Habitus

by Konrad Bercovici · 11/21/11

© John Rosenthal

Crowded northward, the Jews discovered the wilds of the Bronx. The doctors advised them to go and live there when they had a “touch of consumption.” It was “the country.” What they did with these wilds is history. They destroyed beautiful forest estates and built ugly tenement houses, created a new Hester Street where there was a park. But they also created a town where there were only rocks and marshes. Theaters, synagogues, institutions, hospitals, factories, gambling houses, other houses. There is now a generation quite distinct from the East Side Jew. It’s the second-generation Jew, with all the outward characteristics minus beard and mustache, playing baseball, great fight fans, commercial travelers, clean-shirted, white-collared, derby-hatted, crease-trousered. The women are stylish and stout, white-skinned, long-nosed, bediamonded; social workers, actresses, stump speakers, jazz dancers, with none of the color and the virtues of their erstwhile bearded, bewigged parents, and a few vices of their own acquisition. But they bathe frequently.

A third generation is now being housed on Riverside Drive. The Bronx having become “too Jewish” for them, they went to “the Drive.” And as the Drive then still harbored the feeling voiced by many a to-let sign in Harlem and some parts above Gramercy Park—“No Jews”—they did what they had done to Lakewood, New Jersey. Many years ago, Nathan Straus went to a Lakewood hotel to pass a few weeks at that rather exclusive winter resort. The manager told him, “No Jews here.” So he built a hotel next to it for Jews only. The result was that in a few years, hundreds of little and big “kosher” hotels swamped the place. What happened to the “No Jew” place is history. The natives have not yet regretted the change. Last Christmas there was a Jewish flag on top of the community’s Christmas tree on Main Street. Yes. It’s what has happened to the Drive; they built tenement houses. It’s no longer Riverside Drive; it’s Jewish Drive. In another few years, the Drive generation—a very much Americanized one, Glockmans in the last stage of “Bells”—will leave the Drive to go elsewhere because the Drive is too Jewish. Already many prefer to refer to their residences as Morningside. The East Side and part of the Bronx go to synagogues where the prayers are made in Hebrew. Harlem goes to reform synagogues where they have women in the choirs and organ music. The Drive goes to temples where the beardless Rabbis are doctors from American theological seminaries.

Yet so far, the only cultural values have come from the East Side. The men and women contributing to American thought, American letters, American revolt, American art, American music, have come from the East Side—immigrants pregnant yet with their idealism, and the first generation.

I don’t mean to say one has to elbow his way through swarming geniuses on the dirty East Side streets. On an evening, at the close of the factories and sweatshops, west of Third Avenue from Canal Street to Thirty-second Street, when the thousands and thousands are let loose from the chains of the needle-factory wheels, it looks as if it was the mission of Israel in America to trouser, coat, and gown the rest of the population of this continent. Yet if it were not for the Jews, the Metropolitan Opera House would only have its tier boxes and the upper gallery filled—the boxes by the gentry and the gallery by the Italians on Italian nights. Go to Carnegie Hall or to Aeolian Hall at a worthwhile concert and perhaps you will change your opinion about Jews caring for nothing but dollars. You will see many a boy and girl who, you will think, could have used dollars in a more practical way.

As a matter of fact, one does not exclude the other. Has not Jehuda Ben Halevy been a very practical man and great poet? Moses Mendelssohn—Moishe Dessauer—had been a banker, a bookkeeper, and a philosopher, whose book Immortality of the Soul will live longer than the glory of his son Felix. And many a great poet of today combines business ability with art.

Another fallacy is the great feeling of unity among all the Jews. As a matter of fact, the Jews, the immigrants especially, live in national groups—the Rumanian Jews in one district, the Russians in another, the Polish and Galician elsewhere, and so on. The German Jews put a great distance between themselves and the others. One dislikes the other’s peculiarities and all dislike the German Jews especially because they rule the institutions, orphanages, hospitals, charity dispensaries, and the Educational Alliance, and because they treat the others with condescension. Before we entered the European war, each Jew took sides with the country he migrated from. The German Jew could not forgive the Russian Jew for his successful invasion of the needle and real-estate trade. Now they frown on them because of their political activities. The argument is that they spoil the “good name” of the Jews by being Socialists and Bolshevists. In politics, the German Jew has always sided with the stronger one.

How clannish the different Jewish nationalities are can be illustrated by the fact that only one Rumanian Jew is employed in all of the Yiddish newspapers. They are all in the hands of Russian Jews, with here and there a Polish or a Galician thrown in.

A million and a half of Jews from the world over in one city! Glockmans at different stages; tadpoles becoming frogs and vice versa. In all walks of life, wedded to the country for good or worse, molding and being molded, shedding their colors (which do not always fall on barren soil), sing-songing the tongue they have acquired in the manner of the one they have forgotten, trying hard to fit old traditions in a new life—fathers looking upon sons as strangers, only half understanding them, never agreeing, desiring their children to Americanize yet fearing the new will never be worth the old, subconsciously hoping that a wave of anti-Semitism will rescue the race from assimilation.