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always knew I was going to be in the restaurant business,” he said later. “There’s always food there. I grew up so poor, and this was a way of guaranteeing that I’d never be hungry.”
    That Sunday, Nathan had Israel buy him another copy of the Journal . This one advertised a job in a luncheonette. He took the newspaper, folded to display the ad, and again asked passersby to help guide him to the address, on Delancey Street near the terminus of the Williamsburg Bridge. When he got there, he realized that the place was closed on Sunday. Nathan couldn’t understand. Why advertise in a Sunday-edition newspaper when you were closed that day?
    A wasted trip. As he stood in front of the place, a teamster with a horse and wagon pulled up, a deliveryman for Holstein Bakery on Houston Street. He had come to collect the empty cartons from the previous week’s deliveries, egg crates that were tossed into a pile after they were empty. The teamster saw Nathan, and the two of them struck up a conversation in Yiddish.
    â€œWhy did they advertise if they’re not going to be open Sunday?” Nathan asked.
    The teamster explained the baffling ins and outs of big-city commerce. If the luncheonette owner advertised for two days, he would receive a cheaper rate. Ads on Sunday were cheaper still. So the owner had taken the ad out for both the Sunday and Monday editions of the newspaper.
    â€œBut if you’re going to come back Monday,” the teamster told him, “get here before six o’clock, and you’ll be first.”
    Nathan was there Monday morning at five. “I got up at four o’clock and walked an hour in the dark. I found the place more easily because I was there the day before. The first time, it took longer because I had to ask people where to go.”
    He saw the luncheonette boss arrive. Nathan knew enough not to bother him right away; he just made sure the man saw that he was first in line. The boss went in, set the coffee to boil, and came back out to give some to his job seekers.
    Then he addressed the eager beaver in English.
    â€œWant to wash dishes?”
    Nathan didn’t understand the words. “But I said, ‘Yes.’ I nodded my head for yes.”
    â€œFour and a half dollars a week.” The boss held up four fingers and crooked another one to indicate half. His name was Max Leventhal, and he was offering low-level employment to a worker who had already secured a position in a luggage factory that offered almost twice the pay.
    â€œI had a job for eight dollars a week,” Nathan recalled. “But no food. And it was a factory. I didn’t want to be a slave in the factory, breathing dust and everything. Those were my fears. And I always wanted to be in a restaurant. I told myself that I should take the job for four and a half, and maybe I could work up to something else.”
    Dishwashing—“pearl diving” in a slang formulation just then becoming current in his new homeland. When anyone started at the very bottom of the food service business, it’s what they found themselves doing. It wasn’t glamorous—in fact, it was the exact opposite of glamorous, but it was a foot in the door.
    *   *   *
    That same Monday, the first reports of a disaster at sea began to filter into New York. The passenger steamship RMS Carpathia radioed bulletins to the Cape Race wireless station in Newfoundland, but the transmissions were confused. Initial accounts had Carpathia towing the crippled luxury liner RMS Titanic into port at Halifax. The Monday-morning headline in The New York Times scooped the world:
    NEW LINER TITANIC HITS AN ICEBERG; SINKING BY THE BOW AT MIDNIGHT; WOMEN PUT OFF IN LIFEBOATS; LAST WIRELESS AT 12:27 AM BLURRED.
    No one wanted to believe it. Philip Franklin, a spokesperson for the owners of the ship, had a stalwart message to reporters that morning: “We place absolute confidence in the