Persistence and Flexibility: Anthropological Perspectives on the American Jewish Experience

7. A Home Away from Home: Participation in Jewish Immigrant Associations in America

7 A Home Away from Home: Participation in Jewish Immigrant Associations in America Hannah Kliger countrymen going to live in cities and international migrants from many different countries seek out people from their localities in their new homes. Regional associations and hometown clubs are found in Egypt, Nigeria, Peru, Mexico, and Canada. The landsmanshaftn of East European Jews in North America fit into this mold. Kliger in this article shows how these organizations helped Jewish immigrants adapt to American life and, in turn, how the regional organizations were changed by the American environment. It should be pointed out that while the landsmanshaftn are no longer as important as they were, their form and the need for which they were created continue to influence American Jewish life. Cousin clubs partook of landsmanshaftn . In addition, Jews who have moved from metropolitan centers to peripheral areas, whether in the suburbs or in the Sunbelt re-create Jewish clubs which can be seen as the new "hometown clubs," where they can be among others like themselves. For readers of the New York Yiddish daily, The Day, on January 5, 1939 their newspaper presented an exchange of opinions on the following issue: Should an individual affiliate with a landsmanshaft, or rather with other organizations? The weekly column that regularly featured responses and photographs of "the man on the street," challenged by a roving Yiddish reporter to address pertinent issues of the moment, focused that day on participation in landsmanshaftn.1 This Yiddish plural term refers to associations of Jewish immigrants who share common origins in an East European hometown. Not only was the topic of landsmanshaftn deemed of sufficient importance for the 1939 Yiddish reading audience, but the question itself reflects the pervasiveness of landsmanshaft activity within that sector of the American Jewish community. The choice of where to 143 144 A Home Away from Home belong was clearly dichotomized, posing the landsmanshaft against all other possible groups. The published responses to the query reflect an array of concerns. One interviewee chose to draw a broader conceptualization of compatriot , moving beyond the boundaries of shared birthplace to say, "as long as I'm among Jews, it makes no difference if from Lodz or from Boiberik." A second statement reverts to a different criterion: "what good is a landsmanshaft if there are exploiters, bourgeois or dishonest people-a worker must belong with his class." Most of JEWISH EASTERN EUROPE 1830 - 1914 o Provincial Border Congress Poland Pale of Settlement 100 200 km II. Arenas of Jewish Life 145 the comments, however, favor belonging to a landsmanshaft, among eygene, among one's own, where familiar friends easily share memories of the old home and concerns about the new one, America. The meaning of participation in Jewish immigrant organizations, or landsmanshaftn, was intriguing to a newspaper editor in 1939. Yet, despite the appropriateness of studying landsmanshaftn in order to understand the process of ethnic socialization at a grass roots level, and although there are more of these than other institutions created to aid immigrants in their accommodation to American life, the landsmanshaft remains relatively unexplored by students of contemporary American Jewish life. Approaching Research on Landsmanshaftn The landsmanshaft sector has been discussed in several descriptive accounts (Baker 1978; Curchak 1970; Doroshkin 1969; Howe 1976; Levitats 1959; Weisser 1985). Master's essays contributed to the field (Applebaum 1952; Levinthal 1932; Milamed 1980; Soyer 1985). However, a comprehensive survey of landsmanshaft activities has not been made since the investigation led by Rontch, the results of which were published in Yiddish (Federal Writers Project 1938) and summarized in English (Rontch 1939). The 1938 data, gleaned from the questionnaire responses of approximately 2,500 organizations surveyed in New York, were gathered under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. An accompanying volume described Jewish family clubs (Federal Writers Project 1939), which were later treated by Mitchell (1978). The life experiences of landsmanshaft members have been neglected for too long. Landsmanshaft documents and publications form an important base for sociocultural and historical data from which to study how expressions of ethnicity change.2 In addition, the Yiddish press has traditionally provided a forum for the presentation of the actions and priorities of these ethnic organizations.3 In other words, the lives of ordinary people can be interpreted according to their own records and their own testimony. To this end, and in the spirit of The Day's canvas of their readers...