That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South

5. “None of My Own People”: Subsidizing Jewish Motherhood in the Depression-Era South

150 > 151 Weiss’s marriage to a wealthy gentile, who showered her and her daughters with expensive gifts such as “a beautiful home seven other properties a 1935 Graham [Page] car and half interest in his wholesale business,” offered her the means to shed the crushing stigma of institutional dependency and to ascend to the ranks of the social elite.2 Yet this immigrant mother of two would not allow her new husband to learn of her six-year dependence on the orphan home. She sent her final letters through an intermediary and begged Wyle not to try to locate her. For Weiss, being Jewish, foreign-born, and temporarily poor mattered little to her new husband, but institutional dependence signified an unforgivable stain on her past, one that endangered her newfound prosperity and happiness. According to Weiss, “What a man don’t know don’t hurt me,” and she intended to keep her relationship with the home a secret.3 Although Weiss appreciated the home’s enduring generosity, she expressed relief in her freedom from institutional charity: “I am just so happy that we have everything that is not given to us as a charity. I really deserve to be happy after many years of struggle and humiliation.”4 What was humiliating about her years as a subsidized mother, and why didn’t she share her frustrations earlier with Wyle, the woman she characterized as “the best friend [she] ever had”?5 Her six-year experience as a subsidized widowed mother, supported by an agency that took pride in its status as a benevolent protector of impoverished Jewish mothers and children, was fraught with contradictions and searing complexities, many of which challenged Weiss’s understandings of respectable Jewish womanhood and caused her to resent the institution’s intrusion into her personal affairs. Rather than maintain the friendship that emerged out of her desperate need, this former recipient of the home’s aid wrote one final letter to Viola Wyle, reassuring her that “she was Jewish still.”6 Then she and her children disappeared from the home’s records. Considered in the context of her relationship with the Hebrew Orphans Home of Atlanta during the Depression, Weiss’s letters and the meticulous case record compiled by Viola and Armand Wyle tell a story that helps flesh out the contours of southern Jewish uplift and the ambivalence that often accompanied the relationship between the benevolent institution and its needy clients. As demonstrated in earlier chapters, the process of supporting the poor immigrant Jewish masses 152 > 153 “My All Existence and Future Depend on You”: Reading Ambivalent Intimacies in the Case File One month after her case opened, and just weeks after the stock market crash triggered the nation’s descent into financial depression, Rebecca Weiss composed her second letter to Viola Wyle. Having discovered that she and her two young daughters, ages eight and five, would be displaced out of her in-laws’ home, the widowed immigrant wrote to the one person who she believed could help her. “Dear Mrs. Wyle!” she began her letter, “Now where I will move? My all existence and future depend on you.”7 Emphasizing her grief and profound sense of isolation, she continued, “Dear Mrs. Wyle I know you won’t forget me. Otherwise I will starve and nobody would know about it . . . I have no husband and no brothers to help me I just have to depend on good people for my children sake.” She closed her letter with an appeal to Wyle’s friendship as well as a reminder that she requested charity only reluctantly and on behalf of her children: “My girls sending you lots of kisses.”8 These letters from a foreign-born, widowed mother to a U.S.-born and educated social worker marked the beginning of an emotionally intimate friendship that complicates prevailing assumptions about the client–social worker relationships that existed in the 1920 and 1930s. Weiss’s case opened officially in September 1929, and Viola Wyle, the wife of the home’s new superintendent, Armand Wyle, served as Weiss’s first professional representative from the home. Appointed in January 1929 after the unexpected death of Superintendent Feist Strauss, the Wyles received “a whole-hearted Southern welcome” at the board’s annual meeting.9 Both Armand and Viola had received training in modern, “scientific” social work methodology at Jewish orphan homes in Cleveland and New York. Upon...