The American Zangwill, when he comes to make his studies for a
New World "Children of the Ghetto," will find much curious
material in a strange place. To catch the details of the life
and manners of the low class, expatriated Jew he will journey
not to Essex Street, and its ghetto of surrounding blocks,
punctuated as it is by sweaters' shops and signs of Kosher meat,
but to Brownsville, that Polish village of the Hebrews, set down
on the outskirts of Brooklyn, at the edge of the Flatlands
For Essex Street, at its best and in
its most picturesque moments is New York. It is never more or
less than a colony of the metropolis, with not a quarter of the
quaint charm of the Jewry of London or of Frankfort-on-the Main.
The people are there, it is true, the sound of their Yiddish
dialect penetrating the visitor's tympanum, but the tenement
architecture, so distinctly modern and of New York, destroys the
With Brownsville it is different the
moment its boundary line, "the Pale," the unfinished Eastern
Parkway, is crossed. For from six to ten blocks to the East and
West and the same distance to the South, a settlement that comes
nearer to being a Polish Hebrew town than anything else in this
country spreads itself out. Originally settled by a few thrifty
Scotch and Irish, who fifteen years ago built little homes for
themselves here, it has now a population that is completely
Jewish. Within the square mile of territory it occupies, nearly
20,000 men, women and children are gathered.
Had the crafty and cunning Hebrews
of small capital, who began some ten years ago to speculate in
these then waste building lots that had hardly been redeemed
from farm purposes, been gifted with supernatural vision, they
could not have chosen a fitter place for the founding of a
Jewish town. It will be two-score of years at least, before
Brooklyn grows around Brownsville, for the town is set in a
hollow that makes the locality undesirable for residence. The
spreading out of the metropolis of Long Island is in other
directions; Brownsville will remain on the outskirts for many a
year to come.
A POLISH HEBREW TOWN.
People who have studied the
wretched, hunted down Polish Jew in his villages in Russia say
that in Brownsville the similarity to such towns as Sziget and
Berdicheff is marked. An elevated railroad is only a few blocks
away; its posts may be seen. In fact, from certain street
corners, but this "L" and a trolley line that runs along
Brownsville's western border are merely the keys to the outer
Christian world. Over them is a swift and easy egress to New
York. They do not touch nor enter into the colony's life.
Instead of the ordinary ghetto's
squalid streets, shadowed by tall tenements, here are wide,
broad country roads, bounded by a few ambitious wooden
buildings, three stories in height, fancifully painted with
ornamentations of many colors, but for the most part lined with
cheap, ugly cottages that send odors up to heaven, odors of
cooking, uncleanliness and scores of closely packed together
human beings. To [negate] this and to keep the colony in good
health--for there is almost no illness in Brownsville--the
fresh, keen salt breeze blows across the Canarsie marshes into
every crevice of the settlement.
Though a few sidewalks have been
laid, hardly a street is paved. the dirt in them, cut into
ridges by the wheels of peddlers' carts, becomes a morass during
a rain, a hard, uneven, uncleaned road in the midst of a
drought. Almost all the adult inhabitants are engaged in real
estate, "sweatshops," tailoring, shopkeeping or the express
business. The tailors, stitchers, pressers and finishers form by
far the most numerous body. On them the life of Brownsville
hangs. Contractors have made the place. Tempted by the low
rents, and appreciating the fact that here they are free from
the sanitary exactions of Essex Street, more and more have set
themselves up in this new Sziget. With the rents in their favor,
they are often able to underbid their city brethren, and work
pours in upon Brownsville, even in times that are dull
PERIPATETIC REAL ESTATE AGENTS.
Immense packages of
goods come from East and West, even from so far away
as Chicago. In transporting the raw material and
carrying back the finished product, the express
business flourishes. Around the town scores of
hungry eyed, lean real estate agents hover, trying
to carry through deals for the sites of new shops or
the settling of a newly arrived family in rooms.
Seldom, if every, do these real estate men have
offices. they do their work in the street, tramping
ceaselessly to and fro.
The comedy of the ghetto
comes when a real estate sale happens to be made.
The papers are hardly signed when, like a flock of
vultures, these agents swoop down upon the seller.
Each clamors that he and he alone has made the sale,
was really responsible for it, and each claims a
commission. the Polish Hebrew rises to torrents of
Primitive customs rule
in Brownsville. It is one great family, with its
rabbis and elders at its head. The keynote of the
settlement's life is to be found in its absolute
indifference to the rest of the world. It u its
differences itself. Its quarrels and the claims one
man may happen to have against another. Mounted
policemen ride through the streets, and officers on
foot walk through the colony, swinging locusts extra
long and tough. Nobody to Brownsville, as a rule,
pays the slightest attention to them. If in the
midst of some heated argument a policeman dashes
into the group and lays about with his stick or
jerks the collars of two or three or more of the
crowd, the Hebrews accept the punishment without
resistance and with downcast eyes. They knew much
worse when they were in Poland; there not a few of
them felt the stinging blows of the Russian knout.
CHRISTIAN LAW DESPISED.
Christian law these low caste
Hebrews hate and despise. They have no part in it; they care
nothing for its rulings. A Brownsville man in a Brooklyn police
court is the despair of the sitting magistrate. Hew has been
assaulted, perhaps, in a street brawl. His assailant has been
arrested, and he himself is brought into court to make a charge.
But his thin lips close tightly behind his matted, untrimmed
brown beard that never yet has felt the razor, and he shrugs his
bent shoulders, bobbing up and down his greasy, threadbare old
coat of Hester Street cut. perfectly impassive he stands. Not a
word can be drawn out of him and the prisoner is finally
discharged. He--the assaulted one--knows very well that before
the rabbi and in the presence of men of his own faith measure
will be paid with measure, and eye will be taken for eye
according to the Mosaic law. What does he want with these men of
another race and tongue, and why should they bother with his
But there is small need of signs;
the goods displayed tell their own story, and they are, in a
great measure, out on the curbstone for the convenience of
buyers. Brownsville's chief baker, for example, brings out his
trays of unleavened bread, flanked with curiously shaped,
glossy-coated rolls of many styles, and stands beside them on
the sidewalk while they are purchased by twos, threes and fours,
each customer kneading them first with her knuckles and
forefinger until she has found what she wants. Fowls are in
cages hard by, ready to be killed kosher; brooms, coal-hods and
little counters of small pieces of cheap dress goods thrown
Stands of speckled and uninviting
fruit touch these cheek by jowl, and soda water fountains, the
most of the time deserted, are still prominent in the street
picture. Brownsville possesses only one business street, a
highway three city blocks in length, but this is active enough
at sunset each day to make up for the deficiency in its extent.
There used to be three concert halls
in the colony running at full blast, but latterly these have
been shut down by police dispensation; not that they were
especially bad, or that disorderly conduct grew out of them, but
they encouraged big gatherings, and there was always danger of
fire and riot, no small causes of fear in a district built
almost entirely of wood. Now the amusements of the people of
Brownsville are confined to clustering and gossiping in the
streets on nights.
Children are there seemingly by the
thousand score. The racial ambition of Jewish mothers to gather
large families about them is realized in Brownsville in almost
every household. The youngsters are invariably unwashed, and
they play hour by hour delightedly in the dust and dirt of the
street. It is a permanent country for them, and very nearly as
good as an expanse of green meadows.
THE SUNSET COW-MILKING.
Two features of the
Jewish life beyond this Long Island "pale" must not
be left untouched. One is the sunset cow-milking.
Each evening half a dozen cows are driven into a
convenient vacant lot from their pasturage out on
the Flatlands meadows, and milked directly into the
vessels, the pails, pitchers and cups that customers
bring. A crowd of women and children gather about
the woman on her stool, who is sending the fluid
into the pail beneath in long streams. They drink
the milk warm, holding glassfuls up to infants'
lips, while the owner stands by opening and again
closing his well-filled purse, accumulating pennies
and nickels in great store.
The Russian steam bath
is extremely popular at the westward end of the
colony. It consists of two rooms, one above the
other, and connected by a great fireplace. In the
room below a roaring fire is built. In the room
above, which is air-tight, the bathers lie stripped,
while a swarthy attendant dashes down bucket after
bucket of water through the opening in the floor
directly upon the fire. So intense is the heat from
the flames that only a cloud of steam arises, and
the fire blazes merrily on.
No strike in the clothing trade is
now complete unless the Brownsville men and women will join it.
This village has become he labor key of the trade. Its men are
keen-witted and diligent workers. Their one great amusement is
politics, and the colony has had several times since its
founding local bosses, who have shown themselves able, popular
orators. Anarchy has never had a strong hold in the village, and
it is less in vogue there now than ever before, though Emma
Goldman, who has been a frequent visitor and has spoken several
times in the little Anarchistic meeting hall, would probably
deny this statement.