Jews Transform Societies Bloom

Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America, by Stephen G. Bloom. 2001

Refreshing Candor! An American Setting for “Polish” Anti-Semitism. How Jews Transform Societies

There are many reviews of this book available and, instead of repeating them, I review this book in terms of deeper implications. This book, written by an assimilated American Jewish author, describes a microcosm of what was Polish Jewry before WWII. The American who looks down judgmentally at Poles for how they once treated the Jews is in for a shock upon reading this book, whose setting is not 1930’s Poland but 1980’s America.

The “quaint” Hasidim who came to Postville used to exemplify mainstream Judaism until relatively recently. In Poland, most Jews–a huge urban population–were unassimilated right up to the time of the German-made Holocaust. The Jewish arrivals at Postville did not start on the bottom. (p. 50). In like manner, Jews arriving in Poland, several centuries ago, were immediately largely exempt from the heavy manual labor of the Polish masses by the nobility, and bestowed with other privileges.

JEWISH SEPARATISM AND HABITUAL NONCONFORMISM

Newcomers normally are eager to assimilate. In contrast, the Postville Hasidim practiced self-imposed apartheid. They used only their own schools. They did such things as demanding exclusive use of the town swimming pool for part of the day (p. 111), refusing to participate in an ecumenical service at a neutral locality (pp. 146-147), and sometimes even ignoring greetings from neighbors. (p. 51, 146). Even when unassimilated Jews were friendly to gentiles, the attitude behind the aggressive separatism makes it easy to see why, never mind Postville, the Poles commonly saw their Jews as perpetual aliens. The militantly-separatist Yiddishist movement made it worse.

BEYOND NONCONFORMISM: HOW IT COMES TO BE THAT JEWS TRANSFORM SOCIETIES

The following statements are priceless. Author Stephen G. Bloom interviewed Lazar, one of the upstanding members of the Hasidim community (p. 243), who said: “`Wherever we go, we don’t adapt to the place of the people’, Lazar preached…`It’s always been like that and always will be like that. IT’S THE PLACE AND THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE TO ADAPT TO US.'” (p. 209; emphasis added).

RESIDUAL ANTIGOYISM

Continuing his interview, Bloom remarked: “Lazar’s comment underscored the Hasidim’s contempt for non-Jews, which wasn’t limited to the Postville gentiles, but to all Christians…Lazar’s gentile-bashing reminded me of the Yiddish aphorism ER SHMEKT NIT UN ER SHTINKT NIT (`He doesn’t smell and he doesn’t stink’), used derisively to describe non-Jews, who are viewed as inconsequential and unimportant.” (p. 197).

Such attitudes were not limited to the unassimilated. Bloom, a much-assimilated largely nonobservant American Jew, recounts what his parents said: “A common expression used by Jews to describe a slow, dense person was–and still is–`He’s got a GOYISCHER KOP’, which literally means `He’s got a gentile head’ but figuratively means `slow-witted’.” (p. 63, 197). A Polish-Jew author described comparable verbalized sentiments, by Poland’s Jews, to Poles. See the Peczkis review of The Jews in Polish Culture / Aleksander Hertz ; Translated by Richard Lourie ; Editor, Lucjan Dobroszycki ; with a Foreword by Czeslaw Milosz.

The Hasidim were more than just different. Bloom found the Hasidim, in his words, downright rude in their business dealings. (pp. 48-49, 120), and this conduct was even defended by one of them. (p. 209). An American once visiting Poland’s Jews had the same experience. See the Peczkis review of Poland: The Unexplored.

YOU’RE INTOLERANT! BE TOLERANT…BE TOLERANT…

The Postville residents, for their part, grew increasingly tired of being told to be tolerant. A Jewish boy was run off the road, causing injuries that required stitches. (p. 119). Derogatory remarks about the Jews grew more and more common. Bloom grew concerned that the gentiles were hardening their attitudes: “The problem, as I saw it, was that although the locals might have been right about the atrocious behavior of some of the Postville Jews, not a few of the locals began using this behavior to generalize about all Jews…All Jews were greedy, all Jews bargained, all Jews reneged on their agreements.” (p. 242).

In the end, the Postville locals voted to rezone the area (p. 329) in hopes that it would drive the Lubavitchers out. Bloom, who had visited the Postville area many times to be sure of his conclusions, siding with the locals. (p. 319). This is reminiscent of the Endek-led boycotts of Jews in Poland, designed to persuade Jews to emigrate.

ACTUALLY, THE SITUATION FACING POLES, IN DEALING WITH THEIR JEWS, WAS MUCH HARSHER

The reader who wants to use this work as a microcosm of onetime Jewish-Polish relations must realize that the situation in Iowa was much less antagonism-provoking than that in pre-WWII Poland. Imagine, to begin with, the extra sense of alien-ness of the Hasidim in Postville if, instead of speaking English (p. 46), they mainly spoke Yiddish. Imagine if Postville had been under enemy rule only a few decades earlier, and there were harsh memories of many of the Jews having sided with the enemy.

Instead of many local non-Jewish small businesses benefitting economically owing to the presence of the Jews (e. g., p. 109, 118, 120, 319), imagine if virtually all the businesses WERE Jewish. Instead of the nonexistent employment relevance of the Jewish slaughtering plant to factory-working Postville residents (p. xi, 51, 133), imagine most of them dependent, for employment at a livable wage, upon Jewish factory owners. As for the farmers, imagine the prices of farm needs and farm products determined not by supply and demand, but by the profit-making goals of Jewish middlemen. Imagine many farmers in a debtor position, where continued possession of their very farmsteads is at the mercy of Jewish usurers. Finally, instead of being fairly well off (p. 32), imagine the Postville-area farmers locked in poverty for many generations, unable to advance economically because the next-higher niche (the nascent middle class–the small businesses: shopkeepers, tailors, shoemakers, etc.), as noted, is largely pre-occupied by Jews.

How THEN would the relationship of Postville locals and the Hasidim play out? The Polonophobes can get off Poland’s case.