Prince Street embodied the roiling melting pot that was America at the turn of the Twentieth Century. The street’s pushcarts and stores bustled with recent immigrants, building new lives. The novel is mainly set in this period, yet it begins over a hundred years later, when Nathan Segal visits the graves of his mother, Rose, an aunt, Dora, and grandparents, Harry and Lena Pittl in the Beth Mordechai Cemetery. Nathan also encounters the mysterious grave of Thomas Jeremiah Jones, der schvartzer khazzin/The Black Cantor.
The novel shifts back in time and place to follow Harry Pittl’s flight from his native Poland to avoid that country’s draft, which was weaponized against its Jewish population. Harry asks Lena Freitag to wait for him to marry her before he flees the town of his birth. On the way to America, Harry meets fellow passengers in steerage who become lifelong friends. The ‘four musketeers’ wind up in Newark, New Jersey, rather than New York City. One of them, Benny Winkler, is able to persuade his ‘Uncle Morris’ to provide them with temporary shelter and help them get their new lives started.
The young men each find jobs that reflect the immigrant economy of America as well as their own abilities. Their transition into their new society is eased by the massive numbers of immigrants who needed services in Yiddish. The degree of mutual help is manifested in the creation of Landsmanshaften, immigrant mutual aid societies.
But there is another more subtle kind of immigration happening simultaneously. Newark, New Jersey has become a major destination for the Great Migration of blacks out of America’s Deep South and into the more liberal de facto segregation of the Northern United States.
In Newark, some black families, living in close proximity to Jewish neighbors, have integrated into Jewish culture. Jake McNeil is the product of one of these situations. A good friend of Benny Winkler and almost a part of his family, Jake has become an observant Jew who plays ragtime and the blues.
Another product of a black Jewish home is Ellen Jones. Descended from a grandmother who was a slave and a grandfather who was a white Jewish abolitionist in the Confederate Army, Ellen was raised as a Jew. Ellen’s son, Thomas, is gifted with a spectacular singing voice. Thomas’ future seems to veer towards the cantorial or success in vaudeville, reflecting the dual nature of his heritage. Once Ellen and Jake meet, their relationship is inevitable.This novel explores how the lives of certain members of these two diverse ethnicities intertwined while passing through Prince Street.