Arab immigrants to New York have hawked goods since late Ottoman times

Evidence

Bewildered by his new life, Abdel Salam did what every lost immigrant does: He sought out his own kind. In the hardscrabble days of the early seventies, he trundled his way out to the concrete sidewalks of Atlantic Avenue and began working in the same traditions that Arab immigrants to New York had followed since late Ottoman times in the United States. Abdel Salam peddled whatever he could get his hands on. He bought clothes and costume jewelry wholesale and sold them at retail prices around the neighborhood and all over the city. It was a hard, tenuous existence. Once, when he had nothing left to sell and only dust in his pocket, he picked up a stray cat and walked into a pizzeria in Brooklyn. With a smile and some sweet talk, he convinced the man behind the counter that the cat was a purebred Egyptian and worth two dollars and two pies. Maybe the Italian took pity on the poor Palestinian man, but it didn’t matter. This was the best sale and the tastiest pizza of his life. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 476

Categorization

• CANDY: The stray cat sold as a purebred Egyptian for pizza is a genuinely charming, self-contained anecdote.
• XREF: connects to: Syrian merchants profited by supplying America’s Orientalist consumer fantasies — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 226