JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II---Episode 8

                     I. I. RABI COMES TO NEW YORK CITY AT AGE 
                     TWO FROM EASTERN EUROPE 

   When the Rabi family settled in 1900 in New York City, it was not in the Upper West Side alongside wealthy German Jews , but the Lower East Side of Manhattan which, back then, was almost totally dirt-poor Jewish. The city blocks were subdivided  into cultural enclaves with Jews from the same parts of Europe banding together. The Rabis lived at 91 Willett Street in the midst of other Jews from Galicia, while David Rabi belonged to the society of Rymanower Young Men. 
   Young Rabi spoke English in the streets and Yiddish in his home. David and Sheindel Rabi, on the other hand, were never proficient with English, and, as a result, were reticent when they found themselves in an English-speaking environment. Thus it was that Israel Isaac got a new name. When Sheindel enrolled her son in public school, she was asked his name, and responded, "Izzy," the name she and her husband called him. Assuming Izzy to be short for Isidor, the school official put down that name : Israel Isaac Rabi was now, officially, Isidor Rabi. The mistake was never corrected. Later, as a young man, Rabi's response to anti-Semitism was to bring back the second I for Isaac, and, in so doing, to defiantly assert his Jewishness. Throughout his professional career he was known as I. I. Rabi, the two I's standing for Isidor Isaac. To his friends, to his sister Gertrude, to his wife Helen, he was "Rabi" [ pronounced to rhyme with "Bobby"] or simply Rab. 

   The Rabis were Orthodox Hebrew --- a demanding religion. In In the regimen of Judaism, however, the life of the Rabis was buoyed up by their faith that God was directly involved with them, an active and interested participant in their daily and hourly affairs. "Even in casual conversation, God entered, not every paragraph, more like every sentence,  Rabi has said of his childhood. "There was a certain intimacy with the idea of God, a comfortable feeling. He was a relative in a way. You could deal with HIM as Abraham did. " 

   Orthodox Judaism is both culture as well as a religion. "Belief has it," writes Israel Rubin, "that the main virtue of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, on account of which they merited redemption, was their retention of distinctiveness in dress, names, and language. " Thus,the Rabis named their first-born Israel Isaac --- after his rabbi godfather --- a name that left no doubt as to the boy's Jewish identity. They spoke Yiddish : "My mother and father could only read and write Yiddish in Hebrew characters."  David and Sheindel, however, were determined to provide a secular education for their children [a daughter, Gertrude, was born in January 1903] ; and from his earliest youth, Rabi knew that he would go to college :"WHEN I LOOK BACK ON IT, IT SEEMS ABSURD, BECAUSE WE HAD HARDLY ENOUGH MONEY FOR FOOD."

   Rabi's education began, as did that of all proper Jewish boys, in  Hebrew school at the age of three. A poor boy, he was brought together with other poor boys into "some evil smelling basement," where an ill-paid teacher with "no idea of pedagogy" held forth. The teacher "opened the Bible, would look at a letter, and say, 'This is Aleph, the first letter of the alphabet.' " But Rabi learned to read, and quickly. He honed his reading skill on the only books available to him --- Yiddish books and, of course, the Bible. "I could read long before I went to public school. I could read a Yiddish newspaper." 

   The religious influence in Rabi's boyhood was enhanced by Old World superstition. Rymanow, located in extreme eastern Europe some fifty kilometers from the Russian border, is in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains ---- Dracula country, a region famous for its vampires and ghosts, its evil spirits and devils. Rabi heard many hair-raising stories as a child : stories about unaccountably strange things happening to people, stories about face-to-face encounters with ghosts, stories about horrors in the dark times of night. One of his most vivid childhood memories is about looking down a New York street and seeing the full moon poised at the end of it : "One time I was walking along and looked down the street which faced east. The moon was just rising. And it scared the hell out of me ! Absolutely scared the hell out of me." 

   Another reality served to strengthen and intensify the Rabis' hold on their religious faith : the reality of poverty. David Rabi, unskilled as he was, worked at a variety of menial tasks : as a night watchman, in a coal cellar, as an iceman, and in a sweatshop where women's blouses were manufactured. Eventually, by saving and borrowing money, he was able to open a little grocery store, which he ran before and after his long day in the sweatshop ; during the day, Sheindel Rabi was a shopkeeper. In spite of all their hard work, the little store was never successful.