8/21/1995

Washington Times

By Arnold Beichman

     Amidst the great immigration debate, let me describe the

meaning of one of America's outstanding achievements, one which  occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I will describe this achievement in personal terms.

     I refer to the socializing of millions of immigrants-- Ukrainians, Russians, Italians, Jews, Irish--with no government help, no rent vouchers, no food stamps, no case workers, no small business loans, no nothing. I think the only immigrant freebee was night school if they wanted it.

     My father was a good example of this unique American achievement. Having served a stint in the Czar's army he decided to emigrate in steerage from Ukraine to Baltimore where a nephew had opened a small pants manufacturing factory. The nephew had sent him a rail-ticket from New York to Baltimore and a single U.S. dollar. But my father never got to Baltimore because an Ellis Island  pickpocket robbed him of ticket and dollar-bill. So there he was on a Friday forenoon at the Battery in lower Manhattan, with a battered suitcase, penniless, no English and a vague idea: somewhere in Manhattan he had heard there was a synagogue organized by his "landesleute," the people who came from his "shtetl," Kolk, Wolina gobernya (or province) in Ukraine. So he started walking north.

     With questions to pedestrians worded in Yiddish, Russian and Ukrainian he somehow found the synagogue, just in time for Friday night Sabbath prayers, on the top third floor of a ramshackle wooden building on Rivington Street on the lower East Side. There he met people who had known him as an orphan boy back in Kolk. After prayers one of the congregation took him home, fed and lodged him through Sunday morning when he reported for his first job--delivering ice to tenement dwellers for one dollar a day. He had arrived and was now a fellow-member of the Kolker "verein."

     Within a month he had improved his lot; no more packing ice up flights of tenement stairs. He became a street peddler in Little Italy selling bed-sheets and pillow cases spread over wrapping paper on a grimy Mulberry Street sidewalk. Within a year he sent for my mother whom he'd left behind in Ukraine while he was saving money. Then children were born, three, me being the oldest. In the meantime, my father had so prospered that he dared risk a little upward mobility: from the free rent of a sidewalk peddler he became the renter of a deep and damp basement store on Eldridge Street also on the Lower East Side in a sort of cotton goods neighborhood. He also rented for the family dwelling a fourth story three room apartment in an Eldridge Street slum tenement walkup. (It was not until years later that we realized that ours had been a slum dwelling--no toilet facilities, no bath, gas mantle, no electricity. Tobacco Road on the lower East Side.)

     There was nothing romantic about this immigrant life until you compared it with life under the Czar or Lenin or in Italy's "mezzogiorno." Life was harsh, an immigrant was the object of derision--sheeny, kike, wop, mick, greenhorn--but if he didn't make it, his children would: lawyers, doctors, writers, pharmacists, teachers, businessmen, even bootleggers.

    Such was the story, repeated a million times for half a century, of the men and women who found in America what in Yiddish they called "die goldene medina," the golden land, where they and their families could grow up without depending on anybody but themselves and when in dire straits, the "verein," their landesleute.

     The moral of the story is that my father, like millions of other migrants from Europe, became taxpayers, eventually citizens and voters, family heads, some rich, some poor, some average, and managed all this without a penny of government money or personalized government service. The only government these onetime immigrants knew (unless, of course, they became law-breakers) was the policeman on the beat, the mailman and the Yiddish-speaking election district captain who came around just before Election Day soliciting a vote for somebody. One of my father's "landesman" from Kolk was Moishe Be'r Kaiser, father of former Ambassador Philip Kaiser and grandfather of Bob Kaiser, Washington Post managing editor. Not bad for a tiny village of Ukrainian Jews.

                          --end--

Arnold Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a Washington Times columnist.