Art By Giora Carm i

LOOKING BACK

East Side Adventure

Our parents struggled for survival. But
for us, the children of Manhattan's
Lower East Sidi life was an adventure.

YAACOV WRIA

Special to the Jewish News

W

hen I was born on
the Lower East Side
75 years ago, it was a
squalid mile-square area
along the East River, two
miles up from the Battery, the
tip end of Manhattan Island.
The streets were black with
people, tens of thousands of
them squeezed into decrepit
cold-water tenement houses
set in tightly wedged rows.
Everywhere you looked, you
saw clutters of crumbling
brick and crisscrossing
tangles of clotheslines.

We were almost all immi-
grants, or the children of
immigrants, from Eastern
and Central Europe. Every
day we saw more "green-
horns" trudging with packs
from the ships which had car-
ried them tempest-tossed to
Ellis Island.
We were here, thank God,
not there. Never mind that
our homes were so dank and
cold in winter we believed
stories about people turning
into icicles, never to rise from
their beds. Came summer, it
turned so hot we had to sleep
outside on fire escapes, or on
the grass in Corlears Hook

Park along the river.
Our parents hugged
dreams and hopes. They
could escape from the East
Side to the open, green spaces
of Brooklyn or the Bronx
once they became "'Ameri-
canized." The street peddlers,
the stitchers and pressers in
the garment shops, the sick
and the jobless would stay
forever. Some people, nebbich,
had no luck. -
Incredibly, some people
stayed even though they had
the money to buy houses in
Paradise — Flatbush or
Forest Hills. Such mad mil-
lionaires lived in brownstone

houses on classy East Broad-
way. Why? In those days the
Lower East Side was the
heart and hub of Jewish cul-
ture in America. Cantors like
the lengendary Yossele Ro-
senblatt sang in its syna-
gogues, actors like Jacob and
Stella Adler, Boris Ibmashe-
vesky and Jenny Goldstein lit
up its Yiddish theaters. In
budding Talmudic academies
(yeshivot) world famous rab-
bis were raising up a genera-
tion of scholars to rival those
in Europe.
Here homesick newcomers
found community with fellow
townsfolk from Kiev, Vilna,

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

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