Bread to Eat and Clothes to Wear: Letters from Jewish Migrants in the Early Twentieth Century

Introduction

Introduction ( B etween  and , more than 2.7 million Jews from Eastern Europe immigrated to countries overseas. The departure of millions of men, women, and children effected a radical change in the entire aspect of the Jewish people in modern times, and in many ways its consequences are recognizable to this day. This was the Exodus from Egypt in modern form, the exodus of a people who wished to free themselves from economic subjection and from the persecution they suffered in their lands of origin and to create new lives in countries across the ocean. Historians refer to this time as the “period of the great migration” and have discussed it extensively and intensively. For nearly every destination country in which the Jewish migrants settled, scholars have written studies on their absorption into the surrounding society and their impact on it. These studies have addressed absorption patterns, working conditions, relationships between old-timers and newcomers, similarities and differences between Jewish immigrants and immigrants from other ethnic groups who moved to the same place, and many other issues. But very little has been written on the actual process of migration, on the dramatic moment when a family came to the decision that there was no longer any hope for them in Eastern Europe and that they would have to move to a new land—despite all the difficulties—and build a new, safer life. The collection of letters published in this volume is intended to divert historiographical discussion from the absorption process to that of the actual  introduction move to a new country. Tracing the decision to migrate is one of the most difficult and complex projects that a scholar can undertake. Historians of the migration—both Jewish and non-Jewish—who have tried to examine this angle have noted how problematic it is, first and foremost because of the lack of primary sources. This lack has forced scholars to use secondary sources—memoirs and oral testimony—that were recorded many years after the immigrants settled in their new land.1 These sources did not reflect the dynamics involved in making the decision to migrate and did not trace the path taken by the migrants from the moment they left their old homes until they arrived at their destinations. In his monumental book World of Our Fathers, the historian Irving Howe notes that it is doubtful that the memoir literature contains even a reliable echo of the drama of being uprooted: “The statements one finds in the memoir literature are persuasive through their repetition. We came because we were hungry; we came because we were persecuted; we came because life in Russia or Poland had grown insufferable. These are the answers one gets over and over again, and there is not the slightest reason to doubt them. But what they do not, perhaps cannot, explain is why some Jews acted on these urgent motives and others did not.”2 Haim Avni writes that “this subjective drama multiplied by hundreds of thousands merits a fascinating study in itself.”3 The initial process of doubts and vacillations within the premigration family circle has not yet been researched or documented. The “drama of migration” for the ordinary migrant family is therefore absent from the scholarly literature, and the stories of millions of migrants have been lost among the quantitative statistics. Historians who have studied non-Jewish immigration to America have pointed out a similar difficulty in trying to understand how the decision was made to migrate and what hardships the migrants faced before reaching safe haven in another land. This difficulty led these historians to the realization that if they wanted to understand the motives for migration they would have to focus on the towns and villages from which the migrants had come. Philip Taylor, in The Distant Magnet, notes, “It is never enough to think of migration continent by continent, or nation by nation. Emigrants were not Europeans or even Germans and Swedes: they were dwellers in a Norwegian valley, or in the Black Forest district of Württemberg; they were introduction  Slovaks from the northern hills of the Kingdom of Hungary, Bulgarians from Macedonia, or Ashkenazite Jews from Western provinces of Czarist Russia. No scholar, of course, will ever be able to comprehend all this local detail.”4 In Immigrants in the Lands of Promise, the scholar of Italian migration SamuelBailyemphasizestheimportanceofthe...