97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (20 page)

Under Mrs. Schultz’s command, the kosher dining room functioned like a home kitchen writ large. Despite the institutional scale of her work, Mrs. Schultz worked without the benefit of written recipes. Recipes would, in fact, have been useless to her, as she could neither read nor write. The dishes she prepared for her immigrant clients were the same ones she made for her own family, the standard offerings of the Jewish home cook. Even more, Mrs. Schultz learned the regional food preferences of each national group and tailored her cooking to suit their tastes, the same way mothers adapt their cooking for a finicky child. So, for example, if she learned that Ellis Island was expecting a boatload of Hungarians, she prepared her stuffed cabbage with raisins and sugar, to satisfy the Hungarian sweet tooth. For Lithuanians, she omitted the sugar and added vinegar.

The following stuffed-cabbage recipe comes to us from Frieda Schwartz, born on the Lower East Side in 1918. Her special touch is the addition of grated apple to the filling.

S
TUFFED
C
ABBAGE

1 lb beef

1 egg

3 cups canned tomatoes

½ tsp pepper

Beef bones

1 peeled and grated apple

3 tbsp rice

3 tbsp cold water

4 tbsp grated onion

3 tsp salt

1 cabbage

Pour boiling water over cabbage. Let stand 15 minutes. Separate the leaves. Remove the thick stem from the outside of each leaf. Prepare the sauce in a heavy saucepan by combining tomatoes, salt, pepper, and bones. Cook 30 minutes, covered. Mix beef, rice, onion, egg, apple, and water. Place a heaping tablespoon of the mixture in a cabbage leaf. Roll leaf around mixture and add to sauce. Season with lemon juice and brown sugar. Cook 2 hours.
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Fannie Rogarshevsky and her son Philip, circa 1917.
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum

Fannie Rogarshevsky gave birth to two more children in America, bringing the total to six: two girls and four boys. For a time, the Rogarshevskys lived at 132 Orchard Street, moving down the block to number 97 sometime around 1908. The building was also home to Fannie’s parents, Annie and Joseph Beyer, who had adopted their orphaned granddaughter. According to the 1910 census, the sixty-four-year-old Mr. Beyer earned his living as a street peddler. During the 1920s, another set of relatives, the Bergmans, lived directly across the courtyard from the Rogarshevskys, the two buildings connected by a clothesline. Mrs. Rogar shevsky occasionally used the clothesline as a delivery system, sending the Bergmans pots of cholent, a Sabbath stew.

At the time of the 1910 census, all six of the Rogarshevsky children were still living at home. Ida, age eighteen, was employed as a “joiner” in a garment factory; Bessie, age sixteen, was a sewing-machine operator; and Morris, age fifteen, worked as a shipping clerk. Sam and Henry, ages twelve and seven, were in school, and three-year-old Philip was at home with his mother. The four Rogarshevsky boys slept in the parlor room on a jury-rigged bed, their heads resting on the sofa, their feet supported by four kitchen chairs. The two girls shared a folding cot, while their parents slept in the “dark room,” on the other side of the kitchen. The Rogarshevsky boys spent their free time haunting the front stoop and getting into street fights. (One of them, Sam, trained in a local boxing gym with the hopes of going professional, a career many East Side boys dreamed about and some achieved.)

On the 1901 ship’s manifest, Abraham Rogarshevsky described himself as a “merchant.” In New York, however, he worked as a presser in a garment factory, a job held exclusively by men. Mr. Rogarshevsky was paid “by the piece,” his salary dependent on the number of garments completed per week, a common point of contention between factory workers and managers. By 1917, Mr. Rogarshevsky had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, which was then known as the “tailor’s disease,” and died the following year. After her husband’s death, Fannie supported her family by taking in boarders, a common recourse of East Side widows. At the same time, she became the building’s janitor, a job that offered no wage but allowed her to live there rent-free. Between her two jobs, the income of her older children, and the kindness of her neighbors, the single mother of six cobbled together a decent existence. Among her allies were the East Side peddlers, so indispensable to neighborhood homemakers, who provided a wide array of edible goods at the lowest prices in the city.

For Eastern European Jews, the city’s pushcart markets were a reminder of home. The shtetlach that the immigrants had left behind had one key feature in common: an outdoor food market where, once a week, Jewish homemakers shopped for their supplies. Some of what they needed could be found in stores, but they relied on the market for their produce, their poultry, fish, milk, cheese, and butter, as well as household goods like candles, pots, and pans. When they arrived in New York, they found themselves perfectly at home in the tumult of the East Side pushcart markets that had been created by their immigrant predecessors.

To uptown visitors, the East Side pushcart markets were garbagestrewn streets aswirl with foreigners, women in tattered wigs, baskets over one arm, haggling at top volume over third-rate merchandise. In other words, retail mayhem. The more Bohemian of the uptown visitors swooned over the romance of the pushcarts. They came to the markets as sightseers (never as customers) to drink in the Old World atmosphere and observe the local customs. Whenever the city threatened to close down the markets, which it did at regular intervals, they mourned the impending loss, mostly on aesthetic grounds. The pushcart markets on Hester, Orchard, and Essex streets were among the most picturesque spots in New York, and the city would be a much grayer place without them. The point that seemed to elude them was the usefulness of the markets to the people they served. For the tenement housewife, the pushcarts were America’s antidote to hunger. They provided her with a wide assortment of familiar foods at the lowest possible prices, and allowed her to buy them in the quantities she desired. Where else in New York could she buy half a parsnip or a handful of barley, not a single ounce more than she needed? The minuscule purchases possible at the pushcarts surprised uptown New Yorkers, who wondered why anyone would buy a single egg, but to the tenement housewife, it was eminently practical. She had no pantry to store her provisions and no ice box to keep foods from spoiling. More compelling still, small purchases were the only kind she could afford.

Tenement housewives like Fannie Rogarshevsky shuttled between the pushcart and the kitchen at least twice a day. In the mornings, before the children were awake, they bought their breakfast supplies, some hard rolls and maybe a cup of pot cheese. In the afternoon, they returned to the market for their dinner ingredients. To the uptown city-dweller, the idea of shopping meal-by-meal was hopelessly inefficient. The tenement housewife saw things differently, treating the pushcarts as an extension of her own kitchen. For Mrs. Rogarshevsky, who lived directly above the Orchard Street market, this was almost literally the case, and the same was true for thousands of other East Side women.

The pushcart market was a boon to East Siders on both sides of the equation, shopper and peddler alike. A line of work familiar to the Eastern European Jew, peddling was the fallback occupation of new immigrants. It required little capital, no special work skills, and scant knowledge of English. All immigrants needed were a basket and a few dollars to invest. Many started with dry goods—suspenders, collar buttons, sewing pins, and the like—which they peddled door to door. The pushcart, a larger retail venue, demanded more capital and a deeper knowledge of the workings of the city. Pushcart peddlers rented their carts for 10 cents a day from one of the many East Side garages or pushcart stables. They began work each morning around four a.m., wheeling the carts to a wholesale produce market on Catherine Slip along the East River, which catered specifically to the pushcart trade. By five a.m., carts loaded, they were on the street and ready for business. At some point in the afternoon, the peddlers’ wives took over the cart so the men could rest up for the next day’s early start. (Actually, a fair percentage of peddlers were women, and only some were partners with their husbands.) The chief attraction of peddling for the Eastern European Jews was the independent nature of the work. The sweatshop worker had precise hours to keep, quotas to meet, and supervisors to appease. The peddler, by contrast, was his own boss. As one East Sider put it, “the peddler was a man who had seen the sweatshops and thought they were for someone else.” There was dignity in peddling, but, even more to the point, the peddler was free to set his own hours and keep the Sabbath. To observant Jews, this was a crucial advantage over the sweatshops, which followed the Gentile business week and stayed open Monday through Saturday.

Beginning in the 1890s, the pushcart market became a regular destination for New York journalists, who were lured by its literary possibilities. They came in search of good copy and found it in characters like the Polish fishmonger with her barrels of two-penny herrings, or the horseradish peddler, bent over his mechanical grinder, literally reduced to tears by the rising fumes. A more quantitative rendering of the pushcart market was provided by New York mayor George B. McClellan, who presided over City Hall from 1904 to 1909. Pressured by public concern over the quickly growing number of pushcarts, Mayor McClellan appointed a commission to investigate what some New Yorkers referred to as “the pushcart evil.” Their complaints were many. The pushcarts, they said, were a threat to public health. They generated garbage and interfered with proper street-cleaning. They sold contaminated food—moldy bread, worm-ridden cheese, rotten produce—to New York’s most vulnerable citizens. Even more pressing, the pushcarts interfered with the free flow of traffic in a rapidly expanding metropolis, a matter of great concern to city officials.

To establish a common body of facts, Mayor McClellan ordered a systematic “pushcart census,” and on May 11, 1905, a small army of police officers fanned out over the Lower East Side, each one armed with a stack of questionnaires. To some measure, the census confirmed what everybody already knew. The one neighborhood with more pushcarts than any other was unequivocally the Jewish ghetto. Of the four thousand pushcarts counted in Manhattan, two thousand five hundred were on the Lower East Side, with the highest concentration on Hester, Orchard, and Essex streets. The census also brought surprises. The pushcart peddlers earned a better living than anyone suspected, and stayed in their jobs longer than anticipated. Peddling was not just a stepping-stone job, as most people believed, but a destination. Another surprise was the high quality of the goods. Contrary to expectation, more than 90 percent of the fruits, vegetables, eggs, butter, cheese, and bread sold from the pushcarts was declared fresh and wholesome, of better quality than the same items found in a store. The public world of the market offers a rare glimpse into the private realm of the kitchen. Thanks to the mayor’s census, we know precisely what foods were available to the tenement housewife and which she relied on most.

Health workers who studied the immigrants’ eating habits in the early part of the twentieth century bemoaned the shortage of vegetables on the Jewish dinner table. The ghetto market, however, abounded with vegetable peddlers. Of course, there were potatoes, but there were also beets, cabbage, carrots, eggplant, parsnip, parsley, rhubarb, onions, peppers, peas, beans, cucumbers, radishes, and a food listed as “salad greens.” One reason the health workers may have overlooked Jewish vegetable consumption is that so much of it came in the form of soup.

There’s an old Yiddish proverb that goes: “Poor people cook with a lot of water.” The truth of the proverb was borne out on a daily basis in the immigrant soup pot. In the winter months, Jewish cooks like Mrs. Rogarshevsky prepared tangy, magenta-colored borschts; cabbage soup; chicken soup with carrots, celery, and parsnip; potato soup enriched with milk; and, most economical of all, bean soup, a dish found throughout the tenement district regardless of the cook’s religion or country of origin. Lima beans, fava beans, white beans, lentils, chickpeas, and dried peas both yellow and green were cheap, nutritious, and easy to cook. Jewish cooks liked to combine their beans with onion, carrot, celery, and barley, producing soups that were deeply flavored and slightly chewy. They called the soup
krupnik
, a dish traditionally served to impoverished yeshiva students. In its simplest form,
krupnik
was indeed a spartan dish, nothing more than lima beans, a handful of barley, and maybe a chunk of potato. Adding a marrow bone was one way to make it more substantial. For meatless
krupniks
, the cook might add a splash of milk or maybe some dried mushrooms, an ingredient that mimicked the savoriness of meat.