The
American Zangwill, when he comes to make his
studies for a New World "Children of the
Ghetto," will find much curious material in a
strange place. To catch the details of the life
and manners of the low class, expatriated Jew he
will journey not to Essex Street, and its ghetto
of surrounding blocks, punctuated as it is by
sweaters' shops and signs of Kosher meat, but to
Brownsville, that Polish village of the Hebrews,
set down on the outskirts of Brooklyn, at the
edge of the Flatlands Woods.
For Essex Street, at its
best and in its most picturesque moments is New
York. It is never more or less than a colony of
the metropolis, with not a quarter of the quaint
charm of the Jewry of London or of
Frankfort-on-the Main. The people are there, it
is true, the sound of their Yiddish dialect
penetrating the visitor's tympanum, but the
tenement architecture, so distinctly modern and
of New York, destroys the illusion.
With Brownsville it is
different the moment its boundary line, "the
Pale," the unfinished Eastern Parkway, is
crossed. For from six to ten blocks to the East
and West and the same distance to the South, a
settlement that comes nearer to being a Polish
Hebrew town than anything else in this country
spreads itself out. Originally settled by a few
thrifty Scotch and Irish, who fifteen years ago
built little homes for themselves here, it has
now a population that is completely Jewish.
Within the square mile of territory it occupies,
nearly 20,000 men, women and children are
gathered.
Had the crafty and cunning
Hebrews of small capital, who began some ten
years ago to speculate in these then waste
building lots that had hardly been redeemed from
farm purposes, been gifted with supernatural
vision, they could not have chosen a fitter
place for the founding of a Jewish town. It will
be two-score of years at least, before Brooklyn
grows around Brownsville, for the town is set in
a hollow that makes the locality undesirable for
residence. The spreading out of the metropolis
of Long Island is in other directions;
Brownsville will remain on the outskirts for
many a year to come.
A POLISH HEBREW TOWN
People who have studied the
wretched, hunted down Polish Jew in his villages
in Russia say that in Brownsville the similarity
to such towns as Sziget and Berdicheff is
marked. An elevated railroad is only a few
blocks away; its posts may be seen. In fact,
from certain street corners, but this "L" and a
trolley line that runs along Brownsville's
western border are merely the keys to the outer
Christian world. Over them is a swift and easy
egress to New York. They do not touch nor enter
into the colony's life.
Instead of the
ordinary ghetto's squalid streets, shadowed by
tall tenements, here are wide, broad country
roads, bounded by a few ambitious wooden
buildings, three stories in height, fancifully
painted with ornamentations of many colors, but
for the most part lined with cheap, ugly
cottages that send odors up to heaven, odors of
cooking, uncleanliness and scores of closely
packed together human beings. To [negate] this
and to keep the colony in good health--for there
is almost no illness in Brownsville--the fresh,
keen salt breeze blows across the Canarsie
marshes into every crevice of the settlement.
Though a few
sidewalks have been laid, hardly a
street is paved. the dirt in them,
cut into ridges by the wheels of
peddlers' carts, becomes a morass
during a rain, a hard, uneven,
uncleaned road in the midst of a
drought. Almost all the adult
inhabitants are engaged in real
estate, "sweatshops," tailoring,
shopkeeping or the express business.
The tailors, stitchers, pressers and
finishers form by far the most
numerous body. On them the life of
Brownsville hangs. Contractors have
made the place. Tempted by the low
rents, and appreciating the fact
that here they are free from the
sanitary exactions of Essex Street,
more and more have set themselves up
in this new Sziget. With the rents
in their favor, they are often able
to underbid their city brethren, and
work pours in upon Brownsville, even
in times that are dull elsewhere.
PERIPATETIC
REAL ESTATE AGENTS
Immense
packages of goods come from East and
West, even from so far away as
Chicago. In transporting the raw
material and carrying back the
finished product, the express
business flourishes. Around the town
scores of hungry eyed, lean real
estate agents hover, trying to carry
through deals for the sites of new
shops or the settling of a newly
arrived family in rooms. Seldom, if
every, do these real estate men have
offices. they do their work in the
street, tramping ceaselessly to and
fro.
The comedy of
the ghetto comes when a real estate
sale happens to be made. The papers
are hardly signed when, like a flock
of vultures, these agents swoop down
upon the seller. Each clamors that
he and he alone has made the sale,
was really responsible for it, and
each claims a commission. the Polish
Hebrew rises to torrents of
eloquence.
Primitive
customs rule in Brownsville. It is
one great family, with its rabbis
and elders at its head. The keynote
of the settlement's life is to be
found in its absolute indifference
to the rest of the world. It u its
differences itself. Its quarrels and
the claims one man may happen to
have against another. Mounted
policemen ride through the streets,
and officers on foot walk through
the colony, swinging locusts extra
long and tough. Nobody to
Brownsville, as a rule, pays the
slightest attention to them. If in
the midst of some heated argument a
policeman dashes into the group and
lays about with his stick or jerks
the collars of two or three or more
of the crowd, the Hebrews accept the
punishment without resistance and
with downcast eyes. They knew much
worse when they were in Poland;
there not a few of them felt the
stinging blows of the Russian knout. |
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CHRISTIAN LAW DESPISED
Christian law these low
caste Hebrews hate and despise. They have no
part in it; they care nothing for its rulings. A
Brownsville man in a Brooklyn police court is
the despair of the sitting magistrate. Hew has
been assaulted, perhaps, in a street brawl. His
assailant has been arrested, and he himself is
brought into court to make a charge. But his
thin lips close tightly behind his matted,
untrimmed brown beard that never yet has felt
the razor, and he shrugs his bent shoulders,
bobbing up and down his greasy, threadbare old
coat of Hester Street cut. perfectly impassive
he stands. Not a word can be drawn out of him
and the prisoner is finally discharged. He--the
assaulted one--knows very well that before the
rabbi and in the presence of men of his own
faith measure will be paid with measure, and eye
will be taken for eye according to the Mosaic
law. What does he want with these men of another
race and tongue, and why should they bother with
his battles?
But there is small need of
signs; the goods displayed tell their own story,
and they are, in a great measure, out on the
curbstone for the convenience of buyers.
Brownsville's chief baker, for example, brings
out his trays of unleavened bread, flanked with
curiously shaped, glossy-coated rolls of many
styles, and stands beside them on the sidewalk
while they are purchased by twos, threes and
fours, each customer kneading them first with
her knuckles and forefinger until she has found
what she wants. Fowls are in cages hard by,
ready to be killed kosher; brooms, coal-hods and
little counters of small pieces of cheap dress
goods thrown picturesquely together.
Stands of speckled and
uninviting fruit touch these cheek by jowl, and
soda water fountains, the most of the time
deserted, are still prominent in the street
picture. Brownsville possesses only one business
street, a highway three city blocks in length,
but this is active enough at sunset each day to
make up for the deficiency in its extent.
There used to be three
concert halls in the colony running at full
blast, but latterly these have been shut down by
police dispensation; not that they were
especially bad, or that disorderly conduct grew
out of them, but they encouraged big gatherings,
and there was always danger of fire and riot, no
small causes of fear in a district built almost
entirely of wood. Now the amusements of the
people of Brownsville are confined to clustering
and gossiping in the streets on nights.
Children are there
seemingly by the thousand score. The racial
ambition of Jewish mothers to gather large
families about them is realized in Brownsville
in almost every household. The youngsters are
invariably unwashed, and they play hour by hour
delightedly in the dust and dirt of the street.
It is a permanent country for them, and very
nearly as good as an expanse of green meadows.
THE SUNSET
COW-MILKING
Two features of
the Jewish life beyond this Long
Island "pale" must not be left
untouched. One is the sunset
cow-milking. Each evening half a
dozen cows are driven into a
convenient vacant lot from their
pasturage out on the Flatlands
meadows, and milked directly into
the vessels, the pails, pitchers and
cups that customers bring. A crowd
of women and children gather about
the woman on her stool, who is
sending the fluid into the pail
beneath in long streams. They drink
the milk warm, holding glassfuls up
to infants' lips, while the owner
stands by opening and again closing
his well-filled purse, accumulating
pennies and nickels in great store.
The Russian
steam bath is extremely popular at
the westward end of the colony. It
consists of two rooms, one above the
other, and connected by a great
fireplace. In the room below a
roaring fire is built. In the room
above, which is air-tight, the
bathers lie stripped, while a
swarthy attendant dashes down bucket
after bucket of water through the
opening in the floor directly upon
the fire. So intense is the heat
from the flames that only a cloud of
steam arises, and the fire blazes
merrily on.
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