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.
