvation if he yielded to her disgusting bid. She implies that he takes her for a fool. In a moment he is telling her he hopes her children may strangle with cholera for trying to make a beggar of him. She answers that he is a thief, a liar, a dog of an apostate Jew. She makes as if to spit on his wares; he grabs them from her and throws them back on the heap. At length a sale is made and she moves on to the next bout.

Shopping was only half the skill; preparing small amounts of food to feed large families required another kind of expertise. From a herring, two onions, and a piece of day-old bread, a woman could make a four-course supper:
 

First she chopped the milk roe with onion--this the appetizer. The herring brine was the base for a potato soup. The second onion was sliced and flavored with vinegar--the salad, to be sure. The herring itself was the roast, which she wrapped in a wet newspaper and then placed on the red coals in the range.

The total cost for one person: five pennies.

When it came to clothing and household items, these women had also had experience in making do. A single pair of men's trousers could provide pants for two small boys: one got the top, including the waistband (gathered in with a piece of rope or twine to size), and the other got knee pants fashioned from the bottom halves of the legs. Coats that the family wore by day became blankets at night; beds materialized from three kitchen chairs, lined up; and kitchens themselves turned into dormitories. In order to avert chaos in one or two rooms that served at once as kitchens, laundries, workrooms, and living and sleeping quarters for large families and perhaps one or two boarders, women had to develop both meticulous housekeeping habits and expert managerial skills. Not only did they have to keep milk out of the meat dishes, but they had to keep soup off the bundles of garments, and toddlers away from hot, heavy pressing irons.

Room for One More

Keeping boarders was one of the most common occupations among married first-generation women, particularly if they had small children to care for. Molly's sister Ida was one of the few women who started out taking in boarders and ended up a real estate operator. When Ida and Sam arrived in America, they went to board with Sam's relatives. Sam's cousin found him work stripping tobacco leaves in a sweatshop. Ida, who had been a midwife in the old country, intended to set herself up in this occupation again. In the meantime, since Sam had a job, she looked for an apartment of their own. She found one on Hester Street, and borrowed money from a Jewish landsleit organization to pay for the first month's rent. She spent a few days gathering furniture and from her brother Morris coaxed some odd pieces to put in the three rooms that was now their home.

The apartment was on the sixth floor of a tenement, facing the back. It contained a square kitchen--large by old-country standards--and two other small rooms, each with a window opening onto an airshaft. At first Ida was frightened to go near the windows, and would walk as far away as possible when she passed from one room to another. Compared to what she had come from, the apartment was large and light, and, as far as she was concerned, luxuriously furnished. She had a table and four chairs for the kitchen, and in the bedroom, an iron double bedstead and a chest, both of which she painted white. She used ~ one of her feather comforters for a mattress and the other for a cover. In the remaining room, she placed a wooden chair, a small table and a cot, for she planned to take in a boarder, as the other women in the neighborhood did.

If Ida had not been so clever herself, she probably could have gotten good advice from one of the other women in her building, for ghetto women were not stingy with hints for ways to supplement the family's income. In Anzia Yezierska's novel, Bread Givers, one woman tells another how to create a furnished room that will bring in more money:

Do as I done. Put the spring over four empty herring pails and you'll have a bed fit for the president. Now put a board over the potato barrel, and a clean newspaper over that, and you'll have a table. All you need yet is a soapbox for a chair and you'll have a furnished room complete.

Another landlady, in Yezierska's story "My Own People," goes to great lengths to rent an undesirable room. She is a master of euphemism:
 

It ain't so dark. It's only a little shady. Let me turn up the gas for you--you'll quick see everything like sunshine. . . . You can't have Rockefeller's palace for three dollars a month.... If the bed ain't so steady, so you got good neighbors.... I'll treat you like a mother You'll have it good by me like in your own home.

A few days after Ida had completed furnishing the apartment, Sam brought home a "greenie" from the shop. This man took his meals with them, and paid three dollars a week for room and board. Shortly after, another boarder was sent to them by the organization that had loaned Ida the rent money. They made room for him by putting a couch in the kitchen, which now became the living room as well. Because he didn't have a private room, this man paid only $2.25 per week. And he was followed by a woman who took supper with them, paying twenty-five cents a night.

Ida and Sam were already affluent by other families' standards. As a midwife Ida received five dollars for a delivery, and sometimes had as many as two a month. As her reputation for cooking spread, people began to ask if they, too, could take their meals at her house. Ida said people also came for the conversation, and to make friends with one another. Talking about her success in those days, Ida recalls:
 

Suddenly I'm having a restaurant--six or seven people eating at my table. Sometimes I had to serve in shifts. I used to make real Jewish meals, like in the old country, only better because here you could get many things. I would make a lot, and what we didn't use at one meal I'd put covered on the fire escape for the next day. (Of course, only in winter.) In summer I made just enough but there was always left over. You could find everything on Hester Street--herring, beets, cabbage, apples, dried fruits, fresh fish packed in ice like I never saw.

I was making enough so we could put a little money away each week. I was delivering babies but couldn't have one myself. Sam didn't seem to mind, but I did.. Anyway, the years passed and by 1911, we had saved enough money so we could buy a building, with a little help. So we're landlords. I took two apartments on the second floor for myself. In the back we had boarders, in the front a small restaurant to accommodate the boarders and a few friends. It was not open to the public, just to people who knew us. Sam gave up his work and we worked together. He helped shop, cook, and clean. And he managed the building, collected the rents, and repaired what he could.

Life was good to us and we bought another building next door two years later. And so it went. But we were killing ourselves, so Sam said, "Ida, give up the babies and the cooking. We can afford to live like people now." So I stopped with the babies, but not the cooking. I enjoyed having a lot of people. Believe me, we had it better than anyone else we knew.

By 1912, we had a piece of property in the country which was also a boardinghouse during the summer. And we began acquiring some land uptown. By the twenties we were already rich. We were lucky. We came at the right time, met good people. I knew how to cook, but without the pushcart women I would have been a failure. They saved food for me, they told me who had what and how much I should offer, they sent me customers. Believe me, I had plenty help. And Sam, too. He said, "Ida, let's buy a building." Me, with a building? I couldn't believe it. In the old country Jews didn't own. So I said, "Sam, buy it. We're in America, everything is different here, everything is possible." So here we are.

Ida's success was not a common occurrence; the boarder was. Indeed the boarder was almost an institution in most poor, first-generation East European Jewish homes in America. Jacob Riis, a well-known journalist who covered the ghetto during the period of peak immigration, commented that "for the Jews in the crowded tenements of New York the lodger serves the same purpose as the Irishman's pig: he helps to pay the rent." In Children of the Tenements he reports that one woman cared for a "rent baby"--a motherless infant whose father paid seventy five cents a week for its keep. "The child"--it was never called anything else--was like a lodger.

In One Foot in America, Yuri Suhl describes how another motherless boy and his father found meals--and more--at the table of Mrs. Rosenthal. She normally fed from eight to ten boarders, and "if someone brought an eleventh, he would not be turned away. Mrs. Rosenthal would add a chair to the table and a cup of water to the soup pot. Her motto was, 'If there's enough for ten, there is enough for one more.' " Beyond sustenance, Mrs. Rosenthal's meals provided her boarders with a link with the past, a reminder of the old country. After dinner, the boarders--many of them men separated from their families-- gathered in the front room where they gossiped, shared news of their families, and discussed the needle trades and developments in the labor movement.

Mrs. Rosenthal's household and countless others like it were institutions that met both social and economic needs in the immigrant community. There was always an abundant supply of greenhorns who needed beds and meals. The boarder became a fixture of most immigrant Jewish families. In fact, the absence of a boarder was taken as a sign that the family was "doing all right."

While in the old country, Jewish households often contained extended families of several generations, in the New World the presence of boarders--strangers--in their midst required certain adjustments in family life. Harry Golden describes his vision of the boarder's social role within the family in a commentary included in the recent republication of The Spirit of the Ghetto, a classic of the period written by the gentile journalist Hutchins Hapgood:

The male boarder occupied a unique and important position in the immigrant culture. Once he moved in, he quickly became a familiar. He even had the authority to spank misbehaving children. Wherever the family went the boarder went, too. He knew the ins and outs, the joys and sorrows, and could often step in between a quarrelling husband and wife.

Golden's version of "Life with a Boarder" seems a bit romanticized. In the same book, Hapgood, who was one of the few outsiders who wrote about the immigrant Jewish community with sensitivity, insight, and a minimum of ethnic bias, points out that the boarder was often taken in at the cost of domestic happiness. It seems likely that the boarder often came between the wife and husband, and was himself the cause of the quarrel. The husband-wife-boarder triangle, as well as other problems with boarders, became popular themes of Yiddish plays, novels, and stories around this time.

 The Jewish Daily Forward's most widely read column, "Bintel Brief " (bundle of letters), frequently carried letters from husbands and wives seeking to restore domestic harmony to a household that had been disrupted by a boarder or from boarders pleading for forgiveness for breaking up marriages. One woeful letter from a husband who had twice been betrayed by his wife when she became involved with a boarder recounts his story:
 

A few years ago a brother of mine came to America, too, with a friend of his. I worked in a shop, and as I was no millionaire, my brother and his friend became our boarders. Then my trouble began. The friend began earning good money. He began to mix in the household affairs and to buy things for my wife.

This man lost not only his wife to the boarder, but his children, too. In his letter, the husband was not appealing for help--it was too late for that; rather, he wanted to let his wife know how she had ruined him and his life. Hoping to make her feel guilty, he ended: "I hope that my wife will read my letter in the Forward and that she will blush with shame."

Perhaps it was from the columns of his own newspaper that Forward editor Abraham Cahan drew the inspiration for episodes in The Rise of David Levinsky. In this novel, a greenhorn who becomes a millionaire in the garment industry falls in love with his first landlady. Dora will not leave her husband, fearing to lose her children, but Levinsky, something of a romantic, never finds another woman he really wants to marry.

Even though keeping boarders was an extension of their normal household duties, it still put an extra burden on women, many of whom did other wage-earning work as well, either inside or outside the home. Not all women like Ida had a Sam who recognized the enormity of her tasks and helped her out. In Alter Brody's play Rapunzel, Rifkah Sorel complains to her daughter Malka that she must be on her feet all day, cooking for hungry boarders, while "the only kind of business your father ever did was exchanging stories with the synagogue do nothings--"

Etta Byer, who came from Lida, Lithuania, by way of London around the turn of the century, describes what may have been a typical male attitude toward women's work in her memoir, Transplanted People. Etta's three brothers lived with her and her husband in their first small apartment. Many friends were always dropping in, so Etta and Joe had no privacy. The brothers helped out with expenses, but not with household tasks, so when Etta came home from the tobacco sweatshop, where she was an expert roller, she had to do all the cooking, washing, and ironing, and clear up the dirty dishes her brothers left behind. Finally, Etta became ill.

I told Joe I was overworked. They all laughed at me and said that I was crabby. The four men around me were great philosophers, talking about how to improve the world situation; but when a tired little woman asked them to help around the house, they paid no attention.

The situation grew worse. Etta became pregnant but even after she returned home with her new infant, she got no help from the men. When she asked her brothers to fetch coal up from the basement, they refused, saying that was why they paid her rent.

So I took the pail and went myself. In the basement big rats jumped at me. I screamed and I fainted. When I was brought upstairs, I wished I were dead. How could I live with such logical brothers and such a smart husband, all lazy men? When people live together, they have a responsibility toward each other. They must help each other.

Etta could not nurse her infant; he grew ill and died after several months. In her memoir Etta remarks bitterly, "The baby and I did not get the care a cow would get when she brought a calf into the world."

More of the Same

Etta spent a few months away from the shop after giving birth, but many other women in her position barely missed a stride in their wage earning, switching from factory work to home production after they became mothers. The needle trades provided the largest number of jobs for Jewish women. Between 1900 and 1925, for example, about 65 percent of the workers in this industry, male and female, were Jewish. The patterns of production in America were similar to those in Eastern Europe, with the division between home and factory production falling along generational lines. The women who worked in the sweatshops were generally young and single, but after marriage they would join the older generation of homeworkers.

The clothing industry was growing rapidly here. In some American industries, the factory system had become advanced, but sweatshops and home production were still features of the needle trades at the turn of the century. Controlling the trade were German Jewish factory owners who exploited their East European coreligionists as a source of cheap labor. Provided with immediate employment, the East European immigrants became less of a burden on the American community in general, and the German Jewish community in particular. Since Jews had been urban, not rural, dwellers in the old country, and had urban workers' skills, they had fewer problems adjusting to the industrial economy of the large American cities than members of other ethnic groups.

The needle trades produced all types of headgear and millinery, dresses, shirtwaists, skirts, cloaks, suits, and coats, as well as underwear, known as "white goods." The production of artificial flowers and hat trimmings employed many Jewish women as well. Retailers had been among the first to enter ready-to-wear manufacturing. Some set up shops to produce clothing to sell directly to their store customers, employing designers, cutters, pressers, seamstresses, and finishers. The popularity of readymade clothing was growing, coincidentally, as immigration from Eastern Europe increased, so Jews who had already had some experience in the needle trades found their skills in demand. As the industry grew, production became more specialized; in the beginning, all work was done in one shop, but it gradually became more expedient to break manufacturing down into a number of tasks, some of which would be given out to contractors. Designing, patternmaking, and cutting usually remained inside the shop, where they could be closely supervised, but other processes--basting, sewing, felling, and finishing-- were contracted out.

Competition among contractors was fierce. They were continually seeking ways to reduce their overhead so they could underbid one another. One way to do this was to parcel out work to subcontractors who hired the freshest of greenhorns who were willing to work for the lowest wages. Turnover was fairly rapid, for greenhorns soon learned and they moved up to another level of production, but the subcontractors were usually able to replace them easily.

Contractors picked up bundles of cut garments from "inside shops" and turned them over to subcontractors, who usually had sweatshops in their own homes. There two or more people worked on the bundles, and the family was often pressed into service as well. And bundles were also farmed out to housewives who worked on them in their own homes. The subcontractor himself worked along with his hirelings, suffering from the same long hours and close conditions. Since the margin of profit was very low, he often made little more than those in his employ.

Work was paid by the piece. Women working at home alternated paid tasks with their normal household routine. They would set up their sewing machines, spread out the bundles, and between cleaning, shopping, making meals, and caring for their children and any boarders, they managed somehow to complete their work, often pedaling and stitching far into the night. In one story written about this period, a little girl describes her mother's life: "She ain't got no friends. She ain't got time she should have 'em. She sews all times. Sooner I lays me und the babies on the bed by night my mamma sews. Und sooner I stands up in mornings my mamma sews. All, all, ALL times she sews."

Although most women deplored their long hours and low pay, they were grateful to earn the money their families so desperately needed, and availed themselves of every opportunity to get this type of homework. Contractors and manufacturers were able to play willing homeworkers off against disgruntled factory workers seeking to organize and obtain better wages and working conditions. Despite the fact that homework created a breach in labor solidarity, it operated favorably, in the short run, for women who had to continue to share financial responsibilities with their husbands even after they had children. The development of the factory system and the enactment of anti-sweating laws, while benefiting the shopworkers, most of whom were young, unmarried women, actually penalized homeworkers, for it divided the home from the workplace, and kept women out of occupations that had previously provided them with a source of vital income.

As homework became scarcer, a small proportion of mothers tried to make arrangements for the care of their children so they would be free to work in the shops. Of course, there was little day care available to them: more often, these women relied on a female relative or neighbor to look after their children, or even left younger ones in the care of older siblings.

Whatever their hesitations were about leaving children under less than optimal conditions, many women could not afford to pass up opportunities to work, for production in the garment industry was sporadic and between the busy seasons were long periods of idleness. A scene described by Samuel Ornitz in Bride of the Sabbath was probably not unusual: a destitute mother who was nursing an infant when it became "busy by cloaks" had her older son bring the baby to her at work. The boy would - carry his sister and a pot containing his mother's dinner up five flights to the factory loft.

Mamma nursed the baby and ate at the same time. She ate mechanically, too tired to taste the food. Between mouthfuls she kissed the baby's head. When the baby was satisfied, she was too, and handed the boy the baby and the pot. Then, without looking at them again, she went back to work, pedaling like mad.

However crowded and unpleasant the conditions in one's own home, they were worse in sweatshops and subcontractors' homes. A twelve-hour day was not unusual in a subcontractor's place where the "boss" regulated the hours. If a worker couldn't keep up, it was too bad for her, for there was always someone else willing to take her place, under any conditions. In "inside" shops, it was no better. Workers often had to bring their own sewing machines and buy needles and thread from the manufacturer, who sold them at a profit. Sanitation was minimal, some shops had only one toilet for a hundred workers. The task system was introduced to speed up production: the labor was divided into a team operation in which each worker had to keep up with the others. The fastest worker naturally set the pace and drove the others to keep up through constant complaining, using guilt and fear as driving forces. Since workers were paid by the piece, they tried to produce as much as possible, and teams within the shop competed with each other for larger portions of the available work. All of this was, of course, to the advantage of the manufacturer, for he was able to make optimal use of his space and capital, increasing production and thereby his own profit.

Uptown manufacturers set up store factories to wrest control from downtown contractors who, without any capital investment, were becoming successful and threatening to crowd their market. Unlike contractors and subcontractors, they provided machines for their workers, an outlay of cash which, of course, the downtowners, who already operated close to margin, could not afford. Although the development of the factory system thus effectively cut out a good deal of the competition, it also laid the foundation for unionization for workers were no longer isolated from one another as they had been in the homework and sweatshop system. Crowded together in large numbers they were able to share their complaints about low wages and poor treatment.

The Cost of Survival

Despite the rapid growth of the ready-to-wear clothing industry, there were frequent periods of economic recession and seasonal layoffs. Most immigrant women could never save enough from their meager earnings to tide them over slack periods, and the abolition of homework added to the numbers of unemployed. Workers who were unable to find legitimate alternatives for making a living were often forced to turn to the streets. The women who became beggars or prostitutes were an embarrassment to the entire Jewish community.

Like the pushcart trundlers, women schnorrers--professional beggars--also rented children as props, part of their survival kits. A New York Times columnist, Meyer Berger, something of a street historian and sociologist, was intrigued by the ingenuity of the poor, displaced Jewish women who were forced to live by their wits and cunning. He sometimes wrote about their lifestyles:
 

There were a great many women schnorrers among the Jews in the old days. Some of them would hire a neighbor's child and take it with them to increase their appeal, particularly in the shopping and market districts. The usual rental for a baby was twenty-five cents a day. Another trick was showing a landlord's dispossess notice, generally faked, to entice larger contributions.

Berger also wrote about a woman named Beckie who used malingering to get herself housed and fed. She probably had some medical knowledge, for she was able to fake artfully the sort of physical disorders that insured a hospital stay.

Beckie was not hard to look upon, fairly young, a squat little Jewish woman with an appealing expression and eyes which under duress of suffering could be so eloquent as to tear your heartstrings. She had an uncanny way of knowing when a young green doctor would be on the ambulance and in this way she got back many times into the hospital before she was recognized. The ailment she would fake depended on how long she wanted board and lodging. If a long period of time was needed to study obscure symptoms and differential diagnosis, this meant, of course, bed, security and food.

Traditional family ties survived among immigrants in the New World. Like so many others, this family included an unmarried cousin (the woman standing on the left) who came alone to America --Moishe and Ethel Finesilver and family (Boston, 1912). There were others who had to resort to prostitution in order to stay alive. Jews Without Money describes the circumstances that drove one girl to make her decision:
 

Rosie worked for years in the sweatshops, saving money to bring her parents from Europe. Then she fell sick. Her savings melted. She went to a hospital. She came out and could not find a job. She was hungry, feeble, and alone. No one cared whether she lived or died.

She was ready for the river. A pimp met her. He took her to a restaurant and fed her her first solid meal. He made her a practical offer. Rose accepted. She never regretted her choice; it was easier than being in a sweatshop. She saved money to send her parents and was never sick with asthma again.

Gold also mentions that pimps "infested the dance halls" where they lured factory girls into "the life" with fantastic stories. For this reason, many East Side parents forbade their daughters to go dancing, but girls who were on their own did go to the dance halls, and, since they were more likely to be vulnerable, they fell prey to the pimps. Once they entered the profession, many were afraid to leave.

Prostitution among Jewish women in America, no longer the rarity it was in the old country, caused the community great despair. Prostitutes did not occupy isolated sections of the ghetto, but the same streets where families lived and children played. Parents feared for their daughters and were known to sit shiva (a period of ritual mourning) for those who became prostitutes. But in some sectors of the community, "respectable" Jews made their peace with prostitutes, who were, after all, Jews like themselves. As Gold put it, "All these things happened. They were pan of our daily lives, not lurid articles in a Sunday newspaper." In his novel, the mother is friendly with the prostitutes who live on their street. Although she disapproves of their life-style, she invites them in for tea, protects them against teasing and taunts, and listens to their tales of woe.  As a novelist, Gold is sympathetic to their plight, seeing them as victims of poverty and capitalism.

Yuri Suhl also treats the phenomenon of the Jewish prostitute matter-of-factly in One Foot in America. When Sol, an adolescent in the story, goes to a prostitute for the first time, he finds himself in familiar surroundings. Walking across a newly washed floor spread with newspapers, "I thought to myself consolingly, the pimp is Jewish, the woman is Jewish, the tenement house is Jewish, the neighborhood is Jewish, so what's there to be afraid of?"

And the prostitute herself could have been his mother:
 

She tilted her head slightly to one side and regarded me critically. "How old are you, boytchik?" she said in a hoarse, grating voice. "I'll betcha you just turned bar mitzvah yesterday.... Go home and shoot marbles," she said, adding a short, mocking laugh. "He asks me what to do! Today is Sunday. I have no time to fool around with kids. . . . Come back some other time and I'll make up for it. But not on a Sunday, please."

But the prostitutes were not the only indications that Jewish family life in America was disintegrating under the strain of cultural assault and social dislocation. A study by the United Hebrew Charities of family desertion among Jews from 1910 to 1923 reveals some of the main causes: "immorality of husband, or wife, or both; incompatibility of temper; shiftlessness; intemperance; economic conditions including industrial disturbances; financial depression; insufficient wages; illness; discrepancy in ages; interference of relatives; differences in nativity; forced marriages; and immigration of the husband ahead of his family." Husbands who spent a few years here without their families often formed liaisons with Americanized women and then rejected their wives when they arrived, finding their traditional ways and appearance embarrassing.

The number of deserting husbands was so great that the Forward began publishing a column called "The Gallery of Missing Husbands" in which it printed photographs of the men and worked with the National Desertion Bureau, a Jewish agency set up to locate deserting Jewish husbands. Abandoned wives also wrote letters to the "Bintel Brief ' describing their plights. In a typical letter, appearing in 1908, a woman appeals to her husband:
 

Max! The children and I now say farewell to you. You left us in such a terrible state. You had no compassion for us. For six years I loved you faithfully, took care of you like a loyal servant, never had a happy day with you. Yet I forgive you for everything.

Have you ever asked yourself why you left us? Max, where is your conscience; you used to have sympathy for the forsaken women and used to say their terrible plight was due to the men who left them in dire need. -And how did you act? I was a young, educated, decent girl when you took me. You lived with me for six years, during which time I bore you four children. And then you left me.

Of the four children, only two remain, but you have made them living orphans. Who will bring them up? Who will support us? Have you no pity for your own flesh and blood? Consider what you are doing. My tears choke me and I cannot write any more.

Be advised that in several days I am leaving with my two living orphans for Russia. We say farewell to you and beg you to take pity on us and send us enough to live on.

The United Hebrew Charities of New York, which began keeping statistics in 1910 on the proportion of their total relief funds allocated to deserted families, found that over 13 percent of cash relief went to such families in 1910, over 11 percent in 1911, and 9 percent in 1912. With a slight decrease during the war years, the proportion of deserted families obtaining relief remained relatively constant.

In most large cities Jewish orphan asylums were established to care for children who were left not only because one or both parents died, but also because their parents could not afford to keep them, or had to work and couldn't care for them. The "Bintel Brief" often carried letters from a parent pleading for someone to take a child, and in later years printed letters from parents looking for children who had been placed in orphanages, as well as from children wishing to locate parents who had abandoned them.

This was unheard of in the old country. If families had difficulties and could not care for their children, neighbors and relatives immediately came to their aid. But in the New World, despite the reforming of communities of landsleit, persons from the same community in Eastern Europe, families often felt alone with their problems. Every family had its own troubles, and informal community support systems broke down and were replaced by institutionalized aid offered by strangers. Of course, the higher proportion of broken families in the new country probably accounted for this change: there were many more children who needed to be taken in than there were families who were able to accommodate friends and neighbors in distress.

Illness also caused a disruption of family life. The new immigrants were susceptible to virulent forms of diseases they had not been exposed to before. Although tuberculosis infected some Jews in Eastern Europe, it became so common an affliction in America that it was even called "Jewish asthma." In Bride of the Sabbath, Ornitz describes the measures one mother took to protect her children from the disease. In order to get around the New York City Health Department's regulation barring consumptives from factories, she has herself certified a victim of "Jewish asthma" and continues working. She stops taking meals with her children, however, and eats alone, boiling her dishes afterward. She no longer picks up her baby, nor will she kiss her son Saul. Only years after her death does Saul realize that he had done nothing to earn his mother's sudden coldness; she was only trying to spare her children.

Another new problem was the care of the aged. In America households could no longer afford to support members who contributed nothing to their upkeep. While in the old country, many extended families managed financially because they often owned their own houses and some might have had a small garden that yielded a few vegetables and potatoes to supplement the family diet, in America they had to pay rent and buy every grain of food. Although many immigrant families earned more money in America, the standard of living for some was even lower than it had been in Eastern Europe. Some old parents who lived with their children earned their keep by running the household, thus freeing their daughters or daughters-in-law to go out to work; those who were too sick to work became a burden. Homes for the Jewish aged were first established in America to deal with this new problem, though it was difficult both for the aged and their children to accept such institutions. The decision to place parents in homes often divided husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, and even friends. There was a social stigma attached to those who sought this solution, and the ones who were forced to commit their parents were often seen as "heartless opportunists." Children who made this decision suffered as much as their parents, who felt abandoned, for they carried a sense of guilt with them to their graves. Even though economic factors justified this solution on practical grounds, and even though institutional care for the aged was common among other Americans, these Jews felt ambivalent because they had not yet shed entirely old-country standards that condemned their actions.

Jewish homes for wayward girls, also unknown in East European Jewish communities, were established here to help families cope with the problems growing out of the new conditions. There was no doubt that the breakdown of traditions and customs--an internal control system--was eroding family and community life. Even suicide, rare among the Jews of Eastern Europe, became a way out of one's misery. While the idea of America had brought hope to the Jewish immigrants, the reality of America generated a sense of hopelessness for some. Although the immigrants found political freedom and safety from pogroms, threat of destruction, and discriminatory laws, in most instances working conditions and the level of poverty in America were similar to those the Jews thought they were leaving behind.

In Eastern Europe women had, as an extension of their domestic responsibilities, two additional functions: helping to support their families, and transmitting certain elements of Jewish culture. In America they could not continue to perform this second function since their children regarded them as conservative forces and rejected their teaching and guidance in favor of American ways. In fact, the children reversed the teaching process, and brought the New World home to their parents. The matter of language was one example, as Harry Golden pointed out:
 

The system in most households was fixed and simple. The parents spoke Yiddish to the children who answered in English. This system gave rise to the ghetto proverb: "In America the children bring up the parents."

In light of this intergenerational conflict, it is ironic that the women of the immigrant generation have come to be revered as the bearers and conservers of culture--the mythicized "Yiddishe Mommas"--while their real contribution to the immigrant community as breadwinners has gone unnoticed. Because many first-generation women, especially if they were adults when they emigrated, remained tied to the old ways, their grandchildren often remember them only as their babushkaed bobbas who seemed isolated from the mainstream of American life. But perhaps the misconceptions perpetuated by the second and third generations can be explained by the fact that these Jews had absorbed Western bourgeois notions of womanhood [and] had come to espouse the belief gaining popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that woman's true role was not as wage earner but as keeper of morality. Thus, second and third generation men, who went on to achieve great financial success themselves, did not recognize the significant contribution Jewish women had made to the economic survival of their forebears.