Ron Arons, The Jews of Sing Sing (Barricade Books 2008)
After both Ron Arons’ parents died of cancer within eighteen months of each other, he decided to learn more about his family history.
He went through the accumulation of family postcards, letters, papers and documents in Cyrillic, Yiddish and English, in the attic. Hoping for love letters, he instead found a puzzle. Three conflicting birthplaces were featured for his great grandfather on his mother’s side, and his name was listed differently in different documents.
The discovery of an 1881 census in the LDS Library led to a revelation, a reason as to why records had been falsified. Isaac had two wives, Ida and Minnie, who both accused him and sent him to Sing Sing (New York’s notorious prison) for bigamy, a merry chase which reads like an episode of the Keystone Cops.
This discovery explained some strange experiences from Arons’ childhood. Once when he had been a bad boy, he told his grandmother she’d have to ‘send him to Sing Sing’, and she shushed him, saying mention of the word would ‘upset’ his grandfather. When she annoyed him, he was wont to cry, ‘Minah, Minah’ which Arons now recognised as a corruption of ‘Minnie’. His grandfather was threatening his wife that if she didn’t please him, he’d take another woman.
Perusing some 7000 Sing Sing admissions, he outlines the background and criminal history of many famous New York criminals, discovering details that many of these men’s descendants had never been able to find—Edward ‘Monk’ Eastman, Benjamin Gitlow, Irving ‘Waxey Gordon’ Wexler. The histories of these men reveal much about the hardships and sometimes anti-Semitism they faced making a living in the New World. The stories also reveal the peculiar American involvement of gangsters with the early trade union movement (Jewish gangs targeting in one instance the employers, in another the workers). Jewish gangsters were known to have funded Zionist terrorism in Palestine. But they were on average less violent than their non-Jewish criminal counterparts; burglary, larceny and robbery constituted two-thirds of all Jewish convictions. Some were involved in whiskey-running during Prohibition, and later heroin. A number of Jews, like Isaac Spier, were incarcerated for abandonment or bigamy, and their family lives are examined.
It is seen that, from whatever background in the Old Country—Russia, Poland, Latvia, or in Arons’ case Belarus—common identity as Jews and a livelihood that depended on crime brought them together into interconnected gangs. They lived in the same neighbourhoods; they hired the same lawyers; they were chased by the same cops or Feds or judges; they listened to the same rabbi chaplains in prison; they ate at the same diners and went to the same barbers.
It regrettably doesn’t go into genealogy, not going further back in the lineage than great-grandparents. And it doesn’t touch upon Jewish deep ancestry—Moses and the Israelites—but that question has many books devoted to it.
The subject matter is as dry as you would expect—it’s a work of journalism not literature, but there are several amusing bits, and it’s well written. Will be appreciated by ‘true crime’ addicts as well as by genealogy-seeking Jews.
Susie Helme 