In the early twentieth century, Jews were already the most urbanized people in Europe, but in the course of the interwar period they became even more so. They also became the most metropolitanized, as they concentrated not merely in urban areas but ever more densely in the capitals and largest cities of each country: Moscow, Leningrad, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Paris, and until the Nazis began to push them out, Vienna and Berlin.
The successive catastrophes between 1914 and 1921 of the First World War, the Russian Civil War, and the Russo-Polish War had led to the deaths of vast numbers of Jews from battle, pogroms, and disease in the area of the former Russian Empire. The disasters had also dealt something close to a death blow to the traditional Jewish way of life in the region. During the war, entire populations of Jews in shtetlakh of the Pale and Austrian Galicia fled their homes for fear of the depredations of undisciplined armies. At the conclusion of hostilities many, having settled elsewhere, decided not to return. Altogether, death and emigration resulted in Jewish population loss in the former Pale of Settlement of as much as six hundred thousand.1
Jewish migration out of small towns and villages was visible all across the continent. In Germany, especially Bavaria, Baden, Hesse, and Würtemberg, Jews were leaving rural areas and concentrating in Berlin and other big cities. Largely in consequence, the number of Jewish communities in Germany declined from 2,359 in 1899 to 1,611 by 1932.
A similar process was in train in France. The small towns of Alsace, in particular, had once held many flourishing small communities. In Herrlisheim (Bas-Rhin), where Jews, like gentiles, wore wooden sabots, the number of Jewish inhabitants declined from 202 in 1890 to 80 by 1936. Such communities were on the verge of disappearance. A contemporary observer lamented: “The great human reservoir of Alsatian Jewry, the countryside, is exhausted; there remain there, above all, old people waiting to die, caretakers of the beautiful synagogues that were once filled with the vibrancy of youth.”2
The village Jews of Lithuania—pedlars, estate managers (arendarn), innkeepers, millers, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, shoemakers, lime and pitch burners, wheelwrights, carpenters, and lumbermen—had begun in the 1890s to move in large numbers to cities such as Vilna or Kovno or overseas, particularly to South Africa. “By the time World War II broke out,” we are told, “the Jewish villager was virtually extinct in Lithuania.”3
In the USSR and interwar Poland, movement out of shtetlakh attained large dimensions. In the period 1917–27 a million Jews, particularly young people, left Soviet shtetlakh for the big city. The exodus continued over the next decade. The proportion of Soviet Jews living beyond the former Pale rose from 32 percent in 1926 to 43 percent in 1939. The number of Jewish residents in Moscow rose from 28,000 in 1920 to 250,000 by 1939 and of Leningrad from 52,000 in 1923 to 202,000 by 1939. At least 87 percent of Jews in the USSR now lived in urban areas. More than a third lived in five cities: Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov, Moscow, and Leningrad. Just 442,000 Soviet Jews still lived in shtetlakh.4 This was a colossal migration that exceeded even the great flight from the Tsarist dominions that had transformed the American Jewish community in the years between 1881 and 1914.5
One reason for this movement was the desire of those labeled lishentsy, or threatened with being so labeled, to escape into the relative anonymity of urban life. There they stood less chance of being compromised by disclosure of embarrassingly “bourgeois” origins, though “bourgeois” in such cases might have involved no more than peddling, petty trading, or ownership of a small workshop. As a result of the “passportization” of the Soviet population in 1932, however, when all citizens were required to carry identity documents, unauthorized internal migration slowed down and, with it, the pace of Jewish movement out of the former Pale.
What was achieved by a planned system in the USSR was replicated, if more slowly, in a free-market one. In Poland too, shtetlakh thinned out as Jews moved to cities. Although the shtetl survived in a diminished form in Poland, the Soviet Union, and a few other parts of eastern Europe, it was no longer the model Ashkenazi Jewish settlement. Instead it came to seem a static, outmoded relic of a bygone age.
Why did the Jews leave and what exactly were they leaving?
The shtetl is easier to describe than define. It had no fixed size, save that it was smaller than a city (shtot) and larger than a village (dorf) or a hamlet (yishuv). The shtetl had a characteristic social geography, centered on the rynek (town square). This was the site of the weekly market, a manifestation of the shtetl’s essential function as the hub of the rural economy in eastern Europe. Nearby would be the main synagogue and the Jewish bathhouse. Jews lived mainly in houses around the square, in which they often kept stores or taverns. The better-off built their houses of brick, occasionally of more than one storey. Most homes, however, were primitive, single-storey wooden structures, grouped hugger-mugger in unpaved lanes near the square. Fires were frequent. Many towns had all-Jewish volunteer fire brigades, but in the absence of piped water supplies, their capabilities were limited. Often whole towns burned down, sometimes several times.
Every shtetl had its cast of characteristic types, including the rabbi, the magid (itinerant preacher), and the melamed (elementary Hebrew school teacher, generally despised as good for nothing better). Often functions were combined: the hazan (cantor) might act as shohet (meat slaughterer) and sometimes additionally as mohel (circumciser). The shames (synagogue beadle), another lowly figure, was often also responsible for looking after the besmedresh (religious study hall) and bathhouse. The shul-klaper would go round the town on Friday before dark with a big stick, hammering three times on each doorpost to indicate that the time for the lighting of Sabbath candles was imminent.
The badkhn was a jester and master of entertainments at weddings. In his role as comedic master of ceremonies, he offered improvisational humorous advice to the bride and groom. Traditionally the first line was “Weep, bride, weep!” An ancient Jewish institution, the badkhn is mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud (Ta’an 22a). Later badkhones developed a satirical edge and sometimes great dramatic intensity. Although fading away by the 1930s, the badkhn could still be found performing at marriages in country places. The visiting card of Jacob Zismor of Vilna, one of the last of the badkhonim, advertised his availability for “concerts, weddings, barmitzvahs, and all kinds of entertainments, with music or without, always at moderate prices.”6
The shrayber (scribe) would go from place to place acting as a letter writer and teaching children, especially those girls who did not attend a heder (elementary Hebrew school), to write in Hebrew and Latin or Russian scripts. The Yiddish writer Sholem Asch was such a letter writer in his youth in Włocławek (Russian Poland) in the 1890s. In order to supplement their meager incomes, any or all of these figures might also run a small business on the side.
The shtetl was a location as much in the imagination as in the real world. In the paintings of Marc Chagall it seemed poised almost halfway behind heaven and earth, its inhabitants floating off into the clouds. “The ‘shtetl,’” it has been written, “is always a synthesis of facts, memory, and imagination.”7 Drawing in varying quantities on ingredients of nostalgia, idealization, mythification, and repulsion, Yiddish writers from Shalom Aleichem to Sholem Asch depicted the shtetl, depending on their ideological stance, as the hearth of traditional virtues or a nest of reactionary vices, as “a little Jerusalem,” an almost timeless, paradisiacal home ground in which the Jew communed intimately with his Lord, or as a stagnant repository of ignorance, filth, and backwardness. The literary historian Mikhail Krutikov notes that while realism was the dominant literary style in interwar Yiddish literature, “yet, when it came to depicting the shtetl, the clarity and confidence of realistic representation would often be blurred by sentimentalist nostalgia or disfigured by expressionist fragmentation.”8
Shmuel Yosef Agnon’s Hebrew story “Oreah natah lalun” (A Guest for the Night), based on his return visit in 1930 to his birthplace, Buczacz, in eastern Galicia, famously visualized a town of the living dead. Around the same time Isaac Babel, writing in Russian, described the departure for Moscow of a recently bereaved widow from a Soviet shtetl. Her son, who has arrived from Moscow too late for his father’s funeral, roams around his birthplace at night: “His native shtetl was dying. The clock of the centuries chimed the end of its defenceless life. ‘Is this the end, or is it a rebirth?’ Boris asked himself.” Like Agnon, Babel viewed the decline of the shtetl with an ambivalent mixture of sadness and resigned submission to what seemed inevitable social forces. “He walked past the ruins, past the squat, crooked, sleeping houses, a hazy stench of poverty seeping out of their gates, and bade them farewell.”9
Such depictions were not restricted to fiction. A letter written in 1933 by a poverty-stricken Jew in Łódź, Wolf Lewkowicz, records how, out of desperation, he momentarily considered moving to the nearby small town of Opoczno: “But what will I do in Opoczno when 95% of the people are poor, naked and barefoot? The town looks like a cemetery; the people resemble corpses; the houses look like tombstones. What will I do there? After all, Łódź is a city with a population of 600,000, with factories, and I am not able to find work.”10
A visitor to Ostrog in Volhynia (in eastern Poland) in 1937 reported on his impressions. Jews had lived there since the fifteenth century and constituted more than half the population. The town had a rich Jewish history and had been the home of famous rabbis, Hebrew printing presses, and yeshivot. In the interwar period, Ostrog’s location close to the Soviet border hastened its economic decline. The writer reported that shops were shuttered, Jewish inhabitants were “hungry and pale shadows,” and “grown-up girls [were] walking without shoes and gowns for they have none.” “Ostrog,” he wrote, “is perishing.”11 Such descriptions undoubtedly reflect one facet of reality.
The average Polish shtetl in the 1930s, however, was far from the sleepy, one-horse town portrayed by these writers. The shtetl might be in retreat, economically and demographically, but it did not lie down and die. Local Yiddish newspapers in dozens of such towns record the intense associational life, fierce controversies, festivities, amateur theatricals, lectures, and sports events. At the spring festival of Lag Ba’Omer, the fire brigade band would lead a march through the town. On May Day the Bund would hold its own parade and demonstration. Many medium-sized and larger shtetlakh boasted a movie theater that would show Yiddish, Polish, and American films. Thus was inserted into each of these towns a powerful telescope into the starry, secular heaven being conjured up by children of the shtetl in faraway Hollywood.
Around half of all Polish Jews in the 1930s still lived in shtetlakh. The Jews would typically constitute a quarter to half the inhabitants, but since they mainly lived near the center of the town and owned most of the shops and inns, they tended to imprint a Jewish character on the shtetl. For example, a socioeconomic survey of Probuzhana, a small town in the Tarnopol district of southeast Poland with a population in the early 1930s of 3,550, of whom one-third were Jews, reported, in passing: “We may also remark here that when we speak of the commercial structure of the Jewish community we mean the commercial structure of the entire town, since there is only one Christian business establishment in town. This is a stationery store in the Public Library.” Jews also formed the great majority of skilled workers in Probuzhana. But the report pointed to severe economic distress. A large category of persons in the town was “the group of families who have no occupation at all. This group includes 44 families or 14.4% of the total Jewish population. Of this number, 10 are beggars.”12
A visitor in the mid-1920s to another shtetl, Wysoki Dwór, near the border of Poland and Lithuania, noted:
Little attention was paid to the rules of hygiene. Only about 60 per cent of the women made use of the mikvah [ritual bath]. Both the mikvah and the bathhouse were very seldom cleaned. The water in the mikvah was changed infrequently and gave off a foul odour. …
Religious spirit did not appear particularly strong in the town. It was more a matter of tradition than religion. … About 35 per cent of the male population prayed every day. … On the Sabbath, however, everyone attended without exception, although not a Sabbath went by without some controversy in the synagogue. …
In this provincial atmosphere any tendency towards left-wing politics evaporated. This could be seen in the young married men. On the Sabbath, even those of them who were Bundists went dutifully to the synagogue with their prayer-shawl bags.
This town too was desperately poor. Of its 65 Jewish families, 55 received money or other help from abroad. Modernity was nonetheless making some inroads: “Wysoki Dwór,” we are told, “had fallen under the influence of the outside world and was obsessed with soccer.” Moreover, “recently, the younger men could be seen going bareheaded outdoors.”13
As Samuel Kassow has pointed out, the shtetl, bathed in a warm nostalgic glow in the collective Jewish memory, could be a harsh, unforgiving place, especially for those on the lowest social rungs: shoemakers, water carriers, or unmarried girls from poor families.14 In the rainy season it was muddy, in the dry season dusty and smelly, and throughout the year filthy, at any rate by contemporary bourgeois standards.
The small scale and intimate nature of social relations did not preclude class distinctions. If anything, it magnified them. “In our town [Gliniany], there was more democracy but in Premishlan [Peremishliany] they had castes like that. A tailor didn’t talk to a shoemaker, a shoemaker didn’t talk to a bathhouse attendant, a bathhouse attendant didn’t talk to a carpenter.”15 The stock exchange of local opinion, fed by malicious gossip, could be merciless in its scolding of deviants and of those who committed minor peccadilloes. Cruel nicknames, highlighting personal defects, were common. One woman, recalling her shtetl in the 1930s, mentions such names as “Faivel cold sore,” “Eli big belly,” “Meishl Pick the stutterer,” “Crutch the one-legged tailor,” and “Yosl Latrine (smelliest man in town).”16 In Opoczno, a resident wrote to his nephew in Chicago: “Here … can be found a Shmiel Pipil (belly button) … Meyer Petzke (small penis), Yisroel Sralash (defecator). … It’s simply terrible to live in a town where everyone has a nickname.”17
The fragile economy of the Jewish poor in the shtetl was to some degree buttressed by aid from America and western Europe. This came from the Joint, from ORT, and from landsmanshaftn, as well as from individuals who helped support their relatives. Loan societies were a traditional feature of Jewish life throughout east-central Europe. They were revivified in the interwar period by the decision of the Joint to support existing or new gmiles khesed kassas (cooperative loan funds) in Poland, Lithuania, and Romania. The Joint insisted, however, that half the capital for each fund must come from the town itself. Some were small, local mutual aid societies; others developed into full-fledged cooperative banks. By the mid-1930s there were more than eight hundred kassas in Poland alone. The kassas helped tide small businesses and families over rough patches. As a report in 1936 put it, the non-interest-bearing loans provided by these funds were, for many, “practically the last escape from complete destitution.”18
Even in the traditional environment of the shtetl, the hold of orthodox religion was beginning to fray in interwar Poland. While Jewish shops would remain closed, Sabbath observance was no longer universal. In April 1936 the local Yiddish weekly newspaper of Baranowicze, in Polish Byelorussia, announced the performance in the hall of the Apollo movie theater on the first day of Passover, of a play by Sholem Asch, starring the celebrated Yiddish actor Maurice Schwartz. On later days of the festival, the paper advertised “dancing-tambola” and other events similarly out of keeping with strict observance of the holiday. In July of the same year, the paper announced appearances “today, Friday, and tomorrow, shabbes,” by a visiting theatrical troupe who would perform the “Di umgezetslekhe froy” (The Illegal Wife), billed as “a sensational picture of life in three acts.”19 That such spectacles could not merely be staged on a major festival and the Sabbath but find an audience (the performances were sellouts) in a town with a reputation for orthodoxy and with two large yeshivot and the courts of two hasidic rebbes is an indication of the profound change in mores. Nor was Baranowicze in this respect exceptional.
The decline of religious observance in the shtetl was also registered in other ways. In 1934 a letter in the local Yiddish weekly in Wołkowysk, a little to the west of Baranowicze, lamented the “spiritual decline” that led the local Maccabi organization to hold football matches on the Sabbath. Yet the correspondent was clearly in a minority, since he complained that community leaders seemed not to take the matter very seriously, regarding it as akin to the venial offense of not washing hands before saying the grace after meals, rather than recognizing it as a cardinal sin, akin to “eating carrion and treyf [nonkosher food] on Yom Kippur.”20
In the Soviet Union the shtetl was seen as primitive and socially backward, a “malignant tumour on the body of the young, weak Soviet country.”21 Like the Zionists, the Soviets wanted to productivize the shtetl Jews and wean them away from what were seen as parasitic occupations. Young, small-town Jews, lacking a future in the trades that had sustained the previous generation, saw their salvation in the cities, and moved away to colleges, government jobs, or factory work. The shtetlakh were now disproportionately inhabited by old people, although the Byelorussian and Ukrainian authorities tried in the 1930s to encourage the creation of cooperatives of craftsmen as a way of providing some economic rationale for the continued existence of the shtetl.
Unable, after the termination of the New Economic Policy, to continue to trade as pedlars or shopkeepers, Jews who remained in the Soviet shtetl concentrated in the traditional craft occupations of Russian Jews: as tailors, furriers, smiths of tin, copper, or gold, watchmakers, hatters, and bookbinders. Or, in increasing numbers, they packed the tools of their trade together with their miserable household goods and joined their brethren in the exodus to their promised land—the big city. The Soviet Yiddish poet Dovid Hofshteyn recorded its dangerous lure:
Shtot!
City!
Du host mir fun vaytn gerufn
You called me from afar.
…
…
Du host mir fun vaytn getsoygn
You drew me from afar
With forceps
fun shayn un fun shimer.
Of gleam and gloss.
Du host mikh farnart
You seduced me,
un du host mikh gefangen!22
You captured me!
Captivated by the big city, the Jews would not return, save in their imaginations, to the shtetl.
Much changed on arrival in the city. Traditional garb gave way to modern dress. Except among the older generation and the strictly orthodox, the long black kapote (gaberdine coat) was replaced by worker’s clothing, indistinguishable from that of gentiles. Whereas most Jewish males in the shtetl still wore some form of head covering at all times, only the orthodox did so in the city. Even many Hasidim tended to restrict wearing of the shtreimel (fur-trimmed hat) to the Sabbath, though they would, of course, wear a yarmulke (skullcap) at other times.
The orthodox held on determinedly to the old ways, fearful of the corrupting influences of the big city “with its attendant phenomena that have torn away our young people from their roots and turned them into ‘people of the twentieth century’ … who allow their lowest instincts to dominate them, and who throw away their few years of youth on the momentary gleam of over-extended ‘pleasure’”—as an Agudist publication in Antwerp editorialized in 1936. They therefore erected “defensive walls against the engulfing tides of social life.”23 But increasingly their communities came to be little island shtetlakh in a spreading urban ocean of modernization and secularization.
The majority of immigrants from the shtetl to the city did not immediately transform all their social and cultural habits and conventions. Where there seemed no pressing need to change, they retained many of the attitudes, customs, and institutions of their places of origin.
Although they might become less punctilious about the minutiae of kashrut, most east European Jews still favored the traditional dishes: chicken soup with lokshen (noodles) or kneydlach (dumplings), gefilte fish, kreplach (pasta dough triangles, filled with ground meat), varnitshkes (dumplings filled with cheese or jam), tsimmes (sweet casserole), knishes (flat potato dumplings covered in dough), blintzes (pancakes), chopped liver, herring, salt beef, and pickled cucumbers, challah (braided white bread, eaten on the Sabbath), as well as special holiday dishes such as latkes (potato pancakes for Hanukah), hamentashen (on Purim), and various matzah-based foods on Passover. Above all, even nonreligious Jews tended to avoid pig meat.
The volume of the influx to cities in the interwar period was such that many of them were no less Jewish than the shtetlakh the Jews had left. In Warsaw, Lwów, and Kiev, Jews constituted a third of the population. In Białystok and Grodno, they formed close to an absolute majority. The immigrants tended to concentrate in those areas of the cities where Jews already formed a large proportion of the population. In Warsaw, Jews were concentrated in the Muranów district, which was 91 percent Jewish in 1939, as well as in other white- and blue-collar areas in the center and west of the city. As a result, according to Mordechai Altshuler, “the assimilationist impact of the metropolis on the Jews … was less pronounced than in the large cities outside the Pale. Thus the shetl continued to exert an influence on the Jews of these cities.”24
Nearly every city in east-central Europe had its Jewish quarter, generally near the center of town. In Tomaszów Mazowiecki, an industrial town in central Poland, the main street in the heart of the Jewish quarter had 625 inhabitants, of whom 565 were Jews. Here were Jewish institutions, synagogues, and shops. Here too was the Odeon cinema, owned by Adolf Bernstein, which catered to a general audience but often showed films of Jewish interest, for example one on the opening ceremony of the Hebrew University in 1925. Nearby was the bathhouse (eighteen tubs, a steam bath, and five showers: nine thousand customers each year). Part of the reason for such concentration was a feeling of greater security. In the Karpathy neighborhood of Tomaszów Mazowiecki, where Jews were a small minority, local hooligans “looked after their own” Jews (that is, those from the district) but were said to threaten those they did not know. Jews moved out of the area when they could.25
The teeming street life of the Jewish districts imported the sounds, images, and smells of the shtetl marketplace into the heart of the city. The Yiddish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer later recalled Krochmalna Street in the Jewish area of Warsaw, where he spent his childhood years: “Women still peddled handkerchiefs, needles, pins, buttons, and yard goods of calico, linen—even remnants of velvet and silk. … The nostrils were assailed by the familiar odour of soap, oil, and horse manure.”26 Another observer noted how street sellers there would call out the merits of their wares in Yiddish: “Oylem, oylem ests bikhinem, ests bekhinem! Fir beygl a tsenerl, fir tsenerl! fir tsenerl!” (“Everybody! Everybody! Eat for free! Eat for free! Four bagels for ten groszy!”)27
Housing and health conditions in the immigrant areas were generally grim. The Jewish working class in the cities of central and eastern Europe lived, for the most part, in overcrowded, insanitary slums. Conditions for the urban poor in Warsaw may be gauged from a survey of applicants for places in the Medem children’s sanatorium in the mid-1930s. More than 80 percent of the children who applied lived in homes with a density of more than five persons to a room. In one case four families, twenty-four persons, were living in one cellar.28
Among the surviving application forms for 1936 is that of Nachme Rozenman. Aged fifteen, Nachme lived in a barely furnished basement with six others. One of his siblings had died of “lung disease,” from which he too had suffered. His father, a tailor, stitched together clothes that his mother sold in the street. She was illiterate. Nachme had spent only four years in school and had started working with his father at the age of ten. The sanatorium noted that he was dirty, stubborn, and angry but also timid, gloomy, lazy, and apathetic. He quarreled with his sisters and cried a lot.
Another application was from Moshe Kotlorski, aged fourteen. His father had left home before he was born. Moshe did not speak until he was nine years old. His mother died when he was twelve. Since his mother’s death, his father had begun to interest himself in Moshe and from time to time sent him small sums of money. The previous year Moshe had suffered from typhus. He worked as a cobbler and lived in one room with his aunt, her seven children, and two lodgers.29
The east-European Jewish immigrant community in Paris in the 1930s, some 90,000 out of a total Jewish population of 150,000, was still heavily concentrated in certain districts in the heart of the city, in particular the Pletzl (the Marais) and Belleville. When Moshe Zalcman arrived there from Poland in 1929, he had the impression of being back in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw: “the same small shops, the same simple restaurants, the same tumult. My heart beat faster on recognizing my native language. From a shop door emerged the sad melodies of popular Yiddish songs.”30
Some of the immigrants to Paris were pedlars, shopkeepers, or craftsmen but the majority worked in the clothing industry and were employed in small workshops. Others were semi-independent façonniers or fully independent ouvriers à domicile, often drawing on family members for supplementary labor. Most lived on the edge of penury. Many had arrived quite recently from Poland after the United States imposed severe restrictions on immigration in 1924.
They had not received a warm welcome from the established French-Jewish community, from which, as a result, they felt deeply alienated. Mutual resentment was heightened by political division: in general, the immigrants were left-wing, whereas the more bourgeois, French-born Jews tended to the political center, particularly the Radical Party, or even the moderate right. In religious practice too there were differences: the observant among the immigrants hewed to more traditional forms of practice, often worshipping in small shtiblakh. They found the solemn ceremonials of the synagogues under the control of the Consistoire de Paris, such as the grand temple in the rue de la Victoire, austere, cold, and, for all their surface orthodoxy, somehow un-Jewish. The haute bourgeoisie, for the most part, adhered only superficially to traditional practice. On high holy days, we are told, “the doors to the rue de la Victoire synagogue were blocked … by the chauffeurs of wealthy congregants who stood around smoking cigarettes and talking.”31
The immigrants were much more likely than the natives to be closely involved with Jewish institutions. They formed networks of landsmanshaftn and mutual aid societies, some of which were bound together in the Fédération des Sociétés Juives de France. The Fédération, which was mainly Zionist in orientation, and its Communist rival, the Union des Sociétés Juives de France, ran Yiddish libraries as well as night classes, youth clubs, and sports groups. In the late 1930s, inspired by the Popular Front, left-wingers formed organizations such as the Parizer Yidisher Arbeter-Teater (PYAT), which sought to represent onstage the needs of the Jewish masses, “the tragedy of their lack of rights, protests against oppressors, and their struggle for bread, justice and freedom.”32
Jews did not just concentrate in particular districts of cities. They also tended to frequent specific cafés, clubs, and resorts: in Munkács, the Csillag, next to the Tündérkertje (“Wonder Garden”); in Cracow, Szmatka Kawiarnia; in Prague, the Jugendstil-designed Slavia, both the latter favored haunts of the intelligentsia. The café was a gathering place for literary coteries, a rendezvous for lovers, a place to play cards, to read the paper, to argue about politics, to observe and display. In larger cities each profession would have its own gathering place. The regular (generally male) would have his Stammtisch, where he would take refreshment at the appointed hour every day. Sometimes a group would reserve such a table, as at the Europa in Czernowitz, where Hebrew speakers would gather in a special corner. Back rooms would often be rented for political meetings.
In Paris each of the Polish-Jewish landsmanshaftn had its designated locale. Yiddish actors and actresses assembled at the Espérance on the Place de la République. On the other side of the same square, Yiddish journalists held forth at the Thenint. There too the “Amis de Varsovie” held their annual ball. Immigrants from Łódź met at the Taverne de Paris. At the Istamboul, Sephardi Jews would exchange gossip in their native Judeo-Espagnol. Political parties met in the back rooms: the Bund in a café on the rue des Francs Bourgeois, Left Poalei Zion on the first floor of Le Georges, a bistro on the rue de Belleville.33
The Great Depression hit Jews in east-central Europe particularly hard. In Warsaw 34 percent of Jews in the labor force were without work in 1931. Jewish unemployment was much higher than nonJewish—partly accounted for by the low participation of Jews in the civil service, where jobs were relatively secure. In Lwów, for instance, 29 percent of Jews were out of work in 1931, compared with 16.5 percent of non-Jews. The east European economies enjoyed a hesitant recovery in the late 1930s but Jewish unemployment persisted.
The Jewish proletariat in Poland, in the sense of workers employed in big industrial enterprises, was small. Few Jews worked in the extractive industries such as coal mining and petroleum production or in heavy industries such as steel. Altogether only 3 percent of Jewish wage-earners worked in large-scale industry, whereas 83 percent were employed in small artisanal workshops, with not more than five workers. Increasingly in the late 1930s these were home-based family enterprises. More than half of all Jewish employees worked in textile or garment manufacturing. Certain crafts such as cap-making, haberdashery, shoe-making, goldsmithery, and wig-making were predominantly Jewish. Jews were also to be found in large numbers in a few other industries such as printing and book-binding. In Poland, as elsewhere, Jews were much more likely than non-Jews to be economically independent. Nearly half of all self-employed workers in the country were Jews. Such conditions were not auspicious for labor union organization.
Most unionized Jewish workers belonged to exclusively Jewish labor unions. The Bundist unions, with 98,810 members in 1939, half of these in Warsaw and Łódź alone, comprised at least two-thirds of the Jewish union membership. Competition between rival unions was fierce. The socialist Zionists bitterly accused the Bundist unions of “ideological terrorism” and “boundless self-interestedness.”34 For their part, the Bundists complained that the Zionists were “corrupting” workers with “mendacious promises that they would receive certificates [for emigration to Palestine].”35
In Warsaw there were Jewish trade unions for porters, shop assistants, furniture makers, needle workers, photographers, office workers, hairdresser and barbershop employees; metal, soda water, general provisions, and leather industry workers; as well as one for “home-workers and not well-off handicrafts workers.” Adopting a broad definition of the proletariat, the Bund organized not only employed but also self-employed workers. For example, the transport workers’ union recruited large numbers of porters, carters, draymen, cabdrivers, chauffeurs, and deliverymen who, after repeated strikes, succeeded in setting minimum tariffs for their services.
In Warsaw thousands of porters, more often Jews than Christians, since Jewish merchants preferred to rely on other Jews for their deliveries, carried loads on their backs, in wheelbarrows, and sometimes in carts to which they were yoked like horses. These men generally had little or no education. Some had failed in petty trade but most had worked as porters since childhood. Political competition in the porters’ unions was particularly intense. The union of playtse-tregers (porters who carried loads on their backs), for example, changed allegiance successively from the Communists, to the Bund, and then to the left faction of the Polish Socialist Party, after which it split into three.
In December 1936, the porters’ union newspaper reported on the plight of Jewish drozhkazhes (horse-cab drivers) in Lublin. They had joined the union in the hope of resisting what they saw as pressure by non-Jewish competitors, aided by the local authorities, to eject them from what had once been a commanding position in the profession. The municipal inspector, they alleged, was enforcing regulations against them in a discriminatory and merciless manner. They were being fined for trawling illegally for customers, when in fact, so they said, they were merely turning their cabs around. Their licenses were being withdrawn for punitive periods on the ground that their cabs were dirty—this in winter when, so they maintained, it was hard to keep them clean. An anti-Jewish boycott had reduced their incomes so severely, they complained, that they could barely afford to feed their horses, let alone their families.36 Whether the union was able to help them much is doubtful but the episode illustrates how economic pressures and anti-Semitism in the late 1930s were combining to impel some Jews into collective self-help.
Although Jewish workers in Poland were more unionized and more militant (they engaged in more strikes) than non-Jews, their conditions of work were generally worse. Since most worked in small-scale workshops, they were not subject to the eight-hour law that protected workers in large enterprises. As a result, they often worked ten or twelve hours a day—in the busy season even longer. A survey of Jewish barbers in Warsaw in 1937 found that they worked an average of eleven hours a day, six days a week.37 For the same reason, most Jewish workers were not covered by the unemployment insurance law. Often they had no health insurance either and lived in dread of a lengthy or disabling illness.
And then there was the lowest stratum of the Jewish poor: the unemployed or unemployable, the disabled, widows, tramps, and street people. Their lot, of course, was often no worse than that of the poorest segments of the surrounding population, with the important difference that Jewish poverty was mainly urban and gentile poverty mainly rural. The degradation of pauperdom in the big city was different in character from that of the rural poor: urban hunger was less readily assuaged; dirt and pollution in the city were more intense; diseases there were more swiftly transmitted.
For all the thunderous rhetoric of the Jewish labor movement, this was, for the most part, a bourgeois people, at least in the sense that even Jewish workers generally owned what Marxists called the “means of production,” namely the capital equipment and tools of their trade. Since most were self-employed, they fell more naturally into the petty bourgeoisie than any other class. Furthermore, given their relative economic independence, some among them were able to acquire the two essential conditions for upward social mobility: resources for investment and/or education. With easier access to financial and social capital than the great mass of peasants and industrial workers around them, growing numbers of Jews throughout the continent succeeded in advancing rapidly into the entrepreneurial and professional classes.
In Romania, for example, Jews owned nearly a third of all private commercial and industrial enterprises in the late 1930s. Jewish ownership was particularly marked in the provinces of Bukovina (77 percent), Bessarabia (63 percent), and Moldavia (56 percent). The largest industrial company in the country was the Reşiţa Iron Works and Properties, headed by Max Ausschnitt. It employed 17,000 people, producing 90,000 tons of steel per annum, as well as locomotives, machinery, motors, and armaments. Similarly in Hungary, 40 percent of industrial firms were Jewish-owned. Many wealthy Hungarian-Jewish industrialists had been granted patents of nobility under the Habsburgs. Among these was Manfred Weiss, founder of a giant heavy industrial combine, producing iron, steel, aircraft, and motor vehicles. Manfred’s sons, Alfons and Eugene, both barons, headed the concern after his death in 1922.
Jews were also strongly represented in the professions. In Vienna, as many as 65 percent of doctors in the 1930s were Jews. In Poland, more than half of all private physicians and lawyers were Jewish. Similarly in Hungary, where Jews were 5 percent of the total population, half the lawyers and a third of the journalists were Jews.
As Jews moved up the social scale, they left central districts of cities and headed for more salubrious and genteel quarters in the suburbs. In Berlin in 1933 only 15 percent of the Jewish population, then numbering 161,000, lived in the old Jewish area in and around the Scheunenviertel in Berlin Mitte. More had moved out to districts such as Wilmersdorf, Schöneberg, and Charlottenburg: out of Berlin’s twenty districts, these three now held 44 percent of the city’s Jewish population. But there, as elsewhere, they continued, for the most part, to live among fellow Jews. A certain separateness continued to characterize Jews’ social life, even as they moved into the middle class.
The middle and upper Jewish bourgeoisie distinguished themselves from other Jews not only by their choice of residence but by language and mode of life. Most abandoned Yiddish and adopted the language of high culture of surrounding society. In Germany and Austria this was German; in Hungary, Hungarian. In eastern Europe, the language of choice was not necessarily that of the greater part of the surrounding population or of the nation-state. In Romanian-ruled Transylvania, in Slovakia, and in the Vojvodina province of Yugoslavia, Jews, especially the bourgeoisie, spoke Hungarian. In Bucharest the educated classes cultivated French rather than Romanian. In Soviet Ukraine, the rising Jewish professional class, as they left Yiddish behind, preferred Russian to Ukrainian. Richard Pipes, growing up in a middle-class family in Warsaw in the 1920s and 1930s, spoke Polish with his mother but German with his father and his nannies.
The Jewish bourgeoisie of Germany was, until 1933, the largest, proportional to the rest of the Jewish population, and, considered en masse, the most prosperous in Europe. It set the tone for Jewish elites in the continent as a whole by its liberal religious and political outlook, its patriotism, its cultural sophistication, its charitable activities, and the sense of security and optimism that it felt about its place in the world.
The distinct flavor of middle-class life, as it was developed and refined among German-speaking Jews throughout central Europe, is conveyed in the hundreds of unpublished memoirs of German Jews (not all, of course, from the bourgeoisie) that are preserved in the archive of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. These testify to their preoccupation with the ideal of Bildung (an untranslatable concept, involving, among other things, education, civilization, tolerance, and cultivation of the arts), their pride in their respectability, their stress on good manners, cleanliness, and personal grooming, their formality, their deep love and affinity for German literature, their respect for learning, their elevation of music to the height of a religious experience, their horror at fanaticism of all kinds, and their disdain for the lifestyle and “jargon” (that is, Yiddish) of the Ostjuden from whom most of them were themselves descended. These accounts of life in the 1920s and 1930s also bear witness to the outer cloak of dignity and self-confidence that the German-Jewish middle class felt it important to maintain in the face of adversity as well as to their inner disorientation and disillusionment in the late 1930s as their material and psychological world crumpled.