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Maria Balinska 'Boiling Over' (2008)
Contributed by Sam Stabler

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The year 1882 saw the beginning of a mass exodus of Jews - men, women, and children - from Eastern Europe to America. Over two million people arrived in the years leading up to the First World War, an annual average of more than sixty thousand. Carrying little more than small bundles of clothing and about $26 worth of saving, the majority headed straight for the crowded streets of the Lower East Side of Manhattan Island. 'The pent-in sultry atmosphere' wrote the journalist Abraham Cahan... 'was laden with nausea and pierced with a discordant and, as it were, plaintive buzz.'

The burgeoning Jewish community needed kosher food and hence the religious supervision of baking to guarantee there had been no contact with forbidden fats or meats. Food provided one of the few available constants and comforts in these new alien surroundings. 'Like every foreign colony in this city' Abraham Cahan observed, 'the Russian and Polish Jews cling to their methods and form in the matter [of bread]."] The new immigrants wanted breaded which tasted the way it did back home: dark rye, braided challah and, of course, bagels.

Bagels were part of the standard selection produced by bakeries on the Lower East side whose numbers increased as the immigrants flooded in. The conditions were terrible. The Lower East Side bakeries were located mainly along or, to be more precise, under, Hester and Rivington Streets, down steep flights of stairs to a space rarely higher than 7 foot. Because of the rudimentary ovens, the temperature was fierce and on the whole, impossible to control. There was no ventilation. Bakers worked stripped to their waist for thirteen or fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. Typically, young and unmarried, they often lived at their workplace sleeping between the mounds of rising dough and the oven with cats, rats and cockroaches 'as big as birds' for company. Illness was common and lifespan short. And if they did somehow manage to find wife and start a family, it was not unheard of for bakers not to recognize their own children, so rarely were they at home.

Hyam Plumka was seventeen when he arrived in the United States and began working as a bread carrier. 'Such slavery went on in all the bakeries... the workday was eighteen hours in a twenty-four-hour period - from four in the morning until ten at night... On Thursday nights the bakers did not let me sleep at all.' His description of how bakeries cut corners turns the stomach: "In every Jewish bakery the bakery bosses used 'spoiled eggs' that is, eggs that were already very old and could not be sold. The bread carrier had to gather them and put them in a big cup. When I went to gather the eggs, it didn't go well. For inside some of the broken eggs were 'little animals'. Some of the eggs gave a burst when I cracked them open. My hands became full of white worms. The worms were crawling all over the shells of the eggs... Every baker used the spoiled eggs... The same kind of cheating went on in all the Jewish bakeries."

Despite the miserable working conditions and the cruel disappointment, they must have felt, the new arrival were not, to begin with, interested in challenging the system. Exhaustion was an obvious but not insignificant factor. At the same time, there was little desire to limit working hours; every extra dollar earned meant a dollar saved for a wife's or parent's Atlantic passage.

haggadah Section: Yachatz
Source: Maria Balinksa "The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread" (2008)

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