Famous Nathan by Mr. Lloyd Handwerker Page A

arrival, in May 1912, the largest suffragist demonstration in history was held in New York City. Left-leaning free speech protests sprang up across the country, challenging the silencing of labor advocates in San Diego and elsewhere. Both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League had been founded just a few years earlier.
    The Titanic disaster continued to cast a pall. The front page of the New York Times featured news of the sinking for eighteen straight days. Funerals, memorials, and relief benefits for the doomed ship studded the New York City social calendar. On Sunday, April 21, stage stars George M. Cohan and Eddie Foy gathered together Broadway singers and dancers for a gala benefit, while the following Monday the celebrated Neapolitan tenor Enrico Caruso sang Arthur Sullivan’s “The Lost Chord” at the Metropolitan Opera House. Official inquiries in the United States and in Britain kept alive the contentious issue of who was to blame for the catastrophe.
    A popular sentiment of the time was “God went down with Titanic, ” meaning that the randomness of the calamity challenged faith. Commentators extracted various lessons from the wreck, including those that were critical of capitalism, lax maritime regulations, and the hubris of the ship’s owners. From pulpits came sermons that linked the sinking to the evils of modern decadence. “The remote cause of this unspeakable disaster,” preached the archbishop of Baltimore, “is the excessive pursuit of luxury.”
    The catastrophe overshadowed the presidential election primary season that year, essentially a three-way race between incumbent Republican Robert Taft, Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, and former Princeton University president (and eventual winner) Woodrow Wilson. From the left came the Socialist candidacy of Eugene V. Debs, orchestrator of the Pullman Strike.
    Nathan shared the New York Jewish community with some of the leading historical figures of the day. The pioneer Zionist David Ben-Gurion was there, as was, briefly, Leon Trotsky. Another arrival was the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, author of the Tevye stories that would later be dramatized on Broadway as Fiddler on the Roof .
    Passing through the same Lower East Side streets as figures famous and otherwise, living amid noteworthy historical shifts, Nathan pursued his anonymous workaday ways. He lived with relatives, for a period in “a shoemaker’s cellar,” other times in tenements, always paying no more than a dollar a month in rent. He later remembered the meager weekend fare in his lodgings. “Eggs were $1.40 a dozen [$32 in today’s money], so they only gave me one—they only ate one egg for Sunday breakfast.”
    It didn’t matter much what his impoverished home life was like, since he was always working. Nathan negotiated the world of Manhattan luncheonettes with something that approached surefooted confidence. He seemed to know instinctively when to leave a job and when to stay, when to follow a boss or when to cut himself loose.
    Within a month, the restaurant where he originally worked was sold. The new owner, Sam, asked Nathan to stay on. “Sam called me ‘Benny,’” Nathan recalled, because of the problem with multiple Nathans working in the same place. “He said to me, ‘Benny, I want you to be the manager.’ So he made me the manager of the coffee counter, cakes, and pies, in charge of everything. He gave me the keys to the store. I came in at six o’clock to open up the place.”
    But Nathan’s old boss beckoned. Max Leventhal was opening a new luncheonette on Eighteenth Street between Fifth and Sixth, near architect Daniel H. Burnham’s Flatiron Building, one of Manhattan’s first skyscrapers and surely its most distinctive. The neighborhood was busy, near to the shopping district called Ladies’ Mile.
    Max came to Nathan