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his youth? Wasn’t this a chance for new beginnings?
    He finished out the week at the shop but was increasingly restless. “I worked, but I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to be a shoemaker.”
    On Friday, Nathan asked his older brother to help him look for a new job. Israel bought a copy of the Der Morgen Zshurnal , the Jewish Morning Journal . New York was at that time an incredible newspaper town. There were 112 dailies, weeklies, and monthlies being published, including six in Yiddish, Yiddish-English, or Hebrew. That morning, Israel found Nathan an ad for employment at a luggage factory, across town at Fourteenth Street and Ninth Avenue. Clutching the newspaper with the ad circled, the rookie New Yorker set off into the maze of the city.
    North of Fourteenth Street, the grid plan brought a measure of order to the layout of Manhattan, but the old neighborhoods downtown could be confusing, a welter of crisscrossing streets and logic-defying lost quarters. In the area where Nathan headed through, for example, West Fourth Street actually intersected West Twelfth and headed north to West Thirteenth. He depended on the kindness of strangers to help him find his way.
    â€œI started to walk from downtown and asked, ‘Where is this?’ And I showed them the paper, the ad in the paper, so people showed me, ‘Go this way, that way.’ When I got to the factory, it was twelve o’clock, noon. I come upstairs, I see a Jew with a beard.”
    â€œWhat’s your trade?” asked the luggage factory boss, speaking Yiddish.
    â€œShoemaker,” answered Nathan.
    â€œCan you sew seams straight? With luggage, fancy leather luggage, you gotta sew seams.”
    Like job seekers everywhere, Nathan put the best face on his experience. “The best, straight, nothing better.”
    â€œI’ll give you eight dollars a week,” said his new boss.
    But since Nathan had arrived at the luggage factory midday on Friday, the place was about to close in observance of the Jewish Sabbath. The workers had already departed. His new employer told him to come back the following Monday at eight o’clock.
    â€œStill, it bothered me to work in the factory,” Nathan recalled. “I wanted something else, not to be a shopman.”
    Both the luggage factory and shoemaker’s shop participated in a Yiddish-based, highly communal Jewish culture that dominated whole city neighborhoods and entire industries. At this time, an astonishing 70 percent of America’s women’s clothing (and 40 percent of its men’s) was created in New York. Half the country’s garment factories were located there. And three quarters of the workers in the “needle trades” were Jewish.
    Jewish immigrants naturally gravitated to jobs where their coworkers came from the same area of the world and often from the same towns as they did. They wanted employment that did not require them to know English, that would allow them to maintain a kosher diet, keep the Sabbath, and observe the high holy days.
    Convivial as the fellowship of countrymen might be, the hours were long, and the pay paltry. The term “sweatshop” was born here, referring not only to the stifling atmosphere of the rooms where the work was done but to the fact that employers “sweated” their workers, “in the same manner an animal would be milked or bled,” in the words of one history. Social reformer Jacob Riis described typical sweatshop laborers as being “shut in the qualmy rooms … the livelong day.” It was this claustrophobic, dead-end labor against which Nathan Handwerker rebelled.
    Something else spurred him on to seek other occupations. He remembered his experience at the bakery in Galicia. It was hot, strenuous work, but at least he was always guaranteed a meal while employed. No one ever forgets childhood hunger. It was a specter that haunted Nathan as he grew to adulthood.
    â€œI