On life of the Eastern European Jew in Europe
"The life of the east European Jews was anything but an idyl. Given the pressures from without and a slow stagnation within, this world was bound to contain large portions of the ignorant, provincial, and even corrupt. One of the motivating forces behind the communal and political movements that sprang up during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, as well as of the Yiddish poetry and fiction written at the same time, was a desire to stir the blood of a society that had gone sluggish, to cleanse the life of a people that had suffered too long from isolation, poverty, and violence" (Howe 8).
"Locked into a backward economy, the Jews of eastern Europe continued to act and think primarily in premodern, prebourgeois terms. The struggle for livelihood, unending and rarely successful, occupied much time--it had to. But never was it regarded by the acknowledged spokesmen of the Jews as the primary reason for existence. Scholarship was, above all else, honored among the Jews--scholarship not as "pure" activity, not as intellectual release, but as the pathway, sometimes treacherous, to God. A man's prestige, authority, and position depended to a considerable extent on his learning. Those who were learned sat at the eastern wall of the synagogue, near the Holy Ark. Women often became breadwinners so that their husbands could devote themselves to study, while householders thought it their duty, indeed privilege, to support precocious sons-in-law studying the Holy Word" (Howe 8).
"There was another side, of course, Scholarship often degenerated into abysmal scholasticism. Intellect could be reduced to a barren exercise in distinctions that had long ago lost their reality. Manual labor was frequently regarded as a mark of social disgrace. Among the more orthodox, modern thought met with a furious resistance: how could the works of man measure against the Word of God? Secular books, by the early or mid-nineteenth century, began to be smuggled into the yeshivas and read on the sly, their forbidden contents eagerly examined by students as they chanted the Talmudic singsong. A few rabbis were ready to receive the new learning of the West, but in the main the rabbinate felt that any large infiltration of Western thought would be its undoing; and it was right" (Howe 8-9).
On Migration to America
"The statistics give some clues, not why people came but which people came. Between 1881 and 1914 close to two million Jews arrived in America, the overwhelming bulk of them either directly or indirectly from eastern Europe. A migration of such magnitude must have drawn upon all sements of the Jewish population, though in varying proportions at different points in time.
"The Jewish migration was much more a movement of families than that of other Euopean nationalities and groups.. . .
"The Jewish migration, like that of all other groups, was overwhlemingly a movement of young people.
The Jewish immigration was directed much more toward permanent settlement in the United States than was that of other European groups. . . .
"The Jewish migration contained a higher proportion of skilled workers, many of them from urban or semiurban environments, than that of any other group; correspondingly, it contained a much smaller proportion of unskilled laborers.. . .
"The Jewish migration changed in character between the 1880's and the 1900's, with a greater number of intellectuals, relatively educated persons, and skilled workers coming in the later period. . . " (Howe 58-59).
"The crossing involved a startling reversal of roles, a radical shift in attitudes. The qualities that were desirable in the good peasant [and, we might add, in nonpeasant Jews also] were not those conducive to success in the transition. Neighborliness, obedience, respect, and status were valueless among the masses that struggled for space on the way. They succeeded who put aside the old preconceptions, pushed in, and took care of themselves . . . Thus uprooted they found themselves in a prolonged state of crisis" (Howe 39-40, Quoting Oscar Handlin)
"The Yiddish-speaking immigrants were not only different from the "German Jews" who had come earlier; they were also different from the other immigrant groups of that era of mass migration. They were the most intensely involved of all in maintaining their separateness in America.. . . They knew that they had to learn American manners, and that the observances of the Jewish religion, and especially of the Sabbath, were obstacles to success. (In the 1920s the children of the immigrants were studied by Louis Wirth, who wrote a famous book, Children of the Ghetto, and by other sociologist; those who had remained completely Orthodox in their devotion to Jewish religion were less successful than those who had given up at least some of the religious regimen.) And yet, Jews continued to believe, into the second generation and beyond, that "Jewish values," the specific inheritance that the immigrants had brought with them from Eastern Europe, had to be preserved. Their Jewishness--the "Jewish head"--was the critical element in their success in America. This "Jewish head" was the heritage of siege mentality, of centuries of one tool for survival, the use of one's wits. Even in a much less hostile America, Jews believed that they could advance only if their "Jewish" virtues provided them with the energies to excel" (Hertzberg 171).
On Al Jolsen and The Jazz Singer
"[The Jazz Singer] was produced in 1927 and premiered in new York in February 1928. Al Jolson, the best-known Jewish entertainer of the day, played the son of a cantor who abandoned his father's calling to sing on the American stage. . . . [The] appearance of The Jazz Singer marked a turning point in American jewish life. For the first time, the Jews who dominated Hollywood came out of the closet as Jews. This self-revelation of the children of the immigrants was possible because 1928 was the high point of the economic "boom." Jews were well-off: they were at that moment, less afraid of anti-Semites than ever before, or than they were to be again in two years, after the Crash.
"Al Jolson was, himself, the son of a cantor in Washington, D.C. Like the hero of the movie, Jolson had begun as a performer by singing in a synagogue choir, but he had reached the height of his stage career as a minstrel, singing 'Mammy' in blackface. Suddenly, in 1928, Al Jolson told the essence of his Jewish autobiography on the screen for all America to see. Being Jewish, especially as it expressed itself in the inner torment of what was lost when the Jewish past was forgotten, had become a subject that could be discussed in front of Gentile America" (Hertzberg 214-25).
"The Jazz Singer offers a much truer picture of the mainstream [than the writings of socialists and anarchists]. The Jewish masses were to be found in the congregations of the old cantor, the father of the "jazz singer." The young Jews who attended sometimes wished that they had other options. Some were proud of what they had made of themselves in America. Whatever their inner feelings about their Jewishness, most knew that they could be neither "German jews" nor Gentiles. The children of the immigrants had only one option, to be exactly that, children of the jewish ghetto in the New World. They could make their way into American only by force, by acquiring power" (Hertzberg 226).
On Yezierska
Commenting on the aspirations of the foreign-born personalities that populate the author's works, Richard F. Shepard asserted in the New York Times that "Yezierska's people . . . did not want to find themselves. They wanted to lose themselves and find America, to shed Europe and to live the American dream." But a recurring motif of disappointment in success is evidenced by her characters' inability to find contentment as their desires are fulfilled and by the author's own anguished response to wealth and fame in Hollywood. "It was only when Yezierska had achieved . . . relative comforts," wrote Johanna Kaplan in the New York Times Book Review, "that she perceived herself as lost and disconnected, and ceased to thrive." For the writer and her characters, the satisfaction gained from becoming Americanized was tainted by an accompanying sense of alienation from the Jewish culture. (Contemporary Authors Online, entry for Anzia Yezierska)
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Works Cited
Hertzberg, Arthur. The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.