Previous articles in this department have drawn portraits of various American Jewish communities: for instance, New Haven (November, 1947) and “Spruceton” (June, 1948). In the near future, we hope to have Minneapolis and Los Angeles take their turns. Here, Toby Shafter looks beneath the surface of a small community in Maine. Explaining the genesis of this article, Miss Shafter writes: “Except for college vacations and frequent holiday visits to my family, I had not lived for twelve years in the small town on the Maine coast where I was born, brought up, and educated through high school. Early last spring, I returned for my first prolonged stay. I came eager to sample the joys of a Maine spring and summer as described in Holiday magazine with the aid of our Chamber of Commerce. After six months, I departed with somewhat mixed feelings—as you can see.”
_____________
Although my home town is considered of average size for the state of Maine (population 9,000), I must in all truth admit that it is only another seacoast village masquerading as a metropolis. Though its Main Street is raw and new with a full quota of chain stores, supermarkets, and 5-and-ioc emporia, it is still cobbled and it still smells of fish when an east wind is blowing. The parking meters recently installed on Main Street after a full year of controversy among the town fathers made national news when an individualistic citizen insisted on hitching his horse to one without paying the usual fee.
The town itself hugs the south shore of the harbor, with the principal industrial area and the ugly Main Street pre-empting the splendor of the harbor view for a good mile and a half. The slum areas, which are near the principal commercial dock and the lime-reducing kilns at the waterfront, face the colossal and expensive summer hotel on the north shore. The better residential sections fan out directly behind Main Street in a half-mile radius inland. Within a half-circle of two miles by one, the streets are more sparsely settled and gradually give way to farm houses or country homes situated near the many tiny “villages” (post office, general store, and the inevitable white clapboard school house for elementary grades) that are incorporated with our township. Within three miles of town there are forests, mountains, lakes, and streams, to say nothing of the various sumptuous private estates with stables, tennis courts, and golf courses. The sprawling, turreted Samoset Hotel—painted bright yellow and set among cool gardens at the Oceanside—dominates the north shore, but its wealthy patrons cannot buy exclusiveness, for the public breakwater and lighthouse are hard by its grounds and the young people from town who go swimming and fishing there cut across the hotel’s golf course. The more beautiful and unspoiled sections of the south shore are exclusively the domain of the natives or descendants of the natives who own the modest summer cottages there.
Our economic structure is peculiar. Although the town is in the heart of the vacation region, it cannot depend upon the summer tourist trade; this is absorbed by the smaller surrounding towns which specialize in medium-priced resorts. Our town hotels are exclusively commercial and are located in the heart of the business section. The bay is dotted with islands, and both the islanders and the farmers who crowd into town on Saturday afternoon and evening account for a large percentage of the seasonal and year-round trade.
There are certain small industries in town—a bathrobe factory, a fish-freezing plant, a sardine-canning factory, the lime kilns, the granite quarries, and the shipyards. Our town once had a proud seafaring and ship-building tradition, but now there is only a fleet of fishing boats. The lobster fishermen are still independent enterprisers, but all the other industries are now owned by outside interests. Even the fishing boats are being bought up by large companies and their former captains put to work for wages. There is small opportunity for great personal success in our town. The population either works or clerks.
So it is not surprising that the not inconsiderable number of native sons and daughters who have made good (they include America’s most famous woman poet, a contemporary composer, an opera singer, a wellknown photographer, and many others) have had to do so well outside the limits of our town.
_____________
Predominantly white and Protestant, our Town has a few small but distinct minority groups. The Italian colony of perhaps eighty families is concentrated on a waterfront street facing the lime kilns. The wealthier Italians live scattered through the town, as does the somewhat more prosperous Jewish group of about thirty-five families. The Scandinavian contingent (mostly Swedish and Finnish) have farms on the outskirts of town.
The blond Finns and Swedes are, of course, readily acceptable to the older British and German stock. There has been intermarriage to a somewhat lesser degree between the “natives” and second-generation Italians and Jews; a number of future Daughters of the American Revolution will bear names like Mazzini and Rubenstein as well as the now generally accepted Scandinavian patronyms. There is one Negro family in town consisting of a dark-skinned father and three mulatto children. The daughter, who was a classmate of mine, married a white man.
It is true that there was—and still is—a certain definite social clannishness. This is made manifest by a glance at the “society” column of our semi-weekly eight-page local newspaper: in most reports of social events such as bridges, birthday parties, anniversaries, dinner parties, etc., the names will belong overwhelmingly to one group. During school years there is more fluidity in social relationships among all groups, but marriage ties and adult responsibilities seem to cement social barriers.
During the past decade or so, the vitality and position of the minority groups—particularly of the Jews—has deteriorated. This situation has come about partly through an increase of prejudice, partly from a growth of fear within, and partly, in the case of the Jews, from apathy and a loss of old Jewish values with no replacement by new ones. With the passing of the old guard—the immigrants with roots in Russia, Poland, or Lithuania—the Jews in town no longer have the lusty and perhaps misguided enthusiasm for Jewish affairs that once led to the founding of two synagogues and two cemeteries—all this in a town that has never had more than thirty-five Jewish families!
_____________
Materially, however, the Jews of our town have made great strides since the early days when a few East European settlers arrived by accident or design on the shores of what was then a forsaken, muddy fishing village. In the beginning, the immigrant families lived in virtual squalor in a tight cluster of houses by the waterfront. Most became peddlers of one sort or another, one was a farmer, and a not inconsiderable number were petty bootleggers (Maine was a dry state long before the prohibition era). There was a thriving community life. A rabbi who was also shochet, chazan, melamed, and deliverer of bread and meat was imported. As the peddlers became shopkeepers and the others found worthy occupations, they bought houses in all sections of town. In a few years, a local Baptist church (with the baptismal font still to be seen in the cellar) was purchased and remodelled into a synagogue.
The rabbi was not only spiritual head of the community, but also assumed the important duty of extricating hapless members of his flock from the clutches of the law by testifying in court that liquor and vinous spirits were essential to the religious ceremonials of Israel. Every year there was a major crisis at the election of a president for the congregation, with partisan factions campaigning vigorously for months in advance. One year the campaign engendered so much bitter feeling that the defeated candidate and his supporters withdrew from the synagogue, rented a hall over the Salvation Army quarters, and conducted weekly and holiday services there for more than a year. When one of their members died, they purchased a large lot in the country and founded a second cemetery. Never before or since was there such enthusiastic interest and attendance in the synagogue. Finally, tiring of their makeshift temple, the protesting faction, which by now numbered more than half of the Jews, decided to retake the synagogue building by storm. They filed a civil suit in the county court claiming that the others were forcibly preventing them from praying in the official house of worship. The judge bade them re-enter the original congregation, pay their annual dues, and become members in good standing so that they could vote in the next annual election. With the cessation of hostilities, attendance soon dropped to a bare minyan.
Today there is one synagogue, well kept but virtually unused. Although there are no fewer Jews in town than before, there are no regular Friday night or Saturday morning services: it is impossible to obtain a minyan except for the High Holidays and an occasional memorial service for the dead. The Hadassah chapter, which is fairly active, meets in the vestry and holds its social and fund-raising functions there. The men had formed a B’nai B’rith lodge, but were so inactive that the charter was revoked last year. Shamed into action, the officers succeeded in having the charter restored by the payment of back dues, but the situation itself has not been remedied. There are no lectures, cultural groups, or discussions. Once a year, the United Jewish Appeal sends a speaker to raise funds. This meeting does little to advance knowledge or interest in the plight of the Jews overseas and in the problems or promise of Israel. Aside from the sum collected (about ten thousand dollars this year) its chief by-product is petty gossip and grievances over the assessment of each person.
The only bright spot in the picture is the weekly Sunday school. Meeting for two hours and including all the children of grammar school age, the school was organized about two years ago and has met with enthusiastic response from the pupils themselves. The founder was a professional worker employed by the Maine Jewish Council which has its headquarters in Lewiston. Through its efforts thirteen rural Sunday schools were founded in small towns where none had existed for years.
The greatest difficulty lies with the adults. The entire burden of the school is carried by two women who serve as volunteer teachers, and the project is financed by the tencent contributions of the students. Next year, one of the women will not be able to continue, and unless someone comes forward to take her place (which is unlikely), Sunday school will be discontinued. This year it is functioning only by grace of an eightyear-old boy who cajoled his mother into teaching, certainly a reverse of the situation in the usual large city Sunday school. I know from bitter experience how unruly and indifferent the average middle-class city child is to his weekly exposure to Judaism; but when on a recent visit I took part in a few of our town’s Sunday school sessions to teach Palestinian dances, I was struck by the general vitality, as well as by the fact that fully one-third of the children were only half Jewish.
_____________
Intermarriage Would Seem to be almost inevitable under the circumstances. The surprising thing is that there is not more of it. In the past twenty years, there have been exactly two cases in which a local Jewish boy married a local Jewish girl. What has kept the Jewish population constant as families have moved away and older people have died is the fact that most young adults leave the town for a more or less prolonged absence at some time or another during marriageable age, and a fairly large number return with their mates from afar. A number of young men married Jewish girls during the war at army posts and in cities where they were stationed. More men marry than women; the Jewish spinsters in town far outnumber the bachelors. Intermarriage, too, appears to be overwhelmingly in the male domain, a result, presumably, of the greater social freedom enjoyed by the teenage boys. The few women who marry Gentiles, generally marry somewhat above their social and economic class. The men tend to marry Gentile women of their own social class or below. (Their mothers, of course, always claim that they marry beneath them.)
Nearly every “old” Jewish family with children of marriageable age has been affected in one way or another by intermarriage. Although there is always much sadness on the part of the immediate family and much sympathetic clucking of tongues from friends, the announcement that a young man is about to marry or has already secretly married a shiksa hardly creates a sensation by now. The few Jewish girls who have married Gentile men have, on the other hand, been subject to vehement criticism, coffee-hour gossip, and unending speculation. In all cases except one, they have not remained in town. The one girl who did marry a native state-of-Mainer is completely divorced from the Jewish community. On the other hand, the Jewish men who marry outside the fold retain some semblance of attachment to the Jewish community. They generally attend the high holiday services and send their children to the synagogue for Sunday school lessons even though they and their wives do not mingle socially with the Jewish “crowd.” The two “imported” Jews ( a young man and a young woman, both from New York, who married local Gentiles) are completely assimilated: the Jewish community feels no responsibility for them, has no ties with them, and makes them the objects of a mild, but very real, derisive amusement; their first tentative overtures were severely ignored and they have since turned to their in-law families and friends for companionship.
Intermarriage has not been limited to the younger generation. The vanguard of Jewish settlers had their renegades and “lost generation,” too. These few cases of intermarriage twenty or thirty years ago produced no children and the participants were ostracized. The line between acceptance and rejection in a mixed marriage is finely drawn. The history of one family’s alliances and misalliances illustrates the point. The father (of the older generation: born in Russia but brought to America in his teens) made a second marriage with a Gentile woman and was soundly berated by the entire community for setting a bad example to the children of his previous marriage to a Jewish woman. One son and one daughter married Jews (in Boston) and the daughter returned to our town with her husband and infant son. Two sons married local Gentile girls; one is completely assimilated, but the other has amicable relations with other Jews, his Gentile in-laws (who were not too fond of him at first), and his Jewish relatives, and sends his two boys to the Jewish Sunday school. The youngest daughter, now eighteen, has just announced her engagement to a local Gentile boy and automatically became the object of much comment. There is a certain restraint in the comment of Jewish families on the subject of intermarriage. “You can never tell when it will happen to you,” they explain sadly, placing it in much the same category as cholera.
_____________
Although there has been a comparatively large percentage of intermarriages, the Jewish community in our town is by no means on the point of disintegration. Outside forces have stayed the tendency toward complete assimilation. Most of the Jews in town are concerned with the growth of social and economic discrimination that has taken place since my childhood; it is hard to tell exactly what has caused it, but the increase in prejudice is undeniable. As a child and from a child’s point of view, I remember no striking instance of anti-Semitism. It was rumored falsely that the Samoset Hotel was “restricted” (but we did not even know the term). In any event, that was a different world, a world of wealthy “summer people” who could afford to pay extravagant rates for their exclusiveness. The hotel was owned “away” and did not affect in any way the essential life of the town. I do have one frightening memory of a Ku Klux Klan parade the length of Main Street which I witnessed as a child of perhaps five or six. Although it had been a warm summer day, the sight of the whiterobed, masked men marching with measured step behind the flaming cross sent chills up and down my spine. Since the parade was not followed by any overt act against the small number of Catholic and Jewish families, and the most respectable men in town openly belonged, the impression of terror soon faded and I classified it as a sort of mystical secret society like the Masons. The Klan in our vicinity soon disbanded, I suppose, for I never again saw a parade or heard of any local chapter activity.
The growth in anti-Jewish sentiment, it should be made clear, has not reached alarming proportions. No vandals have desecrated the synagogue. Both Jewish cemeteries are safe. The Jewish business men still belong to Rotary, the Lions Club, the Masons, and the American Legion, on the assumption that “it is good for business.” Outside of formal meetings and business dealings, however, there is very little contact between Jew and Gentile on the adult level. For the past few years, it has become the custom to hold an annual interfaith meeting during “Brotherhood Week” among all the Protestant sects and the Jews (the Catholics refuse to be included). One such meeting was held a few years back in the synagogue with a Baptist minister in the pulpit. The Gentiles were deeply impressed by the dignity and beauty of the synagogue as well as by the gracious hospitality. Even the Jews themselves were impressed: they all remarked that never before had there been a congregation in the shul that was so orderly, so well behaved, and so attentive. (Even today and on Yom Kippur the woman’s gallery is generally a source of noise and confusion, which periodically has to be checked by shushing from downstairs.) This year the interfaith meeting is taking place in the form of a “World Day of Prayer.” A kind of evangelical pageant will be presented in which the two best-looking young Jewish matrons have been assigned prominent roles. The frame of mind with which the Jewish community is approaching the problem of interfaith amity is perhaps best exemplified by the wealthy Jewish widow who made a point of warning all the other women not to wear their mink coats to church when they attended the services.
The widow’s anxieties are not wholly without foundation. When a classmate of mine and her husband bought a house on one of the better streets in town, the neighbors objected to “another Jewish family moving in.” Twenty-five years before, when the first Jewish family had established itself diagonally across the street, there had been no such difficulties. As a child, my friend never had to contend with the prejudice which her eight-year-old son encounters every day of his life. She doesn’t quite know what to do about it. For instance, she is somewhat disturbed, when she has occasion to attend some function at the high school auditorium, by a prominently displayed bust of Charles Lindbergh. She is the secretary of the alumni association and had been on the verge of taking the matter up with the high school principal a number of times. But she felt a little shy about broaching the subject because, although she had lived in the town all her life and married there and been one of the outstanding students and popular girls in high school, she was not sure that her viewpoint would be understood.
Perhaps, from a practical point of view, my friend’s instincts are sound. There was a great deal of local excitement one week. The school board attempted to dismiss the high-school principal after nineteen years of continuous service. The sympathies of the townspeople were with the ousted principal, who had been charged with incompetence and non-cooperation. The high-school students went on strike and rode wildly about town one afternoon in paper-decorated jeeps, roadsters, and family cars with banners flying and placards proclaiming, “We want our principal!” I heard a storekeeper say the students shouldn’t have done it—it was too radical—but he and all the other people in town solidly backed up the principal. Outside of my own unexpressed feeling, I heard only one dissenting opinion. A Jewish woman who had herself grown up in the town and graduated from the high school ventured to say that she thought it was high time that he be replaced with someone more progressive. To justify her position, she proceeded to relate somewhat reluctantly an episode that had occurred a few years back.
Her son—at the time a sixth-grade student of ten—had been beset on his way home from school by three high school boys of fourteen, called dirty Jew and assorted synonyms, and followed and badgered the entire mile to his home. Then, when he was within a short distance of the house, the bigger boys had beaten him savagely and he had fallen into his grandmother’s kitchen with his face a bloody mass and his two front teeth hanging out. Later, the mother visited the principal of the high school, related the episode, and suggested that perhaps he ought to initiate a series of talks on tolerance at the high school. The principal dismissed her with a curt, “Sorry—there’s nothing I can do about it.” Only a very few people—not even the boy’s best (Catholic) friend—know of the incident. He himself never mentions the story directly, but I have heard him remark bitterly, “If my mother had taught me to fight, I wouldn’t have two false teeth today.” In my time, such untrammeled violence would have been unthinkable. At most, a childish quarrel might result in a little name-calling.
_____________
If the school fails so in fostering good will, what is one to expect in the competition of the business world? In recent years, the Jews themselves have begun to feel alarmed by their own prominence and success. The Samoset Hotel has been bought by a Jewish corporation and the names of many wealthy Jews appear on the guest roster, which is published semi-weekly in the local newspaper together with sprightly summaries of the gay “doin’s” at the hotel. In addition, much local real estate—some of it country tenements and slum area—has been bought by Jews. There has been a small influx of “new” Jewish families who have set up haberdashery or clothing stores on Main Street and, as they have prospered, bought the adjoining properties or the “blocks” in which their stores are located. Today the largest hotel, two of the three haberdashery stores, three furniture marts, a book store, a wholesale candy store, a rather famous antique shop well known for its showroom, and two women’s clothing stores—all on Main Street—are Jewish-owned. My mother, who has lived in the town for more than thirty years, feels that it is dangerous for the Jews to own so much conspicuous property on Main Street. Many others share her anxiety.
In addition to half the stores on Main Street, the list of Jewish enterprises includes two garages, the large wholesale meat business (non-kosher, of course), three city hotels, two junk yards, two chicken-shipping concerns, and sundry real estate. Only one Jewish family owns a grocery store—a small neighborhood affair which a former blacksmith (still known as der Schmidt) started when horses went out of general use. There is one Jewish tailor in town—the only representative of the artisan class. Two of the town’s three cocktail lounges are Jewishowned. (Our town is still the only wet spot in the county.) One of the two is steadily patronized by the Jewish crowd; the second—inelegantly nicknamed “The Body Exchange”—is studiously avoided and its proprietor termed a “disgrace to the other Jewish people.”
In choosing occupations, the Jewish boys follow very closely the pattern established by their fathers. There are, to be sure, deviations, expansion, and rebellion, but in the main one still finds the son of a used car dealer established in a thriving automobile agency, the butcher’s two sons carrying on a wholesale meat business, the haberdasher’s son installed in a bookshop, etc. Many of the boys have been sent to college and trained in business administration, but few have shown any aptitude or desire to enter the professions. The very few doctors and lawyers the Jewish community has produced have settled elsewhere—a vocational phenomenon utterly unlike that of the general trend. There is one Jewish lawyer who married a local girl and settled in town with her. He does not practice extensively, as he finds real estate transactions more profitable. One practicing physician is a converted Jew, but since he is from “away” and persists in singing in the church choir, he has been gladly relinquished to the Christians. The large majority of the boys born and brought up in our town establish themselves and their families there, after an initial fling in a large city. Almost without exception they seem to consider life there paradise on earth, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
_____________
Our town still has old-fashioned ideas about careers for women, and consequently few of the girls have received any vocational training beyond the commercial high school course fitting them to be stenographers or bookkeepers. The girls from the wealthier Jewish families who have been sent to college are nominally teachers but they have never taught beyond one year, their major energies being most naturally concentrated in pursuit of a husband. The sole ambition of most of the single girls tied down by either family or business responsibilities is to escape to a large city, for they find life dull, dateless, and aimless. In the meantime, they live an effortless, lazy sort of half-life-keeping house for the widowed father, helping out in the store for a few hours each day, meeting the other “girls” (this includes all females from fifteen to fifty) for coffee every afternoon punctually at 3:15. The monotony of the single woman’s existence is unrelieved except for an occasional visit to relatives in the big city. All the Jewish girls in our town dress expensively and well, and when they go to the city they indulge in shopping sprees, go to see a good “legitimate show,” garner a few dates if at all possible, and return to spend the rest of their time growing older year by year.
The young matron’s day, on the other hand, is busy, full, and satisfying. She finds the semi-countrified environment ideal for bringing up small children. She has more freedom, more ease, and more recreation than the average city housewife in a similar economic stratum. Like her husband, she feels herself to be “somebody” in town, not an anonymous unit among tens of thousands of others. She belongs to Hadassah and occasionally joins the Red Cross or the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Hospital. In the winter there are meetings and social affairs and in the summer there are picnics and beach parties. Her husband may belong to Rotary, the Elks, the American Legion, or the Lions Club, but their social life is almost exclusively with other young Jewish couples. No Jews belong to the country club or the yacht club, nor do they seem to want to. So far as I know, there is no exclusion policy, for my brother moored his speedboat at the yacht club basin for a small fee and I used to play tennis at the country club on the same basis. It is simply that few of the Jews in our town are athletically inclined: the men, it seems, are wrapped up in business and find their relaxation in. stag card parties; the women played mah jong when it was the rage, but have now returned to bridge. There is little Jewish atmosphere in the home life of the average young couple. They send the children to Sunday school and sometimes to a Jewish camp. The rules of kashruth are not observed, though there may be gefilte fish on Friday (if mother makes it and sends it over) and matzoth for Passover.
The older people in town have grown so accustomed to the easy tempo of life there that they couldn’t live anywhere else. The long monotonous winter with its clear, cold air and bright skies, its soft, white snows and frosted panes; the slow-coming spring, the rains, the mud, the fogs; the cool, all-too- short summer, and the glory of the autumn—all this has totally unfitted them for the noise and dirt and hurry of the city. Being a Jew in a small town has its own peculiar problems. In a large city it is possible to surround oneself with friends of similar tastes and views. In a small town one knows, and lives with, everybody. Jewish life is inevitably influenced by the forces surrounding it. The overwhelmingly Gentile atmosphere and the desire to be modern have caused even the old guard—the Yiddishspeaking immigrants—to relax the strict orthodoxy they once practiced. A few who once kept kosher homes no longer do so, and with the zest of the newly converted have developed ravenous appetites for lobster stew, steamed clams, and other delicacies of the Maine shore dinner. Those who still retain their orthodoxy censure the new “reform Jews” even more severely than they do the free-thinking, high-stepping younger generation born in this country. Yet they freely admit that orthodoxy has its culinary disadvantages. In a far-off day which I cannot remember the town employed a rabbi who doubled as shochet and melamed. But within my span of memory, we have always ordered our meat from Portland which is approximately one hundred miles away. The meat, not the best cuts to begin with, arrives by mail in a more or less fetid condition, or even worse on a hot summer day. Jewish rye bread comes by a different route but not in a more edible condition. Until I went away to college, I had never tasted rye bread that was not stale. Happily enough, “reform Judaism” has not made such great inroads on the gastronomic prowess of the older Jewish women; they still maintain their cunning with strudel, borscht, kneidlach, or tzimmis.
_____________
The scenery is still superb. Yet beneath the even tenor of life there—embellished by the incomparable jagged rocks, towering pines, and the jewel-blue bay dotted with islands—one can observe a certain nostalgia over the gradual weakening in the real ties that once bound together the Jewish community.
Some of the Jews hanker for the “good old days” of the war between the synagogues. One old man of the rebel faction bemoaned the fact that now it is almost impossible to summon a minyan for Friday night or Saturday morning services, and a job of herculean proportions to get together ten men and boys to commemorate a Yortseit; the only time that a full congregation is assured is during the three High Holidays. I, myself, recall some of the traditional celebrations of my childhood—the Simchas Torah festival when all the children marched around and around the main hall of the synagogue with lighted tapers decorated with flags and apples, the luscious fruits that we enjoyed afterwards (that particularly stands out in my memory), the Purim plays that we used to rehearse for months in advance and the big party in the vestry that followed them, and the political excitement that centered about shul business and elections. Now the spontaneous interest in the synagogue and the cohesiveness of the Jewish community seems to have vanished completely.
Undeniably, there is a definite amount of psychological yearning for things Jewish. Indeed, if these people knew where to find them, they might attach themselves to Jewish values which could give meaning to the inner Jewish longing which they feel but which the old trinity of kashruth, prayer, and charity no longer satisfy. If they are concerned with intermarriage, it is not only as a family disgrace and a town scandal, but also as a threat to their Jewish existence. And above all they are concerned about their children. The children themselves—and this is perhaps new—are anxious for a Jewish education—because they want to “belong” somewhere. Their schoolmates go to church every Sunday and of course have Sunday school and other church functions to attend. Public opinion in a small town wouldn’t permit a Jewish child to attend church—besides, his parents would be ashamed of the situation. The child, therefore, seeks to duplicate the church experience within his own group—often fruitlessly. Sometimes the child is successful in an isolated instance. For example, this year Simchas Torah night was celebrated at the insistence of one seven-year-old boy, who remembered “marching around and around in the shul.” He approached an older man (not his father, who is indifferent) with his request, and, because he was so anxious, a full-fledged celebration was organized on the spur of the moment in the synagogue. As far as a Jewish education for the children is concerned, it seems to be a case of the tail wagging the dog.
_____________
It is clear that the Jews in our town, Though they obviously want something from Judaism, don’t really know concretely what they want. Talking to them about it, the most one can find is a wistful desire to regain and carry on that old vague sense of pride and satisfaction at being a Jew. They want it because their children seem to need it, they remember how much it meant to their own families, and they simply can’t reconcile themselves to its disappearance—knowing that when that is gone, the Jewish group as a group will be gone with it. And that threat, above all, evoking some vestigial but nonetheless real emotion, makes them deeply unhappy—occasionally.
All elements—the old and the young, the orthodox and the iconoclast, the rich, the poor, the learned, and the ignorant—agree that there is a crying need for a young, “new-style” rabbi. Periodically, the conscience of the community is aroused. Last autumn a boy observed his thirteenth birthday without becoming Bar Mitzvah. His parents quite sincerely felt that it would be a hypocrisy to have him go through the empty motions of Bar Mitzvah ceremony without being able to take his place in the congregation. This incident led to new inquiries about the possibilities of obtaining the services of a young rabbi. As usual, the discussions soon ran into the hard fact that the annual salary of a properly educated young rabbi would be well up in the $3,000 bracket. As usual, the townspeople felt that this was beyond their financial means, and there followed the usual stalemate. For the time being, they seem resigned to the situation. The Maine scenery is still beautiful, business is good, lobsters remain plentiful. Man lebt—or does he?
_____________
