Travels Through Jewish America [antikvár]

today i am an ethnic groupI have written a great deal about the Lower East Side of New York City between the years 1905 and 1917, the years which saw a massive migration to America of Jews from Eastern Europe. I knew a lot about the immigrant Jew, his family, his beliefs, his hardships, his joys because I was part of that migration. In 1904, my father, Leib Goldhirsch, left his family in Mikulintsy, a village in eastern Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and with my old-est brother, Jacob, immigrated to the New World, where he hoped there would be more opportunities for his children.Landsleit was the spur. Landsleit is the reason most immigrants got anywhere. Landsleit is the collection of friends, relatives, neigh-bors, who had arrived at someplace earlier. In New York, my father got a job teaching Hebrew in a Talmud Tor ah and my brother got a license and a pushcart and started peddling. Between them they saved enough money to pay the passage for my mother, my two older sisters, and me.Wearing a babushka, my mother carried me down the gangplank of the Graf Waldersee, Clara and Matilda tugging at her skirts. The Graf Waldersee of the North German Lloyd Line left Hamburg on April 1, 1905, and beat the Mayflower to America. It took only eleven days for the Waldersee to get to New York compared to three months for the Mayflower to get to Plymouth Rock. When the United States declared war in 1917, the Graf Waldersee was in New York Harbor, but before we could intern the ship, the lousy Germans scuttled it.Though my mother wore a big red tag which spelled our name, for their own convenience and probably through their own ignorance the immigration officials changed it from Goldhirsch to Goldhurst.Thirty-seven years later, I changed the name againto Golden