Peddling Tales

...Lithuanian-born Mose Ginsberg immigrated to New York City at age 12 after eluding the Russian czar's recruiting agents...

...The former boomtown, which once rang with the robust French of Canadian lumberjacks, looks buttoned up, worn down...

...Whatever the motivation, it initially turned out to be a poor calculation: The miners didn't feel like paying him back...

...Some three million Jews from eastern Europe settled in the United States between 1830 and 1914...

...One "beautiful summer night," as Ginsberg remembered in a taped oral history held at the Adirondack Museum, "I had to pass a cemetery...

...Then there were the cases of the boy peddlers, who started in the business when they were as young as 13...

...For one thing, peddling was a job Jews bird': Poor Jews in central and eastern Europe were peddling for a century before they brought their trade to the Linked States...

...But the cousin soon died, and, lacking funds, Ginsberg faced a hard choice: hit the road selling, or go back to New York...

...But peddlers came and went, sometimes settling down but for the most part moving on...

...Cohen eventually recouped S43 for razor blades and soap (an astronomical amount in those days), but only after he went to their boss, who controlled their paychecks...

...No landmarks or plaques mark their influence or tenure...

...No bustling Main Street beguiles you with picturesque store fronts...

...There are perplexing tales of mercantile woe as well...

...Ginsberg, like so many other Jewish immigrants, began his life in America in New York City—hawking matches, ice, and candles in Hell's Kitchen...

...But it's clear that the Jewish peddlers in the Adirondacks were just a slipstream from the river of Jewish peddlers that branched out across the nation, from the boomtowns of Oregon to the fishing villages of northern Maine to the crossroads hamlets of the south...

...Company was a farm dog nipping at your heels, bed a hay mound in a barn or a rope bed in a frigid attic that raised mean welts...

...He spent several years walking from town to town, selling his goods...

...Evidence of that anti-Semitism is not hard to find...

...It's difficult to say how many Jews eventually made it into the hinterlands of the Adirondacks...

...And just as these immigrant newcomers would assume and expand the Yankees' routes, they also came to bear the hoary stereotypes and cliches that dogged their predecessors—only they had to deal with anti-Semitism, as well...

...Shrewd and hard-bargaining, lanky, lean-jawed, and slick, the Yankee peddler was immortalized in James Fennimore Cooper's The Spy, lampooned in penny joke books, and denounced for "coarse impudence" and "cunning...

...Some peddlers specialized in eggs and dairy...

...Or take the case of Joe Galinsky—the sheriffs daughter locked him in the Lake Pleasant town jail for a lark, then took his horse and wagon (and thus his livelihood) for a joy ride...

...But he kept plugging away, and as it turned out, his dogged determination paid off: He eventually earned enough to open a store in Tupper Lake, a bumpy economic transition made smoother only by his continued peddling (his young bride and extended family stayed home to mind the store...

...The one building in this village on the national historic register, Beth Joseph alone bears witness to an age when the reach of Jewish life was as wide as the rural American frontier and to a time when peddlers cut as thick and bold a swath across the region as the Milky Way on a moonless Adirondack night...

...Finally, peddling allowed devout Jews to observe a religious diet on the road, and they could be home for the Sabbath, when they were often needed to make a minyan of ten men required for prayer...

...Each had his specialty: The "junkie" sold tools and tinware and collected scrap metal for the rail-side junkyards in the towns...

...The village of Tupper Lake in northern New York's Adirondack Park is not easy to love...

...Ginsberg's eventually became the biggest department store in the Adirondack region, and Mose himself was named Citizen of the Year...

...Most of them lived in New York City...

...The commercial heyday of the small-town Main Street and the anti-peddling ordinances that often followed saw to peddling's regional demise...

...And there were reputations built on attitude, such as that of the legendary tough-knuckled junkman Harry Demsky of Amsterdam—Kirk Douglas's fight-prone father...

...But swing off the main drag and reconsider...

...The road was slow and the frontier wild...

...What is not widely known is the story of the Jewish peddlers who followed...

...Of the 43 Jews who opened bank accounts in the Utica Savings Bank between 1847 and 1855 (nearly all peddlers), many are identified in bank records in terms like "Moses Holstein...

...The routes of these Jewish peddlers crosshatched northern New York as finely as a web...

...On another occasion, it took him two hours to get up the courage to pass a "good-sized snake" lying across the road...

...the New England-born Yankee peddler was a cultural cliche...

...The moon was out, and I noticed on the stones, objects moving around...

...Jew peddler, dark Jew face" and "Harris Zacharias a Jew peddler, writes only Hebrew, 46, 5 foot 4 and three-quarters, dark...

...But if you're in the Adirondacks, you might find your way to the synagogue in Tupper Lake, a living house of worship from early summer into the High Holy Days (it's open year-round as a community center and museum...

...It's a synagogue—Congregation Beth Joseph, founded some 100 years ago by Yiddish-speaking peddlers from eastern Europe...

...Ginsberg opted to become a peddler...

...Why peddling...

...Chair bottoms, rosaries, harmonicas, flea powder, waffle irons, drawing pads, and sheet music—all this passed from Jewish peddlers' wagons to the kitchen tables of Adirondack homes...

...others traded in furs, tramping in and out of backwoods homesteads on snow-shoes, washing down decidedly nonkosher stewed fox meat with moonshine...

...Of course, non-Jewish peddlers had been tramping the backroads of rural America since colonial times...

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...The first generation was mainly culled from the German Jewish immigrants who thronged American port cities in the migrations of the mid- 19th century...

...It took the frightened boy an hour to muster up the nerve to walk over to the headstones and see that the phantoms were just "shadows from the leaves of the tree, opposite...

...For most peddlers, the point was nearly always to get out of peddling and into a store of their own...

...The peddlers are no more...

...There are tough luck tales, such as that of William Sheffer: Slumbering beside his horse in a Schroon Lake Village stable, Sheffer dreamed he was being robbed and, in his sleep, stabbed his horse to death...

...It's tough to say how many Jews peddled nationwide: Records were not always kept, and some only peddled a short time before moving on to other endeavors...

...More exotic peddlers came later with the influx of Eastern European immigrants...

...By 1844, almost half of the 85 "peddlers" (sic) who registered in Albany to sell foreign goods in New York State bore Jewish names...

...Factor in the ones who didn't settle in the Adirondacks, and there may have been as many as 200 Jews hawking their wares...

...When I matched up archival sources, oral histories, and conversations with peddlers' descendants, I came up with about 50 Jewish peddlers who plied at least a portion of their trade in what is now the Adirondack Park—more than one for every town...

...No one peddled for die love of it...

...See the austere clapboard building delicately crowned with three wood-framed Stars of David...

...While researching ethnic history in the Adirondack region, I met the children of these peddlers, who told vivid passed-down stories about their fathers' early years in the Adirondack woods...

...By the turn of the century, there were at least a dozen such emporia lining the Tupper Lake business district...

...Second, peddling required access to suppliers, and this the immigrants had, thanks largely to the German Jewish domination of the "rag trade" in New York...

...I recall some very bitter days...

...Almost all of the peddler-founded storefronts have vanished, and with them the loyal small-town minyans...

...In the days before Visa and MasterCard, for instance, was it an act of faith or desperation that prompted peddler Edward Cohen to allow North River miners to buy goods on credit...

...The plan was for a distant cousin to teach him to mend pots...

...The ragman sold gingham, calico, denim, and wool work shirts and gathered sacks of rags for mills...

...Oh, I have many stories, but the stories are so sad," he said...

...It was the peddlers who founded the region's first four Jewish congregations in Plattsburgh (1862), Ogdensburg (1875), Lake Placid (1879), and, of course, Tupper Lake (1899...

...But he didn't warm to the harsh tenements of the city's Lower East Side, and one night he decided to strike out north by train to the Adirondack hamlet called Buck Mountain...

...Some arrived in horse-drawn wagons, and later in cars, but in the beginning they came primarily on foot, forced into arthritic hunches by unwieldy 100-pound duffel-like packs...

...And their stories are now the stuff of local legend—small nuggets of forgotten Jewish life buried in the archives of local town histories...

...And it's a remnant of a once-thriving, though now nearly forgotten, slice of Jewish Americana...

...Ginsberg was shot at and bedeviled by a fear of ghosts...

...They ventured into mining camps, logging hamlets, river towns and isolated farmhouses...