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B y the turn of the nineteenth century, heavy Jewih immigration from eastern Europe had transformed the neighborhood from the Bowery to the East River and from Market Street to Fourteenth Street (and pressing east of Second Avenue) into a center of Jewish life. In the nation’s popular press, the Lower East Side, overcrowded, foreign, predominantly working class, yielded images of a“foreign country of whose habits [the average New Yorker] probably knows less, and with whose inhabitants he certainly has much less in common, than if he had crossed the Atlantic and found himself in Piccadilly or Pall Mall. . . . Its feasts and its fasts, its great personages and its common folk, its markets, its restaurants, its ceremonies, the very language it uses, are as strange to him as if the Bowery, with the shadow of the elevated forever darkening it, were some impassable stream.”1 In the course of the next decade, the “picturesque” ghetto, with its bustling streets and markets,its“hawk visaged and bearded”men and its women with their “ugly wigs,” its malodorous tenements, synagogues, and cheders full of “young ragamuffins,”and its ghetto“types”such as the wedding broker or “shadchen,” the peddler, and the labor agitator, became a familiar institution in magazines like Harper’s Weekly or Munsey’s Magazine.2 Genteel readers even became accustomed to the sound of the quarter’s “queer mongrel dialect.”For their convenience, the“guttural, mongrel tongue, half German, half Hebrew” was usually transcribed according to the contemporary conventions of stage “Yiddish” or the “English of Cracow,” yielding such tidbits of amusing banter as this exchange between a street vendor and his customer, who complains that the pitcher he has sold her has a crack in it: 81 Chapter 4 Eros and Americanization The Rise of David Levinsky, or the Etiquette of Race and Sex “Vat you vants? Be-auttiful chinay for dwenty-five cents? I never say wunst you put vine in dat bitcher, but artefishjul fe-lowers, even if you hat to vate undil your dochter she gets a pridegroom; and she must be past dirty dis day, begause she was so ugly. . . . “Zo! . . . My tear young mans, you is as much gracked as your chinay.”3 Despite the favorite image of the Lower East Side as predominantly (and vulgarly) lower class, by 1910 the area was beginning to see the rise of a small immigrant bourgeoisie. The gradual social ascent of Jews of recent immigrant origin, which in 1930 would result in the classification of 71 percent of Russian Jews as middle class, was fueled primarily by manufacturing and commerce. The garment industry, which by 1900 was all but completely dominated by Jews, and in which eastern European Jews were slowly outcompeting their German cousins, was booming.A sizable proportion of the Jewish workforce moved from working as “hands” in small factories to becoming proprietors of wholesale and retail businesses and commercial enterprises. Others joined the emerging white-collar class as employees in clerical or sales jobs.4 Some even grew rich. Samuel Silverman, who began as a sweatshop worker, became a cloak manufacturer worth half a million dollars.Harris Mandelbaum,erstwhile peddler,became a millionaire through his investment in tenement houses. Harry Fischel, broke on arrival in New York, became a real estate and building magnate whose mansion on Fifth Avenue, a block away from Andrew Carnegie’s, was worth sixty thousand dollars.Israel Leibowitz worked himself up from peddler to one of the largest shirt manufacturers in New York.5 Genteel America responded to these slow but steady social advances, which went hand in hand with the gradual integration of eastern European Jewish immigrants and their offspring in the commodity and leisure-driven culture of America, and, in some cases, with their move out of the ghetto and into the suburbs of Bronxville and Harlem,or even the Upper West Side, with measured concern. In the eyes of some, Jewish social and geographical mobility was not a measure of acculturation or “Americanization” and thus a part of the American success story but a“Hebrew Conquest”designed to turn New York into a “city of Asiatics.”6 This ominous reading of Jewish mobility permeated a sudden flush of articles about“Jewish success stories”in the popular media after 1910.In 1913, McClure’s published an article by Burton J. Hendrick, one of its editors and a populist muckraker of some repute who would take up the cause of...

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