Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Summer II/Section 01/Nathan Schapiro

Overview
Nathan Schapiro was a Russian immigrant and a subject of the Federal Writers' Project.

Early Life in Russia
Nathan Schapiro was born on the Russian coast of the Baltic sea in the 1870s to a shoe cobbler. When he was 20, he was required to train in the Russian army. While he was in the army, Czar Nicholas II replaced Czar Alexander II. Nathan recalls civil warfare in Russia after Nicholas II became the Czar, starting with Nicholas II having the entire family of Alexander II beheaded.

Immigrating to the United States
When Schapiro was 25, he left the army and worked as a shoe cobbler for a year in Cozark, Russia, before immigrating to Bremen, Germany. He viewed immigrating to Germany as a steppingstone to immigrating to the United States, saying “I wanted to come to America when I was eighteen years old, yes, even before I had reached that age, but my parents did not have the money...I made up my mind that I would sail to America as soon as I could save enough money to get me across”. After six months in Bremen, he had saved enough money to immigrate to Baltimore, where his cousin, Levine, had already moved. Because Schapiro already spoke German, he was able to take advantage of the already-established German immigrant community in Baltimore by securing a job working for a German cobbler.

Although immigration was at an all-time high, Schapiro said Levine was the only other Russian speaker he knew in Baltimore. Schapiro reuniting with his cousin after immigrating to the United States is an example of chain migration. It is assumed that the violent pogroms drove most of the emigration from Russia in the late nineteenth century, but a majority of immigrants reestablished connections in the United States through chain-migration.

Peddling in the South
In Baltimore, Levine and Schapiro worked as peddlers, people who carry merchandise around town to sell on the street. Schapiro also worked as a shoe cobbler for a German-owned shop in Baltimore before he and Levine moved to Union, South Carolina where they worked as peddlers.

It was safer for a Jewish person to work as a peddler than a Black person in the antebellum South. Although Schapiro relied on non-verbal communication since he didn’t speak English, farmers allowed him to sleep on their property while he travelled. Schapiro was able to integrate himself into Southern society and travel alone without the fear of being lynched or attacked for his race.

Later Life
Schapiro worked in Union, South Carolina until he moved back to Baltimore around 1910. He bought a store that grew to be worth $50,000 before the Great Depression hit in 1929. Although he lost his business and ended his life with little money, he said he is glad that he left Russia because his three children have more opportunities in the United States. After the Depression, he moved back to Union, South Carolina where he managed a shop.

Pogroms in Russia
After the killing of Alexander II in 1881, violence erupted in Russia in the form of pogroms, which are “attacks, accompanied by destruction, looting of property, murder, and rape, perpetrated by one section of the population against another”. Pogroms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were attacks against the Jewish population in Russia. Although Nicholas II had Alexander II killed, there were rumors that Jewish people had been the real assassins of Alexander II. Jewish villages were attacked based on this rumor, which drove emigration from Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Russian emigration
500,000 Russian immigrants came to the United States between 1891 and 1900. About half of these Russian immigrants were Jewish. A driving force in migration was the violence Jewish people faced in Russia. A necessary factor of migration of Jews to the United States was the possibility of connecting with a family member or friend who had already migrated. This is called chain migration.

Immigration to Baltimore
The city of Bremen had a strong trade relationship with Baltimore, and by the 1870s, “some 25 percent of Baltimoreans were either German-born or had German parents, and the city opened German-English public schools”. Immigrants created communities based on a common culture, language, and social history.