The first real sign of the United States was a close-packed archipelago of buoys marking lobster pots and fishing traps but this was just a prelude to the moment the throng on the deck had been waiting for. The exaggerated sense of occasion that this moment was expected to inspire was heightened by the scowling splendour of the city illuminated in the storm, the racing clouds bathing Liberty in a hideous light. The immigrants, crowding against each other’s backs, shoving and straining, must have felt that all the reports and letters home had understated the awful truth about New York. The real thing was even taller and more intimidating than the tallest story. So you looked out, numbed by the gigantism of the city, asking the immigrant’s single overriding question: is there really a place there for me?
In New York at last, the promised city, the immigrants found themselves in a cacophonic bazaar. So many things! The streets were awash with commodities undreamed of back home — new foods, smart clothes, mechanical novelties, and luxuries made cheap by American ingenuity in the ways of mass production. Your own berth in New York might be no more than a patch of floor in a dumb-bell tenement on the Lower East Side, yet no building was so squalid that its tenants were entirely excluded from the bounty of American life. In the midst of rack-rent poverty, in conditions as impoverished as anything they had suffered in the old country, the immigrants would be surrounded by symbols of extravagant wealth. There were ice-cream parlours, candy stores, beef-steaks and fat cigars. In New York ordinary people, wage-earners, dined out in restaurants; they had alarm clocks and Victrola machines on which they played 'jass' music and by the standards of Europe they were dressed like royalty.
You had new names assigned to you at Ellis Island by immigration officers too busy to bother with the unpronounceable consonant clusters in your old one (Gold, because that's what the streets were supposed to be paved with, was a favourite stand-by). There were new clothes too. You might be able to call upon only a word or two of English, but you could still parade as a suave, fashion-conscious New Yorker.
Identity in Europe wasn't a matter of individual fancy. Even with the money for the raw materials, you couldn't dress up as an aristocrat simply because you liked the look of the noble's style. If you were Jewish, you couldn't pass yourself off as a gentile without incurring a legal punishment. Every European was the product of a complicated equation involving the factors of lineage, property, education, speech and religion. The terms were subtle and could be juggled: even the most rigid class system has some play in it. But once your personal formula had been worked out by the ruling mathematicians, the result was precise and not open to negotiation. A over B times X over Y divided by Z equalled a calico shirt and a pair of clogs.
For anyone brought up in such a system, New York must have induced a dizzying sense of social weightlessness. Here, identity was not fixed by society's invisible secret police. The equation had been simplified down to a single factor – dollars.
The windows of department stores were theatres. They showed American lives as yet unlived in, with vacant possession. When your nose was pressed hard against the glass, it was almost yours, the other life that lay in wait for you with its silverware and brocade. So you were a presser in a shirtwaist factory on Division Street, making a paltry $12.50 a week — so what? The owner of the factory was your landsman, practically a cousin; he had the start on you by just a few years and already he lived in a brownstone, uptown on 84'. Success in this city was tangible and proximate; it was all around you, and even the poorest could smell it in the wind. The distance between slum and mansion was less than a mile; hard work… a lucky break… and you could roam through Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s buying up the life you dreamed of leading…
Alice’s apartment, which I would be sub-renting – courtesy of a brown envelope and the doorman’s blind eye, was in a relatively quiet corner, yet even here one could feel New York trembling under one’s feet. In place of bird-song there was the continuous angry warble of ambulances, patrol cars, fire-trucks. It was the sound of heart-attacks and heart-break, of car crashes, hold-ups, hit-and-run, fight and pursuit; the sound of the city in a round-the-clock state of emergency. If you were going to learn to live here, you’d have to tune out the sound of New York and set up house in the silent bubble of your own preoccupations. For me, the New York air was full of robbery and murder; for Alice, it would all be inaudible white noise.