In “New Haven: The Jewish Community” (COMMENTARY, November 947) Charles Reznikoff drew a portrait of the Jewry of a middle-sized New England city. Here is a picture, by another pen and in a different key, of a smaller New England community. (The town described is a real one, but the author has thought it well not to give its identity here.) Irving Howe’s somewhat acrid appraisal may evoke disagreement, but also, we think, it offers material for sober reflection.
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For some time I had heard fragmentary reports from several friends whose childhood was spent in Spruceton. Strange reports. . . . A Jewish community, some years ago on the verge of disintegration, now thriving, self-confident, “modernized.” Yet a community not quite at peace with itself. Certainly, Spruceton’s Jewish old-timers, the parents of my friends, were far from happy over the boasted “modernization.” What clash of values, perhaps a local version of large problems, was taking place in this isolated Jewish community?
I took the train to Spruceton. The idea of such a trip was itself an adventure; a New Yorker going “to the country” . . . and not for a vacation!
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Spruceton is a sprawling city of 28,000 people. Its long Main Street is dreary and ugly, but in its residential sections one does find that relaxed graciousness one likes to think characteristic of New England.
Spruceton has not taken any special pains to attract industry and rather prides itself on retaining something of the quality and aroma of pre-industrial New England. While Spruceton’s few industries—a tannery, a railroad installation, a large printing plant, and several granite quarries—are becoming increasingly important to its economic life, they are still peripheral in the Spruceton society. The labor movement, for all its impressive membership of some two thousand in the AFL and several hundred in the CIO, exerts no major influence in the city.
The starkly visible extremes of status that cleave most American industrial cities are not evident in Spruceton. It has few mansions; the “aristocracy” of “Mortgage Hill” is small and without inordinate social power. Nor are there any slum areas: Spruceton has few unskilled workers and no Negro sub-proletariat. Most of its residents are “middle-class,” in status and outlook.
This economic homogeneity is matched by an almost equally considerable racial homogeneity. Small Greek and Italian pockets, some French Canadians, and about sixty Jewish families comprise its “foreign” element. All the others are “native stock”—Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, solid, conservative.
Politically, Spruceton is of course Republican, and that without any of the scandalous concessions to the two-party system found in the southern parts of New England. One of the Spruceton Jews to whom I spoke told me that he was a Democrat (and a PM reader!) but that he registered Republican. “In this town, if you don’t register Republican, you might as well close shop.” Probably that statement is an exaggeration. A number of Spruceton Jews had been sympathetic to the Democratic party, especially when it was headed by Roosevelt, but they did not take any pains to publicize this opinion.
Spruceton is overwhelmingly Protestant, though I did hear and overhear expressions of concern about the rapid multiplication of “mackerel-snappers,” as Catholics are called. The local paper, edited by a conservative eccentric, has often sniped at the Catholics and, more recently, at the Jews, for their failure to assimilate themselves to the ways of Spruceton life—that is, to accept the mores of the majority group.
The New England equalitarian tradition, so industriously advertised by our nationalist historians, is here largely a memory of the past. What one encounters in both conversations and the local press is a rigid, heavy, almost eccentric conservatism. To be sure, this attitude is decent and polite—a demagogue like G. L. K. Smith would not find favor in Spruceton. But it soon becomes painfully evident that this is a New England with a withered and crotchety social imagination, a New England in which Sam Adams, Emerson, or Thoreau would not feel at home. Perhaps it is only the naivety of the New Yorker standing in involuntary awe of the great places of early American history, but I felt a certain disappointment at the invariably provincial and almost bigoted attitude of the many Spruceton people with whom I spoke. I found only one sign of intellectual ferment: a small chapter of the American Veterans Committee.
For all its gracious atmosphere, its aura of good living, and its lack of overt conflicts, Spruceton is full of subterranean tensions.
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There are about 160 Jews in Spruceton, of whom the overwhelming majority are middle-class. (In this respect they are Spruceton’s most representative group!) A few are rich—but most of the storekeepers and businessmen are just comfortably well off. There is a handful of Jewish workers but they exert no independent influence; Spruceton’s temple is a congregation of solid businessmen. As I drove down Main Street one afternoon, my cab driver, after observing that my nose pointed in the right direction (upward), remarked on the number of stores owned by Jews. He thought that “bad for the town.”
In its own estimate, Spruceton’s Jewish community is thriving as never before. Its members live in peace, undisturbed by any open enmities, and those given to reflection feel protected by the “New England tradition.” They are prosperous and live in “nice homes.” (I shall not here describe “nice homes.”) And they are proud of their handsome temple, a religious and social center.
In recent years the Jewish community has come together under the leadership of an intelligent “modem” rabbi, who, I was proudly informed, is “a respected figure in the city.” More Jews attend his services, more contribute to relief funds than ever before. Formerly a disintegrating remnant of Orthodoxy, Spruceton’s Jewish community is now a lively center of Reform or “liberal” Judaism. True, a few old-timers grumble: they don’t like the rabbi’s modem ways, they look down upon the Americanized businessmen who have taken over leadership. But these old-timers are numerically insignificant; in a few years their voices will be stilled by death.
The Jewish community, at first blush, shows every sign of growth and vitality; it is even becoming an accepted part of Spruceton’s social life. For most of Spruceton’s Jews, this is the whole story; and from their point of view I could well end here. But let us probe a little deeper.
I Paid my first visit to the Old Man. His son, a friend of mine in New York, had told me that the Old Man knew more about Spruceton than anyone else.
When I first arrived at his dirty and littered junk shop, the Old Man hesitated to talk; he could not understand why anyone should find Spruceton interesting. He was more concerned with politics: Taft, a trikener herring; Dewey, a leideger kop; Churchill, an imperialistisher banditt; Attlee, a sozialistisher schlemiel. After I smiled my assent to these characterizations, he relaxed and began to reminisce. When I told him I brought greetings from his son, rapport was soon established. “A smart boy, my son, a bissel tzu fiel gegen Stalin, but a smart boy.”
The Old Man was small, gentle, quite shy. His face was not crinkled, but was blocked into a series of flat surfaces separated by sharp ridges. It is the kind of face one finds in pictures of 8th-century Jews.
The Old Man came to Spruceton in 1899, when the town had perhaps six or seven Jews living in self-imposed isolation. As more Jewish immigrants drifted in, most of them went “into business” as rag pickers and junk peddlers. They were neither integrated members of Spruceton’s community nor a distinct group on its margin; they crept around in its interstices. Most, the Old Man smilingly recalled, were as poor as when “di mame hat unz gehat.”
During those early years between the turn of the century and the First World War, the Old Man would hitch up his wagon and, together with the other peddlers, ride to Millberg, a large city nearby, for the High Holidays. As soon as there were enough Jews in Spruceton, they began holding their own services. But “yiden zenen doch yiden”—Jews being Jews—conflicts broke out within Spruceton’s Jewish community. “Altogether we had maybe twenty men. So when we split into two minyans, each one used to fight for the tenth man.” What was the reason for the split? That amused the Old Man: as if there had to be a reason! “Well”—he continued in his odd combination of Yiddish accent and Harvard broad “a”—“some of us were junk peddlers and others worked in a rag-sorting place; that’s why there was a split. When they closed down the rag-sorting place, we had peace again.”
For the high holidays, they would hire a prayer leader (baltvilah) and would play host to Jews from surrounding villages. Services were held on the ground floor of the house of the ritual slaughterer (shoichet). Once, the Old Man remembered, “a whole gang of Litvaks, noisy and hungry,” descended on his house two days before Rosh Hashana: they were so isolated they didn’t know the date of the holiday. “So we fed them. A yid iz a yid.”
During the years before the First World War, the Jews usually lived on Spruceton’s outskirts so that they might have space to store their junk. A few more adventurous souls became door-to-door drygoods peddlers and even opened up stores. Since they were viewed primarily as a curiosity, they met with little overt anti-Semitism. The Old Man did recall one incident when his junk wagon was chased by boys shouting “Christ-killer!” “So I got down, waved my horse whip at them, and they ran away.” Only those Jews forced to by their business arrangements mingled with the townspeople; the rest kept to themselves in the south end.
Shortly before the First World War a Jew, Jake Cohen, ran for mayor. He was of course defeated, but there was less of an anti-Semitic reaction than the more fearful Jews had expected and some of them, as the Old Man put it, felt they might now “come out of their holes and look up at the sun.” Jake was apparently something of a character: a captain in the National Guard, always “one of the boys,” and later a producer and actor in silent Western films. “An interesting life for a Jew,” the Old Man said.
In the early 200’s the placid life of Spruceton’s Jews was disturbed by the first overt and, thus far, the most severe outbreak of anti-Semitism in the place. Locally, they were digging into business life and provoking resentment among Gentile competitors; nationally, the Ku Klux Klan was spreading race hatred, of which some even reached Spruceton. A branch of the KKK (“hood-ledoods,” the Old Man called them) was formed in the town and for a while it began to stir up anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish prejudice. The Jews became fearful, but the whole thing blew over in the halcyon prosperity of the middle 20’s.
When the depression came, Spruceton was not so badly hit as most other New England towns. A nearby textile center became a ghost town, but Spruceton still had the state capital. However, New England’s economic paralysis gradually spread there too, and many Jewish storekeepers had to go into bankruptcy and move away. Business failures, sharpening clashes between the old-timers and their modernized children, and internal religious disintegration all converged to make the depression the lowest point of Spruceton Jewry’s history.
It is somewhat surprising that the radical political tendencies of that era did not particularly influence Spruceton’s Jews. As a matter of fact, a branch of the Communist party, composed of Scandinavian granite workers, was formed in West Spruceton, but it had slight impact on the Jewish community. The older generation viewed all politics with scepticism; the younger ones, who might have been more receptive to radical ideas, had largely left Spruceton.
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Thus far the Old Man had a thorough grasp of his story, but now he was clearly at a loss to explain what had happened to the second generation of Spruceton’s Jews, those born and reared there. To maintain chronological sequence, I will here interpolate what I learned from other sources.
Though reared in their parents’ orthodoxy, many of these second-generation Jews rejected it when they reached maturity in the late 20’s or early 30’s. Those who had professional or intellectual ambitions were forced to leave Spruceton entirely, since it offered few opportunities for Jews in these fields. Some of their contemporaries who did remain in Spruceton married Gentiles. The rate of intermarriage for Spruceton’s Jews is nineteen per cent and remains one of the community’s irksome problems.
But even those members of the second generation who rejected religion still retained—if only because of their own uneasy status—a certain community with their parents. For instance, between the Old Man’s remarks on Spruceton’s Jews and those of his intellectual son there was a fairly close similarity of critical perception: both viewed history from the outside. It is remarkable that even those old-timers’ sons who married Gentiles and were therefore driven from the fold still identify Jewishness with the ways of their parents; and to the degree that they identify themselves with both their parents and Jewishness, they concur in the old-timers’ criticisms of “newcomers” and of the temple’s Reform innovations. That, in some instances, their own children are being raised in non-Jewish faiths does not seem to affect this attitude.
It is not difficult to see why the Old Man, as he hesitantly and painfully talked about this second generation, should have found it perplexing. For all his worldliness and basic scepticism, he could not stretch his imagination enough to understand sympathetically either those who had drifted into cosmopolitan intellectuality or those who had intermarried. But when he rather hurriedly shifted the conversation to the next major stage in Spruceton Jewry’s history, he was again secure and keen in his judgment.
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In The middle and late 30’s a new group of Jews, soon to become the dominant one, came to Spruceton. They were businessmen from various New England towns who set up stores and businesses in Spruceton. Most were successful and became what the Old Man laughingly called “alrightnicks.” (Throughout his narrative there was an undercurrent of amused scepticism towards events, his own account of them, and my reception of his account. What did it mean, and what did it matter? And suppose one knew, what could be done about it? Perhaps this was to be expected from a man nearing his seventies, but perhaps—I will not be so bold as to say—it was an attitude that might be described as characteristically “Jewish.”)
This group of alrightnicks soon became the pillar of the town’s Jewish community. Why? How explain the fact that the group that knew least about and cared least for Judaism became the most active and sustaining section of the Jewish community? I posed these questions to the Old Man. Again his face creased with the irritation which inability to formulate his impressions into leading ideas seemed to cause him. He could not answer me, as he frankly admitted.
Above all else, the Old Man was a thoroughly honest human being. When I pressed him about the old-timers with whom he most readily identified himself (were they really so wonderful?), he admitted that for many of them religion was a mere routine, a rigid and meaningless formality. Though they now complained about the “liberal” rabbi’s innovations, their own religious services were falling apart and were quite unable to attract younger elements.
Why then, since he was himself of such lively temperament and not really Orthodox, did the Old Man still consider himself closer to the old-timers than to any one else?
This seemed to be a crucial point; he thought very carefully before answering. His answer was not well formulated, but I think it came to something like this: The old-timers, mostly East European immigrants, continued to live within the emotional and intellectual shadow of the Pale; in that sense, for good or bad, they remained Jews, no matter what their politics, social status, or religious attitudes in America. Even, said the Old Man, when they became “gevirim” (rich men) they continued in “yidishe vegen” (Jewish ways). But what did that mean exactly? Well, if they were money grubbers they were not the same kind as the members of the local Chamber of Commerce; if they were philistines they were not the same kind as the local Rotarians. But how were they different? “Zey hobn zich nisht gekocht in Amerikanerishe zachen.” More than that I could not elicit from the Old Man, but what he seemed to be trying to suggest was that the old-timer Jews were not absorbed by Spruceton. They lived at one remove from it and were therefore able to retain, in no matter how attenuated a form, an attitude of critical distance towards American industrial society.
At this point the Old Man went out of his way to intimate that he himself, for all his attachment to the old ritual, was a nonbeliever. (He reads the New Republic.) His attachment to the old was to some extent a habit, but even more it was an unformulated esthetic appreciation.
Once he began to talk about the current conflict among Spruceton’s Jews, the Old Man felt more sure of himself.
When the present rabbi—a cultured, intelligent man—came to Spruceton over a year ago, he began to institute certain innovations. One of them, perhaps most bitterly resented by the old-timers, was the installation of an organ in the temple. When the Old Man first heard about this, he passed it off with a joke: would the temple feature “hootchie-kootchie” dancers next? A crony of his, when asked about the organ, scornfully murmured, “Eh . . . es skripit.” Others of the older generation, however, were neither so humorous nor so polite.
The conflict came to a head during the recent holidays when the rabbi read parts of the service in English and omitted other parts. This occasioned the Old Man’s biting remark: “This is the first time I have ever seen a herring that has only a head and a tail.” When I asked him if the shofar was blown on Yom Kippur, he replied that it was but that it sounded like a Boy Scout bugle: “Es hat nisht kein tam”—no flavor.
A handful of the old-timers embarked on a rather pathetic hegira: since they no longer could tolerate such heterodoxy, they abandoned the temple and went to Boston and other towns where they could pray in Orthodox synagogues for the high holidays. But the Old Man remained in Spruceton. Why? “Vos vill ich loifen?” I think he meant to suggest by that cryptic remark that the gesture of protest was basically futile. One couldn’t run away from the situation. In a larger city, Orthodox and Reform could split; here they had to coexist. In practice that meant giving way to Reform. He personally preferred the old ways (prayers in English are “dry like crackers”) but he seemed to grasp that the old ways were doomed.
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It Would be pointless to report on other conversations I subsequently had with Spruceton’s Jews, most of which merely substantiated what the Old Man had told me. But I do want to relate an interview with one of the alrightnicks, for in the contrast between him and the Old Man is dramatized the social conflict inside Spruceton’s Jewish community.
Mr. X received me in his expensively furnished house, a “nice home.” He wore a dressing gown and tried to suggest an air of comfortable worldliness; he looked somewhat like Jean Hersholt.
Mr. X had been in Spruceton for about a dozen years, and was now a very well-established businessman. He began by deprecating the importance of the religious differences within Spruceton’s Jewish community; but nonetheless, like almost every other Spruceton Jew to whom I spoke, he seemed unable to leave the subject.
He told me about the old shul in Spruceton. “It was dirty, it stank; when you went in, there were old men in their stockings and with long beards. Then they had that gargle music. . . . Well, you know, it wasn’t the kind of place you’d want to bring your wife and kids to. Then some of us got together and pushed through the temple. Sometimes we did things first and asked permission afterwards, but we got things done.” I ventured to remark that this was in the tradition of American business, but my feeble sarcasm did not seem to disturb him.
Mr. X felt that the Old Man was “something of a trouble-maker, a little un-American. Now we have the finest type of Jew.”
“What is the finest type of Jew?”
“Well, you know, the kind that’s clean, doesn’t push himself or make noise; the kind that’s respected and doesn’t fool around with the Reds. Now we’re part of the Community Chest, the goyim respect us. We’re part of the town. Everyone respects the rabbi.”
Then came the clincher, “I’ll tell you something else. Before, when the old ones ran the show, there was a lot of intermarriage by the young people. Now there isn’t. Now we are learning about being Jews, we send our children to Sunday school and we know what is going on when we hear the prayers in English.”
My last question was: “Is there anti-Semitism in Spruceton?”
“No, it’s not that sort of town.”
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The same evening I talked to Mr. X, I also met a number of Jewish women who were discussing a Zionist dinner that had been held at the town’s leading hotel, at which I was staying. At this dinner there had been an unexpectedly large number of guests, some of whom had got merry and so far forgotten themselves as to sing Zionist songs. Others of the Jewish ladies felt that was “bad behavior-it makes a bad impression on the Gentiles.” As one of them put it, ‘We have to show we’re good Jews, not bad Jews.” I asked her, as I had asked Mr. X, what she meant by “good Jews.” She murmured, “You know. . . . “
The next morning, while sitting in the lobby of the hotel, I could not help but overhear its owner loudly discussing the Zionist dinner: “Jews . . . grabbers . . . noisy, crazy songs . . . what can you expect from them?”
I spoke to a number of other Mr. X’s. Some were cruder, some more subtle, but they were all cut from the same pattern.
There is no denying that Mr. X and his fellow alrightnicks are fundamentally decent enough as individuals. They are, or can be, individually kind; some are rather more imaginative; and a few even have a smattering of culture, though a very thin one. Yet their basic socio-economic situation propels them as a group to a system of beliefs and attitudes that is highly unattractive and that has helped bring about their disagreements with the old-timers.
Mr. X and his fellows have had one severe shock in the past two decades: Hitler. From this shock they learned that, no matter how they may wish to, they cannot assimilate themselves (they really mean obliterate themselves). Yet they have become successful businessmen; their daily life brings them into repeated contact with Gentile businessmen whose values they eagerly seek to adopt. They wish, almost more than anything else, not to be identified with “bad” Jews—those who are “dirty,” wear beards, make “gargle music,” or are always “knocking things.”
Experience has further taught them, as one Jewish businessman ruefully told me, that they can’t integrate themselves in the town’s middle-class Gentile social life. “We tried now and then to join the animal-cracker lodges but somehow most of us never got in. There was no law against admitting Jews, you understand, but. This Jewish businessman said this without any irony; to him it was a matter of deep regret.
Mr. X and his friends faced a tremendous problem, and here we can readily sympathize with them. They had to make a social and cultural niche for themselves. The old ways were out. They were not rebels or intellectuals who could generalize from their own condition. And now they had learned ‘that even if they wished to, they couldn’t become goyim. In a sense, they were more of a “lost generation” than anyone else in the world. The temple was their answer, their hope, and their solution.
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The “Americanization” and “modernization” of Spruceton’s Jewish community cannot be understood exclusively in terms of conflicting religious doctrines. No doubt many of Spruceton’s Jews sincerely think of it that way; no doubt many of the old-timers deeply feel that the new ways are an abomination while some Jewish businessmen feel as deeply that they make religion more meaningful. But if there were only a religious dispute—Orthodox versus Reform or Conservative versus Liberal—the problem would be comparatively minor. The developments in Spruceton are a portent of trends to come—social trends.
The old-timers’ group was disintegrating of itself. Despite such an exception as the Old Man, their most conscious member, they were for the most part people, as Kafka puts it, “who are Jews in an especially pure form because they live only in the religion, but live in it without effort, understanding, or distress.” Nothing could be more absurd than for one so completely irreligious as the present writer to sentimentalize these old-timers. Their day is over and their most intelligent member, the Old Man, knows it.
Their sons likewise could not perpetuate Spruceton’s Jewish community. The sons left Spruceton entirely or they intermarried, or, while formally retaining the faith, in actuality abandoned all interest in it.
That left only the third group: the alrightnicks. They won the Jewish community by default. Thereupon they faced the problem: how reinvigorate this Jewish community so that its members could find identity and prestige while simultaneously ridding themselves of the old stigma?
I think they have solved their problem with admirable skill. The present rabbi is indeed a respected figure in Spruceton, an excellent spokesman at community affairs. A whole new social life is offered by the temple; hence, the decline in intermarriage. In the temple the Jewish businessmen can find a status and security available nowhere else. And the neatly decorous, bilingual services—an incongruous mixture of the traditional and the imposed modern—are not calculated to disturb anyone.
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Second only to the temple as a focus of Spruceton’s Jewish life is Zionism. The old-timers, never joiners, belonged perhaps to a fraternal organization that assured them proper burial. But the alrightnicks find in Zionism a not too irksome means of expressing politically their new awareness of their status as Jews. This awareness is seen primarily as a financial obligation more than faithfully assumed (they are proud of fulfilling “quotas”); it is also a means of vicarious participation in international affairs and still another occasion for social life, in this instance sanctified by the mild personal commitment and thin cultural veneer of present-day American Zionism. I visited Spruceton before the recent Palestine crisis, but I am quite certain that it aroused strong feelings among its Jews. Yet it would be a wild exaggeration to suggest that Zionism impinges directly on, or in any significant way breaks the quiescent kleinbuergerlich pattern of their lives. No pioneer hearts beat here.
The present Jewish community of Spruceton is a perfect expression of the needs of the nouveau riche Jewish businessmen. It permits them to be Jews with “peace of mind”; it permits them to achieve the spiritual identity provided by religious affiliation without paying the price in differentiation of behavior and custom that Judaism once demanded of its followers. Their turn to the temple does not mean that Judaism is making them over in its image; it means that they are making Judaism over in theirs.
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That is why the representative attitude of Spruceton’s alrightnicks is so middleclass: unquestioning, complacent acceptance of American society; slight interest in cultural or intellectual problems; complete absence of that deep, troubled, perhaps even agonized feeling that can result from religiosity; and, above all, a complete lack of self-doubt and self-criticism.
In the values of this group “respectability” and decorum play an oppressively dominant role. They have taken as their goal one of the least attractive traits of the American middle class: its genteel inhibition and fear of public emotional expression, its rejection of spontaneity. Hence, their uneasy feeling when they see Zionists sing at a hotel, their suspicion that such things should either not be done at all or should be confined to the intimacy of the temple.
The rabbi, an intelligent man, is aware of this state of affairs. He seems to work on the principle that once he has snared the Jewish Babbitts he should then be able to create new attitudes in them. I think he is wrong. All of Spruceton life, all of the deeply entrenched and powerfully motivated values of the business world in which most of his congregation lives and works—values that most of them unquestioningly accept—are arrayed against him. If he were to try to imbue the alrightnicks with those critical habits of mind and ethical biases that to one extent or another are part of the old Jewish Weltanschauung, he would meet only with stubborn resistance.
The alrightnicks have won. They are the bulk of Spruceton’s Jewish community; they control the temple and have molded it in their own image. Their turn to Judaism is fundamentally a means of organized adaptation towards American middle-class businessman values. But what social or ethical promise can one find in it?
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