Down on the East Side, far from the Broadway of Arnold Rothstein’s New York, Lillian Lieben and Antonia Rolnick lived on “Jewish Broadway,” or Grand Street. Back in 1900, the New York Tribune wrote that “Grand Street is Broadway plus Fifth Avenue, only very much more so. Its wide sidewalks show more fashion to the square foot on a Sunday than any other part of the city.” By 1910 the population had multiplied and the neighborhood was more seedy. The clothing shops shared the thoroughfare with casinos, saloons, and “coaling stations” where nafkes, prostitutes, could refuel with coffee and cake at three a.m.
Lillian and Antonia were both Russian-Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement, but Lily, with her blond ringlets and peach complexion, looked more French than Russian. Antonia, who went by Tony, was traditional: full crimson lips framed by masses of black hair. Whereas Lily arrived from the Pale in 1897, at the age of three, with her family intact, Tony came over in 1906, at thirteen, with only her father, after narrowly surviving that year’s pogrom in Bialystok. In New York, Tony spoke English haltingly, unable to pronounce sounds like th or ing. Cloth came out as clot, singing as sin-gin. Struggling to adapt, she compensated with grit. At P.S. 20, when gang girls bullied them and pulled Lily’s flaxen curls, Tony attacked, never hesitating to strengthen an argument with a blow. This brassiness earned her a nickname: “Tony the Tough.”
In the afternoons they begged pennies from Lily’s mother, a dressmaker, and hung out in one of the many candy stores, or “cheap charlies,” that dotted the East Side. Over frozen tortonis served in fluted cups, the girls traded dreams. Lily wanted a family. Tony wanted to dance like Isadora Duncan and act in movies.
Soon, however, these ambitions gave way to reality. Both girls dropped out of P.S. 20 in 8th grade and joined New York’s garment industry, whose workforce was more than 70% female and comprised mostly of teenagers. Lily worked in a millinery factory, making artificial flowers and fashioning feathers for one of the prewar era’s more emblematic accessories, its gigantic hats. For her part Tony labored in a laundry, working the foot-operated iron presses, a job akin to climbing steep stairs all day while holding a pipe above your head. Her legs rippled with muscle. Her arms were always covered in burns.
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During the first decade of the 20th century the city’s Jewish garment industry matured. As “skyscrapers” went up each week to create new factory space and house the increasing number of corporations headquartered in lower Manhattan, the old tenement sweatshops moved into street-level storefronts and large lofts. This transformation created efficiencies, and by 1910 New York manufacturers produced 80% of all clothing worn in the U.S.
But even as the infrastructure of the business evolved, labor law didn’t catch up, and working conditions remained much the same as they’d been in the late nineteenth century, or worse: More immigrants meant more competition for jobs, and this dynamic helped strengthen a conviction among employers that labor should be cheap and disposable, per the law of the marketplace. Employees worked eighty-hour weeks without a minimum wage or safety regulations. And garment work was still seasonal, which meant that there was no guarantee of steady employment in the “slack season,” the cold winter months.
As a result, the Russian-Jewish girls who supplied most of the industry’s workforce perceived prostitution as a pit that always loomed, a fate they were constantly trying to avoid. “The danger of corruption,” as one female researcher of the era wrote, “is more intimately connected with Jewish girls than with Irish or Italian. The Jewish girl, while perhaps not personally so proud as the Irish, is in many ways more ambitious and purposive. She desires to have all that the world offers. This purposive characteristic, so noble if devoted to high ends, and so dangerous if directed to pleasure alone, is seen more evidently in the Jewish girl than in any other.”
Of the nobler kind, several East Side daughters became famous for their visionary leadership. In 1908, the New York Times called Pauline Newman “the East Side Joan of Arc ” when the nineteen- year- old led the largest rent strike the city had ever seen, leading to the establishment of rent controls. The following year, Newman joined fellow activists Clara Lemlich and Rose Schneiderman to help inspire the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike. Among the 30,000 who joined that strike, many were of the sort who supported themselves on five dollars a week, wearing spring jackets through winter and renewing old hats with a bit of ribbon. Many lived alone and rented a “half sheet,” a shared bed, in someone else’s apartment. Whether battered by thugs whom manufacturers hired to break up picket lines, or arrested and sent to the workhouse, their enthusiasm for striking only grew with their hardship.
The Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike was a cause célèbre, the first garment strike to win broad public support. The Russian-Jewish girls galvanized both the wealthy suffragettes uptown, who looked at the strikers and found their own movement wanting, as well as their native-born working-class colleagues. “It’s a good thing, this strike is; it makes you feel like a real grownup person,” wrote a Russian-Jewish immigrant named Theresa Malkiel in The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker, a novel that Malkiel wrote from the perspective of a native-born garment worker who is inspired by her immigrant colleagues to join the fight for labor rights. “But I wish I’d feel about it like them Jew girls do. Why, their eyes flash fire as soon as they commence to talk about the strike — and the lot of talk they can put up…”
One could only speculate as to what made “them Jew girls” special, particularly given that Eastern European immigrants were not a physically advantaged race. The shortest and skinniest of all European arrivals, they were cursed with anemia and poor musculature. But they also came with advantages. Their leadership in New York’s labor movement could be attributed to a background of labor fights in Russia. Their durability derived from a culture in which daughters did double duty as wage earners and mother’s helpers so that their brothers could study.
Certainly, they were motivated by the opportunity that America offered. In this new ghetto, they might have labored to stand upright (spinal curvature) or to breathe through inflamed pathways (rhinitis, bronchitis). They might have scratched themselves raw from ringworm and dust-induced skin ailments (“baker’s itch”). They might have choked down their vegetable-free diet of bread and herring with defective teeth, and endured the dull misery of chronic constipation. But here, in a place they called “Dollar Land,” at least no one was literally trying to murder them, and this freed them up to take their own elevation in hand. East Side girls of this generation could hardly hope to go to college, as their brothers were now doing, but that didn’t stop them from putting aside something of their meager earnings for theatergoing and membership in the Jewish Girls’ Self-Education Society, where, for a fee of one dollar a month, they read Gorky, Hugo, and Tolstoy.
At night, in Manhattan, dark desertion characterized the Upper West Side, where Irish girls worked as domestic servants and feared going out, as well as the Lower West Side and Little Italy, where, per custom, unmarried Italian daughters were kept at home. “On the East Side, below 14th Street and beyond Broadway, in contrast, the streets at night are ablaze with light and gay activity,” wrote Mary Van Kleeck in Working Girls in Evening Schools, a survey of the city’s burgeoning night school scene for young women seeking to advance. “We seem here to be in another city. Open shops line the way; noisy voices of push-cart peddlers cry their wares; and men, women, and babies crowd the sidewalk. In this neighborhood the evening schools flourish,” observed Van Kleeck, who found that more Jewish girls, those eighteen or younger, attended night school than all of the city’s native-born females combined.
And yet: Despite the presence of such girls in the East Side immigrant population, the ones kept straight by a higher purpose or some positive force, there were others, perhaps most, who were too normal not to seek respite from the monotony of the factory, too vital and spirited to pass up the seductive pleasures of Dollar Land. While their brothers lit bonfires, rolled dice, and played cards, the girls gathered around street organs, stepping and swaying to the music, and thronged East Side dance halls. Some of these places were branded as dance schools. Some were open during the lunch hour to lure pale-faced factory girls, who, once inside, were invited into the bathroom by older girls and treated to free makeovers and dresses. Other dance venues were rentable arenas where underworld figures arranged “rackets,” or dances, advertising: Dollar Admission! Dames for nothing!
In Jews Without Money, his fictionalized autobiography, Michael Gold recalled this seamy dance-hall culture: “The pimps were hunters. A pretty girl growing up on the East Side was marked by them. They watched her fill out, grow tall, take on the sex bloom. When she was fifteen, they schemed to trap her. Pimps infested the dance halls. Here they picked up the romantic factory girls who came after the day’s work. They were smooth storytellers. They seduced girls the way a child is helped to fall asleep, with tales of magic happiness. No wonder East Side parents wouldn’t let their daughters go to dance halls. But girls need to dance.”
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One Saturday night in late 1910, Tony proposed that she and Lily attend their first racket. Lily was reluctant, but Tony argued that if they could take care of themselves at work, then they were equally able to do so at play. At the dance, waltzes and two-steps pounded on the piano, accompanied by a drum flow. The girls danced together in a block as men watched from the sidelines.
The foot-operated presses had thickened Tony’s lower half, leaving her with the kind of figure that East Siders referred to, not unfavorably, as a “battleship.” Her figure was accentuated by the S-curve silhouette, the popular look of 1910. The shirtwaist, tucked closely in front, bloused loosely over the back of the new “short skirts,” which grazed the top of ankle boots. These skirts, gathered at the center back, fit closely around the hips and flared toward the hem, creating a swaybacked posture that resembled, in profile, the letter S.
Someone cried out, “Take partners for a dance!” Two men at a time stepped out, broke the block, asked a girl to “step up for a turn,” and away they gyrated in the turkey trot or the grizzly bear. Other men circulated among the girls, saying they had sample shoes and dresses in the back. If they fit they’re yours. Lily dodged these pezevenks, lowly pimps, but Tony spent her attentions freely. She danced with a young man who said he ran a photography studio, and passed on photos of beautiful girls like Tony to a casting agency for moving pictures. Tony’s eyes lit up. When he asked why she kept touching her jaw, she said she had a toothache. He called over a friend, an older man who happened to be a dentist.
The East Side was full of dental offices — on some blocks they seemed as common as tailoring shops and bathhouses — but this dentist looked a bit odd. He wore a pinstripe suit and blue-tinted glasses that obscured a glass eye. His hands were heavy with rings and his necktie glimmered with a diamond horseshoe pin.
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In 1896, a one-eyed Jewish soldier in the Russian army abandoned his garrison in Warsaw and decided to become a pimp. Pimping wasn’t a random career choice for Motche Goldberg. In the Russian Empire, prostitution was a regulated and stratified occupation, extending from famous Jewish courtesans down to the “wolf girls” who slept in public parks. Jews comprised four percent of the population of Russia, where legal restrictions confined them to the Pale of Settlement, but they dominated the sex trade. At the Congress Against the Trade in Women, held in London in 1910, a Russian representative said that the participation of Jews in prostitution was “inversely proportional to their legal and social position.”
In Sonia’s Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia, Laurie Bernstein writes: “To anti- Semites in Russia, such activities only confirmed their impression of Jews as clever exploiters of the trusting Russian people.” It was about structural oppression, not race, and the laws made Jews into what the oppressors reviled.
No one in Russia was surprised to discover that a strashnyi yid, “a dreadful Jew,” ran a brothel in this or that city, writes Bernstein, or that a Russian-Jewish gang known as the Maccabees tricked women into prostitution by running fake ads for maids and nannies, or that Jewish men sold their wives abroad and returned to Russia with a passport stamped “Divorced” in order to find new victims. In Yama, a best-selling novel about Russian prostitution, a pious Jew known as “Horizon” supports his elderly mother and observes the Sabbath while he marries girl after girl and sells them all into brothels. When Horizon meets a military general on a train, he presents himself as part traveling salesman, part broker, and says, “Nu, what can a poor Jew do in times like these?”
After Motche Goldberg escaped the army, he seduced a fifteen-year old girl and took her to London, where he joined a group of Jewish pimps known as the Stamford Road Gang. When a reform association closed in on them, the pimps pulled up stakes and fled, prostitutes in tow, to new frontiers of the global sex trade: the diamond mines of South Africa, then on to Argentina and Brazil and the cities of America, to Seattle and St. Louis, to Philadelphia and Boston, and at last to New York, where, after so many years of wandering, Motche Goldberg finally felt at home.
On the East Side, Motche joined a fraternity of pimps, a kind of union called the Independent Benevolent Association. The IBA, incorporated under state law, supplied its members with employment insurance and burial plots, since Jewish cemeteries refused to accept pimps. Over the years, reform ebbed and flowed and the IBA adapted. During a reform administration, the IBA pimps kept out of sight. When the city was “open,” they invested in real estate and posed as movie agents and fashion designers, dentists and doctors. They trolled dance halls and department stores, candy shops and employment agencies, on the hunt for poorly-paid working girls, what they called “chickens” or frisch’ schore, fresh goods.
After the dance, Tony visited Motche at what appeared to be a dental office on Fourth Street. He “cocainized” her gums and examined her teeth. When Motche, who must’ve been in his mid-thirties, told the sixteen- year- old that he would like to take her out, she demurred. “I am not a girl keeping company yet,” she said.
“Then maybe it is time,” Motche said.
They ate dinner at a restaurant. Motche explained how he lost his eye. He said that his mother, confronted with the grisly dilemma that many parents faced in the Pale of Settlement — maim your son or risk losing him to the forced recruitment of the czar’s army — had removed Motche’s eye, but to no avail. The czar’s army recruited him anyway. Tony knew this story well. Back in Bialystok, prior to the pogrom that took her mother’s life, her brother had been sacrificed to the czar’s army too. She assessed Motche. A peculiar figure, she thought. But they shared a culture and a past, and that meant something in the anonymous city.
A few days later, Motche presented Tony with a diamond ring and proposed marriage. It was moving so quickly, Tony thought, but perhaps decisiveness defined success in Dollar Land, lest one work in a steam laundry forever. She accepted Motche’s offer, agreed to premarital sex, and from there Tony’s world fell apart in a series of nightmarish episodes.
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* In Prostitution & Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, Edward Bristow calls “white slavery” — a phrase coined by a London doctor in 1839, with explicit reference to Jewish involvement — “the sexualization of blood libel.” Just as as many gentiles believed that the Jew needed the blood of Christian boys to make his matzoh, they now thought he also required the purity of Christian virgins to keep his flesh mills running. There were all kinds of crazy theories. One Russian author posited that circumcision made sex more pleasurable, and this amplified sensitivity explained the Jew’s enormous vitality, his tireless struggle for existence, etc.
– Featured image: East Side girls inspired the country with their protests and garment-industry labor strikes. Below, garment workers are inducted into strike culture, learning what they called the old Hebrew oath: “If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may my hand wither from the arm I now raise.”
