MAX:  Max, interviewed by Lisa or talking with other family members I [went into the dress business with the] Wallach brothers, and Cooperman... and Epstein. Epstein was a landsman from the old country. So there were five partners. So we stayed in business, and those were the days, where the immigrants from Eastern Europe started to crystallize and each found their own way, according to luck or ability. Everybody wanted to rise up, up, up and a lot of firms were born there which many succeeded with manufacturers, and others made a nice try – and we were mixed up with the majority of the workers. The unions became stronger and workers started making better money, that resulted in fact that people started to find out that [if] one went into business and didn't make it good, so he went out! He went back to the shop to work. Little by little it became evident that not everybody can become rich, that not everybody is able to conduct a factory, and sell by themselves. So they bent down their head and took what they could! That happened with me – I was in business, I was a contractor with three other people... So we made an agreement and they called it a corporation. We worked for one manufacturer. He was the manufacturer, we were the contractors. I worked at a machine and one was a designer and a cutter. Two brothers, they were designers and cutters, and the others worked at the machine, and some other help so they can render.

NARRATOR: Max worked in the garment district of New York for forty years. In the early years, even before the International Ladies Garments Workers Union was firmly established, the burgeoning industry provided ample and consistent opportunities for employment, especially if one was skilled. Max was a machine operator, one component of an assembly line for the mass production of women's clothing. But although a man's skill was just one part of the entire process, eliminating perhaps the possibilities of "rising in the ranks," with a little initiative and money he could very easily try his hand at private enterprise. If it did not succeed, as was the case for Max, then he would just go back to work in the factories. Max was not particularly success-oriented in terms of becoming wealthy; his continuous ambition was to earn a decent livlihood, enabling, like thousands of other Jews in his position, his children to have ample opportunities for their own success.