“The Very Soul of Human Progress”: How Newspaper Databases Revealed a Poor Immigrant's Lecturing of a Movie Star about the "Slums"
Sussya Klepper was born in Romania in 1884. She called it the “dark age”—literally, they had no electricity. When she was two months old, her father Aron boarded a ship to New York. After a year of making $6 a week with a push cart on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he had earned enough money to send for his wife, brother-in-law and baby daughter Sussya. Sussya, or Susan as she went in New York, grew up on the Lower East Side. She eventually had three siblings, and they all shared a single bedroom in a tenement on Allen Street—the two boys shared a bed near the window and the two girls another bed near the wall. Her father ran a pawnshop on the ground floor, where her mother helped; and despite the limited space, they took in boarders to make an additional income. Years later, Susan described growing up on the Lower East Side as the absolute worst—how the streets were filled with mud; how the loud elevated rail passed right outside their bedroom window; how there was no privacy ...