Journal of Modern Jewish Studies Vol 7, No. 3 November 2008, pp.357–376 ISSN 1472-5886 print/ISSN 1472-5894 online © 2008 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14725880802405043 Rebecca Kobrin “WHEN A JEW WAS A LANDSMAN” Rethinking American Jewish regional identity in the age of mass migration Taylor and Francis CMJS_A_340672.sgm 10.1080/14725880802405043 Modern Jewish Studies 1472-5886 (print)/1472-5894 (online) Original Article 2008 Taylor & Francis 73000000November 2007 RebeccaKobrin
[email protected] “My beginnings are in Bialystok,” proclaimed Israel Beker, director of the renowned Habima theater troupe. “[But] I am not just from Bialystok,” he continued, “I am a Bialystoker, and that means much more” (Beker 3). It is tempting to dismiss such a bold articulation of Eastern European Jewish regional loyalty as exceptional, the mere theatrics of its thespian author. Yet Beker’s sentiments concerning the centrality of his birth in the city of Bialystok to his understanding of his identity were shared by thousands of early twentieth-century immigrant Jews, who, despite abandoning Eastern Europe, continued to assert emphatically their East European urban regional identities. 1 In fact, in early twentieth-century America, Eastern European Jews’ contin- ued attachment to their home city or town saw the formation of over 2,000 landsmanshaft (hometown) associations claiming over a half a million members. As Isaac Rontch, head of the Works Progress Administration’s Yiddish Writer’s Group, conjectured, the depth of these East European regional loyalties pushed one of every five Jews living in the United States in 1938 to be a member of a landsmanshaft associations (Rontch, “Der itstiger matsev”, 9). Their popularity, Rontch continued, captured a “striking [feature of American] Jewish life: … whenever two total strangers meet on the street” they immediately needed to know “from which region or city did their new acquaintance [came] from”. In the Eastern European Jewish immigrant world, one’s religious sensibilities, political beliefs or even nation of birth mattered far less than one’s city of origin, provoking Rontch to quip on the opening page of his landmark study: “when did every Jew become a landsman (fun vanen iz a yid a landsman)?” (Rontch, “Der itstiger matsev”, 9). 2 Historians seeking to understand American Jewry have long debated the centrality of regionalism to American Jewish life. 3 What role do regions and regionalism play in the development of Jewish life in the United States? Where do American Jews’ ideas about regions and regional identity come from? What imagined map, territories and boundaries have shaped Jews’ vision of themselves and their relationship to the world around them? When scholars of American Jewish history address these questions, many examine the classical regional cleavages defining the American nation, interrogating the distinctiveness of Southern Jewish life or Jews’ experiences in the West (Bauman; Evans; Kaganoff and Urofsky; Proctor and Schmier; Kahn and Dollinger). To be sure, the divergent cultural, economic and political contexts of these areas molded Jews’ J OURNAL OF MODERN J EWI SH STUDI ES 358 self-perceptions and their daily lives, but such a narrow vision of American Jewish regional identity obscures the sentiments Rontch heard voiced by early twentieth- century immigrant Jews who narrated their regional identities not in reference to the Mason-Dixon Line, but rather in relation to the map of Eastern Europe. Rontch instinctively understood, as Deborah Dash Moore has recently argued, that scholars must write “not just American Jewish history but modern Jewish history through [a lens of] urban regionalism, seeing this as ultimately more significant than nation states for Jews” (Moore, “Regionalism”, 117). The following pages pay heed to Deborah Dash Moore’s clarion call to place urban regionalism at the centre of discussions of American Jewish life, exploring the ways in which early twentieth-century immigrant Jews in both North and South America summoned, deployed and re-articulated their East European urban regional identities. Indeed, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the largest volun- tary demographic shift in modern Jewish history as millions of Jews moved beyond Eastern Europe’s geographic borders. 4 Regardless of whether they settled in New York, Chicago, Milwaukee or Buenos Aires, Eastern European Jews summoned meta- phors of regional distinctiveness to form associations that helped them gain a foothold in their new homes and remain connected to their former homes and other Jewish immigrants scattered throughout the world. 5 These organizations, dismissed by some Jewish intellectuals as “backward” or “retarded,” did indeed constitute “an integral part of the Jewish community” (Rontch, “Present State”, 360). Predicated on the belief that Jews from a particular city or locale shared distinctive needs, these seemingly parochial associations created a transnational sphere through their publications in which Eastern European Jewish émigrés debated, discussed and re-imagined the connection between Jewish identity and urban regionalisms. These organizations high- light that, far from the classic paradigms of American Jewish history that have cast Eastern European Jewish migration as a one-way process in which Jewish migrants relinquish all bonds to their former home as they embraced their new identities as Americans, Eastern European Jews acted as quintessential transnational migrants, as they, to use the words of Nina Glick Schiller, “forged and sustained multi-stranded social relations link[ing] their societies of origin with their settlement societies” (Schiller et al., Nations Unbound, 22). 6 To appreciate fully the historical significance of these organizations that shaped how Eastern European Jews (who comprised the vast majority of American Jewry by the 1930s) conceptualized and theorized regionalism and its relationship to Jewish identity, I begin with a brief historiographical discussion on the place (or more apt: the virtual erasure) of Eastern European Jewish regionalism in the annals of American Jewish life. Then, through a case study of the landsmanshaft institutions and newspapers created by Jewish émigrés from the city of Bialystok—one small slice of the landsman- shaft world—I highlight the diverse forms Eastern European regional identity took as it was projected onto new landscapes in the Americas. Focusing on the Bialystoker Center, founded in New York City in 1919, and the Bialystoker Farband, established in Buenos Aires in 1930, I demonstrate the ways in which the simple act of organizing a “Bialystoker” institution raised larger ideological questions about Jewish urban regional identity: What did it mean to be a Bialystoker Jew outside of Bialystok? What identified one as a “Bialystoker Jew” on the streets of New York or Buenos Aires? While these organizations both articulated a vision of successful adaptation as dependent on its RETHI NKI NG AMERI CAN J EWI SH REGI ONAL I DENTI TY 359 members’ ability to rebuild or recreate “Bialystok” in their new environs, the types of institutions these immigrant Jews actually built and the meanings they assigned to the term “Bialystoker” were diverse, highlighting the complex challenges facing those who sought to re-map their Eastern European urban regional identity onto the landscapes of the Americas Eastern European Jewish regionalism and American Jewish life While it was abundantly clear to Rontch to place Eastern European Jewish regional identity, broadly conceived, at the centre of a narrative on Jewish life in America, the themes raised by his classic study were rarely engaged over the next fifty years. 7 What explains the discrepancy between Rontch’s appreciation of the centrality of Eastern European Jewish regional identity to American Jewish life and its limited scholarly influence in the writing of American Jewish history? To begin with, one must acknowledge the role American exceptionalism played in molding the narrative arc of American Jewish history (as in the larger field of American history). The general “tendency in both academic and popular thought,” as Thomas Bender observes, “to remove the United States from the domain of the international” has encouraged few scholars to conceptualize or narrate the American Jewish identity as entwined with European regional sensibilities (Bender 5). Buttressing an American exceptionalist vision of American Jewish regional identity was the general shift in the larger historical profession away from examining regions; as Celia Appelgate observes, examinations of regions or regional loyalties were seen as “subordinate to the national history project and pursued mainly by little-regarded amateurs” (“A Europe of Regions”, 1160). Taken together, these trends cemented a general disregard for East European urban regionalism in the annals of American Jewish history; even those scholars who turned their attention to landsmanshaft institutions, clearly informed by regional loyalties, cast them as part of “an American phenomenon” and presented them primarily within the framework of American voluntary associational life, gliding over their international entanglements and obscuring the reality that these organizations drew American Jews into a worldwide debate over the legacy of East European Jewish regionalism. 8 At the same time that American Jewish historians virtually erased East European urban regionalism from the annals of American Jewish life, they did, however, constantly advance a vision of regionalism as central to American Jewish life. Echoing scholars in the larger field of American history, American Jewish historians fiercely debated how to depict Jews in the South. Should they be portrayed, as Melvin Urofsky (xii) argues, as “the most assimilated part of American Jewry” as a result of their successful integration into Southern culture without forsaking their Jewishness? Or were Jews in the South shaped only in a “marginal fashion” by Southern culture,” as Mark Bauman (5) contends, sharing more in common with other Jews in America than with “white Protestants in the South”? 9 Despite such ideological differences, these histo- rians shared a vision of regionalism as a vehicle through which to insert Jews into the larger conversation surrounding the American South (Franklin et al.; Bauman). Such debates over the image of Southern American Jewish life obscures the fact that for most American Jews in the first half of the twentieth century, Europe still exerted a J OURNAL OF MODERN J EWI SH STUDI ES 360 strong emotional pull, molding their understanding of their Jewish regional identities. Such a pull surfaces vividly, for instance, in Morris Freeman’s 1942 autobiography concerning his life in the southern city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Known “as the umbrella man of Ninth Street” from Augustov, Poland, Freeman, a staunch Zionist, left the Russian Empire in 1906 to avoid military service, settling initially in Boston. He moved to Chattanooga after the First World War because the area’s rainy winters promised to be good for his business and he quickly became well known throughout the city (Freeman 3–5; Grote; Hale). Often submitting articles to the local press, Freeman offered up a vision of the intricate role that his identity as a Jew from Augustov played in his encounter with Chattanooga. Despite his appreciation of his neighbours’ vision of their home in juxtaposition to Northern cities, when depicting Chattanooga’s favourable economic structure and warm, friendly atmosphere, Freeman summoned the comparative landscape of Augustov rather than Boston. 10 Chattanooga, Freeman opined in one piece, “is the only place in the world in which a poor man like me could have accomplished this dream [of economic success]. … [I]n [Augustov, Poland] a man born poor dies poor and his sons have little chance to rise in the world” (Hale). Looking east to Europe, rather than north to his former home in Boston, Freeman was far from alone in summoning of the landscapes of Europe to describe who he was, his achieve- ments or his sense of his place in his new home in America. In fact, articulations of Eastern European regionalism were used promiscuously by Eastern European Jews in early twentieth-century America, as one can vividly see among Jews from the Polish city of Bialystok in New York City. Bialystok on East Broadway: The Bialystoker Center and Eastern European Jewish regionalism on New York’s Lower East Side “Bialystok [is] on East Broadway” blared a headline in the 21 June 1931, Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) (Sohn, “Bialistok af ist brodvey”, 3). To be sure, the tens of thousands of American Jews who read the Forverts understood that Bialystok—an industrial city of 90,000 residents in northeast Poland—had not been excised from the Second Polish Republic and replanted on the Lower East Side’s main thoroughfare. Yet they appreciated why the newspaper would summon the map of Eastern Europe to hail the consecration of a new building, an edifice that anyone “who travels on the bridges between New York and Brooklyn” would easily see and be “amazed by its fine architec- ture” and “towering” presence (Sohn, “Bialistok af ist brodvey”, 3). While the birth of two influential modern Jewish ideological movements—Zionism and the Bund—were tied to Bialystok, this Forverts feature proclaimed the city’s crowning achievement was its erection of the Bialystoker Center and Old Age Home on East Broadway. As the Forverts chronicled, thousands thronged the streets to watch a “parade of 25,000 Bialystokers” marching down East Broadway, carrying American flags, banners and ribbons flecked with red, white and blue (Figure 1). Like German-American parades of the period, this patriotic procession demonstrated its participants’ “collective self- assurance” about their place in America (see Goren 30–47; see also Conzen; Jacobson 78–82; Davis). The parade culminated in a ceremony during which all marchers gathered around their “new Bialystok,” a 10-storey building draped in American flags. RETHI NKI NG AMERI CAN J EWI SH REGI ONAL I DENTI TY 361 Applauding the Bialystoker émigrés’ success, one speaker argued that this edifice not only elevated Bialystok’s status in America, but in Eastern Europe as well. “Bialystokers have set the standard for others to go by,” maintained David Sohn, the Bialystoker Center’s executive director (Sohn, “Bialistok af ist brodvey”, 3). “Other landsmanshaftn constituents lack Bialystoker Jews’ drive and enthusiasm,” he continued, and they “can [only] dream of having a center of their own such as our Bialystoker Center” (Sohn, “Bialistok af ist brodvey”, 3). The successful building of the Bialystoker Center in New York City, in short, demonstrated to its former inhabitants how distinctive Bialystok Jewry was (and continued to be) in Eastern Europe. Source: Forverts Kunst-baylage, 28 June 1931. The imbrication of New York and Bialystok in this institution, which, in the words of the Forverts, enabled “Bialystok’s unique potential” to be realized on American shores, did mark a milestone for this splintered group that supported over 50 “Bialystoker” organizations in the United States (and 39 in New York City alone). 11 Despite their particularistic rhetoric, these organizations functioned like hundreds of other immigrant associations as they responded to their members’ pressing material needs, providing basic financial assistance in times of illness, unemployment or death, and simultaneously enabling the diverse cross-section of Jews from this city in Poland to carve a niche for themselves in America, regardless of their religious beliefs, gender, age, political affili- ation or class loyalty. 12 FIGURE 1 Source: Forverts Kunst-baylage, 28 June 1931. J OURNAL OF MODERN J EWI SH STUDI ES 362 A few examples provide a glimpse into this diverse network of institutions. There were two “Bialystoker” religious congregations in New York City—Anshei Chesed (founded 1878) and Ahavat Achim (founded in 1884)—which catered to the pious members of the community, who desired, as Louis Cohen (3) observed, to “pray and congregate in the Bialystoker way”. For those younger, well-educated members of the community who valued Americanization above piety, there was the Bialystoker Young Men’s Association, founded in 1906 and whose mission was to provide much-needed “forward-looking” educational, cultural and social activities to aid its members in succeeding economically and melding into America. 13 Class loyalty prompted Jewish socialists from Bialystok to establish the Bialystoker Branch 88 of the Workmen’s Circle in 1905. This immensely popular organization provided aid to workers in New York and in Russia as part of its effort to foment a workers’ revolution throughout the world (Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations, 68). In 1908, middle-class women formed the Bialystoker Ladies’ Aid Society of the Bronx and Harlem—one of the largest Jewish women’s societies in New York—which offered aid to the sick and poor as well as interest-free loans to the unemployed (Albert, unnumbered page). In 1919 after hearing news of the devastating destruction of the First World War, these organizations decided to form an umbrella organization called the Bialystoker Center to coordinate the fundraising efforts on behalf of their former home in Eastern Europe. The mission of this institution was to serve both “the interests of the Bialystoker landsmanshaftn and the interests of the Jewish population in Bialystok” through its collection and distribution of funds (Sohn, “Unzere oypgebn”, 1). This it did with great success. Between 1919 and 1932, the Bialystoker Center distributed over US$9 million (equivalent to US$64 million at 2007 currency values), which helped rebuild the schools, hospitals, orphanages and cultural organizations of this Jewish community destroyed in the First World War and the ensuing unrest. Hailed as “saviours” by Jews in Bialystock for their relief efforts, representatives of the Bialystoker Center were treated by local Polish officials as the powerful political leaders (Kobrin, “Contested Contributions”, 43–62). In 1921 the Bialystoker Center’s executive director, David Sohn, created the Der Bialystoker Stimme (Voice of Bialystok), a newspaper whose title reflected the widespread belief that the Center acted as Bialystok Jewry’s mouthpiece. 14 Grasping the power of print culture, which, as Benedict Anderson (37–46) observes, plays a key role in creating and sustaining group identity among groups who do not share territorial cohesiveness, Sohn dedicated the Center’s resources to producing and disseminating the Bialystoker Stimme. In every issue Sohn ran editorials debating the contours of this increasingly dispersed community, articles reporting on current events in Bialystok and updates chronicling the achievements of Bialystoker émigré communities throughout the world. During its first few decades of publication, the Bialystoker Stimme reached tens of thousands of Bialystoker émigrés worldwide. 15 As Anna Gepner recalled, in Melbourne, Australia, everyone gathered together regularly to read the Bialystoker Stimme when it arrived at her uncle’s home. 16 Yehezkel Aran similarly reminisced how he would also gather with friends regularly in a cafe in Tel Aviv to share their woes and “catch up on all the news conveyed in the Bialystoker Stimme”. 17 With feature articles entitled “A New Bialystok in Argentina” or “Bialystok in America and America in Bialystok”, the Bialystoker Stimme encouraged Bialystoker émigrés around the world to see themselves as extending Bialystok as they endeavoured to root themselves in their new homes. 18 RETHI NKI NG AMERI CAN J EWI SH REGI ONAL I DENTI TY 363 Yet if all were endeavouring to extend Bialystok, only the Biaylstoker Center, argued the Bialystoker Stimme, successfully transplanted Bialystok to the new world. Since at its core, Bialystok was known for its charitable traditions, the Bialystoker Stimme maintained, the Bialystoker Center’s ability to raise and distribute funds estab- lished it as the “new Bialystok” (Chaikin 43). Such a vision of Bialystoker identity was epitomized by the imagery that appeared on the Bialystoker Stimme’s cover starting in 1926 (Figure 2). 19 In the image, one can see on the right Bialystok’s famed FIGURE 2 Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. J OURNAL OF MODERN J EWI SH STUDI ES 364 clock tower, erected in 1742, that stood at the center of the city’s main commercial square; to the left appears a 5-storey building with the words “Bialystoker Center and Bikur Holim” etched on its front. Allegorically enabling these icons of European and American Bialystok to share a sidewalk was a column with the word “kultur” (culture) etched on top and “hilf” (charity) on its base, conveying the view of the Bialystoker Stimme’s editors: charity is the cornerstone of Bialystoker identity, providing the foun- dation for transnational Bialystoker identity. To be a Bialystoker, in short, meant to be charitable. FIGURE 2 Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Such a vision of “Bialystokness” was inculcated into its readers as this image became emblazoned on the paper’s masthead before its regular feature “From Here and from There” (“Fun danen un dort”) that combined Bialystok and New York in its discussion of current events (Figure 3). The acute crisis faced by impoverished Jews preparing for Passover in Bialystok shared front-page space with an accounting of the Bialystoker Center’s Ladies Auxiliary’s upcoming annual picnic. FIGURE 3 Bialystoker Stimme 182 (January 1939). Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The entwining of philanthropy with “Bialystokness” on its cover and masthead resonated with the larger American Jewish culture, which over the course of the early twentieth century began to see the act of collecting and distributing philanthropy as central to how Jews affiliated, defined their identities and articulated the contours of their community (Woocher 1-–63). Yet unlike larger American Jewish philanthropic organizations, the Bialystoker Center made clear that their fundraising efforts were not focused on making donors into “Americans”, but rather reconfiguring Eastern Europe. As Zelig Tigel, a correspondent for the Warsaw Yiddish daily Der haynt summed up in a 1924 article, the new Bialystoker Center with its deep pockets enabled Bialystok to emerge as a new Jewish cultural centre in Eastern Europe. While Warsaw may have been viewed as the most vibrant Jewish community in Poland prior to the Great War, he argued, Bialystok’s rebirth after the war, thanks to its “extension” located on the Lower East side, forced all in Poland to look at this industrial city with newfound respect. 20 Ironically, the Bialystoker Center’s success enacting “the essence of Bialystok” by raising vast sums for this city ultimately drove its lay leaders to contemplate ways in which they could demonstrate Bialystok’s legacy (and their newfound economic power) on a stage closer to home (Soyer, “Between Two Worlds”, 8). While in 1923, the Center’s Board of Trustees emphasized that “the Bialystoker Center’s first goal [was to] succeed in organizing a smooth functioning new Bialystok on the shores of America so that the traditions and spirit of Old Bialystok are preserved”, by 1927 this group agreed to transform their Bialystoker Center into the Bialystoker Center Old Age Home, an elderly care facility open to any immigrant Jew in need. As David Sohn summed up: FIGURE 3 Bialystoker Stimme 182 (January 1939). Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. RETHI NKI NG AMERI CAN J EWI SH REGI ONAL I DENTI TY 365 Soon all active in the Center realized that extending aid to compatriots overseas was not enough. … They realized that Bialystoker children, growing up, faced the vexing question: how could they avert the embarrassment of placing “mother” or “dad”, advanced in years, into a charity Old Age Home? … They hit upon the answer: set up a Bialystoker Home for the Aged in which the Bialystoker old folks would feel at home among their compatriots. The decision in Jan. 1927 to erect a Home for the Aged was greeted with an enthusiastic response. (Sohn, “History and Achievements”, 5, 10) Maintaining a focus on giving charity, but expanding its mission to include elderly Bialystoker Jews and, by 1933, even elderly Jews who possessed no link to Bialystok, the Board’s recasting of the Bialystoker Center from a philanthropic institution focused on Bialystok to a welfare organization intended to aid the elderly marks a monumental shift in this émigré community’s projection of their regional “Bialystoker identities”. 21 The call to create an old age home was far from unique in New York’s Eastern European Jewish immigrant world as demographic shifts pushed regional groups connected to Warsaw and Mohilev to erect similar institutions. 22 No longer seeing themselves in the crucible of their foreign regional attachments, and overwhelmed by the financial strains of the Great Depression and familial responsibilities, the Bialystoker Center’s Board of Trustees, led by David Sohn, argued that a commitment to financially supporting the home demonstrated one’s devotion to maintaining Bialystok’s legacy as a centre for charitable activity (Sohn, “Elter problemen”, 28). However, this shift did not mark the demise of a distinctive Bialystoker Jewish identity, but rather its radical reformulation in response to circumstances in America. In the eyes of the Bialystoker Center’s Board of Trustees, Bialystokness had become a question of spirit, conviction and purpose, not only of birthplace; anyone who joined wholeheartedly in the Bialystoker Center’s mission—providing funds to care for the elderly—could proclaim they had successfully helped plant “Bialystok on East Broadway”. The singing looms of Villa Lynch: Bialystoker organizational life in Buenos Aires In Buenos Aires, many would contest the Bialystoker Center’s new definition of Bialystoker identity as entwined with charity and the disbursement of money. No “new Bialystok”, they would contend, could be defined by the act of giving charity because many Bialystoker Jews, like those who found themselves in Argentina, could not afford to give charity. As one émigré reminisced:“[W]ho could give money away or even have time to worry about supporting a Bialystoker [organization] when one’s family did not have anything to eat?” (Pat 10). Residing in a city with few industries for employment, many Bialystoker Jews in Buenos Aires lived in a precarious economic state that left a deep imprint on their personal psyches as well as their collective lives: the first Bialystoker organization founded in Argentina in 1923 was forced to close in 1924 as a result of lack of funds. As one Bialystoker Jewish émigré summed up: “No one had any time or money to spare” (Pat 10). It was not until 1930, after a new influx of émigrés arrived in Buenos Aires from Bialystok, that the Bialystoker Jewish émigré community had a quorum to support their own organization (Munacker, “Der J OURNAL OF MODERN J EWI SH STUDI ES 366 bialistoker farband”, 86). Responding to the lack of government support for industrial development, this Bialystoker organization’s primary mission was to help émigrés build up the local textile industry—an industry whose workings many were familiar with from Bialystok. Accordingly, they named it the Bialistoker Farband un Credit Coop La Textil (Bialystoker Organization and Credit Union for Textiles, hereafter referred to as the “Bialystoker Farband”)—an organization devoted to granting loans to émigrés to “maintain themselves, acquire property and [achieve] general [economic] progress” (Reisman 7). The Bialystoker Farband played an integral role in the economic advancement of this émigré community in Buenos Aires by offering loans to help its members establish their own factories. Similar to Jewish loan associations in Europe and the United States, the Bialystoker Farband expedited the process of upward mobility in this émigré community by supplying the necessary capital to start and expand businesses (Tenen- baum 67–77). With the aid of these loans, several Bialystoker families founded small spinning and weaving textile factories on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, primarily in a neighbourhood called “Villa Lynch”. These factories soon prospered, providing employ- ment for later waves of Bialystoker Jewish émigrés. By the late 1930s, Villa Lynch became a dense settlement of Bialystoker émigrés, with factories and homes existing side-by-side (Pinkus 94–102). The configuration of Villa Lynch and the success of its factories prompted some Bialystoker émigrés to call Villa Lynch “the Manchester of Argentina”, harkening to not only the paradigmatic industrial center in England, but also the well-known nickname of Bialystok—often called the “Manchester of Lithuania” (Pinkus 7). By binding émigrés together as employees and employers, buyers and sellers, lenders and borrowers, the Bialystoker Farband not only helped these Jews alleviate their financial situation, but also reinforced the ties of their regionally based community. 23 In contrast to New York, where the defining acts of Bialystoker organizations was their dedication to maintaining connections to Bialystok and transplanting its “values” to America, in Buenos Aires, what it meant to be a Bialystoker became entwined with replicating Bialystok’s industry in Argentina. As the Bialystok-born, New York-based Yiddish journalist Hayim Shoshkes remarked after visiting Villa Lynch in 1946, “the singing of the machines” and the “beating of the weaving looms” makes one think one has stumbled into Bialystok, where the symphony of textile manufacturing always filled the air. Remarkably, Shoshkes observed, the Farband had recreated the essence of Bialystok in South America: even though Bialystok’s textile industry now lay in ruins, all Bialystokers did not have to worry that their former home’s industrial legacy was lost—a replica of “Bialystok’s textile industry [could be] found in Villa Lynch” (Shoshkes 16). As it dispensed funds to build up textile factories, the Bialystoker Farband addressed the larger ideological question of what it meant to identify oneself as a Bialystoker in Argentina. From its inception, the organization’s focus on acquiring capital cultivated among Bialystokers in Argentina an understanding of their identity as intricately linked to the politics of the often unemployed factory worker and issues of class. The leaders of the Bialystoker Farband stressed that “in order to be a true Bialystoker” one had to know how “to improve oneself through hard tireless work” (Reisman 7). The Bialystoker Farband’s concept of self-maintenance became central to how Argentine Bialystoker émigrés began to view the greatest attributes of their city of origin. As Moyshe Reisman, founding member of the Bialystoker Farband, noted: RETHI NKI NG AMERI CAN J EWI SH REGI ONAL I DENTI TY 367 “Bialystok’s historical past teaches all the benefit of hard work … [and] that Jewish workers can achieve success despite daunting obstacles” (Reisman 7). Their experi- ences in Bialystok, Reisman (9) continued, led to the foundation of the Bialystoker Farband and other cooperative banks illustrating the ways in which “people must help themselves”. The actions and rhetoric of the Bialystoker Farband tried to convince its members that the values of “tireless work” and economic self-improvement were the central defining attributes of Bialystok regional identity. Soon émigrés in Buenos Aires began to see themselves as more authentically “Bialystoker” than the “allrightniks” (the derogatory Yiddish term applied to those immigrants who were seen as abandoning their morals in order to achieve rapid material success) who had left Bialystok to settle in the United States. In contrast to their compatriots who settled in the United States, became “quick successes”, forgot the lessons of life in Bialystok and supported bourgeois welfare insti- tutions that served constituencies far beyond the Bialystoker community, émigrés in Buenos Aires continued the traditions “of the working-class city of Bialystok” by concerning themselves with the problems of the labourer (Reisman 7). Supporting libraries and “reading circles” to educate Jewish workers, the members of the Farband saw themselves as maintaining the legacy of Bialystok as a centre of worker activism (Resiman 7). They may have not been “quick successes” like their compatriots in America, but they similarly deployed their Bialystoker institution to make an imprint beyond the narrow confines of their regional émigré community. The cover page of the Bialystoker Farband’s magazine Bialystoker vegn (The Ways of Bialystok) expresses a proletarian, as opposed to bourgeois, charitable vision of Bialystok’s legacy (Figure 4). The image on this 60-page publication’s cover begins in the top left corner with a visual representation of a group of factories from which a long winding road emerges. This road then curves and meanders past a representation of the destroyed Bialystoker Synagogue and Bialystoker clock tower, before ending at the name “Bialystoker Farband” emblazoned under a picture of a quill in an ink jar. Echoing the magazine’s stated goal—to “preserve Yiddish culture”—the cover sought to connect Bialystok directly to the mission purported by many Jewish socialist or worker-oriented organizations in this era (Munaker, “Farvos bialistoker vegn”, 2). 24 From its inception in 1897 in Russia, the Bund (the abbreviated name for the Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lita, Poyln un Rusland [General Jewish Worker’s Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia]), an illegal Jewish socialist political party, supported the development of Yiddish language materials to further educate the Jewish working masses. The title page of Bial- istoker vegn reiterated this message as its editors claimed that Bialystoker Jews were charged with a mission “to cultivate Yiddish culture in all their new homes” (Munaker, “Farvos bialistoker vegn”, 2). In contrast to their American compatriots’ commitment to spreading a bourgeois charitable culture, these Argentine Bialystokers saw the road from (or legacy of) Bialystok stemming from its factories where Yiddish culture was nurtured. Bialistoker vegn fulfilled this mission on each of its sixty pages by publishing reports, poetry and stories from Bialystoker Jews living around the world, and encour- aging émigrés to see their Bialystoker identity in their new world as entwined with a devotion to working-class politics and Yiddish. FIGURE 4 Bialistoker vegn 1947. Courtesy of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The vision of Bialystoker identity articulated in this publication and through its sponsoring organization—not only in relation to Eastern Europe, but in juxtaposition to the perceived bourgeois Bialystoker culture in the United States—deserves J OURNAL OF MODERN J EWI SH STUDI ES 368 attention because no longer was Eastern Europe the primary touchstone to which émigrés turned to define themselves. They could not explain what it meant to be a “Bialystoker” by looking only at Bialystok; they also had to define themselves against the perceived class-status and achievements of their former compatriots living in New York. Argentine Bialystokers saw their counterparts in the United States as a looming presence who demanded they articulate a corrected vision of Bialystok’s essence. Contrasting their faithfulness to Bialystok with the questionable loyalty of Bialystoker émigrés who settled in the United States, the members of the Bialystoker Farband would ultimately turn their attention to erecting the Y. L. Peretz Folkshule—a Yiddish elementary school that opened in 1949. They understood their support of Yiddish education as continuing the efforts undertaken by Jewish workers in Bialystok who had embraced Yiddish as they strove to inculcate in its members the need to over- throw the Tsar (Cassedy). To sustain itself, however, this school ultimately drew students from beyond the Bialystoker émigré community. Appreciating the striking FIGURE 4 Bialistoker vegn 1947. Courtesy of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. RETHI NKI NG AMERI CAN J EWI SH REGI ONAL I DENTI TY 369 similarities with the Bialystoker Center’s Old Age Home, the leaders of the Bialystoker Farband still steadfastly adhered to the vision of themselves as the “true Bialystokers” upholding their city’s legacy. A vast sea of difference, they argued, existed between an old age home and a Yiddish educational institution that taught lessons of self-reliance and an appreciation for the plight of the working man. Yet the irony of their argument was lost on few in the transnational Bialystok community who recognized the shared trajectories of the Bialystoker Center and the Bialystoker Farband as a warning to those who sought to glorify Bialystok by transplanting it. Ulti- mately, their efforts undermined Bialystok’s distinctiveness. As Sonia Rapolovsky of Chile summed up, there could never be “another” Bialystok. Her former home “was a fortress of Jewishness and Jewish culture … a true barrier against assimilation like no other city in the world” (Rapalovsky 8). Tragically, this seemingly impenetrable cita- del that inspired such an intense regional collective identity went up in smoke along with the thousands of Jews who had kept it alive. Conclusion The Bialystoker Center in New York and the Bialystok Farband in Argentina demon- strate the long-term resonance of Eastern European urban regionalism—an essential mode of Jewish self-identification in Eastern Europe that assumed new forms in the age of mass migration. While sharing the same moniker and rhetoric of regional distinctive- ness, the Bialystoker Center and Bialystoker Farband viewed their Bialystoker heritage through strikingly different lenses: in New York, the Bialystoker Center projected its “Bialystoker identity” by providing charitable services to Jewish elderly in the larger immigrant community; the Bialystoker Farband in Buenos Aires, on the other hand, maintained that supporting industrial development, working-class politics, education and Yiddish culture perpetuated Bialystok’s true legacy. To be sure, the Bialystok émigré community represents only one small slice of the Jewish immigrant world, but it was far from exceptional. Jews from cities as large as Warsaw or as small as Lomza enmeshed themselves in similar debates as migration forced Eastern European Jews’ regional vision of their identities to be mapped onto new terrains. While Eastern European Jews’ urban regional identities may not have supplanted other political or religious allegiances, it did dovetail with these convictions and frame their articulation. Thus, as Isaac Rontch noted in 1937, one cannot fully understand Eastern European Jews’ encounter with America, or any place in the new world, unless one appreciates the ways in which it was shaped by their mentalities of urban regionalism forged in Eastern Europe (Rontch, “Der itstiger matsev”, 9–12). The above analysis of the global network of Jewish immigrant associations suggests that a renewed engagement with Jewish urban regional identity—an engagement sensi- tive to the transnational constructions of this identity—can productively destabilize our vision of the nation state in modern Jewish history as well as our narration of the Eastern European Jewish immigrant experience. Most American and modern Jewish historians operate in dichotomous frameworks dictated by nationalist paradigms, privileging the territorial boundaries imposed by nation-states in their discussions of the relationship between space and identity in modern Jewish life. The fact that millions of Eastern European Jews scattered throughout the United States, South America and Europe J OURNAL OF MODERN J EWI SH STUDI ES 370 steadfastly held onto their urban regional identities long after they had left Eastern Europe, and debated with one another over the definition of these identities, suggests a need to rethink whether the city, rather than the nation-state, may be a more useful analytical framework through which to study modern Jewish life. To be sure, this article has highlighted the centrality of the city to Jews’ self-perceptions in a specific historical moment—the era of mass Eastern European Jewish migration—but even after lands- manshaft memberships dwindled in the postwar period, the mode of identification these organizations introduced to American Jewish life continued to make a deep imprint. As Deborah Dash Moore’s study of postwar American Jewry illustrates, when Jews were lured from New York and Chicago to cities such as Los Angeles and Miami, regional affiliation continued to be a defining feature of Jewish communal life, albeit now in terms of New York or Chicago, rather than Bialystok or Warsaw (Moore, To the Golden Cities). American Jewish historians could provide a useful model to the larger field of American history not only by emphasizing that “urban regions matter just as much as large swaths of territory”, but also by continuing to look more seriously across the Atlantic, rather than just at the Mason-Dixon Line when theorizing the types of regional loyalties that molded American life (Moore, “Regionalism”, 115). While American historians rarely look beyond the North American continent when discussing their subjects’ regional identities, perhaps they must acknowledge as historian David Thelen (436) observes, that “instead of assuming that something was distinctively American, we [must] assume that elements of it began or ended somewhere else”. A new vision of American Jewish regionalism, which looks beyond the map of the United States, would highlight that American Jews, like America itself, were never isolated or exceptional; immigrants, like nations, have always been molded by foreign mentalities, international networks and global processes. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Aviva Taubenfeld and all the participants in the “Jews in the Modern World: Beyond the Nation” conference for their feedback and insights. Notes 1. Regional identity provided a cornerstone for Jewish identity in Eastern Europe; it played a similar role in identity definition throughout Europe (see Lederhendler 15–22). For the role of regional identity in the larger European context, see Applegate (“A Europe of Regions”); also see Applegate (A Nation of Provincials); Confino; Green; Jenkins. 2. This is my translation. Rontch renders this vignette in English in his 1939 article, “The Present State of the Landsmanschaften,” where he translates this phrase as “from whence is a Jew a landsman?” (360). Note that even Rontch felt it was unnecessary to translate the Yiddish term “landsman”, which was the common word used by Yiddish speakers to refer to someone (man) from the same hometown or region (land), with whom one would share a deep intimate connection. Since no precise equivalent term exists in English, I have chosen to leave landsman in its original form. RETHI NKI NG AMERI CAN J EWI SH REGI ONAL I DENTI TY 371 3. Issue 93(2) of American Jewish History (June 2007) is devoted to regionalism At the 2006 Biennial Conference of American Jewish Historians (Charleston, SC), 4–6 June 2006, a panel was devoted to the topic of regionalism in American Jewish life. Moreover, numerous additional panels delved into this topic through such angles as comparing “city-Jews” and “country-Jews”, or discussions of the specific contours of Southern Jewish life. Much of the heated debate surrounding the question of regionalism still centres on Bauman—a work that argues against the distinctiveness of Southern Jewish life. Bauman’s thesis sparked an enormous response: assessments of his work have dominated the last two conferences of the Southern Jewish Historical Society (2004 and 2005), with Marc Lee Raphael dedicating his keynote address to the 29th Annual Conference of the Southern Jewish Historical Society in 2004 to a critique of Bauman’s work. Moreover, a forthcoming issue of American Jewish History will be devoted to the proceedings of the 2006 Scholars Conference and will include several discussions of the issue of regionalism. 4. The mass migration of Eastern European Jewry marks the largest voluntary demo- graphic shift in modern Jewish history (Lestchinsky; Editorial staff; Glazier v–xxi; Stampfer). For the ways in which Jewish internal migration transformed Jewish life in specific cities in Eastern Europe, see Zipperstein; Corrsin. 5. A vast international literature exists on immigrant associations and the role they play in facilitating immigrants’ economic adaptation to their new homes. For an excellent overview, see Moya. 6. Schiller, Basch and Blanc have worked collaboratively on theorizing transnationalism, producing several excellent overviews of this concept (see, e.g., Schiller et al., Towards a Transnational Perspective; Schiller et al., “From Immigrant to Transmigrant”). 7. Prior to the Second World War, several writers surveyed the landsmanshaftn movement (Rontch (“Der itstiger matsev”); Wald; Zhitinsky, all focus on Argentina; see also Szajkowski). Aside from these works, there few other major scholarly treatments of these institutions appeared until the 1980s. In 1985, Hannah Kliger completed her dissertation entitled Communication and Ethnic Community: The Case of Landsmanshaftn, and Michael Weisser, a popular writer, penned Brotherhood of Memory: Jewish Landsmanshaftn in the New World—a work that argued that landsmanshaftn, because of their use of the Yiddish language, acted as obstacles to Eastern European Jewish immigrant acculturation. A special issue of American Jewish History in 1986 focused on landsmanshaftn and included the following pioneering articles: Milamed; Kliger (“Traditions”); Soyer (“Between Two Worlds”). Soyer (Jewish Immigrant Associations) provides the most extensive, rigorous, nuanced and insightful analysis of landsmanshaftn and their role in Jewish communal life in the early twentieth century. Drawing on expansive research, Soyer argues that landsmanshaftn facilitated Jewish immigrant acculturation by introducing them to American civic culture through their modes of operation. 8. Michael Weisser’s 1985 Brotherhood of Memory: Jewish Landsmanshaftn in the New World, located the “new world” exclusively in the United States and argued that landsman- shaftn failed because of their use of the Yiddish language that did not help its Eastern European Jewish immigrant membership learn English. While Daniel Soyer chal- lenged this assessment of these organizations, suggesting that landsmanshaftn actually facilitated Jewish immigrant adaptation, he saw landsmanshaft organizations as “consti- tuting an American phenomenon” (Soyer, “Between Two Worlds”, 492). 9. Eric Goldstein points out that Bauman must be credited with complicating many of the central paradigms shaping the writing of southern Jewish historical writing, such J OURNAL OF MODERN J EWI SH STUDI ES 372 as the “assimilationist tendencies of southern Jews” that basically erased Eastern European Jews’ religious traditionalism, their strong support of Zionism and even a devotion to Yiddish culture in the South (see Goldstein; I would like to thank the author for sharing this paper with me). 10. “Freeman Fears Nazis in Poland Have Brutally Slain His Mother”, undated article clipped from Chattanooga News-Free Press (Hale, 9 June 1948, included in file). 11. Space does not allow for close analysis of the Bialystoker organizations mentioned above or various others founded by Bialystoker émigrés to address their needs. For more on these different organizations, see Kobrin (2002, Chapter 2); also see the overview provided in Kliger (“Traditions”, 35–9). 12. For a list of Bialystoker organizations in America, see Shmule tsh et al. (166–7); Sohn (“A History”). Bialystoker Jews were far from exceptional among Jews or other ethnic groups (see Milamed 41; Moya 860–4). 13. Many landsmanshaft groups had similar organizations (see Milamed 41). 14. Thus far, I have rendered Yiddish words, phrases, titles and names of organizations, places and persons according to the transliteration scheme of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, except I must note that I make no attempt to standardize nonstand- ard orthography such as Der Bialystoker Stimme, mentioned here, which possesses a Yiddish title that was transliterated at the time of publication by its editors who did not follow the YIVO guidelines for either spelling or capitalization. 15. According to the personal files of David Sohn, director of the Bialystoker Center and editor of the Bialystoker Stimme, during the 1920s and 1930s, 4,000 Bialystoker Stimmes were published in each run and by the 1940s the number published reached 5,000 (see Bialystoker Stimme 239 (November 1945), p. 1; Sohn, “History and Achievements of the Bialystoker Center”). In many communities, one or two Bialystoker émigré families would receive the Bialystoker Stimme and they would share their copy with all the other Bialystoker families in the community. 16. Interview with Anna Gepner, 21 August 1997, Melbourne, Australia. 17. Interview with Yehezkel Aran, 15 April 1999, Tel Aviv, Israel. 18. “Bialistok: a koloniol macht,” Bialystoker Stimme, 8 (February 1924), p. 1; “Der ameri- kaner royter kreys in bialistok,” Bialystoker Stimme 2 (January 1922), p. 1; “Bialistok in argentine un argentine in bialistok,” Bialystoker Stimme, 13 (March 1926), p. 32; “Di bialistoker in berlin,” Bialystoker Stimme, 4 (June 1922), p. 12. The regular column on “Velt barimte bialistoker” debuted in the Bialystoker Stimme (4 (June 1922), pp. 7–9), while the “Unzer eygene velt” column debuted in the Bialystoker Stimme (3 (March 1922), p. 12). Both soon became regular features (see, e.g., Bialystoker Stimme, 4 (June 1922), p. 14; Bialystoker Stimme, 6 (February 1923), p. 22). 19. This cover appeared on every Bialystoker Stimme between 1926 and 1930 (nos 14–22) except for those celebrating specific organizations anniversaries, such as the Bialystoker Young Men’s Association (1926) or the Bialystoker Center’s Ladies Auxilary (1928). 20. “Bialistok, nyu york, patersun,” Bialistoker Relif Journal, 1925, p. 1. 21. The handwritten Annual Report of the Bialystoker Center Old Age Home reports that close to half of the home’s 23 residents were born in Bialystok. 22. The Warschauer Haym Solomon Home for the Aged was founded in 1922 (see Warschauer Haym Salomon Homed for the Aged Souvenir Journal, 1922–1938, 1938; also see Souvenir Journal: Tenth Anniversary Dinner of the Mohilev-on-Dnieper and Vicinity Home for the Aged, 1937). The proliferation of eldercare facilities in the 1920s reflected not only shifting demographics, but the growing concern among many immigrant groups and the larger urban working class about how to care for aging family members who v . i . RETHI NKI NG AMERI CAN J EWI SH REGI ONAL I DENTI TY 373 could no longer earn wages. Many Jewish leaders feared that if poor immigrant Jews flocked to municipal poorhouses, there would be antisemitic repercussions (see Katz). 23. See the similar conclusion reached by Tenenbaum (77). 24. On the larger role socialist organizations played in developing and spreading Yiddish culture, particularly in the postwar era, see Fishman (Chapters 4, 6, 8). References Albert, Anna. “A Quarter of a Century of the Bialystoker Ladies Aid Society of Harlem and Bronx.” Bialystoker Ladies Aid Society of Harlem and Bronx 25th Anniversary Journal (1933): 16–22. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Annual Report of the Bialystoker Center Old Age Home. c 1932 (in Yiddish). Tel-Aviv: Tel Aviv University Archives (A-18/17). Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. 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Zhitinsky, L. “Landsmanshaftn in Argentine.” Argentiner Iwo Shriften 3 (1945): 155–7. Zipperstein, Steven. The Jews of Odessa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985. Rebecca Kobrin, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Columbia University, works in the field of American Jewish History. Her forthcoming book Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora: Between Exile and Empire (Indiana University Press) was awarded the Center for Jewish History’s Fred Rose Young Historian’s Award. She has been awarded a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies for 2008/2009 to begin a new project on Jewish speculation, financial failure and the remaking of American capital- ism. Address: Rebecca Kobrin, 4633 Delafield Avenue, Bronx, NY 10471, USA. E-mail:
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