American Dream Meets Tenement Reality

MARIE GANZ AND NAT J. FERBER, Rebels: Into Anarchy, and Out Again (1920)

Five-year-old Marie Ganz emigrated with her mother from the central European region of Galicia to join her father, Lazarus, in New York City in 1896. Like millions of other immigrants, Marie and her family left the world they knew for the unknown, but promising, opportunities in America. Her memoir, published in 1920 when she was thirty, evokes the dreams and disappointments immigrant families faced in their early years. Ganz’s early experiences inspired her labor reform efforts and anarchism.

It was a home of two tiny rooms. The room in the rear was not much larger than a good-sized clothes closet, and not the stuffiest of closets could be more lacking in sunlight and air. The walls were as blank as an underground dungeon’s. There was neither window nor ventilating shaft. The room in front, almost twice as large, though half a dozen steps would have brought anybody with full-grown legs across its entire length, was a kitchen and living-room by day, a bedroom by night. Its two little windows gave a view of a narrow, stone-paved court and, not ten feet away, the rear wall of another tenement. The sunlight never found its way into that little court. By day it was dim and damp, by night a fearsome place, black and sepulchral.

In this little bit of a home lived five persons, my father and mother, myself, my baby brother, and Schmeel, our boarder. What squalid home in New York’s crowded ghetto is without its boarder? How can that ever-present bogy, the rent, be met without him? He must be wedged in somehow, no matter how little space there may be.

My father had established this home, our first in the New World, through God knows how much toil and worry and self-sacrifice. It took him two years to do it, and he must have haggled with all the bartering instinct of his race over the price of many a banana in the stock on his pushcart in Hester Street before his little hoard of savings had grown large enough to hire and furnish those two miserable rooms and to send tickets to his family in Galicia.

I was only five years old when in the summer of 1896 we joined him in America, but I remember well the day when he met us at Ellis Island. He was like a stranger to me, for I had been not much more than a baby when he left us on our Galician farm, but no child could be on distant terms with him long. Children took to him at once. He understood them, and was never so happy as when joining in their play. A quiet, unobtrusive man was my father, tall and slender, with a short yellow beard and mild blue eyes, and I have not forgotten the childlike glow of happiness that was in his face as he welcomed us.

I suppose it is the experience of most people that among the little scraps of our past lives that we carry with us the most insignificant things are apt to stand out more clearly than others of greater moment. I have found it so. I like to go groping into the past now and then, stirred by curiosity as to how far memory will carry me. It is a fascinating game, this of peering into the dim vistas of the long ago, where the mists of time are shifting as if blown by the wind. Now against the far horizon one scene stands out clearly, then another, as the mists fall apart and close again. Now the perfume of flowers comes to me, and I see our garden in front of the old Galician home — the bright little spot which is all I remember of the Old World. Now a breath of salt air is in my face, and I see a rolling sea and a distant, low-lying shore — my one memory of our journey to America.

But however disconnected and far apart the few scenes that still come back to me from the first years of my life, I have glimpses of our arrival in New York that are as vivid as if it had been only yesterday. In a quiet hour alone I wave the years away, and I am a child again, trudging along beside my father, who, weighted down with the great rolls of bedding we had brought with us from the old home, is guiding us through strange, noisy streets. I am staring in wonder at the great buildings and the never-ending crowds of people. I am frightened, bewildered, ready to cry. I keep a tiny hand twisted in the tail of my father’s coat, fearing to lose him.

At last we turn into a dark, dirty alley, which runs like a tunnel under a tenement house and leads us to our future home in the building in the rear.

Oh, how hot and stuffy were those two little rooms that we entered! The city was scorching under one of the hot waves that bring such untold misery to the tenements. Not a breath of air stirred. The place was an oven. But, flushed with heat and perspiring though he was, my father ushered us in with a great show of joy and enthusiasm. Suddenly his smile gave way to an expression that reflected bitter disappointment and injured pride as he became aware of the disgust which my mother could not conceal.

“So we have crossed half the world for this!” she cried, thinking bitterly of the comfortable farmhouse we had left behind us. I can see her now as she stood that moment facing my father, her eyes full of reproach — a pretty, slender woman with thick, black hair and a face as fresh and smooth as a girl’s.

I am sure it had never occurred to poor, dreamy, impractical Lazarus Ganz that his wife might be disappointed with the new home he had provided for her, or that he had ever fully realized how squalid it was. He was one of the most sensitive of men, and the look of pain in his face as he saw the impression the place made on her filled me with pity for him, young as I was. A five-year-old child is not apt to carry many distinct memories from that age through life, but that scene I have never forgotten.

When at last it grows dark we creep up flight after flight of narrow stairs, lighted by only a tiny gas flame at each landing, to the roof. Long rows of men, women and children are lying there under the stars. We look off over miles and miles of housetops to where they disappear in a blue haze. We spread the bedding we have carried from below, and we lie down to sleep. All the stars of heaven are winking roguishly down at me as I slip away into dreamland.

Beginning with that first night our housetop had a wonderful fascination for me — the cool breezes, the far vistas over the city’s roofs, the mysteries of the night sky, the magic moonlight — a fairyland, a place of romance after the dreary day in the stuffy little rooms below or in the crowded, noisy streets.

Marie Ganz, in collaboration with Nat J. Ferber, Rebels: Into Anarchy — and Out Again (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1920), 1–5.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS