“How long is he going to stay with us? He’s eating up the food.” Lower East Side, New York City, ca. 1912.
THE WORLD THAT Nathan stepped into when he came to America—the early twentieth-century Lower East Side community of Jewish immigrants packed into a teeming, flavorful, overcrowded ghetto—has long been distorted by nostalgia. The memory of it is rose colored, but the reality was oftentimes dreadful. Nathan was a “greene Jew,” a “greenhorn,” as opposed to the “gelle,” the yellows, experienced residents who had a few years in the country. His fellow immigrants both disparaged and embraced such newly arrived figures as Nathan Handwerker.
The ghetto was crowded with poor Jews, poorer even than the greenhorn from Galicia. The average amount of money brought to America by Russian Jews was eight dollars, and Nathan had three times that. New York City was a shock to the immigrant’s system, but it was a shock buffered by traditions, customs, and practices that were instantly recognizable from the eastern European culture left behind. Nathan immersed himself in it as in a cold bath. He lived in a succession of tenement apartments in Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side.
His initial landing place, the apartment of a cousin where he spent his first nights in his adopted homeland, did not last long. He lay awake on his kitchen cot one evening soon after he arrived, listening to a discussion between the host couple. Nathan soon realized they were talking about him.
“How long is he going to stay with us?” asked the wife of his cousin. “He’s eating up the food.”
Nathan didn’t wait. He was too proud to be where he wasn’t wanted. He left early the next day, taking his paltry belongings with him.
“I didn’t want to eat breakfast with them in the morning,” he recalled. “I didn’t tell them why.”
Such was the extent of New York’s well-established Jewish community that a greenhorn like Nathan, even an itinerant one, could survive and even prosper. It was possible for immigrant Ostjuden to work, live, and worship in venues that did not demand them to speak English. Whole neighborhoods, congested as they were, offered Nathan safe harbor among fellow countrymen.
The Lower East Side neighborhood was incredibly concentrated. A third of a million Jewish immigrants lived in a forty-block area around Allen, Essex, Canal, and Broome Streets: the Tenth Ward of New York City. Home to some of the most densely crowded buildings on earth, the neighborhood had a population of 69,944, or approximately 665 people per acre. The language used to describe such dwellings is uncannily reminiscent of descriptions of Old World shtetlach, invoking some of the same words.
“The rooms were damp, filthy, foul, and dark,” stated one government sanitary inspector. “The air was unbearable, the filth impossible, the crowded conditions terrible, particularly in those places where the rooms were used as workshops. The life of the children was endangered because of the prevailing contagious diseases, and children died like flies.”
One vital difference existed between the Galician misery of the Old World and the Tenth Ward congestion of the new: there were jobs for willing and able employees in America. Nathan himself had three separate offers of employment in his first week in the country. The jobs might have been low paying and grueling, but they represented gainful employment nonetheless.
Common in the neighborhood were positions doing piecework in the garment business, much of the time accomplished in the same apartments in which the workers lived. A garment jobber might subcontract out batches of cut fabric for buttonholes, trim, or simple stitching, collecting the completed pieces from the sweatshop workers to return to the manufacturer. Almost half of New York City’s workforce was engaged in clothing production. A pieceworker could earn up to ten dollars a week (compare this to Nathan’s weekly wage of $4.50 at the luncheonette). Rent of a tenement apartment was usually around ten or twelve dollars a month.
Pushcarts were another common neighborhood livelihood. At the turn of the century, there were some twenty-five thousand of them on the Lower East Side. Hester Street in particular became something of a movable bazaar, nicknamed chazermark or “pig market” for its crowds and fulsome odors.
There were also shadier occupations available to newly arrived immigrants. Jewish gangsters Ben “Bugsy” Siegel and Meyer Lansky began their criminal careers as lowly stickup men on the Lower East Side. Street prostitution, brothels, and white slavery were commonplace enough to cause hand-wringing in the press and action by relief organizations. A survey of a Manhattan magistrate’s court in 1908–09 revealed that three-quarters of the women arrested as prostitutes were Jewish.
Many immigrants sought livelihoods in the New World that were simply a natural continuation of what they had done in the old. Polish tailors became sweatshop pieceworkers in their new tenement homes. Former Ukrainian peddlers bought pushcarts and trolled Orchard Street for customers. There had been brothels in Galicia just as there were in the Tenth Ward.
What is today euphemistically called the “hospitality industry”—restaurants and hotels—had its Old World incarnation, too. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish entrepreneurs were among the only people licensed to sell alcohol and operate public houses and dining establishments in Poland, Galicia, and the Pale. Since the trade was seen as beneath the dignity of the Polish gentry, it was traditionally left to Jews to satisfy the demand.
Nathan had worked in bakeries in Galicia. His entry into the restaurant business in Manhattan could be seen as carrying on both a personal and a cultural tradition that had its roots in his eastern European past. For Nathan, restaurant work in America was the next step after having sold knishes in his homeland. The Delancey Street luncheonette catered to people just like him, the tenement masses in the densely populated Jewish neighborhoods all around. The language barrier wasn’t absolute, since at least a few of the customers were ordering in Yiddish.
At that first food service job, he learned the tricks that would serve him well later, such as the proper way to make lemonade. His boss, the other Nathan, showed him how. “He didn’t even have a glass to squeeze out the lemons. I had to squeeze with my hands. With a whole bushel of lemons, I put half a gallon of water in and squeezed them out.”
A contemporary board of health might look askance, but at the time, the practice was to put whole lemons into water and to hand-squeeze the citrus to release the essential oils from the skins. This gave the drink a fuller flavor.
Nathan continued the process. “I put another half a gallon of water in to wash all the peels for more juice, added another gallon in with the lemons, then put in four pounds of sugar.”
The final and most necessary step was to ensure the sugar melted in the bottom of the four-gallon lemonade pail. “There shouldn’t be a lump of sugar at the bottom. My boss had me make lemonade and orangeade. He only had to show me once.”
Nathan’s Old-Fashioned Lemonade
1 bushel (80–100) lemons, sliced or quartered
3+ gallons water
4 pounds (8 cups) sugar
In a half gallon of the water, hand-squeeze the lemons, making sure to bruise the peels. Add additional half gallon of water. Add four pounds of sugar and the last gallons of water to taste, mixing thoroughly to dissolve the sugar.
* * *
Although the ghetto community of the Lower East Side might have tried hard to ignore it, there existed a wider world beyond the Tenth Ward. At the time of Nathan Handwerker’s arrival, that wider world found itself in a tumult. The year 1912 was one of those transformative years in the United States, with repeated social upheavals, controversies, and battles roiling the body politic. To a greater or lesser degree, every one of the day’s signal issues would impact the life and business of the greenhorn immigrant.
Even as the newcomer made his way as a luncheonette counterman, anti-immigration forces were pushing a bill through Congress that would require each new arrival to pass a literacy test. Such legislation would have denied entry into the United States to the functionally illiterate Nathan Handwerker. Only a veto by President Taft prevented the measure from becoming law.
At the same time that anti-immigration organizations were mobilizing on the political front, progressive initiatives sought to further what today we could call human rights. Just a month after Nathan’s arrival, in May 1912, the largest suffragist demonstration in history was held in New York City. Left-leaning free speech protests sprang up across the country, challenging the silencing of labor advocates in San Diego and elsewhere. Both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League had been founded just a few years earlier.
The Titanic disaster continued to cast a pall. The front page of the New York Times featured news of the sinking for eighteen straight days. Funerals, memorials, and relief benefits for the doomed ship studded the New York City social calendar. On Sunday, April 21, stage stars George M. Cohan and Eddie Foy gathered together Broadway singers and dancers for a gala benefit, while the following Monday the celebrated Neapolitan tenor Enrico Caruso sang Arthur Sullivan’s “The Lost Chord” at the Metropolitan Opera House. Official inquiries in the United States and in Britain kept alive the contentious issue of who was to blame for the catastrophe.
A popular sentiment of the time was “God went down with Titanic,” meaning that the randomness of the calamity challenged faith. Commentators extracted various lessons from the wreck, including those that were critical of capitalism, lax maritime regulations, and the hubris of the ship’s owners. From pulpits came sermons that linked the sinking to the evils of modern decadence. “The remote cause of this unspeakable disaster,” preached the archbishop of Baltimore, “is the excessive pursuit of luxury.”
The catastrophe overshadowed the presidential election primary season that year, essentially a three-way race between incumbent Republican Robert Taft, Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, and former Princeton University president (and eventual winner) Woodrow Wilson. From the left came the Socialist candidacy of Eugene V. Debs, orchestrator of the Pullman Strike.
Nathan shared the New York Jewish community with some of the leading historical figures of the day. The pioneer Zionist David Ben-Gurion was there, as was, briefly, Leon Trotsky. Another arrival was the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, author of the Tevye stories that would later be dramatized on Broadway as Fiddler on the Roof.
Passing through the same Lower East Side streets as figures famous and otherwise, living amid noteworthy historical shifts, Nathan pursued his anonymous workaday ways. He lived with relatives, for a period in “a shoemaker’s cellar,” other times in tenements, always paying no more than a dollar a month in rent. He later remembered the meager weekend fare in his lodgings. “Eggs were $1.40 a dozen [$32 in today’s money], so they only gave me one—they only ate one egg for Sunday breakfast.”
It didn’t matter much what his impoverished home life was like, since he was always working. Nathan negotiated the world of Manhattan luncheonettes with something that approached surefooted confidence. He seemed to know instinctively when to leave a job and when to stay, when to follow a boss or when to cut himself loose.
Within a month, the restaurant where he originally worked was sold. The new owner, Sam, asked Nathan to stay on. “Sam called me ‘Benny,’” Nathan recalled, because of the problem with multiple Nathans working in the same place. “He said to me, ‘Benny, I want you to be the manager.’ So he made me the manager of the coffee counter, cakes, and pies, in charge of everything. He gave me the keys to the store. I came in at six o’clock to open up the place.”
But Nathan’s old boss beckoned. Max Leventhal was opening a new luncheonette on Eighteenth Street between Fifth and Sixth, near architect Daniel H. Burnham’s Flatiron Building, one of Manhattan’s first skyscrapers and surely its most distinctive. The neighborhood was busy, near to the shopping district called Ladies’ Mile.
Max came to Nathan with a job offer. “I want you to come work for me. In two weeks, I’m opening a new place.”
Nathan jumped. He didn’t even ask the salary. “Why? Because I knew if I worked for him, I’ll learn the business, because he really knows the business, in and out. And Sam, the new boss, he was a tailor who wanted to try something new. I didn’t know how long he was going to last or if he’s going to last at all in the business, so I didn’t want the surprise.”
Max Leventhal’s new place would be a franchise in the Busy Bee chain, founded by Maxwell Garfunkel, the Moldavian immigrant owner of more than a dozen luncheonettes located throughout lower Manhattan. Innovative for their period, every Max’s Busy Bee worked on the principle of slim profit margins and high volume, making money a penny at a time. The patrons were office boys, building workers, struggling young lawyers, businessmen, and the host of others who did not have much money to spend on their lunches.
Maxwell Garfunkel had come to the United States at age thirteen from Chișinău, near Odessa, in 1888. Arriving in New York with all of fifty cents, Garfunkel toiled and saved. Eight years later, he had amassed a $7,000 bankroll—the equivalent of $164,000 today. He used the money to open his first restaurant, on Ann Street in downtown Manhattan. Everything in the joint—coffee, pies, lemonade, typical luncheonette fare at the time—could be had for two cents. Max’s Busy Bee would not vary its prices for twenty years.
When Garfunkel retired in 1928, he offered a glimpse of the life of a hardworking luncheonette man. “For forty years, I’ve worked from five o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night. I’ve never had a real vacation. I am going to retire. I am tired. Money is not everything. Frankfurters, coffee, lemonade, savings accounts, seven days a week, little sleep, bustle, shouts, profits, frankfurters, soft-shell crabs—these are my memories.”
In his new job at the Eighteenth Street Busy Bee, and after only six months in America, Nathan would make $7.50 a week. When a competing luncheonette on Twenty-First Street offered essentially to double his salary, he turned it down. “I says, ‘Sorry, I’m working, and I’m not going to give up my job.’ Why? Because I didn’t know how long the Twenty-First Street place was going to last in the business.”
During this period, Nathan posed for three photographs of himself at the luncheonette. A bright-eyed but serious twenty-two-year-old man stares fixedly at the camera. In two of the shots, he stands apart from his fellow workers. An accident of the situation? Or is he already separating himself out from the crowd?
On the job, Nathan held various positions, including an early twentieth-century version of an advertising Mad Man. He used to post himself on the sidewalk outside the Busy Bee and loudly hawk its fare.
“So I was standing and working at the lemonade, a penny for a glass of lemonade. I took in fifteen dollars a day.” (Which, to stop and think about it, means he sold 1,500 servings! In a ten-hour day, that works out to be more than two sales a minute.) “And I was hollering, ‘Lemonade! Lemonade!’ And the cops used to come over, trying to stop me.”
The former authority-cowed Galician immigrant had learned by then to stand up for himself. He told the police, “Don’t tell me, Officer, to stop. Go to the boss and tell him to stop me. If he stops me, I’ll be glad to help, to stop hollering.”
For two years, the hardworking, full-throated young Nathan followed Max Leventhal around Manhattan, moving from the Eighteenth Street store to another at 99 Spring Street, between Mercer and Broadway. The luncheonette business was a movable feast. But a change was afoot. Awaiting Nathan was an introduction to a fabled realm that would utterly transform his life.