Two Crossings

[DickZ]

This post is Part 1 of a 16-part story that describes an eastbound crossing of the Atlantic on the Queen Mary in 1936 by a Jewish couple who have vastly improved their lives since coming to the United States thirty years before. During the voyage on the Queen Mary, they recall their westbound journey which first brought them to America so many years ago, and which was made under much harsher conditions. They also describe their life between the two crossings.

Two Crossings, Part 1

“WOW!!”

Jordan Feingold’s jaw dropped when he saw the ship moored at the pier up ahead. It was so much larger than he had ever imagined. Until now, he had only seen pictures of the ocean liner, and the pictures didn’t come close to conveying the vessel’s immensity.

Jordan and his wife Sarah were in a taxicab approaching the pier where RMS Queen Mary was docked. It was August 25, 1936 and they were booked for passage to Southampton, England. The Queen had only been in service for a few months – she had left Southampton on May 27 for her maiden voyage to New York, and it took her just a little more than five days to cross the Atlantic.

The taxi dropped off the gawking soon-to-be-shipriders at Cunard’s Pier 90, which is so big that it stretches from 50th Street to 55th Street, at 12th Avenue in New York City’s harbor.

Statistics don’t mean much in describing a ship when you can’t see it, but the Queen Mary displaced over 80,000 tons and was more than 1,000 feet in length. Jordan knew these numbers and many others even before he saw the ship, but he was still flabbergasted by the sight of her. You just had to see the ship ‘in the flesh’ to comprehend her size.

Jordan and Sarah were taking the cruise to visit relatives in Poland. They were booked in second-class staterooms – they weren’t wealthy enough for first class – at least not yet. But they were doing pretty well, considering how they had started out in life, as well as the Depression that was now ravaging the land.

The Queen Mary had three classes of passengers – the third-class cabins were up in the bow area, second-class cabins were near the stern, and the first-class accommodations were amidships. Jordan had learned that the ship’s motions affect the bow and stern a lot more than they do the midships region, which explained the placement of the cabins. Knowing he would be on this ship for more than five days, he had studied enough to learn that the bow is the front part of the ship. The stern is the rear part, and the midships region is in the middle.

The pier was abuzz with activity and noise. The ship’s crew was loading the food required to feed the 2,500 passengers and the 950-person crew for the crossing, which would be almost 52,000 meals. Of course some of the meals were bigger and better than others, as the second-class passengers like Jordan and Sarah didn’t have the same menu that the first-class passengers would enjoy. Of course their food was better than what the third-class passengers would be getting. But on the Queen Mary, even the third-class passengers ate very well – especially when compared with people who weren’t making the cruise back then in August 1936 in the middle of the Depression.

All the Queen Mary’s provisions were bundled into massive packages that were hoisted by powerful cranes to several receiving stations aboard the ship, from which they were immediately struck down into the storerooms. There were three gangways for getting the people on board, one for each of the classes, and some passengers were already going aboard.

The first-class baggage was being loaded onto the ship by crew members, and taken to the owners’ cabins, but the other classes had to manage their own things. Of course, the second- and third-class passengers could flag down a willing porter to get some help, but then they had to give him a tip.

Jordan had heard about Jesse Owens winning four gold medals just a couple of weeks before at the Berlin Olympics, for the 100-meter dash, the 200-meter dash, the broad jump, and the 4 x 100-meter relay. This event had gotten a lot of publicity because of the two principal characters, at least as far as coverage in American newspapers – Adolf Hitler and Jesse Owens.

And Jordan and Sarah, who lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, had gone to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx to see their hometown heroes play the Washington Senators on August 12, where the Yankees had won 11-7. It was a particularly big hitting day for Lou Gehrig, the New York first baseman who was racking up an incredible streak of consecutive games played. By the end of the season, someone had figured out that he would have played in over 1,800 straight games, assuming of course he didn’t get hurt in the process.

Jordan and Sarah found a porter to take their steamer trunk to their cabin. They went up their second-class gangway back aft, and checked in with the purser aboard the ship. The purser told them how to get to their cabin and gave them a little map of the ship so they could find their way around. The ship was as big as some towns that Jordan and Sarah had been to in recent years, and they knew lots of people who came from towns much smaller than this ship.

They took a little stroll around the after end of the ship, which is where all the second-class living spaces were located. The first thing they wanted to find was their cabin, of course, but then they made sure they could find the dining room, which was almost as important as their cabin. Then they sought out the other places they could go – lounges and auditoriums and things like that where they could go for entertainment.

They noticed that the time for getting underway was fast approaching, so they stopped their familiarization tour and went topside to watch how the ship left the pier.

There were four levels they could watch from – the main deck and three levels above that. Jordan chose the topmost level because it offered the best view of everything. Sarah felt uneasy from that extreme height – remembering something that had happened many years before – something that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

It greatly magnified her discomfort when she saw one of the ship’s crew carrying a small triangle, one that musicians use, that is. This triangle was used to announce various shipboard events, depending on the number of strokes rapped out by the crewmember. Jordan knew the various signals such as for luncheon, dinner, evening entertainment, as these were included in the handout describing the ship.

Sarah held Jordan’s right arm very tightly with both of her hands and she struggled to keep from closing her eyes, which would show the fear that she was trying so hard to suppress.

[DickZ]

...
If there is any interest expressed in this Part 1, I would be very pleased to continue....
Well, I guess there isn't much interest, or at least not enough for anybody to say anything.

It's actually a very good story if you're at all interested in the life of immigrants coming to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, regardless of their nationality. And if you're interested in Jewish immigrants in particular, it's even more than a very good story.

Rather than taking up lots of space here with a long story that nobody is interested in, I'll just send it by private message to the few of you who have contacted me backchannel about it.

I'd be glad to send it to others if they care to come forward.

[AuntShecky]

Hey, where's the next installment?

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Part 2

Jordan and Sarah watched as the mooring lines were taken aboard at 5 PM – late enough to get all the provisions and passengers aboard, but still early enough so the passengers would be able to watch the entire operation of getting the mammoth ship out to sea before daylight disappeared. Tugboats began pulling the vessel clear of the pier and continued blasting with their steam whistles. The tugs brought the ship out into the Hudson River and turned her so she could begin moving forward toward the open sea on her own power. Fireboats accompanied the stately ocean liner, shooting up geysers of water to celebrate her departure.

Sarah was starting to feel more comfortable now, even though she was still so high above the water. Over time, she had learned to live with her fears and to accept the fact that some things would never be completely forgotten, but life had to continue anyway. However, that was sometimes easier said than done, and as hard as she tried, she occasionally failed to ignore what she knew should be ignored.

As the ship proceeded toward the open sea, Jordan and Sarah marveled at the Empire State Building, the pride of the city’s skyline for five years now. It was the tallest building in the world, and had already become a noted landmark. They had even watched the movie King Kong when it first came out, as the building played a major role in the movie. While the building was obviously visible from just about anywhere in the city itself, it somehow seemed so much more majestic when viewed from the water.

As the Queen Mary continued onward, they started coming up behind the Statue of Liberty. When you approach New York from Europe, you first sight the statue’s front, so you are welcomed by her to the land she represents. But when you’re leaving, you see her backside first. Jordan and Sarah agreed that it was more exciting to see the statue when you were arriving at New York and not departing. And there was Ellis Island off in the distance.

Jordan just thought briefly about that first crossing he had made 33 years ago – going the other way – long before he knew Sarah. He told himself he would reflect more intensely on that first crossing a little later. For now, he wanted to enjoy this second voyage – he could turn back the clock later in the cruise.

The fireboats and the tugs had now returned to the harbor as the Queen Mary slowly built up her speed. She was going for the Blue Riband, the prize awarded to the ocean liner that completes the crossing at the highest speed.

The sea was almost like glass so there was very little in the way of ship motions as the Queen continued surging through the water faster and faster. Because of the ship’s speed, the wind began to become quite noticeable, despite the fact that Jordan and Sarah were back on the after end of the ship, which was pretty well protected by a large deckhouse forward of them.

All the sights of New York were now well astern as the ship plowed onward, and it looked like the propellers were really working hard at churning up the water astern of them, which sent a noticeable spray upward. Only a school of dolphins was still with them. The dolphins did their best to keep up, but the ship was going much too fast for them. Soon they too faded into the distance astern.

Jordan and Sarah decided that they had better go to the dining room, as the triangle strokes announcing their seating had ceased a few minutes ago and they didn’t want to risk missing any meals. They had heard about how fantastic the food was on the Queen Mary. They were already dressed for dinner, knowing that watching the departure would take them right up to the dinner hour – they owned a clothing shop that dealt in clothes both for men and for women. They weren’t wearing formalwear this evening, but that would come later in the cruise.

On the Queen Mary, even the second-class dining hall was luxurious. Now of course it didn’t approach the first-class dining room. If it did, then Cunard wouldn’t have been able to sell first-class tickets. And it was the first-class tickets that provided a majority of their profits, for the years that they made a profit. That wasn’t every year.

On their way to the dining room, Jordan and Sarah met a couple from Clydebank, Scotland and they agreed to eat at the same table. Ralph and Eunice Wimpole had come over on the previous Queen Mary westbound run, as Ralph worked for John Brown & Company, the shipyard where the Queen had been built. He was assigned to check out various layout features of the ship to make sure they worked as well in practice as they were projected to during the design process. While Ralph didn’t want to talk shop for the whole meal, nor did anybody else want him to, he did offer just a few little tidbits on the background of the Queen Mary.

Cunard, the company that had operated RMS Mauretania and RMS Lusitania and so many other well-known ocean liners, was the owner when construction began. They started building the Queen in 1930 but by December of 1931, the full force of the world-wide Depression hit Scotland, and construction had to be stopped.

Similar problems were going on with the White Star Line, Cunard’s primary rival. White Star had owned RMS Titanic and RMS Olympic, and was now building RMS Oceanic at Harland & Wolff in Belfast, Ireland, but also had to stop due to the financial conditions. Cunard and White Star found that by merging their companies and pooling their resources, they could complete the Queen Mary.

One other interesting note about the ship came up during dinner. It seems as though the ship was known only as Hull 534 until the launch. There was a rumor – Ralph wasn’t sure if it was true or not – that the Cunard people really intended to name the ship Victoria, which fit in with their pattern of names ending in ‘-ia.’ But they somehow got crossed up by a poorly-worded question to the wrong person. The legend goes that when the chairman of Cunard asked King George V for permission to name the ship (a required formality) after “England's most illustrious queen” (meaning Queen Victoria), the king replied that his wife Mary would be delighted! The king apparently had different views on the term “most illustrious queen” than Cunard had. However, having gone that far, there was no way anyone could tell the king that no, they meant someone other than his wife.

For the rest of the meal, they chatted about their respective children and just a little bit about the political situation in Europe. After dinner tonight they all proceeded to the second-class ballroom. Jordan and Sarah were looking forward to a Gilbert and Sullivan performance tomorrow, but for the first evening at sea, the Gilbert and Sullivan troupe was giving their show in first class.

Now going to the ballroom instead of watching Gilbert and Sullivan wasn’t such a big sacrifice, because Jordan and Sarah loved to dance. Shortly after they first met many years ago, they took dancing lessons from a guy their age by the name of Nathan Birnbaum. This Birnbaum fellow would often meet the ferryboats bringing the newly-arrived immigrants from Ellis Island, and would drum up business for B.B.’s College of Dancing at Avenue B and 2nd Street by telling them in Yiddish that dancing was a requirement for citizenship. Now that wasn’t where Jordan and Sarah met him, because they had both come over long before Nathan became a dancing teacher. They met Nathan at shul – the same shul (rhymes with pull) where they had met each other just a few months before they met him.

After taking several lessons, Jordan and Sarah got to polish their skills at an endless series of weddings and bar mitzvahs, which were some of their major entertainment sources for a long time. But we’ll get into all of that later in the story.

Nathan didn’t remain a dancing teacher all his life, though. He met a shiksa (a non-Jewish woman for those of you who find this to be an unintelligible word) and they developed a vaudeville act together. Then they got married. After a while Nathan Birnbaum changed his name to the more American sounding George Burns, which matched her American sounding Gracie Allen, and they eventually worked their way up from vaudeville to radio. Now they were at the height of their careers, using routines on the radio like this:


Gracie: “George, will you drop this letter to my mother into a mailbox when you go out?”
George: “But Gracie, there’s no stamp on it.”
Gracie: “Of course there’s no stamp on it – the envelope is empty. Why should I pay for sending an empty envelope?”
George: “Well, then a better question might be ‘Why are you sending your mother an empty envelope?’ ”
Gracie: “Oh, George. Don’t be silly – that’s easy. I’m mad at Mother and I’m not speaking to her.”
The Feingolds and the Wimpoles started dancing, as the orchestra was playing all the great songs from 1935 and ’36. They started with one of Sarah’s favorites, The Way You Look Tonight, and moved on to I’ve Got You Under My Skin. Other current songs the orchestra played that evening included Cheek to Cheek, Red Sails in the Sunset, and When I Grow Too Old to Dream.

One of their favorite waltzes dating back to the 1890s started up, which they considered as maybe the best waltz music they knew. They were ecstatic to be able to waltz to this piece, but they were distressed to know the dancing would be finished for the evening after the last note died down.


After the ball is over,
After the break of morn –
After the dancers' leaving;
After the stars are gone;
Jordan and Sarah really put their hearts into this one – they didn’t do fancy flourishes, but just moved down the line of dance – always gliding like iceskaters – sometimes Jordan driving Sarah backwards, sometimes Sarah driving Jordan backwards, but usually rotating counterclockwise slowly as they gracefully continued down the line.


Many a heart is aching,
If you could read them all;
Many the hopes that have vanished
After the ball.

[ampoule]

Are you by any chance a ballroom dancer?

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Part 3

Between Red Sails in the Sunset and When I Grow Too Old to Dream in the ballroom on the first evening of the Queen Mary’s eastbound crossing, Jordan and Sarah met another couple right in the middle of the dance floor – this one from Dearborn, Michigan. John Foster was an executive with the Ford Motor Company, and his wife was named Beverly. John was enroute to the Trafford Park automobile plant that Ford had established many years prior, near Manchester in England, where John explained they had to do everything backwards because those Loony Limeys drive on the wrong side of the road. They all got along very well, and the Feingolds later introduced them to their dinner partners, Ralph and Eunice Wimpole from Scotland, after which John Foster couldn’t tell his tale about Loony Limeys driving on the wrong side of the road anymore.

They talked for just a few minutes following the last note of After the Ball, and decided they were all exhausted. They all agreed to rendezvous for the second sitting of breakfast the following morning, even though this would require getting a larger table. Then they went back to their respective cabins.

Now Jordan and Sarah had been relatively successful in their clothing shop business for several years now, but they still lived somewhat modestly at home. They found the dining room and their cabin to be rather overwhelming, and somewhat out of character with themselves. And it was certainly a far cry from what they had before they came to this country, and for many years after they arrived, but tonight they were just too tired to give much thought to their more humble beginnings. Maybe later. For now, they just hung up their clothes, got washed up, and plopped into their bed. Jordan fell asleep almost immediately. Sarah stayed awake, holding him and humming “After the ball is over . . . ” But before she even finished one stanza, she too was sound asleep.

At breakfast on the first full day at sea, the Fosters talked a little about their work with automobiles, which had really begun booming in the 1920s but had fallen off considerably when the Depression slammed into the entire planet with the arrival of the new decade. John was one of the team that implemented the new assembly line techniques that allowed Ford to produce quality automobiles at prices low enough so much of the population could afford them. The automobile, radio, and talking motion pictures, were making life so much more interesting than it had been before they came along. John seemed to take a lot of pride in having helped.

The Wimpoles talked a little more about their work at the John Brown shipyard in Scotland, building liners like the Queen Mary and other vessels. They also built warships, but after the Great War, there had been somewhat of a tendency to cut back in this area. In fact, Ralph mentioned the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22, which had been the first disarmament conference in history. It was also the first large international conference ever held in the United States. There were nine nations in attendance, and they were wise enough to cut back dramatically on the sizes of the navies of countries like Great Britain and the United States. Cutting back would assure that there would be no more major wars like the Great War that had finally ended three years prior, and then nobody would have to worry about a repetition of that nightmare. These folks had figured out that if we don’t have any armaments, then we couldn’t possibly be dragged into a war. Of course, Ralph went on to explain that now, in 1936, there were beginning to be rumblings about the navies of Japan and Germany, and their armies too, which were even more frightening. Maybe those geniuses who had been wise enough to cut back dramatically after the Great War to prevent another Great War weren’t actually so clever after all.

When it was the Feingolds’ turn to share some of their background with their new friends, all the others wanted to know a little more about their lives before they came to the United States. Now Jordan had figured that since the Fosters had talked about automobiles and the Wimpoles had discussed shipbuilding, he would be expected to discuss something about the clothing shop that he and Sarah owned. But he was overruled by the others, who were probably intrigued by the accents that each of the Feingolds had.

Jordan told how he was born in 1893 when his family was living in Vitebsk, Russia. He explained that Vitebsk was called a gubernia, which is something like what is called a state in the United States or a province in other countries.

The gubernia of Vitebsk was comprised of lots of small loosely-connected towns, which the Jews called shtetls (rhymes with settles). For instance, Jordan was born in the shtetl of Kublitz. His father was a 21-year old tailor, and they lived in an unpainted wooden house with dirt floors, and this wasn’t limited to just the Jews. Just about everybody in the shtetl had an unpainted wooden house with dirt floors, and if they lived in the nice downtown section, like the Feingolds, and if it didn’t rain, they were lucky enough to have a dry dirt street running by their house. Of course, when it rained, they weren’t so lucky because the dirt street turned into an impassable muddy quagmire.

They wouldn’t even have understood the concept of an unpainted versus a painted house were it not for the very few homes that belonged to wealthy residents, which were much more luxurious – made of painted wood, or stone, or brick, and designed to look attractive to the eye.

Vitebsk was located in the Pale of Settlement, which was a portion of Russia that Jews were required to live in, if they wanted to be treated nicely. Just over half Vitebsk’s population of 70,000 was Jewish. Since being treated nicely consisted of having hordes of Cossack horsemen ride through their neighborhoods and set fire to their houses, the Jews didn’t want to find out what it would be like to be treated harshly, so most of them stayed in the Pale.

Jacob and Hannah Feingold, Jordan’s parents, were friends of Michol and Rose Zinman, who were also in their early 20s, and just starting their family as well. The Zinmans had a daughter named Sonia who was born in 1894 in another shtetl – one called Paperniya, because all the Jews had to leave Kublitz after a raucous round of house-burning. Michol was a miller, who ground wheat into flour.

Now not all the Jews lived within the Pale, but the vast majority did. Jordan’s family wasn’t one of these ornery renegades who dared to live where they were forbidden to live, and the Feingolds moved to Vitebsk within the Pale several years before Jordan came along.

When John Foster asked where they lived before they moved to the Pale, Jordan had to admit that he didn’t even know – he had waited to ask his parents things like that until his parents were no longer capable of talking or remembering. Jordan had promised himself to write down all of his own experiences, as well as Sarah’s, so their children wouldn’t be faced with that same kind of information shortfall about what happened before their arrival in the world. Of course, he hadn’t done it yet – maybe when he got to Southampton. Or maybe when he returned to New York. Or maybe some other time because it’s always easier to put off this onerous chore until later, rather than doing it now.

Jordan described the unpainted wooden synagogue that each shtetl had, and how they were able to spend lots of time praying and studying, mainly because their lives were so austere that there wasn’t much else to do when their work was finished. Each shtetl also had a heder, which was a classroom for studying religious material. And nobody has more religious material to study than the Jews, so Jordan spent countless hours learning his lessons in the Talmud, sitting in a poorly-lit heder run by Reb Moshe who didn’t remember what it was like to be young and think about things other than the Mishnah and the Gemara, the two components that make up the Talmud. Jordan often would have preferred going out into the woods to watch the birds and rabbits, but he had to uphold the traditions that can be learned only in heder.

After a while, and after several major pogroms in the area (which Jordan explained to be where the Cossack horsemen ride through the area and not only set fires, but kill people as well), it appeared to lots of these Jews that living in the Pale wasn’t all that much better than living in the rest of Russia, which was downright terrible. So slowly, some of the braver pioneers tried going to faraway places that they had only heard about – places like the United States, or Canada, or England. This had begun a few years before Jordan was born, but it was still a slow trickle.

So both the Feingolds and the Zinmans, along with most of the other Jewish families who started in Kublitz, kept moving from shtetl to shtetl. It took either a great deal of courage to leave for a land overseas, or a traumatic experience much worse than seeing your house burned in front of your eyes. The Feingolds and Zinmans discussed moving to a distant land on several occasions, and agreed that for the time being, they would stay in Vitebsk, where all their relatives lived, despite the need to keep moving. They had to go from Kublitz to Paperniya and then to Sussa, and then to Disna, and then back to Paperniya again, over just a six-year period.

Crossing the ocean was difficult for someone from a small shtetl to do, despite the hardships they experienced in the Pale of Settlement, which is why it required people with the pioneer spirit to take those first steps. Regardless of how bad a known place might be, the unknown for many of us is even more frightening. Leaving one’s parents behind or their brothers and sisters or in some cases, one’s children, and moving to a new world wasn’t something that just anybody could do – especially at first. Of course, one’s willingness to leave depends heavily on just how bad the known place is. It was getting to be pretty bad after Jordan had been born in 1893, but not bad enough to leave.

Once the stories started coming back from the pioneers about the advantages of taking this frightening step into the black unknown, it slowly became a little easier, but it was still traumatic to say the least. Until 1903, the Feingolds stayed in Vitebsk and put up with the occasional house-burning as best they could.

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Part 4

After talking about his background with shtetls and heders and pogroms for an hour during and after breakfast, Jordan said he felt uncomfortable monopolizing the conversation like this. He suggested that they take a break, go topside and get some fresh air for the rest of the morning, and then meet for lunch when the triangle strokes signaled it was again time to eat.

But just before they left the dining room, Jordan and Sarah looked around and marveled at its magnificence, just as they did last evening at dinner. There was a huge map covering the forward bulkhead (front wall) of the room, showing the Atlantic Ocean, western Europe and the eastern United States, carved into polished wood. This map showed the route of the Queen Mary – it wasn’t quite as elaborate as a similar map in the first-class dining room, but it was still breath-taking.

There was mahogany paneling all over the place, and several mahogany-covered columns which helped to keep the overhead above (that thing we call a ceiling in a building) from crashing down onto the diners below. All the tables were covered with starched bright white tablecloths with matching napkins, and were set with beautiful sterling silver the likes of which Jordan and Sarah had never seen before. The dishes were Blue Delft china, called “restaurant class” so they wouldn’t compete with the even more elegant dishes used in the first-class dining room. Their water and wine were held in Waterford crystalware. Jordan and Sarah didn’t have things like this at home.

They looked at each other and smiled sheepishly at the idea of using such lavish dinnerware, thinking about – but not discussing – what they had used not too many years ago. Getting accustomed to their vastly improving situation wasn’t as easy as they had hoped, but they were still very anxious to leave their previous life as far behind them as they could, and as fast as they could.

The Feingolds went out on deck and strolled it all the way from the stern to the bow. There was a special route through the midships region so that they couldn’t stray into the first class accommodations. When they got up to the bow area, they checked out the small Jewish chapel that the Queen Mary carried. Very few ocean liners had Jewish chapels, but the Queen did. It was 12 ft by 15 ft, and was called The Scroll Room, because the Torah (Five Books of Moses) is in the form of a parchment scroll mounted on two wooden rollers so the reader can turn to the desired place in the book by rotating the rollers.

After a brief stop in the chapel, where they offered thanks for the many blessings that had been bestowed on them, Jordan and Sarah returned to the second-class area back aft, and checked out the shuffleboard area. They got some quick instruction on the intricacies and strategy involved in the cut-throat game of shuffleboard from one of the Queen Mary crewmembers, because this was a game they had never played before. The Lower East Side had very few shuffleboard venues, if any at all, in the period from 1903 to 1936. Maybe there were some on Fifth Avenue where the mansions were, but not on the Lower East Side with its tenements. Neither Jordan nor Sarah had ever been invited to anything on Fifth Avenue.

After they had pretty much gotten the idea behind the secrets of shuffleboard, they met George and Harriet Fleming, who were looking for some opponents to play. George was an executive with the National Broadcasting Company, and it turned out that he was responsible for the operations of radio stations in the New England area. The radio had been one of the major factors in improving people’s lives during the early part of the twentieth century, as it put information and entertainment directly into people’s homes. There had been American newspapers since before the American Revolution, and there had been plays performed in theaters even longer than that. But the radio added a new dimension by being right there in everyone’s living room. This was considered to be almost as great a step forward as the railroads had been in the previous century.

For lunch, they met the Wimpoles and the Fosters again, but Jordan resisted their efforts to have him resume the story of how he got to America. He suggested that maybe Ralph Wimpole, the Scotsman, could explain the British game of cricket to them because this was a game that nobody played in America. However, after about thirty minutes into the explanation, Jordan noticed that Sarah’s eyes were starting to glaze over and her facial color was vanishing, so he changed the subject to the Olympics that had just concluded in Berlin. After that, Sarah’s eyes started looking more normal again and her usually rosy complexion began coming back.

The Feingolds spent the afternoon with their new friends from shuffleboard, George and Harriet Fleming, the radio people. George and Harriet lived in Boston, and were avid Red Sox fans. Jordan and Sarah, although they had never actually played baseball, had become fanatic rooters for the New York Yankees. So they talked about their respective teams, how each was doing now, and about new prospects who were coming up – like Joe Dimaggio who was now up with the Yankees for his first season, and Ted Williams who was still on a Red Sox farm team. Since the Flemings were such diehard Red Sox fans, Sarah didn’t tell them about the big sign she would always take to Yankee Stadium to hold up for all to see when Boston was visiting – it said “Red Sox are Meshuganeh!!!”

They met the Wimpoles and the Fosters for dinner, where the Feingolds were treated to lots of kosher food that was very familiar to them, and yet at the same time, very different. The Feingolds were still maintaining their rigid dietary restrictions, but these meals on the Queen Mary were so much more elaborate than the kosher meals they had eaten before. The food was the same – it just looked so different on Delft china, and there was so much more of it. And the Queen Mary added a nice personal touch by having on their staff a little old lady wearing a babushka-like kerchief. She went around to all the tables where the kosher meals were being served and exhorted the diners to “EAT!! EAT!!” with a Yiddish accent and with all the related facial and hand gestures, just to make them feel at home.

After dinner, they went to the Gilbert and Sullivan performance, which both Jordan and Sarah had come to love in recent years – years in which they didn’t have to devote 110% of their energy to no-frills survival. Tonight they were doing The Gondoliers, which Jordan and Sarah thought was a very underrated performance. They both liked the better-known The Mikado, Pirates of Penzance, and HMS Pinafore, all of which were certainly great. But there was something about The Gondoliers that made it their favorite.

They had heard the term tuneful applied as a measure of comparing Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and they considered The Gondoliers to be the most tuneful of them all. While the melodies were the most important yardstick for the Feingolds, they also appreciated the cleverness in the story and in the individual lines of the performance. All Gilbert and Sullivan works had that to varying degrees, but they thought The Gondoliers was the best of them all. And the very colorful costumes of the gondoliers working the canals of Venice added a great deal as well.

One of the Feingolds’ favorite parts for clever humor was when the gondoliers were singing about a society in which everyone would be equal, and how great that would be – at least until everyone realized what had happened as a result of achieving equality for all in that society:


For every one who feels inclined,
Some post we undertake to find
Congenial with his frame of mind
And all shall equal be.

The Earl, the Marquis, and the Dook,
The Groom, the Butler, and the Cook,
The Aristocrat who banks with Coutts,
The Aristocrat who hunts and shoots,
The Aristocrat who cleans the boots,
The Noble Lord who rules the State,
The Noble Lord who cleans the plate,
The Noble Lord who scrubs the grate,
The Lord High Bishop orthodox,
The Lord High Coachman on the box,
The Lord High Vagabond in the stocks.At this point, Jordan was tapping away with his left foot, trying to keep time with the very catchy tune. Sarah gently put her hand on his knee to tell him without words not to get too carried away, since they were in public after all.


For every one who feels inclined,
Some post we undertake to find
Congenial with his frame of mind
And all shall equal be.

Sing high, sing low,
Wherever they go,
They all shall equal be!And then the final touch on this concept of the society with all being equal:


In short, whoever you may be,
To this conclusion you'll agree,
When every one is somebodee,
Then no one's anybody!

Now that's as plain as plain can be,
To this conclusion we agree

When every one is somebodee,
Then no one's anybody.Considering that the operetta had been first performed in 1889, they figured it was quite astute of Gilbert and Sullivan to be so far ahead of their time in discussing such a society of equals. The old musicians knew that long before the first society of equals was established, that such a society couldn’t remain a society of equals for very long.

The long-lost king of Barataria was finally identified and crowned, and the performance concluded with its final dancing of the cachucha, the fandango, and the bolero. Then the Feingolds, Wimpoles, and Fosters all agreed to adjourn to one of the lounges for a brief nightcap.

During the nightcap, Jordan relented and started his description of the overland trip from Vitebsk to Glasgow, Scotland, that he and his family began in late February 1903. Now it just so happened that the infamous Kishinev pogroms had started on April 6, but the Feingolds had already finished their journey to Glasgow by then, and were actually in the middle of the Atlantic at that point, so those pogroms had nothing to do with their leaving. What had finally settled it for them was the letter from friends who had made the journey to America three years earlier, who were saying life was so much better in New York than it was in Vitebsk. They even said the streets were paved with gold in New York, but the Feingolds didn’t really know what gold was, so that had very little to do with their decision to go. They just wanted a chance to live without torches being carried through whichever shtetl they happened to be in at the time, and having to constantly change their lodgings from one hovel to another.

Jordan was now ten years old and his family by this time included two brothers and two sisters who had come along after him. His parents Jacob and Hannah had been saving for many years, expecting that things would get so bad that they would have no choice but to leave Russia. All that saving required that they do without even more things than they were doing without before, which was almost everything there was. Jacob talked his trip over with Michol Zinman, his friend the miller who also had a new and growing family, but Michol wasn’t ready to take that mammoth step yet.

So the Zinmans walked the Feingolds over to the nearest railroad stop, gave them big good-bye hugs and wishes for luck in the New World, and helped them board the train.

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Part 5

When the sun came up dead ahead of the Queen Mary on her second full day at sea, the Feingolds were already awake, washed, and dressed. Three minutes before the triangle strokes announced their sitting for breakfast, they were in their seats at the table in the dining room. The Wimpoles and the Fosters arrived a couple minutes later.

Ralph Wimpole explained that he understood Jordan’s reluctance to monopolize the conversation with his tales of coming to America, thinking that others should be allowed to tell something about themselves as well. But Ralph went on to say that the Queen Mary was moving so fast in her quest to win the prized Blue Riband speed record that Jordan had to continue with his story uninterrupted by others, or he would never finish by the time the ship arrived in England. John Foster seconded Ralph’s suggestion, so Jordan agreed to continue the tale with an aim of finishing just the highlights before the ship was tied up alongside the pier in Southampton. The details could take forever, and they probably wouldn’t be interested in too many gruesome details anyway.

So Jordan resumed the saga.

While still in Vitebsk, Jacob Feingold, Jordan’s father, had learned that RMS Anchoria, a 30-year old British ship that was powered by both steam propulsion and sails, would be leaving Glasgow, Scotland for New York City on March 31, 1903. The Feingolds had also learned from those who had gone before them in making the journey that you not only had to have enough money for steamship tickets, as well as the railroad fare to reach the departure port from which your steamship sailed, but you also had to have some extra cash to bribe various officials along the way, especially at border crossings in eastern Europe.

Everything went smoothly for the Feingolds in the overland trip, but that was an exception. For many people, getting to the seaport was no small feat, and lots of others trying to reach ports of departure encountered many challenges. Some never made it to their ships and had to return home.

Jacob and Hannah Feingold, along with their children Jordan (10 years old), Abraham (9), Bella (7), Golda (6), and Moshe (4) pulled into the Glasgow railroad station on March 29th, two days ahead of their ship’s scheduled departure. They were lucky enough to be housed by an organization called Jewish Aid Scotland, because otherwise they would have been short on money. They had to try to arrive early, so as to be sure they didn’t miss the ship’s sailing due to an unforeseen snag in getting there, and it turned out that they arrived too early. But Jewish Aid Scotland was well aware of such situations, and was prepared to help those embarking on their journeys to the New World.

Having lived their entire lives in shtetls, regardless of how many different shtetls there had been, the Feingolds were anything but worldly. This ocean voyage to a faraway land was as frightening to them as just about anything could have been, including Cossacks with torches coming to burn down their house. Onboard they were to be lodged in what was called steerage, because it was a set of compartments back aft near the rudder and steering gear, well below the main deck. The main deck was the one where you could get some fresh air. Steerage was the economy class of the day.

The term steerage was eventually extended to cover similar compartments up in the forward portion of the ship as well, even though there were no steering systems up there. The steamship companies gradually recognized that the more immigrants they could carry, the more money they would make, so they increased the size of their steerage accommodations as much as they could, and with the drive for profits being what it is, they squeezed them in more tightly.

At least the Feingolds had lots of company – if that was any consolation. The Anchoria carried 800 passengers in steerage, as well as 100 in first class and 200 in second class. None of the other steerage passengers were from Vitebsk, but there were lots of other Russians, and even more Yiddish-speaking folks from other countries. Just before embarking, Jacob and Hannah met Mendel and Pepi Ghetzler, a young Jewish couple from Bucharest, Romania, who were hoping to make it to Chicago with their two children Moritz and Amelia. Moritz was two years old, and little Amelia was only six months. The Ghetzlers had taken freight trains from Bucharest to Glasgow to catch the ship. They had cousins in Chicago who were expecting Mendel to help them in their brand new photography shop. He was 29 years old and had opened a photography shop in Bucharest, but when the word got out to those in the neighborhood that the Ghetzlers were Jewish, problems began cropping up. That was when the Ghetzlers decided to journey west.

At noon on March 31st, the Anchoria got underway, cleared the harbor at Glasgow, and pointed her bow toward the New World. Everybody had to be in their assigned compartments for getting underway, so the Feingolds and the Ghetzlers and all the others, including Italians, Irishmen, Germans, Poles, and Russians, were down below and checking out their berthing area. There were stacked berths, seven high in each stack. There wasn’t much room between the stacks, and once you were in your berth there wasn’t much room above. If you got into bed on your stomach, you stayed there for the whole time because you couldn’t roll over. Tossing and turning in bed wasn’t possible in steerage.

Once the vessel cleared the harbor, she started rolling and the people in steerage weren’t used to this. None of them had even seen an oceangoing vessel before, much less ridden one on a journey of almost four thousand miles. The first seasick passenger earned that distinction three minutes after the ship passed the Port Glasgow Beacon and headed for the open sea.

Now when you’ve got a lot of people cooped up in a compartment on a ship that is rolling even just a little bit, it doesn’t take any more than just one individual to trigger a raucous round of heaving for everybody else in the place. Well, that’s exactly what happened as the Anchoria set her course for America, and for most of the eleven-day journey, the sickness continued almost on a non-stop basis.

Since nobody could survive eleven days of continual seasickness, the only thing that saved the steerage passengers was the ability to put some of the people topside on the open main deck with its fresh air. A take-charge Italian woman named Sophia Scala organized the unwieldy group of disparate nationalities into a team, asking for a representative of each nationality to form a coordination committee. With lots of effort and lots of sign language, the committee set up a rotation scheme to insure that everybody had their equal turn topside.

Mrs. Scala also organized cleaning teams to try to maintain some sort of decent conditions down below, since it quickly became obvious that the ship’s crew had neither the manpower nor the inclination to keep up with a never-ending problem. Each nationality joined in, taking turns, to help keep the toilets and the sinks in a presentable manner despite the adverse conditions. Hannah Feingold and Pepi Ghetzler worked on the Yiddish cleaning team, which included Jewish women from Russia, Poland, Romania, Austria-Hungary, and Germany.

The smell of disinfectant joined with the smell of the seasickness. While one might hope they would cancel each other out, they didn’t. But at least it was better to have the combined smells than to have just those from seasickness.

Every now and then, the ship would hit a smooth patch of weather. If the cleaning teams had kept up with their work well enough that the smell of the compartment would let the passengers develop an appetite, barrels of herring and sardines were moved in, along with crackers and rye bread.

This coordinated teamwork among nationalities was a prelude to the melting pot that most of the newly-arrived immigrants would later willingly jump into after they settled into their respective homes ashore. At the same time, however, each of the nationalities stuck together for a feeling of security, apart from the others. Each nationality would sing its own ethnic songs and tell its own ethnic stories to help pass the time at sea. Some of the new immigrants remained in this mode for their entire lives once they reached their new homes, feeling more secure when they were with their own kind.

And with there always being a spoil-sport who never lets up even for a moment, heder began for all qualified young boys on the second day at sea. Jordan began wondering just how far he had to go to get away from Talmud lessons. His brother Abraham, who was one year younger, could put up with the lessons much better than Jordan. And their sister Golda, who was only six, was even more interested in Talmud than either of the boys. She couldn’t read yet, but she had heard some of the discussions arising from the Talmud lessons. She actually understood some of them, and even found them to be interesting, which perplexed Jordan to no end.

She would always ask her father, “Papa, why can’t I go to heder like Jordan and Abie?” Every time she asked, Jacob would patiently tell her that heder was only for the boys. She considered this to be very unfair, because she had learned quite a bit from Jordan when he came home from school, and knew quite a bit more than he did about the studies.

So when they were up on the main deck after the class had been dismissed, Golda asked Jordan to go over the material they had just studied in heder. Since Jordan really loved his little Goldeleh (three syllables, GOLD eh leh), despite her deplorable affinity for Talmud, he agreed and they went over today’s lesson for an hour out in the fresh air. The ship’s motions were actually better than they had been since leaving Glasgow, and there was very little bouncing around.

After the hour had passed, he noticed that Golda was rubbing her eyes so he said “That’s enough for today, Goldeleh. You’re getting tired.” When she said that she wasn’t tired in the least, and that she wanted to keep studying, he said “Well, I’m tired. So we’ve had enough. Let’s go see if it’s time to eat yet.”

They went down into their berthing compartment and found that dinner had already been served, and that their mother Hannah had scooped some herring out of the barrel into her shawl for them to eat when they came down. They had the herring with some crackers.

Due to the adverse conditions down below in steerage, every voyage suffered some casualties of the crossing. The ship crew’s approach to this scenario was to ‘bury’ the bodies immediately, which in this case meant simply dropping them over the side. Mothers wrapped their dead babies in blankets to hide them from the crewmembers responsible for ‘burials.’ Sometimes they succeeded and were able to get their babies ashore in New York – more often they didn’t, and the bodies were wrenched away from the sobbing mothers and were tossed into the sea. Hannah tried her best to console some of the mothers who had lost children in this cruel manner, but it didn’t seem to help much.

On their eleventh day at sea, April 10, 1903, the Statue of Liberty emerged from the mists ahead and Jordan was up on deck when it happened. At ten years of age, he wasn’t quite ready to have a full appreciation for what he was now seeing, but he still knew it was something important.

He didn’t know it yet, but in a few years he would learn that a Jewish woman named Emma Lazarus had written a poem that appears at the base of the Statue of Liberty. The end of its first stanza reads:


Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!For now, all Jordan knew was that there was an immense and beautiful woman holding up a torch off in the distance, and that the torch was coming closer. His first reaction was to think it was another torch coming to burn down his house again, but he soon realized the lady with her lamp was actually welcoming him to a new life in a new land.

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Part 6

It was now eleven o’clock in the morning onboard the Queen Mary, as Jordan made sure to delay the seasickness part of his westbound crossing story until after everybody had finished eating their breakfast. That took the completion of the story until well after breakfast. They agreed to take a short break and re-convene at the second sitting for lunch, to hear all about a place called Ellis Island.

The Wimpoles had remembered seeing Ellis Island when they were topside on the Queen Mary while she was leaving New York, but the Fosters had been down in their cabin at the time. To the Wimpoles and the Fosters both, Ellis Island was really just a name – they had both heard of it in passing – something or other to do with new immigrants – but that was all.

The Feingolds wandered back to the shuffleboard area and sure enough, the Flemings, he of NBC radio, were there again and hoping for another fierce contest like they had yesterday. George Fleming was quick to point out that they had already gotten yesterday’s baseball results from the radio room, and his beloved Red Sox had beaten the Detroit Tigers by a score of 7-0. Sarah asked if the league standings were included in the news reports, and the George went on to say that despite a Yankee loss to the St. Louis Browns by a score of 5-2, the New York team was still leading the second place team, the Cleveland Indians, by 12-1/2 games. And despite the Red Sox victory coupled with the Yankee loss, the New Yorkers were still leading Boston by 19-1/2 games! Sarah was thoughtful enough to contain her glee at the news that her beloved Yankees were so far in front of everyone else, since she was in the company of Red Sox fans. She knew how she would feel if the situation were reversed, so she didn’t gloat about it – at least not in a visible way.

Seeing that the Flemings were so down in the dumps about how the Red Sox were doing this season, the Feingolds tried to curb their competitive fire that yesterday had driven them to a resounding victory on the shuffleboard court in their very first chance at playing this game. Of course, they hadn’t told the Flemings that they had never played the game before. The Flemings emerged from today’s contest as the glorious victors.

The Feingolds made it back to the dining room a few minutes after the first signal for their sitting, and the Wimpoles and Fosters were already there at the table, waiting for the story to resume.

Jordan told them all about how they had to wait for about three or four hours onboard the Anchoria until several barges and tugboats started shuttling them over to Ellis Island, which was where all newly-arrived immigrants were processed before being admitted to the country. Once they reached the landing and got off the barge, they climbed a large stairway and entered right in the middle of what was called the Great Hall.

Jordan thought the Great Hall was the biggest place he had ever seen, and even scarier than the ship. That was saying a lot. The Great Hall was a huge open area with a very high ceiling, and with a maze of metal railings to keep all the immigrants in orderly lines as they moved to each of the inspection stations they had to pass. The noise of just the people talking among themselves in all their different languages was rather overwhelming to Jordan. And the smell of all these people, none of whom had bathed in weeks, was almost as bad as the steerage compartments on the ship – when everyone was seasick. It was a different smell, to be sure, but still downright disgusting. Jordan hadn’t thought about the fact that he was contributing to the stench in his own small way, since he was only ten years old.

Jordan later thought he heard that there were something like 5,200 people processed that day. He also later learned that 11,747 immigrants were processed on one April day four years after his arrival, but he couldn’t believe that was possible.

It was a scary place for a ten-year old boy who had spent his entire life in a shtetl and had hardly ever seen more than 25 people in one place at one time. At least until he went on that ship. When he went to a wedding or bar mitzvah back in the shtetl, there were maybe 50 people in the same place at the same time, but that was about it. But at least that place in the shtetl was familiar to him. There were too many people to count here in the Great Hall, but Jordan guessed there must have been at least a thousand. There were about a thousand people on the ship, but he didn’t see them all together at the same time when they were aboard. Here in the Great Hall, you could see them all.

A man wearing a hat with blue initials HIAS came up to Jacob to explain in Yiddish what was going on in this apparent scene of mass confusion. He first explained that HIAS was the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and then introduced himself as Morris Rabinowitz. He said he had come over from Warsaw six years before. His job was to help the Yiddish-speaking immigrants through the frightening process of gaining acceptance to live in America, and he assured them that he could still remember how horrified he was when he went through the same thing they were now going through. It relieved the Feingolds a little bit to hear that others had felt what they were feeling now.

Morris checked the ID cards that each of the Feingolds had been issued when they entered the Great Hall, to make sure they were all right. They were pinned on each individual’s coat, and gave the person’s name, language, birthplace, most recent home, and the ship that had brought them to Ellis Island. Morris told the Feingolds that two years ago, a Jew from Minsk by the name of Shloyme (pronounced as two syllables - SHLOY mee) Pomerantz was issued a nametag showing him to be “Ike Ferguson” and his incredulous family asked him how he got a name like that. Shloyme had to admit to them “I was so fermished from the trip across the ocean and all the mischeghas here in this huge room that when the inspector asked me for my name, I said ‘Ich fergessen [Yiddish for ‘I forget’]. So Shloyme instantly became an honorary Irishman by the name of Ike Ferguson. Or so the legend goes, anyway.

Morris then explained that they were in line to speak with an inspector, who had help from various interpreters to cover all the languages spoken by the immigrants. While they would spend less than five minutes with the inspectors, they would probably stand in line for at least five hours get to see him.

Morris explained the questions they would be asked, like “What is your name?” and “Have you been to America before?” and “Do you have any relatives here in America?” and “Is anyone coming to meet you here at Ellis Island?” and “Do you have a job lined up yet?” He said that after the interviews to speak with inspectors, they would go through the medical examinations that had to be passed in order to stay in America.

He coached Jacob and Hannah on how to answer the questions, because it wasn’t legal to say you had a job pre-arranged before arriving here. Labor unions were concerned about the influx of immigrants and how they were lowering wages for everybody, so they had gotten laws passed forbidding immigrants from having jobs arranged before they arrived. Of course there was no way to stop an immigrant from working once he or she arrived, but that was a different matter. There were various other kinds of pitfalls to these questions, and Morris explained them all.

Before he left to help other Yiddish-speaking immigrants, Morris explained the Staircase of Separation at the end of the Great Hall, which everybody used to leave the building. A turn to the left led to a ferry to Manhattan. Jacob said that his family would take the ferry to Manhattan, G-d willing. A turn to the right at the bottom was to the railroad ticket office, for people who were going to places other than New York. Morris further explained that while it surely wouldn’t apply to the Feingolds, people who were detained for any reason or sent back to Europe, would go straight ahead at the bottom of the staircase to a holding room. He assured them that only about two percent of the immigrants had to go back to Europe, which he explained to the Feingolds to be a very small number, as they didn’t comprehend the idea of percentages.

Morris then told the Feingolds that he would keep an eye on them as they advanced along in their line, and that he would be available to help them when they got closer to the first interview station later. Then he went off to find other new Jewish immigrants who would welcome the warm feeling they got from knowing that someone like Morris was looking out for them.

After they had been in line for about four hours, they could see they were getting close to the first interview station, and true to his word, Morris reappeared in time to keep them calm. It had been quite a while since they had eaten, but their nerves were in such a state that they really weren’t much in the mood for eating right now anyway. They just wanted to get this ordeal over with, as they knew it was the second major milestone they had to pass to start their new life. Of course they had already safely completed the first major milestone, which was getting from Vitebsk to Ellis Island. There were lots of others who hadn’t been blessed enough to make it that far. They had heard of people detained at various railroad stops on the way to their ports who never made it to their ships, and of course there were several families on the Anchoria that had lost loved ones at sea. The Feingolds knew that someone was watching over them from above to have come so far without a mishap.

Even before they had left Vitebsk, and long before they met Morris here in the Great Hall, they had heard about the dreaded eye disease called trachoma and the examination for it. Trachoma was a highly-contagious disease that could often lead to blindness. The two key words here were both scary – contagious and blindness, so at Ellis Island, trachoma meant going back to where you came from if you had it. And adding to the psychological pain of the exam was the fact that the examiner used a glove buttonhook to turn your eyelid inside out – while you just stood there and let him do it. Jordan wasn’t looking forward to that in the least bit, but all the children had already been told that about it so they would be prepared.

They were now close enough to the head of the line to see what was happening to the people being inspected. They could hear the questions being asked and answered, and they could see that some people had their coats marked with chalk. Morris had explained that these chalk marks meant various physical problems that had to be explored further. There were too many different codes for Morris to explain them all.

When they finally got to the inspector station, the interview with Jacob began. Jacob explained that he had a friend from Vitebsk, Aaron Shapiro at 95 Orchard Street, near Delancey Street, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He explained that Aaron was here without his family, which was still back in Russia. Aaron had a pushcart from which he sold fruit, and he supported himself with his earnings, saving to bring over his family as soon as he could. Jacob also explained to the inspector that he had been a tailor in Russia, and would see if he could get a job along those lines.

Things went well as far as the interview, and they didn’t really talk much to Hannah or to the children. But now everybody had to undergo the medical tests. Here everyone held their breath and entered the area where the exams were conducted.

Everything was going well with the medical exams – until they got to little Goldeleh, the six-year old aspiring Talmudic student. The doctor told Jacob that he was very sorry about this, but Golda had trachoma, and she would have to go back to Europe! Due to her young age, she could be accompanied by her mother, so she didn’t have to make the trip alone. If the entire family wanted to return with her, they would have to pay for their passage. If it was just Golda and Hannah, the steamship company would cover the cost.

The entire Feingold family was crushed by this news. Jordan didn’t understand the reason, and thought it was just about the end of the world. Why should Mama and Goldeleh have to go back after we have already come all this way?

The family discussed it as calmly as they could under these trying circumstances, and decided that Hannah and Golda should go back to Scotland, and see if Jewish Aid Scotland had any background in curing trachoma. As much as they wanted to keep the family together, they couldn’t really afford for everybody to return, in which case they would have to pay their own fare. And besides, having the whole family return to Europe was too big a step backward. They had already come too far to start regressing now.

Jordan told everyone at his table in the Queen Mary dining room he didn’t want to dwell too much on the parting that they made at the bottom of the Staircase of Separation, because thinking about it was still very painful even after all these years. He merely said that Papa, Abie, Bella, Moshe, and he all went to the left for the ferry to Manhattan, and that Hannah and little Goldeleh went straight ahead, to be taken back to the Anchoria by the next barge.

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Part 7

After Jordan told about the farewell to Mama and Goldeleh, the Feingolds went up topside to the deck chairs, not far from the shuffleboard area, where they could just relax and watch the ocean, and let Jordan catch his breath. The waves were a little bit higher today than they were yesterday, but the Queen Mary still rode them well and there was very little rolling of the ship.

While they were at dinner, the Fosters pointed out that the after-dinner entertainment this evening for second-class passengers was the movie that came out last year, called A Night at the Opera, starring the Marx Brothers. John Foster said he really didn’t care that much for the Marx Brothers, and didn’t understand why they were so popular. Both of the Feingolds agreed heartily, as did the Wimpoles who came from Scotland who had only seen one Marx Brothers movie before, one called Duck Soup. Anyway, everybody at the table agreed that they would rather hear Jordan resume his tale to relate how his family got set up on the Lower East Side, and what life was like there in the days following his arrival.

After dinner, they went out to the deck chair area in the fresh air, and gathered their six chairs around in a circle, so the story could resume.

Jordan explained how they went to a tenement building at 95 Orchard Street, where Papa’s friend from Vitebsk by the name of Aaron Shapiro lived. Aaron had met them where the ferries drop their passengers after bringing them over from Ellis Island.

Now Aaron was married and had three children, but they were all still back in Vitebsk waiting for Aaron to come up with enough money to bring them over. So Aaron was living as a boarder in someone else’s apartment. Not too many people could afford to live in a tenement unit by themselves. Usually a three-bedroom unit was occupied by twelve people, and sometimes even more.

To start out, the Feingolds were going to have to be boarders too, but they were hoping to be able to get their own unit as soon as possible, where the five remaining Feingolds would be joined by at least six boarders, just to help pay the expenses. But everything depended on how much money Jacob could bring in, and how much it cost to have someone taking care of the household duties. Having to watch Hannah return to Glasgow put a big hole in their plans, not only because they would all miss her and little Goldeleh, but because now they didn’t have anyone in the family to handle the cooking and housekeeping. Bella at seven was too young, and neither Jordan nor Abie had even the foggiest idea of how to do that kind of work. They would have to see how things went before deciding on whether or not they should remain as boarders, or try to get their own apartment, which might be too difficult from a financial viewpoint.

They boarded with Bernard Goldstein and his wife Shana, and their six children. Shana was a very good housekeeper and Jacob agreed to pay her a little extra each month for taking care of the children when they weren’t in school. So the Feingolds were now established in their living accommodations, on the fifth floor at 95 Orchard Street.

They lived on the rear side of the building, and were lucky enough to have a window that faced the rear side of another tenement building. They were lucky because some apartments didn’t even have any windows at all. Being in the back of the building, they couldn’t see all the activity on Orchard Street from their window. Orchard Street, like many major streets on the Lower East Side, was wall-to-wall peddlers with pushcarts and stands selling fruit, vegetables, bread, fish, chicken, meat, and various other foods, as well as all kinds of clothes and shoes. And there were also stores in the ground floors of all the buildings facing Orchard Street competing with the vendors out in the street. The street was crawling with activity and humming with the noise of people from six in the morning until eight at night.

Jordan explained that almost every immigrant who worked, and that was almost every immigrant over the age of twelve years old who breathed, did so in a job that revolved around food or clothes. They stuck to basics back then. To survive, everyone had to have food and clothes, and they were fixated on survival, without all the frills that might come later to improve one’s enjoyment of life.

There were three bedrooms in the apartment. The eight Goldsteins used two of the bedrooms, and Jacob, Jordan, Abie, and Bella used the other. Four-year old Moshe and two unmarried male boarders slept in the living room on cots. That made a total fifteen people in the apartment. There was one water closet with a sink and toilet down the hall, which was shared by the other sixty people on the floor. There was no bathtub.

Mrs. Goldstein had organized the kitchen with racks all over the walls for pots and pans, with hanging bins for fruits, vegetables, and bread. Mealtimes with all these people were something to behold, and they ate in two shifts.

The new immigrants were called greenhorns by the veterans, and they kept this moniker for a full year, until they started acting like someone who hadn’t just come over yesterday ‘on the boat.’

All of the Feingold children except for four-year old little Moishele (MOY sheh leh) went to public school, as Jacob was adamant that they should become educated and learn English. Jordan and Abie also went to heder in the afternoon after the public school let out.

Jacob was able to buy a pushcart on credit from a friend who had come over from the shtetl Kublitz two years before. At first, Jacob thought it would be more economical for him to use his tailoring skills to make men’s pants himself and then sell them from his pushcart. But after a month of this, and having learned a little more of the community, he soon figured out that it would be much more efficient to buy them from others and devote his full efforts to selling them from his pushcart. He took his pushcart into remote neighborhoods that didn’t have the luxury of direct delivery of pants right to their doors, and hoped he could sell enough pants to lighten his load by the end of the day.

He would chain his pushcart to a fruit stand on Orchard Street at night, and carry all his unsold goods up to the apartment. The trip up the five flights of stairs wasn’t all that bad, as long as you were carrying less than 50 pounds at a time. But he found that he had to carry at least 50 pounds each trip up to the apartment at night after he chained his pushcart to the fruit stand – otherwise he would have to make more than three trips up in the evening. And then of course, he also had to bring the whole load back down in the morning when he was ready to get back to work.

After he had gotten all his wares up to the apartment and had eaten dinner, it was off to night school to learn English. There were fifty other Yiddish-speaking immigrants in his English class.

Jacob would have liked to take Saturdays off from work so he could attend shabas (Sabbath) services at shul, but he found that he had to work six days a week to make enough money to pay the rent and contribute to the Goldsteins’ food budget. The children went to shul, though, with Jordan being in charge of getting them there on time, and back again after the services.

The children attended services and went to heder at the nearby Eldridge Street Synagogue, which was the first one built in the United States by Eastern European Jews. It had opened in 1887, six years before Jordan was born. At the synagogue, Jordan, Abie, Bella, and Moishele got to meet lots of other children their age with similar backgrounds, as most of them had come from Eastern Europe as well.

Prior to the year 1900, peddlers and pushcarts were usually welcomed as they provided a very valuable service to people who couldn’t really go shopping in stores, because the peddlers brought the goods right to the doors of anyone who wanted to buy. However, due to the large wave of immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, oversaturation of the pushcarts led many people who had been in the country for years to scorn them. The pushcart men received lots of verbal abuse from much of the general populace, but they learned to live with this. They really had no choice but to keep trying to sell their wares.

On Sundays, Jacob was so exhausted from his trying week, that the best he could do was to take the children to the park, where they could play while he could sit on the grass and try to recoup his energy for the next week’s grind.

After a year of this existence, with no diversions whatsoever from his relentless work schedule, Jacob started wondering if he had done the right thing in coming to America. He still missed Hannah and Goldeleh very much, and would write letters to them in Glasgow frequently.

His hopes were buoyed considerably when he learned that a nun who was also a nurse in Glasgow, by the name of Sister Georgianne, was operating a non-denominational clinic at her convent that had achieved some success in curing the dreaded trachoma. This brave lady knew that she was exposing herself to great risks since the disease was so contagious, but that didn’t deter her from her goal of curing those stricken by this infliction. Hannah was working as a maid in the household of a Jewish couple in Glasgow, while Goldeleh remained in the clinic. Hannah donated most of her earnings to the convent that was operating the trachoma clinic.

When Jacob received a letter from Hannah in August, 1904, he knew he had done the right thing by staying in New York and trying to establish a new life, which would be a long-term process. Little Goldeleh had been miraculously cured thanks to Sister Georgianne, and both of them would be coming back to New York in September on the Astoria, another ship similar to the Anchoria, the one that had brought them all over for their first trip.

The Feingolds would soon be reunited! Jordan was beside himself with glee, and he asked Jacob if he could buy the first volume in a series of Talmudic books for Goldeleh. Even though Jacob knew they couldn’t really afford a luxury like that, he was so ecstatic that he gave Jordan the money.

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Part 8

At breakfast on the third full day at sea, the Fosters and the Wimpoles were anxious to hear about the big reunion when Hannah and Goldeleh made their way back to New York.

But Jordan said he had some things he had to cover before the reunion. A week before Hannah and Goldeleh returned to New York, Jacob had a talk with Jordan, explaining that there wasn’t enough money coming into the household. He told Jordan that while he didn’t like to ask this in the least, he thought it would be best for Jordan to drop out of school and start working as a shoeshine boy. It was simply a matter of needing the money to try to improve their situation.

Even with Hannah’s return, which would allow the Feingolds to stop paying the extra money for Mrs. Goldstein to care for the children while Jacob was working, they weren’t making enough headway in improving their lives. They were just spinning their wheels – staying in the same situation – barely surviving but not really living. Jacob hoped that maybe with some more money, they could try to find a better apartment, since they would have to relocate anyway. They would never be able to stay with the Goldsteins with Hannah coming back. Hannah liked running her own kitchen, and sharing one with the Goldsteins wouldn’t really work out. The idea of two Jewish women sharing one kitchen made Jacob actually shudder.

They located an available apartment nearby on Delancey Street, which had three bedrooms, just like their current place on Orchard Street. The Feingolds could live in two of those rooms, and could rent out the third to boarders to supplement their income. They would have no trouble finding boarders, as there was always a surplus of singles looking for lodging. The major problem was finding boarders who would actually pay when it came time to collect the rent, and to help buy the food.

Jordan was pretty well along in his learning English at this point, so Jacob was concerned that taking him out of school might slow down his progress in learning the language. But once Jordan started shining shoes in the Herald Square area, he found that using English on the streets was a better way of learning than just sitting in a classroom. He now was bringing in some money to contribute toward the rent and food, and he was learning English more quickly than before.

Jacob, Jordan, Abie, Bella, and little Moishele were at the pier on the morning of September 14, 1904, the day the Astoria was scheduled to arrive. Of course, they were at the pier where the ferries brought the immigrants from Ellis Island, after the new arrivals had been cleared.

It was probably Jordan’s biggest thrill to that point in his life when someone pointed out the Astoria making her way toward Ellis Island under a bright and sunny sky at 10 AM on the scheduled date. It seemed to Jordan that it took years before Hannah and Goldeleh finished all the processing on Ellis Island and finally arrived at the Manhattan ferry landing. It was almost 6 PM when Jacob and Jordan both spotted Hannah and Goldeleh on the ferry when it was still fifty yards from the landing. Jordan almost fell into the water he was waving so hard.

What a joyful reunion it was – all the family was together as one again. And Jordan, who was becoming quite an English speaker, was amazed to hear Goldeleh speaking English with a hint of a Scottish brogue. She had been learning her English at that convent under the tutelage of Sister Georgianne in Glasgow.

Jordan was so amazed at his “wee lil’l lassie” that he almost forgot to give her the present he had picked out for her – the first volume of a Talmud series. It even had her name inscribed – of course he used Golda Feingold instead of Goldeleh, as the latter was just for talking purposes.

They were soon moved into their new apartment on Delancey Street. It was actually better for Jacob in many ways. Besides having his loved ones back, now they were on the second floor instead of the fifth, so when he had to schlep his pushcart wares up to the apartment every night after work, it was much easier.

Hannah was so elated to be back and she took great delight in setting up the kitchen in their Delancey Street walk-up. They were able to locate some boarders whom they actually knew from the shtetls back in Vitebsk.

Jordan was doing most of his shoeshine work in busy Herald Square, but when he heard about the new Pennsylvania Station that was being built a few blocks away, he started spending part of his day there. He wanted to watch how the building was put together, as he had heard that it would eventually be quite magnificent. They started it in 1905, and Jordan liked watching the demolition of the buildings that would have to be leveled in order to erect the railroad station.

After that, it seemed to him that they dug a really mammoth hole in the ground. That mystery was solved when he eventually found out that they were planning on routing the trains through tunnels that went under the Hudson River. Jordan didn’t work all day at this site, because things were busier for his shoeshine business over in Herald Square, but he did check it out frequently to watch the building progress. He kept tabs on when they started putting up the pink granite structure, and liked watching them put the massive columns in place. The entire construction period went from 1905 to 1910, so this building provided much of his entertainment over those years. Other than that, it was shining shoes, eating, and sleeping. Of course he still went to synagogue on Saturdays, and remained in charge of the younger members of the family. And he still went to heder in the late afternoon, after he had finished polishing shoes for the day.

One day in the spring of 1908, Goldeleh came down with a terrible cough. Hannah’s chicken soup, which Hannah thought was the most powerful medicine ever invented, and which usually cured a cold almost overnight, didn’t seem to slow Goldeleh’s cough down a bit. The Feingolds couldn’t afford a family doctor, as they could barely stay afloat with routine expenses. Fortunately they had escaped any medical emergencies ever since Sister Georgianne back in Glasgow had cured Goldeleh of her trachoma five years before. Hannah’s chicken soup had been able to handle everything that came their way ever since they returned to New York and moved into their new apartment on Delancey Street.

There were thousands of other Jewish immigrants in this same pickle, as they could barely afford to pay their rent and buy food with their paltry earnings. They considered wearing clothes or shoes without holes in them to be a major luxury - medical expenses were far beyond the reach of most of them. Fortunately for these immigrants, a German-Jewish lady by the name of Lillian Wald had recognized this problem several years prior, even before the Feingolds arrived in New York. Jordan explained that Lillian had incredible drive and listing all of her accomplishments would take several hours. For the purposes of brevity, he would concentrate on just one aspect of her contribution to Jewish immigrant life at the turn of the twentieth century.

It was said in speaking about Lillian Wald that there are two kinds of people – those who turn away from frightening situations and pretend they don’t even exist because they are too distasteful, and those who stand up and take action to try to improve things. Lillian recognized early on that if she didn’t do it, then maybe nobody else would. And it’s likely that she was right. We’ll never know for sure if someone else might have stepped up in her absence, but she went ahead and tackled the problem herself.

One of her major accomplishments was setting up the Visiting Nurse Service which trained nurses, and paid for them as well, who would then go out into the tenements to help those who needed that help. This certainly wasn’t a free service, as nothing of value is without cost. It’s just that the cost was covered by a wealthy German-Jewish banker by the name of Jacob Schiff, rather than by the immigrants themselves. Schiff had been in the country for a long time and had established himself as a financier of railroads and steel and many of the other burgeoning industries which were improving people’s lives near the turn of the century. His success in financial well-being was already established, and while he joined J. Pierpont Morgan and some of the Vanderbilts in competing for who had the most impressive residence on Fifth Avenue, this particular Jacob also paid for implementing all of Lillian Wald’s projects, including the Visiting Nurse Service.

To make a long story short, when Goldeleh was coughing away for days with no improvement in sight, Hannah went to the Visiting Nurse Service office and asked for a house call. A kind woman by the name of Bessie Glosserman came by, checked out Goldeleh, and decided what action was needed. Bessie, who was called “Boozie” by her friends, spent the entire night there for the first two nights, to make sure things were starting to improve. This was par for the course with the Visiting Nurse Service, as this was the kind of thing that Lillian Wald herself had done before, back in the early days when she was first setting up the Service. Goldeleh was getting better by the third day of Boozie’s treatment, and within a week, she was back to her usual self.

Remember that Jacob Feingold was selling pants from a pushcart – a pushcart that he chained to a fruit stand every night after pushing it through neighborhoods that had no stores in them. He bought the pants from other immigrants who were making them – either in their own homes by contract, or in factories that came to be called sweatshops.

At least half the immigrant Jews at this time were in the garment industry – either selling them or making them. As we’ve already discussed, Jacob was in the business of selling them.

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Part 9

After lunch on their third full day at sea, the Feingolds asked if the others would mind taking a short break from the story, to rest for a couple of hours. Jordan was finding that telling this story was very emotionally draining. So Jordan and Sarah went up to lie on the comfortable deck chairs aboard the Queen Mary.

Sarah went into a deep sleep and began dreaming.

In her dream, she recalled her arrival in America, which was much the same as Jordan’s – she came from Pinsk, another gubernia in Russia that also included several scattered shtetls, arriving with her family, the Jacobsons, in 1908 at the age of fourteen. They came over on a ship like the one that brought the Feingolds, went through Ellis Island, and moved into one of the tenements on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side. All this happened before she met Jordan.

Her family enrolled Sarah in public school right away, and she did well there. She started learning English right from the beginning, in her public school during the day, and she was actually able to help her parents with their English. The older Jacobsons were taking their English courses at night.

But after a year with Sarah in school, her father decided they needed the income she could earn as a seamstress, since she had learned a few sewing skills from her mother. Her mother, Mary, had to stay at home to take care of several of Sarah’s younger brothers and sisters.

Sarah was lucky enough to get a job in one of the garment trade sweatshops, which, as bad as they were, would still provide an income. And also, Sarah would be able to meet some other people in similar circumstances to hers.

Sarah could do lots of things in the way of sewing by the time she was seventeen years old. But when you worked at a sweatshop, you were allowed to do only one thing at any given time. It was what would later be called an assembly line when the same technique was used for producing automobiles in greater and greater numbers with the same number of workers.

In a sweatshop, one person would make the buttonholes, another person would sew on the buttons, and 37 other people would each do one of the other 37 or so steps that had to be completed to finish a garment. This division of labor was done so the workers would become very efficient at whatever part of the overall process they were responsible for. When a worker could produce five items an hour, the pressure was applied to her to increase to seven an hour, and when she could do that, the push was on to reach ten per hour. The relentless desire for increased output never stopped, nor did it even slow down.

The girls in these sweatshops would work for ten hours a day during the week, and eight hours on Saturday. On top of the long hours was the added pressure of continually striving for more and more output, and it doesn’t seem that the workers could really talk to each other while they were doing their individual tasks. So it’s not like a worker could lighten her load or ease the pressure on herself by exchanging a funny story with a friend at the next work station at the table. It was a constant nose-to-the-grindstone ordeal for the entire workday. Well, they did get about 20 minutes off for lunch. And of course they could each go to the bathroom twice a day.

The owners wanted to make sure they were getting their money’s worth out of Sarah and her cohorts. If they went to the bathroom more than twice a day, or if they spent more than three minutes in the bathroom on either of their two visits, production would obviously suffer dramatically. Hence the employers had timer personnel who kept track of such infractions to make sure they didn’t happen more than once.

When Sarah would get home at night, she barely had enough strength left to eat whatever her mother had prepared for dinner, and to drag herself to her cot in the bedroom to get a full night’s rest so she could be ready for the next day’s work. But at least she was bringing in the money that the family needed to pay their rent and to buy the food to keep everyone going for that next day.

Simply making it to the next day was the goal, and she accomplished this goal day after day, week after week.

The only real pleasure Sarah got during those sweatshop days was the Sunday cooking sessions that she had with her friend from work by the name of Becca Feibish. Becca’s family had come over from Russia just like Sarah’s family had, and just like so many other Eastern European Jews had – with the hope of eventually having a better life than they had in the old country. Becca and Sarah were the same age – seventeen.

For these Sunday cooking sessions, they would alternate – one Sunday at the Feibish apartment on Attorney Street, and the next Sunday at the Jacobson place on Rivington Street. Their mothers would show them how to cook various items that had to be in the repertoire of any good Jewish girl who will eventually be in charge of feeding others – things like matzoh balls, which they called k’nedlech (pronounced kuh NADE lech but the lech is like you’re scratching your throat from the inside and sounds nothing like the word stretch.)

Other things they learned to cook were challah – the braided egg bread (CHAL lah, but the CH is like the final sound in k’nedlech). And chopped liver, which was called gehakta leber (geh HOCK tah LAY ber) in Yiddish and was better than the much more expensive spread called pâtė di foie gras which none of the immigrants could afford anyway.

And of course, the most important of them all – gefilte (geh FILL teh) fish.

It was Becca’s mother Rachel who gave them their lesson on k’nedlech. She started the lesson by explaining that the entire Jewish world is divided into two groups, which are not equal in size. The larger group likes light and fluffy k’nedlech that float in the soup, while the smaller group likes heavy sinkers that plunge straight to the bottom. Rachel Feibish was able to show the girls how to prepare each of these, so they would be ready to accommodate a broad range of tastes. There were various secrets on what to do if you wanted them light and fluffy, and special ingredients and techniques to make them heavy sinkers.

Sarah’s mother Mary gave the lesson on challah. She showed the girls how to combine all the initial ingredients when starting, and how long to let this concoction sit and work on itself, and then the added ingredients you had to put just before starting the first round of manipulating the mixture until it reached the consistency of dough, and how to keep kneading once it reached that consistency. And Mary continued with all the tips, both written and unwritten, that are necessary to achieve a perfect loaf of challah, including her special way of applying the “varnish” – that is, the shiny brown glaze on the top of the loaf that makes all the difference in the world. She professed to have the best varnishing technique on earth, which put to shame all the other lousy ways that other less competent cooks would use to create utter disasters in their ovens.

Then it was back to Mrs. Feibish’s place for the gefilte fish lessons, where they learned that if you didn’t use a wooden bowl with a hockmeisser for chopping your fish, and if you didn’t use these kinds of fish instead of those, and if you didn’t use just this amount of matzoh meal for every pound of fish, and if you didn’t use these spices instead of those, and if you didn’t use these onions instead of those, then you were just wasting your time because your gefilte fish would taste like last week’s newspaper, or maybe even worse. But Sarah and Becca remembered all these lessons and in one week learned to make the best gefilte fish you could find outside the Pale of Settlement.

This was the only entertainment that Sarah and Becca had for a long time, so they learned to concentrate all their laughter into this one day of each week.

It was at these Sunday cooking sessions that two important purposes were achieved – the two girls got to learn the traditions of the Jewish kitchen so they could apply them later in life, and they got to have at least a little bit of enjoyment to offset the ordeals they had to suffer the other six days of the week.

Many people feel that this rite of passage in which Jewish mothers pass down their cooking secrets to their daughters, is even more important than all the combined Talmud lessons ever conducted in all the heders of the entire world since the beginning of time.

Now both girls were rather shy, and at the age of seventeen, it would take them time and experience to overcome that. Of course, they didn’t yet understand the need for time and experience to eventually defeat their shyness. Fortunately they had another friend from work, Sadie Feigenbaum, who knew all the secrets that every young girl should know to deal with the opposite sex. Or at least Sadie thought she knew all these secrets.

Anyway, Sadie would constantly be providing advice to Sarah and Becca about what was the right thing to do in any given situation. Sarah and Becca eventually began to conclude that Sadie didn’t really know any more than they did – she just wanted everyone to think that she did. Sadie was just as anxious as either Sarah or Becca to meet a nice Jewish boy who was pleasant to be with for hours on end, but it hadn’t happened yet for any of them, not even for Sadie.

Of course, none of the girls had those hours on end to devote to any Jewish boy, whether he was a nice one or not, at this particular time. They had to keep making buttonholes, or sewing on buttons, or attaching sleeves to bodices, or whatever else they did in the sweatshop for all those hours every week. But they always held out hopes that working in the sweatshop wouldn’t go on forever.

Sarah, Becca, and Sadie worked in a modern building just to the east of Washington Square. Washington Square is near the entrance to Fifth Avenue, where the mansions of many tycoons were located. Each of these tycoons was trying to outdo the other in an endless race for whatever glory comes from having the most magnificent house on the Avenue. The girls would meet in the early morning at the Washington Arch, a beautiful structure in Washington Square, and walk over to work together.

Sarah’s dream then focused on a particular day – bright and early in the morning on the last Saturday of March, 1911 – spring was only a week or so away. Sarah, Becca, and Sadie met near the Washington Arch, ready for another day at work. As soon as all three girls were there for the rendezvous, Sadie immediately started giving out advice on how to catch a man. Sarah saw this quite clearly in her dream, and smiled a little in her sleep, the same way she would always smile at Becca whenever Sadie started with her advice, and the same way Becca would smile back at her. It was their ‘Here we go again!’ smile.

Sarah twitched a little when in her dream she saw a gentle breeze pull one tiny new green leaf from the branch of an elm tree near the Washington Arch. The leaf wafted slowly through the air, whirling gracefully, sometimes rising upward and sometimes plunging downward, but always moving toward the building where the girls worked. In her dream, Sarah then saw all three girls go into the building and take the elevator to the ninth floor.

Suddenly, Sarah bolted upright from her deck chair on the Queen Mary – she was now wide awake and trembling silently in terror. Jordan knew instantly that she had just had a nightmare, and he knew what that nightmare was all about. He held her as tightly as he could. What had triggered this jolt to Sarah was the tiny green leaf in her dream. It had struck the sign hanging from the corner of the building where the girls worked.

The sign said “Triangle Shirtwaist Company.”

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Part 10

[Author’s note: If you didn’t already know what happened at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company on March 25, 1911, by now have used your Google machine to find out. If you remember at the end of Part 1, there was some past event that made Sarah recoil in fear at their height above the water while watching the Queen Mary leave the dock in New York, and that her fear got even worse when she saw the triangle used to signal various shipboard events. If you didn’t pick up on that in Part 1, now you know what that past event was.

When I laid out my initial plans for this story, I intended to TRY to describe the fire and the chaos in the building as it spread. After several attempts, I have found that I just can’t do it. It’s just as well, as you probably wouldn’t want to read any more about it than you’ve already done anyway.

It will have to be enough to say that Sarah Jacobson and Sadie Feigenbaum made it down safely from the ninth floor, while Rebecca Feibish was one of those who jumped to avoid the flames.]

Sarah rushed to the street with her clothes smoldering, and found Becca’s body on the sidewalk. She took off her shawl, beat it a few times to make sure it wasn’t still burning, and covered Becca with it. Sarah sat there beside Becca for an hour until both of their mothers arrived to see if they were all right. Sarah’s mother arrived first, and Sarah convinced her mother that she was just fine, but explained to her that Becca had jumped from the ninth floor to the sidewalk below.

Mrs. Jacobson and Sarah did their best to comfort Mrs. Feibish, who arrived a few minutes later, but of course it didn’t help in the least. It may have been Sarah’s subconscious thought, but it sure seemed like Mrs. Feibish was looking at her with the question “Why are you still alive, while my Becca isn’t?” Mrs. Feibish never asked this, of course – it’s just that Sarah felt that Mrs. Feibish was thinking it. Or maybe it was just that Sarah was thinking it herself.

Rebecca Feibish was one of the 146 souls who lost their lives that day. The week before she died, she and her best friend Sarah had learned from Becca’s mother how to make gefilte fish. Before that fateful day, Becca still had her whole life ahead of her, a lifetime of opportunities to make gefilte fish for a family that would appreciate all that it meant. She never had the chance to put her mother’s lessons to use. The family she had always hoped to have, the one she often dreamed about, simply never happened.

Back on the Queen Mary, Jordan took Sarah back to their cabin to rest and recover from her ordeal. This wasn’t the first time Sarah had experienced such a flashback, and Jordan knew that it wouldn’t be the last. After staying with her for an hour, Jordan went out to find the Wimpoles and the Fosters, explaining that Sarah and he would eat in their cabin this evening, or at least they would try to. He hoped they could resume their tale the next morning. Then Jordan got back to the cabin to be with Sarah as soon as he could. He held her tightly the entire night – even when both of them finally drifted off to sleep.

The next morning, Sarah was almost back to her usual jovial self. She suggested that Jordan go down to the dining room first, and give the Wimpoles and Fosters a quick rundown of the Triangle fire, and she would come down about a half hour later to join them. She would even tell the story of how the two of them met.

When Sarah joined the party at breakfast the next morning, Jordan had already prepared them for what she would be telling. Everybody waited until Sarah arrived at the table before ordering their breakfast. The Wimpoles and Fosters all got various combinations of scrambled or fried eggs with either ham, sausage, or bacon, as well as either toast or English muffins. Sarah ordered herself a kosher salami omelet, and Jordan got some matzoh brei (rhymes with try), which is fried matzoh. He told the Wimpoles and Fosters that he preferred the ‘big pancake’ alternative, as opposed to the ‘scrambled in pieces’ option. Furthermore, he said that if they didn’t really understand those two variations, that was too bad, because he wasn’t going to explain it any further. Jordan said he preferred his matzoh brei with just salt and pepper, although lots of people, who must be weird in other ways as well, liked to put jelly, applesauce, or sugar on it.

Sarah explained that it took her eight months after the fire before she finally started getting out of the apartment. After those eight months, she realized that she would never forget the ordeal she had gone through, but that she had to get on with living regardless. To make it a little easier to take the step of getting out, one of her younger brothers, Reuven, would be reading at the shul for his bar mitzvah on Saturday, November 25, 1911. His parashah (or portion of the Torah, pah RAH shah) would be Vayetze (vah YAY tsay), the story from Genesis of Jacob wrestling with an angel and later meeting Rachel at the well. The Jacobsons’ shul was the Eldridge Street Synagogue, but Sarah had hardly ever been there since she had started working.

Sarah helped by making the strudel, as the Jacobsons had to do all the food themselves. And it wasn’t just because Sarah was unemployed – they couldn’t have afforded to hire a caterer even if she was still earning her wages. But Sarah certainly realized that by not working, she was having a major negative impact on the family’s finances. They were still in the phase where day-to-day living was a struggle and every additional dollar brought in was a tremendous help. Like all the other recent immigrants, they were still anxiously looking forward to a day when it wouldn’t be quite so difficult, but they were still far from that point.

Sarah had to sit with all the other women in the upstairs portion of the synagogue during the service, even though her brother was the focal point, the star, the Big Macher Himself, at least for today (pronounce it as MACH-er, where MACH rhymes with the composer Bach, but again, the CH is like scratching your throat from the inside). Downstairs on the central bimah (pulpit, pronounced BEE mah), Reuven read his part beautifully, and any mistakes he made were so minor that hardly anyone even knew the difference. Sarah just chuckled twice, but only to herself and not out loud, when her brother’s voice cracked a little bit.

Other family members and friends made other things for the reception, and it would be a simple reception with finger food only, for everyone who attended the services. The Jacobsons could not afford the more elaborate invitation-only seated dinner that some of the wealthier members opted for. Nor would they have any music or dancing.

After the ceremony, Sarah helped with all the others in the family putting out all the food on the tables in the downstairs room that held the general reception after a bar mitzvah. The other members of the congregation were anxiously awaiting the Kiddush, or the prayer over the wine, and the Hamotzi (hah MOE tsee), or the blessing over the bread.

Sarah explained to the Wimpoles and the Fosters that saying the Hamotzi is like firing the starting gun at a race in the Olympics, as it is the signal to attack the food tables with all the gusto you can muster. Of course, Lower East Side residents had no trouble mustering lots of gusto when it came to food.

Sarah made sure that she wasn’t standing between the congregation and the food tables when the Hamotzi was finished, because that’s a dangerous place to stand at any time, in any circumstance. It’s even more dangerous when there were lots of people out there in the congregation who weren’t that far from starvation.

Among the members hungrily awaiting the Kiddush and the Hamotzi was a nice-looking young man with very shiny shoes, although the rest of his clothes didn’t really look nearly as good. Now Sarah was only noting this – not finding fault with it. She knew better than to judge someone by how nice their clothes were, because she wasn’t exactly decked out in a high-fashion gown herself. This nice-looking young man with the really shiny shoes was looking at her quite intently while she was arranging her strudel on the serving platter. And she was returning his stare just as intently. Then he smiled at her. Rather than looking away, she smiled right back.

Maybe Sadie Feigenbaum knew what she was talking about after all!!

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Part 11

Sarah suggested that this was a good stopping point, and they could resume the story after lunch. Out in the middle of the Atlantic, it was very nice weather today. From their breakfast table in the dining room, she could see through one of the larger portholes that it would be very pleasant to be out in the sun and fresh air. For the rest of the morning, the Feingolds walked about the main deck, all the way from stem to stern. They stopped in again for another brief visit to the Jewish chapel up forward.

After lunch on the Queen Mary, and back up in their deck chairs arranged in a circle, Sarah continued the story of how she and Jordan met.

After the Kiddush and the Hamotzi were completed at her brother Reuven’s bar mitzvah, Sarah explained how the nice-looking boy with the shiny shoes actually ignored the food tables, even though he looked really hungry, and came over instead to introduce himself to her. He also asked how long she had been coming to shul here at Eldridge Street. He said he was sure he would have remembered seeing her before if she was a regular member of the congregation.

Sarah explained that for the past couple of years she had worked in a sweatshop that required work on Saturdays, so she hadn’t been very good about going to shul. She went on to say that something really traumatic had happened to her several months ago, so she hadn’t done much of anything away from her apartment. But she told him that she recognized how important it was to get over this trauma, so she was going to be better about going to shul – starting today. Now she didn’t get very specific about what the traumatic event was, but Jordan could make an educated guess. The Triangle fire had made a major impact on the entire city.

When Jordan and Sarah looked over at the food tables a few minutes after they started talking, they saw that the strudel plate had been stripped clean. Jordan asked Sarah if she had made the strudel, and she said yes. In fact, she whispered, she still had hidden away several more slices back in the kitchen that she had been saving for an emergency. After retrieving her hidden stash, she offered one to Jordan and saw that he ate it pretty quickly. He immediately realized his mistake, and apologized for wolfing it down like that. Actually, Sarah was flattered that Jordan almost inhaled her strudel, and the fact that he apologized meant that he knew it wasn’t the proper thing to do – all good signs. He carefully ate the next one with much more dignity, and she saw him counting how many more there were still hidden away in her napkin. He told her this was the best strudel he remembered ever having.

He told how he had worked as a shoeshine boy for four years, starting when he was eleven, and how at the age of fifteen, he began hiring younger shoeshine boys to work for him. He found that managing the operation was more to his liking than actually shining the shoes. He gave Sarah a brief rundown on her father’s earlier days as a pushcart pants peddler, and challenged her to say ‘pushcart pants peddler’ three times fast. She couldn’t even do it twice without giggling.

Jordan also told her that his father was planning on opening a clothing store as soon as he could, but was very worried about how it would go. He knew from others that it was painful even trying to get started. That involved building up a list of satisfied customers, which did not happen overnight. The work would be almost as hard as when he had his pushcart, but it would be more dignified. And best of all, it had the potential for growing over time. He just had to accumulate a little more money before taking this huge step forward.

Just meeting Jordan seemed to be the spark Sarah needed to become a much more devout and pious attendee of shul in the coming months. To be honest, she said to the Wimpoles and the Fosters, Jordan had already been showing up regularly. But now she too made a point of coming to Saturday services as well, so she thought herself a bit hypocritical. But that simple thought didn’t stop her from going to shul more regularly.

They always enjoyed talking to each other at the oneg shabbat (OH naig sha BAHT), or the reception following the services. Jordan would have liked it even without the food that was always served at these receptions, because he was quickly becoming quite fond of Sarah. But the food provided an added bonus that he very much appreciated, even though his family was now starting to accumulate enough money to make day-to-day life much better than it had been before. They were starting to eat better at home, thanks partially to Jordan’s shoeshine business earnings, and Jacob’s store was slowly starting to improve. But Jordan still appreciated the delights of the weekly oneg shabbat, and Sarah’s presence at these receptions made shul even better.

They would see each other at Saturday services every week, and started meeting other members of the congregation who were their same age. A few months after they had first met each other, they met a boy by the name of Nathan Birnbaum. Nathan actually went by the nickname Nattie, and it turned out that his uncle was the cantor for another shul on the Lower East Side. Nattie explained that he was working as a dancing instructor at a nearby dance studio, and he suggested that they give his lessons a try.

They took these lessons for two months, coming twice a week, starting in April, 1912. It turned out that Sarah was a natural born dancer, and Jordan, while not quite up to Sarah’s level, was pretty good himself. After two lessons they didn’t have to count to themselves for the waltz (ONE-two-three, etc). The good old standard two-step, with its quick-quick-slow tempo, came to them right away. And while the foxtrot was still two years from making its official entrance to the dance scene, they got some preliminary lessons in that developing dance as well, and pretty soon they didn’t have to say slow-slow-quick-quick-slow to themselves anymore, either in English or in Yiddish.

Jordan really began enjoying recreation, which he began to appreciate more and more as time went on. He had never had this luxury before, and the diversion was more than welcome. However, since he was still paying so much for the dancing lessons, and Sarah had just started working again as a seamstress, that it cut down somewhat on how much time they could spend dancing, and where they could go to put their newfound skills to use.

It was at the dancing school that they heard about a common practice for money-strapped folks on the Lower East Side. The revelation came either from students in their dancing class, or maybe it was from Nattie himself. Jordan couldn’t remember who had told him about this. It was well known that there were lots of weddings and bar mitzvahs always going on around town. These were the catered affairs that the wealthier residents could afford. They always had music and dancing, and most even had seated dinners. But what wasn’t so well known was that you could often get into these affairs as just innocent visitors. They didn’t check invitations at the door, and so as long as you looked reasonably presentable, you could slip in with the invited guests. Jacob’s new clothing store provided the clothes to make Jordan more presentable. Jordan bought the clothes with his own earnings, but Jacob gave him a discount for being his son. And Jacob knew someone with a women’s clothing store who sold a couple of nice gowns to Sarah for a good price.

Now Jordan and Sarah were always careful not to indulge in any of the food or drink that was put out, since they realized that they were crashing the gate. It’s just that these events gave them somewhere to put their newly-developing dancing skills into practice outside the dance studio.

One evening in August, 1913 they were dancing their feet off at one of these affairs, having the time of their lives because it was a fantastic orchestra. Suddenly, right in the middle of a beautiful and dreamy waltz, a large brute of a man approached them on the dance floor. He asked Jordan if he was a friend of the bride or of the groom. Jordan didn’t know either one of them, of course, since he and Sarah were only there for the dancing. But he figured that this big lug had no way of knowing that. So he replied “We’re here for the bride.” At which time the bouncer said “This is a bar mitzvah. Get the hell out of here.”

Sarah explained to the Wimpoles and the Fosters that she was totally humiliated by this, and it took her two whole weeks to get over it to the point that they would try it again at another wedding - or was it at another bar mitzvah?

Sarah told about her family’s friends who lived down the street, and whom they got to know very well. Louis and Bertha Winholtz lived in their own one-room apartment above a shop at the corner of East Fifth and Rivington Street. They had come over in 1912 from Cracow, Poland, shortly after getting married. They both worked in the garment industry, just like so many of the other new immigrants.

Louis would wheel garment racks loaded down with the latest fashions through the streets, delivering full racks from the factories to the stores, and returning the empties to the factories to load them up again. He quickly learned all the back alley shortcuts that the garment racks could be maneuvered through safely, and which ones would just get you stuck, thereby ruining your delivery speed record. The men handling the racks took great pride in establishing their reputations for speed in making deliveries. And not only because it translated directly into more money, which it did. There was a trophy given every year to the “Fastest Wheels in the Shmatte Trade” and the competition was fierce. Sarah explained that a shmatte (pronounced SHMAH teh) is just a drab housedress, but the women’s garment industry was given that name.

Bertha became quite adept at doing custom embroidery, building on skills that she had first acquired back in Poland. She would sit with each client to map out in full color exactly what that customer wanted the finished product to look like, and she put out such beautiful work that she had many repeat buyers, as well as frequent referrals for new customers. As her reputation slowly grew, so did her list of happy clients.

Just like all the other new immigrants, they enrolled in a night school for English lessons. One evening during the first week of their lessons, long before they reached the high proficiency levels they would later achieve in spoken and written English, they were strolling arm in arm through the busy streets of the Lower East Side. It was up Orchard Street and down Ludlow, up Essex Street and down Norfolk. After marveling at all the activity and businesses on all these streets, Bertha asked Louis, “Who is this Itche Krem anyway? Is he Jewish? He must be a very rich man to have all these stores.” Louis laughed and explained the true significance of the near-ubiquitous ‘Ice Cream’ signs in the windows of nearly every corner candy store.

At first, they were as poor as shul mice. They had no children yet, but they did have two small incomes. So they decided that maybe they would further reduce the amount of extra money they had left at the end of every month - they would take the plunge into starting their own family. On September 6, 1913, with a doctor and midwife in attendance in their apartment, a son entered this world with a lusty bellow. They named him William. Since Jews also give their children Hebrew names, they called him Wolf Beresh, with the Beresh to indicate the beginning of their family. The Hebrew name for the Book of Genesis is Bereshis, meaning In the Beginning.

The delivery went without a hitch, and Louis figured it would be all downhill from there. But when William’s bris rolled around on the eighth day after his birth, Louis was much more nervous than he had been for the birth, or for anything else thus far in his life. The bris is the occasion when Jewish boys are subjected to the torture of a ritual circumcision, right there in their own homes and with lots of strangers watching – sort of. Well, most of the guests wind up looking at the wall, the floor, the ceiling, or out the window – everywhere except at the guest of honor, which the guest of honor would appreciate if he had even an inkling of what all this was about. Now with mothers being what they are, it is traumatic for them to deal with this. However, even though fathers have a much easier time than mothers during childbirth, it’s a totally reversed situation for the bris. The bris hits fathers a lot harder, because fathers can relate so much more readily to what the main event is all about.

Louis bravely held little William’s legs during the procedure while the mohel (rhymes with foil) did his duty. Louis was careful not to peek, but he still felt woozy when William let out a scream that sounded something like a very loud but brief “LAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!” which always comes during this rite of passage. But a wine-soaked tip of a diaper inserted into William’s open mouth took only a few seconds to calm down both the new father and his new son.

And Bertha breathed a little easier too.

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Part 12

After Sarah had finished telling the Wimpoles and the Fosters about how they did their dancing back in the days when they couldn’t afford to go to real ballrooms on their own, and all about her family’s friends the Winholtzes, she noticed that dinner time was approaching. She suggested they all go down to their cabins to get ready for dinner, and re-convene in the dining room. At that point, Jordan could tell all about how his father Jacob made the move from a pushcart peddler to opening a full-fledged men’s clothing store.

After they had all met in the dining room, and had all ordered their meals, Jordan resumed the saga.

After ten years of peddling from a pushcart, and saving his money as best he could, Jacob opened a men’s clothing store in October, 1913. It was on Orchard Street, one of the busier thoroughfares on the Lower East Side, right between a kosher butcher and a shoe store. It was only a block away from where the Feingolds had their first apartment, the one they had while Hannah and Goldeleh were still in Scotland.

An absolute necessity for any clothing store in those days was a man with the strange title of puller-in. It was the responsibility of the puller-in to get people into the store. These were always smooth-talking and forceful individuals, with qualities like those required of a salesman. Of course, if you couldn’t get customers into your store, the best salesman in the world would be of absolutely no value. So the best talkers had to be assigned to puller-in duties.

These pullers-in had a standard catalog of sales pitches, starting with where they came from. For example, Jacob’s first puller-in, Milton Moskowitz, came from Vitebsk and knew everybody who had lived in the shtetls of Vitebsk from 1899 to 1910. Since there were lots of these people who had come over to America and were living on the Lower East Side, Milton kept a sharp eye out for those he knew. And he continually added to those he knew by talking to those he didn’t already know.

And when these pullers-in didn’t spot any familiar faces in the crowd of potential customers, they had to find other lines to use. One of the more popular lines was “Your son is just the same size as my nephew Hermie, and I was saving a beautiful tweed suit for him. Go in and ask Daniel, the head salesman, if you could see the suit that Milton is saving for his nephew. You can have it for the same price he was going to give me.”

As distasteful as it was to employ these tactics, Jacob really had no choice if he wanted to make a success of his store. But he drew the line at dishonesty, which some of the other stores utilized. He figured that rather than going for the quick sale at the risk of losing a possible long-term customer, he would rather be honest in his dealings. There were several tricks used by some of the clothing store salesmen just to make a quick sale, even if it jeopardized their success in the longer term.

For example, here’s how the hard-of-hearing trick went, as Jordan had heard from other clothing store owners who used it. Jacob would never have considered using this trick in his store, regardless of how desperate he might have been to make a sale. Moishe (pronounced MOY sheh) would be out in the store with the customer, and Joel would be in the stockroom behind the sales area. When a customer would ask Moishe how much this blue serge suit was, Moishe would holler to Joel in the back. “Hey Joel, how much is the blue serge suit?!! I don’t see a tag on it!” And Joel would holler back “The blue serge suit is nineteen dollars!!” Then Moishe would bellow “Joel, you know I can’t hear so well. Speak up!! How much is the blue serge suit?”

Joel would answer even louder than before, “I SAID NINETEEN DOLLARS!!”

Then Moishe would turn to the customer and say “It’s nine dollars, sir.” The customer, thinking he was saving ten dollars thanks to Moishe’s hearing problem, would say “I’ll take it – don’t even bother wrapping it up.” He wanted to be on his way before Joel emerged from the stockroom and put a halt to the bargain he was getting. The customer was happy because he saved all that money, and since the suit only cost Moishe and Joel five dollars, they were happy too.

So everyone was happy, at least until time proved to the customer that he didn’t get as big a bargain as he thought he had. If he eventually realized that, he would never come back to Moishe and Joel’s store again.

There were several other tricks like this, such as the hidden money in the pocket trick, but they were just too numerous to discuss individually. But Jacob made sure he didn’t use anything like these tactics in his store. Establishing a reputation as an honest seller was Jacob’s goal – he figured that in the long run, he would be much better off with that philosophy. Only time would tell, of course.

Jacob’s business began to grow, slowly at first but then in larger and larger leaps forward, so Jordan and his brother Abie came to help out. They were finding out that being honest and fair in dealing with their customers was the best long-term approach of them all. Jordan still kept his shoeshine business going, because he wasn’t actively shining the shoes anymore. But he could also help out in the shop as the clothing business continued to grow.

They were selling only men’s clothing for now, and what might be described as on the lower end of the quality and economic scale. Since their store was on the Lower East Side, they wouldn’t have attracted too many upscale customers. The customers for upscale clothes lived somewhere else.

After becoming such frequent attendees at the weddings and bar mitzvahs of others, just so they could dance, Jordan asked Sarah if she could be persuaded to have a wedding of their own – one that involved themselves as main characters instead of simply as dancers, and which would eventually lead to some of their own children’s bar mitzvahs. They could then dance at all of these events. Sarah said ‘yes’ after thinking about it for a few seconds.

Their wedding in was held on Sunday, May 9, 1915, at the Eldridge Street Synagogue. The ceremony took place with bride, groom, and rabbi standing under the traditional canopy, called a chuppah (pronounced CHUH (rhymes with hook but without the k) – pah). Jordan and Sarah had asked that the ceremony be conducted at least partly in English, as they were so delighted to be in America. Rabbi Lieberman, who still had his Yiddish accent from Poland, asked Jordan “Do you take Sarah to be your vife?” Jordan liked to think he was now free of his old country accent, since he had started learning English at the age of ten, and had been speaking it for twelve years now. But he shocked himself, and all the people in attendance, when he answered the rabbi by saying “Yes, I do take Sarah to be my vife.” This triggered more than a few giggles from those in the congregation. Rabbi Lieberman glared at Jordan for a second, thinking he was being publicly mocked in some kind of a cruel joke. But after a second or two, and watching Jordan, he realized that it was just a simple case of jangled nerves. He grinned at Jordan, and Jordan sheepishly grinned back.

Jordan knew he had reached the end of the ceremony when he was given the glass to step on and crush. There are a few interpretations of what this represents, but most people think it symbolizes the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.

The wedding reception was held in the same room where they had first met after Sarah’s brother Reuven’s bar mitzvah. While they were still struggling financially, they were a little bit better off than they were four years prior at Reuven’s bar mitzvah. They still had to provide all the food for themselves, with the help of family members and friends, and they didn’t have a seated dinner. But they were able to hire a small band to play music for dancing.

Since Sarah was one of the major participants, she didn’t have to arrange any of the serving plates tonight. Others took care of that for her. After the Kiddush and the Hamotzi, the attendees assaulted the food tables just like they always do.

When the music started for dancing, both Sarah and Jordan were delighted to be able to dance at their own wedding. And when the horah began (a traditional circular dance – actually at Jordan and Sarah’s wedding it was a predecessor to what today is called the horah), and when the bride was hoisted by the attendees in a chair, and then the groom was lifted as well, they knew every¬thing was now all official.

They got their own two-bedroom apartment on Norfolk Street, just a few blocks from the Feingolds and the Jacobsons. Sarah took great pleasure in setting up her kitchen, and the tenement was quite a bit better than what they had each lived in after first arriving in this country. Sarah was still working as a seamstress, while Jordan helped in Jacob’s men’s clothing shop, and continued to run his own shoeshine business on the side.

Of course, living together now for the first time since they had met, they started learning more and more about each other as time went by. Their new apartment (well, it was new to them even though it had been built 45 years before they moved in) had been modernized. They actually had their own bathroom right there in their own unit, so they didn’t have to go down the hall to share a bathroom with others like they used to. They even had their own private bathtub as well.

Unfortunately, having all these luxuries provided additional reasons to argue, which they had never done before. It was strange that Jordan and Sarah, whose prior experience with bathrooms was limited to those that were open to lots of other people besides themselves, quickly developed strong feelings for how the toilet paper should be hung in their own private bathroom. Jordan thought the free end of the paper should come off the back of the roll, and Sarah thought it should come off the front. Sarah won that argument, but Jordan made sure he remembered that fact for the next time they had a disagreement on such a vital matter as that. The next issue was whether to leave the toilet seat up or down – Jordan somehow lost that one too.

Not long after their wedding, it started becoming apparent that the United States would eventually be joining in the Great War which had been raging for two years already in Europe. Jordan had a serious talk with Sarah. He explained that he was so grateful to his new homeland that he felt he should enlist for military service. Sarah was more understanding than Jordan expected. While she certainly would have preferred that he stay with her in New York, she said she appreciated his feelings for serving their new country and actually agreed wholeheartedly with his decision – as long as he promised to be very careful if he ever faced combat. For her part, Sarah promised she would do her best to get by without him for what she hoped would be a brief absence.

He joined the Marine Corps in June of 1917, and after his basic training, he was assigned as a rifleman in the Fourth Brigade of US Marines. His unit sailed for France in late September, 1917, arriving in early October. They reported immediately to the French forces who would supplement the basic training they received in the US, with the experience they had gained in fighting Germans for the past three years. His brigade moved into position in France near an area called Belleau Wood in mid-May 1918.

Over most of the month of June, Jordan and his fellow Marines were engaged in attacking German positions, and in fending off German counterattacks on their own positions. They were never deeply dug into trenches as much of the Western Front was for the entire war, because they were constantly moving – sometimes forward and sometimes backward. The only times they dug in were those when they were being barraged by artillery fire, and they quickly dug small foxholes for that.

Very often they were so tired after a long battle that they would just fall asleep under the stars still wearing their helmets and backpacks. Jordan didn’t really like discussing in detail all his recollections of the war – he came back unscathed, but saw several comrades killed in action, and even more of them wounded.

He did his share in fighting the Germans, but never elaborated on exactly what he did. He just said that he did all in his power to defend his comrades and himself, and remarked that what drove him most effectively to do his soldiering in combat was his desire not to let down his comrades, or to embarrass himself in their eyes.

Finally the Germans retreated from the area late in the month of June, and Jordan’s active role in the war ended with this action in Belleau Wood. The war ended with an armistice on November 11, 1918.

Jordan and Sarah were back in each other’s eager arms by Hanukkah of 1918, a holiday that usually occurs in December, but doesn’t involve the use of trees whatsoever as decorations in the living room. In fact, that was the Hanukkah when Jordan’s mother Hannah gave him two sweaters – one blue and one green. At a family get-together shortly after Hanukkah, Jordan wore the green sweater so his mother would know how much he appreciated getting it. He was a little disappointed when her reaction was “So vat’s amatta – you don’t like the blue vun?”

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Part 13

On the morning of their fifth full day at sea, the friends all met in the dining room for breakfast. Sarah then continued the story.

When Jordan and Sarah thought they were doing well enough financially, they thought the time had come to start raising a family of their own. Their first child was a daughter, born October 28, 1919. While Jewish people often name their children for deceased members of their own family, Sarah asked Jordan if they could name their daughter Rebecca, to honor her best friend Rebecca Feibish, who had perished in the Triangle fire. Jordan knew how much Becca had meant to Sarah, and agreed to the name.

While newborn Jewish girls don’t have as dramatic an introduction to the world as do their brothers, what with the ritual bris and all the attendant hullabaloo, they do have a naming ceremony in the shul or at home. The Feingolds' ceremony took place in downstairs reception area of the Eldridge Street Synagogue in November, 1919, where little Rebecca’s Hebrew name was announced to be Rivkah Chaiya (RIV kah CHAI yah). Sarah explained to the attendees that her daughter was named for a girl with whom Sarah used to work, and with whom she had long ago learned to make gefilte fish. Jordan had to hold onto Sarah’s arm to support her while she was giving the explanation, and Sarah found it extremely hard to get her story out to the congregation.

They were still excited to see Jacob’s clothing store business growing quickly as 1919 was drawing to a close, and they were saving all their profits in shoeboxes which they kept in their apartment. Jacob still hadn’t developed a trust for the banking system, which he didn’t understand all that well. Sarah stayed home to care for little Becca, but with the combined income from the clothing store and the shoeshine business, they were doing better now than they ever had.

They were even able to engage in some activities related to something other than earning money now. Both Jordan and Sarah were concerned about the fact that they had to cut short their schooling to help support their families. This left them somewhat lacking in lots of knowledge about things other than selling or making clothes, cooking, or dancing, which had been the limits of their world to this point. They didn’t think that was enough.

Jordan and Sarah both had a great desire for learning. This was because both were interested in the world around them, and wanted to know much more about it than they already knew, which was next to nothing. They began making frequent trips to the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. It was a beautiful building that had just been completed in 1911, and it was magnificent to look at – both inside and out. Of course they weren’t there just to look at the impressive building, as that was only a secondary benefit of visiting the library.

Jordan found that he liked history, particularly about the technological advances made in the last century and this one. These advances included things like the telegraph, railroads, steamships, electrical power, radio, and motion pictures. All of these things enabled the people to make huge strides forward in improving their lives over what they were like before these new marvels came along.

Sarah quickly developed an interest in literature, and she started finding out by reading stories written over a vast span of centuries, that as time progressed and as new things were invented, the basic character of the people themselves stayed pretty much the same over the years. She read books both in English and in Yiddish. Her favorites, in chronological order, were Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, several works from the Roman Empire including those by Julius Caesar, Cato, and Plutarch. These were followed by biographies of Italian artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. She also liked several British and Russian writers from the previous century – including Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky among others. Sholom Aleichem was a recent Yiddish writer who had come from Russia and lived for a while in New York City. He had gained great fame by writing short stories that captured the essence of shtetl life. Many of his stories revolved around the adventures of a lovable dairyman named Tevye (pronounced TEV yeh).

Sarah found the Russian novelists like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, as well as playwrights like Anton Chekov, to be particularly fascinating, in view of the fact that she came from Russia, but she had no understanding of anything outside whatever shtetl she happened to be living in at any given time. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekov opened her eyes to a Russia that she had never known before. And Sholom Aleichem reminded her of what life was like in a shtetl, which wasn’t really all that unbearable until people started harassing you. Of course shtetl life was rather primitive when compared to what they had in America.

While Jordan and Sarah both remained devout and observant Jews, neither of them had a burning desire to pursue Jewish studies – they left that to Jordan’s younger siblings Abie and Goldeleh (who had to do this on her own because she was a girl), as well as to Sarah’s younger brothers Benjamin and Emanuel. After his bar mitzvah, Sarah’s brother Reuven lost interest in religious studies also. Jordan and Sarah continued their regular attendance at their shul, of course, but that was about the extent of their activities on the religious front. The Talmud’s deep mysteries would remain a mystery to them for the rest of their lives, and that was fine with them.

The first generation Feingolds (Jacob and Hannah) and the first generation Jacobsons alternated each year hosting the Seder (pronounced SAY der), which is the ritual meal on the first evening of Passover each year. Jordan and Sarah both really liked the Seder, as it is a beautiful service which tells the story of how the Children of Israel were once slaves in Egypt, and how they came to be free. The service before the meal tells how the Exodus from Egypt came about, and it reminds everyone to be thankful for the fact that the Jews were able to return from bondage to their original homeland. Then comes the meal with the k’nedlech and the gefilte fish and all the other delicious things to eat.

By 1919, both families had apartments nice enough to host up to 20 guests for dinner, although all 20 weren’t seated at the same table. At least they were all there under one roof. When the second generation such as Jordan, Sarah, Abie, Goldeleh, and the others started having children of their own, the annual Seder started growing with leaps and bounds. They eventually found that they had to divide up into smaller groups. They learned that there is a limit to how much fun you can have when all the growing family is assembled at the same place at the same time. Doubling the size of the crowd doesn’t exactly double the amount of pleasure had by all, as Sarah explained. In fact, the amount of fun even starts to decline rapidly as the size and noise of the crowd increases exponentially. The Wimpoles and Fosters agreed, saying that they had already experienced the same thing in their own families.

By this time, Jordan and Sarah were able to start enjoying several of the nearby Yiddish theaters. Yiddish theater certainly didn’t originate on the Lower East Side, but neither Jordan nor Sarah knew of it from anywhere else. They had simply never been in a position to enjoy it before. There were at least twenty-four Yiddish theaters in New York City in 1920, and some of them were on the Lower East Side.

There were a few different types of presentations at these theaters. Some were comical, others were serious. Most of the time, Jordan and Sarah preferred the funny shows as these gave them a release from the tensions of everyday living. There were also times when serious issues were addressed, though, such as political or labor situations. And there were lots of Shakespearean plays done in the Yiddish theaters. The Wimpoles and Fosters got a big kick out of Jordan’s description of Hamlet’s soliloquy spoken in Yiddish.

In 1921 as business continued to grow, Jordan and Sarah brought into the world their first son, whom they named David. This enabled Jordan himself to undergo what all new fathers of boys experience through the thrills of a bris. Jordan explained that since he had already described William Winholtz’s bris in enough detail to make everyone wince, he wouldn’t subject them to another painful description here. Ralph Wimpole and John Foster expressed their appreciation for Jordan’s not repeating the details of little David’s bris.

Jordan’s mother Hannah and Sarah’s mother Mary were each only a block away, and both were anxious to babysit their new grandchildren whenever an opportunity arose. In 1922, they got to see their chances for babysitting grow dramatically when Jordan and Sarah became fans of the New York Yankees. This baseball team played at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, which could be reached easily by subway. Jordan and Sarah came to like pitchers Waite Hoyt and Carl Mays, as well as the first baseman Wally Pipp. But their absolute favorite was the Yankees’ rightfielder Babe Ruth. They each had a feeling that the Babe would eventually be one of the game’s all-time greats.

In 1924 a second son was born, whom they named Isaac. Now that both Jordan and Sarah were the veterans of their own son David’s bris, as well as several others for the sons of friends in the neighborhood, they were able to take Isaac’s bris like the old hands that they were at this point.

Things were going so well in the business by 1925 that Jacob decided to open an upscale clothing store in the more prosperous area of Herald Square. Sarah urged him to think about including women’s fashions too, as she had a feel for what would sell. She started designing fashions at this time, and turned several of her own designs into actual gowns just to see if they might be able to sell them.

Her gowns sold so quickly that Jacob asked Sarah to consider hiring a few seamstresses to make more gowns like that. Sarah seemed to have a natural knack for designing women’s fashions, and they hired four seamstresses to turn Sarah’s designs into gowns. Based on her previous experience as a sweatshop seamstress, Sarah insisted that the girls be paid well and be given pleasant and comfortable working conditions. Jacob agreed because he didn’t want to exploit others. And besides, he was making reasonable amounts of profit even when he provided good working conditions. What more could he want? He said that becoming obscenely wealthy wouldn’t appeal to him anyway. Comfortable was good enough for Jacob – rolling in riches certainly wasn’t necessary – particularly when it required the exploitation of other people.

In 1925 Jordan and Sarah were upset when one of their favorite New York Yankees, first baseman Wally Pipp, was injured and had to be replaced by some new upstart by the name of Lou Gehrig. They booed and hissed this greenhorn rookie, and that was when Sarah first started making large signs to hold up at games at Yankee Stadium so there would be no doubt about what she thought about things. They hoped that good old Wally would be back in action soon, but every game they went to that year had this jerk Gehrig at first base – even when Wally was feeling better. Of course, they couldn’t help but notice that this bum Gehrig was starting to be a pretty good player himself. Maybe they had been too hasty in their judgment.

In November of 1927, Jacob was only 55 years old. But after enduring all the hardships of his life in the shtetls of Russia, and his years with handling his heavy pushcarts on the Lower East Side, carrying his loads of goods up the steps to his apartment at night, and back down again to the pushcart in the morning, and with all the mental stress from making sure he provided for his family, he succumbed to a sudden heart attack. Jacob had overcome the difficulties of bringing his family to the New World in hopes of a better life, but in the long run these challenges proved to be fatal to him.

The new life he had prayed for and worked so hard for, would have to be left to those who followed in his footsteps. Jacob himself would never reap the benefits of making it to America, even though he was the one who took the mammoth and frightening steps to get the family across Europe, then across the Atlantic Ocean, and then settled on the Lower East Side.

For Jordan, it took a long time for the initial shock of Jacob’s death to even begin to wear off. When it finally did, Jordan remembered that Moses led the Jews for forty years in the wilderness after their Exodus from Egypt, so that those who had known slavery in Egypt would not move on to the Promised Land. Jordan wondered if maybe the same principle applied to his father and his life in this modern-day Land of Promise.

The day of Jacob’s death, Jordan said the first of what would be many recitations of the mourner’s Kaddish (pronounced KAH dish) for his beloved father.


Yis'gadal v'yis'kadash sh'mei raba . . .
. . . .
Yis'barach v'yish'tabach v'yis'pa'ar v'yis'romam v'yst'nasei . . .
. . . .
. . . .
V'im'ru amen.

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Part 14

On the afternoon of the fifth full day at sea, Sarah was delighted to hear there would be a shipwide bridge tournament – including all the classes of passengers. Jordan was happy to hear about the tournament, but he wasn’t quite as ecstatic as Sarah. For Jordan, bridge had become a pleasant entertainment – for Sarah it was a serious obsession.

When they had learned how to play bridge in 1930, Sarah was fascinated with this game, and she quickly found out that she could play exceptionally well. It was hard for Jordan to come close to what she could do, but he still enjoyed the game. He played well enough for most situations, but at the really high levels of competition, he was in over his head.

Sarah had to learn to accept that simple fact, and she appreciated all that Jordan did outside the world of bridge, which made it all right if she would never win any major championships with him. Bridge certainly wasn’t the most important thing in the world – or even close to it. But she was the first to admit that she still liked bridge more than she should have.

When the tournament started on the Queen Mary, Jordan noted the usual stares going Sarah’s way when she didn’t arrange her cards after they were dealt. She just left the cards as they were, rather than putting all the spades together here, and all the hearts together there. This was always disconcerting to their opponents, but Jordan had become used to it, so he didn’t even have to work hard anymore to suppress his grin when they gawked like that.

The day was rather uneventful as far as excitement goes, and the Feingolds came in eighth out of 56 couples. The only memorable thing occurred on one hand when an opponent, halfway through playing a hand, came out with “I’ve played that pretty foolishly, haven’t I?” Sarah responded “When you have the aces, kings, queens, and jacks of three suits, how could you possibly play foolishly?”

The Wimpoles and the Fosters had also been in the tournament, but with the way the couples rotated around the tables, neither of them ever played the Feingolds. After the tournament was finished, the friends found their customary deck chairs for the resumption of the ongoing saga.

Sarah explained that their favorite of the modern marvels was the motion picture. Rudolph Valentino started making movies in 1919, which was a few years before Jordan and Sarah could afford to indulge in such activities as going to the movies. They finally started going to movie theaters in 1924, which was pretty much the height of Valentino’s career. Sarah told the Wimpoles and the Fosters that she always used to joke that Jordan was the Jewish Valentino, but Jordan would insist that he couldn’t possibly be, because he parted his hair in the center, while Valentino parted his on the left side.

Those were the days when the written words of the actors were posted on the screen for the people who could read fast – the people who couldn’t read that fast, or couldn’t read at all, would have to rely on someone who could, or else they would remain lost as far as what was going on in the movie. They had live piano players or organists right down in front of the theater, to add a little sound to an otherwise totally silent experience. That way, you wouldn’t have to listen to the guy three rows behind you telling his girlfriend who didn’t know how to read, exactly what each of the characters was saying whenever the words were flashed up there on the screen. Jordan told the Wimpoles and the Fosters that he was really glad that they eventually came up with talking movies, so you didn’t have to listen to people all over the theater reading the lines to their companions who couldn’t read for themselves.

But in 1926, a year before they came up with the talking movies, Valentino passed away at the age of 31, as the result of a post-surgical infection in the hospital after exploratory surgery found a large ulcer in his stomach. He had so many fans that there were major riots in the streets of New York, which is where he died, but Jordan and Sarah didn’t participate in those. They did, however, get to view his body lying in state at a funeral parlor the next day, before he was taken by train back to Hollywood for burial.

Then when the talking movies started in 1927, Jordan and Sarah were surprised to learn that a nice Jewish boy, the son of a cantor, was the star of the first ‘talkie’ which was called The Jazz Singer. It was Al Jolson, a Lithuanian Jew, whose schtick was dressing up in blackface and singing. Most of the film was silent, but there were a few songs such as Toot-Toot-Tootsie Goodbye and My Mammy. Jordan tried to sing along with Al right there in the theater, but Sarah elbowed him in the ribs to get him to knock it off before an usher escorted them out.

Sarah told about the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah (ROSH ha SHAH nah) and Yom Kippur (YOM kip POOR) for the year 1928. Rosh Hashanah is the New Year; Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement. She explained that these two holidays are considered by many to be the most important ones on the entire calendar. It was on these occasions that the shofar, or ram’s horn, was blown. Now there aren’t too many people around who know exactly WHY the shofar is blown, but it’s sort of like what Tevye the dairyman explained in some of Sholom Aleichem’s stories – a tradition. Sarah explained that when she was growing up, she figured it must have been some kind of signaling method that they used in the ancient days before telegraph, telephone, and radio, but she never was able to find anyone who could either confirm or deny her theory.

That year Rosh Hashanah started with the evening service on Friday, September 15, 1928. Now this corresponded to the year 5689 according to the Hebrew calendar, which means that this calendar started a long time before much of recorded history. By Sarah’s estimate based on what she had read, the patriarch Abraham was born about the year 1710 by the Hebrew calendar, so she guessed that the Year Zero must have been someone’s idea of the time of Adam and Eve.

Then the even more important Yom Kippur came ten days after Rosh Hashanah. This was the day that one asked for forgiveness for any sins he may have committed over the past year, and for the strength in the coming year to avoid repeating any of those sins – or to avoid committing any new ones. What Sarah disliked most about this particular holiday was the fact that you had to go 25 hours without eating, just to prove your repentance. Now that’s not just eating a little bit, nor is it excluding this or that from whatever you eat over the day – it’s eating and drinking absolutely nothing for an entire day, plus one hour for some reason that Sarah never understood. Neither Jordan nor Sarah was too fond of this particular tradition, but they did it anyway. What they did like about Yom Kippur was the Kol Nidre (pronounced KOLE nih DRAY), which the cantor sings so beautifully.

The High Holidays of 1928 were particularly meaningful to Jordan and the rest of the Feingold family, because Jacob had been blowing the shofar in shul ever since 1905, two years after the family arrived on the Lower East Side. There were very few who had mastered the proper way to blow the shofar, and Jacob had been one of the few. The shofar sounded so different this year with someone other than Jacob blowing it – in more ways than one.

It was coming out of the Yom Kippur services that Jordan and Sarah couldn’t help but overhear a disagreement between their neighbors on Norfolk Street, the Rosenblatts, one of whom was very status conscious – as if one could get much status there on the Lower East Side. The younger brother William said to his older brother Joseph, “Why can’t we change our name so we don’t sound so Jewish?” Now Joseph apparently wasn’t particularly thrilled with this idea, but he said “OK, I agree. You can change your name to Schlemiel (pronounced shleh MEAL).” After thinking about that for a minute, William gave up on his campaign for changing the family name.

In addition to the baseball games, the public library, and the movies, Jordan and Sarah enjoyed taking their children to play in the park on Sunday afternoons. By 1927, Becca was nine, David was six, and little Isaac was three. It was now getting to the point that the children were getting to be more like real people than like babies, which is what they had been until then. Sarah pointed out that a milestone like that was very noticeable and memorable. She went on to say she certainly didn’t mean to imply that there was anything wrong with their babies being babies – it’s just that it seemed so different when their babies started becoming real people.

Jordan took over the story from Sarah at this point to tell how one Sunday in 1929, while they were out for their afternoon in the park with the children, Isaac suddenly started complaining of bad pains somewhere near his stomach. Having been through three children, all of whom experienced many ailments along the way, Jordan and Sarah didn’t think anything unusual was afoot here. But when it continued throughout most of the next day, they took him to Beth Israel Hospital. It turned out that he had appendicitis – Sarah was merciless with herself for not bringing him to the hospital sooner.

Little Isaac died in the hospital at the age of five years from the associated complications.

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Part 15

After the somber note on little Isaac’s death at five years of age, Jordan suggested they get ready for the formal dinner that would be held tonight – their last night at sea. The Queen Mary was still knifing through the water at a speed that had her on schedule to arrive in Southampton the next morning.

When the friends all met in the dining room, the three men were wearing their tuxedos, while the women were wearing their finest gowns. The three women totally ignored the men despite the magnificent lines of their tuxedos and the stunning way they had all hand-tied their bow ties around their well-starched detachable collars. Nor did the women care much about the men’s beautiful cufflinks or the gold-filled studs down the fronts of their white dress shirts, or their gorgeous cummerbunds that were all properly oriented so as to be able to catch any crumbs that fell during the meal.

It seemed for some reason that the women just wanted to check out each other’s gowns and say “ooooh and aaaaah and ooooh and aaaaah” about all the different features of each one. The men noticed that their wives were starting to sound like the social columnist in the New York Times. If that social columnist had been there on the Queen Mary that evening, he would have written something like this – “Mrs. Wimpole made one of the evening’s boldest fashion statements, wearing a high-neck, sapphire-blue gown of Malayan satin that hugged all her curves, along with long puffy sleeves in an exquisite design by Giovanni Mozzarella. And Mrs. Foster also looked stunning – and slim – in a lime green hand-woven off-the-shoulder gown with a tiered skirt fashioned by Francois Frigidaire. She wore her hair like Gloria Swanson. And Mrs. Feingold was wearing a fetching white strapless gown of silk chiffon with magnificent and yet understated eight-color embroidery by the incomparable Bertha Berman.”

The men were hoping that this gab session would end before any of them developed their first case of nausea on the entire voyage, as nobody had even come close to feeling seasick before this banter began about the evening gowns. After an incredible thirty minutes of mutual admiration society drivel, it finally halted when the ladies simply ran out of gown features to oooh and aaah about. Then everybody sat down for dinner.

Jordan wanted to tell the waiter that they would like a few extra minutes before he brought the meals, just to let the women rest their jaws before they would have to start eating. But with discretion being the better part of valor, he chose to simply keep quiet on that issue, so they could rest their jaws in relative silence. Otherwise, their jaws wouldn’t really get any rest.

While they were waiting for the food to arrive, John Foster started talking about how excited he and his wife Beverly were about radio. He explained that they had a very nice large radio in a beautiful wood cabinet in their living room. He mentioned the fact that they had never had entertainment in their own home before the radio came along several years ago, unless they wanted to try entertaining themselves. However, he pointed out that Beverly couldn’t sing a note, and he couldn’t play any musical instruments. And vice versa, as well. But both of them were really good at listening, and were stricken with this marvelous invention of the radio now. They could sit there in their living room and watch the radio cabinet for hours on end, although he did note that it seemed silly that they would watch the cabinet, which didn’t do anything more than sit there. He just said it seemed like the thing to do, even if there wasn’t anything to actually watch. The Wimpoles and the Feingolds agreed that they all watched their radio cabinets as well.

John said he and Beverly had been listening for eight years now, and were very happy with how much better the programs and the radios themselves were now in 1936, as compared to what they were like when they first started. But when they first started, it didn’t really matter how bad the quality was. The novelty of the experience more than compensated for the lack of quality.

The Fosters’ favorite program was Fibber McGee and Molly, which had only been on the air for a year now. One of their favorite features of this show, and this happened in most episodes, was when Fibber McGee forgot that his closet was packed to the gills with things he had forcefully jammed into it. So when he opened the closet door, the contents all came tumbling down noisily on his head. And the next week, the same thing happened. And the week after that – and the week after that.

Jordan talked a little bit about the dancing teacher that had given Sarah and him their lessons more than twenty years ago. His name was Nathan Birnbaum, but he went by Nattie at the dancing school. When he changed his name to George Burns and started his radio act with his new wife Gracie Allen, his career really began to take off. They actually started their radio broadcasts on the British Broadcasting Company in 1926, and had a guest appearance on someone else’s show in the United States in 1930. Then by 1932 they had their own Burns and Allen Show going full throttle. Once in 1933 George and Gracie were on the Lower East Side visiting some friends, and Jordan and Sarah ran into them in the middle of Hester Street. It was a great reunion between the dancing teacher and two of his most devoted students. They enjoyed meeting Gracie and found out that in person she wasn’t anything like the character she played on the radio.

Sarah told how Jordan and she had become virtual fixtures at Yankee Stadium since 1924. Now they didn’t have season tickets or anything that elaborate, but they started going to at least thirty games a year. These were the years when the Yankee lineup came to be called “Murderers’ Row.” Babe Ruth led the sluggers, followed closely by the first baseman who had replaced Wally Pipp in 1925, Lou Gehrig, and whose value had risen dramatically in the Feingolds’ eyes. In 1927, the team hit its high-water mark, when they won the American League pennant and the World Series, and Babe Ruth hit an astounding 60 home runs. Gehrig had 47 homers, plus 175 runs batted in.

Jordan then resumed discussing their lives back on the Lower East Side. He said that he and Sarah had considered moving to a ‘better neighborhood’ like most of the people did when they started earning enough money to afford it. But he said that they found themselves to be pretty much attached to the Lower East Side and its way of life. So rather than moving out, they just got their apartment on Norfolk Street redecorated and bought some new furniture. The place just felt like home to them, and they were still near Jordan’s mother, Hannah, and Sarah’s parents, the Jacobsons.

Business was going so well in the Herald Square store that Jordan and Sarah opened a second store in Times Square in 1929. Sarah continued designing the ladies’ gowns and her seamstress crew had doubled to eight girls at this point. Jordan managed the Herald Square store and his brother Abie took care of the one in Times Square. Each year continued to be better than the last, but they still kept their money in shoeboxes in their apartments. That habit, started by their father Jacob, had been maintained by his sons ever since he passed away.

While they wouldn’t call it the Great Depression until a few years after it started with the stock market crash on October 29, 1929, the Feingolds’ business began slowing down along with most of the other businesses in the country in 1930. They did their best to keep all their seamstresses working, but by 1932, they had to let two of them go due to lack of work. They managed to give each of these girls a very generous bonus in gratitude for their loyalty over the past years, and promised to bring them back as soon as business began improving.

Having saved most of their cash in shoeboxes all along, and never having gotten accustomed to spending lots of money, the Feingolds survived pretty well, at least compared to lots of other people in the country. Hundreds of banks across the nation failed, costing many people their life’s savings. Unemployment levels reached 25% in most cities, and even higher in a few others. And salaries declined considerably for those lucky enough to keep their jobs.

In early 1934, the Feingolds couldn’t believe that the time had already arrived for their son David’s bar mitzvah. It seemed to them that it was just yesterday that he was lying in his crib wearing diapers, and here he was getting ready to read from the Torah in shul. In view of the Depression, they didn’t want to be too extravagant, even though they could have afforded to put on a nice reception after the ceremony. They wanted to keep it simple, something like Sarah’s brother Reuven’s bar mitzvah where Jordan and Sarah had met 23 years before.

David’s parashah, or reading from the Torah, was called Kedoshim (keh DOE sheem), from the Book of Leviticus, which is considered an expansion of the Ten Commandments. Sarah was again upstairs with all the other women at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, even though it was her son rather than her brother this time who was in the limelight. She couldn’t help but think back to her brother’s bar mitzvah which was so similar, and conclude that the continuity offered by her religion was so comforting to her. In a world where so many things were constantly changing, she could always count on her times in the synagogue as being the firm and steady continuation of familiarity.

The reception would be quite similar to Reuven’s reception so many years before, where the nice young man with the shiny shoes noticed the nice young lady arranging her strudel on the serving platter. Again there would just be finger food, although there would be a more elaborate dinner at the Jacobsons afterwards for only the immediate family. Of course the immediate family at this point was considerably larger than it had been even five years ago.

When Becca reached the age of 15 in 1934, Sarah thought it would be a great time to teach her daughter all the secrets of Jewish cooking that were so important for her to know. It was the passing of the torch that had been done so many times before her, and would be done again so many times afterward. Sarah did very well in most of her lessons to Becca, teaching her daughter how to make things like k’nedlech, challah, gehakta leber, strudel, potato latkes, and matzoh brei. Becca understood everything her mother was saying, and proved to be quite a little cook.

But one dish presented a problem for Sarah. She had to try seven different times before she could get all the way through the lesson with Becca on how to make gefilte fish.

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Part 16

Everybody agreed to get to bed relatively early after the formal dinner, since the ship would be arriving at Southampton early the following morning. They all wanted to watch the ship’s entry into port, which meant that they had to get up a lot earlier than they normally did.

There was an early breakfast scheduled for the morning of the arrival – breakfast would start at 4 AM since the ship would pass clear of the Isle of Wight at 4:30 AM and enter the channel for Southampton.

The Wimpoles, Fosters, and Feingolds met at 4:15 in the dining room, before the sun came up. The Feingolds had lox and bagels, but they each had their own distinct preferences. Jordan liked belly lox, which is very salty, along with cream cheese and sliced yellow onion. He liked a lot of lox, enough to completely cover the cream cheese, and relatively thick slices of onion. Sarah liked Nova Scotia lox, which is not salty at all, with cream cheese and sliced tomatoes instead of onions. And she put such a little bit of lox that it didn’t even cover all the cream cheese – it was just scattered in small pieces around the surface of the cream cheese. Jordan explained to her all the time that she just didn’t know what she was missing by not trying it his way, but Sarah never seemed to listen.

But one thing that both Jordan and Sarah definitely agreed on is that bagels should NOT be toasted. Oh, and another thing Jordan and Sarah definitely saw eye to eye on is that strawberries, blueberries, and chocolate chips, as good as they are, do NOT belong in bagels.

Jordan had learned over the years, after eating innumerable lox and bagels, that he was much neater when he assembled the entire package into the form of a closed sandwich, as opposed to trying to eat two separate open-faced bagels each having its own lox, cream cheese, and onion. He didn’t make nearly as big a mess with the closed sandwich. However, he did note that when he had it in this closed form, he didn’t get as much lox, cream cheese, or onion. Sarah started to describe some of the messes he had made in the past when he tried the open-faced bagel approach, but then she thought better of it and stopped her description before she made any of the guests sick.

By 5 AM, they noticed through one of the dining room portholes that the horizon ahead was easily visible now, so they all went topside to have an unobstructed view of the ship’s entry into Southampton. It was a very comfortable 65 degrees Fahrenheit, and a nice breeze was blowing as the ship proceeded up the channel at ten knots towards the harbor.

Both sides of the channel were lush with green trees – oaks and elms, Jordan thought, but he couldn’t be positive because the ship wasn’t close enough to get that good a look. Ocean liners transiting this channel in either direction were such a common sight here that the people ashore went about their business without stopping to watch the ship. Of course, at 5:30 AM there weren’t all that many people up and about who could stop to watch the ship anyway.

Just like for their departure from New York, but in reverse order, the tugboats came alongside and tied up to the Queen, to pull her into her berth alongside the pier. Due to the early morning arrival, there were no fireboats spraying fountains of water into the air, nor were there any celebratory tugboat whistles being sounded like there had been for their departure from New York.

Despite all the activity, what with the tugboats pulling the ship into place and the mooring lines being thrown over to the pier and being attached to the massive bollards along the pier, Jordan again began recalling all the things he and Sarah had described to the Wimpoles and the Fosters over the past several days. Yes, they had certainly come a long way in the past 33 years, much farther than simply the distance measured in miles.

The Wimpoles, Fosters, and Feingolds exchanged addresses and telephone numbers so they could keep in touch once they all returned to their respective homes. They also exchanged hugs and expressed how much they had enjoyed each other’s company during the crossing.

Just before they left the ship, it was announced that the Queen Mary had won the Blue Riband with a speed of 30.63 knots for her eastbound voyage, to go along with her earlier 30.14 knots in the westbound direction. This was the fastest combined speed ever recorded for trans-Atlantic crossings.

As they went down the gangway, Jordan looked at Sarah and said “That’s really great about winning the Blue Riband - NOW we’ll have something to tell our grandchildren.”

She looked at him, smiled, and rolled her eyes.

END OF THE STORY

However, there will be another episode that includes links to public domain internet pictures relating to the story. Links include those to the Queen Mary, shtetls in Europe, ships carrying immigrants to the New World, Ellis Island, life on the Lower East Side of New York, etc.

[DickZ]

Two Crossings, Links to Pictures

Here is the Queen Mary honored on a postage stamp 1936 – the year our story took place:

http://www.qm2.org.uk/images/stamp_uk_13apr2004_42.jpg

And in a painting with the ship moored in New York:

http://www.anmm.gov.au/webdata/shop/images/image_678_1.jpg

And on a post card :

http://www.oswild.org/hobnob/family/john/egypt/queen-mary.jpg

Sailing into New York Harbor:

http://www.simplonpc.co.uk/2Cunard-Vintage/QueenMary13-1stNY.jpg

A dining room (notice the chart on the forward bulkhead showing the Queen’s route between New York and Southhampton):

http://www.pelgranepress.com/SeePageXX/images/queenmary04.jpg

An observation lounge in the ship as currently configured for restaurant service in Long Beach:

http://hull534.freeshell.org/obslo-thumb.jpg

Here are some scenes in various shtetls in eastern Europe:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/1/1039973_9686c676ce.jpg

http://www.uoregon.edu/~rkimble/Mirweb/Miralbum/houses.in.shtetl.jpg

http://www.roussimoff.com/Sold Painting Images/liweddingbig.jpg

http://www.agiftforlaughter.com/images/shtetl-tevye.jpg

RMS Anchoria – the ship that brought the Feingolds to the United States is shown below. While the Feingolds are fictitious, the Ghetzlers mentioned in the story during all the hardships in steerage were my maternal grandparents. I only wish I had talked to them about their experiences – deferring discussions until after people die is a pretty lousy approach to finding out anything.

Of course the Anchoria is the ship in the background and not the small boat in the foreground:

http://www.library.mun.ca/qeii/cns/photos/cnsphoto0305009.jpg

Here are some steerage passengers topside watching for Statue of Liberty when an immigrant-carrying ship was approaching New York, as arrival in New York Harbor was the only time that all passengers were allowed topside at the same time.

www.upress.umn.edu/sles/Chapter2/Images2/immigrant.jpg

Here are some views of Ellis Island.

Exterior
http://sydaby.eget.net/swe/pics/ellis_island_l.jpg

Painting of Great Hall
http://www.delmar.santacruz.k12.ca.us/jenkins/projects/EllisIsland9

Trachoma check
http://www.nyc24.org/2003/islands/zone6/images/zone6_history_photo6.jpg

And some street scenes on the Lower East Side:

http://www.assumption.edu/ahc/1920s/modern%20woman/Hester%20Street1903.jpg

http://www.youthlarge.com/dan/east405.jpg

http://www.thedustyshelf.com/images/r-photo-4.jpg

http://ecrp.uiuc.edu/v2n1/bhavnagri/dpa21-01.jpg

Here’s an overview of the Lower East Side, if you’d like a little more info than the story gave:

http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/immig/polish6.html

Remember that when Jordan was starting out as a shoeshine boy, he watched the construction of the Pennsylvania Station.

Here’s a shot of it in mid-construction:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3098/2316647270_251286f56b.jpg?v=0

And the magnificent completed exterior:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Penn_Station3.jpg

And the General Waiting Room:
http://blogs.redding.com/mbeauchamp/archives/PennStation2.jpg

The Eldridge Street Synagogue, which is where Jordan and Sarah met on the occasion of Sarah’s brother’s bar mitzvah in 1911, and where Jordan and Sarah were later married four years later.

Exterior

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/0f8egpl2avh1n/610x.jpg

Interior

Note that women still sit upstairs and men sit downstairs - a tradition that still stands.

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.andrewlmoore.com/images/photography/Eldridge_Synagogue.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.andrewlmoore.com/view_image.php%3Fproject_id%3D5%26photo_id%3D70&h=490&w=388&sz=141&hl=en&start=1&um=1&tbnid=mfTcL8ybvmE0IM:&t

Some views of the garment industry workers:

http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/hine-photos/images/garment-workers.gif

http://www.laborphotos.cornell.edu/images/5780pb13f7a.jpg

This site offers tours and movies showing life on the Lower East Side. Under the RESEARCH AND EXPLORE section, you can take a virtual tour of a typical apartment without even leaving your computer:

http://www.tenement.org/

[jayne]

Hello, DickZ. My grandfather was Maurice Ghetzler, married to Dorothy Schewitz. We are related, then? Please contact me! - Jayne Rosen in Florida

[jayne]

I am thinkingG you must be the Zimmerman we were just discussiing today at dinner. My uncle Leslie hetzler is in town with his wife Lila.

[DickZ]

Hello, DickZ. My grandfather was ...
Hi Jayne,

I've responded twice via private message, so I hope you've gotten at least one of them. If you haven't, please check out the private message feature of this forum so we don't have to bother all the others with our family talk.

Dick