Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (review)

Beth Cohen’s well-researched volume is the latest work on a topic that has been debated in both the scholarly and popular literature since the end of World War II: the question of how well Holocaust survivors adapted to life after the war. Cohen’s focus is on the one-third who came to America.

In the early postwar period, many articles emphasizing the successful adjustment of the immigrants appeared in the general media and in publications such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society’s Rescue. But there was an agenda here. The agencies that served the new arrivals wanted the doors to Jewish immigration to remain open, and they therefore portrayed the survivors as resilient, eager, and ready to start new lives. A somewhat different picture was presented by social-work professionals, prominent among them Carol Meyer, Elaine Mishkin, and Mary Russak. Their work detailed the problems that aid workers faced in dealing with the DPs, but offered a cautiously optimistic finding that, with proper help, survivors could succeed in America.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, less was written on the topic. The survivors themselves were busy rebuilding their lives; the traumas that they had endured were buried as they raised families and pursued careers. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, the survivors’ inability to forget became the focus of extensive research in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Basing themselves largely on interviews with their own patients, scholars such as Henry Krystal, William Niederland, Milton Jucovy, Martin Bergmann, and Leo Eitinger argued that the survivors had been seriously and permanently damaged by their suffering.

In the 1990s, the intellectual ground shifted yet again, as new research by Boaz and Eva Kahana, John Sigal, Morton Weinfeld, the author of this review, and others, found that the survivors had done quite well despite their trauma. Previous research had over-emphasized maladjustment, they found, because it tended to focus on those who had been in therapy rather than on the “typical” survivor.

Thus, Beth Cohen’s work is actually the latest addition to a debate that has swung back and forth through the years. As is so often the case in such debates, the truth lies somewhere between the extremes. Cohen has chosen to stress the difficulties that the newcomers encountered and has made effective use of case files, agency meeting minutes, letters, oral testimonies, and interviews that she conducted herself.

Cohen provides a thorough explanation of how survivors made their decisions about where to settle in America. While most made New York City their home, many went elsewhere, encouraged to do so by Jewish social service agencies. These organizations were sensitive to the American Jewish community’s fear that too heavy a concentration of survivors in New York might provoke displays of antisemitism. This was not a new concern; Jacob Schiff’s Galveston Plan (1907–1914), which was geared toward persuading Jews to settle in the southwestern portion of the United States, was based on similar anxieties. Included in Cohen’s discussion are fascinating case studies of the resettlement efforts in Denver, Colorado and Columbia, South Carolina that vividly describe the challenges facing both the communities and those whom they welcomed into their midst.

Cohen is critical of the general agency practice of limiting financial support for newcomers to one year, especially since many of them had severe emotional and physical disabilities. Cohen’s account makes it abundantly clear that finding employment did not in itself guarantee successful assimilation into American life, or necessarily result in a degree of happiness.

The chapter titled “Bearded Refugees” represents a real contribution to the literature. It describes the unique difficulties and dilemmas encountered by Orthodox rabbis, cantors, religious teachers, and schochtim (ritual slaughterers). The United Services for New Americans created a special department to assist such religious functionaries. We learn that this group was not monolithic, ranging as it did from Hasidic Jews to those who...