Sylvia Pankhurst's Passover in New York - a walk through the radical Jewish history of the Lower East Side

For Dana Mills

We had noticed the building on East Broadway three weeks before, when searching for the story of a fire in a school by Seward Park in 1911. With the word "Forward" emblazoned in the brickwork on the side, it was hard to miss. It was intriguing and seemed to recall the language of the German socialist movement.

I wrote up the story of the fire in the school which had taken place only two weeks after the devastating fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, not far away in Greenwich Village - and stored the "Forward" building for later.

On 2 July, Morgan and I returned to the Lower East Side ahead of the book launch of A Suffragette in America. Beforehand, we walked the streets and entered the synagogue on Eldridge Street. Opened in 1887, it provided a place of worship for the growing number of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who were making their home on the Lower East Side. The ornate and heavy building represented arrival, presence. After falling into disrepair, it has now been magnificently restored.

The synagogue on Eldridge Street, photographs by Katherine Connelly, 2 July 2019.

That bright light of a late afternoon in July dazzled through the stained glass windows, making everything else appear darker. The vivid paint work with its golden stars picked out by great collections of lamps.

It was here we learnt more about the "Forward" building which was featured on a display screen. Built in 1912, it was the headquarters of the Yiddish-language socialist newspaper "The Forward" which had indeed taken its name from the German Social Democrats' newspaper Vorwärts.

The Forward Building

In the four roundels next to the words "FORWARD BUILDING" engraved in stone over the doorway are the faces of the newspaper's German socialist heroes: Karl Marx (who looks rather more like William Morris), Ferdinand Lassalle, Friedrich Engels and one other - no one can quite remember now, it might be August Bebel, champion of women's rights, or it might by Wilhelm Liebknecht, a founder of the German Social Democratic Party, comrade and sometime drinking partner of Marx, or it might be his son, leading anti-war socialist Karl Liebknecht, who was murdered alongside Rosa Luxemburg by the proto-fascist Freikorps in 1919.

Engels in New York

Lassalle

Bebel or Liebknecht?

Marx

The size of the building indicates the impressive achievement and reach of this socialist newspaper just three years after a group of predominantly Jewish, working-class women in New York led a strike wave against the sweatshops that galvanised low paid, immigrant women workers across the country.

After squinting up at the faces in the roundels, it was time for the book launch - on the street parallel, Henry Street.

This place had been very specially chosen for the launch, there was nowhere else in New York City I would rather have spoken about Sylvia Pankhurst's A Suffragette in America than in the Henry Street Settlement.

The most lyrical and magical of all the chapters in Pankhurst's book is one which describes a journey across the New York streets to a place where 'the shops bore Yiddish signs'. Here she enters a house filled with animated, political women whom she joins for a meal: '[e]xcept for the big crackling wafers of unleavened bread, it does not matter of what the meal consists'. She is then taken to see children from the tenements performing 'Sleeping Beauty', in which awakening of the princess symbolises the coming of spring.

Researching the book, I worked out that Pankhurst was describing visiting Henry Street Settlement - a social welfare institution founded by the nurse Lillian D. Wald in 1893. Unlike many Settlement Houses, which operated on the assumption that the poor needed saving from themselves by an enlightened elite, Wald used her experience of suffering on the Lower East Side to demand reforms from the elites. She was determined that her Settlement House would espouse comradeship - and an important part of that was celebrating Passover with her neighbours:

"Hospitality", she wrote in her memoir Windows on Henry Street, "is a tradition in our neighborhood. One of the invitations most prized at Henry Street is that which bids us welcome to a Passover service."

Alice Lewisohn, a close friend of Wald's who helped choreograph the Sleeping Beauty, remembered that the very objects in the dining room were symbols of welcome:

"The brasses and coppers on the mantels, or the Russian bowl on the table, provided the link between the colonial decorum [the era the house on Henry Street was built] and the foreign homelandds of the neighbors. The relationship between the old and the new countries was always preserved." (Alice Lewisohn Crowley, The Neighborhood Playhouse: Leaves from a Theater Scrapbook [New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1959], p.11.)

Portrait of Lillian D. Wald with menorahs and samovar in the dining room at Henry Street, 2 July 2019.

The dining room at Henry Street Settlement.

The brasses - menorahs and samovars and bowls - remain in the dining room of Henry Street today. Years later, Alice Lewisohn would tell a biographer of Lillian Wald about the atmosphere of gatherings in the dining room where women "sparkled on during the meal, recounting episodes, telling tales spiced with native dialect, wit and fun. Bubbling spirits sparred back and forth across the table". (Quoted in R. L. Duffus, Lillian Wald: Neighbor and Crusader [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938], p.136.)

Pankhurst too remembered "a loud discussion at the table". The food at the meal and the children's performance about the coming of spring indicate that she joined them for one of those prized Passover meals at Henry Street. The year was probably 1912 - the same year that the "Forward" building opened.

While researching and writing the introduction to this chapter, I spoke to Dana Mills, a friend, comrade and expert on the history of radical dance (author of Dance and Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries). She impressed upon me that the same people who came to Henry Street to break bread, the parents of the children who danced in the Sleeping Beauty were those who were taking action against the sweatshops.

On 2 July, Dana and I launched A Suffragette in America in conversation in the dining room at Henry Street. In the room were activists, and dancers, and people who had come to Henry Street in their youth.

Launching A Suffragette in America in conversation with Dana Mills, dining room at Henry Street Settlement, 2 July 2019.

It was an exciting conversation. One of the things I spoke about was how Henry Street, as a place that championed reform and working-class access to and time for culture, resonated with Pankhurst's socialism. Dana spoke about how the project Pankhurst had admired in its infancy - the Lewisohns' Neighborhood Playhouse - trained some of the most exciting and avant garde dancers of the twentieth century, including Anna Sokolow, whose mother, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, was a socialist in the garment workers' union in New York.

Watching the Sleeping Beauty at Henry Street in 1912, Pankhurst was captivated. The coming of spring seemed also to represent a different future: "we might begin to be brothers and sisters from that hour." It was a fleeting moment; acutely conscious of the poverty around her she felt "the cold hard world outside dimmed the brightness and warmth glowing in my heart, and seemed to bolster up anew the barriers I had thought so easy to surmount." But hope was there - and it lasted Pankhurst a lifetime.

As I write this from lockdown in London, I am acutely aware that the Coronavirus means that Passover will be very different for my Jewish friends this year. And so, at a time when workers are again resisting the (Amazon) sweatshops, I dedicate this piece about the coming of spring and the hope that springs from walking the history of the Lower East Side to my friend and comrade Dana Mills.