Pedlars, according to author Hasia R. Diner, were “the foot soldiers of the great migration” of Jews from eastern Europe and the Pale of Settlement to the lands of America, Canada, Britain, South Africa, Sweden and Australia from about 1780 to the 1920s, she writes in this bold, original and exhaustively researched study of Jewish pedlars.
Diner uses memoirs, autobiographies, literary accounts, diaries, oral histories, family narratives and a diversity of other sources to compile her study. Along every step of the road that this careful researcher treads, she makes sure to leave no stone unturned. The result is what one reviewer has perceptively termed “history from below,” written from the vantage point of a lowly pawn rather than that of a king, queen, czar or emperor.
While many of us may believe that our grandparents or great-grandparents were pedlars, that may not have been true, at least not by Diner’s definition. The pushcart vendors who plied their goods in large cities like Toronto, Montreal, New York and Buenos Aires were hawkers, not pedlars; street-corner merchants were also not pedlars, Diner writes, because they “did not perform the one act which unites all the pedlars of this book. They did not go into their customers’ domestic spaces.”
By bringing needed goods to the doorsteps of rural homes throughout the heartlands of America, Canada and other lands, pedlars performed a valuable service, especially for women, allowing them access to a wider range of consumer goods than before, sometimes even empowering them as consumers for the first time. Simultaneously, pedlars often provided their customers with their first actual encounter with a Jewish person. While engaged in selling their jumble of goods, the pedlars thus established a cultural bridge. Eventually many came to know their customers well enough to be invited to stay over in their homes.
Some veteran pedlars – such as Jacob Epstein of Baltimore, who sold jewelry, oilcloth, fabric for dresses, and patterns, pins, needles, thimbles and kitchenware from his Baltimore Bargain House – specialized in providing peddling supplies to newcomers. Epstein used to meet incoming ships at the docks and seek out the immigrant Jewish men as they disembarked. Then he would offer to set them up as pedlars, providing them with supplies and suggesting routes throughout the American South and mid-Atlantic coastal region.
The Jewish pedlar was a stock figure in literature, theatre, cartoons and folk humour, often representing “trickery, otherness and greed,” Diner notes. One such figure appears in the Canadian classic novel, Anne of Green Gables; another more benign representation appears in Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace. The peddling life was certainly a lowly and gruelling one, but many saw it as preferable to wasting away in an oppressive sweatshop or labouring in a factory where work on the Sabbath was mandatory.
Diner walks us through the full life-cycle of the profession, from the moment the would-be itinerant trader arrives on foreign soil and is invariably assisted by a relative, friend or friendly stranger. Pedlars lived according to a weekly cycle, heading out by foot or wagon on Sundays or Mondays, visiting the customers’ homes one by one, and returning home on Fridays.
Although many excelled at it, the routine was physically draining. Carried on the back, a pedlar’s pack typically weighed 100 to 150 pounds.
For some, the job was shameful and humiliating. Diner cites a story of a pedlar who knocked on the door of a home in Concord only to discover that his Americanized son, a student at Harvard, happened to be visiting in the home.
“The father hastily collected his goods and left, not wanting his son to see him in such a servile position.”
On another occasion, the same man, loaded down with his wares, boarded a train and was clattering down an aisle when he spotted his daughter with a group of her school friends. Terrified of embarrassing her, he quickly exited the train and waited for the next one. Newspaper reports of pedlar suicides were not uncommon.
In some towns, established shopkeepers resented pedlars for intruding into their commercial territories, and may have helped to generate ugly anti-pedlar campaigns that were tinged with racist rhetoric and violence; such crusades occurred in places such as Ireland, Quebec, Cuba and South Africa. Some American towns posted warning signs on their outskirts that proclaimed, “No Peddlers Allowed.”
Besides the usual risks of road accidents or inclement weather, pedlars were mocked, arrested, chased, set upon by dogs, attacked, stoned, and even murdered.
Despite these dangers, however, some ultimately found a path that led to success beyond their wildest dreams. While engaged in their itinerant lifestyle, pedlars often took on related occupations, becoming collectors of cast-off materials such as tin, bones, rags, bottles, paper and scrap metal, items that, while worthless to their former owners, could be sold in bulk at a profit. Others became pawnbrokers, money-lenders and, in the American South, cotton brokers.
Such spin-off businesses sometimes became highly lucrative. Guggenheim, Lehman, Seligman, Straus and Eisner are the names of only a few of the legendary American businessmen from industrialists to department store moguls, who started as pedlars.
The book presents many such rags-to-riches stories. One of its dozen or so photographs is a portrait of Leon Koffler, seated in a horse-drawn buggy in Toronto in 1914; Koffler’s two Toronto-area drug stores would become the genesis for the international Shopper’s Drug Mart and Super-Pharm chains. Isaac Cohen, another pertinent Canadian example, was a pedlar in Kingston, Ont., who eventually built a major scrap-iron operation.
(My great-grandfather and several great-uncles worked for Cohen when they first arrived in Canada. After a couple of years, they moved to Maria Street in West Toronto Junction and established their own scrap-iron enterprise. It did well, but unfortunately, not to the degree of the scrap business operated by another Maria Street family, the Tanenbaums, which became a billion-dollar enterprise.)
Pedlar memoirs and narratives typically share the same theme. While offering an occasion for their writers “to congratulate themselves on the nation’s essential goodness,” they highlight America’s or Canada’s role as a land of opportunity and “celebrate the heroic notion of the self-made man.” Transformed by success, the lowliest man on the professional totem-pole sometimes came to embody the highest of American ideals.
