which was experiencing a rapidly growing Jewish community from the influx of immigrants coming through the city’s port, and decided to stay. It was in Baltimore that he met his future wife, Ida.
Ida (Chaya Feiga) Shapiro was born on May 17, 1900, in the town of Podwoloscycka, Poland, near the Russian border. She was the oldest of six children born to Yechiel Eliyahu and Rachael Leah Shapiro. Like Harry, Ida was the first of her family to come to America, arriving at the age of 15. She went directly to Baltimore where she had an aunt living on Aisquith Street and stayed with her while working for the Sonnenborn Company as a seamstress. When she and Harry met at a social gathering for young Jewish adults who had recently arrived in the U.S., they felt an immediate and as it turned out a lasting attraction. They made a striking couple who shared many compatible traits and they soon planned to marry.
As we will come to see, both Harry and Ida possessed the emotional warmth, the entrepreneurial spirit and a wide range of abilities that would prove key to their accomplishments and those of the progeny that would issue from their marriage. Harry came to be known by customers and community for being friendly, with a good sense of humor. He was a well-rounded person: hardworking, earnest and religious, as well as an adept dancer and swimmer. He could speak five languages fluently: Russian, Polish, Italian, Yiddish and English. Although all-business at work, he was a strong family person. His first grandchild, Ronald, fondly remembers how when he graduated college, his grandfather, who had never attended college, presented him with a generous gift and wept with emotion.
Ida was also a people-person and outgoing and, like Harry, very charitable. Their son Edward often cites her sharp mind and her unerring business and personal advice that proved to set him, correctly, on a life-long career. Their second child, Seymour, found her to be a very loving mother. Leonard, another son, remembers her as being “a tall and stately woman of regal bearing in both her manner and dress.” She also became known as an excellent cook and baker. “Nothing is as good as her strudel,” remembers her grandson, Gary; and another grandchild, Shellye, proudly reprinted in her synagogue’s cookbook one of Ida’s ‘secret’ recipes, “Bubby Attman’s Chocolate Chip Honey Cake,” a dessert that she would bake every Jewish New Year and is still offered in the Attman delicatessen. She was so adept at sewing it was said she could look at an advertisement for a dress and make it in a day. But above all, it would be her sense of family, her close and supportive relationship with her husband and children that would help guide them all to success. “She imbued the family with a sense of destiny,” said Gary.
Harry and Ida married on October 25, 1918. The ceremony was performed by Rabbi Abraham N. Schwartz, a leading figure in Baltimore’s religious Jewish community who in 1917 had founded the Talmudical Academy of Baltimore, the first Hebrew day school to be launched in the United States outside New York City. Harry and Ida would later enroll their children in this school for all or part of their Jewish education.
Harry and Ida’s marriage came during a major health crisis in America and throughout the world. The Spanish Flu, first confirmed in a soldier at a military camp in Kansas in March of 1918, had become pandemic by August. During the ensuing year, the Spanish Flu killed 600,000 people in the United States and 25 million people worldwide (twice the number of people killed during World War I). Although public health restrictions were put into place to halt the illness, daily life continued for most people and the couple pressed ahead with their wedding plans.
Once married, Harry and Ida began jointly operating a small confectionery/deli that Harry had started in 1915 on the corner of 2000 East Baltimore and Washington Streets, not far from Lombard Street. Here, while selling candies and sodas and other confections, Harry had also started selling salami and bologna sandwiches for a nickel to people on their way to work or at night to youths hanging out in the neighborhood. The new couple worked closely together to make this business successful, living in rooms in the back of the store, renting out rooms on the second and third floors and, in what became characteristic of their working lives, putting in long hours. They soon teamed up with a partner to buy a store from Nathan and Elsie Weinstein at 1019 East Lombard Street, where they opened a food market and deli. Harry and Ida operated stores in both locations until 1927, when they decided to concentrate on their Lombard Street location and closed their first store. They took full ownership of the delicatessen in 1940 when the partnership dissolved. But Harry and Ida continued to live at 2000 East Baltimore Street while rearing three sons: Edward born in 1920, Seymour in 1927, and Leonard in 1934, eventually moving to a home in Colonial Village in Northwest Baltimore in 1953.
During their early years in Baltimore and in spite of the pressures of building a business and starting to raise a family, Harry and Ida worked to fulfill a promised goal: to bring their families to America.
First, they brought over Ida’s family in 1920. On February 24, 1920, in an affidavit required by U.S. immigration authorities, Harry swore that he was “willing, able and ready to purchase steamship tickets for his said mother-in-law and family to come and live with him… and that he is willing and able to receive, maintain, and support the aforesaid immigrants.” At that time, Ida’s mother was 48 and a widow (her husband and a son had been murdered during a pogrom the year before) and the children that came with her were Enda, 19; Dolora, 16; Rose, 14; and, Jacob, 13.
Later, on August 7, 1923, after much planning and correspondence, Harry brought his father, mother and siblings to America. More than two years before, in February of 1921, Harry had prepaid $1471.16 for their intended passage from Hamburg to New York by boat and then by train to Baltimore. This sum was to cover $1125 for third class passage on a Swedish American Line steamship (the s/s Drottningholm) for his father, mother, six adult siblings (Rachel, Joseph, Golda, Abraham, Feiga and Schloima) and two young sisters (Chaika, 9, and Anna, 6), plus a U.S. head tax of $56, railway fare of $65.16 and landing money of $225. When a problem arose in their processing through Immigration in 1923, Harry traveled to New York and to Ellis Island to appear as a witness in their behalf before the Board of Special Inquiry (U.S. Immigration Law required that “every alien who is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to land” had to appear before this body).
To make the trip and stay over, Harry took a room at the Broadway Central Hotel in New York City (the hotel touted itself as offering “accommodations better than indicated by the moderate rates charged”). While at the hotel, Harry wrote Ida a nine-page letter in Yiddish on the hotel stationery to keep her apprised of developments. He told her of how distressed he was at seeing the conditions in which the newly-arrived immigrants were waiting to be processed (“things are so crowded you can’t even put a pin”) and bemoaned what his family had experienced before and during the trip (“so many tribulations they have had to endure”). With a reference to Hashem on every page, he declared however that “one has to be strong and trust.” In an indication of their closeness, Harry also included an endearing message: “I kiss you my dear sweet pearl.” [Note: This letter, along with numerous letters and postcards in Yiddish that Harry’s family had sent to him from Europe, were saved over the years in a metal Salome Mild Havana Smoker cigar box that Harry, then Seymour, and then his son, Marc, kept.]
To expend all this effort and provide $1400 in funding was quite remarkable for anyone to undertake, especially in those days for a person operating a small business. As indicated in his Affidavit of Support that the government required, Harry, who at the time had a wife and one child and was “engaged in delicatessen and grocery business,” was earning $2500 a year. To help pay for the transportation expenses for his family, Harry also took out a loan that he then repaid over coming years.
The fact that Harry and Ida were able to bring their families to America by the end of 1923 is significant because the next year, due to the political pressures building against the growing influx of immigrants, the U.S. immigration laws were dramatically changed, essentially closing America’s fabled golden doors to Catholics and Jews from Eastern and Southern Europe.
Together, Harry and Ida eventually were able to facilitate the emigration to the United States of three of their parents, as well as brothers, sisters,
