HOME  CULTURE Jewish Heritage Fading Into History (Jewish Lower East Side)
|
Fading Into History (Jewish Lower East Side) |
|
|
|
|
|
by Allen Salkin
|
 LINDA Macfarlane, née Feuer, stood on East Houston Street and looked
stunned as she peered south at the sleek bistros and boutiques lining
Orchard Street. "It's all gone," she whispered to her husband as she
clutched his arm. "What happened?"
Ms. Macfarlane, 59, left New York more than 25 years ago. Now, on a
recent visit to the city, she wanted to show her husband the children's
clothing store where she had worked "selling shmattes" as a teenager.
But the store, whose name she cannot remember, is gone, as are most of
the landmarks and talismans in the neighborhood that was for
generations the traditional symbol of the American Jewish experience:
the fabric merchants, the ethnic food sellers, the children's furniture
stores.
"I wanted to smell it, follow my nose, the food, the places," Ms.
Macfarlane said wistfully, brushing her blond hair back from her eyes.
"But nothing smells the same anymore. The people, everything's gone.
The whole ghetto is gone."
Last month, Ratner's Delicatessen on Delancey Street sold its last
onion roll and closed after 97 years. Two years ago, the owners of
Schapiro's Kosher Winery on Rivington Street rolled their barrels out
of the basement and called it quits, selling the building for $2.3
million. Two weeks ago, H&M Skullcap moved from its home on
Hester Street, where it had been for half a century, to 13th Avenue in
Borough Park, Brooklyn, a thriving Jewish business thoroughfare. "The
Chinese don't want to buy yarmulkes," said Mendel Fefer, a salesman.
Some of the remaining small synagogues have so few members that they
must import teenagers from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to help make the
minyan of 10 required for daily prayers.
The long-contracting Jewish Lower East Side, the primal homeland for
American immigrant Jews, has lost so much of its cultural texture and
so many of its living touchstones that it may be time finally to
pronounce it dead. Yet paradoxically, even as the traditional
neighborhood vanishes, interest in its place in Jewish heritage is
exploding, evidenced by the packs of competing walking tours, a spate
of new books about its history and increased attendance at the Lower
East Side Tenement Museum.
At its peak, around 1910, the square-mile area bounded by East Third
Street, the Bowery, Catherine Street and the East River was home to
373,057 people, a great majority of whom were Eastern European Jews. In
the 2000 census, the entire population was only 91,704, nearly half of
whom were of Asian descent. Only 17,200 were whites of non-Hispanic
descent.
Despite its changing ethnic and religious makeup, the Lower East Side
is hardly suffering economically. Shiny new shops, selling everything
from rubber miniskirts to $10 margaritas, have taken over storefronts
and brightened blocks that had been abandoned for decades. Clinton
Street has become a gourmet destination and Orchard Street a
high-fashion strand. The long-shuttered Sunshine Theater on East
Houston Street, once a Yiddish vaudeville house, is now a cinema.
Moviegoers can fortify themselves with refreshments from the venerable
Yonah Schimmel Knishes next door.
Grand Street between Allen and Chrystie Streets bustles with Chinese
shops selling vegetables and seafood. Last month, Vanity Fair magazine
published a map showing local outposts of trendiness.
Despite such shifts, for countless American Jews like Ms. Macfarlane,
the area has remained almost a holy land in memory, an old country to
return to. The real old country — the cities, towns and shtetls of
Europe — has long since disappeared in clouds of war and genocide. But
even as recently as a few years ago, a person walking the streets of
the Lower East Side could sense the collective memory of a tangible
past, helped along by the few Jewish businesses that survived.
Two years ago, the area was designated a state and national historic
district. But such a designation does not freeze a neighborhood's
appearance and retard change the way landmark designation does.
As a result, what is being lost now are the last images that make it
possible to conjure the fantasy of the old days. And a few tenements
where Jews once lived, a couple of silver candlestick sellers, Russ
& Daughters smoked-fish emporium and Streit's matzo factory are
not enough to do the trick for people like Ms. Macfarlane or any of the
other mystified visitors seen daily on Orchard Street. To make the
dream live, they seem to need the taste of kosher corned beef (Katz's
Delicatessen is not kosher), the reek of pickles in brine and the
Yiddish-inflected voices of haggling merchants.
They crave the specters of a vanished culture, said Joyce Mendelsohn,
who teaches New York City history at the New School and leads walking
tours based on her guidebook, "The Lower East Side Remembered and
Revisited" (Lower East Side Press, 2001). "People got upset when
Ratner's closed," she said. "They feel an emotional, nostalgic tie to
the neighborhood, which is expressed in food in a large way. They are
running for the bialys, for the pickles. It's like the heart of the
Jewish experience they're hoping to go back to in some way."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
