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Making A Way Out Of The Slum
by
It was the one note of disappointment I heard: the boys would not stay on the farm. To the aged it gave a new purpose, new zest in life. There was a place for them, whereas the tenement had none. The young could not be made to stay. It was the old story. I had heard it in New England in explanation of its abandoned farms; the work was too hard, was without a break. The good sense of the Jew recognizes the issue and meets it squarely. In Woodbine strenuous efforts were being made to develop the social life by every available means. No opportunity is allowed to pass that will “give the boy a chance.” Here on the farms there were wiser fathers than the Lithuanian. Let one of them speak for himself.
His was one of a little settlement of fifteen families that had fought it out alone, being some distance from any of the villages. In the summer they farmed, and in the winter tailoring for the Philadelphia shops helped them out. Radetzky was a presser in the city ten years. There were nine in his house. “Seven to work on the farm,” said the father, proudly, surveying the brown, muscular troop, “but the two little ones are good in summer at berry-picking.” They had just then come in from the lima-bean field, where they had planted poles. Even the baby had helped.
“I put two beans in a hill instead of four. I tell you why,” said the farmer; “I wait three days, and see if they come up. If they do not, I put down two more. Most of them come up, and I save two beans. A farmer has got to make money on saving expenses.”
The sound of a piano interrupted him. “It is my daughter,” he said. “They help me, and I let them have in turn what young people want–piano, music lessons, a good horse to drive. It pays. They are all here yet. In the beginning we starved together, had to eat corn with the cows, but the winter tailoring pulled us through. Now I want to give it up. I want to buy the next farm. With our 34 acres, it will make 60, and we can live like men, and let those that need the tailoring get it. I wouldn’t exchange this farm for the best property in the city.”
His two eldest sons nodded assent to his words.
Late that night, when we were returning to Woodbine, we came suddenly upon a crowd of boys filling the road. They wore the uniform of the Hirsch School. It was within ten minutes of closing-time, and they were half a mile from home. The superintendent pulled up and asked them where they were going. There was a brief silence, then the hesitating answer:–
“It is a surprise party.”
Mr. Sabsovich eyed the crowd sharply and thought awhile.
“Oh,” he said, remembering all at once, “it is Mr. Billings and his new wife. Go ahead, boys!”
To me, trying vainly to sleep in the village hotel in the midnight hour with a tin-pan serenade to the newly married teacher going on under the window, there came in a lull, with the challenge of the loudest boy, “Mr. Billings! If you don’t come down, we will never go home,” an appreciation of the Woodbine system of discipline which I had lacked till then. It was the Radetzky plan over again, of giving the boys a chance, to make them stay on the farm.
If it is difficult to make the boy stay, it is sometimes even harder to make the father go. Out of a hundred families picked on New York’s East Side as in especial need of transplanting to the land, just seven consented when it came to the journey. They didn’t relish the “society of the stumps.” The Jews’ colonies need many things before they can hope to rival the attraction of the city to the man whom the slum has robbed of all resources. They sum themselves up in the social life of which the tenement has such unsuspected stores in the closest of touch with one’s fellows. The colonies need business opportunities to boom them, facilities for marketing produce in the cities, canning-factories, store cellars for the product of the vineyards–all of which time must supply. Though they have given to hundreds the chance of life, it cannot be said for them that they have demonstrated yet the Jews’ ability to stand alone upon the land, backed as they are by the Hirsch Fund millions. In fact, I have heard no such claim advanced. But it can at least be said that for these they have solved the problem of life and of the slum. And that is something!