Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? Read Online Free PDF Page A

laundry. You know, that didn’t encourage them to behave well.”
    If Henry had once been found undesirable as a son-in-law, he was now a prosperous gentleman, respectable and respected. Lean and strikingly good looking as a youth, he had since acquired a stomach but still cut a dashing figure with his handlebar mustache and a gold chain across his vest. He behaved like other well-to-do bourgeois. A coachman drove him to his office in the Lower Broadway business district. In the evenings he dressed for dinner and afterward might visit the Progress or Criterion clubs, where he would pass a dignified hour with brandy and cigars. He served on the board of trustees of Mount Sinai Hospital, one of his few remaining concessions to his Jewish roots. Now known as J. Henry Rothschild, he had reached a proud middle age in which the fruits of struggle and American capitalism had combined to give him his heart’s desire.
    Ready-to-wear cloaks—styling, producing, and selling them—were the chief passion of Henry’s life. It was an extremely competitive field, more notable for bankruptcies and nervous collapses than for philosophic contemplation or the reading of great literature. Beginning as a stock clerk at a time when cloaks were still custom-tailored or imported, Henry had foreseen the possibilities of manufactured women’s apparel and had associated himself while still in his twenties with the former owner of a retail cloak shop, Meyer Jonasson. The pioneering Jonasson, also a German Jew, saw no reason why fine cloaks could not be mass produced. He had need of a bold young man with ideas and energy, and in no time at all Henry was established as a partner in the firm. By the time Dorothy was born, Meyer Jonasson & Company had been a household name, the General Motors of the cloak and suit industry, for nearly fifteen years. The garment industry called J. Henry Rothschild “the greatest salesman of them all,” a man whose name was synonymous with “personal magnetism, good fellowship, and loyalty to his friends.”
    While Jonasson and other German Jews controlled the manufacture of cloaks, they relied for labor upon tens of thousands of Jews who had emigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1880s and 1890s and settled in a half square mile on the Lower East Side. The second-generation Germans welcomed these Russian and Polish co-religionists as they would have greeted a plague. The immigrants, they believed, gave all Jews a bad name: They were filthy and diseased, had no objections to crowding ten to a room in tenements that stank of onions and urine, and were grateful to work eighty-five hours a week doing piecework for pennies. At 358 Broadway, Henry Rothschild proudly conducted out-of-town buyers through the Jonasson factory, which appeared to be a model of sanitation and employee comfort. In fact, practically none of the work was performed on the premises. It was farmed out to small contractors who operated the sweatshops where Jonasson’s garments were made up by the newly arrived immigrants.
    Jewish New York, by the 1890s, was a dual universe. One half was the uptown refuge of the Rothschilds, with its cheeky Irish maids and seaside houses, the other was Jewtown’s Essex and Hester streets with its old-world samovars and menorahs, its rag peddlers and Pig Market, its hives of cutters, pressers, basters, finishers, and embryonic anarchists. Henry Rothschild, family legend says, had a holiday ritual. Every Christmas Eve, it was his habit to ride through the streets of the Lower East Side in his coach. In his lap lay a stack of white envelopes, each containing a crisp new ten-dollar bill. These tips he distributed to the neighborhood police officers.
    Conflicts and a sense of shame persisted throughout his youngest daughter’s life. Never once was she heard to refer to the invisible backdrop of her early life, the humid, steamy pressing rooms where the temperatures reached 120 degrees. It was not only her father and his