My Son the Doctor

  
I am reading a book about shtetls in the Ukraine during the Soviet period, a good deal of it based on extensive interviews with 95 people, a small number born before 1920, just about all the others after 1920 and through the 1930s.[1] I’m nowhere near done with it—my Kindle says I’m at 22%[2]--but it has already served to raise my consciousness, as it was put in the 1960s, that is, made me fully aware of something that I knew but was never focused on. I’m referring to the way in which Jews are typecast—not just by non-Jews, but by Jews themselves.

   Last December I wrote a piece “From Court Jew to Head of the Fed,” that makes use of such a stereotype. While it has now been posted, let me here say briefly that it traces—lightly—the role of Jews as bankers at European courts to the founder of the house of Rothschild to the six Jewish heads of the Federal Reserve. Lord knows that it was and is common to regard Jews as practitioners of a variety of “trades” that centered on money, with two causes prominent: they could not own land—and could thus not be farmers—and they were not admitted into the guilds—and therefore were unable to be craftsmen.

   All that is true enough, but, and this is now important to note, for a limited piece of geography. Not being a historian of the Jewish people (or a historian of anything else, for that matter) I see things from the perspective of the locale about which I know a little, Western Europe, especially Germany—or, rather its predecessor states, since there was no Germany until 1871. Now I read about the concentration of Jews in those little towns always referred to in Yiddish as shtetl, which to me, as a speaker of German, sounds just like Städtle, for “little town.” There, according to an 1926 ethnographic report about a number of shtetls, the Jews “were working as stonemasons, coachmen, carpenters, bathhouse attendants” but also “as street beggars, ex-convicts, ex-convicts, prostitutes, pimps, an entire mass of petty and even pettier trades . . . and two or three wealthy people.”[3]  

   While the entire chapter discusses what shtetl Jews did for a living, the account of the so-called Tulchyn district gives some revealing statistics. “Within the general category of artisans, certain handicraft fields . . . were overwhelmingly dominated by Jews: 132 of 144 barbers were Jewish (92 percent); 108 of 140 coopers (75 percent); 80 of 82 glaziers (98 percent) 102 out of 141 coachmen (72 percent); and 1,372 of 1,639 tailors (84 percent).” There were also Jewish professionals—lawyers, judges, doctors, dentists—but the numbers are very small compared to those of artisans. The entire chapter expands on the same theme, looking at different areas: a great many artisans, a handful of professionals and only a tiny number of agricultural workers.

   There is no talk of guilds anywhere. At a young age, the kids began to learn their trades from their fathers. Crafts tended to be family affairs. That was one reason why the home, usually small and crowded, also served as the place of work, the second reason being the almost pervasive shtetl poverty.

   Indeed, poverty and persecution were the causes of massive immigration from Eastern Europe to America. This is how what came to be known as The Lower East Side in Manhattan was populated to the gills, so to speak. A Yale-New Haven Curriculum Unit puts it well: From The Shtetl To The Tenement . . .1850 – 1925. And Veidlinger points out that that is where, earlier than the period of his study, ambitious shtetl-dwellers had gone to become educated and move up in the world. Not a large fraction of the original arrivals made it beyond becoming garment works and shopkeepers. Delancey Street was not teeming with professionals during the first quarter of the 20^th century.

   But some of the next generation and more of the one after that moved to other sections of New York City and to its suburbs. They were able to do so, thanks to the fact that they had come to the land of opportunity, which here meant, above all, schooling. In those days the City Colleges: CCNY, Brooklyn College and the rest did not charge tuition and everyone with a good high school record was admitted. (Really good, but not necessarily spectacular.) Thus a certain level of smarts and Sitzfleisch for studying got you a bachelor degree. Many of my high school teachers in the early 40s were Jewish and Italian, probably second generation arrivals in America.

   And others became accountants, lawyers, and of course, physicians. From shtetl barbers and glaziers, working out of a poor hovel of a home to airy apartments in the Bronx, in Brooklyn, and on the upper West Side of Manhattan. No, there has not yet been a Jewish president, but it is not surprising that mother should be proud of her son the doctor. Surely that joke of endless variations is the descendent of the East European shtetl via the tenements of Hester and Essex Streets and the shops of Downtown Second Avenue.

A Jewish President calls mom and asks her to come to the White House for a Passover Seder. She would rather not and refuses to go. The President, her son, says she will get Secret Service escort and a ride in Air Force One - just pack a bag. Eventually she agrees to come. At the curbside with her luggage, waiting for the Secret Service, her neighbor asks; "So; where are you going?" "You know my son the doctor; I'm going to his brother’s house."

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[1] Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

[2] Still, I’m further along than that suggests, since 100% often takes you far beyond a book’s text, through notes, appendices, and a many-page index.

[3] The quotation is from the beginning of Chapter 3, “Social Structure of the Soviet Shtetl” with the first section entitled “There were Such Great Tailors.”