From Shtetl to Milltown: Litvaks, Hungarians, and Galitzianers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1925 (review)

Robert Perlman has written a brief, well-researched book illuminating the lives of Jews in small industrial towns surrounding Pittsburgh. His work places Jewish immigrants and their children in the context of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and the economic roles these Jews established in the United States. He bases his research on a wide variety of materials including interviews, family and local memoirs, archives, census data, and naturalization records. Perlman integrates statistics and stories of individuals to provide a book that, while written for a general audience, strives to be well-rooted in current studies of Jewish immigrants and social history.

The author focuses on seven milltowns. The Jewish populations of these towns ranged in the 1920s from about 3,000 to 5,000 in McKeesport (approximately 9-10 percent of the total population) to 200 in Ambridge (less than 2 percent of the population). The author devotes the most attention to McKeesport, and little to Johnstown, noting the extensive work done by Eva Morawska (Insecure Prosperity: Small-Town Jews in Industrial America, 1890- 1940, 1996) on that community, which this volume complements.

Perlman is to be commended for studying lives of immigrants before their arrival in America, carefully researching places of birth, and even making a trip to Eastern Europe to seek out whatever records of immigrant families might be located in Hungary, Slovakia, and Ukraine. (Unfortunately, very few, he reports.) Many Jews in these Pennsylvania communities originated in shtetls. For example, the Spiegel family profiled in Chapter Four, moved to McKeesport from Izsnyete, a village of 1,478 people near Munkacs with about thirty Jewish families. The author states that of Hungarian Jews—the large majority—in McKeesport, "69 percent came from localities where the total population was less than 2,000" (p.32). A detailed list of 78 individuals and their birthplaces (located both pre-1918 and today) is particularly valuable.

Perlman devotes considerable attention to the occupational and social status of Jews in Pennsylvania. He finds that in McKeesport, "[i]n 1900 two-thirds of the [Jewish] earners were blue-collar workers; 20 years later two-thirds were in white collar work" (p.80). He emphasizes the continuity of skills, particularly selling food, brought from Europe, as well as language skill. Perlman notes the emphasis on education for children, both boys and girls, with the goal of avoiding the mills or other regimented blue-collar jobs.

Since communities studied varied in size, some had a variety of synagogues and Jewish organizations, while others established a single congregation only with difficulty. Families went to considerable difficulties to obtain Jewish education for their children through heders, talmud torahs, and Sunday schools, to purchase kosher food, and to observe Jewish holidays. The author sketches out some of the intergenerational conflicts and the gradual development of Reform and Conservative congregations, but at times this information is too brief.

Perlman's description of Jewish social life in the earlier twentieth century is stronger than his overview of synagogue and religious life. He notes the rapid growth of Zionist groups early in the twentieth century, and the AZA (Aleph Zadik Aleph) youth group in the 1920s, as well as the development of women's organizations. He especially notes the strong strictures against dating or marrying non-Jews. The availability of automobiles facilitated travel to other towns or to Pittsburgh to socialize with other young Jews.

Perlman introduces place of origin in his sub-title. However, as used by the author, "[t]he term 'Litvak' has no clear-cut geographic or political meaning" (p. 20). Although his research shows significant numbers of Jews coming from Galicia and Hungary, it appears that very few came from Lithuania and many more came from the Ukraine. In addition, while there are a few remarks, the book would have benefited by a few pages...