A guest post By David Winner, author of MASTER LOVERS
In my first years in New York in the nineties, I would wander through the Lower East Side, past the bodegas, the Dominican restaurants, and the palimpsests on the sides of buildings recalling the Jewish past with no clue that I had any familial connection to the landscape. Growing up celebrating Christmas in Virginia, I was barely conscious of even being Jewish. But at nearly thirty, my family history suddenly revealed itself to me. My great-great-grandfather, a rabbi, had played a crucial role in building the Jewish Lower East Side, and the actions of his son, my great-grandfather, helped lead it to financial devastation.
In New York in the nineties, Angela (my then girlfriend now wife) and I would visit my great aunt Dorle Jarmel Soria in her expansive midtown apartment. Dorle, cogent despite her advanced age, told us tales of Maria Callas, Leonard Bernstein, and other friends from her music publicist past. She spoke often of her beloved mother, Grand, but rarely of her father, Louis, a shadowy figure. I learned nothing of earlier generations as if the family had spontaneously generated with Dorle’s birth in 1900.
But one afternoon in 1994, while walking down Canal Street, Angela chanced across the insignia S. Jarmulowsky and Sons emblazoned upon a grand neo-classical former bank building. The AIA Guide to New York revealed him to be Sender Jarmulowsky, and he turned out to be Dorle’s grandfather. Gradually, I pieced his story together. Born impoverished in Poland in 1840, then orphaned in a cholera epidemic, Sender’s life spectacularly transcended expectations like a Jewish Horatio Alger through a series of happenstances with significant repercussions for New York Jewish history. After being adopted by a rabbi, he became a rabbi himself then married into wealth. Both a Talmudic scholar and a nascent businessman, Sender and his wife, Rebecca Markels moved to Hamburg and started brokering the steerage class boat tickets to New York so essential to the growth of the Lower East Side, which would become the largest community of Jews in the world. Senders would buy cheaper passages during winter with fake passenger names and then sell them for more when the prices rose in the summer because the shipping lines were willing to change the names on tickets. Despite his lucrative trade, Sender’s application for permanent residency in Hamburg was denied, and my great-great-grandfather and his family emigrated to New York in 1873. He built the bank on Canal Street for the same population that bought ship passages, nearly half the Lower East Side, as well as helped found the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue nearby.
But after Sender’s death, his sons Louis and Meyer irreparably damaged the very community that their father had helped build. They used account holder money to buy buildings in Harlem where they were involved in racist redistricting, and when account holders began taking money out at the onset of WW1, the bank defaulted on the infamous Black Tuesday, destroying lives and livelihoods. Members of families brought from Europe by the Sender committed suicide.
Dorle and her family escaped an angry mob outside their building by climbing up the fire escape and eventually changed their names and the arc of their lives. This dark Jewish history
was almost ignored for generations, perhaps due to what historian, Tony Michels, has called “Jewish Triumphalism,” a tendency to focus on positive stories. And I, too, have not always been comfortable speaking of the corrupt Jewish bankers in my lineage.
A pariah in her community but liberated from traditional orthodox female expectations, Dorle embarked on a thrilling series of escapades and accomplishments. Her five simultaneous love affairs in the 30’s are recounted in Master Lovers, my recently released memoir.
In the years following the crisis, Lower East Side Jews began to disappear to Brooklyn, New Jersey, Long Island. As the neighborhood grew impoverished in the economic blight of the seventies and eighties, the Jarmulowsky bank became a sweatshop, the Eldridge Street Synagogue fell into disrepair, and the Spanish replaced Yiddish on the streets.
Now Spanish itself has been replaced by English, as the Latinx community that came up in the wake of the Jews has been largely displaced by the gentrification sweeping across almost all lower New York since the 90’s. Ironically, the apex of that gentrification is the swanky hotel and cocktail bar, 9 Orchards, now occupying the Jarmulowsky bank. The family story that I’d only stumbled upon later in the life of “Old World Orphan,” Sender Jarmulowsky and his sons, the tale Jewish historians sought to ignore, is prominently displayed on their webpage and placards and brochures throughout the building. With this secret story reframed as an intriguing factoid from the past, perhaps now, with over a century gone by, it might slip past the gatekeepers of Jewish Triumphalism, redefined as a heritage to claim.
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David Winner is the author of a fiction/nonfiction mashup, Master Lovers, and three novels, Tyler’s Last, The Cannibal of Guadalajara, and the Kirkus-starred Enemy Combatant. He won the 2009 Gival Press Novel Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, Fiction, The Iowa Review, The Millions, The Kenyon Review and other publications in the U.S. and the U.K. David is also the fiction editor of The American, a monthly magazine based in Rome, a senior editor at Statorec magazine, and a frequent contributor to The Brooklyn Rail. He is co-editor of the New York Times-noted Writing the Virus: Work for Statorec Magazine and is a columnist for 3 Quarks Daily.
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