New York’s shtetl

It's not easy to find your way if you are lost in New York without a map or GPS. Don't count on a passerby. They usually answer: I'm not from here. I don't speak English. New York is a city of immigrants who come to the States searching for job, adventure, and inspiration. One can learn their stories at the Tenement Museum located in the heart of Lower East Side. In the 19th century it was one of the most crowded places in the world, with a density of 7,000/sq mi. The neighborhood was inhabited mainly by Italians and Jews from Eastern Europe living in tenement buildings.

The Tenement Museum is located in one of these 100-year old buildings. Despite of the flaky plasterwork, some marks of the old decorations can still be seen. The tourists climb the narrow wooden stairs to reach the first floor and are invited to the apartment inhabited once by a Jewish tailor and his family. First three rooms aren't renovated. They remain in the condition in which the whole apartment was before a partial renovation of the building. The walls are decorated with faded wallpaper, a little blackened near a stove. In two other rooms there is a sweatshop from the early twentieth century. A small sewing machine. An oil lamp. Gowns. Mannequins. Charcoal iron boxes.

There were the living conditions of the Levin family who came to New York from Plock (nowadays Poland) at the end of 19th cent. Why did the tailor and his wife decide to emigrate? If they didn’t like Plock, they might have settled in quickly developing manufacturing city such as Lodz, Zyrardow or Warszawa. However, in a country occupied by tsarist Russia they would always be second-class citizens. The United States offered an equality of all civilians, though it didn’t provide a carefree life.

The tailor had to work very hard. He arranged a small sweatshop in his apartment. He hired two women and started sewing dresses. They worked on a chord. The sweatshop’s owner had an agreement with a purchaser. He guessed how many clothes he would sew every week. If he didn’t complete the order, he didn’t obtain any money. Therefore, the tailor was always under pressure. One can imagine how often Levin was sitting near the kerosene lamp stapling the last pieces of the textile. At the same time, his wife had to take care of four children, their house and kosher kitchen. Did they miss Plock? Although they moved from a shtetl to the big city, they still lived their old life. Their neighbors were Yiddish-speaking Jews, and there were many Jewish stores, workshops and praying houses. Since they barely knew English, the Levins didn’t leave the Lower East Side very often. They resided in New York, but they still lived in the shtetl.

However, the Rogashevsky family, which moved to the former Levins’ apartment in the second decade of the 20th cent., was forced to leave the shtetl. Their children used to go to public schools and to work in huge factories together with descendents of other immigrants. New generation quickly integrated with a new world, showing it also to their parents.

In old apartment of Levins and Rogashevskys one may listen to the interviews conducted with recent immigrants. They stress that is pretty difficult to live in a foreign country. They say they work hard for a better future of their children. Maybe I met one of them on a New York street…