|
Three hundred thousand souls in the process of evolution? Three hundred thousand men, women and children, gathered from the four corners of the earth, ready and waiting to become American citizens! 'What is Brownsville, the section of which we have heard much and seen nothing?' someone queried. And that is the shame. It is the picture you may conceive of the new Brownsville which has grown out of the old. If you see clearly, if you hear keenly, if you think deeply. Follow the trail up and down Pitkin Avenue on a starry night. Go into the evening schools, Peep into the Baby Health Station. Peer behind tenement-house windows and be convinced. By a thousand tokens you may know the awakening of the American conscience. It is strange mingling of the old and the new which has come out of the Brownsville of Russia and Poland, of Lithuania and Hungary, of Austria and Germany -- and of Italy. For Brownsville is not entirely Jewish. Arnold the little church of Our Lady of Loretto, in the very heart of the settlement, there clusters a Latin colony that is Catholic to the core. And it, too, is treading the road to Americanization.
Around the streets of Brownsville, where ugly
tenements crowd one another, where dirt and mire shock the senses of the
aesthetic, where mothers literally rear their brood of children in city
thoroughfare, a new light has dawned. Gradually it came, say social
service workers and others who have gone deep into the study of humanity
-- slowly but surely, strongly. It may be hidden beneath the veneer of
an older civilization, but it is there, they say.
Dumont Avenue, from Christopher Avenue The New Stock to Which Brooklyn Looks What is this new stock in which Brooklyn may look for some of the inspiration of the future? It is a race of moods, of emotions, of strong passions, of gayety, or camaraderie, of countless ambition and ceaseless caring. Through the crowded streets, life passes by. Teeming with vitality, seething with emotion, you might have grasped the meaning of the new order of things had you looked closely, only just the other evening. Now grave, now gay, ignorant and sophisticated mingled. In streets so thickly cluttered with its mass of humanity that one had to push a way through youth and age, hope and despair were depicted. This is what you might have seen. A ragged mother in a tenement house door humming a lullaby to her baby. A young, young couple openly making love under an arc light. An old, old man, his books under his arm, plodding off to school to learn the language of America. A bearded patriarch, closeted with his Talmud, spending ceaseless hours of study behind closed doors. A pushcart vendor giving largess to a tattered urchin. Rows and rows of chattering girls buying lingerie and watermelons, hats and bonbons, rouge and trinkets from the same cart. A delegation of small boys carrying an American flag through the streets -- old, old women with black shawls draped around wisened faces cheering them in Yiddish.
Small girls from Jerusalem to Berlin, from Moscow
to Petrograd, held together under the banner of the Girl Scouts of
America.
Here Are Maidens of Brownsville All this and more you may see written into the history of Brownsville on a clear evening under a blue-black sky. If you doubt that there is smartness in Brownsville, dash about her young girls, grace and charm, go into some of the more modern shops which dot the streets, and learn the error of your ways -- if you do not believe that they of other races and other creeds long for the learning that is America's, saunter into the night schools and believe. They trot up and down the congested ways, these girls who have what the French call chic, and they bargain, bargain, bargain, from store to store. A few cents less for a fairy frock, a dollar off from the price tag of a tailored suit, they beg. And they get it. Some of them are plump; some so thin that they make only a slim, slim line in their one-piece gowns. Most of them are dark-eyed, almond-skinned vivacious, but some are blonde and still -- some have poise, others are overrunning with gayety. But they are all out for the beautiful. They buy French rouge, while they munch American chocolates -- they burst from English into Yiddish to suit the taste of the acquaintance they happen to meet, but they are beco0ming, say those who know, a vital part of the future of the United States of America. Journey just a little farther in your search for Europe as she is being Americanized. The evening high schools, of which there are a number, prove the assertion. And their students, drawn from those of an alien race, a foreign creed, crowd them to the doors. P.S. 109, which has accommodations for 4,000., takes care of a nightly mob of the ambitious. And the others are equally crowded. An old man, easily eighty, jostled a girl of six in the crowd the other evening. A housewife, her grammar stuck in a basket between eggs and sugar, cheese and sausage, walked side by side with a boy of fourteen. Eager to learn is the throng. They are learning, instructors will tell you, with a rapidity that puts to shame the American boy who is a truant, the American girl who frivols away the hours. Splendid spirit there is in Brownsville, but there is artifice too. The open air stock exchange, where men barter for hours, is as picturesque as it is busy, as full of sordid trade relations as it is of bustling business activity. Italian Code for Womanhood Stern The Italian girl in Brownsville, lacking the freedom of the Jewish or the American maid, cannot keep pace with the pleasure program which is offered her neighbor. The Brooklyn Bureau of Charities has done much to alleviate this, and to bring wholesome recreation into the scheme of things. But the Italian father is stern -- his code for womanhood is strict. Only just recently have the Latin girls been allowed to become Girl Scouts and only then under the most perfect chaperonage. The conflict between father and daughter in the Italian colony is one of the problems, according to social workers, in the plan to thoroughly Americanize Brownsville. There is constant friction between the old tradition of another race and the youngness of youth which years to make America's program of recreation here as well as the idealism of her citizenship. Playgrounds may solve it, it is claimed, but as yet these are entirely inadequate, and, except for the Girl Scout camps, dance halls and movies furnish the only recreation. Talk Language of Motherhood From the old to the young, the re-awakening which has come is a part of the broad scheme of Americanization. Journey a little father along to a spot wedged in between the kosher market place and a dingy old shop and find the very beginning of all these things. To the infant welfare station of the New York City Department of Health, 150 Jewish babies are taken daily for vaccination against smallpox. Stodgy mothers who croon over sobbing children; slim, young parents tottering under the weight of sturdy urchins, crowd the two small rooms almost to suffocation. They speak no English -- they jabber in many tongues the universal language of motherhood --but they are learning what it means to be an American and learning it happily, gladly. There is no law to force such a precaution upon Brownsville parents, but there is, it seems, a consciousness that such things must be done. As early as three months they are borne into the station, these fluffs of humanity, big-eyed and wondering. There is a gentle pin prick, a wail, a tender, soothing voice, and it is done. Mother Brownsville has taken one more step in her American evolution. Over Brownsville way housing conditions are bad. Sometimes six small children sleep in one bed in the more crowded and poorer sections. But the Brownsville Jewish Charities have cast a supervising eye and they have allowed no lodgers to overcrowd already congested tenements. Wherever there has been an increase in rent for the poor, they have met the increase and kept the family down to its original number. Here, it is said, the spirit which binds one Jew to another in his desire to help is at its most pathetic, its most beautiful. "I have known them to share their last crust of bread with each other," a charity worker said. In stuffy ill-smelling tenement sleeping rooms where no social service expert has been called, where there is income enough to hold aloof from proffered aid, there is an undreamed of spirit of womanhood. If you are sympathetic enough, you may see it, for the Hebrew mother speaks of her lot simply, without affectation, in language unrestricted. The Brownsville woman bears many children. Over in the Labor Lyceum, she may have listened to Margaret Singer tell of birth control. But if she heeds her, there is no sign. Bravely she brings them into the world. Courageously she rears them. There is little of complaint, much of self-sacrifice. "But why?" said irrelevant America to the mother of 10. "It is for my new country," answered she of Polish birth in her broken English. Continue the journey. Go out beyond the places where unkempt children sprawl on filthy pavements; where merchants shriek their wares; where there is squalor on the one hand and tawdry wealth on the other. Here where there is quiet and peace, green trees and solitude. Brownsville's Hospital, built by her honest citizens, rears its head. For 19 years the women of Brooklyn's Ghetto, the men of her factories and sweat shops, the children even, toiled and saved and starved that this thing of mercy might come to be. Toiled and Saved For the Hospital It is a part of the plan of splendid Americanization. It is to become a health center, as well as a hospital. Here mothers and expectant mothers will learn what it means to bring boys and girls into the world, of how the man child and woman child must be prepared for the duties of citizenship. For recreation Jewry pours into the Yiddish theater. They prefer intensive drama with the passion of the race, but light comedy is also a favorite. The craze for pleasure has not dimmed the desire for advancement over in Brownsville the old are keeping pace with the procession. There is a newness of outlook, a broadness of vision, a desire to advance. You may find in its broad highways, in its marrow, dark little rooms, the spirit of life and of love. At every turn of the way there is a smile and a tear, a laugh and a sob. There is something tragic about a people who have the courage to overrun obstacles, to conquer in spite of difficulties. Birth and death and the soil are a part of the dauntless ones who are knocking at the gates. Of such was the spirit of the Pilgrim fathers, it is said. |
