Lower East Side Fiction and the Displacement of Unified Jewishness

E pluribus unumorE pluribus plura?Unity and Diversityin American Culture

Edited byHANS-rURGEN GRABBEDAVID MAUKOLE MOEN

CARSTEN HUMMELJULIA NITZ

U niversita tsverlagWINTERHeidelberg2011

JOSEF JARAB

Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age:One or Two Chapters in the History of American Modernism? 77

ANNE OLLIVIER-MELLIOS

Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Intellectuals 89

HANS-rURGEN GRABBE

Preface ix

SABINE SIELKE

Screening the Nation:How Current U.S. American Cinema Transforms the "Mainstream"and Mourns Its Own Marginalization 103

A List of Publications under the Auspices of theEuropean Association for American Studies xi SUSAN WINNETT

Back to the Fold: Memoir, Conversion, and Community 123

DAVID MAUK

E pluribus unum or E pluribus plum?A Brief Exploration of the Theme 1

MARCEL ARBEIT

Southern Writers outside the South and Their Identities:The Case of Elizabeth Spencer 133

GERT BUELENS

Oneness through Rupture:On the Severances that Bind Americans 5

HANSBAK

Language, Identity, and Politics in Multicultural New York:Chang- Rae Lee's Native Speaker 147

ELIANE ELMALEH

African American Artists and the American Flag:Unity, Diversity, and Protest 21

SUSAN CASTILLO

George Washington Cable's Caribbean Gothic 161

WINFRIED FLUCK

The Romance with America:Approaching America through Its Ideals 35

JUDE DAVIES

"American Idealism and German Frightfulness":Theodore Dreiser and the Politics of Solidarity across Difference 175

BERND HERZOGENRATH

Pluribus IMultitudes:A Materialist Approach to the American BodylPolitic 57

JAN NORDBY GRETLUND

Unifying and Diversifying:Southerners Caught between Jefferson and Hamilton 189

ELISABETTA MARINO

Amy Lowell and Japan:From Her Earlier Production to Pictures of the Floating World 205

DANA MIHAILESCU

Lower East Side Fiction and the Displacement of Unified Jewishness .... 221 Lower East Side Fiction and the Displacement ofUnified Jewishness

SOPHIE VALLAS

Call Her Isola:Ed McBain's Mythical City in the 87th Precinct Series 241

On the East Side "Jews from everywhere. And each variety of them is in it-self a special group, with some of the customs its people have acquired fromthose with whom they have lived, above their own, which in the process ofadaptation to those countries have changed so they are not nearly as like oneanother as the world supposed them to be" (Bercovici, Around the World67). In this excerpt from Around the World in New York, a travelogue writ-ten in 1924 by Konrad Bercovici,' the recent Romanian Jewish immigrantpoints to East Side Jewishness as plural and complex, bearing the imprintof one's native place apart from the characteristics of one's ethnic commu-nity. More specifically, he addresses the differences between individuals ofEastern European Jewish-American groups and highlights the strong influ-ence of each country of origin which needs to be seen as an integral part ofone's individuality: "The Jews of one nation are friendly or unfriendly withthe Jews of a neighboring nation according to the friendliness or unfriendli-ness of the nation with which they live" (68).Bercovici even notes that in ev-eryday life these conflicts are more clearly felt in contrast to moments of crisiswhen Jews tend to help one another no matter what. In other words, in con-sidering the case of immigrants moving from autocratic governments to thedemocratic environment of the United States, what happens is that once "theexternal pressure has dissipated, natural internal divisions reappear," thus,there are internal Jewish conflicts in which different national backgrounds

GEORGE BLAUSTEIN

"Other" American Studies:The Salzburg Seminar, American Intellectuals, and Postwar Europe .... 261

LAURENCE GERVAIS-LINON

Gated Communities and Common Interest Housing Developments:Artefacts of Mediation between "Unum" and "Plura" 287

Writing this paper was supported by UEFISCSU grant no. 2801r October 2007, for theresearch project entitled "Cultures of Diaspora: The Margin and the Mainstream inJewish-Romanian and Jewish-American Literatures."Konrad Bercovici is a Jewish author of Romanian background, who was most prob-ably born in Gala\!, in 1881. He spent most of his childhood in Braila, emigrated toParis around 1897 and finally settled in the United States around 1904, becoming aprolific though largely forgotten prose writer.

play an important part (Kaplan 52).2 Drawing from these important claims,my paper proposes a comparative analysis of Eastern European experiencesin Lower East Side fiction written by Jewish immigrants from several locales.

It should be noted at first that the classical definition of New York's LowerEast Side corresponds to the notion of ''American ghetto" which sociologistLouis Wirth3 developed in an eponymous article from 1927- Wirth thereinexplains that "[i]n the American cities the name 'ghetto' applies particularlyto those areas where the poorest and most backward groups of the Jewishpopulation, usually the recently arrived immigrants, find their homes" (57).This quote is particularly relevant for understanding the partial way in whichthe ghetto was portrayed by Wirth, an outsider and authoritative sociologist:this was not a place of diversity but a local cultural area informally built andincluding the inferior members of the Jewish community. In other words,based on the authority of an outside perspective, the ghetto appeared as amonolithic block, essentially different from and implicitly inferior to main-stream dignified society.

Not only sociological works captured this outsiders' partial and biasedrendering but also early photographs of the Lower East Side which, accordingto Deborah Dash Moore and David Lobenstine, documented "a combinationof what immediately confronts them-the shock of poverty and difference-and what conforms to their vision of how the area should look" (30). Put dif-ferently, outside views offered a combination of descriptive and prescriptiveapproaches. Especially for mainstream Americans, ethnic groups were strik-ingly similar in their poverty and struggle to assimilate and, as such, thesecommunities were treated as a generic mass to be differentiated from theold stock. To this was added the prescriptive dimension of the gaze, main-

stream Americans' imposition and control of what a ghetto should look like,to which the immigrants were expected to comply no matter what.

Not surprisingly, then, literary appraisals by mainstream critics at thetime observed the same patterns as sociologists and photographers and up-held the notion of Lower East Side as a local and limited Jewish phenomenon.Such was Dexter Marshal's 1896 praise of Abraham Cahan's recently releasedYekl for its insider view of the East Side, seen as "the life of the crowded sliceof Central Europe set into the mosaic of the New World's greatest seaportcity" (44, emphasis added). The same praise of a uniform ethnic enclave ofthe ghetto as depicted in Cahan's The Imported Bridegroom and Other Storiesresonates from Howells's review of the short story collection in 1898, notingthat "[n]o American fiction of the year merits recognition more than thisRussian's stories of Yiddish life, which are now entirely of our time and place,and so foreign to our race and civilization" (41).

Starting from here, one would expect early twentieth-century EasternEuropean Jewish-American authors to offer an image of the Lower East Sideas a homogeneous local space different from the outer city life of America, es-pecially if one follows the reports of respectable sociologists, photographers,critics, and writers representing mainstream America. Yet, as shown in thecase of Konrad Bercovici, there is also an emergent voice to the contrary,upholding diversity within unity, and coming, it would seem, from the writ-ers of Jewish background. It is this latter direction that I mean to uphold byfollowing in the footsteps of critics like Dalia Kandiyoti and Delia Caparoso-Konzett, who point to the Lower East Side as a heterogeneous location inrelation to Abraham Cahan's works and, respectively, Anzia Yezierska's sto-ries. Thus, according to Kandiyoti, Cahan's ghetto social order can be bestcharacterized as "pell-mell," versus the general homogeneity of Americanmainstream local color, which was meant to serve the nativist cause by a fi-nal effacement of the foreign and the outsider (90). Instead, Kandiyoti notesthat "Cahan refuses to present ethnicity as a uniform block. Moreover, space,however bordered and defined, does not equal unified ethnicity, contrary tomuch nativist discourse" (90).

As pertinently remarked by Delia Caparoso- Konzett, the Lower East Sidewas a "transitional space," "a shifting field of tension between adjustment tothe New World and the simultaneous recovery of ethnic awareness" (25-26).To put it differently, the ghetto was a vital hybrid site in which conflictingvalues and mores were to be negotiated. In its ability to host a whole arrayof different ethnic groups and beliefs, the space of the ghetto superseded itsearlier connection with confinement and stood "reconfigured in its ethni-cal and cultural diversity, linking people of different national origins into

2 Lawrence Kaplan actually made this claim in relation to Orthodox Judaism, in orderto explain the reason for the proliferation of plural Daas Torah viewpoints withinthe Jewish community as a result of the success of Orthodox Judaism. Moments ofreligious crisis lead to the coalescence of different factions; in moments of calmnessinternal dissension is the natural state of affairs. What we see in the case of KonradBercovici is that the same phenomenon also applies to secularized forms of JewishAmerican social life at the turn of the twentieth century.

3 Louis Wirth was not the first to use the term "ghetto" in this sense. As Moses Rischinhas shown, the term was initially popularized in late nineteenth-century Jewish worksof literature from the United Kingdom and the United States. More precisely, "theNew York ghetto first burst prominently into print" (Rischin 17) in Abraham Cahan's1896 story suggestively entitled Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. Cahan himselfwas indebted for its use to the 1892 publication of British Jewish Israel Zangwill'sChildren of the Ghetto, the first book to give the term public currency in its emphasison the London ghetto.

the shared imagined territory of the transnational" (Caparoso-Konzett 49).Caparoso-Konzett reads Yezierska's work as integrated within "an emergingtransnational literature, one that denies allegiance to established myths ofpeoples and nations and instead puts forth the unstable experience of migra-tion" (46).

Whether one calls it pel! mel!, transitional, or transnational, the LowerEast Side looms as a site of plurality rather than of simple unity. This is anidea that springs with equal force from the articles dedicated to Lower EastSide photography, food ways, culture and museum life in the powerful bookRemembering the Lower East Side edited by Hasia R. Diner, Jeffrey Shandler,and Beth S. Wenger. That volume relevantly stresses how "the Lower EastSide was never monolithic at any historical moment. In every generation, theLower East Side had multiple meanings, and different groups imagined andused the neighborhood in a variety of ways" (4).

In order to prove how plurality is also the case of Lower East Side fiction,not just culture, I have chosen to concentrate on four early twentieth-centuryimmigrant authors (Konrad Bercovici, Abraham Cahan,4 M. E. Ravage,5andAnzia Yezierska6) and to analyse two key aspects in relation to their works.First, I shall consider their various birth locations, ranging from Yezierska'sPolish Plotsk and Cahan's Russian Vitebsk to Ravage's Romanian Bil.rladandBercovici's Galati, and examine how these connect to their handling of somecommon themes (such as marriage and education on the Lower East Side).Then, given the varied gendered perspectives these authors represent, my in-tention is to trace to what degree a gendered lens highlights particular facetsof Jewishness on the Lower East Side.

In a nutshell, myaim is to extend the picture of a heterogeneous Lower EastSide, so far analyzed by critics in relation to cultural space (in Remembering

the Lower East Side) or to just one Jewish-American author (in the worksof Kandiyoti and Caparoso-Konzett). By engaging in a dialogue with vari-ous early twentieth-century Jewish-American writers of different EasternEuropean backgrounds, my paper argues that early twentieth-century LowerEast Side literature is yet another relevant critical site for grasping the het-erogeneity of the Jewish American ghetto and, by extension, of ways of beingJewish in the United States.

Abraham Cahan began his career as a writer in the 1890S, thus managingto reflect on the image of the Lower East Side at the very outset of the EastEuropean Jewish mass immigration to AmericaJ Cahan's two stories I amgoing to look at represent the author's main works that explicitly deal withthe Lower East Side. These are Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896)8and "The Imported Bridegroom," published in a new collection of Lower EastSide stories released in 1898.

Both these stories address the difficulty of fostering or maintaining anOld-World-type of marriage on the Lower East Side. Yekl explores the prob-lems of an Old-World-marriage via a young Russian Jewish family, that ofGitland Yekl. Yekl, the husband immigrates to America three years ahead of hiswife and baby, Americanizing his name to Jake. "The Imported Bridegroom"features the failed attempt of an old Jew,Asriel Stroon, to bring his American-born daughter a bridegroom from native Russia, in the person of Talmud stu-dent Shaya Golub. Once in the New World, the Talmud student turns awayfrom religion and becomes a secularized philosophy reader. In other words,in both stories Lower East Side becomes a place of dislocation and transfor-

4 Abraham Cahan, one of the most renowned Jewish-American figures of the earlytwentieth century, was born in Vilna, Lithuania, then part of Russia, in 1860. He cameto the United States in 1882, soon after the tsar's death to escape possible arrest for thetsar's murder. He edited the Yiddish socialist weekly Forverts while simultaneouslywriting fiction in English.Born Marcus Eli Revici in 1884, in Barlad, Romania, M. E. Ravage grew up in near-byVaslui. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1900, becoming a freelance writer and prolificjournalist. After the end of the First World War, as his grandson Christopher Clausenremembers, he settled in "Paris with his French immigrant wife (a non-Jew) and theirtwo daughters" and continued to write historical biographies and articles (46).

6 Born around 1883 in Plotzk, a Polish province under Russia, Anzia Yezierska came tothe United States together with her family in around 1892 and became one of the mostpopular Jewish-American writers of the period following her "Sweatshop Cinderella"story.

7 The period of Eastern European Jewry's mass immigration to the U.S. ranges from thelate 1880s to the early 1920S and has been documented in numerous historical sourc-es, such as Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America(New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1939); Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers(New York: Touchstone Editions, 1976); Gerald Sorin's Tradition Transformed: TheJewish Experience in America (Baltimore: TIle Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997);or Stanford Sternlicht's The Tenement Saga: The Lower East Side and Early JewishAmerican Writers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press/Terrace Books, 2004).

8 After the English version of Yekl was rejected for publication on the grounds of itsparochial content, since it merely dealt with "Jewish life and immigration-not ofinterest to American readers" (Kirk 34)-Cahan first published it in Yiddish as Yankelthe Yankee (Arbeiter Zeitung, 1895) and then finally in English one year later, as Yekl:A Tale of the New York Ghetto.

Jews crowded out of the 'pale of Jewish settlement: Russified Jews expelled fromMoscow, Saint Petersbourg, Kieff, or Saratoff; Jewish runaways from justice;Jewish refugees from crying political and economic justice; people turned froma hard-gained foothold in life and from deep-rooted attachments by the capriceof intolerance or the wiles of demagoguery-innocent scapegoats of a guiltyGovernment for its outraged populace to misspend its blind fury upon; studentsshut out of Russian universities, and come to these shores in quest of learning;artisans, merchants, teachers, rabbis, artists, beggars-all come in search of for-tune. (14)

it subsumes the entire Jewish community from the initial location of thestory-the sewing-machine sweatshop. Here, some of the operators boast oftheir "intimacies with the leading actors of the Jewish stage" while one reads"a socialist magazine in Yiddish [... J in the Talmudical intonation" (1, em-phasis added). As can be derived from the above observations, these peoplecenter on Jewish issues (as expresseq in their engrossment with vaudevilleshows and leftist press) but, while doing that, they also betray the inner con-flict of Jewishness, i.e. the clash between the religious imperative inherent inone's Talmudic intonation and the interest in the atheist radical movementof socialism. Individual and collective insecurity thus mingle unwittingly inJake's story.

Once Gitl arrives on the Lower East Side problems ensue. The Old-World-greenhorn-wife becomes an obstacle in the Jewish man's attempt to begin anew life in the New World. As indicated by Werner Sollors, what is at stakehere is a specific pattern of opposition between "consent" and "dissent," be-tween "hereditary relations" and "contractual relations," taking up the formof "arranged marriage" and "romantic love." Consequently, in America, Jakefeels trapped in his marriage, which is seen as an Old-World-arrangementassociated with old ethnic bonds as opposed to newer relationships basedon romantic love. Jake's posed disdain for such weddings becomes apparentin his making fun of boarder Bernstein, an observant Jew, whom he asks,"Shay, Mr. Bernstein, what about your shadchen?" (48). The reference to amatrimonial agent, a common occurrence in the Old World, seems a sign ofbackwardness in the American ghetto.

Starting from here, it is noteworthy to record the divergent paths un-dertaken by Jake and Gitl. In the name of American ways, Jake ironicallyretracts into an exilic type of identity, at a distance from the Jewish com-munity in America, feeling like "a wretched outcast," "a martyr paying thepenalty of sins" for which he did not feel culpable (73). He follows an indi-vidual path, running counter to the call of the community, but he ends up byupholding an essentially Jewish stance in his decision to divorce his wife andmarry "elevated" Mamie. Significantly, as he woos Mamie, he calls her bythe Yiddish diminutive, "Ach, Mamiele," rather than by the much cherishedAnglicized version of her name (53, 75). Moreover, his freedom from Gitl isin fact bought by Mamie's amassed money, her "savings, for a marriage por-tion, of five years' hard toil" (80). Mamie's dowry money is thus redirectedin buying Jake out of his previous marriage. But the same money serves toannul Jake's sense of freedom, locking him into another form of an arrangedmarriage: "in his inmost heart he was the reverse of eager to reach the CityHall. He was painfully reluctant to part with his long-coveted freedom so

mation. It is pictured in Yekl as "one of the most densely populated spots onthe face of the earth," full of immigrants from "all the Yiddish-speaking cen·tel'Sof Europe" (13). It is a place encompassing:

The above passage spells out the reasons behind Jewish immigration to theUnited States, namely officially engendered economic and social discrimina-tion and limited possibilities of education. As such, the enumeration managesto strongly uphold exile as the initial coordinate ofJewish life in the America.

What is at stake in Cahan's work is memory and how much it contributesto an individual's identity in its personal and collective forms, intertwiningexilic and communitarian experiences. Jewish memory seems to flourish onthe Lower East Side more than in any other U.S. neighborhood. It encom-passes an almost exclusive Jewish community-as illustrated in Yekl: "TheJewish quarter of the metropolis, which is a vast and compact city withina city, offers its denizens incomparably fewer chances of contact with theEnglish-speaking portion of the population than any of the three separateGhettos of Boston" (24).

Despite the isolation from mainstream American ways, the closely-knitJewish community of the ghetto is not as unitary as it might appear at firstsight and still faces challenges of exilic persistence in the new, democraticenvironment. More precisely, after immigration, Jews cling to an exilic formof existence, prolonging their sense of suffering and pain because of the oth-ers' condescending gaze and their own insecurity. Jake's situation is a case inpoint. Having come to the United States, leaving his wife GitJ and his baby sonbehind in Pravly, Russia, Jake would like to leave the past behind and adoptAmerican ways, such as a "Yankee jerk of his head" (2). Not openly acknowl-edging his married status and going to dance academies where "English wasthe official language," Jake dances with two girls at once, Mamie and Fanny,yet on his departure, he can't help but think of the need to spend his firstwages on a steamship ticket for his wife and baby (17). Thus, the past seemsto be a constant revenant that weighs heavily on Jake's mind. Relevantly, theconfrontation of old and new ways is not simply a characteristic of Jake but

soon after it had at last been attained, and before he had had time to relish it"(89). Thus, in assuming an exilic identity in view of overcoming a backwardJewish existence, Jake ends up more descent-drawn than he had imagined.His earlier malicious address to Bernstein rebounds on him and he ends upin an arranged marriage, at Mamie's beck and call.

Bycontrast, Gitl draws strength from a collective existence, capitalizing onthe sense of community and shared experiences. First, in her own apartment,in front of the contemptuous look of her husband, Gitl and boarder Bernsteinare equally intent on performing the traditional ablutions and whisperingthe prayer before dinner. Later on, in order to keep her husband, Gitl seeksthe advice of community members like Mrs. Kavarsky, who prompts her todiscard her kerchief and sell the wig: "No wonder he does hate you, seeingyou in that horrid rag, which makes a grandma of you" (56). It is the sameMrs. Kavarsky who brings Gitl's physical change into effect, but the result isdifferent than expected: Jake asks for a divorce. Meanwhile, Gitl acquires thecommunity's support, as Mrs. Kavarsky bursts out against Jake's adultery: "Ishall tell him [a politzman] I cannot leave her alone with a murderer like you,for fear you might kill her and the boy, so that you might dawdle around withthat Polish wench of yours" (72).

The outcome is that Jake remains alone on the Lower East Side while Gitlrejoices with a solid collective backing. I[Jake's choice takes him to despair,collective support bolsters Gitl towards a modernized existence, both physi-cally and socially. At the end of the story, she appears "in her own hair," witha broad-brimmed hat and a "peculiar air of self-confidence with which a fewmonths' life in America is sure to stamp the looks and bearing of every im-migrant" (83).Moreover, in the case of a Jewish woman, the American ghettoopens up the possibility of marrying an educated person like Bernstein asopposed to Russia, where he would have never accepted as spouse the formerwife of a blacksmith.

Jake chooses an exilic, lonely path. Consequently, rather than transcend-ing his condition he becomes much more mired in traditional ways. By con-trast, Gitl's uninterrupted contact with her peers' sufferings and advice hasthe potential of transforming bitterness into a healing outpour of disappoint-ments. This opens up the way towards accepting a contingent existence-apath that will also be followed by other characters.

Lower East Side Life Vacillating between Communitarian Support and theContingency Game

Cahan's "The Imported Bridegroom" deals with another possible scenario re-lated to the institution of marriage on the 1890S Lower East Side: the secularbusinessman turned religious in his old age and the fate of a young Talmudscholar in the democratic environment of America.

Once again Jewishness on the Lower East Side is problematized in termsof individual exile and collective patterns. First, the reasons behind Asriel'sturn to Judaism reside in his fear of death: "Alas! He had been so taken upwith earthly title deeds that he had given but little thought to such deeds aswould entitle him to a 'share in the World-to-Come;' and while his valuablepapers lay secure between the fireproof walls of his iron safe, his soul was leftutterly exposed to the flames of Sheol" (98). Asriel fears that his individualpunishment for non-observance will be exile from Heaven. In the attempt toescape the exilic path, he chooses Shaya as a son-in-law and behind his deci-sion one reads self-interest more than piety, given his own thoughts that "hewho supports a scholar of the Law is like unto him who offers sacrifices" (132).

The same self-centered attitude applies to his daughter, Flora, who wantsto turn Shaya into a doctor in view of acquiring a dignified image in the eyesof the Lower East Side community: '''Oh, won't it be lovely when everybodyknows that you go to college and study together with nice, educated up-townfellows!" (140). Escape from exile, in the case of Asriel, and the need to over-come the insecurity of being part of a traditional Jewish community by un-dertaking a higher class image accepted by both mainstream Americans andthe Jewish community, in the case of Flora, become the dominant issues ofthe story.

As the story unfolds, Shaya seems to diverge from old Asriel's traditionalpath and follow the assimilationist way upheld by his Americanized daugh-ter. Yet, at the end of the story he carves out a third space for himself, beingless interested in medicine than in philosophy, and less interested in philoso-phy per se than in the newly-found philosophical reading group. Flora has ashallow sense of community and of belonging, as apparent in her reaction toher husband's intellectual and habitual developments:

The young woman gazed about her in perplexity. [... J It was anything but theworld of intellectual and physical elegance into which she had dreamed to beintroduced by marriage to a doctor. Any society of 'custom peddlers' was betterdressed than these men, who appeared to her more like the grotesque and un-couth characters in Dickens's novels than an assemblage of educated people. Fora moment even Shaya seemed a stranger and an enemy. (161)

In contrast, Shaya totally immerses himself in a community of shared spiri-tual beliefs that transcends ethnic background and places identity at the levelof the contingent, as a matter of affiliations. For him Jewishness is associatedwith a private realm which does not interfere with the pan-ethnic sharing ofideas, as he expresses in the following passage addressed to Flora:

Floraly, you know what: come upstairs for just one minute. We are reading thenicest book you ever saw, and there is a lot of such nice gentlemen there!-sev-eral genuine Americans-Christians. Do come, Floraly. [... J You'll see what nicepeople. I tell you they are so educated, and they love Jews so much! A Jew is thesame as a Gentile to them-even better. (159)

community does not remember the reason behind Chaim's fleeing but onlyhis inexcusable flight once his wife became pregnant: the husband becomesthe sinful, punishable exile while the wife gets everyone's help and respectfor her diligence and strength. In addition, in keeping with the community-drawn image of a responsible mother and wife, Rebecca publishes her chil-dren's photos in the papers and repeatedly asks for her husband's return.9

There is, however, one important aspect in which Rebecca distances her-self from the teachings of the Lower East Side community who advise her toremarry after Chaim's seven years of absence, stating how he might have diedin the meantime. Despite this plea, Rebecca goes on to cherish the name ofher husband and takes the guilt of his departure on herself:

In other words, Shaya's path on the Lower East Side goes beyond the requi-sites of a transformed Jewish community (as long as this is based on super-ficial reasons) and uses the sense of a community of ideas that will finallyfoster a cosmopolitan identity-with Jewishness as a private sphere.

Another facet of the Old-World-marriage on the Lower East Side is ex-plored in Konrad Bercovici's 1929 story, "Success, and How It Comes." It re-lates the case of a secular Jewish family on the Lower East Side, a business-minded husband and a nagging wife. Bercovici's story is meant to prove thatthe Talmud can be wrong in stating that "[n]othing in this world is worsethan a nagging wife" (332). Instead, the narrator, a retiring businessmancalled Levine, tells the story of a jewelry manufacturer, Chaim Raphaelson,who comes to earn a lot on Bradstreet thanks to his nagging wife, Rebecca.

In Bercovici's story, Jewish life on the Lower East Side is broadly associ-ated with the occupation of a peddler and emphasis falls on Chaim's hardwork. Ironically, the nagging wife boosts the economic advancement of thehusband who benefits from the wrong ascriptions of "wholesalers and job-bers," mistakenly identifying his need to spend as little time with his wife aspossible with his dedication to work (333). As a result, Chaim saves 2,000 dol-lars and buys a land estate in Bronx; yet his wife disagrees to his selling theland to the congregation for 4,000 dollars and to starting a candy store. Herrefusal to sign the papers turns Chaim into a self-exiled man from his fam-ily, community and business. Most importantly, it is the wife's equal status toher man in the United States that determines Chaim to henceforth become aphysical exile, disappearing without a trace.

Once alone on the Lower East Side, pregnant Rebecca benefits from thecommunity's support. The neighbors bestow the stigma of deserter on thefled husband and ensure Rebecca's well-being once she purchases the can-dy-store her husband craved for, as everybody is immediately summoned to"buy from Mrs. Raphaelson, whose husband had run away" (335). Thus, the

She knows now that Chaim was right when he spoke about a candy-store; so shedoesn't want to believe that he was dead. If he was dead, she cries, then she haskilled him. So she tells her children about the wonderful father they got, but whowas lost and will come back. And the tears she has in her eyes every day! (335-36).

In this case, the husband's absence turns the nagging wife into a self-con-scious person, ready to accept her mistakes and to keep a good image of thehusband in front of the children. Most importantly, she remains faithful toher missing husband.

And, as ifby magic, Chaim does return to everyone's joy and to the fam-ily's economic profit. This time Chaim acts more prudently than his wife, notselling his Bronx lots to the president of the congregation, who is ready to of-fer him 5,000 dollars on the spot, "like before" (336). Rebecca reproaches herhusband for not making the deal, "Chaim, you fool, he has forgotten it wasonly'four thousand! Tomorrow he will remember maybe!" (336). However,Chaim's visit to the Bronx the following day proves him right: ''All around hiseight lots, houses! Stores! The streets are paved! Children! It is lively!" (337).The price of land has gone up to 50,000 dollars since Chaim's departure. Heis no longer an exile at the end of the story but a responsible businessmanwho has learnt that a good deal is the result of patience as well as of chance.

9 Publishing photos of deserting husbands was in fact a common practice on theLower East Side from the 1890S to 1920S, and many wives did appeal to Yiddish dai-ly Forward's "Binte! Brief" section for their husbands' return; some of these pleashave been collected and translated in English by Isaac Mentzker and Harry Goldenin A Bintel Brief Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish DailyForward (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). At the time, after drawing support fromthe National Desertion Bureau, the Forward even established a special column totrace the run-aways, known as "The Gallery of Missing Husbands."

In his case, departure from the Lower East Side plays an important role inhis economic success, gained after having had contact with the world outside.

Bercovici has thus shown that Jewishness on the Lower East Side is a mat-ter of contingency in which traditional communitarian patterns playa roleas well as apparently negative stereotypes such as "the nagging wife" or "thedeserting husband." The acceptance of this life contingency seems to pavethe way out of an exilic identity and towards a positive communitarian ex-istence. Yet, writers do not only consider the different guises of marriage onthe Lower East Side in order to understand Jewishness at the time but alsofocus on Jewish youth's education in America as a case in point. This themeis largely explored by authors who arrived in the United States as children oradolescents, such as Ravage or Yezierska, and who had to struggle themselveswith the educational system of America.

In his 1917fictionalized memoir An American in the Making, M. E. Ravagefocuses on the Lower East Side around 1900, after his arrival at Ellis Island. Inhis book, the Jewish-ather-position in the United States is related to markersof cultural construction. On the one hand, there is the American failed no-tion of the immigrant who is not "the raw material Americans suppose himto be," but the bearer of a deep-rooted tradition that comes in conflict withthe New World (60). On the other hand, Jewish conduct along the lines ofdescent types of relations inherited from back home is incompatible with theAmerican system. This time the other is not constructed on a legislative basisbut springs out of the confrontation between different cultural values.

Max, the narrator, gradually shifts from descent-based connections toconsent. At first, blood connections are the key for his start in life, given hisexpectations of receiving help from his cousin, Couza: "my kinsman woulddo [something] for me," "set me to making money in one of his factories" or"use his great influence with the American government" (64). TIle notion offamily in Romania is based on cross-generational inheritance of professionalsecrets and on religious continuity. In America, initially, descent-based so-ciety continues to function, as exemplified by the fact that Max's first em-ployers in the new country also serve as his foster family. This indicates thatthe immigrant's initial encounter with the United States on the Lower EastSide is with the America of his fellow-immigrants. It also explains the kindsof questions he is asked in his job interview: "about my family, how long I[Max] had been in America, what I had done before" (124). In other words,one's past credentials rather than skill were the criteria for job ascription.Subsequently, Max's first employers, Mr. and Mrs. Weiss, act as parents inthe new land, Mrs. Weiss paying particular attention to offering him educa-tion on courtesy, and taking care of his outfit and appearance while, just like

a Jewish father, Mr. Weiss initiates Max into professional secrets: "From himI first learnt that honesty, particularly with an employer, is the best policy,that bar-men never drink (except at a customer's invitation, which is anotherstory and is governed by a special ethical rule), and that patience with a liber-ally spending customer, even when he says and does unpleasant things, is avirtue that is its own reward (125-26)."

However, Max soon senses in Mr. Weiss's advice not just the disinterestedsharing of experience but the material self-interest of the employer hiddenbehind the three rules of bar-room activity. Discovering the primacy of eco-nomic profit under Mr. Weiss' mask of fatherly care, Max becomes awareof the different realities of the American environment in which self-relianceprevails. As a result, on entering the American market system, Max is finallydrawn to discover that in America, unlike Romania, a person is not identifiedwith a single stable occupation but with several. Learning his lesson, Maxdecides to leave the bar for better wages in the garment industry.

All these episodes take place in what Max calls the East Side Ghetto, andhe specifically focuses on "Little Romania," the home of Romanian Jews onthe Lower East Side, geographically delimited in the East by Clinton Street(beyond which was Little Galicia), in the South by Grand Street (beyondwhich Russians and Lithuanians lived) and to the North by Tompkins SquarePark, a boundary towards "real Americans" (88). In offering these coordi-nates, he at once points to the diversity of the East Side experience and indi-vidualizes his own case.

Narrator Max continues to distance himself from values of his own Jewishcommunity, as economic rules draw him closer to American values. He de-clares, he was still in Little Romania but "comrade in spirit South of GrandStreet," i.e. to Russian Jewish ways represented by the socialist lectures hestarts to attend-similarly to Cahan's Shaya who chose philosophy (160). So,on the one hand, there is Max's rupture from his Romanian-based Jewishcommunity while, on the other hand, he replaces this by a Russian-styleJewish community with which he chooses to affiliate himself in the name ofideas in 1903. This, in its turn, is a temporary halt, and he breaks from social-ists too by deciding to go to college in Wisconsin, Missouri, in 1905. But whilethe former rupture happens within the confines of the Lower East Side, thelatter entails a departure to Missouri in the name of education.

For Max, that latter moment is also the one occasioning a relapse into anexilic type of identity, as his family refuses to help him with the tuition fees,and socialists disclaim him as a deserter aiming to enter the middle classes.Importantly, on Max's return to the Jewish ghetto in New York after his firstyear at Wisconsin, the distance he has acquired in relation to his kin is em-

phasized for example by his restrained emotions as opposed to the affectiveoutbursts of his brother:

There was Paul faithfully at the ferry, and as I came off he rushed up to me andthrew his arms around me and kissed me affectionately. Did I kiss him back? Iam afraid not. [... J. I had become soberer. I carried myself differently. There wasan unfamiliar resolve, something mingled of coldness and melancholy, in my eye.(259-60)

than anything else, education occasions the break with the Lower East Side,since in public school they "got their first glimpses of real America" (25).

The same thirst for knowledge that Ravage's narrator displays character-izes Sara Smolinsky in Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers (1925). In her case too,education implies dealing with a dilemma, given her assertion that "knowl-edge was what I wanted more than anything else in the world. I had mademy choice. And now I had to pay the price. So this is what it cost, daring tofollow the urge in me. No father. No lover. No family. No friend. [... j And Imust go on-alone" (208).

There occurs the same clash between an old sense of Jewish communityand the new social order of America. Additionally, Yezierska's story offersinsight into the plight of women. Old World values are obliquely dealt withthrough Sara's religiously pious father transplanted on the Lower East Sidein order to emphasize the impossibility of his claims. At the same time, onefollows Sara's necessary break with her family and the choice of an exilic pathin order to succeed in America. She, thereby, challenges the obsolete counter-productive character of past norms in new circumstances.

Unlike her sisters who, though sharing Sara's distaste for their father'steachings, live up the patience and suffering expected of dutiful children,Sara dares confess and confront her father, refusing to repress her feelings.As if to confirm the alleged failure of her father's path, Sara openly points tohis denial of responsibility in both marriage matters and business, by asking"[wjhy are you always blaming everything on the children? [... j Didn't youyourself make Fania marry Abe Schmukler when she cried she didn't wanthim?" (85).Also, she notes, "You're never here. You're away praying most ofthe time" and "you, yourself, gave away four hundred dollars to a crook forempty shelves" (134-35). As a consequence, her act of leaving home and theLower East Side in order to become a teacher is an attempt at showing thenecessity of actively assuming one's position as an exile in order to succeed.By studying, Sara acquires the independent authoritarian teacher self she hasset her mind to. The price to be paid is acknowledging her difference from hercollege fellows just as she had previously acknowledged her difference fromthe voice of the traditional Jewish community on the Lower East Side.

At college, her main difference resides in the unchecked Jewish outpourof emotions that she believed to have surpassed thanks to the courses of psy-chology teacher Edman. Realization of the gap came from a class assignment,which asked students to come up with examples showing how strong emo-tions interfere with thinking. This is the moment when Sara discovers plentyof such instances in the everyday life of the Jewish community (222). Thelesson she learns is the "self-control" of a "person of reason," only that in her

The former Jewish greenhorn seems to have become a reserved man, closelyresembling the mainstream norm. At the same time, the empowering re-strained attitude of the young scholar depends on the disempowered relativeswho have remained in the New York ghetto; a traditional enclave of kindredimmigrants and fellow-citizens who only experienced extremely limited con-tact with what Ravage terms "the America of the Americans":

I needed sadly to readjust myself when I arrived in New York. But the incred-ible thing is that my problem was to fit myself in with the people of Vaslui andRumania, my erstwhile fellow-townsmen and my fellow-countrymen. It was notAmerica in the large sense, but the East Side Ghetto that upset all my calculations,reversed all my values, and set my head swimming. (61)

In other words, the Jewish man's adoption of the mainstream posture inMissouri is sanctioned by contrast to the Lower East Side tradition-preserv-ing community to which the student returns for the holiday.

Max refers to the New York episode by means of the "home"-"exile"polarities: before leaving for the ghetto, Max's assertion to his room-mateHarvey was that "I am going home, old man!" (264). However, the returnto his kin proves to be the passage to yet "another strange land," given theabove-mentioned unchecked emotionalism. But, on going back to Missouri,Max is no longer a stranger but greeted by Harvey and other American peers,concluding "I was not a man without a country. I was an American" (266). So,in Ravage's narrative, exilic and Jewish communitarian experiences live sideby side on the East Side, and what is favored is not a kin-based but a consent-based community beyond ethnicity and centered on ideas. This communitycannot be initially located on the Lower East Side; it can only be brought tofruition by one's mobility outside this area.

Thus, M. E. Ravage opens up Lower East Side as a heterogeneous placewhere different forms of Jewishness interact and where the sense of belong-ing to a community goes beyond the ethnic framework and implies the pri-macy of affiliations and contingency. Max, the student, follows such a pathin choosing to get an American education. Yet, as remarked by Diner, more

hunger for spiritual development she shows the same outpour of emotions intrying to establish a humane relationship with the teacher, offering him hotmilk for his coughs and an umbrella to protect him from the rain (223). Hisanswer, "You mustn't bother so about me. I don't like it" makes her realizeshe has not changed the emotional register: "Will even the hurts and shamesof my life teach me nothing?" (229, 230). Meanwhile, learning to suppress herfeelings and getting tough in order to survive, Sara becomes a teacher andreturns to her family on the Lower East Side after an absence of six years.

Similar to Ravage's case, her achieved self-control paradoxically comes tolight in her reaction to her mother's death that is contrasted with the behav-iour of the Lower East Side community: "Floods of tears were shed by thesestrangers, but my eyes were dry. My heart was numb. My mind became apetrified blank" (255). Feelings succumb to reason in the calm attitude takenby Sara as opposed to the Jewish overflow of emotions.

But, in Sara's case, return to the Lower East Side is different from Max's,given the particular event under discussion, that of her mother's death,which changes Sara forever, especially since "[fJor the first time in my life Isaw Father weeping, like a lost child" (252). After becoming a witness to herfather's moment of weakness and irrepressible pain, Sara realizes that hermother had always been right about his innocence as to worldly affairs; hereally needs to be taken care of. Consequently, while her sisters do not wantto help their father because he has willfully chosen another wife, Sara can-not rest and wonders, "What will become of Father if we abandon him to themercy of that woman?" (268). Later, as she meets her father, who has takenup peddling in order to support his money-driven wife, she remembers hermother's last words: "'Be good to Father. I leave him in his old age, when heneeds me most. Helpless as a child is he.' I looked at Father with Mother'seyes. I saw in him only the child who needed mothering-who must be pro-tected from the hard cruelties of the world. (285)."

These episodes reveal Sara's central problem, namely whether or not shecan successfully break with her traditional family and carve out a new life forherself, unburdened by the Jewish heritage. Sara returns to the communityon the Lower East Side and finds comfort in the arms of another Polish Jew,Hugo Seelig, with whom she can start a modern life. At the same time, shealso realizes that she needs to keep her father's spirit alive by making room inher life for him and his traditional ways:

my power to keep lighted the flickering candle of his life for him. Could I denyhim this poor service? Unconsciously, my hand reached out for his. (296)

Then suddenly the pathos of this lonely old man pierced me. In a world where allis changed, he alone remained unchanged-as tragically isolate as the rocks. Allthat he had left of life was his fanatical adherence to his traditions. It was within

In fact, in all of Yezierska's novels (Bread Givers, 1925; Salome of theTenements, 1923; Arrogant Beggar, 1927), the author features heroines whosecentral problem is that of Sara and who all finally return to the Lower EastSide but infuse it with a new spirit. Thus, what Sara understands is that parents"could never really leave the Lower East Side borderland," but they remainedstuck to traditions that had become completely internalized and understoodas natural coordinates of being (Diner 25), as in the obvious case of her father.What she also understands and assumes, in contrast to Max, is the need totake responsibility for the old generation by coupling the sense of Jewish so-cial justice with respect for the struggle of the individual self. This is the senseof Jewishness carried on by the Lower East Side through Yezierska's hero-ines, a sense that Jewish women seem to inherit from their caring mothers.Considering all these different trajectories, one realizes that the Lower EastSide stands out as "the transitional zone in which Jews learned to be free," alocus of conflict, generational gulf, maturation and negotiation (Diner 20).Also, in keeping with Diner's findings, the sojourn within and the drama ofexodus are the two elements giving the Lower East Side its lingering power.

In this sense, the works of these four writers represent a deep probing intothe meaning of Jewish exile and communitarian experiences on the LowerEast Side. In all cases, the central experience on the Lower East Side is thesense of absence taking up the form of an exilic path either understood asphysical departure of one's spouse or as the children's exodus in view of get-ting an education. However, what ensues is a movement of return which re-sults in a relapse to some form of a community that encompasses a diverserange of stances. For Cahan's Shaya and for Ravage's Max, this is a trans-national community which can become full-fledged only olltside the LowerEast Side and by means of a break from the old generation and from super-ficial goals of Jewish wives. For Bercovici's Rebecca and Chaim, for Cahan'sGitl, and for Yezierska's Sara, this is a Jewish community which implies theuse of traditional methods (for the older generation) and the coupling of pro-gressive reform and responsibility to the old generation (in the case of theyounger character).

Following this comparative outlook, it seems that the way to overcominga Jewish sense of exilic identity in the early twentieth-century Lower EastSide was that of keeping in permanent contact with other people that hadlived through similar experiences. The performance of humanitarian actsout of love and understanding became the basic means of overcoming that

state of exile. It follows from here that avoiding the exilic experience did notprove to be a winning strategy for Jews at the turn of the century. Theirs wasnot so much an attempt at defending themselves from exile as at strugglingwith it. The fact that another human being felt pain and loneliness jointlywith somebody else could thus become a means of mitigating everybody'ssuffering. The predominance of such shared experiences of suffering as basisfor creating new bonds in the United States justifies the importance of vari-ous Jewish-American communities of feeling that could be drawn either eth-nically or transnationally. In other words, the diverse Jewish experiences onthe Lower East Side dismantle simplistic attempts at identifying the neigh-borhood as the locus of unified Jewishness. Diversity, not unity, prevails onthe Lower East Side.

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