The Potato Factory

Chapter Twenty

Ikey had eight hundred and thirteen pounds on him. Some of this was the remainder of the money paid to him in Birmingham by Maggie the Colour and Silas Browne, and some furnished by Hannah as a ploy to convince him of her sincerity in aiding his intended escape. It was sufficient to pay his fare to America from Denmark, as well as allowing him to stock up on merchandise likely to be in short supply in the New World.

Ikey, always a dreamer and schemer, saw America as a land of rich pickings for a man of his character and talent. It was his intention to land with a portmanteau stuffed with merchandise to confound the locals.

Alas, this was not to be, the prices for these articles in Denmark being too high at the shopfront and, besides, it was against Ikey's principles to purchase goods which afforded only a small margin of profit. It had not occurred to him that the Danish Jews might not speak Yiddish or contain a Jewish criminal class who would furnish the merchandise he required direct from the fob pockets of the unsuspecting citizenry, and therefore at prices a lot more competitive than those obtainable in wholesale jewellery emporiums.

So Ikey took the first ship he could find bound for New York. Though his hands were empty his head was full of plans for a life lived on the straight and narrow path as a merchant jeweller.

The crossing was rough and utterly miserable. In late February the Atlantic swells were large and frequent gales whipped the tops of the steel-coloured waves into a fury of howling white spray. The small three-masted packet was tossed like a cork seemingly all the way to the mouth of the Hudson River.

On a cold March morning, with dirty islands of late ice still floating on the river, the ship anchored at the immigration wharf at Castle Gardens. By early afternoon Ikey had paid his entry fee, been subjected to a smallpox vaccination and was allowed to step onto the streets of New York as free as an English lark.

It is a part of the human imagination to carry in our minds pictures of places we have heard or read about, pictures which have no substance other than the bricks and mortar of pure speculation. Ikey had expected New York to be a city not unlike London, though perhaps more primitive, for New York too lay on a great river and spoke the English tongue with a strange half-Irish intonation.

As an English Jew Ikey had assumed that he would fit in snugly enough. After all, the Jews of his world were street traders and merchants and of a naturally talkative and friendly disposition with the inclination to congregate together, marry among themselves, and on those several pious occasions such as Passover, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to share their faith. They would also attend synagogue on the Sabbath as brothers according to the ancient laws of Abraham, the prophets and the rabbinical creed.

Being a Jew, while being a matter of religion and orthodoxy, was also one of temperament. A Jew does not expect any but his own kind to understand him. Being Jewish is not something you wear outwardly like a badge, rather it is something you feel inwardly. It is as if your heart beats to a different cadence. This is as true of the Jew who is a villain as it is of one who is a rabbi. The smell of a chicken soup fart with noodles is absolutely one hundred per cent unmistakably Jewish. If you should be making chicken soup, delicious chicken soup, and you wish to make it Jewish, maybe you could try making these noodles.

Beat two eggs with a bit of pepper and salt. Add flour until it is a stiff paste. Flour a cutting board, then roll out the paste until it is very thin. Allow to dry for two hours. Now cut the dough into strips about three inches long by one inch wide. Stack and cut again into matchlike strips. Separate them by tossing, and spread them out to dry. Then toss them with boiling chicken soup and boil for ten minutes. Guaranteed to produce first-class farts when added to chicken soup!

New York, Ikey told himself, would have its own Rosemary and Petticoat Lanes, its rookeries with noxious smells and a low-life similar to St Giles, Whitechapel and Shoreditch, and a population composed from rags to riches which seemed to live the one on top of the other. This was the situation in London, Amsterdam and Hamburg and, in fact, wherever European urban Jews could be found. A Jew was not a part-time Jew or a sometime Jew or a non-observing Jew, he was Jewish for the duration of his life. This gave a wandering Jew a strength and unity he could depend on wherever he found a congregation of his own people.

Ikey had not stopped to think that being a Jew also made him accountable to the dictates and rituals of his community. In the matter of being Jewish he was expected to act in a prescribed manner, but not necessarily as a good man. In the good man business, the ritualised and formal nature of the English and European Jewish code of behaviour had allowed the form to become more important than the function, Jewishness being more important than goodness.

Ikey never missed going to the synagogue, where he gained a reputation for being a devout man and an Israelite without guile. In the synagogue each has a separate seat with a box where he deposits his holy books and locks them up until he returns to worship. Ikey frequently made use of his box for the most unhallowed of purposes, concealing within it items which if discovered would have sent him 'across the water' several times over.

Yet Ikey was an excellent example of a pious, if not strictly orthodox, Jew. While he did not observe the dietary laws, mutton stew followed by a dish of curds being his most frequent repast, he never worked on the Sabbath. He paid his tithes, contributed to Jewish charity, took his seat in the synagogue and observed with a full heart Rosh Hashanah, Passover and Yom Kippur.

Therefore it came as a great surprise to him to find that what he had always taken for granted was no longer the case in New York. Being a Jew was none, or very few, of the mystical things he'd always supposed it to be, nor was it any longer the secret satisfaction, despite the eternal suffering of the Jews, to be gained from being one of the chosen people.

The New York Jews neglected the Sabbath and many of them were now taking their rest on Sundays without the slightest show of guilt. The lighting of Sabbath candles and the singing of the Sabbath song was seldom practised. Secular learning of a pragmatic nature was regarded as more important than the study of the Torah. Moreover, philosophical thinking, based on the precepts of freedom and emancipation, was being given precedence over rabbinical discussion. The rebbe was not the centre of the universe nor did he settle all the arguments on behalf of Jehovah. The new Bnai Jeshurun synagogue on Elm Street contained only a handful of worshippers on any given Sabbath morning.

However, if the loss of the rituals and strictures of orthodoxy defined the American Jews, it did not lead to a corresponding loss of ideals, moral misconduct and social irresponsibility. In all this secular speculation, they had not given up a belief in Jehovah or the responsibility of God's chosen people to behave in a moral and honest way. Instead they rejected meaningless ritual and accepted natural goodness as the central tenet of their faith.

To be a good Jew meant to be a good man. What all this amounted to was that Ikey could no longer hide behind his observance of Jewish ritual while continuing to behave in an altogether reprehensible manner. While he had determined to turn over a new leaf in America, this realisation nevertheless came as a profound shock to him.

Ikey was also astonished to find that New York had few poor Jews and that the Jewish community lived openly in the mid-town area spread on both sides of Broadway. New York contained only five hundred Jewish families. Most were American-born and had formed into a community over the past one hundred and fifty years. There was none of the frantic struggle to gain a foothold in a new society or the clash of contradictory cultures between the immigrant and native-born children. The Jews of New York were an established, sober, moral and well-integrated minority population, most of whom had been in America before the War of Independence. They all seemed to know or be on nodding terms with each other, and had excellent business and social relations with their gentile neighbours.

Ikey had timed his arrival badly, for if he had landed in New York ten years later he would have found some forty thousand European Jews in New York, and their numbers would continue to grow hugely for the remainder of the century. The dreadful slums, starvation, poverty and crime of the Lower East Side would come to exist as poor Jewish immigrants came to Goldeneh medina, 'The Golden country'. Alas, in Yiddish Goldeneh medina had a second meaning and was the name also given to a 'fool's paradise', a false gold, bright but worthless.

In this fool's paradise Ikey would have been completely at home. But he was totally at odds with the calm and ordered society he now found himself in, despite his determination to lead a sober and respectable life. Ikey's notoriety had not escaped the notice of the Jews of New York and the tight-knit community immediately closed ranks against him. England's most notorious Jewish criminal was not given a warm welcome. Ikey, despite his apparent wealth and appropriate philanthropy, found himself largely ostracised by his own kind.

Even those contacts to whom he had previously shipped stolen watches and silver objects had conveniently come to see these consignments as having been legitimised by the fact of arriving on American soil. They saw themselves as moral men, albeit practical, who had asked no questions of the origin of the merchandise and so heard no lies, their guilt assuaged.

But while they chose to believe that the stolen merchandise Ikey had sent them had somehow been 'washed' in the Atlantic crossing and thus transformed into honest goods, they were unwilling to accept that, by the act of the same crossing, Ikey had converted from being a criminal to an honest man. They felt morally obliged not to encourage a notorious criminal to establish himself in business in their own city or neighbourhood.

They would not recommend Ikey to wholesalers or to jewellery craftsmen, the greatest majority of whom were Jewish. Diamond merchants would not trade with him and the gold and silversmiths found themselves regrettably short of supplies or lamented that their consignment books were filled with orders beyond their expectations to complete. Despite his offer to pay them in cash, even in gold, their doors were closed to him. The few goods Ikey managed to assemble he sold only to gentiles. His poor selection, together with the used nature of his merchandise, attracted little attention and earned him a reputation not much beyond that of an enterprising pawnbroker.

The only respect Ikey commanded was from the First Manhattan Bank of New York where the manager, wreathed in unctuous smiles, would come out of his office to greet him personally. On the Sabbath, Ikey sat, a stranger in a strange land, alone in the bright new synagogue on Elm Street. The psalms the cantor sung were old, but the feeling of complete and abject loneliness was new.

Ikey had always thought of himself as a loner, a solitary soul who kept his own counsel. In his own eyes, but for his money, he was a worthless person. But now he began to realise that he had lost the human infrastructure, the supporting cast of thieves and shofulmen, card sharps, pimps, whores, actors, street urchins, his Academy of Light Fingers. How he missed the coarse company around a ratting circle, the hustle of Rosemary Lane, the rank humanity of the poor and hopeless, the tinsel and despair of the West End, the pickpockets and swells, beggars and noblemen who made up the street community of his native London.

America was proving completely alien to his past, his talents and to his very demeanour. Ikey's fortune and life had been developed on the mean dark streets and in the chop houses, taverns and thief dens of the grandest and most woebegone city on earth. He was by nature a creature of the night, wrapped in his familiar coat of secret pockets and accustomed to skulking within the dark shadow cast by a flat-topped, wide-brimmed hat.

Now all that had been forsaken for shopkeeping in daylight on Broadway, dressed in a suit of good American broadcloth which constantly scratched and itched. Ikey was a deeply unhappy man, but one determined to redeem himself in the eyes of his fellow Jews in his new country. Ikey was in search of personal redemption, but first he had to save himself from himself. He must separate from Hannah without losing the fortune contained in the Whitechapel safe. Four months after arriving in New York, he sat down to write to his wife in London.

My dear Wife,

America has proved a most pleasant place and the prospects for the advancement of our ambition is most encouraging. With the early summer come to us, at last the climate is most salubrious. You will take kindly to the air and space and the houses are of a solid brown stone and well proportioned. There is a spacious central park with room enough for children to play to their hearts content in safety. It is as though they should find themselves in some country dell. I have opened a jewellery establishment with excellent fittings on Broadway, a location which shows the promise of good trading if goods to the liking of the population can be offered at a price to be afforded. The craftsmen here are not of a sufficient standard to be desired, or of the same quality to be found in London, there being a notable shortage of finely made fashionable jewellery, the Americans being behind in what is of the latest mode in London and Paris. There is here also a great shortage of good watches of the medium quality variety and I beseech you to obtain quantities of the same. I have reason enough to believe I can turn these to good account, though I charge you to send me none but 'righteous' watches and not to touch even one what has been gained 'on the cross'. I shall require these to be of an assortment of nickel plate, sterling silver and gold. I believe these will here obtain up to six times the price of the watches purchased by you on the straight. My greetings to your children.

I am, as ever, your humble husband,

Isaac Solomon.

Ikey took care to be cheerful in his letter, though not overly so, for he knew that Hannah might smell a trap, the discussion of cheerful subjects and outcomes not being the usual nature of their conversation together. His mention of children and the park was sufficient to alert her to his desire to have her join him. He also deliberately refrained from sending a money order for the goods, giving her to understand that she should finance the purchase herself for their future mutual benefit. This thought being conveyed with the single sentiment '… for the advancement of our ambition…' She would receive the letter and see it clearly as a test of her intention to follow him to America, in which case, provided she co-operated with him, he would eventually send her his part of the safe combination.

By using Hannah as his purchasing agent Ikey was putting into place yet another plan. If the wholesale merchants and jewellers in New York would not take his custom then he would import all his merchandise from London. The passage across the Atlantic had been reduced to a little less than a month and the superior craftsmanship of the London and Paris workshops and their lead in the fashions would soon establish him in the forefront of Broadway jewellery establishments. He would deal in only the best merchandise, all of it initially honestly purchased. An evaluation and certificate of authentication would be issued with the more valuable pieces.

Ikey was determined to continue to obtain his merchandise through Hannah and always without payment, forcing her to finance the orders he placed by enclosing a signed I. O. U. for the amount against the time she would arrive in America. He intended this debt to accumulate until it matched half the amount of cash in gold sovereigns which Hannah knew to be contained in the safe of their Whitechapel home. Ikey knew full well that Hannah would not accept his I. O. U. s without knowing them to be covered by his share of the gold coin.

The deposit of thirty thousand pounds in sovereigns was by no means the most valuable part of their joint fortune. Within the safe lay precious stones: diamonds, rubies and emeralds contained within beautiful brooches, pins, necklaces and rings, and a double strand of exquisite South Seas pearls taken from the home of the Duke of Devonshire. There were also several hundred heavy fob chains of eighteen carat gold, a quantity of silver and gold plate and a dozen exquisite jewelled watches with rare movements. Finally, encased within a velvet-lined box and further protected by a chamois leather pouch, a jewelled and enamelled French carriage clock said to have belonged to Louis XIV. These objects, collected over fifteen years of fencing, represented much the greater part of Ikey and Hannah's personal fortune.

However, almost all the pieces were marked goods so particular in character that they dared not be presented in the London market where they would be instantly recognised. Even on the Continent they would need to be most carefully arranged within the world of the demi-monde if they were to escape detection. The best chance by far lay in the American market where new wealth was eager to acquire the trappings of an old culture and families such as the Astors and the Vanderbilts possessed the money to purchase it without asking too many awkward questions.

Hannah did not have the experience to value correctly this merchandise, nor did she have the knowledge to dispose of it discreetly. The precious stones could be removed from their casings and sold separately and the gold chains melted down, but not without a thorough knowledge of how this should be done to prevent the attention of both the underground and the police.

No middleman in the thief kingdom of London had the resources to pay or the foolhardiness to dispose of such a haul in under a year at the least. And even then each stone, if it were not cut into smaller specimens, would need to be entered onto the market with the greatest possible discretion. Therefore the chances of a gem stone of note being discovered and traced back to Hannah was exceedingly great. Indeed, even in America, it would take all of Ikey's considerable skill and the shopfront presented by a thriving and outwardly respectable jewellery establishment on Broadway with a reputation for straight dealing to judiciously dispose of the contents of the safe to the richest of the American gentiles.

In his subsequent letters Ikey decided he would increase his caution to Hannah to always buy 'righteous' goods, emphasising the great risk that she would be caught if she attempted to do otherwise. He knew that she would take this warning to include the disposal of the contents of the safe, this risk being even greater than the purchase of stolen merchandise should Hannah be foolish enough to try to act as a fence. Ikey was conscious that Hannah cared about her children more than anything else and the prospect of being transported and losing them was the one great fear he had to exploit in her.

Ikey also knew that if he should give Hannah the combination to the safe she might be tempted to abscond with only the money, the value of the gold chains and the proceeds obtained from the sale of their two London properties. The rest of the hugely valuable haul she might wait to dispose of at another time in some foreign country of her choice.

He had therefore determined on a ploy which, over a series of letters, would let her know that he was negotiating the sale of the pearl necklace to an American of great wealth. When he came close to the limit of his credit with her he would reveal this personage to be the redoubtable John Astor, said to be the richest man in America, 'American Royalty' as the saying went. The pearls were worth one hundred thousand pounds and Ikey was confident that Hannah's greed would persuade her to come to America with the contents of the safe.

Of the two of them, Ikey was the more vulnerable. Hannah would continue to exist whatever might happen, for Hannah hated not herself, only everyone else, and Ikey was simply the incarnation of everything she despised. Ikey, despite the fact that he might yet make a new and separate wealth in America, saw Hannah's determination to rob him of his fortune as an action more hellish in its nature than if she had plotted to murder him. If she were to succeed in stealing his fortune she would have won, not just his wealth, but his very existence. Her victory, and the hate contained within it, would destroy him completely. Victory over Hannah and therefore over himself lay in his retaining the contents of the safe. Hannah was playing a game with her husband for his money and because he was the perfect focus for her extraordinary resentment against the world. Ikey was playing a game with his wife for his very life.

Alas, the best laid plans…! Ikey was not to know that his luck was on its way to Van Diemen's Land and, at the moment of Hannah's receiving his letter in London, it was dangling freely on its gold chain about the scrawny neck of Tiberias Potbottom.