Natalie Schuman

Macaulay Honors College: The Peopling of New York City University of New York

Assignment Three: An Immigrant Journey

Williamsburg: From Hasidic to Hipster

I am a fourth generation American and my most recent immigrant ancestors moved to the area around Philadelphia when they arrived from Poland, Lithuania and Hungary. My dad’s side of the family was Jewish and were very religious when they moved to America. Hasidic neighborhoods in different Northeastern cities are often similar so I have chosen to examine the neighborhood of Williamsburg.

This neighborhood is interesting for me to look at it because it embodies my past in that my great, great grandparents were once Hasidic people living in an urban area. But it also embodies my identity in that I have friends who live there, I often shop and eat there, and I can relate to the new people moving in – young, artistic people. I can find my identity represented in both sides of the great struggle of past decade between the Hasidic people who have been living in Williamsburg for years and the incoming “hipsters” who are gentrifying the neighborhood.

I was born and raised in Manhattan but much of my social life existed in Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan. Williamsburg was definitely a frequent stop for my friends and me. We loved the trendy cafés and the thrift stores.

If my Jewish great-great-grandparents had immigrated to New York City and not Philadelphia, they would have likely settled in a neighborhood similar to Williamsburg. They would have known people already living there and perhaps stayed with them until they got on their feet. They would join their synagogue and find jobs in the neighborhood. In a few years they would have been a part of the community and considered Williamsburg home.

However, as a half-Jewish young American woman, I would have little in common with my family members who lived in communities like that. Ironically, I would fit in better with the hipsters of Williamsburg than I would with the Hasidic people, even though they are technically “my people”. 

Walking around Williamsburg, I can feel the pull of both sides of my identity. I get off the L train at Bedford Avenue. I head South on Bedford Avenue towards the Williamsburg Bridge. For the next ten blocks or so, I am confronted by vintage stores, tattoo parlors and lots of hip white people on bikes. As I continue south, I can see the Williamsburg Bridge in the distance. This bridge acts as the dividing line between the two cultures that are primarily represented in this region.

As I continue down Bedford Avenue, I note the lack of a bike lane. For a short time, there was bike lane here that stretched fourteen blocks and garnered much controversy. The hipsters in the neighborhood were very happy about the bike lane. It allowed them to travel via bicycle to work and on trips to health food store. But the Satmar community was very upset as it ran right through their neighborhood. At community board meetings, representatives for the Satmar community spoke out against the bike lane as a disruption to pedestrian traffic and school bus routes.

While this reason was not mentioned in the board meetings, it is likely that the Satmar people were worried about more hipsters taking the route through the Satmar community. Many also claimed that the Satmar were worried that scantily dressed women would be riding through their part of town. In 2009, after Bloomberg won his campaign for reelection, the bike lane was removed. It is generally believed that the bike lane was a reward for the Satmar community’s bloc vote for Bloomberg.

Just before I get to the bridge, I stop in Traif for some lunch. Traif means “unkosher” in Yiddish and carries a critical connotation. Traif specializes in pork and shellfish – go figure. In traditional hipster sarcasm and irony, this restaurant, located right at the border between hipster and Hasidic Williamsburg pokes fun at the Hasidic dietary restrictions while referencing American’s own excessive obsession with pork. Traif’s logo is a drawing of a pig with a heart in the middle. The menu includes strawberry-cinnamon glazed Berkshire baby back ribs and a risotto of Maine lobster, spicy sausage, toasted barley, pistachios and mushrooms.

Walking through Williamsburg along Bedford Avenue, I can feel the sharp change. As I walk under the Williamsburg Bridge, I see no more trendy Thai restaurants or chic cafés. The number of people wearing Doc Martens and flannels sharply decreases. Instead, the streets are filled with people wearing traditional Hasidic outfits and shuls line the streets.

Walking through this part of the neighborhood, I don’t exactly fit in. I am Jewish but I am wearing a flannel and doc martens. I am what the Hasidim would call artisten. This is their Americanized Yiddish word for a hipster. Once in the Hasidic part of Williamsburg, I head west on Broadway and pass 60 Broadway. A huge building filled with condominiums. This building used to be the Gretsch Musical Instrument Factory but is now home to hundreds of apartments. The building was converted in 2003 as the neighborhood was changing to accommodate more affluent young people. The Hasidic people protested but it was eventually converted to the apartment building it is today.

Now we wonder, why couldn’t these two groups get along? Men in both groups are famous for sporting big, bushy beards. Hassidic fashion has been stable for decades and evokes style of the past. Hasidic men wear overcoats, t’fillin and Shtreimel, which is a fur hat worn by married men. The women are usually completely covered and some cover their hair or wear wigs.  Similarly, hipsters are always looking to the past to influence their fashion choices, finding overalls or a 50’s housewife dress hip.

Of course, I am joking. These two groups of people are extremely different. Hipsters are by definition progressive people. They tend to be very politically liberal, independently thinking, etc. These values are very different from the very conservative, traditional Hasidic people living across the border. On top of that, Hasidic people are very insular and would not be happy to share their neighborhood with a whole different group of people.

I think Williamsburg is not only interesting because of the ties it has to my own identity, but because it is changing so rapidly. In a few years, there may be no more Hasidic people left, all forced out by the high rents and lack of strong community. While I still feel connected to both sides of the struggle for Williamsburg, it is a shame that they cannot coexist. 

I am fourth generation American. Because of this, the stories regarding my ancestors’ travels to America and their first experiences here have become reduced to little more than facts and a few memorable details. Despite this, I will attempt to fill in the blanks of where my family came from.

My mother’s father’s grandmother came from a village called Porak in Czechoslovakia. Porak was a mining village and she came from a coal mining family. They came to America for more opportunities. They immigrated to a mining town near the Poconos called Eckley. My mother’s father’s grandfather came from Warsaw, Poland. He and his family also immigrated to Eckley where the two met. My great-great grandfather was a miner in Eckley and they raised their family there. Eckley is a famous mining town because it was the home of the Molly Maguires. The Molly Maguires were a secret society of coal miners. Their children stayed in Eckley and so did my grandfather until he moved to Philadelphia where he met my grandmother.

Little is known about my grandmother’s grandparents except that they were born in Ireland until they moved to Brooklyn. They stayed in Brooklyn for a few years, then moved to Philadelphia and worked in a factory that made machine parts. The majority of my mother’s family is still in the Philadelphia area today. I think it is interesting how families will travel thousands of miles to come to America and then will stay in one town, or area for generations and generations.

My father’s side of the family comes from all over Eastern. One of my grandmother’s grandmothers was born in Riga, Latvia. My grandmother’s mother’s father was born in Hungary. Half of my grandfather’s family came from Hungary. His other grandparents came from Poland and Lithuania. They were all living in shtettles there, so they came here for more opportunities and a better life.

My grandfather’s grandfather came to America with his family but left many relatives behind. Her father kept in contact with some of his cousins, his mother’s sister’s children. My grandmother still has letters between them from before the war. Everyone on this side of the family is Jewish and unfortunately, the correspondence stopped mid way through the war. These relatives were living in Vilnius in Lithuania which was occupied by German forces during the war. There were about 265,000 Jews living in there and the Nazis in Paneriai murdered 95% of them. My family has assumed that unfortunately, our relatives in Lithuania were killed in a concentration camp. My grandmother keeps the letters between her father and his cousins, and is grateful that her grandfather left when he did.

My grandfather’s mother was born in Hungary and came to America alone when she was 13 years old. Her mother had died and her father remarried to a woman who didn’t want my great grandmother around.

My grandmother’s grandfather settled in a town called Canchahakan where he started silent movie house. It was a real family operation. My grandmother’s aunt played the piano during the films, another aunt took tickets, and another operated the projector.

Natalie Schuman. The Peopling of New York City. Professor Rosenblum. Due: Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Assignment 1: Profile of a story of immigration.

Note: I was absent on the first day of class so I did my interview with a friend, not a classmate.

Charlotte Kohlmann’s Immigrant Story

“Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

-From “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus. 1883.

Despite the often-unfair laws regarding immigration today, these words engraved in the base of the Statue of Liberty epitomize the journey of Charlotte Kohlmann’s grandparents to New York City.

Charlotte Kohlmann was born in Riverdale in the Bronx on February 12^th, 1994. She lives in a red house in a residential area filled with people from all different countries. She identifies herself as American but has roots in Germany and Italy, among other places.

Charlotte’s mother’s father’s name is Feliche Perrela. He was born in a town called Macchiagodena in Italy. Macchiagodena is a town in the province of Isernia in South Central Italy. It is located in the Appennines Mountains in the region of Molise. Macchiagodena was a farm town and there was little work other than farming. In the early to mid 20th century, many residents of Macchiagodena emigrated to other parts of the world including the United States to find better jobs and earn more money. At 19 years old, Charlotte’s grandfather, Feliche was one of those people. Feliche waited until after the 3rd Sunday in May to leave his town. On this day, a huge fair was held to celebrate the patron saint of the town, San Nicola. He feasted and celebrated with his family and friends as he would any other year. Though there was a feeling of sadness around the celebration as they all knew that Feliche was to leave the next day, along with a dozen other men in the town.

Feliche and the men he traveled to New York with were not the first men from Macchiagodena to start a life here. Feliche went to live with his people in Little Italy in the Bronx. Living in this neighborhood sometimes even felt like being back home. He knew people from his old town and the same sense of community in Italy existed in this small pocket of home in this new, scary city. Feliche got a job as a construction worker. When he got his first paycheck, he sent exactly half of it back to his family in Macchiagodena. Feliche continued to send exactly half of his paycheck back to Macchiagodena until he died in 2005.

As more and more men from Macchiagodena traveled to the Bronx, women started feeling comfortable coming too. That brings us to Jesualda. Jesualda was born in Macchiagodena and at 18 years old, her mother took her and her two sisters to the Bronx. Jesualda grew up in a small apartment in the Bronx. Her neighbors in New York were her neighbors back in the hills of Macchiagodena. She and her neighbors in Little Italy shared a thin wall and a communal bathroom while they used to be separated by acres of farmlands.

It was in Little Italy that Jesualda met Feliche. He courted her for a year and eventually they got married and had two children, one of whom was Charlotte’s mother, Emma. For Feliche and Jesualda, New York City offered a new life that may have been hard at first, but it allowed their ability to put food on the table not be at the whim of the weather and how well their crops did. Jesualda and Feliche never went hungry again, and neither did their children or grandchildren.

“We’re leaving now. I don’t know where Papa is.” These were the first words written in a leather bound journal with no name. The journal goes on to tell the story, in French, of Ursula Kohlmann’s journey from Germany to New York City. Ursula is Charlotte’s father’s mother, Charlotte calls her “Opa”. She was a Jew in Germany in 1940 and New York City offered her asylum from Hitler’s hell. She was 14 when she started the journal. It described traveling through Spain, Czechoslovakia, France, all together 15 countries with her mother, until they finally arrived in New York City. Ursula had learned French in school but her mother tongue was German. She wrote the journal in French, left out her name and any clue that she was Jewish to protect herself in case the diary fell into the wrong hands. They took a boat called the “Sepa Pinto” from Portugal to New York City. She still remembers the ride, how frightened she was of both being in a new place, and being caught by the leader of her old country. She remembers her mother threw up on the Sepa Pinto from motion sickness and anxiety.

When she arrived in New York and settled in, her mother enrolled her into a public high school on 153^rd street. Ursula was one of the only non-African American students there.  She missed her home and felt out of place in her new environment. She eventually found other Jews who had come to New York City to escape the Nazis. They formed a group and jokingly called themselves “The Elite”.

Paul Kohlmann was also a member of this group. He came to New York from Germany at 19 years old. Paul was the only one in his family healthy enough to flee so he had to leave them all behind in Europe. Paul and Ursula dated for a few months and eventually got married. Paul wanted to fight in the war, on the side of the Americans. But when he got to the recruitment office, he was told he could not fight Germany because he was not an American citizen. They sent him instead to the Army base in the Phillipines.

For Paul, Ursula, Feliche and Jesualda, New York City took them in and protected them, offered them a new life. Charlotte understands the importance of her grandparents’ stories and has taken it upon herself to record and preserve their history. This year, Charlotte helped her grandma translate the diary she kept during her journey to New York City from French to English. She put together a scrapbook of her grandmothers’ photographs. Pictures of “The Elite” on the beach forming pyramids with their bodies fill the pages of the scrapbook.