Читать книгу It All Started With a Deli - M. Hirsh Goldberg - Страница 9

Between 1880 and 1924 when U.S. immigration laws became highly restrictive, 24 million immigrants of various nationalities streamed into the United Sates. Of those, an estimated 2.2 million were Jewish, most of them from Eastern Europe, in what has been termed the third wave of Jewish immigration to America. This wave dwarfed the first wave, of Spanish or Sephardic Jews from 1640 to 1820, and the second, of German Jews, from 1820 to 1880. In the case of Eastern European Jews, they were not only “yearning to breathe free,” but fleeing from gathering threats to their safety. Among those millions were two families: the Gettmans (the original name of the Attmans in Europe) and the Shapiros who came at different times in different ways during those years, but all of whom eventually settled in Baltimore, Maryland and gave rise to this family’s history.

The mass of Jewish people who lived through those times witnessed years of great turmoil. With the emancipation of Western Europe’s Jewry in the 19th century, Jews were beginning to enter into general society. But Eastern Europe itself was undergoing seismic changes in their governments and society. In the past, social and economic upheaval often led to the implementation of anti-Jewish policies and physical attacks on Jews as the general populace looked for reasons for their woes, and lashed out at scapegoats in their midst. In Russia, for instance, in 1881, revolutionaries assassinated Czar Alexander II. The death of this czar, an advocate of many anti-Semitic policies, only led to more social unrest and to the next czar who was even more anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism was ever present, either in the form of discriminatory government policies or in peasant-inspired destructive, deadly pogroms that swept periodically through Jewish shtetls and villages in Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine. The years leading up to the eruption of World War I in 1914 and in the war’s aftermath proved to be a time of additional troubles for the Jews. Through all this, America beckoned as a welcoming haven of acceptance for Jews, spurring many to leave their homes in Europe and seek new lives in America.

Troubled by the ever-constant threat of pogroms, the dire economic times, and the restrictions on employment and religious practices, Harry Attman’s parents urged him to go to America. It was the general practice among Jews for one family member to travel to the United States, find work and, it was hoped, save enough money to help bring other family members over. And so in November 1912, 20-year-old Harry Attman became the first in his family to emigrate to America.

Harry (his Hebrew name was Tzvi) was born in Kusmien, Russia, a village near the Polish border, on October 26, 1893, to Shmarja and Sluva Gettman (in English their names became Shmariah and Sylvia). Shmarja was a grain dealer. The eldest of nine children, Harry had three brothers and five sisters (two of whom were born after he left home). In one of many sacrifices he would make for his family, Harry, by traveling alone to America, would not see his parents, brothers and sisters for eleven years.

Small but athletic and solidly built, Harry was adventuresome and looked forward to his new life. He first traveled from his home to the port city of Rotterdam where he boarded the ship Uranium for voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. It was just several months after the Titanic had sunk in the Atlantic after hitting an iceberg on its maiden voyage. Joining the crowded third class passenger area far below deck, he carried with his meager possessions an unusual set of implements for him: a pair of scissors, a razor, and a comb with which he planned to cut hair. It was one of the first indications of his enterprising spirit that would eventually find full display in his own business. While America at that time was a welcoming country to immigrants, government authorities were also careful to screen passengers for diseases and other problems before allowing anyone to disembark. Those who looked sickly or exhibited any of a series of disabilities faced the prospect of being sent back to their country of origin. In a Special Notice to Passengers given out at entry points and kept thereafter by Harry among his papers, the following warning was issued:

No person who is Insane, Imbecile, Deaf, Dumb, Blind, Crippled or otherwise infirm or suffering from Trachoma, Tuberculosis, Favus, or any other contagious disease will be permitted to land, nor any person without money or baggage, or in any way liable to become a public charge, nor any person who has been an inmate of a prison, poor-house or work-house or any charitable institution.

Only those who passed scrutiny were allowed into the United States. Others were sent back, even if it meant breaking-up families. The lucky ones admitted into the country often found immigrant officials marking on their clothing an “OK” in chalk.

Harry used his set of scissors/razor/comb to earn money by charging for his services as a barber for his fellow travelers, but he was also helping them avoid those dreaded problems with inspection. In those days, a transatlantic voyage could take two weeks or more. The rough Atlantic seas could make the trip difficult, especially for the third class passengers below deck where most of the immigrants booked the cheapest passage. In fact, one young passenger who came across at about the same time as Harry later remembered how many of the passengers became violently seasick. Harry’s barber services must have seemed appealing to those who wished to look healthy and their children well-cared-for when they disembarked and had to pass the scrutiny of U.S. officials.

Young Harry was showing how he instinctively grasped what the author of one of the most successful business books of that and future eras advocated. Napoleon Hill, born into poverty in America in 1883 ten years before Harry was born and living through the same time period as Harry, advised individuals in Think and Grow Rich that the road to business success in the America of the time (and at any time thereafter) was to “find a need and fill it.” Harry had sensed a need on that voyage and filled it. He and later his sons exhibited this entrepreneurial spirit and implemented such a strategy as they each built highly successful enterprises. Interestingly, family members cannot recall any time that Harry, before or after that voyage to America, ever picked up scissors and gave anyone a haircut.

When Harry arrived at Ellis Island on November 23, 1912, he experienced the first change in his life in the New World. Immigration agents gave him a new name. At birth, he was named Harry Gettman, but after passing through the immigration process he found that his last name was printed out on documents as Ettman, which was later transcribed as Attman. Such a name-change was not an uncommon experience for immigrants. Many of these officials could not understand the language or read the writing of immigrants. In the processing of hundreds if not thousands of people a day, many speaking Yiddish, Polish, German, or Russian, officials often recorded names in variant English. ‘Gettman’ may have sounded or looked like ‘Ettman’ and so Harry Gettman of Russia eventually became Harry Attman in America. [A similar name change occurred to another immigrant to Baltimore who eventually entered the food business. A kosher caterer named Baida, who operated in Baltimore in the latter half of the 1900s, was given that name after he followed his brother through the immigration line; when asked his last name, he replied in Yiddish, “Baida dazelba,” which means “the same as his.” He subsequently found on his papers that his last name in English was now Baida.]

After being admitted into the United States, Harry traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where a cousin on his mother’s side, Harry Mittelman, lived and operated a deli/confectionery store. This was Harry’s first introduction to employment in the food business. He worked in the store for several years, was paid $5 a week, and lived upstairs. By 1915, Harry was ready for a change. He went to Baltimore to meet some friends, liked the city, which was experiencing a rapidly growing Jewish community from the influx of immigrants coming through the city’s port, and decided to stay. It was in Baltimore that he met his future wife, Ida.

Ida (Chaya Feiga) Shapiro was born on May 17, 1900, in the town of Podwoloscycka, Poland, near the Russian border. She was the oldest of six children born to Yechiel Eliyahu and Rachael Leah Shapiro. Like Harry, Ida was the first of her family to come to America, arriving at the age of 15. She went directly to Baltimore where she had an aunt living on Aisquith Street and stayed with her while working for the Sonnenborn Company as a seamstress. When she and Harry met at a social gathering for young Jewish adults who had recently arrived in the U.S., they felt an immediate and as it turned out a lasting attraction. They made a striking couple who shared many compatible traits and they soon planned to marry.

As we will come to see, both Harry and Ida possessed the emotional warmth, the entrepreneurial spirit and a wide range of abilities that would prove key to their accomplishments and those of the progeny that would issue from their marriage. Harry came to be known by customers and community for being friendly, with a good sense of humor. He was a well-rounded person: hardworking, earnest and religious, as well as an adept dancer and swimmer. He could speak five languages fluently: Russian, Polish, Italian, Yiddish and English. Although all-business at work, he was a strong family person. His first grandchild, Ronald, fondly remembers how when he graduated college, his grandfather, who had never attended college, presented him with a generous gift and wept with emotion.

Ida was also a people-person and outgoing and, like Harry, very charitable. Their son Edward often cites her sharp mind and her unerring business and personal advice that proved to set him, correctly, on a life-long career. Their second child, Seymour, found her to be a very loving mother. Leonard, another son, remembers her as being “a tall and stately woman of regal bearing in both her manner and dress.” She also became known as an excellent cook and baker. “Nothing is as good as her strudel,” remembers her grandson, Gary; and another grandchild, Shellye, proudly reprinted in her synagogue’s cookbook one of Ida’s ‘secret’ recipes, “Bubby Attman’s Chocolate Chip Honey Cake,” a dessert that she would bake every Jewish New Year and is still offered in the Attman delicatessen. She was so adept at sewing it was said she could look at an advertisement for a dress and make it in a day. But above all, it would be her sense of family, her close and supportive relationship with her husband and children that would help guide them all to success. “She imbued the family with a sense of destiny,” said Gary.

Harry and Ida married on October 25, 1918. The ceremony was performed by Rabbi Abraham N. Schwartz, a leading figure in Baltimore’s religious Jewish community who in 1917 had founded the Talmudical Academy of Baltimore, the first Hebrew day school to be launched in the United States outside New York City. Harry and Ida would later enroll their children in this school for all or part of their Jewish education.

Harry and Ida’s marriage came during a major health crisis in America and throughout the world. The Spanish Flu, first confirmed in a soldier at a military camp in Kansas in March of 1918, had become pandemic by August. During the ensuing year, the Spanish Flu killed 600,000 people in the United States and 25 million people worldwide (twice the number of people killed during World War I). Although public health restrictions were put into place to halt the illness, daily life continued for most people and the couple pressed ahead with their wedding plans.

Once married, Harry and Ida began jointly operating a small confectionery/deli that Harry had started in 1915 on the corner of 2000 East Baltimore and Washington Streets, not far from Lombard Street. Here, while selling candies and sodas and other confections, Harry had also started selling salami and bologna sandwiches for a nickel to people on their way to work or at night to youths hanging out in the neighborhood. The new couple worked closely together to make this business successful, living in rooms in the back of the store, renting out rooms on the second and third floors and, in what became characteristic of their working lives, putting in long hours. They soon teamed up with a partner to buy a store from Nathan and Elsie Weinstein at 1019 East Lombard Street, where they opened a food market and deli. Harry and Ida operated stores in both locations until 1927, when they decided to concentrate on their Lombard Street location and closed their first store. They took full ownership of the delicatessen in 1940 when the partnership dissolved. But Harry and Ida continued to live at 2000 East Baltimore Street while rearing three sons: Edward born in 1920, Seymour in 1927, and Leonard in 1934, eventually moving to a home in Colonial Village in Northwest Baltimore in 1953.

During their early years in Baltimore and in spite of the pressures of building a business and starting to raise a family, Harry and Ida worked to fulfill a promised goal: to bring their families to America.

First, they brought over Ida’s family in 1920. On February 24, 1920, in an affidavit required by U.S. immigration authorities, Harry swore that he was “willing, able and ready to purchase steamship tickets for his said mother-in-law and family to come and live with him… and that he is willing and able to receive, maintain, and support the aforesaid immigrants.” At that time, Ida’s mother was 48 and a widow (her husband and a son had been murdered during a pogrom the year before) and the children that came with her were Enda, 19; Dolora, 16; Rose, 14; and, Jacob, 13.

Later, on August 7, 1923, after much planning and correspondence, Harry brought his father, mother and siblings to America. More than two years before, in February of 1921, Harry had prepaid $1471.16 for their intended passage from Hamburg to New York by boat and then by train to Baltimore. This sum was to cover $1125 for third class passage on a Swedish American Line steamship (the s/s Drottningholm) for his father, mother, six adult siblings (Rachel, Joseph, Golda, Abraham, Feiga and Schloima) and two young sisters (Chaika, 9, and Anna, 6), plus a U.S. head tax of $56, railway fare of $65.16 and landing money of $225. When a problem arose in their processing through Immigration in 1923, Harry traveled to New York and to Ellis Island to appear as a witness in their behalf before the Board of Special Inquiry (U.S. Immigration Law required that “every alien who is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to land” had to appear before this body).

To make the trip and stay over, Harry took a room at the Broadway Central Hotel in New York City (the hotel touted itself as offering “accommodations better than indicated by the moderate rates charged”). While at the hotel, Harry wrote Ida a nine-page letter in Yiddish on the hotel stationery to keep her apprised of developments. He told her of how distressed he was at seeing the conditions in which the newly-arrived immigrants were waiting to be processed (“things are so crowded you can’t even put a pin”) and bemoaned what his family had experienced before and during the trip (“so many tribulations they have had to endure”). With a reference to Hashem on every page, he declared however that “one has to be strong and trust.” In an indication of their closeness, Harry also included an endearing message: “I kiss you my dear sweet pearl.” [Note: This letter, along with numerous letters and postcards in Yiddish that Harry’s family had sent to him from Europe, were saved over the years in a metal Salome Mild Havana Smoker cigar box that Harry, then Seymour, and then his son, Marc, kept.]

To expend all this effort and provide $1400 in funding was quite remarkable for anyone to undertake, especially in those days for a person operating a small business. As indicated in his Affidavit of Support that the government required, Harry, who at the time had a wife and one child and was “engaged in delicatessen and grocery business,” was earning $2500 a year. To help pay for the transportation expenses for his family, Harry also took out a loan that he then repaid over coming years.

The fact that Harry and Ida were able to bring their families to America by the end of 1923 is significant because the next year, due to the political pressures building against the growing influx of immigrants, the U.S. immigration laws were dramatically changed, essentially closing America’s fabled golden doors to Catholics and Jews from Eastern and Southern Europe.

Together, Harry and Ida eventually were able to facilitate the emigration to the United States of three of their parents, as well as brothers, sisters, and other family members: a total of 19 relatives.

But they were unable to bring two members of Ida’s family to the safety of America. On the holiday of Shavuot on June 4, 1919, after they had arranged for their passports and were just months away from leaving, Ida’s father and a brother, who had served in the Russian army, were both shot and killed during a pogrom. Shaken by this, Harry and Ida would later name two of their children in memory of Ida’s father and brother.

Without the efforts of Harry and Ida, the Attman and Shapiro family lines would undoubtedly not have survived the violence that swept through their towns in Europe during the coming two decades. Both areas were overrun by the Nazis and engulfed in the Holocaust. It is estimated that of the Jewish population of 3.3 million alive in Poland at the start of World War II, only 369,000 Jews—11 percent—survived.

Meanwhile, in Baltimore, Harry and Ida were creating a family that would not only survive, but flourish over four generations and into the 21st century.