“Angels covered me up.” The Handwerker family in Galicia.
IN THE YEARS leading up to World War I, anyone who could not foresee the looming conflict was a fool. Anyone who was not a fool looked for ways to get out. Nathan Handwerker sought to escape. He well remembered the soldiers he had seen across the pasture fence as a young boy.
“I didn’t want to get killed,” he recalled later. “I saw a war was coming. The emperor came to Galicia.”
Franz Joseph arrived in the region for the shield-clashing military exercises that the Austrian army held every year. There were other telltale signs. When Austria constructed a railroad that year, Nathan noticed that it did not lead to the market town of Jarosław but directly to the huge military installations at Prysmzl.
All the preparations for war at least temporarily buoyed the Handwerker finances. The soldiers of the underfunded Austrian army had to buy food to augment their meager rations. Rose Handwerker had by that time taken over much of the responsibility for making the family living.
“She was a businesswoman, selling vegetables,” Nathan recalled of his mother. “She rented a cellar, a deep cellar without lights, a cellar to go down two floors deep, because the deeper the cellar is, you didn’t have to heat it up for the winter.”
It turned out that Rose had to go farther and bargain harder to purchase her produce. “The local merchants gave her trouble, so she went to the outskirts. The farmers liked her better there. She spoiled them. She gave them more money in order to be able to buy from them. One farmer had a whole wagon of cabbage. One farmer had carrots. A farmer had radish, horseradish. Potatoes. Chickens. Chickens were tied up at the feet, so she put them in boxes, stacked them, sold them in town. People come up from the army. Everybody’s coming to pick up food.”
For five years, from the time he left the bakery in Radymno to when he departed for America, Nathan’s job was to assist his mother in her produce business. Recalling the period a half century later, he retained sharp memories of those repeated trips down into the rented root cellar.
“Whatever was left over from the day’s selling, I had to carry it into the basement overnight. So I used to carry it down in the dark. If I had a sack of potatoes, it would be hard for me to pick it up again, so I had to go down slow, two floors deep and no light.”
Nathan managed to keep his wits about him and not act simply as a beast of burden. In July 1906, he noticed that the markets of Jarosław were entirely sold out of potatoes.
“Let me go to Narol,” he asked his parents. He knew of a potato farm in his home village. He used to work in the fields there as a child. The wealthy landowner would be sure to have a ready supply.
“I went to this rich farmer—they call him ‘the Baron,’” Nathan recalled. “The richest man in the whole neighborhood—not only in the town but around the town, too. I go in, and I ask him in Polish, ‘So have you got any potatoes?’ He took me to a big warehouse; it went up to the ceiling, and the potatoes it filled up.”
Nathan managed to buy 180 pounds of spuds at a penny a pound. He took them back to Jarosław by horse and wagon and made a good profit.
“I was fourteen years old, and this was my first deal that I made for my family. We got about five groschen for a bag of potatoes, five times what I paid. My father and mother made a lot of money.”
The incident helped teach the young boy the unchallengeable law of supply and demand. It also demonstrated how the sale of an inexpensive, humble food can yield a small fortune. Although he never received a formal education, Nathan was a quick study. Always watching and listening, he retained the lessons from his years working as a child, ideas and practices he would later bring to his business. From an early age, he realized the value of an experienced worker and that a premium should be placed on reliable business partners.
Though he did not get along well with his father, Nathan took many of his adult values from examples set by his mother. He followed her idea that maintaining relations with loyal suppliers was good business. Rose also taught her son the virtue of looking out for the wider community. In the case of the great Jarosław potato bonanza, his mother made it a policy to sell only a single bag per customer. “My mother says, ‘No, give everybody a chance to get some.’”
* * *
As Nathan came of age, remaining in Galicia meant dodging chapper gangs of forcible recruiters and essentially playing chicken with history. Mounting anti-Semitism plagued the whole area. “The Poles were the biggest Jew haters,” Nathan recalled. In the market, a Polish woman once shouted at him, “Jew, go to Palestine!”
Against such bigotry, there were only three bulwarks: religion, the tightly knit Jewish community, and the refuge of family. But faith and family, which had helped preserve shtetl societies for hundreds of years, failed to protect them now. Multiple threats from a collapsed economy, impending war, and ethnic hatreds worked to tear Galicia apart and took their toll on the Handwerkers, as well.
The formerly close-knit family separated. Israel, Nathan’s oldest brother, departed for a new life in America. Other Handwerker brothers made exploratory forays into the nearby towns of Lublin and Sandomierz, always working at their father’s trade of shoemaking. Nathan proved himself the thrifty one. “I didn’t spend too much. When I went out to eat, I used to eat a bowl of soup and one piece of bread. A slice of bread was for three cents. I could eat more, but I wanted to save money.”
Joseph Handwerker, Nathan’s older brother and the second oldest sibling, traveled to Germany, the first step in his journey to America. He sent word asking his little brother to come join him. Nathan needed help to decipher the message. “I get a postal card, but I can’t read, I can’t write. And I couldn’t add two and two. I packed up, but I didn’t have enough to pay for a railroad ticket to go to Frankfurt.”
His sister Anna loaned him going-away money. “I kissed her good-bye and said, ‘Don’t tell nobody.’ I knew she wouldn’t.”
Nathan told his father he was departing for America, intentionally breaking the news in the synagogue, where he knew Jacob could not cause an argument. He said good-bye with a simple phrase, “Ich gay avek” (I’m leaving).
He carried what few clothes he had in a burlap onion bag, because a valise or suitcase would attract the suspicions of the police. He was an eighteen-year-old male, perfect cannon fodder. Nathan made his journey in constant fear of the authorities. At any step along the way, if he had been questioned by the police, he would have been shipped back to Austria and into the army. That would be tantamount to a death sentence, but by some miracle, it never happened.
“On the train, there was a long bench from one end to the other. I was lucky with the policemen when they came to check to see if anybody was crossing the border without papers. I would look down the train car, and when I saw that who was coming was wearing boots, polished boots, when I saw one foot, a polished shoe, I knew it was a policeman.” He would bolt from the train and reboard by a different door.
Nathan later remembered disembarking in Frankfurt early in the morning, a stranger in a strange land, admiring the gardens, the fountains, but having only a “penny and a half” left to his name. All he could afford was a soft pretzel. So he bought a pretzel and went to a fountain to fill up on water.
“I slept in a synagogue. I slept on the floor. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t write. I had nothing. I slept in my shoes.”
From the mouths of everyone around him, he heard the same word … America. Emigration was like a fever, everywhere in the air. Newspaper ads listed daily departures of passenger ships. His brother Israel, already in New York, wrote to Joseph, encouraging him and Nathan to make the crossing. Behind them lay poverty and war. There was no reason to turn back. The whole Handwerker family was either moving or planning to move.
Nathan was in Germany, but he wanted to be in America. “I was dreaming about it.” Joseph Handwerker was restless, too, and soon moved on from Frankfurt to Berlin, and then on to Antwerp, Belgium. Nathan followed, having to cross a series of borders to get there. Guard after guard failed to detect the young Galician refugee.
“Angels covered me up,” Nathan said about his journey. “That’s the only way I can see it. Four days sitting on the train. Three borders. The German border, Luxembourg, and Belgium. And nobody asked me where I’m going. When I got off the train, I knew they wouldn’t send me back. And I bent down and I kissed the sidewalk.”
In Antwerp, Nathan applied himself to building up a nest egg for the cross-Atlantic journey. He was tireless, going door to door in the diamond district of the busy Belgium port city to sell his services as a cobbler. “I want to make shoes,” he told anyone who would listen. “New shoes, men’s and ladies’ shoes, and soles and heels. You’ll be satisfied.”
Scrimping and saving, in half a year he managed to build up a bankroll of several hundred Austro-Hungarian kronen, the gold coins of his countrymen that he could easily change for any other currency. He kept his money in the bank. His brother Joseph was not so frugal. He got swept up in the nightlife of the city, going out almost every night while Nathan stayed home and worked at the cobbler bench.
Both brothers were making more money than they ever could have dreamed back home in Galicia. But only one kept his eye on the prize. “My brother Joe, when he went to a restaurant, he used to eat the biggest piece of fish, the best. He spent money on gambling, on going out, on girls.”
After six months in Antwerp, Nathan was ready. He headed off to join the oldest Handwerker brother, Israel, in New York City. A steerage ticket on a passenger ship to America cost him one hundred of his hard-earned kronen. He traded in another thirty kronen for American dollars, spending money for the New World. Nathan thus took his place amid the single greatest wave of emigration in human history.
* * *
On Saturday, March 16, 1912, nineteen-year-old Nathan Handwerker boarded the SS Neckar in Rotterdam, Netherlands, bound for New York City. (Once again, he had to manage a border crossing to get to his departure port, and once again, angels had covered him up from the hostile eyes of the authorities.)
“I could buy a ticket, I found out, for a certain amount, around a hundred dollars American. I needed twenty-five more dollars for when I arrived at New York, or else immigration wouldn’t let me in. I know about this since I talked to people. I had to find out myself where I am and where I’m going.”
His brother Joseph cooked Nathan a chicken for the journey, using a lot of garlic, and also bought him oranges and salami. Nathan felt safe enough that he could travel with a valise now, so he packed up all the foodstuffs into the suitcase with his only suit.
SS Neckar, one of four Rhine-class steamships running on the Norddeutscher Lloyd line, had four decks and space for almost three thousand passengers: 140 first class, 150 second class, and 2,600 third class. Neckar was actually an old cattle ship repurposed for the booming trans-Atlantic passenger trade. At least in the crowded quarters of steerage, the livestock idea fit perfectly.
When Nathan boarded the SS Neckar, he quickly realized he was out of his element.
“I didn’t understand what they were talking,” he recalled, describing his inability to understand the instructions of the ship’s crew. “They were taking away my valise with the food and put it in the checking room. A lot of people are going in the same boat, so we had three people to a room, three beds, one on top of another.”
He had heard of thieves and pickpockets victimizing passengers on these Atlantic crossings, the poor immigrants arriving in America robbed of what little they had. “So I grabbed the top bed. If the thief is going to rob me, he has to go to the top.” He hid his money in his sock and once again slept in his shoes.
Joe’s garlic chicken was even then rotting somewhere in the baggage hold of the ship. Nathan never saw his valise again. He eyed the food offered to steerage passengers like him. Not liking the look of the meat, which he immediately judged to come from horse, not cow, he chose the herring instead. For the whole crossing, he survived on that, bread, and potatoes (“They gave us them with the peels”).
“The only thing I had to buy was a glass of beer for a nickel. I was afraid to take out a dollar because they shouldn’t see I had money. Every morning, I went out to the deck, and I take off my shoes. Because the money I had hidden there smelled, and I aired it out.”
At the SS Neckar’s steady pace of thirteen and a half knots, it took Nathan twenty-two days to cross the Atlantic. He spent his time perfecting his signature. He did not yet know the Latin alphabet and still had no ability to read or write at all. He had someone write his name for him. Then he carefully learned to imitate the letters, practicing over and over.
Also on the same sea that spring, making the journey at a higher latitude, was the mighty RMS Titanic. Aboard were many of the richest and most celebrated people of the age, but also 1,706 steerage passengers who more resembled Nathan Handwerker than Jacob Astor or Benjamin Guggenheim.
Nathan’s initial sighting of the American shoreline might very well have been a spray of white light on the horizon. The illuminated wonders of Coney Island’s amusement parks could be seen from thirty miles out at sea and were often the first glimpse of the New World for immigrants nearing the end of their exhausting transatlantic journeys.
Neckar arrived in New York Harbor on April 7, 1912, an Easter Sunday, the sixth day of Passover that year. Manhattan was not yet a crowded forest of skyscrapers, but for an immigrant from the countryside of Poland, the view was still impressive. Dominating the New York skyline was the ornate, still-under-construction Woolworth Building—at 792 feet, the tallest structure in the world.
The weather on the day of Nathan’s arrival, according to newspaper reports, was “charming,” the warmest Easter it had been in forty-two years. President Taft played his first game of golf of the season that weekend. Oarsmen were out on the Harlem River. The holiday crowds “filled Fifth Avenue with color.”
Nathan saw none of it. U.S. immigration authorities allowed first- and second-class passengers to disembark when the boat docked that Sunday at a West Side pier. Third-class passengers like Nathan were made to wait until the next day, when they would be ferried to the immigration facility on Ellis Island. Later that afternoon, with the SS Neckar still docked and Nathan still on board, the weather turned nasty. What was termed in the press to be “a mini-hurricane” or “a gale” rocked New York Harbor.
Back in Europe, war clouds had continued to build. Russian armies mobilized. Serbian troops laid plans for an autumn offensive that would carve up huge tracts of the Balkans for annexation. War was fast becoming modernized, with the first aerial bombing (of Turkish troops by an Italian dirigible) accomplished that March. The next month in Moscow, the first issue of the underground organ of the Communist Party, Pravda, was distributed, only to be immediately confiscated and burned by Tsarist police.
That was the world from which Nathan Handwerker had escaped. He had gotten out just in time. As James Joyce said about his hero Stephen Dedalus (writing during the same period as Nathan’s miraculous journey), history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. Now at last Nathan had done so. He had arrived in America, the land of his dreams.
His difficulties began almost immediately.