Famous Nathan (5 page)

Immigration inspectors checked for viruses not of the biological but the social kind. Officials demanded answers to such questions as “Are you an anarchist?” or “Are you a polygamist?” With much of Europe engulfed in ideological ferment, the largely WASP establishment of America was perhaps more worried about communism than about conjunctivitis.

A widespread belief exists, spread most prominently by
The Joys of Yiddish
author Leo Rosten, that Ellis Island was where the term “kike” first surfaced. Originally not an ethnic slur at all (that came later), the word was used by personnel on the island to refer to eastern European Jews like Nathan Handwerker. Illiterate newcomers, or at least those not familiar with the Latin alphabet, were directed to sign their names with an
X
. Deeply religious Jewish immigrants refused, seeing this mark as the sign of the Christian cross. Instead, they used a circle, the word for which in Yiddish is
kikel
.

By the time Nathan was asked to sign his entry paperwork, he was ready. He had learned his signature on the voyage over. Illiterate though he was, he was able to sign his name on his entry papers. In the present-day environment of endless bureaucratic red tape and Homeland Security checks, it seems inconceivable, but when Nathan officially entered the United States, official identity forms were not required.

“I had my twenty-five dollars,” he said, citing the rumored amount that Ellis Island officials required new arrivals to possess in order not to be declared indigent (the equivalent of $585 today). “I also had a workbook. You couldn't work in Galicia if you had no workbook. But no passport. I didn't need it. They only take the signature when you come in. So I signed. No papers. They didn't ask for anything.”

Entering the United States that day, Nathan was two months shy of his twentieth birthday. He had reached his full adult height, a meager five feet three inches tall. He didn't have the bulk necessary to describe him as a fireplug, but he had a pleasant, open, strong face and a hank of dark hair that hung over the right side of his forehead. The resemblance to a young Pablo Picasso was uncanny. Most important, and probably like Pablo, he had a look of determination in his eye.

The healthy-as-a-horse Nathan survived the Ellis Island medical gauntlet unchalked. “I wasn't afraid,” he said.

He wasn't alone, either. After he finished being processed, he descended from the Great Hall to the first floor to meet his brother Israel. Here was the age-old immigrant story, the one who came before paving the way for others. Nathan left Ellis the way he had come, returning to Manhattan with Israel in the same flat-bottomed ferry.

His brother took him to a restaurant for his first meal in his new home. “He says, ‘Come with me, we'll eat there; they'll give you a good meal for ten cents.'” Afterward, Israel guided him to the tenement apartment of a Handwerker cousin, the son of his mother's brother. “They have a cot bed in the kitchen, and they pulled it out for me to sleep, so I slept there for two nights.”

It was the last day of Passover. Nathan had successfully completed an epic, life-changing passage. His guardian angels had “covered him up” the whole way. Millions of others accomplished similar journeys, to the degree that 40 percent of the people in the United States have an ancestor who passed through Ellis Island. Nathan took his place among a city teeming with immigrants, what was then a metropolis of five million people.

Now, after a meal, after sleep, work.

*   *   *

The new arrival did not allow grass to grow under his feet. Nathan arrived in New York City on a Monday. Tuesday afternoon found him employed at his first job, working for a shoemaker's at First Avenue and Ninth Street. Today, the neighborhood is part of the East Village, but in the early part of the last century, it was still within the precincts of the dense, flavorful, immigrant-heavy area known as the Lower East Side.

Nathan had taken up Jacob's profession, though the mundane details of the job were slightly different. “I was used to work with wooden nails, and here I have to work with stainless-steel nails. But I learned fast.”

That small detail of wooden nails measures the gulf between Nathan's former world in Galicia and his new one in Manhattan. In another sense, though, the new boss was the same as the old boss. The shoemaker's trade was eminently familiar to him—the smell of leather, the cobbler's crouch, the endless
tap-tap-tap
hammering. Had Nathan crossed an ocean simply to fall back into a timeworn routine of his youth? Wasn't this a chance for new beginnings?

He finished out the week at the shop but was increasingly restless. “I worked, but I couldn't do it. I didn't want to be a shoemaker.”

On Friday, Nathan asked his older brother to help him look for a new job. Israel bought a copy of the
Der Morgen Zshurnal
, the
Jewish Morning Journal
. New York was at that time an incredible newspaper town. There were 112 dailies, weeklies, and monthlies being published, including six in Yiddish, Yiddish-English, or Hebrew. That morning, Israel found Nathan an ad for employment at a luggage factory, across town at Fourteenth Street and Ninth Avenue. Clutching the newspaper with the ad circled, the rookie New Yorker set off into the maze of the city.

North of Fourteenth Street, the grid plan brought a measure of order to the layout of Manhattan, but the old neighborhoods downtown could be confusing, a welter of crisscrossing streets and logic-defying lost quarters. In the area where Nathan headed through, for example, West Fourth Street actually intersected West Twelfth and headed north to West Thirteenth. He depended on the kindness of strangers to help him find his way.

“I started to walk from downtown and asked, ‘Where is this?' And I showed them the paper, the ad in the paper, so people showed me, ‘Go this way, that way.' When I got to the factory, it was twelve o'clock, noon. I come upstairs, I see a Jew with a beard.”

“What's your trade?” asked the luggage factory boss, speaking Yiddish.

“Shoemaker,” answered Nathan.

“Can you sew seams straight? With luggage, fancy leather luggage, you gotta sew seams.”

Like job seekers everywhere, Nathan put the best face on his experience. “The best, straight, nothing better.”

“I'll give you eight dollars a week,” said his new boss.

But since Nathan had arrived at the luggage factory midday on Friday, the place was about to close in observance of the Jewish Sabbath. The workers had already departed. His new employer told him to come back the following Monday at eight o'clock.

“Still, it bothered me to work in the factory,” Nathan recalled. “I wanted something else, not to be a shopman.”

Both the luggage factory and shoemaker's shop participated in a Yiddish-based, highly communal Jewish culture that dominated whole city neighborhoods and entire industries. At this time, an astonishing 70 percent of America's women's clothing (and 40 percent of its men's) was created in New York. Half the country's garment factories were located there. And three quarters of the workers in the “needle trades” were Jewish.

Jewish immigrants naturally gravitated to jobs where their coworkers came from the same area of the world and often from the same towns as they did. They wanted employment that did not require them to know English, that would allow them to maintain a kosher diet, keep the Sabbath, and observe the high holy days.

Convivial as the fellowship of countrymen might be, the hours were long, and the pay paltry. The term “sweatshop” was born here, referring not only to the stifling atmosphere of the rooms where the work was done but to the fact that employers “sweated” their workers, “in the same manner an animal would be milked or bled,” in the words of one history. Social reformer Jacob Riis described typical sweatshop laborers as being “shut in the qualmy rooms … the livelong day.” It was this claustrophobic, dead-end labor against which Nathan Handwerker rebelled.

Something else spurred him on to seek other occupations. He remembered his experience at the bakery in Galicia. It was hot, strenuous work, but at least he was always guaranteed a meal while employed. No one ever forgets childhood hunger. It was a specter that haunted Nathan as he grew to adulthood.

“I always knew I was going to be in the restaurant business,” he said later. “There's always food there. I grew up so poor, and this was a way of guaranteeing that I'd never be hungry.”

That Sunday, Nathan had Israel buy him another copy of the
Journal
. This one advertised a job in a luncheonette. He took the newspaper, folded to display the ad, and again asked passersby to help guide him to the address, on Delancey Street near the terminus of the Williamsburg Bridge. When he got there, he realized that the place was closed on Sunday. Nathan couldn't understand. Why advertise in a Sunday-edition newspaper when you were closed that day?

A wasted trip. As he stood in front of the place, a teamster with a horse and wagon pulled up, a deliveryman for Holstein Bakery on Houston Street. He had come to collect the empty cartons from the previous week's deliveries, egg crates that were tossed into a pile after they were empty. The teamster saw Nathan, and the two of them struck up a conversation in Yiddish.

“Why did they advertise if they're not going to be open Sunday?” Nathan asked.

The teamster explained the baffling ins and outs of big-city commerce. If the luncheonette owner advertised for two days, he would receive a cheaper rate. Ads on Sunday were cheaper still. So the owner had taken the ad out for both the Sunday and Monday editions of the newspaper.

“But if you're going to come back Monday,” the teamster told him, “get here before six o'clock, and you'll be first.”

Nathan was there Monday morning at five. “I got up at four o'clock and walked an hour in the dark. I found the place more easily because I was there the day before. The first time, it took longer because I had to ask people where to go.”

He saw the luncheonette boss arrive. Nathan knew enough not to bother him right away; he just made sure the man saw that he was first in line. The boss went in, set the coffee to boil, and came back out to give some to his job seekers.

Then he addressed the eager beaver in English.

“Want to wash dishes?”

Nathan didn't understand the words. “But I said, ‘Yes.' I nodded my head for yes.”

“Four and a half dollars a week.” The boss held up four fingers and crooked another one to indicate half. His name was Max Leventhal, and he was offering low-level employment to a worker who had already secured a position in a luggage factory that offered almost twice the pay.

“I had a job for eight dollars a week,” Nathan recalled. “But no food. And it was a factory. I didn't want to be a slave in the factory, breathing dust and everything. Those were my fears. And I always wanted to be in a restaurant. I told myself that I should take the job for four and a half, and maybe I could work up to something else.”

Dishwashing—“pearl diving” in a slang formulation just then becoming current in his new homeland. When anyone started at the very bottom of the food service business, it's what they found themselves doing. It wasn't glamorous—in fact, it was the exact opposite of glamorous, but it was a foot in the door.

*   *   *

That same Monday, the first reports of a disaster at sea began to filter into New York. The passenger steamship RMS
Carpathia
radioed bulletins to the Cape Race wireless station in Newfoundland, but the transmissions were confused. Initial accounts had
Carpathia
towing the crippled luxury liner RMS
Titanic
into port at Halifax. The Monday-morning headline in
The New York Times
scooped the world:

NEW LINER
TITANIC
HITS AN ICEBERG; SINKING BY THE BOW AT MIDNIGHT; WOMEN PUT OFF IN LIFEBOATS; LAST WIRELESS AT 12:27 AM BLURRED.

No one wanted to believe it. Philip Franklin, a spokesperson for the owners of the ship, had a stalwart message to reporters that morning: “We place absolute confidence in the
Titanic
. We believe that the boat is unsinkable.”

By Monday evening in New York, the true scope of the catastrophe became apparent:
Titanic,
the largest ship then afloat, had gone down. An eyewitness report detailed the exact moment the news hit the city.

“The scene on Broadway was awful. Crowds of people were coming out of the theaters, cafés were going full tilt, and autos were whizzing everywhere when the newsboys began to cry, ‘Extra! Extra paper!
Titanic
sunk with 1,800 aboard!' Nobody could realize what had happened, and when they did begin to understand, the excitement was almost enough to cause a panic in the theaters. Women began to faint and weep.”

In the stretch of days between the sinking and the arrival in New York of the survivors on
Carpathia,
the city became a death-haunted place. There was no way the news could not have reached Nathan, so complete was the grip that the calamity asserted on the public imagination. A new phrase entered the American vernacular: “Women and children first.”

It was all anyone talked about. That Thursday, thirty thousand people gathered at Pier 54 on the Hudson River for the 9:00
P.M.
docking of
Carpathia
. Almost every cop on the city's force was summoned to duty in the neighborhood, which was cordoned off by ropes hung with ghostly green lanterns. A misty rain and occasional lightning flashes heightened the drama of the scene.

“There was almost complete silence on the pier,” wrote an eyewitness. “Women wept, but they wept quietly.”

For a transatlantic immigrant who had crossed the same seas just a week previously, the story of RMS
Titanic
must have taken on a tragic weight. Five hundred thirty steerage passengers died when the liner sank. Nathan Handwerker could have been one of them. He could well have left Europe not from Holland but from Cherbourg, France,
Titanic
's second-to-last port of call. Nathan had to believe that he had just dodged a bullet.