when a jew was a landfsman, kobrin

Journal of Modern Jewish Studies Vol 7, No. 3 November 2008, pp. 357376ISSN 1472-5886 print/ISSN 1472-5894 online 2008 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14725880802405043

Rebecca Kobrin

WHEN A JEW WAS A LANDSMAN

Rethinking American Jewish regional

identity in the age of mass migrationTaylor and FrancisCMJS_A_340672.sgm10.1080/14725880802405043Modern Jewish Studies1472-5886 (print)/1472-5894 (online)Original Article2008Taylor & Francis73000000November [email protected]

My beginnings are in Bialystok, proclaimed Israel Beker, director of the renownedHabima theater troupe. [But] I am not just from Bialystok, he continued, I am aBialystoker, and that means much more (Beker 3). It is tempting to dismiss such a boldarticulation of Eastern European Jewish regional loyalty as exceptional, the meretheatrics of its thespian author. Yet Bekers sentiments concerning the centrality ofhis birth in the city of Bialystok to his understanding of his identity were shared bythousands of early twentieth-century immigrant Jews, who, despite abandoningEastern Europe, continued to assert emphatically their East European urban regionalidentities.1 In fact, in early twentieth-century America, Eastern European Jews contin-ued attachment to their home city or town saw the formation of over 2,000 landsmanshaft(hometown) associations claiming over a half a million members. As Isaac Rontch, headof the Works Progress Administrations Yiddish Writers Group, conjectured, thedepth of these East European regional loyalties pushed one of every five Jews livingin the United States in 1938 to be a member of a landsmanshaft associations (Rontch,Der itstiger matsev, 9). Their popularity, Rontch continued, captured a striking[feature of American] Jewish life: whenever two total strangers meet on the streetthey immediately needed to know from which region or city did their new acquaintance[came] from. In the Eastern European Jewish immigrant world, ones religioussensibilities, political beliefs or even nation of birth mattered far less than ones city oforigin, provoking Rontch to quip on the opening page of his landmark study: when didevery Jew become a landsman (fun vanen iz a yid a landsman)? (Rontch, Der itstigermatsev, 9).2

Historians seeking to understand American Jewry have long debated the centralityof regionalism to American Jewish life.3 What role do regions and regionalism play inthe development of Jewish life in the United States? Where do American Jews ideasabout regions and regional identity come from? What imagined map, territories andboundaries have shaped Jews vision of themselves and their relationship to the worldaround them? When scholars of American Jewish history address these questions, manyexamine the classical regional cleavages defining the American nation, interrogating thedistinctiveness of Southern Jewish life or Jews experiences in the West (Bauman;Evans; Kaganoff and Urofsky; Proctor and Schmier; Kahn and Dollinger). To be sure,the divergent cultural, economic and political contexts of these areas molded Jews

J O U R N A L O F M O D E R N J E W I S H S T U D I E S358

self-perceptions and their daily lives, but such a narrow vision of American Jewishregional identity obscures the sentiments Rontch heard voiced by early twentieth-century immigrant Jews who narrated their regional identities not in reference to theMason-Dixon Line, but rather in relation to the map of Eastern Europe. Rontchinstinctively understood, as Deborah Dash Moore has recently argued, that scholarsmust write not just American Jewish history but modern Jewish history through [a lensof] urban regionalism, seeing this as ultimately more significant than nation states forJews (Moore, Regionalism, 117).

The following pages pay heed to Deborah Dash Moores clarion call to place urbanregionalism at the centre of discussions of American Jewish life, exploring the ways inwhich early twentieth-century immigrant Jews in both North and South Americasummoned, deployed and re-articulated their East European urban regional identities.Indeed, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the largest volun-tary demographic shift in modern Jewish history as millions of Jews moved beyondEastern Europes geographic borders.4 Regardless of whether they settled in NewYork, Chicago, Milwaukee or Buenos Aires, Eastern European Jews summoned meta-phors of regional distinctiveness to form associations that helped them gain a footholdin their new homes and remain connected to their former homes and other Jewishimmigrants scattered throughout the world.5 These organizations, dismissed by someJewish intellectuals as backward or retarded, did indeed constitute an integralpart of the Jewish community (Rontch, Present State, 360). Predicated on the beliefthat Jews from a particular city or locale shared distinctive needs, these seeminglyparochial associations created a transnational sphere through their publications inwhich Eastern European Jewish migrs debated, discussed and re-imagined theconnection between Jewish identity and urban regionalisms. These organizations high-light that, far from the classic paradigms of American Jewish history that have castEastern European Jewish migration as a one-way process in which Jewish migrantsrelinquish all bonds to their former home as they embraced their new identities asAmericans, Eastern European Jews acted as quintessential transnational migrants, asthey, to use the words of Nina Glick Schiller, forged and sustained multi-strandedsocial relations link[ing] their societies of origin with their settlement societies(Schiller et al., Nations Unbound, 22).6

To appreciate fully the historical significance of these organizations that shapedhow Eastern European Jews (who comprised the vast majority of American Jewry bythe 1930s) conceptualized and theorized regionalism and its relationship to Jewishidentity, I begin with a brief historiographical discussion on the place (or more apt: thevirtual erasure) of Eastern European Jewish regionalism in the annals of AmericanJewish life. Then, through a case study of the landsmanshaft institutions and newspaperscreated by Jewish migrs from the city of Bialystokone small slice of the landsman-shaft worldI highlight the diverse forms Eastern European regional identity took as itwas projected onto new landscapes in the Americas. Focusing on the BialystokerCenter, founded in New York City in 1919, and the Bialystoker Farband, established inBuenos Aires in 1930, I demonstrate the ways in which the simple act of organizing aBialystoker institution raised larger ideological questions about Jewish urban regionalidentity: What did it mean to be a Bialystoker Jew outside of Bialystok? What identifiedone as a Bialystoker Jew on the streets of New York or Buenos Aires? While theseorganizations both articulated a vision of successful adaptation as dependent on its

R E T H I N K I N G A M E R I C A N J E W I S H R E G I O N A L I D E N T I T Y 359

members ability to rebuild or recreate Bialystok in their new environs, the types ofinstitutions these immigrant Jews actually built and the meanings they assigned to theterm Bialystoker were diverse, highlighting the complex challenges facing those whosought to re-map their Eastern European urban regional identity onto the landscapes ofthe Americas

Eastern European Jewish regionalism andAmerican Jewish life

While it was abundantly clear to Rontch to place Eastern European Jewish regionalidentity, broadly conceived, at the centre of a narrative on Jewish life in America, thethemes raised by his classic study were rarely engaged over the next fifty years.7 Whatexplains the discrepancy between Rontchs appreciation of the centrality of EasternEuropean Jewish regional identity to American Jewish life and its limited scholarlyinfluence in the writing of American Jewish history? To begin with, one mustacknowledge the role American exceptionalism played in molding the narrative arc ofAmerican Jewish history (as in the larger field of American history). The generaltendency in both academic and popular thought, as Thomas Bender observes, toremove the United States from the domain of the international has encouraged fewscholars to conceptualize or narrate the American Jewish identity as entwined withEuropean regional sensibilities (Bender 5). Buttressing an American exceptionalistvision of American Jewish regional identity was the general shift in the larger historicalprofession away from examining regions; as Celia Appelgate observes, examinations ofregions or regional loyalties were seen as subordinate to the national history projectand pursued mainly by little-regarded amateurs (A Europe of Regions, 1160).Taken together, these trends cemented a general disregard for East European urbanregionalism in the annals of American Jewish history; even those scholars who turnedtheir attention to landsmanshaft institutions, clearly informed by regional loyalties, castthem as part of an American phenomenon and presented them primarily within theframework of American voluntary associational life, gliding over their internationalentanglements and obscuring the reality that these organizations drew American Jewsinto a worldwide debate over the legacy of East European Jewish regionalism.8

At the same time that American Jewish historians virtually erased East Europeanurban regionalism from the annals of American Jewish life, they did, however,constantly advance a vision of regionalism as central to American Jewish life. Echoingscholars in the larger field of American history, American Jewish historians fiercelydebated how to depict Jews in the South. Should they be portrayed, as Melvin Urofsky(xii) argues, as the most assimilated part of American Jewry as a result of theirsuccessful integration into Southern culture without forsaking their Jewishness? Orwere Jews in the South shaped only in a marginal fashion by Southern culture, asMark Bauman (5) contends, sharing more in common with other Jews in America thanwith white Protestants in the South?9 Despite such ideological differences, these histo-rians shared a vision of regionalism as a vehicle through which to insert Jews into thelarger conversation surrounding the American South (Franklin et al.; Bauman).

Such debates over the image of Southern American Jewish life obscures the fact thatfor most American Jews in the first half of the twentieth century, Europe still exerted a


strong emotional pull, molding their understanding of their Jewish regional identities.Such a pull surfaces vividly, for instance, in Morris Freemans 1942 autobiographyconcerning his life in the southern city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Known as theumbrella man of Ninth Street from Augustov, Poland, Freeman, a staunch Zionist, leftthe Russian Empire in 1906 to avoid military service, settling initially in Boston. Hemoved to Chattanooga after the First World War because the areas rainy winterspromised to be good for his business and he quickly became well known throughout thecity (Freeman 35; Grote; Hale). Often submitting articles to the local press, Freemanoffered up a vision of the intricate role that his identity as a Jew from Augustov playedin his encounter with Chattanooga. Despite his appreciation of his neighbours vision oftheir home in juxtaposition to Northern cities, when depicting Chattanoogasfavourable economic structure and warm, friendly atmosphere, Freeman summonedthe comparative landscape of Augustov rather than Boston.10 Chattanooga, Freemanopined in one piece, is the only place in the world in which a poor man like me couldhave accomplished this dream [of economic success]. [I]n [Augustov, Poland] a manborn poor dies poor and his sons have little chance to rise in the world (Hale). Lookingeast to Europe, rather than north to his former home in Boston, Freeman was far fromalone in summoning of the landscapes of Europe to describe who he was, his achieve-ments or his sense of his place in his new home in America. In fact, articulations ofEastern European regionalism were used promiscuously by Eastern European Jews inearly twentieth-century America, as one can vividly see among Jews from the Polish cityof Bialystok in New York City.

Bialystok on East Broadway: The Bialystoker Center and Eastern European Jewish regionalism on New Yorks Lower East Side

Bialystok [is] on East Broadway blared a headline in the 21 June 1931, Forverts (JewishDaily Forward) (Sohn, Bialistok af ist brodvey, 3). To be sure, the tens of thousands ofAmerican Jews who read the Forverts understood that Bialystokan industrial city of90,000 residents in northeast Polandhad not been excised from the Second PolishRepublic and replanted on the Lower East Sides main thoroughfare. Yet theyappreciated why the newspaper would summon the map of Eastern Europe to hail theconsecration of a new building, an edifice that anyone who travels on the bridgesbetween New York and Brooklyn would easily see and be amazed by its fine architec-ture and towering presence (Sohn, Bialistok af ist brodvey, 3). While the birth oftwo influential modern Jewish ideological movementsZionism and the Bundweretied to Bialystok, this Forverts feature proclaimed the citys crowning achievement wasits erection of the Bialystoker Center and Old Age Home on East Broadway. As theForverts chronicled, thousands thronged the streets to watch a parade of 25,000Bialystokers marching down East Broadway, carrying American flags, banners andribbons flecked with red, white and blue (Figure 1). Like German-American parades ofthe period, this patriotic procession demonstrated its participants collective self-assurance about their place in America (see Goren 3047; see also Conzen; Jacobson7882; Davis). The parade culminated in a ceremony during which all marchersgathered around their new Bialystok, a 10-storey building draped in American flags.


Applauding the Bialystoker migrs success, one speaker argued that this edifice notonly elevated Bialystoks status in America, but in Eastern Europe as well. Bialystokershave set the standard for others to go by, maintained David Sohn, the BialystokerCenters executive director (Sohn, Bialistok af ist brodvey, 3). Other landsmanshaftnconstituents lack Bialystoker Jews drive and enthusiasm, he continued, and they can[only] dream of having a center of their own such as our Bialystoker Center (Sohn,Bialistok af ist brodvey, 3). The successful building of the Bialystoker Center in NewYork City, in short, demonstrated to its former inhabitants how distinctive BialystokJewry was (and continued to be) in Eastern Europe.Source: Forverts Kunst-baylage, 28 June 1931.The imbrication of New York and Bialystok in this institution, which, in the wordsof the Forverts, enabled Bialystoks unique potential to be realized on American shores,did mark a milestone for this splintered group that supported over 50 Bialystokerorganizations in the United States (and 39 in New York City alone).11 Despite theirparticularistic rhetoric, these organizations functioned like hundreds of other immigrantassociations as they responded to their members pressing material needs, providingbasic financial assistance in times of illness, unemployment or death, and simultaneouslyenabling the diverse cross-section of Jews from this city in Poland to carve a niche forthemselves in America, regardless of their religious beliefs, gender, age, political affili-ation or class loyalty.12

FIGURE 1 Source: Forverts Kunst-baylage, 28 June 1931.


A few examples provide a glimpse into this diverse network of institutions. Therewere two Bialystoker religious congregations in New York CityAnshei Chesed(founded 1878) and Ahavat Achim (founded in 1884)which catered to the piousmembers of the community, who desired, as Louis Cohen (3) observed, to pray andcongregate in the Bialystoker way. For those younger, well-educated members of thecommunity who valued Americanization above piety, there was the Bialystoker YoungMens Association, founded in 1906 and whose mission was to provide much-neededforward-looking educational, cultural and social activities to aid its members insucceeding economically and melding into America.13 Class loyalty prompted Jewishsocialists from Bialystok to establish the Bialystoker Branch 88 of the Workmens Circlein 1905. This immensely popular organization provided aid to workers in New York andin Russia as part of its effort to foment a workers revolution throughout the world(Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations, 68). In 1908, middle-class women formed theBialystoker Ladies Aid Society of the Bronx and Harlemone of the largest Jewishwomens societies in New Yorkwhich offered aid to the sick and poor as well asinterest-free loans to the unemployed (Albert, unnumbered page).

In 1919 after hearing news of the devastating destruction of the First World War,these organizations decided to form an umbrella organization called the BialystokerCenter to coordinate the fundraising efforts on behalf of their former home in EasternEurope. The mission of this institution was to serve both the interests of the Bialystokerlandsmanshaftn and the interests of the Jewish population in Bialystok through itscollection and distribution of funds (Sohn, Unzere oypgebn, 1). This it did with greatsuccess. Between 1919 and 1932, the Bialystoker Center distributed over US$9 million(equivalent to US$64 million at 2007 currency values), which helped rebuild theschools, hospitals, orphanages and cultural organizations of this Jewish communitydestroyed in the First World War and the ensuing unrest. Hailed as saviours by Jewsin Bialystock for their relief efforts, representatives of the Bialystoker Center weretreated by local Polish officials as the powerful political leaders (Kobrin, ContestedContributions, 4362).

In 1921 the Bialystoker Centers executive director, David Sohn, created the DerBialystoker Stimme (Voice of Bialystok), a newspaper whose title reflected the widespreadbelief that the Center acted as Bialystok Jewrys mouthpiece.14 Grasping the power ofprint culture, which, as Benedict Anderson (3746) observes, plays a key role in creatingand sustaining group identity among groups who do not share territorial cohesiveness,Sohn dedicated the Centers resources to producing and disseminating the BialystokerStimme. In every issue Sohn ran editorials debating the contours of this increasinglydispersed community, articles reporting on current events in Bialystok and updateschronicling the achievements of Bialystoker migr communities throughout the world.During its first few decades of publication, the Bialystoker Stimme reached tens ofthousands of Bialystoker migrs worldwide.15 As Anna Gepner recalled, in Melbourne,Australia, everyone gathered together regularly to read the Bialystoker Stimme when itarrived at her uncles home.16 Yehezkel Aran similarly reminisced how he would alsogather with friends regularly in a cafe in Tel Aviv to share their woes and catch up onall the news conveyed in the Bialystoker Stimme.17 With feature articles entitled A NewBialystok in Argentina or Bialystok in America and America in Bialystok, theBialystoker Stimme encouraged Bialystoker migrs around the world to see themselvesas extending Bialystok as they endeavoured to root themselves in their new homes.18


Yet if all were endeavouring to extend Bialystok, only the Biaylstoker Center,argued the Bialystoker Stimme, successfully transplanted Bialystok to the new world.Since at its core, Bialystok was known for its charitable traditions, the BialystokerStimme maintained, the Bialystoker Centers ability to raise and distribute funds estab-lished it as the new Bialystok (Chaikin 43). Such a vision of Bialystoker identitywas epitomized by the imagery that appeared on the Bialystoker Stimmes cover startingin 1926 (Figure 2).19 In the image, one can see on the right Bialystoks famed

FIGURE 2 Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.


clock tower, erected in 1742, that stood at the center of the citys main commercialsquare; to the left appears a 5-storey building with the words Bialystoker Center andBikur Holim etched on its front. Allegorically enabling these icons of European andAmerican Bialystok to share a sidewalk was a column with the word kultur (culture)etched on top and hilf (charity) on its base, conveying the view of the BialystokerStimmes editors: charity is the cornerstone of Bialystoker identity, providing the foun-dation for transnational Bialystoker identity. To be a Bialystoker, in short, meant to becharitable.FIGURE 2 Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.Such a vision of Bialystokness was inculcated into its readers as this image becameemblazoned on the papers masthead before its regular feature From Here and fromThere (Fun danen un dort) that combined Bialystok and New York in its discussion ofcurrent events (Figure 3). The acute crisis faced by impoverished Jews preparing forPassover in Bialystok shared front-page space with an accounting of the BialystokerCenters Ladies Auxiliarys upcoming annual picnic.FIGURE 3 Bialystoker Stimme 182 (January 1939). Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.The entwining of philanthropy with Bialystokness on its cover and mastheadresonated with the larger American Jewish culture, which over the course of the earlytwentieth century began to see the act of collecting and distributing philanthropy ascentral to how Jews affiliated, defined their identities and articulated the contours oftheir community (Woocher 1-63). Yet unlike larger American Jewish philanthropicorganizations, the Bialystoker Center made clear that their fundraising efforts were notfocused on making donors into Americans, but rather reconfiguring Eastern Europe.As Zelig Tigel, a correspondent for the Warsaw Yiddish daily Der haynt summed up ina 1924 article, the new Bialystoker Center with its deep pockets enabled Bialystok toemerge as a new Jewish cultural centre in Eastern Europe. While Warsaw may havebeen viewed as the most vibrant Jewish community in Poland prior to the Great War,he argued, Bialystoks rebirth after the war, thanks to its extension located on theLower East side, forced all in Poland to look at this industrial city with newfoundrespect.20

Ironically, the Bialystoker Centers success enacting the essence of Bialystok byraising vast sums for this city ultimately drove its lay leaders to contemplate ways inwhich they could demonstrate Bialystoks legacy (and their newfound economicpower) on a stage closer to home (Soyer, Between Two Worlds, 8). While in 1923,the Centers Board of Trustees emphasized that the Bialystoker Centers first goal [wasto] succeed in organizing a smooth functioning new Bialystok on the shores of Americaso that the traditions and spirit of Old Bialystok are preserved, by 1927 this groupagreed to transform their Bialystoker Center into the Bialystoker Center Old AgeHome, an elderly care facility open to any immigrant Jew in need. As David Sohnsummed up:

FIGURE 3 Bialystoker Stimme 182 (January 1939). Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.


Soon all active in the Center realized that extending aid to compatriots overseas wasnot enough. They realized that Bialystoker children, growing up, faced thevexing question: how could they avert the embarrassment of placing mother ordad, advanced in years, into a charity Old Age Home? They hit upon theanswer: set up a Bialystoker Home for the Aged in which the Bialystoker old folkswould feel at home among their compatriots. The decision in Jan. 1927 to erect aHome for the Aged was greeted with an enthusiastic response. (Sohn, History andAchievements, 5, 10)

Maintaining a focus on giving charity, but expanding its mission to include elderlyBialystoker Jews and, by 1933, even elderly Jews who possessed no link to Bialystok,the Boards recasting of the Bialystoker Center from a philanthropic institution focusedon Bialystok to a welfare organization intended to aid the elderly marks a monumentalshift in this migr communitys projection of their regional Bialystoker identities.21

The call to create an old age home was far from unique in New Yorks Eastern EuropeanJewish immigrant world as demographic shifts pushed regional groups connected toWarsaw and Mohilev to erect similar institutions.22 No longer seeing themselves in thecrucible of their foreign regional attachments, and overwhelmed by the financial strainsof the Great Depression and familial responsibilities, the Bialystoker Centers Board ofTrustees, led by David Sohn, argued that a commitment to financially supporting thehome demonstrated ones devotion to maintaining Bialystoks legacy as a centre forcharitable activity (Sohn, Elter problemen, 28). However, this shift did not mark thedemise of a distinctive Bialystoker Jewish identity, but rather its radical reformulationin response to circumstances in America. In the eyes of the Bialystoker Centers Boardof Trustees, Bialystokness had become a question of spirit, conviction and purpose, notonly of birthplace; anyone who joined wholeheartedly in the Bialystoker Centersmissionproviding funds to care for the elderlycould proclaim they had successfullyhelped plant Bialystok on East Broadway.

The singing looms of Villa Lynch: Bialystoker organizational life in Buenos Aires

In Buenos Aires, many would contest the Bialystoker Centers new definition ofBialystoker identity as entwined with charity and the disbursement of money. No newBialystok, they would contend, could be defined by the act of giving charity becausemany Bialystoker Jews, like those who found themselves in Argentina, could notafford to give charity. As one migr reminisced:[W]ho could give money away oreven have time to worry about supporting a Bialystoker [organization] when onesfamily did not have anything to eat? (Pat 10). Residing in a city with few industries foremployment, many Bialystoker Jews in Buenos Aires lived in a precarious economicstate that left a deep imprint on their personal psyches as well as their collective lives:the first Bialystoker organization founded in Argentina in 1923 was forced to close in1924 as a result of lack of funds. As one Bialystoker Jewish migr summed up: Noone had any time or money to spare (Pat 10). It was not until 1930, after a new influxof migrs arrived in Buenos Aires from Bialystok, that the Bialystoker Jewish migrcommunity had a quorum to support their own organization (Munacker, Der


bialistoker farband, 86). Responding to the lack of government support for industrialdevelopment, this Bialystoker organizations primary mission was to help migrsbuild up the local textile industryan industry whose workings many were familiarwith from Bialystok. Accordingly, they named it the Bialistoker Farband un Credit CoopLa Textil (Bialystoker Organization and Credit Union for Textiles, hereafter referred toas the Bialystoker Farband)an organization devoted to granting loans to migrs tomaintain themselves, acquire property and [achieve] general [economic] progress(Reisman 7).

The Bialystoker Farband played an integral role in the economic advancement ofthis migr community in Buenos Aires by offering loans to help its members establishtheir own factories. Similar to Jewish loan associations in Europe and the United States,the Bialystoker Farband expedited the process of upward mobility in this migrcommunity by supplying the necessary capital to start and expand businesses (Tenen-baum 6777). With the aid of these loans, several Bialystoker families founded smallspinning and weaving textile factories on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, primarily in aneighbourhood called Villa Lynch. These factories soon prospered, providing employ-ment for later waves of Bialystoker Jewish migrs. By the late 1930s, Villa Lynchbecame a dense settlement of Bialystoker migrs, with factories and homes existingside-by-side (Pinkus 94102).

The configuration of Villa Lynch and the success of its factories prompted someBialystoker migrs to call Villa Lynch the Manchester of Argentina, harkening to notonly the paradigmatic industrial center in England, but also the well-known nicknameof Bialystokoften called the Manchester of Lithuania (Pinkus 7). By binding migrstogether as employees and employers, buyers and sellers, lenders and borrowers, theBialystoker Farband not only helped these Jews alleviate their financial situation, but alsoreinforced the ties of their regionally based community.23 In contrast to New York,where the defining acts of Bialystoker organizations was their dedication to maintainingconnections to Bialystok and transplanting its values to America, in Buenos Aires, whatit meant to be a Bialystoker became entwined with replicating Bialystoks industry inArgentina. As the Bialystok-born, New York-based Yiddish journalist Hayim Shoshkesremarked after visiting Villa Lynch in 1946, the singing of the machines and thebeating of the weaving looms makes one think one has stumbled into Bialystok, wherethe symphony of textile manufacturing always filled the air. Remarkably, Shoshkesobserved, the Farband had recreated the essence of Bialystok in South America: eventhough Bialystoks textile industry now lay in ruins, all Bialystokers did not have toworry that their former homes industrial legacy was losta replica of Bialystokstextile industry [could be] found in Villa Lynch (Shoshkes 16).

As it dispensed funds to build up textile factories, the Bialystoker Farbandaddressed the larger ideological question of what it meant to identify oneself as aBialystoker in Argentina. From its inception, the organizations focus on acquiringcapital cultivated among Bialystokers in Argentina an understanding of their identity asintricately linked to the politics of the often unemployed factory worker and issues ofclass. The leaders of the Bialystoker Farband stressed that in order to be a trueBialystoker one had to know how to improve oneself through hard tireless work(Reisman 7). The Bialystoker Farbands concept of self-maintenance became central tohow Argentine Bialystoker migrs began to view the greatest attributes of their city oforigin. As Moyshe Reisman, founding member of the Bialystoker Farband, noted:


Bialystoks historical past teaches all the benefit of hard work [and] that Jewishworkers can achieve success despite daunting obstacles (Reisman 7). Their experi-ences in Bialystok, Reisman (9) continued, led to the foundation of the BialystokerFarband and other cooperative banks illustrating the ways in which people must helpthemselves.

The actions and rhetoric of the Bialystoker Farband tried to convince its membersthat the values of tireless work and economic self-improvement were the centraldefining attributes of Bialystok regional identity. Soon migrs in Buenos Aires began tosee themselves as more authentically Bialystoker than the allrightniks (the derogatoryYiddish term applied to those immigrants who were seen as abandoning their morals inorder to achieve rapid material success) who had left Bialystok to settle in the UnitedStates. In contrast to their compatriots who settled in the United States, became quicksuccesses, forgot the lessons of life in Bialystok and supported bourgeois welfare insti-tutions that served constituencies far beyond the Bialystoker community, migrs inBuenos Aires continued the traditions of the working-class city of Bialystok byconcerning themselves with the problems of the labourer (Reisman 7). Supportinglibraries and reading circles to educate Jewish workers, the members of the Farbandsaw themselves as maintaining the legacy of Bialystok as a centre of worker activism(Resiman 7). They may have not been quick successes like their compatriots inAmerica, but they similarly deployed their Bialystoker institution to make an imprintbeyond the narrow confines of their regional migr community.

The cover page of the Bialystoker Farbands magazine Bialystoker vegn (The Ways ofBialystok) expresses a proletarian, as opposed to bourgeois, charitable vision ofBialystoks legacy (Figure 4). The image on this 60-page publications cover begins inthe top left corner with a visual representation of a group of factories from which a longwinding road emerges. This road then curves and meanders past a representation of thedestroyed Bialystoker Synagogue and Bialystoker clock tower, before ending at thename Bialystoker Farband emblazoned under a picture of a quill in an ink jar. Echoingthe magazines stated goalto preserve Yiddish culturethe cover sought to connectBialystok directly to the mission purported by many Jewish socialist or worker-orientedorganizations in this era (Munaker, Farvos bialistoker vegn, 2).24 From its inceptionin 1897 in Russia, the Bund (the abbreviated name for the Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bundin Lita, Poyln un Rusland [General Jewish Workers Union in Lithuania, Poland andRussia]), an illegal Jewish socialist political party, supported the development of Yiddishlanguage materials to further educate the Jewish working masses. The title page of Bial-istoker vegn reiterated this message as its editors claimed that Bialystoker Jews werecharged with a mission to cultivate Yiddish culture in all their new homes (Munaker,Farvos bialistoker vegn, 2). In contrast to their American compatriots commitmentto spreading a bourgeois charitable culture, these Argentine Bialystokers saw the roadfrom (or legacy of) Bialystok stemming from its factories where Yiddish culture wasnurtured. Bialistoker vegn fulfilled this mission on each of its sixty pages by publishingreports, poetry and stories from Bialystoker Jews living around the world, and encour-aging migrs to see their Bialystoker identity in their new world as entwined with adevotion to working-class politics and Yiddish.FIGURE 4 Bialistoker vegn 1947. Courtesy of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.The vision of Bialystoker identity articulated in this publication and through itssponsoring organizationnot only in relation to Eastern Europe, but in juxtapositionto the perceived bourgeois Bialystoker culture in the United Statesdeserves


attention because no longer was Eastern Europe the primary touchstone to whichmigrs turned to define themselves. They could not explain what it meant to be aBialystoker by looking only at Bialystok; they also had to define themselves againstthe perceived class-status and achievements of their former compatriots living in NewYork. Argentine Bialystokers saw their counterparts in the United States as a loomingpresence who demanded they articulate a corrected vision of Bialystoks essence.Contrasting their faithfulness to Bialystok with the questionable loyalty of Bialystokermigrs who settled in the United States, the members of the Bialystoker Farbandwould ultimately turn their attention to erecting the Y. L. Peretz FolkshuleaYiddish elementary school that opened in 1949. They understood their support ofYiddish education as continuing the efforts undertaken by Jewish workers in Bialystokwho had embraced Yiddish as they strove to inculcate in its members the need to over-throw the Tsar (Cassedy). To sustain itself, however, this school ultimately drewstudents from beyond the Bialystoker migr community. Appreciating the striking

FIGURE 4 Bialistoker vegn 1947. Courtesy of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.


similarities with the Bialystoker Centers Old Age Home, the leaders of theBialystoker Farband still steadfastly adhered to the vision of themselves as the trueBialystokers upholding their citys legacy. A vast sea of difference, they argued,existed between an old age home and a Yiddish educational institution that taughtlessons of self-reliance and an appreciation for the plight of the working man. Yet theirony of their argument was lost on few in the transnational Bialystok community whorecognized the shared trajectories of the Bialystoker Center and the BialystokerFarband as a warning to those who sought to glorify Bialystok by transplanting it. Ulti-mately, their efforts undermined Bialystoks distinctiveness. As Sonia Rapolovsky ofChile summed up, there could never be another Bialystok. Her former home was afortress of Jewishness and Jewish culture a true barrier against assimilation like noother city in the world (Rapalovsky 8). Tragically, this seemingly impenetrable cita-del that inspired such an intense regional collective identity went up in smoke alongwith the thousands of Jews who had kept it alive.

Conclusion

The Bialystoker Center in New York and the Bialystok Farband in Argentina demon-strate the long-term resonance of Eastern European urban regionalisman essentialmode of Jewish self-identification in Eastern Europe that assumed new forms in the ageof mass migration. While sharing the same moniker and rhetoric of regional distinctive-ness, the Bialystoker Center and Bialystoker Farband viewed their Bialystoker heritagethrough strikingly different lenses: in New York, the Bialystoker Center projected itsBialystoker identity by providing charitable services to Jewish elderly in the largerimmigrant community; the Bialystoker Farband in Buenos Aires, on the other hand,maintained that supporting industrial development, working-class politics, educationand Yiddish culture perpetuated Bialystoks true legacy. To be sure, the Bialystokmigr community represents only one small slice of the Jewish immigrant world, butit was far from exceptional. Jews from cities as large as Warsaw or as small as Lomzaenmeshed themselves in similar debates as migration forced Eastern European Jewsregional vision of their identities to be mapped onto new terrains. While EasternEuropean Jews urban regional identities may not have supplanted other political orreligious allegiances, it did dovetail with these convictions and frame their articulation.Thus, as Isaac Rontch noted in 1937, one cannot fully understand Eastern EuropeanJews encounter with America, or any place in the new world, unless one appreciatesthe ways in which it was shaped by their mentalities of urban regionalism forged inEastern Europe (Rontch, Der itstiger matsev, 912).

The above analysis of the global network of Jewish immigrant associations suggeststhat a renewed engagement with Jewish urban regional identityan engagement sensi-tive to the transnational constructions of this identitycan productively destabilize ourvision of the nation state in modern Jewish history as well as our narration of the EasternEuropean Jewish immigrant experience. Most American and modern Jewish historiansoperate in dichotomous frameworks dictated by nationalist paradigms, privileging theterritorial boundaries imposed by nation-states in their discussions of the relationshipbetween space and identity in modern Jewish life. The fact that millions of EasternEuropean Jews scattered throughout the United States, South America and Europe


steadfastly held onto their urban regional identities long after they had left EasternEurope, and debated with one another over the definition of these identities, suggests aneed to rethink whether the city, rather than the nation-state, may be a more usefulanalytical framework through which to study modern Jewish life. To be sure, this articlehas highlighted the centrality of the city to Jews self-perceptions in a specific historicalmomentthe era of mass Eastern European Jewish migrationbut even after lands-manshaft memberships dwindled in the postwar period, the mode of identification theseorganizations introduced to American Jewish life continued to make a deep imprint. AsDeborah Dash Moores study of postwar American Jewry illustrates, when Jews werelured from New York and Chicago to cities such as Los Angeles and Miami, regionalaffiliation continued to be a defining feature of Jewish communal life, albeit now interms of New York or Chicago, rather than Bialystok or Warsaw (Moore, To the GoldenCities). American Jewish historians could provide a useful model to the larger field ofAmerican history not only by emphasizing that urban regions matter just as much aslarge swaths of territory, but also by continuing to look more seriously across theAtlantic, rather than just at the Mason-Dixon Line when theorizing the types of regionalloyalties that molded American life (Moore, Regionalism, 115). While Americanhistorians rarely look beyond the North American continent when discussing theirsubjects regional identities, perhaps they must acknowledge as historian David Thelen(436) observes, that instead of assuming that something was distinctively American, we[must] assume that elements of it began or ended somewhere else. A new vision ofAmerican Jewish regionalism, which looks beyond the map of the United States, wouldhighlight that American Jews, like America itself, were never isolated or exceptional;immigrants, like nations, have always been molded by foreign mentalities, internationalnetworks and global processes.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Aviva Taubenfeld and all the participants in the Jews in theModern World: Beyond the Nation conference for their feedback and insights.

Notes

1. Regional identity provided a cornerstone for Jewish identity in Eastern Europe;it played a similar role in identity definition throughout Europe (see Lederhendler1522). For the role of regional identity in the larger European context, seeApplegate (A Europe of Regions); also see Applegate (A Nation of Provincials);Confino; Green; Jenkins.

2. This is my translation. Rontch renders this vignette in English in his 1939 article, ThePresent State of the Landsmanschaften, where he translates this phrase as fromwhence is a Jew a landsman? (360). Note that even Rontch felt it was unnecessary totranslate the Yiddish term landsman, which was the common word used by Yiddishspeakers to refer to someone (man) from the same hometown or region (land), withwhom one would share a deep intimate connection. Since no precise equivalent termexists in English, I have chosen to leave landsman in its original form.


3. Issue 93(2) of American Jewish History (June 2007) is devoted to regionalism At the 2006Biennial Conference of American Jewish Historians (Charleston, SC), 46 June 2006,a panel was devoted to the topic of regionalism in American Jewish life. Moreover,numerous additional panels delved into this topic through such angles as comparingcity-Jews and country-Jews, or discussions of the specific contours of SouthernJewish life. Much of the heated debate surrounding the question of regionalism stillcentres on Baumana work that argues against the distinctiveness of Southern Jewishlife. Baumans thesis sparked an enormous response: assessments of his work havedominated the last two conferences of the Southern Jewish Historical Society (2004and 2005), with Marc Lee Raphael dedicating his keynote address to the 29th AnnualConference of the Southern Jewish Historical Society in 2004 to a critique of Baumanswork. Moreover, a forthcoming issue of American Jewish History will be devoted to theproceedings of the 2006 Scholars Conference and will include several discussions ofthe issue of regionalism.

4. The mass migration of Eastern European Jewry marks the largest voluntary demo-graphic shift in modern Jewish history (Lestchinsky; Editorial staff; Glazier vxxi;Stampfer). For the ways in which Jewish internal migration transformed Jewish life inspecific cities in Eastern Europe, see Zipperstein; Corrsin.

5. A vast international literature exists on immigrant associations and the role they playin facilitating immigrants economic adaptation to their new homes. For an excellentoverview, see Moya.

6. Schiller, Basch and Blanc have worked collaboratively on theorizing transnationalism,producing several excellent overviews of this concept (see, e.g., Schiller et al.,Towards a Transnational Perspective; Schiller et al., From Immigrant to Transmigrant).

7. Prior to the Second World War, several writers surveyed the landsmanshaftnmovement (Rontch (Der itstiger matsev); Wald; Zhitinsky, all focus on Argentina;see also Szajkowski). Aside from these works, there few other major scholarlytreatments of these institutions appeared until the 1980s. In 1985, Hannah Kligercompleted her dissertation entitled Communication and Ethnic Community: The Case ofLandsmanshaftn, and Michael Weisser, a popular writer, penned Brotherhood of Memory:Jewish Landsmanshaftn in the New Worlda work that argued that landsmanshaftn,because of their use of the Yiddish language, acted as obstacles to Eastern EuropeanJewish immigrant acculturation. A special issue of American Jewish History in 1986focused on landsmanshaftn and included the following pioneering articles: Milamed;Kliger (Traditions); Soyer (Between Two Worlds). Soyer (Jewish ImmigrantAssociations) provides the most extensive, rigorous, nuanced and insightful analysis oflandsmanshaftn and their role in Jewish communal life in the early twentieth century.Drawing on expansive research, Soyer argues that landsmanshaftn facilitated Jewishimmigrant acculturation by introducing them to American civic culture through theirmodes of operation.

8. Michael Weissers 1985 Brotherhood of Memory: Jewish Landsmanshaftn in the New World,located the new world exclusively in the United States and argued that landsman-shaftn failed because of their use of the Yiddish language that did not help its EasternEuropean Jewish immigrant membership learn English. While Daniel Soyer chal-lenged this assessment of these organizations, suggesting that landsmanshaftn actuallyfacilitated Jewish immigrant adaptation, he saw landsmanshaft organizations as consti-tuting an American phenomenon (Soyer, Between Two Worlds, 492).

9. Eric Goldstein points out that Bauman must be credited with complicating many ofthe central paradigms shaping the writing of southern Jewish historical writing, such


as the assimilationist tendencies of southern Jews that basically erased EasternEuropean Jews religious traditionalism, their strong support of Zionism and even adevotion to Yiddish culture in the South (see Goldstein; I would like to thank theauthor for sharing this paper with me).

10. Freeman Fears Nazis in Poland Have Brutally Slain His Mother, undated articleclipped from Chattanooga News-Free Press (Hale, 9 June 1948, included in file).

11. Space does not allow for close analysis of the Bialystoker organizations mentionedabove or various others founded by Bialystoker migrs to address their needs. Formore on these different organizations, see Kobrin (2002, Chapter 2); also see theoverview provided in Kliger (Traditions, 359).

12. For a list of Bialystoker organizations in America, see Shmule tsh et al. (1667);Sohn (A History). Bialystoker Jews were far from exceptional among Jews or otherethnic groups (see Milamed 41; Moya 8604).

13. Many landsmanshaft groups had similar organizations (see Milamed 41).14. Thus far, I have rendered Yiddish words, phrases, titles and names of organizations,

places and persons according to the transliteration scheme of the YIVO Institute forJewish Research, except I must note that I make no attempt to standardize nonstand-ard orthography such as Der Bialystoker Stimme, mentioned here, which possesses aYiddish title that was transliterated at the time of publication by its editors who didnot follow the YIVO guidelines for either spelling or capitalization.

15. According to the personal files of David Sohn, director of the Bialystoker Center andeditor of the Bialystoker Stimme, during the 1920s and 1930s, 4,000 Bialystoker Stimmeswere published in each run and by the 1940s the number published reached 5,000 (seeBialystoker Stimme 239 (November 1945), p. 1; Sohn, History and Achievements ofthe Bialystoker Center). In many communities, one or two Bialystoker migrfamilies would receive the Bialystoker Stimme and they would share their copy with allthe other Bialystoker families in the community.

16. Interview with Anna Gepner, 21 August 1997, Melbourne, Australia.17. Interview with Yehezkel Aran, 15 April 1999, Tel Aviv, Israel.18. Bialistok: a koloniol macht, Bialystoker Stimme, 8 (February 1924), p. 1; Der ameri-

kaner royter kreys in bialistok, Bialystoker Stimme 2 (January 1922), p. 1; Bialistok inargentine un argentine in bialistok, Bialystoker Stimme, 13 (March 1926), p. 32; Dibialistoker in berlin, Bialystoker Stimme, 4 (June 1922), p. 12. The regular column onVelt barimte bialistoker debuted in the Bialystoker Stimme (4 (June 1922), pp. 79),while the Unzer eygene velt column debuted in the Bialystoker Stimme (3 (March1922), p. 12). Both soon became regular features (see, e.g., Bialystoker Stimme, 4(June 1922), p. 14; Bialystoker Stimme, 6 (February 1923), p. 22).

19. This cover appeared on every Bialystoker Stimme between 1926 and 1930 (nos 1422)except for those celebrating specific organizations anniversaries, such as the BialystokerYoung Mens Association (1926) or the Bialystoker Centers Ladies Auxilary (1928).

20. Bialistok, nyu york, patersun, Bialistoker Relif Journal, 1925, p. 1.21. The handwritten Annual Report of the Bialystoker Center Old Age Home reports that close

to half of the homes 23 residents were born in Bialystok.22. The Warschauer Haym Solomon Home for the Aged was founded in 1922 (see

Warschauer Haym Salomon Homed for the Aged Souvenir Journal, 19221938, 1938; alsosee Souvenir Journal: Tenth Anniversary Dinner of the Mohilev-on-Dnieper and Vicinity Homefor the Aged, 1937). The proliferation of eldercare facilities in the 1920s reflected notonly shifting demographics, but the growing concern among many immigrant groupsand the larger urban working class about how to care for aging family members who

v. i.


could no longer earn wages. Many Jewish leaders feared that if poor immigrant Jewsflocked to municipal poorhouses, there would be antisemitic repercussions (seeKatz).

23. See the similar conclusion reached by Tenenbaum (77).24. On the larger role socialist organizations played in developing and spreading Yiddish

culture, particularly in the postwar era, see Fishman (Chapters 4, 6, 8).

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Rebecca Kobrin, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Columbia University,works in the field of American Jewish History. Her forthcoming book Jewish Bialystokand Its Diaspora: Between Exile and Empire (Indiana University Press) was awarded theCenter for Jewish Historys Fred Rose Young Historians Award. She has been awardeda fellowship from the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies for 2008/2009 to begin a newproject on Jewish speculation, financial failure and the remaking of American capital-ism. Address: Rebecca Kobrin, 4633 Delafield Avenue, Bronx, NY 10471, USA. E-mail:[email protected]

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