Famous Nathan (6 page)

But he was too busy to be spooked. The new hire worked at the luncheonette, a small “store,” as he called it, with only four or five other employees. There was a single communal table for customers, mirrored walls, and an L-shaped counter with chairs. Nathan's boss gave him two aprons, both white, one to wear below his waist and another on top.

A hitch arose: he had to be called “Benny,” not Nathan. A manager's name was Nathan, and it would have caused too much confusion for there to be two Nathans in the tiny kitchen.

It didn't take long for “Benny” to move up the restaurant food chain. After a single morning at the sink washing dishes, his boss approached. “He comes over [to check his work]. He never had seen anything like it. Clean!”

The boss offered a fresh apron. “Put on the apron, Benny. You're going to be a busboy.”

“What should I do?” Nathan asked in Yiddish.

The boss gave him a rag. “If you see a customer leave, you pick up their dishes, bring them to the sink, and wipe the counter.” He mimed the actions so that Nathan understood.

The noon rush was upon them. Customers stopped at the counter for sandwiches and frankfurters and then grabbed seats. They were reluctant to return to the counter for their desserts and coffee, in fear they'd lose their place at the table.

“When people get busy, you'll take orders,” Nathan the manager told Nathan the new busboy.

“Boss, I can't,” Nathan said in Yiddish. “I'm Jewish. I can't speak English.”

“One at a time,” the manager said, holding up his forefinger so that his busboy could grasp the concept. “One order at a time.”

Language impaired or not, the new employee was quick. “I caught on right away what he meant. Small coffee was one cent. A large coffee was three cents. The manager was on the coffee counter. I would hold up one finger or three to get coffee.”

In this slow, laborious manner, Nathan Handwerker learned English. He would call out orders before he knew what the words meant. “Milk” became the next vocabulary entry, and then “pie” and “cake.” The clientele flung unintelligible phrases at him: “half a coconut pie,” “half an apple pie,” “a cheesecake.” Rush hour in a busy Manhattan luncheonette, a trial by fire. Somehow, Nathan made it through.

On the afternoon of his first day, as the tide of customers ebbed, Nathan's boss came over to take charge of the money the new busboy had collected during lunch. Proud of his honesty, Nathan was exact with the count: “Not a penny short, not a penny over.”

The boss was happy. “Go eat, Benny,” he said.

Nathan motioned that he needed to be shown how he could take a meal. The manager gave him a small measure of the unbelievable bounty of the New World: three sandwiches, one stuffed with sliced beef, one a cheese sandwich, the third a hamburger. The employees were charged three cents for half a pie and a penny for glass of lemonade. As generous as the staff lunch was, it didn't satisfy the new immigrant's bottomless hunger.

“I could have eaten three times as much, but I was afraid to lose the job,” Nathan recalled. Cheese and beef together? His kosher dietary strictures went by the wayside.

On the cook line ahead of Nathan/Benny was the frankfurter man, a veteran who had more seniority. The newcomer worked on one side of the counter, the frankfurter man was on the other. Frankfurters with sauerkraut cost two cents. With a toasted roll added in, the tally went up to three cents. The job of dishing up the sausages would represent a step up the ladder for Nathan.

The next Saturday was payday. Nathan stood last in line to receive his money, four and a half dollars for the week. When his turn came, the owner, Max, gave him five dollars.

“Boss, you gave me too much money,” Nathan said, still speaking Yiddish. He displayed his pay.

“I'll give you a raise, but next week, you work on the frankfurters.”

Once again, Nathan had to protest, citing his lack of the native tongue.

“You don't have to speak English,” the boss said. “All you have to say is, ‘All hot, get 'em while they're hot.'”

He made the newly promoted dishwasher say it. “All hot, get 'em while they're hot.”

“Griddle frankfurters three cents,” the boss said. “Boiled frankfurters two cents with sauerkraut.”

Nathan repeated the lines until he had them down cold. The phrases were probably among the first hundred or so words that Nathan learned in English.

When he came into the luncheonette the following Monday, he worked the frankfurter counter. Nathan might not have known it at the time, but it was a match made in heaven. He had been in America all of two weeks.

 

4

The Tenth Ward

“How long is he going to stay with us? He's eating up the food.” Lower East Side, New York City, ca. 1912.

THE WORLD THAT
Nathan stepped into when he came to America—the early twentieth-century Lower East Side community of Jewish immigrants packed into a teeming, flavorful, overcrowded ghetto—has long been distorted by nostalgia. The memory of it is rose colored, but the reality was oftentimes dreadful. Nathan was a “
greene
Jew,” a “greenhorn,” as opposed to the “
gelle,
” the yellows, experienced residents who had a few years in the country. His fellow immigrants both disparaged and embraced such newly arrived figures as Nathan Handwerker.

The ghetto was crowded with poor Jews, poorer even than the greenhorn from Galicia. The average amount of money brought to America by Russian Jews was eight dollars, and Nathan had three times that. New York City was a shock to the immigrant's system, but it was a shock buffered by traditions, customs, and practices that were instantly recognizable from the eastern European culture left behind. Nathan immersed himself in it as in a cold bath. He lived in a succession of tenement apartments in Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side.

His initial landing place, the apartment of a cousin where he spent his first nights in his adopted homeland, did not last long. He lay awake on his kitchen cot one evening soon after he arrived, listening to a discussion between the host couple. Nathan soon realized they were talking about him.

“How long is he going to stay with us?” asked the wife of his cousin. “He's eating up the food.”

Nathan didn't wait. He was too proud to be where he wasn't wanted. He left early the next day, taking his paltry belongings with him.

“I didn't want to eat breakfast with them in the morning,” he recalled. “I didn't tell them why.”

Such was the extent of New York's well-established Jewish community that a greenhorn like Nathan, even an itinerant one, could survive and even prosper. It was possible for immigrant
Ostjuden
to work, live, and worship in venues that did not demand them to speak English. Whole neighborhoods, congested as they were, offered Nathan safe harbor among fellow countrymen.

The Lower East Side neighborhood was incredibly concentrated. A third of a million Jewish immigrants lived in a forty-block area around Allen, Essex, Canal, and Broome Streets: the Tenth Ward of New York City. Home to some of the most densely crowded buildings on earth, the neighborhood had a population of 69,944, or approximately 665 people per acre. The language used to describe such dwellings is uncannily reminiscent of descriptions of Old World shtetlach, invoking some of the same words.

“The rooms were damp, filthy, foul, and dark,” stated one government sanitary inspector. “The air was unbearable, the filth impossible, the crowded conditions terrible, particularly in those places where the rooms were used as workshops. The life of the children was endangered because of the prevailing contagious diseases, and children died like flies.”

One vital difference existed between the Galician misery of the Old World and the Tenth Ward congestion of the new: there were jobs for willing and able employees in America. Nathan himself had three separate offers of employment in his first week in the country. The jobs might have been low paying and grueling, but they represented gainful employment nonetheless.

Common in the neighborhood were positions doing piecework in the garment business, much of the time accomplished in the same apartments in which the workers lived. A garment jobber might subcontract out batches of cut fabric for buttonholes, trim, or simple stitching, collecting the completed pieces from the sweatshop workers to return to the manufacturer. Almost half of New York City's workforce was engaged in clothing production. A pieceworker could earn up to ten dollars a week (compare this to Nathan's weekly wage of $4.50 at the luncheonette). Rent of a tenement apartment was usually around ten or twelve dollars a month.

Pushcarts were another common neighborhood livelihood. At the turn of the century, there were some twenty-five thousand of them on the Lower East Side. Hester Street in particular became something of a movable bazaar, nicknamed
chazermark
or “pig market” for its crowds and fulsome odors.

There were also shadier occupations available to newly arrived immigrants. Jewish gangsters Ben “Bugsy” Siegel and Meyer Lansky began their criminal careers as lowly stickup men on the Lower East Side. Street prostitution, brothels, and white slavery were commonplace enough to cause hand-wringing in the press and action by relief organizations. A survey of a Manhattan magistrate's court in 1908–09 revealed that three-quarters of the women arrested as prostitutes were Jewish.

Many immigrants sought livelihoods in the New World that were simply a natural continuation of what they had done in the old. Polish tailors became sweatshop pieceworkers in their new tenement homes. Former Ukrainian peddlers bought pushcarts and trolled Orchard Street for customers. There had been brothels in Galicia just as there were in the Tenth Ward.

What is today euphemistically called the “hospitality industry”—restaurants and hotels—had its Old World incarnation, too. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish entrepreneurs were among the only people licensed to sell alcohol and operate public houses and dining establishments in Poland, Galicia, and the Pale. Since the trade was seen as beneath the dignity of the Polish gentry, it was traditionally left to Jews to satisfy the demand.

Nathan had worked in bakeries in Galicia. His entry into the restaurant business in Manhattan could be seen as carrying on both a personal and a cultural tradition that had its roots in his eastern European past. For Nathan, restaurant work in America was the next step after having sold knishes in his homeland. The Delancey Street luncheonette catered to people just like him, the tenement masses in the densely populated Jewish neighborhoods all around. The language barrier wasn't absolute, since at least a few of the customers were ordering in Yiddish.

At that first food service job, he learned the tricks that would serve him well later, such as the proper way to make lemonade. His boss, the other Nathan, showed him how. “He didn't even have a glass to squeeze out the lemons. I had to squeeze with my hands. With a whole bushel of lemons, I put half a gallon of water in and squeezed them out.”

A contemporary board of health might look askance, but at the time, the practice was to put whole lemons into water and to hand-squeeze the citrus to release the essential oils from the skins. This gave the drink a fuller flavor.

Nathan continued the process. “I put another half a gallon of water in to wash all the peels for more juice, added another gallon in with the lemons, then put in four pounds of sugar.”

The final and most necessary step was to ensure the sugar melted in the bottom of the four-gallon lemonade pail. “There shouldn't be a lump of sugar at the bottom. My boss had me make lemonade and orangeade. He only had to show me once.”

Nathan's Old-Fashioned Lemonade

1 bushel (80–100) lemons, sliced or quartered

3
+
gallons water

4 pounds (8 cups) sugar

In a half gallon of the water, hand-squeeze the lemons, making sure to bruise the peels. Add additional half gallon of water. Add four pounds of sugar and the last gallons of water to taste, mixing thoroughly to dissolve the sugar.

*   *   *

Although the ghetto community of the Lower East Side might have tried hard to ignore it, there existed a wider world beyond the Tenth Ward. At the time of Nathan Handwerker's arrival, that wider world found itself in a tumult. The year 1912 was one of those transformative years in the United States, with repeated social upheavals, controversies, and battles roiling the body politic. To a greater or lesser degree, every one of the day's signal issues would impact the life and business of the greenhorn immigrant.

Even as the newcomer made his way as a luncheonette counterman, anti-immigration forces were pushing a bill through Congress that would require each new arrival to pass a literacy test. Such legislation would have denied entry into the United States to the functionally illiterate Nathan Handwerker. Only a veto by President Taft prevented the measure from becoming law.