How Prevalent is Clannishness?

   I have long been an avid reader of New York Times obituaries, now made even easier since I just need to click on “Obituaries” on my morning visits to the excellent Times website. I read most of them, but not all, leaving out sports heroes, for example, since I know practically nothing about that world—at least not after the Brooklyn Dodger days of Leo Durocher and Ralph Snyder, PeeWee Reese, Stanky and Furillo, et al.  and of course Jackie Robinson. Those guys, or at least most of them, have gone to Dodger Heaven that hovers above Brooklyn and certainly not over Los Angeles.

   In the “completeness” of the daily sets of obituaries—scare quotes because of course there can be no complete—and the care with which they are prepared, the Times is truly an exemplary paper of record. While of course I know of some who are there commemorated, far more are unfamiliar. That makes them--and especially the very long obits—part of my education. Indeed, quite often they also make me an educator, since I email copies to others who I think might be interested.

   What will not be news to anyone is the startling increase, during the last decade or so, of the ages reached by the recently deceased. The six whose lives are recounted on June 23, 2015, the day I am drafting this, passed away at 81, 93, 86, 76, 97, and 94, with the 76-year-old “youngster” dying of cancer. During that same decade the number of obituaries of children of Jews who came to America from Eastern Europe, mostly between the two World Wars, came to decrease markedly: that generation, like mine, was getting old.

   I paid special attention to this small but  noteworthy subclass of people who had been accomplished in a wide range of endeavors. For one thing, they refuted, so to speak, the feeling of superiority many German Jews had vis-à-vis so-called Ostjuden. To a degree, my parents were touched by that affliction, while I had never succumbed to it, probably because I left Germany at too young an age to have really become a German Jew. (My parents were not overjoyed when I married the daughter of Russian Jews.)

   But more generally, my scrutiny of those obituaries brings out in me what I can only call clannishness. Unless there are obvious signs to the contrary, I try to determine whether the subject of the obituary was Jewish, especially when I am impressed by his or her accomplishments. The name can be a sign, though a very fallible one; it may be revealed, one way or the other, in the account of the subject’s life; but most often, origins become obvious in the latter part of an obituary, given the Times’s style for this genre, when the parents and childhood of the subject are taken up. “He is the son of a Greek immigrant who owned a small restaurant in Brooklyn” or “She is the daughter of so-and-so, who had emigrated from Russia and was the owner of a New York drug store.” When, in this way, I identify another successful Jew, I am proud. Another one of our guys had made good.

   As the title of this little piece suggests, I conclude with a question. Is my clannishness a peculiar Jewish trait or do members of other subgroups of American society behave in similar ways? Do Italian readers of obituaries have analogous reactions? Do Americans whose families stem from Ireland react with pride when they read about a successful landsman? What about those with backgrounds that are Scottish, Chinese, Mexican, or Korean—and so with many more Americans that have retained some identity from their pre-American background? How many silently exclaim: another one of our guys made good?  I certainly don’t know the answer to that question, but I suspect that often the answer is “yes.” The United States may be the celebrated Melting Pot, but for many the melting fire is not hot enough to obliterate all of the traits that had been theirs before they came to these shores.

Your comments, positive or negative, are much appreciated.

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