by Andrew Patner, May 1995 <Rentap@aol.com> (sent to Preserve Maxwell Street on June 10, 1997)
Broadcast in May 1995 on WBEZ-FM, Chicago's National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate, as a part of the "Chicago Matters: Immigration," a project of the Chicago Community Trust. Published, in revised form, in The Forward, New York City in June 1995
The knock would come at my door as early as 5 a.m. most winter Sundays. It would still be completely dark outside -- night really -- when I would rub my eyes and put on my long underwear before joining my father downstairs for the ride to the Near West Side. We didn't speak much in the car. I was still waking up, or perhaps still asleep. My father was thinking, and the streets themselves were so quiet that to talk, even amongst ourselves, would have disturbed those rare moments of a city asleep and at peace.
We would park a few blocks from our destination, often along a railroad viaduct. This allowed some space for our entrance and heightened the ritual, for visiting this space involved a very personal, physical presence. We had come to Maxwell Street, a place from long before city planning, suburban shopping malls, or parking lots. And while the Sunday Market had become well known as a source of licitly and illicitly acquired hubcaps, it was very much a place from before the time of the automobile, from the time of Jewish peddlers with rickety wagons and packs on their backs. And however much the Market changed over the decades, it retained what the British author Lawrence Durrell once termed "a spirit of place" -- the sense of those who had come before.
In the days of those childhood trips, the 1960s, we did not speak too much about the past of the place. We spoke more about the odd machines or old toys that we might find there -- the unusual piece of furniture, the old diary or Cubs' tickets, the complete set of the famous 1910 Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica that I acquired for 10 cents a volume from a man who could not understand why I wanted so many books that were all the same. The food we ate there was usually of other immigrant groups, fresh tacos from Mexicans with silver vending trucks, Polish sausages cooked on open grills beside steel drums filled with burning newspapers where you could warm your hands. We completed our rounds in time to be back home for Sunday School at Temple in Hyde Park by nine o'clock.
But we knew the history, even if we didn't spend much time talking about it then. My great-grandfather, Jacob Dobkin, was a wheelwright. He came from White Russia and made the wheels for custom wagons and automobiles. He was a proud man, and when custom cars were no longer made he stopped working. When my great-grandmother, Anna Padnos, died at 90 in 1959, the newspaper obituary repeated the perhaps apocryphal story that she had come to Chicago from a shtetl outside of Minsk to see the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 and had never left. She and Jacob Dobkin settled just north of Maxwell Street in the area around Jane Addams's Hull-House, the gateway for generations of the city's early European immigrants.
My great-grandmother's apartment on De Koven Street was a welcoming station for new arrivals to Chicago and America. She passed on to them her wisdom, generosity, and superstitions. Although she read the Yiddish Forward each day from cover to cover, she gave her children such American names as William and Charles and Edward and George, Minerva, Frances, and, my grandmother's name, Rose. She encouraged them to speak English, and other than the occasional phrase or epithet, Yiddish died out quickly in my Chicago family.
Unlike other immigrant groups, Eastern European Jews moved wholesale in giant leaps across the city, and my family was no exception. The Near West Side was abandoned for Lawndale in the teens and 1920s, synagogues, schools, stores, and theatres appeared there almost overnight. My great-grandmother bought a house off of Douglas Boulevard, the Main Street of the Jewish West Side, around the corner from Little Jack's, the Jewish Berghoff.
The world that my relatives lived in was a relatively closed one, weighed down by hard times and frequently unsatisfying work. Though not particularly religious, their lives revolved around the Jewish calendar, with Friday night suppers, synagogue attendance, and family gatherings, or trips to the Jewish summer resorts of South Haven, Michigan. My grandfather's brother married the daughter of the proprietor of one of the most popular, Mendelsohn's Atlantic. Sundays were set aside for shopping trips at the stores on Maxwell Street.
Even before racial changes on the West Side in the 1950s, Jews were moving to the far North Side, to West Rogers Park, and their synagogues and delicatessens went with them. My grandparents were an early part of this wave, moving to the area just South of Devon around California in the 1930s. There my father's playmates had such names as Fatty, Eggy, and Smitty in a world where ethnic identity defined which side you were on in a neighborhood tussle. It was in part to escape this narrow world that my father and his younger brother roamed the country and the globe a bit, before each studied law at the University of Chicago. After a stint in the Peace Corps in Peru, my uncle settled in Washington, D.C.
My father stayed in Hyde Park after law school, a place as far away from his old neighborhood as Washington was. There were many German Jews there from old families, well-to-do, highly educated and accomplished. But more than that, there were all kinds of people there, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, and the watchword among children of immigrants and descendants of former slaves alike was racial integration. My parents leaped into these efforts with both feet, in part because of their own immigrant heritage, in part because of principles of social justice passed on to them by their own parents.
Early on, if you had said "roots" to my father he would probably have imagined cords growing out of the earth and holding him down, holding him back. But as time passed and the worlds of his youth receded, his trips to Maxwell Street seemed to take on additional importance. Though there were years when he would not go at all, a decade after his parents died he would report on seeing a man there who had known his father, or a distant cousin, or someone selling photos of "The Street" as it had once been. In its last years, my father became very enthusiastic about the place and delighted in taking visitors there. In the final months before the market's demolition last year, however, no one in my family could even utter its name.
Our country is so young, our city so new, that the children of immigrants become their immigrant parents, the descendants become their forebears, whether they seek to imitate them or to deny or ignore them. At Maxwell Street, my father and I could actually move in the steps of our parents and grandparents, uncles and cousins. We could repeat their rituals, if in reverse -- as buyers, rather than sellers -- and watered-down over time from a livelihood to something like a hobby. We could watch new immigrants, from Mexico and Korea, absorb these patterns and add new ones of their own.
The legacy of the immigrants of the Great Migrations a century ago included an almost insanely hopeful plunge into the future. That hope is now a part of our past, of our history. By destroying its physical signs -- uprooting the landmarks, paving the footsteps, shooing the ghosts - it seems, to this descendant of Maxwell Street, that the city has diminished its present. It has become like the child who commits the greatest sin of any immigrant culture -- who tells his grandparents that he doesn't want to hear their stories anymore.
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