Free Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America by Stefan Kanfer Page B

dialect.”
    The floor is “littered ankle-deep with half-sewn garments. In the alcove, on a couch of many dozens of ‘pants' ready for the finisher, a bare-legged baby with pinched face is asleep. A fence of piled-up clothing keeps him from rolling off on the floor. The faces, hands, and arms to the elbows of everyone in the room are black with the color of the cloth on which they are working.”
    In this situation the immigrant Jews were victimized by more enterprising and seasoned co-religionists who had learned the ropes a few years earlier. There was no social safety net for the poor in the 1880s, and precious few charities. In his autobiographical novel,
The Rise of David Levinsky,
Abraham Cahan recalls the protagonist's first day in Manhattan. He and a tailor, whom he had met aboard ship, run into a sweatshop operator on the street. The employer has come down to the Battery to look for cheap labor. The tailor is immediately hired; then comes a question for Levinsky. “And what was your occupation? You have no trade, have you?”
    “I read Talmud.”
    “I see, but that's no business in America.”
    Out of pity the contractor hands out a quarter and departs. Levinsky is on his own. In a few days he, too, finds piecework in the garment trade.
    The oppressed and crowded newcomers sent word back to their relatives overseas; America was not quite the Golden Land of their dreams. On the other hand, it wasn't the Pale, either. As David Levinsky finds, “The sign boards were in English and Yiddish, some of them in Russian. The scurry and hustle of the people were not merely overwhelmingly greater, both in volume and intensity, than in my native town. It was of another sort.” The swing and the step of the pedestrians, the voices and manner of the street peddlers “seemed to testify to far more self-confidence and energy, to larger ambitions and wider scopes, than did the appearance of the crowds in my birthplace.”
    Fresh arrivals added to the vitality. They came into the tenements, wave upon wave, until by the end of the nineteenth century the Jewish regions of lower Manhattan were more crowded than the slums of Bombay. If Levinsky and his friends found this perversely heartening, the uptown journalists did not. In the opinion of the
New York Times
the Jewish district had turned downtown into “the eyesore of New York and perhaps the filthiest place on the western continent.” The paper's correspondent thought it “impossible for a Christian to live there because he will be driven out, either by blows or the dirt and stench. Cleanliness is an unknown quantity to these people. They cannot be lifted up to a higher plane because they do not want to be.”
    The
Times
was not alone. “These people” became the bane of New York City reformers. They had a particular distaste for the Eleventh Precinct in Manhattan, the gerrymandered Jewish district. MotherMandelbaum was a particular irritant. The 250-pound fence, her husband, Wolfe, and their three children lived at 79 Clinton Street in a duplex elegantly furnished with furniture and draperies stolen from the homes of uptown aristocrats. Mother's dry goods were supplied by a series of colorful burglars, among them Mark Shinburn, who invested his profits in foreign money orders payable to relatives in Prussia and then returned to Europe, identifying himself as Baron Shindell of Monaco.
    All this was a source of amusement in the New York ghetto, where the right kind of outlaw could assume heroic proportions. But outside that district, the words “criminal” and “Jew” were becoming synonymous.
The Great Metropolis,
first published in 1887 and popular for at least a dozen years afterward, devoted a long chapter to “New Israel, A Modern School of Crime.”
    Strangely enough the author, Frank Moss, displays little of the antiNegro bias of his time. The Jews are his main concern, and he notes that the “colored people who once lived in Baxter Street were a decent