March 19th, Howard’s Daily Diary, Deglorification of the Jewish Ghetto of the lower Eastside of NY, or some facsimile in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Hasia Diner, in her book “Lower Eastside Memories” persistently presents a sacred description of life, as lived in the Jewish ghetto of the Lower Eastside of New York, inhabited mainly by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. She describes in glorified terms, the pushcart markets, the smells, the melee of shoppers bargaining and the vendors yelling out what they had to sell, all in Yiddish.
I found these descriptions touching, because although I never lived on the Lower Eastside, I identified with my mother who did and who took me as a child with her to shop at similar pushcart markets in Brownsville. Besides, I suppose that women shopping today, for their family food and supplies are interested mainly in the prices, availability and convenience, rather than the smells, shoving, or shouting in Yiddish, which most don’t understand. I often wonder about what would have happened to these markets if K-Mart or Wal-Mart had opened a competitively priced store on Hester St? I suspect that the Jewish shoppers at the pushcart markets would have shunned the big box stores because they regarded shopping as a social event, being greeted with true warmth and caring friendship, as well as a place to exchange gossip in a native tongue.
But, what about the living conditions in the dingy, crowded, often unheated flats, not much better in Brownsville, with its apartments squirming with cockroaches and vermin. I haven’t heard of many Jewish families “who have made it to the suburbs” rushing to move back to Diner’s wonderland of the Lower Eastside.
Furthermore, something which Diner has completely neglected regarding the important things in Jewish life in Brownsville was the growth of a Mafia type group, known as “Murder Incorporated.” This group, led by another Jew, named Lepke Buchalter, controlled the rackets and extorted protection money from shopkeepers in Brownsville. As kids, we often ran errands for some of the gangsters hanging about the street corner near Mannie’s candy store. Lepke and his Murder Inc. would for a price murder anyone, anywhere in the United States. But they were also heroes to us kids on the streets, in that they challenged authority and had taken on the Bund on 86th St. successfully. The Bund on 86th St, also known as German town, was a loose group who engaged in anti-Semitic activities.
However, Murder Inc. also affected my family in a more direct way, in that my older brother was employed by them to collect protection fees. But one day, a rival gang caught him, took his collections and beat him nearly to death. I recall the police bringing him, bleeding into our apartment for identification, I also recall my mother screaming: “Oiy vey, we got to get out of here before they kill him.” Luckily, we had relatives in the East Bronx and within a few weeks, we were living on Vyse Ave. in the East Bronx.
