JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II---- Episode 9

    CONTINUING WITH LIFE STORY OF I. I. RABI, NOBEL PRIZE--WINNING PHYSICIST, WHO GREW UP DIRT POOR AND  JEWISH IN MANHATTAN & BROOKLYN IN THE FIRST PART OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

    Home to the Rabis was a tiny, two-room flat, one room serving as kitchen, dining room, and living room ; and the other a windowless bedroom, barely large enough for a bed. The toilet in the back yard was shared by other occupants of the building. In these two rooms lived six people : David and Sheindel Rabi ; Isidor and his little sister Gertrude ; and two boarders. Rabi could never remember where and how, in those cramped quarters, they all slept. 
   Home was in a slum---a Jewish ghetto. The streets teemed with activity. There were kids, kids, and more kids. "The streets were ours," wrote Irving Howe. "Everyplace else --- home, school, shop --- belonged to the grownups. But the streets belonged to us." There were gangs of Jewish boys, tough boys who roamed the streets and terrorized those who could, and would, be frightened. It took ingenuity to survive; and Rabi, though small for his age, made use of a special gift : he could tell stories. He so fascinated the bullying big boys with Bible stories that he became their mascot. 

   The neighborhood was a typical slum : "There were lots of prostitutes and saloons. Every intersection had three or four saloons. . . And there lots of synagogues." Synagogues and saloons : contradictory symbols of life in the ghetto of the Lower East Side. Young Rabi could, on the one hand, witness pious and devoted allegiance to religious life and, on the other, observe flagrant disregard of law. In their two-room flat, Rabi and Gertrude were thrust into the mature world of adult conversation. "We had relatives coming to our house who expressed different political ideas," Gertrude has said. Rabi listened and learned. And he read. 

   Of all the Bible stories, one held a special and unique appeal --- the Creation story : "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. " Rabi felt that here was something to explore, to understand, and, yes, to question : "The first verses of Genesis were very moving to me as a kid. The whole idea of the Creation --- the mystery and the philosophy of it. It sank in on me, and it's something I still feel."

   Although later he would forgo the practices and the rituals of Orthodox Judaism,  basic elements of that religious tradition remain the essence of humankind : "There's no question that basically, somewhere way down, I'm an Orthodox Jew. In fact, to this very day, if you ask for my religion, I say 'Orthodox Hebrew' --- in the sense that the church I'm not attending is that one. If I were to go to church, that's the one I would go to. That's the one I failed. It doesn't mean I'm something else." And with a conviction that has been tested by his training as a scientist, and that has endured his active participation in some of the most noteworthy events of the twentieth century, Rabi could say up until his lips were sealed by death in 1988, "My early upbringing, so struck by God, the maker of the world, this has stayed with me."
In 1907, David Rabi moved his family to Brownsville, a community in Brooklyn. [Best keep yo honky ass out of this hood.] Brownsville, in 1907, was like the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but with a difference. Each was the site of large Jewish populations, whose character was essentially the same. Both communities brought together recent immigrants who had in common their religious faith and their POVERTY.  Brownsville differed from the Lower East Side in being rural : there were chickens and goats in the streets, and the streets themselves were mud when it rained and dust when the sun beat down. Milk could be bought directly from a farmer. Brownsville was, in essence, the Lower East Side with dirt roads and nanny goats. The Rabis were fortunate : they had a nice yard behind their house and, for two years, Rabi was an avid gardener. 
   The move from Manhattan to Brooklyn was motivated by economics. Since the first little grocery store in the Lower East Side was not bringing in enough money, David Rabi opened a new store in Brownsville. The family lived in three rooms behind their store. When, at the age of nine, Rabi began to take a more active part in the operation of the store, it became, even more than before, a family operation. After school and on school holidays, he would deliver groceries around the neighborhood. And he would listen. "My father had very little to say and my mother was not very talkative, but for some reason the store became the neighborhood meeting place. Families would congregate there, and the conversation---on a wide range of subjects --- was very lively. This is how things were."