31. In Second Class

Many people do not know why ʿĪsā al-Bāshiq failed in this country. He emigrated from Syria at nineteen, a handsome young man with a strong will, an intelligent disposition, and a blazing mind, proficient in reading and writing three languages. While the first of his countrymen to reach America had traveled in steamship steerage, he came in second class and wore a hat from the moment he left his family in Beirut for the ship.[110]

The truth is that in ʿĪsā al-Bāshiq, New York witnessed its first Syrian young man bearing the polish of outward civilization together with the substance of inward cultivation. Yet, alas, today he is fifty and remains in the same condition in which he arrived from home more than thirty years ago.

People attribute his lack of success to many things. Those who know him understand that none is the true cause of his failure.

Ask him today and he will answer that he did not fail. On the contrary, he succeeded brilliantly, but never ate the fruits of his success because greedy hands stole them.

He says that he caused the success of this man, that man, and another. Today those men are great merchants. He, however, has renounced this world and the next. Nothing about people concerns him, as though he were a person without a soul and, in the way he conducts his affairs, had forgotten that he was one of humankind.

In truth, on the day ʿĪsā arrived in New York he rolled up the sleeve of earnestness and began joining the strength of his will to his intelligence and diligence. He worked by day and part of the night to attain the success he hoped for in the land of success. Yet he failed while his enterprises flowered and bore fruit. Other hands gathered the fruit, and the poor man remained on his mat, neither longer nor shorter than before.

A few days after his arrival, Duʿaybis ibn al-Asmar, a man from his country, came to him and proposed an affair that would lead them both to great wealth in the not-distant future. Duʿaybis had spent several years selling rosaries and holy pictures in and around New York. Through the trade’s profits and his own parsimony, he had gathered a considerable sum. He proposed that he and ʿĪsā open a commercial establishment in New York: Duʿaybis would supply the capital, ʿĪsā his experience, and at year’s end they would divide the profits.

The good idea entered ʿĪsā’s mind immediately. They established the partnership and, within a few days, commenced business under the name D. Asmar and Company.

ʿĪsā tried to stuff his own name into the firm’s, but his partner’s obstinacy made it impossible. He feared the whole idea would unravel, so he consented to forgo publicizing his name and contented himself with future profits. In vain he tried to persuade his partner that labor and experience were like capital, and that capital alone, unless joined with labor and experience, brought no profit. At last ʿĪsā said, “If what you want cannot be, then I want whatever will be.”

D. Asmar and Company was founded upon a solid basis. Its manager and member, ʿĪsā al-Bāshiq, devoted all the intellectual gifts and inward diligence God had given him to making the company prosper and soon become one of the greatest commercial establishments. His partner, however, hoped to swallow New York in a single mouthful without spending one dollar upon the bite.

This was the first subject of conflict between the partners. ʿĪsā thought the establishment should be founded during its first year upon the pillars of trust and advertising. He was not miserly when any matter required expenditure. His partner stood as an obstacle in the road, unconvinced by ʿĪsā’s proof. In his belief, commercial outlay was nothing but waste, and thrift was profit. As the American proverb said, every cent saved was a cent earned.[111]

And so ʿĪsā spent most of the first year striving, working, and exerting his utmost to patch whatever his partner tore through stinginess and avarice. Many times he paid from his own pocket for matters concerning the establishment, lest he arouse his partner’s temper. When the first year ended, the sum ʿĪsā had spent equaled his share of the profits. Duʿaybis’s profits, meanwhile, were like the widow’s jar: full, virginal, and untouched by any hand.[112]

His partner ʿĪsā was utterly astonished. When he asked how Duʿaybis had met his personal expenses, the man answered that he had “managed here and there.”

At the beginning of the new year Duʿaybis came to ʿĪsā’s office and said he was considering dissolving the partnership, with one buying the other’s share.

ʿĪsā could not understand why his partner wished to dissolve the firm despite its success in the first year and despite Duʿaybis’s profit, which he had added to his own capital. Poor ʿĪsā himself had worked, suffered, and spent everything in his power in the hope that the profit would multiply in the years ahead and give him saved capital.

The comic part was that ʿĪsā exhausted himself trying to persuade his partner to preserve the firm. Dissolution after a single year would reduce confidence in it. Continuing would be more profitable for both, and their profits could be expected to multiply in the coming years, since what had passed could not be called a time of trade and profit but a time of founding and beginning.

When ʿĪsā said that, if division was unavoidable, he would buy the establishment, Duʿaybis answered, “Very well. Give me the price of my share.”

Where could ʿĪsā find the price of his partner’s share? Now he understood the kind of division Duʿaybis wanted. He gave a bilious laugh mixed with pain and despair.

“If I sell you my share, what will you pay me for it?”

“I shall pay whatever the ledger shows is yours, with a grain of musk besides.”

“That is justice according to the law. Then give me what is mine in the ledger; that is sufficient. Keep the grain of musk. It comes from your grace and noble generosity, and I am grateful for your munificence.”

ʿĪsā took the ledger, struck out his name, picked up his hat, and walked toward the door. Before leaving he turned a scowling face toward his partner.

“Goodbye, Duʿaybis. What lay between us is finished. As for the grain of musk, I have no need of it. Leave it in your mustache.”

The following day D. Asmar and Company opened its door as usual. In place of its manager and member, ʿĪsā al-Bāshiq, sat a young man keeping the books for eight dollars a week.

Why should Duʿaybis share the profit on his money with another when he could hire a boy at a trifling wage to take the partner’s place?

ʿĪsā made an agreement with another Syrian establishment to represent it with sample cards in the interior.[113] At first he showed a remarkable power to win customers for his new house, until its receipts became five times what they had been. At year’s end he returned to New York for the accounting, happy with his success and hoping for still greater progress in coming years. He considered that year a period of founding and built his hopes upon tomorrow.

When the “salesman” sat down with the “boss” to settle accounts, he found him perfectly courteous and solicitous. The proprietor immediately closed ʿĪsā’s account at a balance of about three hundred dollars, saying that it grieved him deeply to let him go but that fear of the future compelled him. He thought it best to reduce expenses in order to ward off risks.

In vain ʿĪsā tried to persuade his “boss” that his fear had no place and that the future smiled upon them with certain success. Once he exhausted himself, he took his hat and made for the door to search for work in another establishment.

ʿĪsā entered many agreements like this with numerous Syrian houses. At the end of each year he increased the establishment’s profits and departed himself, content to have escaped safely. At last he tired of work and despaired of success. He sought refuge in drink and gambling. To this day he works one day and idles for a month, while people marvel at his condition and attribute his failure to causes from which he is as distant as earth from heaven.

Once I happened upon him in a café. I turned toward him and began conversing about the affairs of this mortal abode. He opened his quiver of secrets to me.

“People think me unsuccessful. By my life, in my first year I founded D. Asmar and Company. A boy whom Duʿaybis hired for eight dollars a week ate the fruit of my labor. Only a few months passed before he robbed the establishment and forged drafts against its owner worth more than half the capital, forcing the firm into bankruptcy. The boy spent the money upon girls. After serving two years in prison, he met me on the street and admitted that necessity had driven him to steal because his wage was insufficient.

“The second establishment, for which I won many customers, was forced into bankruptcy after two years. A financial storm blew through the American markets, and most of its customers fled with their unpaid debts.”

He listed before me many establishments whose commercial foundations, he said, he had set upon rock. Scarcely had he completed a foundation before he was forced to leave. What angered him most was that upon those sound foundations they raised only buildings of mud brick instead of stone.

Poor ʿĪsā al-Bāshiq! People think him a drunkard, gambler, and idler. They say of him, “His figure is polished; his pocket holds not a bean.”[114] In truth he is a man who cooked and another ate, who planted and someone else harvested.

He says that America does not belong to those who emigrate in second or first class, or to those who can read, write, and speak languages. It belongs to the others: merchants by coincidence and fate.

NOTES

[110] Steamship second class marked ʿĪsā as unusually educated and respectable among early Syrian migrants, most of whom traveled in steerage. The title makes class position a satirical explanation for why practical commercial opportunists repeatedly exploit him.
[111] A version of the English maxim ‘A penny saved is a penny earned,’ associated with Benjamin Franklin’s thrift ethic, appears here in immigrant commercial Arabic.
[112] The inexhaustible widow’s jar recalls 1 Kings 17:8–16, in which a widow’s meal and oil do not fail. Haddad’s mixed image emphasizes that Duʿaybis leaves his profit wholly untouched while ʿĪsā spends his own share on the firm.
[113] Commercial travelers carried sample cards or boards (masāṭir) representing a wholesaler’s merchandise and took orders from retailers in inland towns.
[114] Arabic al-qāma maṣqūla wa-l-jayba mā fīhā fūla, a rhyming judgment: ‘the figure is polished, but the pocket has not a bean.’ It contrasts ʿĪsā’s cultivated appearance with poverty.
