House of Glass Read online

  By the time Bill was born in 1902, the Lower East Side was the largest Jewish neighbourhood in the world and was known as New York’s – and, by extension, America’s – Jewish ghetto. But that generalising term does a disservice to the varieties of immigrants, and how they created their own tiny worlds within the crowded and noisy New York neighbourhood. Hungarian Jews lived above Houston Street, Galician Jews between Houston and Grand Streets, Romanian and Levantine Jews between Allen Street and the Bowery, and Russian Jews below Grand Street. The Freiman family – occasionally renamed Fryman by census takers – lived at 102 Allen Street, suggesting Sam and Rosy were actually Romanian, even though the US censuses from the time repeatedly described them, as they later would Sara, as Austrian. The building wasn’t especially big, but according to the 1900 census, twenty-two other families lived in it, because it was a tenement.

  By 1900, 90 per cent of Jews on the Lower East Side lived in tenements,[4] which were five-or six-storey homes that had been subdivided by landlords into apartments for families, most just 25 feet wide and 100 feet long, with barely any light, ventilation or fresh air, for $12 a week. There was no indoor plumbing, just a lone tap outside that would supply all the water for the building’s tenants to clean, cook and wash, and only one outhouse for every twenty tenants, although rather than walking all the way downstairs and out in the freezing cold to use it, many would use a chamber pot and simply dump the waste out of the window, only occasionally checking to see if anyone was walking below. They didn’t even have gas light until the early 1900s, and residents tended to cook with coal, meaning they were living in what were essentially pitch-black caves, and they would have to grope their way through the dark hallways to find the stairway and their apartment, feeling along the walls with the flat of their palms. Tenements first emerged on the Lower East Side in the 1860s as a solution to overcrowding, but as immigrants continued to move to New York, and the immigrants who were there continued to have children, the tenements themselves became emblems of overcrowding. A tenement apartment that housed four people in 1870 would, by 1900, be home to ten or twelve. They were dirty, dark and disease-ridden, but for most immigrant Jews in New York they were home, and the Freimans lived in theirs for twenty years.

  When Sam Freiman moved his family into a Lower East Side tenement, he was, like most Jewish immigrants in that neighbourhood, illiterate. He worked as a pedlar, meaning he sold second-hand clothes and rags from the street, and every day he would have to dodge ‘loafers’ – generally Irish-Americans – who hung around on street corners and outside bars shouting anti-Semitic abuse at him[5] as he worked in the snow and the rain to earn, at best, pennies. A letter written in 1855, when one-third of Jewish wage-earners were pedlars, describes the life of a Jewish pedlar in the city:

  When the newly arrived Israelite asks what he shall do to make a living, he is most commonly advised to go and peddle. Accordingly a basket is hastily fixed up and he is hurried into the country. The country merchants receive [him] coolly and oppose him step by step. An acrimonious feeling takes hold of the pedlar’s heart – he is disappointed and discouraged, and yet he goes on from day to day, changes the basket for the bundle, the bundle for the horse and wagon peddling, and finally emerges a sleek, thrifty merchant. Have the history of one of these men and you have the history of them all.[6]

  Sam never became a sleek and thrifty merchant; instead, he did something else that was all too common of his demographic: he abandoned his family. Absconding fathers and husbands were so common among the Lower East Side immigrants that one of the several Yiddish daily newspapers in New York at the time had a regular column devoted to missing men. Sometimes they died in a drunken brawl. Sometimes they died of pneumonia after getting drunk and either falling in the river or falling asleep outside in the bitter New York winter. Most commonly, they simply ran off, worn down by trying to provide for their multiple children by selling rags. Bill later told his sons that his father was a drunk who died in the gutter, but none of Sam’s children ever knew for certain what happened to their father, other than that he disappeared in 1911 and they never saw him again. Like Chaya when Reuben went off to war, Rosy was suddenly a single mother in a country whose language she never learned, with five children to support on her own, aged between seven and sixteen. But unlike Chaya, she did not have Henri to support her. Instead, she had Moses.

  Moses was nine when his father vanished and the last of the boys still to be at school. Like almost all Jewish immigrant children in the Lower East Side, Moses’ older brothers, Michael and Yakov, dropped out of school at eighth grade, because fourteen was the age when children could get work permits, and families in the Lower East Side needed money a lot more than they needed educated kids. Many of these kids worked in sweatshops, sewing garments or rolling cigars from 6 a.m. until 11 p.m. for 50 cents a day, in horrifically perilous conditions. In one single fire in a New York sweatshop in 1911, the year Sam left, 146 workers were killed, half of whom were Jewish teenage girls.[7] Because Moses was the last boy at school, this also meant he was the boy who was most at home and became the man of the house, even though he was still in single digits. Perhaps for that reason, or maybe it was just always in his nature, Moses started getting into brawls in the neighbourhood.

  ‘Your grandfather was the wild child in the family. Always a character,’ my father’s cousin Herb Freiman, the son of my grandfather’s oldest brother, Michael, told me.

  I’d never met Herb until I started researching this book, and I then spent a day with him in Long Island where he lives, not far from Farmingdale. In fact, despite my grandfather having so many siblings, and all of them living pretty much next door to one another for most of their lives, I knew almost no members of his family. But when I walked into Herb’s house and saw him waiting for me on the sofa in his living room, my breath caught in my throat: he was the spitting image of my grandfather, who by that point had been dead for twenty-five years. That same cheeky smile, those same bright blue eyes (‘The Freiman eyes,’ Herb said, knowing what I was thinking) and, even though he was hooked up to an oxygen tank, the same inexhaustible jokey demeanour. His cousin Ann, Rivka’s daughter, also joined us. She was the only one of my father’s cousins that I knew as a child and I remembered she’d always been extremely thin and careful about what she ate. That was still the case when we met at Herb’s, almost thirty years since we’d last seen one another. When she casually mentioned what she weighed that morning, a low number by anyone’s standards, Herb shot back, ‘Well, Ann, the good news is the circus is going to hire you to be the Fat Lady!’ When we then went out to lunch at Herb’s club and Ann picked half-heartedly at her salad, he teased her again, saying, ‘Slow down there, Ann. Eat one more grape and you won’t be able to fit in the car!’ This was exactly how my grandfather used to talk, and while Sara couldn’t stand it and thought it tacky, my sister and I thought he was funniest guy we’d ever known. Herb was similarly delightful. I wished I’d got to know him sooner.

  ‘Bill was born with a stutter, so he probably got into fights about that. But he taught himself to speak elegantly, more elegantly than anyone else in the family. But he fought because he wanted to protect his family,’ Herb said.

  My grandfather did talk elegantly – I’d forgotten that. Eloquent and fast, with an enormous vocabulary, without a hint of Yiddish accent. He also took care to lose what he called his ‘Jewish accent’, by which he meant the rising inflection and nasal tone which are still vocal signifiers of Jewishness in modern pop culture, in everything from Woody Allen movies to Curb Your Enthusiasm. As far as Bill was concerned, it was how his family talked, and he was determined to sound different from them. But if he talked well he wrote even better, always in cursive, so florid it verged on calligraphy, and wonderful long letters full of gossip and advice and philosophical thoughts. He was actually left-handed but, through characteristic force of will, he’d taught himself to write with his right hand so as to be able to use a fountain pen without
smearing the ink. You’d have never guessed that he didn’t speak English until he was seven and was illiterate until he was ten. And that, of course, was entirely the point. Like Alex, Bill dreamed of a better life than the one he was born into, and the way he spoke and wrote were an expression of that. There was a reason I knew almost none of his family: he didn’t want me to. They were part of a world he wanted to leave behind.

  Life in the tenements was brutal. Newspaper headlines from the time give a sense of the chaos and cost: ‘Three Perish in Midnight Fire! Flames Sweep Through a Big Five-Storey Tenement! Other Tenants Missing!’[8] ‘Eight Dead By Fire! Awful Tragedy in Hester Street! Woman Burned to Death in Sight of Crowd! Faces of Tortured People Seen at the Windows!’[9] Being a child in the tenements was especially perilous. All the buildings had yards, but these were hemmed in by other buildings and were often where the outhouse was, so were dark and disgusting. Instead, children preferred to play in the street, but because of the lack of decent lighting cars and bicycles didn’t see them. In 1911, when Moses was nine, 183 children in New York were killed by moving vehicles and a further 381 were hit but survived.[10] There were parks and playgrounds, but these were often far away, meaning a three-year-old would have to walk ten or even twenty blocks, dodging cars, just to play on swings. Some mothers in the tenements – especially those who had been abandoned by their husbands – found life so hard that they would put their children on so-called orphan trains that took poor inner-city children out of the metropolis to live with rural families and essentially work as farmhands. Rosy, fortunately, did not do that, but life would have been extremely hard for all of them. Her income was supplemented by Michael and Yakov working, probably in factories, where they would have earned a couple of dollars a week, and it’s possible that Sam occasionally sent the family money from wherever he’d disappeared to, but there was no evidence of this. Ultimately, they would have largely had to depend on Rosy’s paltry earnings as a seamstress while each of the children looked after one another, each one hurrying after the other in school until they, too, could leave and earn money.

  Moses picked up English quickly when he went to school. But he also desperately wanted to earn money to improve his family’s situation generally, and as a child he sold ribbons on the street after school. As a teenager, he gave driving lessons. He was always looking for a crack in the wall through which he could crawl and find some money. By 1920, just as the Glasses were leaving Chrzanow, Rosy decided it was time to move her family. This might have been partly because of her youngest son, who got in so many fights that, for his own safety, she needed to get him out of the Lower East Side. But also, this was the trajectory of all Jews who wanted to lift their family into the middle classes: they had to get out of the Lower East Side. Many Jews went uptown, or to Brooklyn or Harlem. A friend told Rosy she should go to ‘the centre of the universe’ and so, according to family legend, she closed her eyes and pointed to a place on a map of New York. She landed on Long Island.

  By the time the Freimans left the city, the Lower East Side was changing irrevocably. Within a decade, it wouldn’t even be largely Jewish any more but instead became an Italian neighbourhood. Cities shift and flux, and today when you walk through the Lower East Side there are pickle stores next to Italian delis next to encroaching designer boutiques. During the 1920s, the Jewish population of the Lower East Side plummeted dramatically, from 260,000 to 100,000,[11] and this was partly because of a situation the Glass family in Paris would have found familiar.

  Since the late nineteenth century, Congress had been quietly passing laws banning various groups of people from entering the United States. By the time the First World War began, these barred groups included such alleged threats to the American way of life as polygamists, lunatics and Chinese labourers. In 1916 the American lawyer and eugenicist Madison Grant published his still influential book, The Passing of the Great Race, in which he stressed the danger of the changing ‘stock’ of American immigration, with more and more people coming to America from southern and eastern Europe instead of what he deemed to be the more superior countries in the north and west of the Continent. The Nordic race, he wrote, was ‘being literally driven off the streets of New York City by swarms of Polish Jews’ and he urged tighter immigration laws ‘if the higher races are to be maintained’.[12] Almost exactly one hundred years later, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, would echo Grant when he told members of Congress in January 2018 that America needed more immigrants from Norway and fewer from ‘shithole countries’, by which he meant El Salvador, Haiti and certain African nations. Trump was widely condemned for it at the time, but his poll numbers did not suffer. Like Grant’s in 1916, it felt like his words were prising open a box of ghouls that America seems to re-open every century. In the first two years of Trump’s presidency, the FBI reported a rise in hate crimes motivated by race in America[13] and attacks against Muslim, South Asian and Middle Eastern communities rose by 45 per cent.[14]

  After the First World War, national feelings of patriotism made their familiar transition into expressions of racism and anti-Semitism. Just like in France, Jews were associated with radicals, Bolsheviks and European revolution, and anti-Semitism became not just acceptable but, in many circles in the United States, respectable. The Dearborn Independent, a weekly newspaper established by the notoriously anti-Semitic Henry Ford, had, in 1925, a circulation of 900,000, making it then the second most popular newspaper in the United States, because it was distributed in all Ford’s car dealerships. At that time, it launched a vicious campaign against so-called Jewish influence in the United States, spurred on by Ford’s certainty that Jews started wars in order to profit from them. ‘I know who started [the First World War]: German-Jewish bankers,’ he was widely quoted as saying. Throughout the 1920s, the Dearborn Independent ran articles with headlines such as ‘The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem’ and ‘Jewish Power and America’s Money Famine’. In case readers hadn’t grasped Ford’s point, the Dearborn Independent reprinted and distributed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the already discredited forgery that claimed to show Jewish plans for world domination. Ford eventually closed down the paper and issued an apology, written for him by the then chairman of the American Jewish Committee, Louis Marshall. But even though his views had been criticised at the time, by Jews and non-Jews alike, he was capturing elements of the national mood. F. Scott Fitzgerald acknowledged as much in The Great Gatsby, when the oafish character Tom Buchanan talks airily about how ‘if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged.’ Through Tom, Fitzgerald captured – as journalist Pankaj Mishra put it – ‘a deepening panic among America’s Anglophile ruling class’.[15]

  Madison Grant’s book was hugely popular and had enormous political influence. He was close friends with Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, and the former publicly praised his book. He also knew the American politician Albert Johnson, who sponsored the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921, which set a limit of 350,000 immigrants allowed in each year. This, Johnson wrote, would help prevent America from being polluted by hordes of ‘abnormally twisted’, ‘unassimilable’ Jews, ‘filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits’.[16] The bill passed easily, but it did not go as far as its supporters had hoped. So in 1924 Johnson, along with Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania, turned to Grant as a self-appointed expert on world racial data for statistics that would support tightening quotas on immigrants from southern and eastern European countries. The Immigration Act of 1924, or the Johnson-Reed Act, as well as targeting Jewish immigrants, effectively banned all Arabs, East Indians and Asians from entering the country. Jewish politicians from across the country, alongside many Catholic ones, tried to fight the bill, defending immigrants’ contributions to the country. But it wasn’t enough, and the bill passed overwhelmingly in both the House and the Senate.

  Grant’s influence wasn’t limited to 1920s America. It is not a sur
prise that a book that advocated segregating races with ‘undesirable’ and ‘inferior’ traits, described Jews as ‘social discards’ and endorsed the ‘one drop rule’[17] to prevent mixing between the races would be welcomed in 1930s Germany. Grant’s book was the first non-German book the Nazis ordered to be reprinted when they came to power, and Adolf Hitler told Grant, ‘This book is my Bible.’ The same book President Theodore Roosevelt described in 1917 as ‘a capital book; in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts our people most need to realize’[18] would, less than twenty years later, become inspiration for the Nazis. Hitler also praised America’s restrictions on naturalisation as proof that America endorsed the Nazi project, and ultimately the Immigration Act helped to facilitate the Holocaust because it prevented thousands of European Jews from escaping to America, including Anne Frank and her family.[19] Sometimes America isn’t quite as far away from fascism as it thinks.

  Grant set out to change New York’s racial mix and, in that regard, he partially succeeded. Reed’s immigration laws had an enormous effect on immigration in general, Jewish immigration in particular, and on the Lower East Side specifically. In 1920, the year before the first of Johnson’s laws was passed, there were 800,000 new arrivals into the country, among them 120,000 Jews. By 1925, the numbers had fallen to 295,000 and 10,000 respectively.