Famous Nathan by Mr. Lloyd Handwerker

women arrested as prostitutes were Jewish.
    Many immigrants sought livelihoods in the New World that were simply a natural continuation of what they had done in the old. Polish tailors became sweatshop pieceworkers in their new tenement homes. Former Ukrainian peddlers bought pushcarts and trolled Orchard Street for customers. There had been brothels in Galicia just as there were in the Tenth Ward.
    What is today euphemistically called the “hospitality industry”—restaurants and hotels—had its Old World incarnation, too. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish entrepreneurs were among the only people licensed to sell alcohol and operate public houses and dining establishments in Poland, Galicia, and the Pale. Since the trade was seen as beneath the dignity of the Polish gentry, it was traditionally left to Jews to satisfy the demand.
    Nathan had worked in bakeries in Galicia. His entry into the restaurant business in Manhattan could be seen as carrying on both a personal and a cultural tradition that had its roots in his eastern European past. For Nathan, restaurant work in America was the next step after having sold knishes in his homeland. The Delancey Street luncheonette catered to people just like him, the tenement masses in the densely populated Jewish neighborhoods all around. The language barrier wasn’t absolute, since at least a few of the customers were ordering in Yiddish.
    At that first food service job, he learned the tricks that would serve him well later, such as the proper way to make lemonade. His boss, the other Nathan, showed him how. “He didn’t even have a glass to squeeze out the lemons. I had to squeeze with my hands. With a whole bushel of lemons, I put half a gallon of water in and squeezed them out.”
    A contemporary board of health might look askance, but at the time, the practice was to put whole lemons into water and to hand-squeeze the citrus to release the essential oils from the skins. This gave the drink a fuller flavor.
    Nathan continued the process. “I put another half a gallon of water in to wash all the peels for more juice, added another gallon in with the lemons, then put in four pounds of sugar.”
    The final and most necessary step was to ensure the sugar melted in the bottom of the four-gallon lemonade pail. “There shouldn’t be a lump of sugar at the bottom. My boss had me make lemonade and orangeade. He only had to show me once.”
    Nathan’s Old-Fashioned Lemonade
    1 bushel (80–100) lemons, sliced or quartered
    3 + gallons water
    4 pounds (8 cups) sugar
    In a half gallon of the water, hand-squeeze the lemons, making sure to bruise the peels. Add additional half gallon of water. Add four pounds of sugar and the last gallons of water to taste, mixing thoroughly to dissolve the sugar.
    *   *   *
    Although the ghetto community of the Lower East Side might have tried hard to ignore it, there existed a wider world beyond the Tenth Ward. At the time of Nathan Handwerker’s arrival, that wider world found itself in a tumult. The year 1912 was one of those transformative years in the United States, with repeated social upheavals, controversies, and battles roiling the body politic. To a greater or lesser degree, every one of the day’s signal issues would impact the life and business of the greenhorn immigrant.
    Even as the newcomer made his way as a luncheonette counterman, anti-immigration forces were pushing a bill through Congress that would require each new arrival to pass a literacy test. Such legislation would have denied entry into the United States to the functionally illiterate Nathan Handwerker. Only a veto by President Taft prevented the measure from becoming law.
    At the same time that anti-immigration organizations were mobilizing on the political front, progressive initiatives sought to further what today we could call human rights. Just a month after Nathan’s