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4 Jews in Small Towns, on the Farms, and In-Between As we leafed through one of our antique manuscript cookbooks, a faded magazine reproduction of a Victorian-era print fluttered out. The softfocus picture shows a peasant family from somewhere, trudging through deep snow, heading somewhere else. In the background we note a small cottage. No smoke curls from its chimney. It has been abandoned. The father, who already looks weary, somewhat incongruously carries a rake over his shoulder. One son, undoubtedly the elder, lugs a basket of firewood. Perhaps they plan to camp along the road. Far behind, we see the mother, burdened by a huge basket strapped to her back. It probably holds everything of value that they possess. A small child, most likely a daughter, keeps close to her mother’s skirts, as little children often do; another son, bent from the weight of his bundle, brings up the rear of this ragged parade. It is a sad picture of a very bleak time. And we could not help but wonder if our cookbook’s author had saved this illustration because it reminded her of her own family’s exodus from the Old Country. Eastern European Jews left their homes, crossing vast expanses of terrain in all kinds of weather—some by rail; some hidden in the backs of wagons; some on foot—mile after mile, day after day, heading for a harbor where they could board a ship to take them to America. Most traveled light: the Shabbos candlesticks and tablecloth, perhaps; a few clothes, certainly; a package or two of home-cooked foods, absolutely. Who could trust what was served on the boat, even if they said it was “kosher”? When these Jews arrived at any of the New World’s port cities, where did they go? The majority headed straight for urban centers, where they ended up packed “like raisins.”1 Rabbi A. R. Levy of Chicago, writing for the Reform Advocate, articulated the widely held belief that “[f]rom the Russian pale of settlement to the crowded ghettos of America does not spell out liberty and freedom.”2 Jews in Small Towns, on the Farms, and In-Between . 61 A smaller number of Jewish immigrants, though, headed toward America’s less congested towns and cities. Louis Witkin, originally from the Ukraine, but living in Superior, Wisconsin, explained why Jews clustered closely even there: “You didn’t have to live in a Jewish area, but as a rule, you come to a strange town, you go among the Jewish to live—’cause you don’t know anybody else, you know, and you’re more satisfied to live among the Jewish.”3 Some opened shops; some practiced their Old World crafts if there were a demand; others peddled for a while to build up capital and/or to send for their relatives in the Old World. Lee Shai Weissbach notes, “Many . . . started out as peddlers. They settled for the same reasons the Germans did. . . . While the mass migration that began in 1881 affected the makeup of America’s major Jewish centers almost immediately, it took perhaps a decade, and sometimes longer, for East Europeans to begin arriving in smaller cities and towns in significant numbers, especially away from the eastern seaboard.”4 The German-Jews, although somewhat ambivalent toward these newcomers, rallied to provide whatever support they could—money, food, clothing, English lessons, citizenship and cooking classes. “These refugees from Russia are our brethren. . . . We are responsible for them to God, to our adopted country and to humanity.”5 That sentiment led to the development of philanthropic and social programs designed to help the Eastern European Jews settle in and become American. The Baron Maurice de Hirsch Fund, established in 1891 in America, provided a variety of different kinds of aid to those newly arrived Jews: manual arts training classes, cooking classes, farming lessons, and loans. Eventually, different Jewish philanthropic agencies banded together, forming the Industrial Removal Office (IRO) in 1900 to assist them in moving out of Eastern cities. Those involved in these “de-congestion” efforts concentrated on Jewish men “who want[ed] to remove their families from that influence which threatens them with moral and physical deprivation and degredation.”6 We suspect that it was through the work of the Baron de Hirsch Fund or the IRO that settlers such as Etheldoris Stein Grais’s family found themselves in Minnesota. Etheldoris, who grew up in Hibbing, in the Masabi Iron Range of...

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