97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (18 page)

Living among the new Russians, Mrs. Gumpertz was out of her element. In 1884, she inherited the fantastic sum of $600 from her husband’s family in Germany and used the money to finance her move to Yorkville, a predominantly German neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She remained in Yorkville, living with her daughters until her death in 1894. She was fifty-eight years old.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Rogarshevsky Family

I
n the first decade of the twentieth century, immigrant traffic between Europe and the United States reached its peak, with 1,285,349 immigrants arriving in 1907 alone, a number that stunned Americans at the time and has never been equaled since. A typical day in those high-volume years could see over three thousand immigrants pass through Ellis Island, most ferried to the mainland within two to three hours. Roughly ten percent, however, were detained as captive guests of the immigration authorities. Among them were eight members of the Rogarshevsky family, two adults and six children. The Rogarshevskys immigrated to the United States from Telsh, Lithuania, a town famous in the nineteenth century as a center of Jewish learning. Abraham and Fannie Rogarshevsky, their five children, along with an orphaned infant niece, sailed from Hamburg, landing at Ellis Island on July 19, 1901. Here, they were briefly detained. The reason given in the official documents was very simply “no money.” The problem was most likely resolved by a relative who came to Ellis Island to vouch for the family, promising to support the Rogarshevskys until they found steady employment.

The Rogarshevskys were held for only a couple of days, but thousands of new arrivals found themselves stuck on Ellis Island for weeks and even months. The detainees fell into three basic groups. Women traveling alone were held on Ellis Island until a male relative came to fetch them, most often a husband or a brother. Another group contained the family members of immigrants held in the Ellis Island hospital. The final and most amorphous group was made up of immigrants who were “not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to land.” Deportees were also held on Ellis Island pending their return to whatever country they had come from. The vast majority of deportees were rejected as “paupers.”

Detainees were housed in dormitories large enough to accommodate three thousand people. As the newspapers pointed out, that was more than the Waldorf-Astoria and Astor hotels combined. Unlike the Waldorf, however, the immigrant “hotel” on Ellis Island was a strictly no-frills operation. Guests slept on three-tiered bunks with wire mattresses, the bunks enclosed in pens that resembled oversized birdcages. Each morning, the pens were unlocked and disinfected to prevent the spread of typhus, cholera, and lice.

Along with shelter, Ellis Island provided new arrivals with nourishment: three meals a day served in a vast hall—the “world’s largest restaurant,” as one visitor described it. Diners sat at long bench-lined tables draped in sheets of white paper. In the interest of conserving space, the aisles between the tables were just wide enough for a grown man to squeeze through sideways. Even so, the immigrants ate in shifts, a thousand at a time, the first meal of the day served at half past five in the morning. Waiters in white jackets brought the immigrants their food. For many diners, it was the first time they had ever eaten food prepared and served by strangers.

Visitors to the mess hall were shocked by the immigrants’ disregard for table etiquette: They dove into their food like birds of prey and tossed the scraps—the bones and potato peels—onto the floor. When the dining room was expanded in 1908, easy clean-up was factored into the new design. The entire space was covered in white tile and enamel paint, with every sharp angle or edge softened into a curve to prevent dirt from settling into the corners and crevices. The dining-room floor was sloped toward half a dozen drains, so the room could be easily hosed. “It is doubtful,” one visitor concluded, “if the guests of any hotel in the country have their meals served under more satisfactory conditions of cleanliness, healthfulness, and good cheer.”
¹
As to the quality of the food, opinions were decidedly mixed.

The immigrants’ dining room at Ellis Island, date unknown.
National Archives

Like the baggage-handlers and money-changers, the Ellis Island food purveyors were private contractors granted the privilege of doing business on government property, hence their generic title: “privilege holders.” Of all the island’s concessions, feeding the immigrants was the most lucrative, and local caterers competed for the job in public auctions. The results were announced in the local papers, like the final score in a sporting event. Along with running the dining room, the food concessionaire operated a lunch stand, where immigrants paid cash for bread, sausage, tins of sardines, fruit, and other portable items. In the dining room, the immigrant ate for free, the food paid for by the steamship companies that brought them to America. In 1902, that came to 35 cents a day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, a small sum that added up quickly. During the high-volume years, feeding the immigrants detained on Ellis Island cost the steamship companies half a million dollars annually, but the money came out of the terrific profits they made on their steerage passengers, the golden goose of the shipping industry.

The immigrants’ first lesson in American food ways, however, took place before they had even landed. Once their ship had docked, the immigrants were loaded onto barges that ferried them to Ellis Island. It was here that each passenger was handed a cup of cider and a small round pie, the quintessential fast food of turn-of-the-century America. The two foods that most impressed the new immigrants were bananas (many tried to gnaw through the skin) and sandwiches. As they waited their turn in the Ellis Island registry line, sometimes a thousand people long, waiters snaked through the crowd, distributing coffee and ham or corned-beef sandwiches. The immigrants munched appreciatively, marveling over the sweetness of American white bread.

The regimen in the Ellis Island dining room was meager and repetitive, a step up from prison fare. For breakfast, there was bread and bowls of coffee with milk and sugar. At lunch, the immigrants were given soup, boiled beef, and potatoes. For supper, more bread, this time with the addition of stewed prunes. Unscrupulous caterers and crooked officials conspired to winnow the big-ticket items (the meat and the dairy) from the immigrants’ diet until all that was left was bread, coffee, and prunes. As a result, thousands of immigrants sustained themselves on an innovation of the Ellis Island kitchen: the prune sandwich.

In 1903, President Roosevelt launched an investigation into corruption on Ellis Island, which ended with a thorough overhaul of the reigning administration. One beneficiary of the regime change was the immigrant dining room. Menus tell the story best. The one below is from a later period, but captures the reformers’ culinary mandate:

SUNDAY, JULY 1, 1917 BILL OF FARE
FOR THE
IMMIGRANT DINING ROOM

BREAKFAST

Rice with Milk and sugar

served in soup plates

Stewed Prunes

Bread and butter

Coffee (tea on request)

Milk and crackers for children

DINNER

Beef Broth with Barley

Roast Beef

Lima Beans-Potatoes

Bread and Butter

Milk and crackers for children

SUPPER

Hamburger Steak, Onion Sauce

Bread and butter

Tea (Coffee or Milk)

Milk and crackers for children
²

The immigrants also dined on pork and beans, beef hash, corned beef with cabbage and potatoes, Yankee pot roast, and boiled mutton with brown gravy. These were the sturdy foods of the American working person served in accordance with the nutritional wisdom of the day. Cooked cereals, cheap but nourishing, were routine at breakfast, while the midday meal, the most substantial of the day, was built around protein and starch. Milk, the all-American wonder food, was available at every meal for immigrant children, and was freely dispensed between meals as well. Vegetables were more or less limited to peas, beans, and cabbage.

Given the very limited diets the newcomers were accustomed to, the great quantities of food that materialized each day in the Ellis Island dining room was cause for euphoria. The fact that it was free of charge was literally beyond belief. To reassure the immigrants, signs were posted in the dining hall in English, German, Italian, French, and Yiddish: “No charge for food here.” Milk, bread and butter, coffee with sugar, all of it free and in endless supply. And the meat! A single day’s ration on Ellis Island was more than many immigrants consumed in a month. The bounty of Ellis Island hinted at the edible riches that waited on the mainland. At the same time, the island also fed tens of thousands of waiting deportees, people who would never reach the mainland but were granted a fleeting taste of American abundance. Deportees spent their days locked up in holding pens, but the food they received on the island was wholesome and plentiful. According to one island official, the thick slabs of buttered bread and hot stews were so much better than any food the deportees had ever known that they wept at the thought of leaving Ellis Island, even if staying meant a lifetime of confinement.

Each year, on the last Thursday of November, detainees celebrated American abundance at a Thanksgiving banquet that featured roast turkey, cranberry sauce, and sweet potatoes. Whether or not they grasped the meaning behind the meal, the immigrants were clearly swept up in the festive spirit of the day. In place of flowers, the women bedecked themselves with sprigs of celery plucked from the tables, while the children feasted on candy and oranges. After the dinner was served, the men puffed on cigars, a habit acquired just for the occasion. The meal itself lasted for several hours, the waiters instructed to keep filling the plates until every diner was fully sated. When it was over, the immigrants were serenaded by a hundred members of a German singing society. Their final number was the
Star-Spangled Banner
, a song the audience had never heard before, sung in a language it couldn’t comprehend. Nonetheless, the immigrants caught on quickly and rose to their feet, their heads bowed.

As to the food, it was also unfamiliar. The great majority of the guests had never seen a cranberry or an orange-fleshed potato, but the dish that perplexed them most was mince pie. A reporter from the
New York Sun
who visited Ellis Island in 1905 witnessed the immigrants’ first tentative bite of this holiday classic:

Mince pie was a novelty as to form if not to contents to everyone who sat down to his first Thanksgiving dinner. Half a pie was served to each, but it was some minutes before the diners could make up their minds as to what they were getting and as to whether they would risk it.

But then:

When once they buried their teeth in the spicy filling, it was easy to see that they would be willing converts to the great American practice of pie-eating.
³

The implications were clear. In that moment of conversion, their taste buds adjusting to the fruity richness, a future American was born.

Images of Ellis Island as a floating cornucopia contrasted sharply with the “island of tears” portrayed in the immigrant press, among the institution’s most vocal critics. Foreign-language newspapers condemned Ellis Island for its overcrowding, its callous handling of new arrivals, and its overzealous implementation of immigrant law. When the complaints grew loud enough, government commissions were convened to investigate the charges. (Roosevelt’s 1903 investigation was in response to a series of condemnatory articles that ran in the German-language newspaper, the New York
Staats-Zeitung
.) While some claims were exaggerated, many charges leveled by foreign-born reporters were essentially true. Immigrants were denied entrance to the United States on petty technicalities; they were treated with gruff indifference by island employees and wedged into bug-infested dormitories. The deeper truth, however, is that the brutal efficiency of the Ellis Island machine somehow coexisted with genuine attempts at humane handling of the alien masses.

Detention on Ellis Island was a dreary, physically demanding, and anxiety-ridden experience. During that first busy decade, the immigrants’ dining room was among the island’s only bright spots. (Another was the roof garden complete with boxes of flowering geraniums, awnings for shade, benches for resting, and a children’s playground.) Over time, however, the men who ran Ellis Island looked to the immigrant depot as the first all-important point of contact between the United States government and its future citizens, developing a near-mystical belief in the power of that first encounter. Frederick Wallis, immigration commissioner from 1920 to 1921, summed up the new thinking this way: “You can make an immigrant an anarchist overnight at Ellis Island, but with the right kind of treatment you can also start him on the way to glorious citizenship. It is first impressions that matter most.”
⁴
In his efforts to ensure the best possible impression, the commissioner introduced a series of reforms, imposing higher standards of cleanliness and courtesy. He established a baby nursery for young mothers, a playroom for children, and a recreation hall for adults. On weeknights, the immigrants attended lectures and motion-picture showings, while Sunday afternoons were set aside for live concerts. In the dining room, the new spirit of hospitality meant a more inclusive kitchen pantry, an attempt to satisfy the immigrants’ diverse culinary needs. One of the most important additions to the Ellis Island regimen was pasta—or “macaroni,” as it was listed on the menu. As the officials in charge of Ellis Island grew more attuned to the immigrants’ native food customs, the job of feeding them grew more complex. But while each group traveled with its own set of culinary biases and food taboos, no group arrived with more stringent and elaborate dietary restrictions than the Jews.