Barney Ross: The Life of a Jewish Fighter

PART ONE

1

Barney Ross was a kohain , born into the ancient priestly caste, and reared by his father to become not a pugilist but a Hebrew teacher and Talmudic scholar. Indeed, the Rasofskys were directly related to Rabbi Baruch Leib Rosowsky, famed cantor of the Great Synagogue of Gogol Street in Vilna. By Jewish tradition, kohanim are said to be descendants of the High Priest Aaron, forbidden by religious law to visit cemeteries or have contact with anything impure; on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Barney and his older brothers would walk up to the front of the synagogue, remove their shoes without touching the laces, wrap themselves in their talaysim , extend their hands, and confer the priestly blessing, the birchas kohanim , on the congregation.

In Brest-Litovsk, in addition to his virtually unpaid work as a Hebrew teacher, Reb Itchik had worked as a dairyman and small grocer, traveling the surrounding towns by oxcart. Following the state-sanctioned 1903 pogroms, most horrifically in the city of Kishinev—City of Slaughter, in the words of the Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik-Rasofsky—Itchik saved up enough to make the passage to New York, leaving behind his wife, Sarah, and their firstborn son, Ben, with a promise that he would earn enough money to bring them later.

Itchik arrived on the Lower East Side in November 1903, his name now anglicized to Isidore, and, finding that the crowded Jewish ghetto had more than its share of Hebrew teachers, went to work selling a variety of vegetables, butter, and eggs from a pushcart. He graduated to a horse and wagon, and working tirelessly—sometimes one hundred hours a week, Barney later said—it took him two years to save enough money to bring over his wife and son, now nine, from Russia, where they settled in a dingy basement apartment on Rivington Street.

Sarah Rasofsky—née Epstein—was a small, soft-featured woman from the Polish town of Selz. In her later years she would become heavyset and frail, nearly blind from diabetes and glaucoma, but in her twenties she had the strength to go to work alongside her husband on the grocery wagon. It was hardly the goldeneh medina they had imagined; they fell into the venal Lower East Side tumult novelist Michael Gold gives us in Jews Without Money: Pimps, gamblers and red-nosed bums; peanut politicians, pugilists in sweaters; tinhorn sports and tall longshoremen in overalls. The family was never far from starvation and illness; two children, indeed, died in infancy. Then Sarah gave birth to a second son, named Morrie.

Her third son arrived on December 23, 1909. He was named Dov-Ber, a distinctively Ashkenazic doubling of the Hebrew and Yiddish words for bear. His school records list him as Barnet David Rasofsky, his United States Marine Corps discharge papers have it Barney David Ross, but among family and close friends he was generally known by one of three affectionate Yiddish nicknames: Beryl, Beryleh, or Berchik—variants of Little Bear.

Before he was two years old, the family, barely subsisting in New York, set out by train for Chicago, where Sarah’s uncle Sam Rosenberg had a small grocery store for sale in the Maxwell Street ghetto. They arrived in 1911 and settled on Jefferson Street, in the hub of an outdoor market that sociologist Louis Wirth described as full of color, action, shouts, odors, and dirt…resembl[ing] a medieval European fair more than the market of a great city today. Its origins are to be sought in the traditions of the Jews, whose occupations in the Old World differed little from what they are here.

In the crowded tenements, outbreaks of tuberculosis, pneumonia, and cholera were endemic. The Rasofskys’ two-room apartment would soon grow more crowded with the arrival in just a few-year span of three more children—daughter Ida, and sons Sam and George. But rarely were they all in the apartment together; Sarah and Itchik worked such long hours that their sons remembered them practically living inside their store.

Some accounts have listed the establishment, at 1307 South Jefferson, as Rasofsky’s Dairy, but in fact it was so ramshackle that it had no name. Nor was there room for three customers to stand at one time amid the bags of flour and canned goods and pickle barrels. The Rasofskys lived directly across the street at number 1310 South Jefferson, and from their second-floor apartment window, above a bakery, Barney and his brothers could watch their father in his apron and skullcap, and on days when there was a flood of customers, Sarah or one of the boys would be constantly dashing across the street to help. In lieu of a cash register, Itchik and Sarah wrote all the transactions in pencil, and on the wall, tacked in place, regular customers would leave their credit tabs scrawled on scraps of paper bag. Sunday being the busy market day on Maxwell Street, the entire family would be enlisted in the bustling business—Barney and Morrie lifting heavy sacks, Ida taking customers’ orders, Sammy and Georgie selling cherry phosphates on the sidewalk for two cents each.

Barney later remembered those years with fondness: a swarming, raucous yet intimate neighborhood, populated with shopkeepers like Krakow the fishmonger, whose son would grow up to be heavyweight contender Kingfish Levin-sky; Finkelstein the butcher, whose son would grow up to be welterweight champion Jackie Fields. Thursday mornings Barney would watch his mother peel six pounds of potatoes for the cholont, a Shabbos delicacy that would cook Friday afternoon in the bakery downstairs and be ready when the family came home from synagogue that evening. On Monday nights his father, who suffered from constant rheumatic pains in his shoulder, would visit the Turkish baths on 14th Street, often bringing Barney and Morrie along to sit in the sweltering steam room and have their backs beaten with oiled oak leaves to increase the circulation, kibitzing and arguing about Talmudic interpretations with an old Russian named Motl.

Under Reb Itchik’s eye, there was a strict observance of the ancient laws: not a light switch could be flicked, not a match struck, nor a scrap of toilet paper torn after sundown on Friday (Itchik would in fact bring home the green squares of tissue with which the apples and oranges had been wrapped for use in the family bathroom).

By all accounts, Beryl Rasofsky was an excellent Hebrew student, mastered Rambam and Gemorrah taught by a cheder-master named Stein—dubbed Hinky Dink by the children, owing to his hobbling on an orthopedic platform shoe. Sarah Rasofsky often marveled that "he could teach the haftorah to a stone." After her husband’s death, Hinky Dink would become a kind of surrogate father, the man sitting at the head of the Rasofsky family table during Passover Seders and other holiday meals.

2

From similar hardscrabble roots had sprung such luminaries as the bandleader Benny Goodman and Admiral Hyman Rickover, both sons of Maxwell Street tailors; Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, son of a fruit-and-vegetable peddler; actor Paul Muni, son of the owner of a Yiddish theater; Barney Balaban, the Paramount Pictures mogul; and William Paley, founding president and chairman of the board of CBS. Yet the neighborhood was so notorious for its criminal activity that it became known to the police and crime reporters as Bloody Maxwell or the Bloody Twentieth (for the old 20th Ward). A 1906 Chicago Tribune description of the area claimed that murderers, robbers, and thieves of the worst kind are born, reared, and grow to maturity in numbers that far exceed the record of any similar district on the face of the globe.

The Jewish mobsters rising from what historian Albert Fried, in The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America, calls The Gehenna of the Westside, were man for man as ferocious as any in the country. Jacob Greasy Thumb Guzik, the financial genius of Al Capone’s organization, is the most widely known Jewish racketeer to have come from Maxwell Street, but Samuel Nails Morton, who owned a garage near the Rasofsky grocery, made a more lasting impression on young Beryl. Nails was known to be involved in the rackets, so Pa had always forbidden me to have anything to do with him, Ross recalled. Pa wouldn’t even sell him anything when he came into the store. In some respects, Nails Morton—a gangster whose biography reads like something conjured by Isaac Babel—informed Barney Ross’s worldview as much as any lesson learned from his Orthodox father.

Morton (1894–1923) was a tall, muscular man who had earned the nickname Nails, according to crime expert Jay Robert Nash, because of his tough-as-nails attitude and fighting prowess. Morton also took it upon himself to defend the streets of the Jewish community against invading gangs of other nationalities. Since the area was neglected by the police, Morton would patrol the streets at night with friends, carrying a baseball bat, and woe to anyone who thought to break into the shop of a fellow Jew.

In 1917 he was arrested for nearly beating several members of a rival Polish gang to death and, found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon, given the choice of prison or the military. He enlisted in the 131st Illinois Infantry, which shipped to France as part of the Rainbow Division. In battle he was promoted to sergeant and, according to Nash, in one engagement, where his company was pinned down by murderous machine-gun fire, Morton led a squad of men through no-man’s-land, wiping out an enemy machine-gun nest and clearing a trench full of Germans, capturing twenty men. Wounded twice in the close-quarters fighting, Morton was the only survivor of his squad and was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French government and promoted to first lieutenant. In his files it was noted that in addition to possession of natural leadership qualities, Lieutenant Morton has an unusual aptitude for weapons.

Back in Chicago, Morton returned to the rackets, allying himself with the North Side boss Dion O’Bannion, who more than other Chicago mob bosses seems to have had a particularly broad-minded policy of ethnic diversity in his hiring. By 1923, Nails was one of the most visible and wealthiest bootlegging gangsters in Chicago; earning an estimated $250,000 a year, driving large touring cars and wearing tailor-made suits with special pockets where he could secret his two revolvers. (Morton and Hershie Miller were charged with shooting and killing two Chicago police officers—one had reportedly called Nails a Jew bastard—but both racketeers were acquitted of murder on the grounds of self-defense.) He carried an ivory-handled walking stick that concealed a razor-sharp sword, and cut a rakish figure, appeared frequently at prizefights, and was said to own interests in boxers. On May 13, 1923, while riding a horse on the Lincoln Park Bridle Path, Nails was thrown, and kicked in the head by a too-spirited mount. The iron horseshoe caused a skull fracture and Morton died without ever regaining consciousness. Louie Two Guns Alterie, one of the O’Bannion mob’s top killers, returned to the stable a few days later, asked to rent the same horse, and promptly shot it in the head. (The scene was reenacted in the 1932 film The Public Enemy, in which Jimmy Cagney dispatches a horse that has killed his good friend Nails Nathan.)

Nails Morton lies today beneath a stone obelisk in Jewish Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park, a near western Chicago suburb. His death was widely mourned in the Jewish community; as the Chicago Daily News reported at the time, Five thousand Jews paid tribute to Morton as the man who had made the West Side safe for his race. As a young man he had organized a defense society to drive ‘Jew baiters’ from the West Side.

Despite his father’s vehement disapproval, Beryl Rasof-sky, chronically undernourished, so short and skinny that his nickname was Runt, had heard the siren’s call of Nails Morton’s world. He began a secret life of gambling and petty crime, shooting craps on the corner, stealing gloves and apples and bunches of bananas from pushcarts, engaging in the hand-to-hand wars being fought among the kids on every block.

Piss on you dirty sheenies, Ross later recalled the rival gangs of Irish, Polish, and Italians taunting. The Jewish boys of Maxwell Street couldn’t enter the nearest swimming pool without fighting their way inside. Just to the north, on West Taylor Street, the infamous Italian-American gang known as the 42’s were wreaking constant terror; the youth gang was to become a kind of farm club for the Mob, with juvenile hoodlums like Sam Giancana eventually rising to the pinnacle of organized crime in Chicago. Whenever Beryl came back home bearing evidence of this interethnic street fighting, even if he’d only received lumps defending himself, Reb Itchik would be waiting to inflict more damage with a leather cat-o’-nine-tails.

Beryl Rasofsky at age fourteen.

I got more beatings at home than I got on the streets, Ross told sportswriter Dan Daniel years later. "My parents had the typical Jewish attitude toward fights, black eyes, bloody noses and skull fractures. Mom didn’t like to see me come in late for meat and potatoes with bleeding scratches. So I got it but good. And I kept right on battling those Italian kids, and a lot of Jewish ones, too."

He found that, in spite of his lack of size or strength, he was an adept street fighter. I was so fast on my feet and so agile that I was able to get in a few quick punches, then dance and weave so much that my opponent would knock himself out trying to hang one on me, he recalled.

3

On December 13, 1923, ten days short of his fourteenth birthday, Barney was dressing in his ROTC uniform for a morning drill at the Joseph Medill School when a gunshot echoed on Jefferson Street. Rushing downstairs, he heard a cry of " Gonovim! " A small crowd had formed around the grocery, and Beryl pushed his way inside. His father lay on the floor, blood soaking through his white apron, shot in the chest. Beryl tore at his father’s clothes, ripped off the apron and his shirt and tzitzis. It’s alright, Beryl, Itchik said. Ambulance attendants rushed inside the grocery; Beryl heard the sound of his mother shrieking as his father was carried away.

The shooting made the afternoon edition of the Chicago Daily News:

GROCER, 60, SHOT IN FIGHT WITH ROBBERS

Two negroes entered the grocery of Isaac Rosofsky, 60 years old, 1303 [inaccurate address but verbatim from news story] Jefferson Street, this morning and purchased 5 cents’ worth of apples. The grocer handed the apples to the men and they drew pistols and ordered