Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album (review)

Gilbert Sandler is a native Baltimorean with a long, distinguished career as a local journalist who knows more about the city than almost any person alive. Over the years, the columns he wrote for the old Baltimore Evening Sun and more recently for The Jewish Times have become a treasure house for those interested in the daily life of the city during the twentieth century. These columns have provided Sandler the basis for a series of short books on the city, each one eminently readable and full of fascinating slices of life in Baltimore. This time, drawing mainly on his columns in The Jewish Times, he has turned his attention to the city's Jewish community, the world in which he grew up. His columns, based largely on interviews and his own memories, also draw upon research in the Baltimore Sun files and the records of the Maryland Historical Society. Thus while the resulting book reads like a series of informal memories about bygone days, they are very well informed and often quite discerning.

The volume is organized in four sections. "The Old Neighborhood" focuses mainly on the section of East Baltimore which, during the early decades of the twentieth century, clattered and buzzed with thousands of hard-working and aspiring Russian and East European Jewish immigrants. "The Private World of German Jewry" chronicles life among this group that had already prospered by 1900 and moved "uptown" to the elegant Eutaw Place section of the city. The author brings back to life institutions such as the exclusive Phoenix Club and the Harmony Circle Balls (held at the club) where the city's German Jewish debutantes were introduced. Sandler also describes an adjacent (and less well known) neighborhood along Lake Drive which emerged during the 1920s and 1930s as the first fashionable neighborhood comprised of both German and Russian Jewish families.

A short section called "Doing Business" discusses several of the city's most prominent commercial families, individuals like the Hutzler's who developed Baltimore's most well known department store, but there are also fine sketches of business families that are now known only to those well on in years. For example, there was the Handler family whose 400 ice cream outlets in the Baltimore area made their name "a household word" during the interwar period (p. 88). They may indeed have ranked among the nation's top enterprises in this business. When Howard Johnson's proudly advertised 28 different flavors of ice cream, Handler's was already making 55 flavors.

The last section, "The Way We Were," contains a very diverse group of sketches, including some of the book's most interesting ones. "Park Heights" is a fine portrait of the bustling community created in the 1930s and 1940s by East European Jews "moving up the ladder, and out of East Baltimore" (p. 128). It is a valuable piece, now that much of this once thriving center has entirely disappeared, its children and grandchildren now living ever more distantly from the city. Another essay looks at the old pre-World War II Talmud Torah schools, precursors of the current (and much larger) private Jewish schools in the Baltimore region. They are recalled here with fondness and a bit of nostalgia. One man who graduated in 1945 recalled what no-nonsense places they were: "We didn't color, we didn't do arts and crafts. We sat and we studied" (p. 166).

This book is obviously intended for a popular audience, and those having some familiarity with the Baltimore Jewish community of the 1910-1950 era will probably enjoy it the most. Nevertheless, anyone interested in this period of American Jewish history will be enriched by a number of the little essays and sketches. Historians looking for larger themes in these vignettes will find relatively little beyond the familiar story of the German-East European decades of the twentieth century. The...