Nearly 30 years after I first saw “Ragtime,” I found myself back in a Broadway theater with my brother watching a beautifully restaged and reimagined revival. It was my third time seeing the musical and I thought I knew it well. Walking out, I realized that I didn’t.
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Like so many spectators, I had always understood “Ragtime” as a story about race, immigration, class and America’s deepest injustices. The show touches on all of those themes as it presents the soul-crushing story of a man of color rightly seeking justice. The musical refuses to romanticize the country or ignore its failures. That is one reason the show has endured for nearly three decades.
But after seeing “Ragtime” this time around, I left thinking about a character I had never fully appreciated: Tateh.
Somewhere between seeing “Ragtime” as a high school student in the mid-1990s and experiencing the show again as a parent and professor, I realized I had missed the show’s quietest argument. Beneath the stories of racial injustice and social upheaval is a remarkably thoughtful meditation on the American dream — one told largely through the eyes of a poor Jewish immigrant from Latvia.
Tateh arrives in America with his young daughter and little else. His wife is dead and on a rag ship heading into New York harbor, “America is our home now. America is our shtetl.”
Tateh is after something larger than economic opportunity. He wants his daughter to inherit a different life than the one they have known and that hope has animated generations of immigrants. They did not come to our shores because America promised an easy life, they came because it offered the possibility of building one.
What Tateh finds is not the America of nostalgic memory and certainly no streets paved in gold. He is ambitious and optimistic, but he is also hungry, beaten and repeatedly humiliated. In one of the musical’s most disturbing scenes, Tateh is asked to sell his daughter. Surely, if anyone had reason to conclude that America had betrayed its promise, it was Tateh — yet he chooses to stay.
The question “Ragtime” sets up from Tateh’s degradation is what does one do in response to so many injustices. The musical then offers two answers and it takes both seriously.
Emma Goldman, the anarchist and socialist, sees everything Tateh sees. Workers exploited, wealth hoarded and immigrants treated with contempt. The musical wisely refuses to caricature her; she possesses genuine moral seriousness and real compassion for those society has failed.
Goldman even names them. Standing before the crowd at Union Square, she demands “the land of opportunity for Tateh and his little girl.” Earlier, surveying his misery, she observes that this is not the America he came here for. She is right.
But notice what actually changes Tateh’s life.
The turn comes on a train out of Lawrence, Massachusetts. The mill strike there has collapsed into violence; Tateh has been beaten and nearly lost his daughter in the chaos. When he finally catches the departing train, he has nothing left to give her but reassurance — “Don’t cry. Don’t be afraid. I’m here. We’re together” — and a small book of silhouettes he has cut by hand. Imagine you’re fearless, he tells her, and soon you won’t fear.
He is not pitching a product. He is comforting a frightened child. Then the conductor sees the little book — and buys it. In that moment, an act of fatherhood becomes an enterprise. Tateh’s first customer appears not because he chased wealth but because he loved his daughter. The market emerges out of love and creativity.
Life is unfair and the world is unjust, but we can still build and move on.
Both of these Jewish immigrants see America failing its immigrants but the critical difference between them is not merely tactical; it is philosophical. Emma Goldman’s politics are fundamentally oppositional: she marches, she agitates, she denounces, she demands and she is eventually deported. Her moral energy is spent tearing down what exists, and nowhere in her vision is there a clear account of what gets built afterward, or by whom. In contrast, Tateh does not organize against anything and repeatedly says “No politics.” Tateh wants to create and wants to build — his answer to injustice is not a populist movement but a product, a business, a family, a future.
A century after Goldman thundered at Union Square, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and their allies hold real power in our largest cities including New York, where those politics now occupy City Hall a few subway stops from the square where Goldman spoke.
Today’s DSA appeal rests on Goldman’s diagnosis and it dangerously shares her incompleteness. Their critiques are often earnest and the grievances are real. But protest can only name what people are owed while building and innovating are what deliver it. “Ragtime” is not asking us to choose between acknowledging injustice and believing in America. It insists that we can do both and shows which posture actually changes a family’s life.
When we meet Tateh again, years have passed and the formerly impoverished Latvian paper cutter has changed his name, entered the new motion picture industry, built a company and emerged as a proud and successful American immigrant. His success was neither immediate nor guaranteed, but it came through persistence, showing that America remained open enough that reinvention was possible.
Tateh’s story answers the question of whether people are primarily products of structures they cannot escape or whether they can create new possibilities within imperfect institutions. “Ragtime” clearly settles on America as a land of promise with Tateh’s story being the proof. He never denies the existence of injustice; he simply refuses to let injustice become the defining fact of his life.
Tateh’s story may be the version of the American dream we most need to remember and then recover — life is unfair and the world is unjust, but we can still build and move on.
Much of today’s immigration debate revolves around the border, asylum policy and labor markets. Those are important questions. But “Ragtime” pushes us toward a question that precedes the ones that dominate the headlines today: what kind of country are immigrants actually entering?
For much of our nation’s history, the answer was never that America was free of prejudice or injustice. Instead, America was a country where even in the face of prejudice and injustice, new arrivals could still build something here — a family, a business and a future their children might carry further than they could. This is what we see on stage with Tateh and his success does not erase his past or hardships. What America offers him is the chance to begin again and he seized those opportunities.
Thirty years after I first encountered “Ragtime,” I finally heard this quieter theme running beneath the musical’s more familiar critique of America’s failures. Tateh leaves Lawrence with little more than his daughter, his talent and the determination to keep going. By the end of his journey, what he has built is so much more than a business. He has built the possibility that his daughter’s life will begin where his struggle ended and that, perhaps more than anything else, is the American dream.
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