CHAPTER 23

The Bakers Union

The Bakers Union had a long history with the Bund. In 1902–1903 the Bund had illegally organized the bakers union. Since then the Bund had always stayed in close contact with it. Several outstanding Bund activists had emerged from their ranks. In Czarist times the bakers had established a custom of sharing their fayranter¹ with their unemployed baker comrades; they continued that practice.

By the twenties, almost all the bakers were older men. Only a handful were young and were called pomocniki (assistants) or “third hands.” A pomocnik had to work many years, six or eight, before he was allowed to “approach the box,” that is, to make the dough. It was one of the reasons so few young people entered the trade. Another reason certainly was the occupation’s bad reputation among the Jews. The old saying with which parents used to threaten their children was still current: “If you don’t behave, you’ll be apprenticed to a baker.” If there were some few young people who did become bakers, they were almost always provincials. A young man would come from a provincial shtetl to Warsaw seeking work. If he couldn’t find it and had no roof over his head, he would apprentice himself to a baker. That way he would at least have a piece of bread, and perhaps also a place to sleep.

But perhaps the chief reason for the small stream of young people to the baker trade was the difficult and unhygienic working conditions. The bakeries in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw were located in small, narrow, dark, often dank cellars. These were small bakeries, with at most only two or three bakers working. If a baker had a free half-hour in the middle of his shift, he would lie down on the steps of the cellar, or on a sack of flour, or on the lid of the “box,” or even on the plank bed on top of the tile stove. In the morning one could see the bakers returning home from work with packages of bread or rolls under their arms (it was traditional to bring baked goods home), tired, sleepy, downcast, their faces coated with a pale white matte. Seldom did you see a baker happy or smiling. The bakers loved to sing Rosenfeld’s famous song, Mayn Yingele.² But they sang it with a variation: instead of the verse, The coming of day drives me early from the house, they sang The coming of night drives me early from the house.

Most of the bakers were from the provinces. One could encounter among them pious Jews with beards and long gabardines, as well as enlightened workers who participated in the socialist movement. There were also, however, bakers who were connected to the underworld, even those who had “brides” (prostitutes) on the streets, mostly servant girls who had been led astray. The bakers were always embroiled with servant girls and “brokers” of servant girls. Their acquaintance with the servant girls stems from, of all things—tsholnt.³ In the wealthy homes that kept servant girls, the girls would be sent Friday night before sunset to the bakers to have their tsholents placed in the bakers’ ovens to keep them warm. The girls were then sent back Saturday evening, after prayers, to pick them up and bring them back to the houses for dinner. In the process, acquaintanceships would be struck up between the bakers and the servant girls. Sometimes legitimate matches and respectable families grew out of these acquaintanceships, and sometimes tragedies and misfortune.

When I returned to Warsaw, the Bakers Union was located at Pawia 8. There I met old comrades from our prewar, illegal work together in the Bund, for example, Elye (Eliyohu—Elijah) Sztrigler, or “Elik the Philospher,” as he was called. Before the war he used to send dispatches to the St. Petersburg Bundist newspaper, Tsayt (Time). He was a quiet, restrained person and an abject pauper. Because of his poverty and family troubles, he had become unkempt, apathetic, and withdrawn. He was, nevertheless, a member of the Executive Committee and quietly did his work. Elye Sztrigler died in 1929. His son left for Paris that same year.

Meylekh Ciglman was a veteran Bundist and our leading organizer among the bakers. He was tall and broad shouldered, with an angular, striking, and expressive face. His appearance reminded one of the “ideal proletarian” then being pictured on socialist posters. He was quiet and reticent. When he spoke, it was quietly, slowly. No coarse language ever came out of his mouth. He hated it when bakers used profanity. In the work of our movement he was judicious, thoughtful, strong in character, consistent, loyal, and devoted. He later became a member of the Warsaw Executive Committee of the Bund, and when the Bund regained its influence over the Bakers Union, he became its Chairman. He had nine children. The youngest attended our Yiddish secular schools. The older ones were members of our SKIF and the Yugnt-Bund Tsukunft. One of his sons is now in America and a member of the Bund.

Yankl Frimerman was also a veteran activist, schooled in the Bund. Though he was not well—asthmatic, he was nevertheless very active in the union’s Executive Board. He was also a member of the Warsaw School Board and participated energetically in the work of our Yiddish secular school system.

When the Bakers Union was under the aegis of the Bund, Israel Bass, another veteran Bundist, was always the one to carry the union’s banner. His only son, Alter Bass, belongs among the immortal heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto. In the ghetto, he was the distributor of the illegal underground press of the Bund and the Youth-Bund, Tsukunft. If he had been caught, he would have suffered horrific torture and death. During the Nazi occupation, secret, illegal meetings of the Bund would take place in his family’s apartment. Alter would stand guard on the street below. He was arrested while carrying out one of his underground tasks for the Bund, and in the Gestapo prison was horribly tortured to reveal who the others were who worked with him in the underground movement. He withstood the worst possible torture, but would not betray his comrades. He didn’t survive, never again to return to us.

Khayim Itskovitch mostly occupied himself in the union with Bundist issues. The bakers called him the “virgin,” because he would not permit obscenities to be uttered in his presence, and in general devoted himself to the “higher things,” with books and culture.

The union also had its nonpartisan members. These were of two types: True nonpartisans not wanting to get themselves too involved with the party work of the Bund, but loyal members of the union. And then there were those who wanted to avoid union discipline. Among the latter were also those who were involved in dirty dealings. In order to evade responsibility for these illicit activities, they tried to get themselves off the hook by saying they were in the “opposition” and were “nonpartisan.” It took a lot of work before we could rid the union leadership of this latter kind of “nonpartisan.”

The most prominent among the truly nonpartisan union members was Yankl der Shvartser (Jacob with the Black Hair). With his slow-paced, sedate manner, he was particularly suited to negotiate with the bosses. He was the “diplomat” of the Executive Board and performed this task till he left for America.

A typical example of the other kind of “nonpartisan” was Yirmiyohu who was also a member of the Executive. He hardly worked much at all as a baker, but he had lots of money from his “side businesses.” He was a representative of the Executive to the fayrant committee whose job it was to secure unemployed bakers with a night’s work in accordance with the old tradition of the union. Instead Yirmiyohu made a deal with some of the bosses and bakers: he would not send any unemployed bakers to their shop to pick up the overtime hours, and the full-time bakers would kick back to him some of the money they earned by not giving up any of their overtime to an unemployed baker. At Passover, during the matse season, he made quite a lot of money through such deals with the “oven men.” When we tried to raise the question about Yirmiyohu’s shady dealings, he screamed bloody murder, saying the Bund was persecuting a “nonpartisan.” There were also underworld thugs among these so-called “nonpartisans.”

Among the activists in the union belonged one called Shmay Beker. Before the war he had been a Bundist, and distinguished himself in our fights with the strikebreakers. After the war, he connected up with the goons and occupied a prominent place among them. He was one of the first to leave and join the Communists, creating a great deal of trouble for the bakers in the Bakers Union. Later he left for Russia.

The normal, year-in-year-out activities of the Bakers Union were divided into two periods. Almost all year it was quiet at the union—there was little work and many members didn’t pay their dues. But during matse week (which in fact lasted four weeks), the union came alive. The bakers earned well, bought clothes for their wives and children, and prepared for a beautiful holiday. They even were able to set aside a little money for the slow time to come. The members paid off their backlog of owed membership dues (deducted from their salaries), and the union could also set aside a little money for the between-the-busy-season times.

When the Kombund split off from the Bund, the Communists, together with the Kombundists and the strong-arm thugs, captured the Bakers Union. (The Polish Bakers Union also fell under Communist domination.) The Jewish Bakers Union seceded from the Central Council of the Jewish Trade Unions. The Bundist bakers, however, did not leave the Bakers Union. They remained as an internal opposition, and in the thirties the Bund finally won the union back.

Figure 44. Executive Board, Bakers Union. From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

Notes

1.Fayranter is what they called overtime hours at that time in Poland. In several trades the established custom was that the fully employed workers would give up their overtime hours to their unemployed comrades; it was an especially old tradition among the bakers.—BG

2.This popular Yiddish song is a sweatshop father’s lament that his son doesn’t know him because he can never see him during the little boy’s waking hours—his work drives him out early in the morning and he only sees the boy when he comes home late at night, when his beloved little boy is asleep; it is a poem by Morris Rosenfeld (1862–1923), one of the NY Yiddish “sweatshop poets.”—MZ

3.A special dish (meat, potatoes, and legumes) for the Sabbath meal, prepared the day before and stored Friday night in bakers’ ovens so it could be picked up and served warm on the Sabbath, when no cooking is allowed.—MZ