"Our Russian Exiles: Views in the Hebrew Quarter on the West Side,"

A Locality Where Little if Any English Is Heard, and the Entire Population Speaks the Jewish Patois of Poland—Nearly Every Man Engaged in Trade of Some Kind—Women Who Make Cheap Clothing and Sort Rags.
 

On the West Side, in a district bounded by Sixteenth street on the south and Polk street on the north and the Chicago River and Halsted Street on the east and west, one can walk the streets for blocks and see none but Semitic features and hear nothing but the Hebrew patois of Russian Poland. In this restricted boundary, in narrow streets, ill-ventilated tenements, and rickety cottages, there is a population of from 15,000 to 16,000 Russian Jews.

The Jews of Russian, on their removal to this country, follow precisely the habits of their forefathers in Warsaw; the habit of living together in cities and the faculty for trade. As in Warsaw, for instance, the proportion of common laborers and menials is very small, hardly 8 per cents. Every Jew in this quarter who can speak a word of English is engaged in business of some sort. The favorite occupation, probably on account of the small capital required, is fruit and vegetable peddling. Here, also, is the home of the Jewish street merchant, the rag and junk peddler, and the "glass puddin'" man. The big rag warehouses and scrap iron yards are here supplied by the decrepit old rag-pickers and the noisy owner of the "old regs an' iron" wagon.

The principal streets in the quarter are lined with stores of every description, all of them kept by Jews and nearly all with a sign in Hebrew hung out, showing that the trade catered to is not Gentile. The streets given up to domiciles are very narrow, hardly wider than alleys, and lined on both sides with one-story cottages and garbage boxes. In tenement houses glimpses are had of whole families in hot crowded rooms at work with sewing-machine and needle putting together the "indestructible overall," and in a stifling little closet of a room a cobbler is at work on rough, heavy boots. Trades, with which Jews are not usually associated, such as saloonkeeping, shaving, and haircutting, and blacksmithing, have their representatives and Hebrew signs. The butcher and his satellite, the man who goes to the abbatoir and slaughters animals and who slits the gullet of the Sabbath chicken or the holiday duck, both have their signs, which to the uninitiated look much like a bar of music without the staff.

In a narrow street a private school is in full blast. In the front basement room of a small cottage forty small boys, all with hats on, sit crowded into a space 10x10 feet in size, presided over by a stout middle-aged man with a long, curling, matted beard, who also retains his hat, a battered, rusty derby of ancient style. All the old or middle-aged men in the quarter affect this peculiar headgear, and one would imagine that they had all been manufactured at one time from the same block and had withstood the same vicissitudes of time and weather. The men are all bearded—that is, those who are old enough to have beards—and they are all of the type one sees in pictures of Jewish Siberian exiles. The hair is also worn long, with little curls which hang before the ears. A middle-aged or old man without a long black coat is a rarity, and to the passing stranger these men all look very much alike. A group in conversation gives one the impression that a large-sized row is in progress from the loud, shrill voices and excited and numerous gestures.

The younger generation of men are more progressive and, having been born in this country, are patriotic and want to be known as Americans and not Russians. The women know only three stages of life. The young, unmarried women are often very attractive, with lean, dark Oriental faces and large, dark eyes. They affect little coquetries of dress and are able assistants in the shops of their fathers and brothers. The married women soon show the effects of care and the troubles of motherhood. The younger ones still show traces of former beauty, fast being lost in approaching obesity and attention to their household, maternal, and shopping duties. The last stage, that of old age, is passed in attendance on the younger children, or doing light housework. The old women are usually very fat, with here and there a little, wizzened, old great-grandmother, who wanders about crooning to a fat baby while mother cooks the dinner. The streets literally swarm with children, who play about the gutters and are a dark-skinned, tumble haired, noisy lot of youngsters.

There are a number of dingy-looking doorways, over which a sign proclaims that Russian baths may be taken within. There is also the usual sign in Hebrew. But the Russian bath-houses have the appearance of neglect, which the condition of the inhabitants does not belie.

A venture into a rag warehouse to one not used to the atmosphere is nearly fatal. Imagine a large, dingy storeroom packed to the ceiling with bales of evil-smelling, dirty rags, garnered from gutter and ash-barrel, being sorted by a dozen yellow-faced sickly-looking women with their heads tied up in kerchiefs and shawls and you have the source of the raw material for the paper you write on. How the rag-sorters live in this weather is a mystery.

The interior of a store which looks as though it had been "mussed up" by a cyclone is that of a dealer in "unclaimed freight and railroad wreckage." All sorts of good are tumbled about in confusion. There are drop-a-nickel-in-the-slot race-track machines, meaningless looking railroad castings, cases of unlabeled bottles containing a suspicious-looking liquid, household utensils, old clothes, bales of useless advertising matter, and hundreds of useless articles drawn in the great lottery of unclaimed baggage.

The wife of the proprietor told in disgusted tones of trunks of fair exterior which when brought home and opened contained seventy-five or a hundred pounds of a fair article of firewood at a net cost of $4.50 paid to the United States Express Company at a recent auction.

The scrap-iron yards are busy places. Wagons drive in, are weighed, and dump out their assortment of old iron on to a huge pile, which is then sorted by a number of laborers, not Jews. Piles under sheds is a miscellaneous mass of old metal, an old anchor lies in one corner, in another a pile of lead pipe and sheet lead, and across the way odd pieces of all sorts of brass fixtures. A stylishly-dressed young man, the purchasing agent for a manufacturing establishment, is moving critically from one pile of lead to another; he wants to purchase two tons of lead for his firm to tide over a delayed shipment.

The commercial life of this district seems to be uncommonly keen. Every one is looking for a bargain and every one has something to sell. The home life seems to be full of content and easy going unconcern for what the outside world thinks. During these hot nights the dwellers on Judd, Liberty, and other residence streets bring out mattresses and blankets and camp under nature's roof on sidewalk and steps.

Source:  Chicago Tribune (July 19, 1891): 20.