Inside Looking Out: The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, 1868-1924 (review)

130 SHOFAR Inside Looking Out: The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, 1868-1924, by Gary Edward Polster. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990. 240 pp. $32.00. German Jewish-American response to the influx of East European Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century is an important part of the story of the American Jewish experience. Gary Polster, a sociologist by trade, offers his own contribution to it by providing a detailed account of the Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum (lOA), an agency designed to provide for and educate Jewish orphans in midwestern states in ways that would prepare them for lives as successful Americans. The results are mixed. Ably recounted are the intentions of orphanage officials as well as the programs and regimens they instituted to carry out their joint goals of "americanizing" their wards into patriotic members of America's working class and of turning them away from the religious orthodoxy and Old World culture of their firstgeneration parents. Along the way, Polster provides access to a rich vein of reminiscence and memory of former residents that depicts something of the daily life and "joys and sorrows" of those who spent time at the orphanage. Yet Polster's unfamiliarity with the most recent work of American social historians limits his ability to pull things together in ways that might fully illuminate the response of everyday people caught up in the process of discovering their American and Jewish identities. Between 1868 and 1918, the JOA, first established as a regional home for the children of Jewish· Civil War veterans, housed 3,518 children and adolescents. By the 189Os, its annual population of 500 inmates became almost exclusively East European Jewish. Most children stayed an average of seven years, in ways that tested both the physical capacity of the institution and the programs and ideas of its leadership. Although the book deals briefly with JOA's operation prior to and after Samuel Wolfenstein's tenure as its superintendent, it focuses on the thirtyfive -year period between 1878 and 1913 when this Prussian-born rabbi attempted to remake the character and beliefs of his charges. An important spokesman for Cleveland's wealthy German Jews who were concerned with protecting their own status as secularized, assimilated Americans, Wolfenstein made it his mission to create model, hard-working, patriotic Americans who would reject the orthodox religious beliefs, language, and customs of their parents in favor of the tenets of reform Judaism. Reluctantly abandoning original intentions to run the home as an extended family in the face of overcrowding, Wolfenstein sought to carry out his plans by instilling a "quasi-military" style of discipline and regimentation in the daily life of the institution that isolated residents as much as possible from the outside world. From analysis of his sermons to descriptions of the Volume 10, No.2 Winter 1992 131 institution's own schools, its manual training program for boys, the daily chores of boys and girls that distinguished them by gender both immediately and in terms of their future social roles, and the many rules and regulations that limited their freedom (from the censoring of mail to limiting parental visits to July and August), Polster provides an impressive array of proscriptive evidence as to the goals and purpose of the JOA. Interspersed throughout this detail are personal reminiscences, gleaned from interviews with some thirty respondents who resided there either as orphans or staff between 1894 and 1930. As Polster shows, they offer a mixed account of whether or not proscription achieved the desired results and real ambivalence about their orphanage experiences. Nevertheless, he concludes that for the most part, Wolfenstein's dreams came true. "Most orphans," he argues, "blended into the American mainstream," abandoned Yiddish ways and orthodox traditions , and became patriotic Americans "strongly committed to American social , political, and economic patterns" (p.203). These conclusions about JOA residents certainly match the experience of many other children of East European immigrants as they came to terms with American life. No doubt Wolfenstein and other social reformers affected that process. But as David Nasaw, Roy Rosensweig, Elliott Gorn and a host of other social historians suggest, working-class people, be they adults or children...