How Strange It Seems: The Cultural Life of Jews in Small-Town New England (review)

Employing a social-historical approach, Hoberman presents small-town Jewish life in New England from 1900 to 2000. His detailed consideration of historic immigration patterns notes that success was based on economic opportunity in farming, peddling, junk and scrap metal dealing, and most recently organic farming. Success came first economically, then personally and communally, as economic stability allowed early immigrants to build communities, temples, and eventually to hold strictly to the Sabbath.

Particularly in the early years, personal and economic success resulted from immigrants blending the traditions of their new home region and of Jewish life. Economically, many early newcomers were able to blend knowledge of livestock, poultry, and agriculture from their European background with knowledge and new technologies learned in America. Both this group and later groups also blended emphases on hard, honest work and community involvement to create a niche in the New England countryside, as they gained respect through their actions (112).

Hoberman’s historical approach is personalized and invigorated through the inclusion of oral histories collected from sixty community members. The vibrancy of anecdotes from these personal narratives highlights his points throughout the text beginning in the first chapter where interviewees’ anecdotes emphasize how strange the concept of rural Jewish life is within Jewish American culture through lines such as “Jews don’t own chainsaws” or “pigs” and “Jews live here?” While such anecdotes might seem to suggest a sensationalized or romantic portrayal of these communities, Hoberman avoids this result, through an underlying emphasis on cultural dialogue and authenticity throughout the text’s presentation of a people’s “exposures to a combination of geographical, economic, and social circumstances” and “a people’s tendency” to identify, quantify, come to understand the present, and create the future through group discussion (9).

As scholars of folklore and oral history know, traditional narratives are a part of such group discussion, representing commonly accepted truths through an authoritative voice of family tradition and community history. In fact, Hoberman discusses how such narratives point to more than one simple truth. He highlights the community members stories’ themes as recognition that they, the narrators and listeners by association, are not only living and working rurally but also successfully doing so by compromising in ways American Jewish culture also deems uncommon. Buttressing and modifying this position are narratives, which acknowledge the sacrifices early Jewish settlers in the region faced. Traveling peddlers and early families passed down stories explaining that there was a heavy reliance on eggs as a replacement for the often difficult to obtain kosher meat. Other families’ narratives revealed the challenges of trying to keep the Sabbath in areas where they were the only Jewish family or one of a few. Stores were kept open, often with family members having Sabbath in the back and coming up front to conduct business, as needed. While these narratives have an element of long-suffering to them, they also dramatically emphasize the creativity and tenacity required as families struggled to retain and practice their religion, often with little or no external support.

Through the inclusion of such narratives, Hoberman successfully personalizes a history of great import to the rural areas of one American region, literally etching images and emotive connections to history within the reader’s mind and heart. Poultry farming families are not merely successful in transporting agricultural knowledge to a new home, but a necessary cog on the wheel of Jewish settlement and life, producing for larger markets, but more importantly providing a needed and religiously acceptable protein source for their family and possibly traveling Jewish peddlers.

This is a history which, with its emotive connections to questions of authenticity within an immigrant group, as people adapt to a new land and its people, must echo in the minds of readers whose families have narratives from different times, of different American regions, but who, too, have family...