Fourth Street East Read online

  The Eckveldts welcomed Anna Zwirn as the Berlfeins had welcomed my father. With warmth: she came from their shtetl. With uneasiness: she was another mouth to feed. And with gaiety: a “green one” was always good for some fun. They got very little out of Anna Zwirn. When she was handed a banana, she peeled it.

  During the course of that first evening, since no preparations had been made for the unexpected visitor, couriers roamed up and down East Fourth Street, hurriedly seeking information that should have been gathered leisurely during the preceding weeks. By bedtime the problem had been solved. A “place” had been found for Anna Zwirn.

  In the morning the girl from Klein Berezna presented her hosts with their second surprise. Anna Zwirn refused to be conducted to the “place.” She had not hoarded her pocket money for eleven years to earn her passage to the Golden Land in order to go back into the kind of degrading work to which she had already given half her young life in Gross Berezna. They could turn her out into the streets if they chose. She was not going to take a job as a servant.

  Since she was not equipped to take any other kind of job—the immigrants of East Fourth Street didn’t know of any other kind of job for a girl—the Eckveldts were faced with a terrible problem. They were, like almost everybody else on East Fourth Street, poor people. They could put up a stranger for the night. They could not support her indefinitely. On the other hand, they could not adopt the alternative Anna Zwirn had herself suggested. They could not turn her out into the streets. Mr. Eckveldt went upstairs to consult with his friend Yokkib Berlfein. By the time my father came home from work that night, the problem had been solved.

  Uncle Yokkib led him into the front room of the Berlfein flat, which was used only on the Sabbath. Anna Zwirn was seated on a chair near the window. My father had never seen her before. Uncle Yokkib called Anna to the center of the room and lifted her up onto the round golden-oak table on which the Sabbath meals were served.

  “This is the girl you are going to marry,” Uncle Yokkib said. “It is your duty.”

  My father did his duty. To do it properly he had to change his way of life. As a bachelor, he had been able to withstand Uncle Yokkib’s argument that there was no future in shucking oysters. As a married man, he could not.

  A few days before the wedding my father said good-bye to his friends in the high, airy, gaily decorated, mirrored room full of the cheerful sounds of clinking glasses and laughing men, where for almost a year he had performed with dexterity and relish a difficult task that required great skill. The next morning he was led by Uncle Yokkib to a poorly lighted, badly ventilated, vermin-infested loft on Allen Street. Even those who said my father was stupid admitted that he learned soon enough how to bend over a sewing machine as though he were cringing from the lash. Perhaps there is not much to learn. For the rest of his life, almost until the day he died, my father was “in cloaks and suits.”

  I am only guessing, of course, but as guesses go it would seem to be a safe one: being “in cloaks and suits” could not have provided my father with very much in the way of a spiritual dimension for his life. Others seem to have found it in the fight against sweatshop conditions. My father joined this fight. In fact, he was a member of the small pioneer group that succeeded in wresting from “the bosses” the initial concessions that led to the establishment of the proud and wealthy labor union that now dominates one of the nation’s major industries. But my father’s participation, no matter what the physical risk, and all accounts of the period indicate that the physical risks were considerable, would not have been motivated by the revolutionary passion. It was simply, I am certain, a matter of shyness. My father was a retiring man. He shunned not only the spotlight. He cowered from the casual glance. To avoid it, to gain the protective coloration of the many, he would hurry to join the group, no matter what the group was doing. If the group happened to be going out on a picket line, my father’s first thought would be, not that he might get his head broken, but that if he didn’t go out, everybody would notice him hanging back. He never did.

  “This is some dope,” Uncle Yokkib once said to a few visitors in our house. They had dropped in to have a sympathetic glass of tea with my mother on an occasion when my father did get his head broken. “If somebody came running into the shop,” Uncle Yokkib said, “and he screamed ‘I’m the captain of a firing squad! I gotta have somebody to shoot! Hurry up, somebody! Let’s have a volunteer to get himself killed!’ What do you think would happen?” Uncle Yokkib had turned to the bedroom door, behind which my father lay under a turban of bandages. “Joe Kramer would be so ashamed for the captain because he had nobody to shoot, that he would jump up from his machine and say here, please stop looking so ashamed! Take me!”

  It was, in my opinion, the lack of spiritual satisfaction he derived from the regularity with which he got his head broken, even though the cause was impeccably just, that led to the passion that ruled the remaining years of my father’s life.

  I know nothing of its origins that would pass the legal test of evidence. Without cooperation, the mind and the heart cannot be explored. The mind and the heart of another human being, that is. And while my father, if asked, would undoubtedly have been too shy or frightened to withhold the reasons for what he was doing, somebody would have had to ask him first. In his lifetime, nobody did. And now that he is gone, I can’t.

  Perhaps that is better. For my purpose, at any rate. Which is to explain for myself why my father did what he did, why he lived as he lived. For this, a man’s own words do not always help. Indeed, they often confuse. What more eloquent explanation of his purpose could the inventor of the wheel achieve than to point mutely to his own invention? What could my father add in words to explain the reason for the invention of his one-man underground railway? All he had to do was point to the men and women whose lives he saved. He was never asked to do this. Hence these notes.

  Almost every immigrant family, in those days on New York’s Lower East Side, was engaged in a process known as “bringing somebody over.” The somebody was almost always a close relative, a brother or sister, a son or daughter, a father or mother. And the place from which the somebody was being brought over was usually the town in Europe from which the immigrant already in America had himself or herself come.

  The bringing-over process required a great deal of paper work, and what would today be considered a modest sum of money. It was far from modest by the standards of those days and the people who had to earn it in the sweatshops of Allen Street. Nevertheless, it was not the money that slowed down and often strangled the bringing-over process. It was the paper work. It was a rare immigrant who could understand or even read the documents that had to be filled in, sworn to before notaries, reproduced in varying quantities, mailed to consulates in Europe, supplemented by further documents demanded from abroad, and then, when files were lost, as they frequently were, start the tedious process over again. My father proved to be one of those rare immigrants. It was, in fact, because of the extent of his rarity that my father became an object of ridicule.

  “You heard the newest?” I can still hear Uncle Yokkib telling a laughing group on the bench in front of Gordon’s candy store. “This schlemiel, Joe Kramer, now guess who he’s helping over?” The members of Uncle Yokkib’s audience knew a rhetorical question when they heard one. Nobody guessed. “The brother from that Polack, he runs the stable on Fifth Street, Lesniak he’s called!”

  Even a boy could understand the exclamations and low whistles of disbelief. A boy who lived on East Fourth Street, anyway. It was a block inhabited exclusively by Jews. The notion that a Jew on Fourth Street would lend a hand with the bringing-over process of a Polish gentile on Fifth Street was unheard of. But most of the new aspects my father had brought to the bringing-over process had been unheard of until he began to devote himself to them.

  He started, understandably enough, with the members of his immediate family. By the time my father began writing to them from East Fourth Street, his fathe
r had died in Woloshonowa, his oldest brother had married his young stepmother, and the happy couple was running the inn on the road to Warsaw. Perhaps that was why they refused my father’s offer to help bring them over to America. Perhaps, remembering the reasons why he had left home, my father never made that particular offer. He did, however, make the offer to his other brothers. All five accepted. This annoyed my mother.

  She said my father did not earn enough to support his own family. How could he afford to pay the passage money for five people? He couldn’t. My father could not afford to pay the passage money for a single person. But he could afford to do the paper work. This did not involve money. The paper work of the immigrant bringing-over process required a certain amount of intelligence, and a great deal of patience. Nobody on Fourth Street was willing to grant my father the former. They could not, however, deny him the latter. So they made of it a weapon of derision.

  “There he goes,” they would say on Saturday mornings as my father set out on the long walk to Lafayette Street. “The neighborhood Shabbes goy.”

  A Shabbes goy, which translated literally means a “Saturday gentile,” was a person who came into a Jewish home on Saturdays and, for a fee, performed those chores that were forbidden by Holy Writ to the orthodox on the Sabbath. On East Fourth Street this was, as a rule, limited to one: lighting the stove. In my experience this person was always, for obvious reasons, a gentile. The term was never applied to a Jew except as a joke. To hear it applied seriously to my father was something his family found unbearable. I was, of course, a member of that family.

  My father was not called the neighborhood Shabbes goy for the obvious reason. He never in his life struck a match on a Saturday. But he did something that, on East Fourth Street, was considered worse. My father stopped attending Saturday services in the synagogue. He had to. It was the only time of the week when he could go to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, known to generations of “bringers-over” as HIAS. Without regular visits to HIAS, the paper work involved in the bringing-over process always ground to a halt. In fact, without regular visits to HIAS, the paper work never got under way. It was here, in the long, low brown building in Lafayette Street, that the maddening complexities of the endless documents were reduced to sanity by patient clerks who understood the immigrant mind.

  My father, like most men on East Fourth Street, could not go to HIAS on the days when he was earning his family’s bread on Allen Street, and the helpful offices were closed on Sunday. Unlike most men on East Fourth Street, my father faced up to the issue: his God, or his passion. He knew it was sinful not to attend Sabbath services in the synagogue. He knew, also, that unless he stayed away from these services, he would be unable to get on with the paper work involved in the bringing-over process. There is no secret, as I have indicated, about how the decision went in my father’s mind. What the decision cost him, I cannot say. I can, however, add two facts from my own observation. One, my father was a very devout man. And two, he never indicated, by word or sign, that he was aware of the derision and opprobrium heaped on him for his weekly act of sacrilege.

  Both were intensified when it became known that my father, on his Saturday visits to HIAS, would work just as hard on the papers of a stranger as on those of one of his own brothers, that he would give as much attention to the documents of a gentile as to those of a Jew. He cared nothing about the origins, or character, or personality, or motives of the man or woman or child who was seeking to be brought over from Europe. All that was required to attract my father’s services—which, with the practice of years, became extraordinarily skilled—was to ask for his help. He never denied it to anybody.

  It was when my father’s help moved into the second area of the bringing-over process that his family’s embarrassment turned to shame.

  Now that he is dead, and I am no longer ashamed, what my father did seems eminently sensible. What good was all the paper work if after the months, sometimes years, of effort, it all came to nothing for lack of passage money? Since he could not himself supply the money, my father tried to get it from others. Very few people on East Fourth Street earned more than he did. Some not as much. Nobody could afford a contribution of fifty or seventy-five dollars to bring over an immigrant who was, in most cases, a total stranger and, in many, a gentile. But everybody could afford one dollar. Or less. They did not think they could afford it, and few of them wanted to contribute it. My father made it his business to persuade them. To this business he began to devote his Sundays.

  He would set out early, when the Catholics of East Fifth Street were on their way to Mass, and then move on to other streets and other sects. Until late at night he roamed the streets of our neighborhood and others, buttonholing strangers as far west as Avenue A and as far south as Columbia Street, pleading the cause of a girl in Lemberg whose papers were all in order and who was only sixteen dollars short of escape from the next pogrom. Surely you could afford a dollar? A half dollar? A quarter? Even a dime will help. Where can you earn for such a low price a good mark in God’s book? It’s a bargain! It was also exactly what the people of the Lower East Side called it: begging.

  Best of all, however, it was effective. My father kept no records, of course, and the members of his family were able to survive his passion only by pretending they were unaware of it. Two weeks ago, however, on the way home from the cemetery, my sister and I fell into a discussion of those early days. Out of our heads, decades after the events, we were able to put together a list of thirty-three men, women, and children, all now alive, who had reached America through my father’s efforts before Hitler’s holocaust swept across Europe. The list was far from complete. It included only those names that had lingered in our memories because my father’s efforts in their behalf caused his family the most shame.

  One thing we were spared: the unexpected arrival of a Castle Garden conductor with an unmet immigrant in tow. My father’s interest in his charges did not stop with the completion of their papers and the collection of their fares. He kept track of the ships that carried them and the relatives who signed their documents. My father saw to it not only that one of these latter was waiting at Castle Garden when the stranger disembarked, but also that the relative had provided a job for the new arrival. Many of these arrived with a feeling of greater confidence in the man who had shepherded their papers for so long than in the relatives who came to pick them up at the ship. As a result, my father’s relationship with many of the immigrants he helped to America continued long after they were here. Most of these relationships were economic.

  My father had an almost mystical faith in compound interest. He had never heard of it until he came to America. He could not believe it existed anywhere else in the world. Only here, in this Golden Land, could a man take a dollar he had earned with his sweat, plant it in a marble building as he would plant a seed in the earth, and watch it grow. To each new arrival, just before he went off to his first job “in cloaks and suits” or she departed for her first “place,” my father would deliver a lecture on the virtues of compound interest. I never heard it, but it must have been compelling. Almost every one of his listeners would bring him, on his or her first day off, some part of the first salary earned in America. Together, if it was a Saturday, they would set out on foot for the Bowery Savings Bank, which was not too far from the HIAS, and my father would help the immigrant start his first savings account. Many of them were so awed by the deposit book, they were afraid to keep it in their own possession. They asked my father to act as custodian. I can still remember the thick block of pale blue envelopes, held together with a piece of elastic discarded from one of my mother’s old corsets, in the top drawer of the dresser I shared with my father. At one time or another he must have been the guardian of twenty or thirty deposit books. My mother, who disliked everything about my father’s involvement in the bringing-over process, disliked most this end product.

  The fiduciary relationship filled her with distrust. Taking care of other people’s
bankbooks could end in only one way: trouble. My mother, not for the first time or the last, was proved right.

  Esta Mollka Unger was brought over from Poland by an uncle who lived on East Third Street and worked in my father’s shop. My father aided with the paper work, helped collect the passage money, and saw to it—a process known as “noodging”—that Esta Mollka’s uncle met her at the ship and had a “place” waiting for her. My father gave her his lecture on compound interest. She was impressed. She brought him her first salary, and he accompanied her to the Bowery Savings Bank. She asked my father to keep the book for her. He agreed. It was added to the block held together with the piece of elastic from my mother’s corset. Once a month, when she received her salary, Esta Mollka would appear at our door, and my father would walk with her to the Bowery Savings Bank, where she made her deposit. The relationship was no different from a dozen others that existed between my father and the immigrants he had helped to bring over.

  Then, during Esta Mollka’s third year in America, her uncle died. He had been a childless widower. I do not know how much affection there had been between him and Esta Mollka, but it soon became apparent that she missed him. During those three years she had come downtown from her “place” to spend every Sunday with him. We had seen her only once a month, and then very briefly, when she came to our house for the walk with my father to the Bowery Savings Bank to deposit her salary. Shortly after her uncle’s death Esta Mollka started showing up at our house every Sunday. We soon learned why.

  Her uncle had been her last surviving relative. Now she was all alone in the world. She liked her “place.” The people for whom she worked were apparently kind to her and pleasant to be with. Esta Mollka would happily have spent her day off with them. However, they did not understand this. They thought she, like any employee, looked forward to her day off. Every Sunday, speeding Esta Mollka downtown with their good wishes for a pleasant time, they did not realize they were speeding her into ten hours of loneliness she did not know how to handle. It was inevitable that she should turn to the only other family she knew in the new land that had become her home.