Max arrives in America, landing in the small town of Whitman Massachusetts, near Boston, where he hoped to find work in his profession as a skilled womens' tailor.
NARRATOR: Lisa, backgrounding/commenting. Max had arrived in his new American home with a legitimate skill; normally, there would be a place for him in Whitman to grow a tailoring business. But the industrial revolution arrived much earlier in Whitman than it did in Wysokie. And so Max's talent as a custom tailor never had the opportunity to flourish; it instead was squeezed and specialized within the mechanized processes that were changing the garment industry. Max could have chosen to remain in Whitman, to eke out a living cleaning and fixing clothes. But it is doubtful that he could have supported a wife and five sons. At least by going to New York he had opportunities for success. Adapting once again to the changing times, Max and his wife joined the masses of people pouring into the cities.
MAX: Max, interviewed by Lisa or talking with other family members It happened so that when I came to Boston, [when] I had to do some tailoring, I did ladies' tailoring. It so happens that Shack [Morris Shack, Max's uncle, b 1885 in Bielsk Podlaski, arrived in the U.S. 1902, d 1952 in Brockton, Mass.] was a ladies' tailor, but he devoted himself more for alterations for men's suits. He didn't make no new suits, cause the tendency in Massachusetts, in all the small towns... was to buy ready-made stuff. Factories. The only thing they needed tailors [for] is to do alterations. Make it shorter, make it smaller, make it bigger. That's already a product of the United States, where they have the big factories in the big cities. Custom-made, it used to be alright, but it was expensive. The custom-made tailoring was only for richer people, that can afford to make custom tailoring. Otherwise, the market was flooded of the ready-made stuff, that you buy it, you make it in a factory and then they sell it in the stores...
IMAGE: Washington Street Whitman, Massachusetts
/???/ Ibid. p. 191
Max couldn't make a living as a tailor so he tried his hand at running a dry-cleaning store.
LISA: Lisa, interviewing her grandfather, Max So you couldn't make a lot of money from your cleaning store?
MAX: I made a living! How can you make a lot of money in the cleaning store? The circumstances were against me, because it was a small town. Maybe I think it was 11,000 population. It had about a dozen Jewish families. So then when the draft came, a lot of boys went away to the army. The customers for the cleaning store was still smaller. The young boys left, and the old ones don't care for cleaning... So the store was not good for me, especially when I got married and had to go out in life to make a living...
Were Max's occupational difficulties due in part to his foreign surname? That he could fix!
NARRATOR: While living in Whitman, Max came to feel that his old-world family name Lien was problematic in the New World. He scoured the town in search of a name "which would be nice and easy for the tongue and easy for the pen to write." He found the name Leavitt in an optometrist's window, liked the sound of it, and began using it for his family name. This became legalized once he was drafted into the army and received his citizenship. Mordecai Yitzhak Lien then became Max Isadore Leavitt.
IMAGE: untitled (Geo D. Leavitt OPTOMETRIST)
/???/ In 1910, Whitman actually had a population of 7,000. (Whitman Public Library)
(Conspicious by his lack of mention: we hear nothing of Max's U.S. military service. In Eastern Europe, military service for Jews could mean a death sentence or --possibly considered worse-- forced conversion from Judaism. Would that Max have commented on the contrast.)
His Americanizatized name established, Max considered his next alternative: seeking more opportunity than was available to him locally:
MAX: I saw that there's no future for me to stay in little Whitman, and wait for a customer to bring me to make it shorter, or longer. I felt that the trend of the moment was the big city for poor people, beginners like what you call... So the best thing we could do is to leave a small town and go to New York.
IMAGE: Max (seated at left) and his fellow workers
IMAGE: Sweatshop in garment district, New York City Image is blank
/19/ Sachar, p. 330
/20/ Allan Nevins: Ernest Hill Ford: Expansion and Challenge 1915-1933 (New York Scribner's Sons. 1957) p. 314-315