I am put in the embarrassing position of having to call people proletarian against their own wishes. In a minor ity of cases I can soften the blow by nonsensi cally dubbing them — the term was invented in Western Europe— “white-collar proletarians.” Among these I would include Torah scribes, Jewish teachers, the makers of prayer shawls and producers of candles, the ritual butchers and the little religious officials. We can call them members of a religious proletariat. But beyond them there is a vast crowd of sufferers, oppressed and despised, comforted neither by faith nor by class consciousness nor by revolutionary enthusiasm. Among them are the water carriers in the shtetl, who, from early morning till late at night, fill the water barrels in the homes of the better-off in return for a minimal weekly wage. They are touchingly naive people, of an almost un-Jewish physical strength. On the same rung of the social ladder are the furniture movers, the porters, and a whole lot of others who live from occasional work, but always from physical labor. They are healthy, brave, and good-hearted. I don’t know of any people in whom goodness is situated so close to physical strength, or rudeness so far removed from a coarse occupation, as with the Jewish day laborer.
Some Slav peasants who converted to Judaism also live by such casual labor. Such conversions are relatively frequent in the East, even though official Judaism opposes them, and of all the religions in the world the Jewish faith is the one that doesn’t set out to make converts. No question, the Eastern Jews have a much greater admixture of Slav blood in their veins than the German Jews have of German. So when Western European anti-Semites and German Jews claim that Eastern Jews are “more Semitic” and hence “more dangerous,” they are as mistaken as the Western Jewish banker who feels himself “more Aryan” on the strength of mixed marriages that have taken place in his family.
*In Right and Left (1930), Roth sardonically describes the East as “extend ing from Katowice as far as Rabindranath Tagore.”
†Probably a reference to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5.
GHETTOES IN THE WEST VIENNA
1.
The Eastern Jews who come to Vienna settle in the Leopoldstadt, the second of the twenty districts. There, they are close to the Prater and the Nordbahnhof. Peddlers can make a living in the Prater — from selling picture postcards to tourists and from the compassion that happily often accompanies pleasure-seeking. The Nordbahnhof, meanwhile, is where they all arrived. The scents of home still waft through its lofty halls, and it remains the gateway for their possible return.
The Leopoldstadt is a sort of voluntary ghetto. Many bridges connect it to other parts of the city. Every day, the traders, peddlers, brokers, and deal makers — all the unproductive elements of immigrant Jewry — may be seen funneling across these bridges. But these same bridges are also crossed by the progeny of said unproductive elements, the sons and daughters of the traders, who work in factories, offices, editorial suites, and workshops.
The sons and daughters of Eastern Jews are productive. Their parents may be hawkers and peddlers, but among the younger generation are many of the most gifted lawyers, doctors, bankers, journalists, and actors.
The Leopoldstadt is a poor district. There are tiny apartments that house families of six. There are tiny hostels where fifty or sixty bed down on the floors.
The Prater is where the homeless live rough. The very poorest workers live in the vicinity of the station. The Eastern Jews don’t live any better than the Christian inhabitants of this district.
They have lots of children, they are unaccustomed to hygiene and cleanliness. They are detested.
No one will do anything for them. Their cousins and coreligionists, with their feet safely pushed under desks in the First District, have already gone “native.” They don’t want to be associated with Eastern Jews, much less taken for them. The Christian Socialist and German Nationalist Parties both have anti-Semitism as an important plank of their political programs. The Social Democrats are wary of being thought a “Jewish party.” The Jewish nationalists are fairly impotent. In any case they are a middle-class outfit, and the great mass of Eastern Jews are working class.
The Eastern Jews depend on the support of middle-class charitable organizations. People are inclined to rate Jewish compassion more highly than it deserves. In fact Jewish charity is just as imperfect an institution as any other. First and foremost charity benefits the giver. In a Jewish welfare office the Eastern Jew often finds himself treated no better by his coreligionists or fellow nationals than by Christians. It is terribly hard to be an Eastern Jew; there is no harder lot than that of the Eastern Jew newly arrived in Vienna.
2.
When he sets foot in the Second District, he is greeted by familiar faces. Or do they really greet him? No, he probably just sees them. People who have already been there for ten years have no use for the recent arrival. Someone else has arrived. Someone else wants to earn. Someone else wants to live.
The worst of it is: He can’t just be left to perish. He’s not a stranger. He is a Jew and a compatriot.
Someone will be found to take him in. Someone else will advance him a small loan or get him credit. Someone else will organize a territory for him, or turn over his own. The new arrival will go into installment selling.
His first and most difficult call is on the police.
The man behind the counter dislikes Jews in general, and Eastern Jews in particular.
He will demand to see papers. Exotic, improbable papers. Papers the like of which are never required from Christian immigrants. Besides, Christian papers are in order. All Christians have sensible, European names. Jewish names are mad and Jewish. Nor is that alclass="underline" They have two or three surnames, qualified by false or recte. You never know what to call them. Their parents were married by a rabbi. The marriage has no legal standing. If the father’s name is Weinstock, and the mother’s Abramovsky, then the children of their union will be called Weinstock recte Abramovsky, or perhaps Abramovsky falseWeinstock. The boy, for example, is given the Jewish first name of Leib Nachman. Because the name is difficult and might sound provocative to others’ ears, the son styles himself Leo. So his name is: Leib Nachman, styled Leo Abramovsky false Weinstock.
As far as the police are concerned, names like that are nothing but trouble. The police don’t like trouble. Nor is it just the names. The birthdates are inaccurate. The papers have generally been burned. (The registry offices in small towns in Galicia, Lithuania, and Ukraine were continually ablaze.) All the papers have been lost. Nationality is a moot point. Following the War and the Treaty of Versailles, it’s become still more complicated. Now, how did our man get across the border? Without a passport? Or with a false one? That means his name isn’t his real name — even though he gave so many of them, so many, in fact, that they can’t all be right — but it’s probably wrong in an objective sense as well. The man listed on the papers, on the alien registration form, isn’t the same as the man who’s standing in front of him. So what’s to be done? Lock him up? Then the wrong man would be locked up. Have him extradited? That would be extraditing an imposter. Whereas if he’s told to come back with proper papers, with sensible names on them, then it wouldn’t just be sending the right man packing, but maybe a way of making a wrong’un into a proper one.