Utopia, New Jersey: Travels in the Nearest Eden

Woodbine: Immigrants on the Land

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 Woodbine Immigrants on the Land South Jersey farmland is flat. The drive inland from Cape May reveals a landscape of broad fields fringed by trees, both pine and deciduous. Lakes appear around curves in the road. Stretches of woods are preserved habitat for wildlife . When the Jewish farmers first came here to Alliance, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was a wilderness. There were no motel cabins by the lakes then, and few cleared fields. On the map, the first colonies cluster close toVineland and Millville. I follow the order of the road. Carmel is at the crossroads of Routes 634 and 552. Houses are strung along 552, shaded by established trees—maple, holly, dogwood—and one so immense and ivy-covered that it must be a survivor of the earlier settlements. Most of the houses are meager, narrow, and shabby, built to provide only the most basic roof for a family. A new school proclaims itself Pinelands Elementary . Streets of newer houses run off to the north. To the east of the intersection is a small strip mall featuring a discount liquor store and a beauty supply business. Across from that, at the intersection of 552 and 608, is Big Daddy’s Sports Haven, selling dirt bikes, paintball supplies, and archery equipment. Traffic is heavy and the sidewalks intermittent . The area is not pedestrian friendly. Nor does much here proclaim it the hotbed of radical thought that was its reputation with the other colonies of the region. Rosenhayn is another crossroads by train tracks. Weinstein’s General Store is being rehabbed. There’s a U.M.E. church. I turn onto Landis Avenue past Speranza’s Deli and gas stations, heading for Norma. I am out in farmland WOODBINE 139 again, passing a Pentecostal church and billboards for Harley Davidson and Dunkin Donuts. A turn on Gershel Avenue brings me into Norma. Old houses, with their typical back ells, stand amid new ranches. The landscape remains, but little is left of the human settlement save the street names: Isaac Avenue, Steinfeld Avenue, Rosenfeld Avenue, Gershel Avenue. Yards sport red canna lilies. I pass Ron’s Animal Shelter and a feed and grain store. Between Norma and Brotmanville , fields are lush with timothy. A flock of wild turkeys feeds. There’s an apple orchard at the corner of Schiff Avenue and an overgrown tree farm. A garage and Morgan’s grocery store seem to make up the village of Brotmanville . Alliance is a dot on the map, where, in spring, paint horses graze in a pasture speckled with buttercups. On a second trip, in fall, I find Alliance’s one remaining synagogue,Tifereth Israel, at the corner of Schiff and Gershel avenues. Across Schiff Avenue are cornfields; across Gershel, the woods are reclaiming a handsome brick house. The synagogue, a white frame building, looks like a farmhouse until you notice the long windows and the circular blue plaque above them with Hebrew letters painted in gold. Beneath the windows are hydrangeas, faded an endof -summer pink. Behind the synagogue, the mown lawn holds the tangled woods at bay. The door is locked; a sign advertises electronic protection. New concrete steps lead up to the main door, and a typed sheet announces services for Rosh Hashanah andYom Kippur, just passed. Down Gershel Avenue, across from a cluster of small houses and a derelict trailer, a grove of trees marks the boundary of the Alliance Cemetery. Beyond them a small brick building proclaims itself a museum, open on occasional weekends and holidays. Just beyond are the brick gates to the cemetery itself. I come upon another set of gates; the plaque there reads: IN MEMORY OF THE FIRST COLONISTS WHO MIGRATED FROM RUSSIA TO THE WOODLANDS OF SOUTH JERSEY AND ON MAY 9, 1882, FOUNDED ALLIANCE, THE FIRST JEWISH FARM COLONY IN THE UNITED STATES Beyond these gates, the gravestones are old, recording deaths in 1893, 1894—memorials to hard times of one kind or another in those early years. The inscriptions are often in Hebrew. A narrow paved road leads from the UTOPIA, NEW JERSEY 140 main gate down an avenue of sycamores, between two rows of gravestones. It ends in a grassy circle around a flagpole, where the American flag is flying. Plantings of daylilies flank four benches where one can sit on this cool, overcast day. Around the cemetery are pine woods and, on...