The Rise of David Levinsky (67 page)

Hundreds of people who had become rich overnight now became worse than penniless overnight. The Ghetto was full of dethroned “kings for a day only.” It seemed as if it all really had been a dream.

One of the men whose quickly made little fortune burst like a bubble was poor Tevkin. I wondered how his children took the socialist rent strikes.

Nor did I escape uninjured when the crisis broke loose. I still had a considerable sum in real estate, all my efforts to extricate it having proved futile. My holdings were rapidly depreciating. In hundreds of cases similar to mine equities were wiped out through the speculators’ inability to pay interest on mortgages or even taxes. To be sure, things did not come to such a pass in my case, but then some of the city lots or improved property in which I was interested had been hit so hard as to be no longer worth the mortgages on them.

Volodsky lost almost everything except his courage and speculative spirit.

“Oh, it will come back,” he once said to me, speaking of the boom.

When I urged that it had been an unnatural growth he retorted that it was the collapse of the boom which was unnatural. He was scheming some sort of syndicate again.

“It requires no money to make a lot of money,” he said. “All it does require is brains and some good luck.”

Nevertheless, he coveted some of my money for his new scheme. He did not succeed with me, but he found other “angels.” He was now quite in his element in the American atmosphere of breathless enterprise and breakneck speed. When the violence of the crisis had quieted down building operations were resumed on a more natural basis. Men like Volodsky, with hosts of carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers—all Russian or Galician Jews—continued to build up the Bronx, Washington Heights, and several sections of Brooklyn. Vast areas of meadowland and rock were turned by them, as by a magic wand, into densely populated avenues and streets of brick and mortar. Under the spell of their activity cities larger than Odessa sprang up within the confines of Greater New York in the course of three or four years.

Mrs. Chaikin came out of her speculations more than safe. She and her husband, who is still in my employ, own half a dozen tenement-houses. One day, on the first of the month, I met her in the street with a large hand-bag and a dignified mien. She was out collecting rent.

I
T was the spring of 1910. The twenty-fifth anniversary of my coming to America was drawing near.

The day of an immigrant’s arrival in his new home is like a birthday to him. Indeed, it is more apt to claim his attention and to warm his heart than his real birthday. Some of our immigrants do not even know their birthday. But they all know the day when they came to America. It is Landing Day with red capital letters. This, at any rate, is the case with me. The day upon which I was born often passes without my being aware of it. The day when I landed in Hoboken, on the other hand, never arrives without my being fully conscious of the place it occupies in the calendar of my life. Is it because I do not remember myself coming into the world, while I do remember my arrival in America? However that may be, the advent of that day invariably puts me in a sentimental mood which I never experience on the day of my birth.

It was 1910, then, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of my coming was near at hand. Thoughts of the past filled me with mixed joy and sadness. I was overcome with a desire to celebrate the day. But with whom? Usually this is done by “ship brothers,” as East-Siders call fellow-immigrants who arrive here on the same boat. It came back to me that I had such a ship brother, and that it was Gitelson. Poor Gitelson! He was still working at his trade. I had not seen him for years, but I had heard of him from time to time, and I knew that he was employed by a ladies’ tailor at custom work somewhere in Brooklyn. (The custom-tailoring shop he had once started for himself had proved a failure.) Also, I knew how to reach a brother-in-law of his. The upshot was that I made an appointment with Gitelson for him to be at my office on the great day at 12 o’clock. I did so without specifying the object of the meeting, but I expected that he would know.

Finally the day arrived. It was a few minutes to 12. I was alone in my private office, all in a fidget, as if the meeting I was expecting were a love-tryst. Reminiscences and reflections were flitting incoherently through my mind. Some of the events of the day which I was about to celebrate loomed up like a ship seen in the distance. My eye swept the expensive furniture of my office. I thought of the way my career had begun. I thought of the Friday evening when I met Gitelson on Grand Street, he an American dandy and I in tatters. The fact that it was upon his advice and with his ten dollars that I had become a cloak-maker stood out as large as life before me. A great feeling of gratitude welled up in me, of gratitude and of pity for my tattered self of those days. Dear, kind Gitelson! Poor fellow! He was still working with his needle. I was seized with a desire to do something for him. I had never paid him those ten dollars. So I was going to do so with “substantial interest” now. “I shall spend a few hundred dollars on him—nay, a few thousand!” I said to myself. “I shall buy him a small business. Let him end his days in comfort. Let him know that his ship brother is like a real brother to him.”

It was twenty minutes after 12 and I was still waiting for the telephone to announce him. My suspense became insupportable. “Is he going to disappoint me, the idiot?” I wondered. Presently the telephone trilled. I seized the receiver.

“Mr. Gitelson wishes to see Mr. Levinsky,” came the familiar pipe of my switchboard girl. “He says he has an appointment—”

“Let him come in at once,” I flashed.

Two minutes later he was in my room. His forelock was still the only bunch of gray hair on his head, but his face was pitifully wizened. He was quite neatly dressed, as trained tailors will be, even when they are poor, and at some distance I might have failed to perceive any change in him. At close range, however, his appearance broke my heart.

“Do you know what sort of a day this is?” I asked, after shaking his hand warmly.

“I should think I did,” he answered, sheepishly. “Twenty-five years ago at this time—”

He was at a loss for words.

“Yes, it’s twenty-five years, Gitelson,” I rejoined. I was going to indulge in reminiscences, to compare memories with him, but changed my mind. I would rather not speak of our Landing Day until we were seated at a dining-table and after we had drunk its toast in champagne.

“Come, let us have lunch together,” I said, simply.

I took him to the Waldorf-Astoria, where a table had been reserved for us in a snug corner.

Gitelson was extremely bashful and his embarrassment infected me. He was apparently at a loss to know what to do with the various glasses, knives, forks. It was evident that he had never sat at such a table before. The French waiter, who was silently officious, seemed to be inwardly laughing at both of us. At the bottom of my heart I cow before waiters to this day. Their white shirt-fronts, reticence, and pompous bows make me feel as if they saw through me and ridiculed my ways. They make me feel as if my expensive clothes and ways ill became me.

“Here is good health, Gitelson,” I said in plain old Yiddish, as we touched glasses. “Let us drink to the day when we arrived in Castle Garden.”

There was something forced, studied, in the way I uttered these words. I was disgusted with my own voice. Gitelson only simpered. He drained his glass, and the champagne, to which he was not accustomed, made him tipsy at once. I tried to talk of our ship, of the cap he had lost, of his timidity when we had found ourselves in Castle Garden, of the policeman whom I asked to direct us. But Gitelson only nodded and grinned and tittered. I realized that I had made a mistake—that I should have taken him to a more modest restaurant. But then the chasm between him and me seemed to be too wide for us to celebrate as ship brothers in any place.

“By the way, Gitelson, I owe you something,” I said, producing a ten-dollar bill. “It was with your ten dollars that I learned to be a cloak-operator and entered the cloak trade. Do you remember?” I was going to add something about my desire to help him in some substantial way, but he interrupted me.

“Sure, I do,” he said, with inebriate shamefacedness, as he received the money and shoved it into the inside pocket of his vest. “It has brought you good luck, hasn’t it? And how about the interest? He, he, he! You’ve kept it over twenty-three years. The interest must be quite a little. He, he, he!”

“Of course I’ll pay you the interest, and more, too. You shall get a check.”

“Oh, I was only joking.”

“But I am not joking. You’re going to get a check, all right.”

He revolted me.

I made out a check for two hundred dollars; tore it and made out one for five hundred.

He flushed, scanned the figure, giggled, hetsiated, and finally folded the check and pushed it into his inner vest pocket, thanking me with drunken ardor.

 

Some time later I was returning to my office, my heart heavy with self-disgust and sadness. In the evening I went home, to the loneliness of my beautiful hotel lodgings. My heart was still heavy with distaste and sadness.

G
USSIE, the finisher-girl to whom I had once made love with a view to marrying her for her money, worked in the vicinity of my factory and I met her from time to time on the Avenue. We kept up our familiar tone of former days. We would pause, exchange some banter, and go our several ways. She was over fifty now. She looked haggard and dried up and her hair was copiously shot with gray.

One afternoon she told me she had changed her shop, naming her new employer.

“Is it a good place to work in?” I inquired.

“Oh, it’s as good or as bad as any other place,” she replied, with a gay smile.

“Mine is good,” I jested.

“That’s what they all say.”

“Come to work for me and see for yourself.”

“Will I get good wages?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“Any price you name.”

“Look at him,” she said, as though addressing a third person. “Look at the new millionaire.”

“It might have been all yours. But you did not think I was good enough for you.”

“You can keep it all to yourself and welcome.”

“Well, will you come to work?”

“You can’t do without me, can you? He can’t get finisher-girls, the poor fellow. Well, how much will you pay me?”

We agreed upon the price, but on taking leave she said, “I was joking.”

“What do you mean? Don’t you want to work for me, Gussie?”

She shook her head.

“why?”

“ I don’t want you to think I begrudge you your millions. We’ll be better friends at a distance. Good-by.”

“You’re a funny girl, Gussie. Good-by.”

A short time after this conversation I had trouble with the Cloak-makers’ Union, of which Gussie was one of the oldest and most loyal members.

The cause of the conflict was an operator named Blitt, a native of Antomir, who had been working in my shop for some months. He was a spare little fellow with a nose so compressed at the nostrils that it looked as though it was inhaling some sharp, pleasant odor. It gave his face a droll appearance, but his eyes, dark and large, were very attractive. I had known him as a small boy in my birthplace, where he belonged to a much better family than I.

When Blitt was invited to join the Levinsky Antomir Society of my employees he refused. It turned out that he was one of the active spirits of the union and also an ardent member of the Socialist party. His foreman had not the courage to discharge him, because of my well-known predilection for natives of Antomir, so he reported him to me as a dangerous fellow.

“He isn’t going to blow up the building, is he?” I said, lightly.

“But he may do other mischief. He’s one of the leaders of the union.”

“Let him lead.”

The next time I looked at Blitt I felt uncomfortable. His refusal to join my Antomir organization hurt me, and his activities in the union and at socialist gatherings kindled my rancor. His compressed nose revolted me now. I wanted to get rid of him.

Not that I had remained inflexible in my views regarding the distribution of wealth in the world. Some of the best-known people in the country were openly taking the ground that the poor man was not getting a “square deal.” To sympathize with organized labor was no longer “bad form,” some society women even doing picket duty for Jewish factory-girls out on strike. Socialism, which used to be declared utterly un-American, had come to be almost a vogue. American colleges were leavened with it, while 518 American magazines were building up stupendous circulations by exposing the corruption of the mighty. Public opinion had, during the past two decades, undergone a striking change in this respect. I had watched that change and I could not but be influenced by it. For all my theorizing about the “survival of the fittest” and the “dying off of the weaklings,” I could not help feeling that, in an abstract way, the socialists were not altogether wrong. The case was different, however, when I considered it in connection with the concrete struggle of trade-unionism (which among the Jewish immigrants was practically but another name for socialism) against low wages or high rent. I must confess, too, that the defeat with which I had met at Tevkin’s house had greatly intensified my hostility to socialists. As I have remarked in a previous chapter, I ascribed my fiasco to the socialist atmosphere that surrounded Anna. I was embittered.

The socialists were constantly harping on “class struggle,” “class antagonism,” “class psychology.” I would dismiss it all as absurd, but I did hate the trade-unions, particularly those of the East Side. Altogether there was too much socialism among the masses of the Ghetto, I thought.